Across the plains : with other memories and essays

TAUCHNITZ EDITION

COLLECTION OF BRITISH AND AMERICAN AUTHORS
VOL. 2818

ACROSS THE PLAINS

BY

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

IN ONE VOLUME

LEIPZIG: BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ

PARIS: LIBRAIRiB HENRI GAULON. 30. RUE MADAME

The Copyright of this Collection is purchased for Continental Circulation

only, and the volumes may therefore not be introduced into Great Britain

or her Colonies. (See also pp. 3-6 of Large Catalogue.)

EACH VOLUME SOLD SEPARATELY

«=J

fe,

o

2

COLLECTION

OF

BRITISH AUTHORS

TATJCHNITZ EDITION,

VOL. 2818.

ACROSS THE PLAINS, ETC. BY R. L. STEVENSON.
IN ONE VOLUME.

This volume has been reprinted in igiS.

The. usual quality of paper will again be used as soon

as possible after the war.

TAUCHNITZ EDITION.
By the same Author,

TREASURE ISLAND I vol.

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, & AN INLAND VOYAGE. . I vol.

KIDNAPPED * vol«

THE BLACK ARROW I vol.

THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE I vol.

THE MERRY MEN, ETC I vol.

ISLAND NIGHTS' ENTERTAINMENTS I vol.

CATRIONA. A SEQUEL TO "KIDNAPPED" .... I vol.

WEIR OF HERMISTON I vol.

ST. IVES * 2 vols>

IN THE SOUTH SEAS 2 vols.

TALES AND FANTASIES * vol.

ACROSS THE PLAINS

WITH OTHER

MEMORIES AND ESSAYS

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON,

AUTHOR OF "TREASURE ISLAND," "THE MERRY MEN,"

COPYRIGHT EDITION.

LEIPZIG

BERN HARD TAUCHNITZ
1892.

7

TO PAUL BOURGET.

TRAVELLER and student and curious as you are, you will
never have heard the name of Vailima, most likely not even
that of Upolu, and Samoa itself may be strange to your
ears. To these barbaric seats there came the other day a
yellow book with your name on the title, and filled in every
page with the exquisite gifts of your art. Let me take and
change your own words: J'ai beau admirer les autres de
toutes mes forces, c'est avec vous que je me complais a

vivre.

R. L. S.

VAILIMA,
UPOLU,
SAMOA.

LETTER TO THE AUTHOR.

My DEAR STEVENSON,

You have trusted me with the choice and
arrangement of these papers, written before you
departed to the South Seas, and have asked me
to add a preface to the volume. But it is your
prose the public wish to read, not mine; and I
am sure they will willingly be spared the preface.
Acknowledgments are due in your name to the
publishers of the several magazines from which
the papers are collected, viz. Frascr's, Longman's,
the Magazine of Art, and Scribner's. I will only
add, lest any reader should find the tone of the
concluding pieces less inspiriting than your wont,
that they were written under circumstances of
especial gloom and sickness. "I agree with you
the lights seem a little turned down," so you write
to me now; "the truth is I was far through, and

8 PREFACE.

came none too soon to the South Seas, where I
was to recover peace of body and mind. And
however low the lights, the stuff is true. . . ."
Well, inasmuch as the South Sea sirens have
breathed new life into you, we are bound to be
heartily grateful to them, though as they keep
you so far removed from us, it is difficult not to
bear them a grudge; and if they would reconcile
us quite, they have but to do two things more —
to teach you new tales that shall charm us like
your old, and to spare you, at least once in a
while in summer, to climates within reach of us
who are task-bound for ten months in the year
beside the Thames.

Yours ever,

SIDNEY COLVIN.

February, 1892.

CONTENTS.

Page

1. ACROSS THE PLAINS 7

2. THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 78

3. FONTAINEBLEAU 105

4. EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE." . . . 136

5. RANDOM MEMORIES . . . 158

6. RANDOM MEMORIES CONTINUED 176

7. THE LANTERN-BEARERS 191

8. A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 211

9. BEGGARS 232

10. LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN . . . . 248

11. PULVIS ET UMBRA 262

12. A CHRISTMAS SERMON 273

I.

ACROSS THE PLAINS:

LEAVES FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF AN EMIGRANT
BETWEEN NEW YORK AND SAN FRANCISCO.

MONDAY. — It was, if I remember rightly, five
o'clock when we were all signalled to be present
at the Ferry Depdt of the railroad. An emigrant
ship had arrived at New York on the Saturday
night, another on the Sunday morning, our own
on Sunday afternoon, a fourth early on Monday;
and as there is no emigrant train on Sunday, a
great part of the passengers from these four ships
was concentrated on the train by which I was to
travel. There was a babel of bewildered men,
women, and children. The wretched little book-
ing office, and the baggage-room, which was not
much larger, were crowded thick with emigrants,
and were heavy and rank with the atmosphere of
dripping clothes. Open carts full of bedding
stood by the half-hour in the rain. The officials

12 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

loaded each other with recriminations. A bearded,
mildewed little man, whom I take to have been
an emigrant agent, was all over the place, his
mouth full of brimstone, blustering and interfering.
It was plain that the whole system, if system there
was, had utterly broken down under the strain
of so many passengers.

My own ticket was given me at once, and an
oldish man, who preserved his head in the midst
of this turmoil, got my baggage registered, and
counselled me to stay quietly where I was till he
should give me the word to move. I had taken
along with me a small valise, a knapsack, which
I carried on my shoulders, and in the bag of my
railway rug the whole of Bancroft's History of the
United States, in six fat volumes. It was as much
as I could carry with convenience even for short
distances, but it insured me plenty of clothing,
and the valise was at that moment, and often
after, useful for a stool. I am sure I sat for an
hour in the baggage-room, and wretched enough
it was; yet, when at last the word was passed to
me and I picked up my bundles and got under
way, it was only to exchange discomfort for down-
right misery and danger.

I followed the porters into a long shed reach-
ing downhill from West Street to the river. It

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 13

was dark, the wind blew clean through it from
end to end; and here I found a great block of
passengers and baggage, hundreds of one and
tons of the other. I feel I shall have a difficulty
to make myself believed; and certainly the scene
must have been exceptional, for it was too dan-
gerous for daily repetition. It was a tight jam;
there was no fair way through the mingled mass
of brute and living obstruction. Into the upper
skirts of the crowd porters, infuriated by hurry
and overwork, clove their way with shouts. I
may say that we stood like sheep, and that the
porters charged among us like so many maddened
sheep-dogs; and I believe these men were no
longer answerable for their acts. It mattered not
what they were carrying, they drove straight into
the press, and when they could get no farther,
blindly discharged their barrowful. With my own
hand, for instance, I saved the life of a child as
it sat upon its mother's knee, she sitting on a
box; and since I heard of no accident, I must
suppose that there were many similar interpositions
in the course of the evening. It will give some
idea of the state of mind to which we were re-
duced if I tell you that neither the porter nor
the mother of the child paid the least attention
to my act. It was not till some time after that

14 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

I understood what I had done myself, for to ward
off heavy boxes seemed at the moment a natural
incident of human life. Cold, wet, clamour, dead
opposition to progress, such as one encounters in
an evil dream, had utterly daunted the spirits.
We had accepted this purgatory as a child accepts
the conditions of the world. For my part, I
shivered a little, and my back ached wearily; but
I believe I had neither a hope nor a fear, and
all the activities of my nature had become tribu-
tary to one massive sensation of discomfort.

At length, and after how long an interval I
hesitate to guess, the crowd began to move, heavily
straining through itself. About the same time
some lamps were lighted, and threw a sudden
flare over the shed. We were being filtered out
into the river boat for Jersey City. You may
imagine how slowly this filtering proceeded, through
the dense, choking crush, every one overladen with
packages or children, and yet under the necessity
of fishing out his ticket by the way; but it ended
at length for me, and I found myself on deck
under a flimsy awning and with a trifle of elbow-
room to stretch and breathe in. This was on the
starboard; for the bulk of the emigrants stuck
hopelessly on the port side, by which we had
entered. In vain the seamen shouted to them to

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 15

move on, and threatened them with shipwreck.
These poor people were under a spell of stupor,
and did not stir a foot. It rained as heavily as
ever, but the wind now came in sudden claps and
capfuls, not without danger to a boat so badly
ballasted as ours; and we crept over the river in
the darkness, trailing one paddle in the water like
a wounded duck, and passed ever and again by
huge, illuminated steamers running many knots,
and heralding their approach by strains of music.
The contrast between these pleasure embarkations
and our own grim vessel, with her list to port and
her freight ,of wet and silent emigrants, was of
that glaring description which we count too ob-
vious for the purposes of art

The landing at Jersey City was done in a
stampede. I had a fixed sense of calamity, and
to judge by conduct, the same persuasion was
common to us all. A panic selfishness, like that
produced by fear, presided over the disorder of
our landing. People pushed, and elbowed, and
ran, their families following how they could. Chil-
dren fell, and were picked up to be rewarded by
a blow. One child, who had lost her parents,
screamed steadily and with increasing shrillness,
as though verging towards a fit; an official kept
her by him, but no one else seemed so much as

I 6 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

to remark her distress; and I am ashamed to say
that I ran among the rest. I was so weary that
I had twice to make a halt and set down my
bundles in the hundred yards or so between the
pier and the railway station, so that I was quite
wet by the time that I got under cover. There
was no waiting-room, no refreshment room; the
cars were locked; and for at least another hour,
or so it seemed, we had to camp upon the
draughty, gaslit platform. I sat on my valise, too
crushed to observe my neighbours; but as they
were all cold, and wet, and weary, and driven
stupidly crazy by the mismanagement to which
we had been subjected, I believe they can have
been no happier than myself. I bought half a
dozen oranges from a boy, for oranges and nuts
were the only refection to be had. As only two
of them had even a pretence of juice, I threw the
other four under the cars, and beheld, as in a
dream, grown people and children groping on the
track after my leavings.

At last we were admitted into the cars, utterly
dejected, and far from dry. For my own part, I
got out a clothes-brush, and brushed my trousers
as hard as I could till I had dried them and
warmed my blood into the bargain; but no one
else, except my next neighbour to' whom I lent

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 17

the brush, appeared to take the least precaution.
As they were, they composed themselves to sleep.
I had seen the lights of Philadelphia, and been
twice ordered to change carriages and twice
countermanded, before I allowed myself to follow
their example.

Tuesday. — When I awoke, it was already day;
the train was standing idle; I was in the last car-
riage, and, seeing some other strolling to and fro
about the lines, I opened the door and stepped
forth, as from a caravan by the wayside. We
were near no station, nor even, as far as I could
see, within reach of any signal. A green, open,
undulating country stretched away upon all sides.
Locust trees and a single field of Indian corn
gave it a foreign grace and interest; but the con-
tours of the land were soft and English. It was
not quite England, neither was it quite France;
yet like enough either to seem natural in my eyes.
And it was in the sky, and not upon the earth,
that I was surprised to find a change. Explain
it how you may, and for my part I cannot explain
it at all, the sun rises with a different splendour
in America and Europe. There is more clear
gold and scarlet in our old country mornings;
more purple, brown, and smoky orange in those
of the new. It may be from habit, but to me the

Across the Plains, etc. 2

I 8 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

coming of day is less fresh and inspiriting in the
latter; it has a duskier glory, and more nearly re-
sembles sunset; it seems to fit some subsequential,
evening epoch of the world, as though America
were in fact, and not merely in fancy, farther
from the orient of Aurora and the springs of day.
I thought so then, by the railroad side in Penn-
sylvania, and I have thought so a dozen times
since in far distant parts of the continent. If it
be an illusion it is one very deeply rooted, and in
which my eyesight is accomplice.

Soon after a train whisked by, announcing and
accompanying its passage by the swift beating of
a sort of chapel bell upon the engine; and as it
was for this we had been waiting, we were sum-
moned by the cry of "All aboard!" and went on
again upon our way. The whole line, it appeared,
was topsy-turvy; an accident at midnight having
thrown all the traffic hours into arrear. We" paid
for this in the flesh, for we had no meals all that
day. Fruit we could buy upon the cars; and now
and then we had a few minutes at some station
with a meagre show of rolls and sandwiches for
sale; but we were so many and so ravenous that,
though I tried at every opportunity, the coffee was
always exhausted before I could elbow my way
to the counter.

ACROSS THE PLAINS. IQ

Our American sunrise had ushered in a noble
summer's day. There was not a cloud; the sun-
shine was baking; yet in the woody river valleys
among which we wound our way, the atmosphere
preserved a sparkling freshness till late in the
afternoon. It had an inland sweetness and variety
to one newly from the sea; it smelt of woods,
rivers, and the delved earth. These, though in so
far a country, were airs from home. I stood on
the platform by the hour; and as I saw, one after
another, pleasant villages, carts upon the highway
and fishers by the stream, and heard cockcrows
and cheery voices in the distance, and beheld the
sun, no longer shining blankly on the plains of
ocean, but striking among shapely hills and his
light dispersed and coloured by a thousand acci-
dents of form and surface, I began to exult with
myself upon this rise in life like a man who had
come into a rich estate. And when I had asked
the name of a river from the brakesman, and
heard that it was called the Susquehanna, the'
beauty of the name seemed to be part and parcel
of the beauty of the land. As when Adam with
divine fitness named the creatures, so this word
Susquehanna was at once accepted by the fancy.
That was the name, as no other could be, for that
shining river and desirable valley.

2O ACROSS THE PLAINS.

None can care for literature in itself who do
not take a special pleasure in the sound of names ;
and there is no part of the world where nomen-
clature is so rich, poetical, humorous, and pic-
turesque as the United States of America. All
times, races, and languages have brought their
contribution. Pekin is in the same State with
Euclid, with Bellefontaine, and with Sandusky.
Chelsea, with its London associations of red brick,
Sloane Square, and the King's Road, is own
suburb to stately and primeval Memphis; there
they have their seat, translated names of cities,
where the Mississippi runs by Tennessee and Ar-
kansas;* and both, while I was crossing the con-
tinent, lay, watched by armed men, in the horror
and isolation of a plague. Old, red Manhattan
lies, like an Indian arrowhead under a steam fac-
tory, below anglified New York. The names of
the States and Territories themselves form a chorus
of sweet and most romantic vocables: Delaware,
Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming,
Minnesota, and the Carolinas; there are few poems
with a nobler music for the ear: a songful, tune-
ful land; and if the new Homer shall arise from
the Western continent, his verse will be enriched,

* Please pronounce Arkansaw, with the accent on the
first.

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 21

his pages sing spontaneously, with the names of
states and cities that would strike the fancy in a
business circular.

Late in the evening we were landed in a wait-
ing-room at Pittsburg. I had now under my charge
a young and sprightly Dutch widow with her chil-
dren; these I was to watch over providentially for
a certain distance farther on the way; but as I
found she was furnished with a basket of eatables,
I left her in the waiting-room to seek a dinner
for myself.

I mention this meal, not only because it was
the first of which I had partaken for about thirty
hours, but because it was the means of my first
introduction to a coloured gentleman. He did me
the honour to wait upon me after a fashion, while
I was eating; and with every word, look, and
gesture marched me farther into the country of
surprise. He was indeed strikingly unlike the
negroes of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, or the Christy
Minstrels of my youth. Imagine a gentleman,
certainly somewhat dark, but of a pleasant warm
hue, speaking English with a slight and rather odd
foreign accent, every inch a man of the world,
and armed with manners so patronisingly superior
that I am at a loss to name their parallel in Eng-
land. A butler perhaps rides as high over the

22 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

unbutlered, but then he sets you right with a re-
serve and a sort of sighing patience which one is
often moved to admire. And again, the abstract
butler never stoops to familiarity. But the coloured
gentleman will pass you a wink at a time; he is
familiar like an upper form boy to a fag; he un-
bends to you like Prince Hal with Poins and
Falstaff. He makes himself at home and welcome.
Indeed, I may say, this waiter behaved himself to
me throughout that supper much as, with us, a
young, free, and not very self-respecting master
might behave to a good-looking chambermaid. I
had come prepared to pity the poor negro, to put
him at his ease, to prove in a thousand conde-
scensions that I was no sharer in the prejudice of
race; but I assure you I put my patronage away
for another occasion, and had the grace to be
pleased with that result.

Seeing he was a very honest fellow, I consulted
him upon a point of etiquette: if one should offer
to tip the American waiter? Certainly not, he
told me. Never. It would not do. They con-
sidered themselves too highly to accept. They
would even resent the offer. As for him and me,
we had enjoyed a very pleasant conversation; he,
in particular, had found much pleasure in my
society; I was a stranger; this was exactly one of

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 23

those rare conjunctures. . . . Without being very
clear seeing, I can still perceive the sun at noQn-
day; and the coloured gentleman deftly pocketed
a quarter.

Wednesday. — A little after midnight I con-
voyed my widow and orphans on board the train;
and morning found us far into Ohio. This had
early been a favourite home of my imagination;
I have played at being in Ohio by the week, and
enjoyed some capital sport there with a dummy
gun, my person being still unbreeched. My pre-
ference was founded on a work which appeared
in Cassell's Family Paper, and was read aloud to
me by my nurse. It narrated the doings of one
Custaloga, an Indian brave, who, in the last
chapter, very obligingly washed the paint off his
face and became Sir Reginald Somebody-or-other;
a trick I never forgave him. The idea of a man
being an Indian brave, and then giving that up
to be a baronet, was one which my mind rejected.
It offended verisimilitude, like the pretended
anxiety of Robinson Crusoe and others to escape
from uninhabited islands.

But Ohio was not at all as I had pictured it.
We were now on those great plains which stretch
unbroken to the Rocky Mountains. The country
was flat like Holland, but far from being dull.

24 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

All through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, or
for as much as I saw of them from the train and
in my waking moments, it was rich and various,
and breathed an elegance peculiar to itself. The
tall corn pleased the eye; the trees were graceful
in themselves, and framed the plain into long,
aerial vistas; and the clean, bright, gardened
townships spoke of country fare and pleasant
summer evenings on the stoop. It was a sort of
flat paradise; but, I am afraid, not unfrequented by
the devil. That morning dawned with such a freez-
ing chill as I have rarely felt; a chill that was not
perhaps so measurable by instrument, as it struck
home upon the heart and seemed to travel with
the blood. Day came in with a shudder. White
mists lay thinly over the surface of the plain, as
we see them more often on a lake; and though
the sun had soon dispersed and drunk them up,
leaving an atmosphere of fever heat and crystal
pureness from horizon to horizon, the mists had
still been there, and we knew that this paradise
was haunted by killing damps and foul malaria.
The fences along the line bore but two descrip-
tions of advertisement; one to recommend to-
baccos, and the other to vaunt remedies against
the ague. At the point of day, and while we were
all in the grasp of that first chill, a native of the

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 25

state, who had got in at some way station, pro-
nounced it, with a doctoral air, "a fever and ague
morning."

The Dutch widow was a person of some char-
acter. She had conceived at first sight a great
aversion for the present writer, which she was at
no pains to conceal. But being a woman of a
practical spirit, she made no difficulty about ac-
cepting my attentions, and encouraged me to buy
her children fruits and candies, to carry all her
parcels, and even to sleep upon the floor that she
might profit by my empty seat. Nay, she was
such a rattle by nature, and so powerfully moved
to autobiographical talk, that she was forced, for
want of a better, to take me into confidence and
tell me the story of her life. I heard about her
late husband, who seemed to have made his chief
impression by taking her out pleasuring on Sun-
days. I could tell you her prospects, her hopes,
the amount of her fortune, the cost of her house-
keeping by the week, and a variety of particular
matters that are not usually disclosed except to
friends. At one station, she shook up her chil-
dren to look at a man on a platform and say if
he were not like Mr. Z.; while to me she ex-
plained how she had been keeping company with
this Mr. Z., how far matters had proceeded, and

26 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

how it was because of his desistance that she
was now travelling to the west. Then, when I was
thus put in possession of the facts, she asked my
judgment on that type of manly beauty. I ad-
mired it to her heart's content. She was not, I
think, remarkably veracious in, talk, but broidered
as fancy prompted, and built castles in the air
out of her past; yet she had that sort of candour,
to keep me, in spite of all these confidences,
steadily aware of her aversion. Her parting words
were ingeniously honest. "I am sure," said she,
"we all ought to be very much obliged to you."
I cannot pretend that she put me at my ease;
but I had a certain respect for such a genuine
dislike. A poor nature would have slipped, in the
course of these familiarities, into a sort of worth-
less toleration for me.

We reached Chicago in the evening. I was
turned out of the cars, bundled into an omnibus,
and driven off through the streets to the station
of a different railroad. Chicago seemed a great
and gloomy city. I remember having subscribed,
let us say sixpence, towards its restoration at the
period of the fire; and now when I beheld street
after street of ponderous houses- and crowds of
comfortable burghers, I thought it would be a
graceful act for the corporation to refund that

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 2J

sixpence, or, at the least, to entertain me to a
cheerful dinner. But there was no word of re-
stitution. I was that city's benefactor, yet I was
received in a third-class waiting-room, and the
best dinner I could get was a dish of ham and
eggs at my own expense.

I can safely say, I have never been so dog-
tired as that night in Chicago. When it was time
to start, I descended the platform like a man in
a dream. It was a long train, lighted from end
to end; and car after car, as I came up with it,
was not only filled but overflowing. My valise,
my knapsack, my rug, with those six ponderous
tomes of Bancroft, weighed me double; I was hot,
feverish, painfully athirst; and there was a great
darkness over me, an internal darkness, not to be
dispelled by gas. When at last I found an empty
bench, I sank into it like a bundle of rags, the
world seemed to swim away into the distance, and
my consciousness dwindled within me to a mere
pin's head, like a taper on a foggy night.

When I came a little more to myself, I found
that there had sat down beside me a very cheer-
ful, rosy little German gentleman, somewhat gone
in drink, who was talking away to me, nineteen
to the dozen, as they say. I did my best to keep
up the conversation; for it seemed to me dimly

28 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

as if something depended upon that. I heard
him relate, among many other things, that there
were pickpockets on the train, who had already
robbed a man of forty dollars and a return ticket;
but though I caught the words, I do not think I
properly understood the sense until next morning;
and I believe I replied at the time that I was very
glad to hear it. What else he talked about I have
no guess; I remember a gabbling sound of words,
his profuse gesticulation, and his smile, which was
highly explanatory; but no more. And I suppose
I must have shown my confusion very plainly;
for, first, I saw him knit his brows at me like one
who has conceived a doubt; next, he tried me in
German, supposing perhaps that I was unfamiliar
with the English tongue; and finally, in despair,
he rose and left me. I felt chagrined; but my
fatigue was too crushing for delay, and, stretching
myself as far as that was possible upon the
bench, I was received at once into a dreamless
stupor.

The little German gentleman was only going
a little way into the suburbs after a diner fin,
and was bent on entertainment while the journey
lasted. Having failed with me, he pitched next
upon another emigrant, who had come through
from Canada, and was not one jot less weary than

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 2Q

myself. Nay, even in a natural state, as I found
next morning when we scraped acquaintance, he
was a heavy, uncommunicative man. After trying
him on different topics, it appears that the little
German gentleman flounced into a temper, swore
an oath or two, and departed from that car in
quest of livelier society. Poor little gentleman !
I suppose he thought an emigrant should be a
rollicking, free-hearted blade, with a flask of for-
eign brandy and a long, comical story to beguile
the moments of digestion.

Thursday. — I suppose there must be a cycle
in the fatigue of travelling, for when I awoke next
morning, I was entirely renewed in spirits and ate
a hearty breakfast of porridge, with sweet milk,
and coffee and hot cakes, at Burlington upon the
Mississippi. Another long day's ride followed, with
but one feature worthy of remark. At a place
called Creston, a drunken man got in. He was
aggressively friendly, but, according to English
notions, not at all unpresentable upon a train.
For one stage he eluded the notice of the officials;
but just as we were beginning to move out of the
next station, Cromwell by name, by came the con-
ductor. There was a word or two of talk; and
then the official had the man by the shoulders,
twitched him from his seat, marched him through

3O ACROSS THE PLAINS.

the car, and sent him flying on to the track. It
was done in three motions, as exact as a piece of
drill. The train was still moving slowly, although
beginning to mend her pace, and the drunkard
got his feet without a fall. He carried a red
bundle, though not so red as his cheeks; and he
shook this menacingly in the air with one hand,
while the other stole behind him to the region of
the kidneys. It was the first indication that I had
come among revolvers, and I observed it with
some emotion. The conductor stood on the steps
with one hand on his hip, looking back at him;
and perhaps this attitude imposed upon the
creature, for he turned without further ado, and
went off staggering along the track towards Crom-
well, followed by a peal of laughter from the cars.
They were speaking English all about me, but I
knew I was in a foreign land.

Twenty minutes before nine that night, we
were deposited at the Pacific Transfer Station
near Council Bluffs, on the eastern bank of the
Missouri river. Here we were to stay the night
at a kind of caravanserai, set apart for emigrants.
But I gave way to a thirst for luxury, separated
myself from my companions, and marched with
my effects into the Union Pacific Hotel. A white
clerk and a coloured gentleman whom, in my

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 31

plain European way, I should call the boots,
were installed behind a counter like bank tellers.
They took, my name, assigned me a number, and
proceeded to deal with my packages. And here
came the tug of war. I wished to give up my
packages into safe keeping; but I did not wish to
go to bed. And this, it appeared, was impossible
in an American hotel.

It was, of course, some inane misunderstand-
ing, and sprang from my unfamiliarity with the
language. For although two nations use the
same words and read the same books, intercourse
is not conducted by the dictionary. The busi-
ness of life is not carried on by words, but in
set phrases, each with a special and almost a
slang signification. Some international obscurity
prevailed between me and the coloured gentleman
at Council Bluffs; so that what I was asking,
which seemed very natural to me, appeared to
him a monstrous exigency. He refused, and
that with the plainness of the West. This
American manner of conducting matters of busi-
ness is, at first, highly unpalatable to the
European. When we approach a man in the
way of his calling, and for those services by which
he earns his bread, we consider him for the time
being our hired servant. But in the American

32 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

opinion, two gentlemen meet and have a friendly
talk with a view to exchanging favours if they
shall agree to please. I know not which is the
more convenient, nor even which is the more
truly courteous. The English stiffness unfortunately
tends to be continued after the particular trans-
action is at an end, and thus favours class separa-
tions. But on the other hand, these equalitarian
plainnesses leave an open field for the insolence
of Jack-in-office.

I was nettled by the coloured gentleman's re-
fusal, and unbuttoned my wrath under the simili-
tude of ironical submission. I knew nothing, I
said, of the ways of American hotels; but I had
no desire to give trouble. If there was nothing
for it but to get to bed immediately, let him say
the word, and though it was not my habit, I should
cheerfully obey.

He burst into a shout of laughter. "Ah!"
said he, "you do not know about America.
They are fine people in America. Oh! you will
like them very well. But you mustn't get mad.
I know what you want. You come along with
me."

And issuing from behind the counter, and
taking me by the arm like an old acquaintance,
he led me to the bar of the hotel.

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 33

"There," said he, pushing me from him by
the shoulder, "go and have a drink!"

THE EMIGRANT TRAIN.

All this while I had been travelling by mixed
trains, where I might meet with Dutch widows
and little German gentry fresh from table. I
had been but a latent emigrant; now I was to
be branded once more, and put apart with my
fellows. It was about two in the afternoon of
Friday that I found myself in front of the
Emigrant House, with more than a hundred
others, to be sorted and boxed for the journey.
A white-haired official, with a stick under one
arm, and a list in the other hand, stood apart in
front of us, and called name after name in the
tone of a command. At each name you would
see a family gather up its brats and bundles and
run for the hindmost of the three cars that
stood awaiting us, and I soon -concluded that
this was to be set apart for the women and
children. The second or central car, it turned
out, was devoted to men travelling alone, and
the third to the Chinese. The official was easily
moved to anger at the least delay; but the
emigrants were both quick at answering their

Across the Plains, etc, 3

34 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

names, and speedy in getting themselves and
their effects on board.

The families once housed, we men carried
the second car without ceremony by simultaneous
assault. I suppose the reader has some notion
of an American failroad-car, that long, narrow
wooden box, like a flat-roofed Noah's ark, with a
stove and a convenience, one at either end, a
passage down the middle, and transverse benches
upon either hand. Those destined for emigrants
on the Union Pacific are only remarkable for
their extreme plainness, nothing but wood enter-
ing in any part into their constitution, and for
the usual inefficacy of the lamps, which often
went out and shed but a dying glimmer even
while they burned. The benches are too short
for anything but a young child. Where there is
scarce elbotv-room for two to sit, there will not
be space enough for one to lie. Hence the
company, or rather, as it appears from certain
bills about the Transfer Station, the company's
servants, have conceived a plan for the better
accommodation of travellers. They prevail on
every two to chum together. To each of the
chums they sell a board and three square
cushions stuffed with straw, and covered with
thin cotton. The benches can be made to face

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 35

each other in pairs, for the backs are reversible.
On the approach of night the boards are laid
from bench to bench, making a couch wide
enough for two, and long enough for a man of
the middle height; and the chums lie down side
by side upon the cushions with the head to the
conductor's van and the feet to the engine.
When the train is full, of course this plan is im-
possible, for there must not be more than one to
every bench, neither can it be carried out unless
the chums agree. It was to bring about this
last condition that our white-haired official now
bestirred himself. He made a most active
master of ceremonies, introducing likely couples,
and even guaranteeing the amiability and honesty
of each. The greater the number of happy
couples the better for his pocket, for it was he
who sold the raw material of the beds. His
price for one board and three straw cushions be-
gan with two dollars and a half; but before the
train left, and, I am sorry to say, long after I
had purchased mine, it had fallen to one dollar
and. a half.

The match-maker had a difficulty with me;
perhaps, like some ladies, I showed myself too
eager for union at any price; but certainly the
first who was picked out to be my bedfellow,

3*

36 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

declined the honour without thanks. He was an
old, heavy, slow-spoken man, I think from Yankee-
land, looked me all over with great timidity, and
then began to excuse himself in broken phrases.
He didn't know the young man, he said. The
young man might be very honest, but how was he
to know that? There was another young man
whom he had met already in the train; he guessed
he was honest, and would prefer to chum with
him upon the whole. All this without any sort
of excuse, as though I had been inanimate or
absent. I began to tremble lest everyone should
refuse my company, and I be left rejected. But
the next in turn was a tall, strapping, long-limbed,
small-headed, curly-haired Pennsylvania Dutch-
man, with a soldierly smartness in his manner.
To be exact, he had acquired it in the navy.
But that was all one; he had at least been trained
to desperate resolves, so he accepted the match,
and the white-haired swindler pronounced the
connubial benediction, and pocketed his fees.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in mak-
ing up the train. I am afraid to say how many
baggage- waggons followed the engine, certainly a
score; then came the Chinese, then we, then the
families, and the rear was brought up by the con-
ductor in what, if I have it rightly, is called his

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 37

caboose. The class to which I belonged was of
course far the largest, and we ran over, so to
speak, to both sides; so that there were some
Caucasians among the Chinamen, and some
bachelors among the families. But our own car
was pure from admixture, save for one little boy
of eight or nine, who had the whooping-cough.
At last, about six, the long train crawled out of
the Transfer Station and across the wide Missouri
river to Omaha, westward bound.

It was a troubled uncomfortable evening in
the cars. There was thunder in the air, which
helped to keep us restless. A man played many
airs upon the cornet, and none of them were much
attended to, until he came to "Home, sweet home."
It was truly strange to note how the talk ceased
at that, and the faces began to lengthen. I have
no idea whether musically this air is to be con-
sidered good or bad; but it belongs to that class
of art which may be best described as a brutal
assault upon the feelings. Pathos must be re-
lieved by dignity of treatment. If you wallow
naked in the pathetic, like the author of "Home,
sweet home," you make your hearers weep in an
unmanly fashion; and even while yet they are
moved, they despise themselves and hate the
occasion of their weakness, It did not come to

38 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

tears that night, for the experiment was inter-
rupted. An elderly, hard-looking man, with a
goatee .beard and about as much appearance of
sentiment as you would expect from a retired
slaver, turned with a start and bade the performer
stop that "damned thing." "I've heard about
enough of that," he added; "give us something
about the good country we're going to." A mur-
mur of adhesion ran round the car; the performer
took the instrument from his lips, laughed and
nodded, and then struck into a dancing measure;
and, like a new Timotheus, stilled immediately
the emotion he had raised.

The day faded; the lamps were lit; a party
of wild young men, who got off next evening at
North Platte, stood together on the stern platform,
singing "The Sweet By-and-bye" with very tune-
ful voices; the chums began to put up their beds;
and it seemed as if the business of the day were
at an end. But it was not so; for, the train
stopping at some station, the cars were instantly
thronged with the natives, wives and fathers, young
men and maidens, some of them in little more
than nightgear, some with stable lanterns, and all
offering beds for sale. Their charge began with
twenty-five cents a cushion, but fell, before the
train went on again, to fifteen, with the bed-board

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 3Q

gratis, or less than one-fifth of what I had paid
for mine at the Transfer. This is my contribution
to the economy of future emigrants.

A great personage on an American train is
the newsboy. He sells books (such books!), papers,
fruit, lollipops, and cigars; and on emigrant journeys,
soap, towels, tin washing dishes, tin coffee pitchers,
coffee, tea, sugar, and tinned eatables, mostly hash
or beans and bacon. Early next morning the
newsboy went around the cars, and chumming on
a more extended principle became the order of
the hour. It requires but a copartnery of two to
manage beds; but washing and eating can be
carried on most economically by a syndicate of
three. I myself entered a little after sunrise into
articles of agreement, and became one of the
firm of Pennsylvania, Shakespeare, and Dubuque.
Shakespeare was my own nickname on the cars;
Pennsylvania that of my bedfellow; and Dubuque,
the name of a place in the State of Iowa, that of
an amiable young fellow going west to cure an
asthma, and retarding his recovery by incessantly
chewing or smoking, and sometimes chewing and
smoking together. I have never seen tobacco so
sillily abused. Shakespeare bought a tin washing-
dish, Dubuque a towel, and Pennsylvania a brick
of soap. The partners used these instruments,

40 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

one after another, according to the order of their
first awaking; and when the firm had finished
there was no want of borrowers. Each filled the
tin dish at the water filter opposite the stove, and
retired with the whole stock in trade to the plat-
form of the car. There he knelt down, support-
ing himself by a shoulder against the woodwork
or one elbow crooked about the railing, and made
a shift to wash his face and neck and hands; a
cold, an insufficient, and, if the train is moving
rapidly, a somewhat dangerous toilet.

On a similar division of expense, the firm of
Pennsylvania, Shakespeare, and Dubuque sup-
plied themselves with coffee, sugar, and necessary
vessels; and their operations are a type of what
went on through all the cars. Before the sun was
up the stove would be brightly burning; at the
first station the natives would come on board
with milk and eggs and coffee cakes; and soon
from end to end the car would be filled with little
parties breakfasting upon the bed-boards. It was
the pleasantest hour of the day.

There were meals to be had, however, by the
wayside: a breakfast in the morning, a dinner
somewhere between" eleven and two, and supper
from five to eight or nine at night. We had

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 4!

rarely less than twenty minutes for each; and if
we had not spent many another twenty minutes
waiting for some express upon a side track among
miles of desert, we might have taken an hour to
each repast and arrived at San Francisco up to
time. For haste is not the foible of an emigrant
train. It gets through on sufferance, running the
gauntlet among its more considerable brethren;
should there be a block, it is unhesitatingly
sacrificed; and they cannot, in consequence, pre-
dict the length of the passage within a day or
so. Civility is the main comfort that you miss.
Equality, though conceived very largely in America,
does not extend so low down as to an emigrant.
Thus in all other trains, a warning cry of "All
aboard ! " recalls the passengers to take their seat';
but as soon as I was alone with emigrants, and
from the Transfer all the way to San Francisco, I
found this ceremony was pretermitted ; the train
stole from the station without note of warning,
and you had to keep an eye upon it even while
you ate. The annoyance is considerable, and the
disrespect both wanton and petty.

Many conductors, again, will hold no com-
munication with an emigrant. I asked a con-
ductor one day at what time the train would stop
for dinner; as he made no answer I repeated the

42 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

question, with a like result; a third time I returned
to the charge, and then Jack-in-.office looked me
coolly in the face for several seconds and turned
ostentatiously away. I believe he was half
ashamed of his brutality; for when another
person made the same inquiry, although he still
refused the information, he condescended to an-
swer, and even to justify his reticence in a voice
loud enough for me to hear. It was, he said, his
principle not to tell people where they were to
dine; for one answer led to many other questions,
as what o'clock it was? or, how soon should we
be there? and he could not afford to be eternally
worried.

As you are thus cut off from the superior
authorities, a great deal of your comfort depends
on the character of the newsboy. He has it in
his power indefinitely to better and brighten the
emigrant's lot. The newsboy with whom we
started from the Transfer was a dark, bullying,
contemptuous, insolent scoundrel, who treated us
like dogs. Indeed, in his case, matters came
nearly to a fight. It happened thus: he was going
his rounds through the cars with some com-
modities for sale, and coming to a party 'who
were at Seven-up or Cascino (our two games),
upon a bed-board, slung down a cigar-box in the

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 43

middle of the cards, knocking one man's hand to
the floor. It was the last straw. In a moment
the whole party were upon their feet, the cigars
were upset, and he was ordered to "get out of
that directly, or he would get more than he
reckoned for." The fellow grumbled and mut-
tered, but ended by making off, and was less
openly insulting in the future On the other
hand, the lad who rode with us in this capacity
from Ogden to Sacramento made himself the
friend of all, and helped us with information,
attention, assistance, and a kind countenance. He
told us where and when we should have our
meals, and how long the train would stop; kept
seats at table for those who were delayed, and
watched that we should neither be left behind
nor yet unnecessarily hurried. You, who live at
home at ease, can hardly realise the greatness of
this service, even had it stood alone. When I
think of that lad coming and going, train after
train, with his bright face and civil words, I see
how easily a good man may become the bene-
factor of his kind. Perhaps he is discontented
with himself, perhaps troubled with ambitions;
why, if he but knew it, he is a hero of the old
Greek stamp; and while he thinks he is only
earning a profit of a few cents, and that perhaps

44 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

exorbitant, he is doing a man's work, and better-
ing the world.

I must tell here an experience of mine with
another newsboy. I tell it because it gives so
good an example of that uncivil kindness of the
American, which is perhaps their most bewilder-
ing character to one newly landed. It was im-
mediately after I had left the emigrant train; and
I am told I looked like a man at death's door, so
much had this long journey shaken me. I sat at
the end of a car, and the catch being broken,
and myself feverish and sick, I had to hold the
door open with my foot for the sake of air. In
this attitude my leg debarred the newsboy from
his box of merchandise. I made haste to let
him pass when I observed that he was coming;
but I was busy with a book, and so once or twice
he came upon me unawares. On these occa-
sions he most rudely struck my foot aside; and
though I myself apologised, as if to show him
the way, he answered me never a word. I chafed
furiously, and I fear the next time it would have
come to words. But suddenly I felt a touch
upon my shoulder, and a large juicy pear was put
into my hand. It was the newsboy, who had ob-
served that I was looking ill and so made me
this present out of a tender heart. For the rest

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 45

of the journey I was petted like a sick child; he
lent me newspapers, thus depriving himself of his
legitimate profit on their sale, and came repeatedly
to sit by me and cheer me up.

THE PLAINS OF NEBRASKA.

It had thundered on the Friday night, but
the sun rose on Saturday without a cloud. We
were at sea — there is no other adequate expres-
sion— on the plains of Nebraska. I made my
observatory on the top of a fruit-waggon, and sat
by the hour upon that perch to spy about me,
and to spy in vain for something new. It was a
world almost without a feature; an empty sky, an
empty earth; front and back, the line of railway
stretched from horizon to horizon, like a cue
across a billiard-board; on either hand, the green
plain ran till it touched the skirts of heaven.
Along the track innumerable wild sunflowers, no
bigger than a crown-piece, bloomed in a continuous
flower-bed; grazing beasts were seen upon the
prairie at all degrees of distance and diminution;
and now and again we might perceive a few dots
beside the railroad which grew more and more dis-
tinct as we drew nearer till they turned into wooden
cabins, and then dwindled and dwindled in our wake
until they melted into their surroundings, and we

46 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

were once more alone upon the billiard-board.
The train toiled over this infinity like a snail;
and being the one thing moving, it was wonderful
what huge proportions it began to assume in our
regard. It seemed miles in length, and either
end of it within but a step of the horizon. Even
my own body or my own head seemed a great
thing in that emptiness. I note the feeling the
more readily as it is the contrary of what I have
read of in the experience of others. Day and night,
above the roar of the train, our ears were kept
busy with the incessant chirp of grasshoppers — a
noise like the winding up of countless clocks and
watches, which began after a while to seem proper
to that land.

To one hurrying through by steam there was
a certain exhilaration in this spacious vacancy,
this greatness of the air, this discovery of the
whole arch of heaven, this straight, unbroken,
prison-line of the horizon. Yet one could not
but reflect upon the weariness of those who
passed by there in old days, at the foot's pace
of oxen, painfully urging their teams, and with
no landmark but that unattainable evening sun
for which they steered, and which daily fled
them by an equal stride. They had nothing, it
would seem, to overtake; nothing by which to

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 47

reckon their advance; no sight for repose or for
encouragement; but stage after stage, only the
dead green waste under foot, and the mocking,
fugitive horizon. But the eye, as I have been
told, found differences even here; and at the
worst the emigrant came, by perseverance, to the
end of his toil. It is the settlers, after all, at
whom we have a right to marvel. Our conscious-
ness, by which we live, is itself but the creature
of variety. Upon what food does it subsist in
such a land? What livelihood can repay a human
creature for a life spent in this huge sameness?
He is cut off from books, from news, from com-
pany, from all that can relieve existence but the
prosecution of his affairs. A sky full of stars is
the most varied spectacle that he can hope. He
may walk five miles and see nothing; ten, and it
is as though he had not moved; twenty, and still
he is in the midst of the same great level, and
has approached no nearer to the one object
within view, the flat horizon which keeps pace
with his advance. We are full at home of the
question of agreeable wall-papers, and wise people
are of opinion that the temper may be quieted
by sedative surroundings. But what is to be said
of the Nebraskan settler? His is a wall-paper
with a vengeance — one quarter of the universe

48 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

laid bare in all its gauntness. His eye must
embrace at every glance the whole seeming
concave of the visible world; it quails before so
vast an outlook, it is tortured by distance; yet
there is no rest or shelter, till the man runs into
his cabin, and can repose his sight upon things
near at hand. Hence, I am told, a sickness of
the vision peculiar to these empty plains.

Yet perhaps with sunflowers and cicadas,
summer and winter, cattle, wife and family, the
settler may create a full and various existence.
One person at least I saw upon the plains who
seemed in every way superior to her lot. This
was a woman who boarded us at a way station,
selling milk. She was largely formed; her features
were more than comely; she had that great rarity
— a fine complexion which became her; and her
eyes were kind, dark, and steady. She sold milk
with patriarchal grace. There was not a line in
her countenance, not a note in her soft and sleepy
voice, but spoke of an entire contentment with
her life. It would have been fatuous arrogance
to pity such a woman. Yet the place where she
lived was to me almost ghastly. Less than a
dozen wooden houses, all of a shape and all
nearly of a size, stood planted along the railway
lines. Each stood apart in its own lot. Each

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 49

opened direct off the billiard-board, as if it were
a billiard-board indeed, and these only models
that had been set down upon it ready made.
Her own, into which I looked, was clean but
very empty, and showed nothing homelike but
the burning fire. This extreme newness, above
all in so naked and flat a country, gives a strong
impression of artificiality. With none of the litter
and discoloration of human life; with the paths
unworn, and the houses still sweating from the
axe, such a settlement as this seems purely scenic.
The mind is loth to accept it for a piece of
reality; and it seems incredible that life can go
on with so few properties, or the great child,
man, find entertainment in so bare a playroom.

And truly it is as yet an incomplete society
in some points; or at least it contained, as I
passed through, one person incompletely civilised.
At North Platte, where we supped that evening,
one man asked another to pass the milk-jug. This
other was well dressed and of what we should
call a respectable appearance; a darkish man,
high spoken, eating as though he had some usage
of society; but he turned upon the first speaker
with extraordinary vehemence of tone —

"There's a waiter here!" he cried.

Across the Plains, etc, 4

5O ACROSS THE PLAINS.

"I only asked you to pass the milk," explained
the first.

Here is the retort verbatim —

"Pass! Hell! I'm not paid for that business;
the waiter's paid for it. You should use civility
at table, and, by God, I'll show you how!"

The other man very wisely made no answer,
and the bully went on with his supper as though
nothing had occurred. It pleases me to think that
some day soon he will meet with one of his own
kidney; and that perhaps both may fall.

THE DESERT OF WYOMING.
To cross such a plain is to grow homesick
for the mountains. I longed for the Black Hills
of Wyoming, which I knew we were soon to enter,
like an ice-bound whaler for the spring. Alas!
and it was a worse country than the other. All
Sunday and Monday we travelled through these
sad mountains, or over the main ridge of the
Rockies, which is a fair match to them for misery
of aspect. Hour after hour it was the same un-
homely and unkindly world about our onward
path; tumbled boulders, cliffs that drearily imitate
the shape of monuments and fortifications — how
drearily, how tamely, none can tell who has not
seen them; not a tree, not a patch of sward, not

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 5!

one shapely or commanding mountain form; sage-
brush, eternal sage-brush; over all, the same weari-
ful and gloomy colouring, grays warming into brown,
grays darkening towards black; and for sole sign
of life, here and there a few fleeing antelopes;
here and there, but at incredible intervals, a creek
running in a canon. The plains have a grandeur
of their own; but here there is nothing but a con-
torted smallness. Except for the air, which was
light and stimulating, there was not one good
circumstance in that God-forsaken land.

I had been suffering in my health a good deal
all the way; and at last, whether I was exhausted
by my complaint or poisoned in some wayside
eating-house, the evening we left Laramie, I fell
sick outright. That was a night which I shall not
readily forget. The lamps did not go out; each
made a faint shining in its own neighbourhood,
and the shadows were confounded together in the
long, hollow box of the car. The sleepers lay in
uneasy attitudes; here two chums alongside, flat
upon their backs like dead folk; there a man
sprawling on the floor, with his face upon his
arm; there another half seated with his head and
shoulders on the bench. The most passive were
continually and roughly shaken by the movement
of the train; others stirred, turned, or stretched

4*

52 ACROSS TOE PLAINS.

out their arms like children; it was surprising
how many groaned and murmured in their sleep;
and as I passed to and fro, stepping across the
prostrate, and caught now a snore, now a gasp,
now a half-formed word, it gave me a measure of
the worthlessness of rest in that unresting vehicle.
Although it was chill, I was obliged to open my
window, for the^degradation of the air soon be-
came intolerable to one who was awake and using
the full supply of life. Outside, in a glimmering
night, I saw the black, amorphous hills shoot by
unweariedly into our wake. They that long for
morning have never longed for it more earnestly
than I.

And yet when day came, it was to shine upon
the same broken and unsightly quarter of the
world. Mile upon mile, and not a tree, a bird,
or a river. Only down the long, sterile canons,
the train shot hooting and awoke the resting echo.
The train was the one piece of life in all the
deadly land; it was the one actor, the one spectacle
fit to be observed in this paralysis of man and
nature. And when I think how the railroad has
been pushed through this unwatered wilderness
and haunt of savage tribes, and now will bear an
emigrant for some £ 1 2 from the Atlantic to the
Golden Gates; how at each stage of the con-

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 53

struction, roaring, impromptu cities, full of gold
and lust and death, sprang up and then died
away again, and are now but wayside stations in
the desert; how in these uncouth places pig-
tailed Chinese pirates worked side by side with
border ruffians and broken men from Europe,
talking together in a mixed dialect, mostly oaths,
gambling, drinking, quarrelling and murdering like
wolves; how the plumed hereditary lord of all
America heard, in this last fastness, the scream
of the "bad medicine waggon" charioting his
foes; and then when I go on to remember that
all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentle-
men in frock coats, and with a view to nothing
more extraordinary than a fortune and a sub-
sequent visit to Paris, it seems to me, I own, as
if this railway were the one typical achievement
of the age in which we live, as if it brought to-
gether into one plot all the ends of the world
and all the degrees of social rank, and offered to
some great writer the busiest, the most extended,
and the most varied subject for an enduring
literary work. If it be romance, if it be contrast,
if it be heroism that we require, what was Troy
town to this? But, alas! it is not these things
that are necessary — it is only Homer.

Here also we are grateful to the train, as to

54 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

some god who conducts us swiftly through these
shades and by so many hidden perils. Thirst,
hunger, the sleight and ferocity of Indians are
all no more feared, so lightly do we skim these
horrible lands; as the gull, who wings safely through
the hurricane and past the shark. Yet we should
not be forgetful of these hardships of the past;
and to keep the balance true, since I have com-
plained of the trifling discomforts of my journey,
perhaps more than was enough, let me add an
original document. It was not written by Homer,
but by a boy of eleven, long since dead, and is
dated only twenty years ago. I shall punctuate,
to make things clearer, but not change the spelling.
"My dear Sister Mary, — / am afraid you will
go nearly grazy when you read my letter. If Jerry "
(the writer's eldest brother) (thas not written to you
before now, you will be surprised to heare that we
are in California, and that poor Thomas" (an-
other brother, of fifteen) "is dead. We started

from in July, with plenty of provisions

a?id too yoke oxen. We went along very well till

. we got ^vithin six or seven hundred miles of

California, when the Indians attacked us. We

found places where they had killed the emigrants.

We had one passenger with us, too guns, and one

revolver; so we ran all the lead We had into

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 55

bullets (and) hung the guns up in the wagon so
thai we could get at them in a minit. It was
about two o'clock in the afternoon; droave the cattel
a little way ; when a prairie chicken alited a little
way from the wagon.

" 'Jerry took out one of the guns to shoot it, and
told Tom drive the oxen. Tom and I drove the
oxen, and Jerry and the passenger went on. Then,
after a little, I left Tom and caught up with Jerry
and the other man. Jerry stopped for Tom to come
up ; me and the man went on and sit down by a
little stream. In a few minutes , we heard some
noise ; then three shots (they all struck poor Tom,
I suppose) ; then they gave the war hoop, and as
many as twenty of the red skins came down upon
us. The three that shot Tom was hid by the side
of the road in the bushe.s.

ffl thought the Tom and Jerry were shot; so I
told the other man that Tom and Jerry were dead,
and that we had better try to escape } if possible.
I had no shoes on; having a sore foot, I thought
I would not put them on. The man and me run
down the road, but We was soon stopt by an
Indian on a pony. We then turend the other way,
and run up the side of the Mountain, and hid be-
hind some cedar trees, and stayed there till dark.
The Indian* hunted all over after us, and verry

56 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

close to us, so close that we could here there tomy-
hawks Jingle. At dark the man and me started
on, I stubing my toes against sticks and stones.

We traveld on all night; and next morning, Just
as it was getting gray, we saw something in the
shape of a man. It layed Doivn in the grass.

We went up to it, and it was Jerry. Pie thought
we ware I?idians. You can imagine how glad he
zvas to see me. He thought we was all dead but
him, and ive thought him and Tom was dead.
He had the gun that he took out of the wagon to
shoot the prairie Chicken; all he had was the load
that was in it.

"We traveld on till about eight o'clock, We
caught up ivith one wagon with too men zvith it.

We had traveld with them before one day ; we
stopt and they Drove on; we knew that they ivas
ahead of us, unless they had been killed to. My
feet was so sore when we caught up with them
that I had to ride; I could not step. We traveld
on for too days , when the men that owned the
cattle said they would (could) not drive them an-
other inch. We unyoked the oxen; we had about
seventy pounds of flour ; we took it out and divided
it into four packs. Each of the men took about
1 8 pounds apiece and a blanket. I carried a little
bacon, dried meat, and little quilt; I had in all

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 57

about twelve pounds. We had one pint of flour a
day for our alloyance. Sometimes we made soup
of it; sometimes we (made) pancakes; and some-
times mixed it up with cold water and eat it that
way. We traveld twelve or fourteen days. The
time came at last when we should have to reach
some place or starve. We saw fresh horse and
cattle tracks. The morning come, we scraped all
the flour out of the sack, mixed it up, and baked
it into bread, and made some soup, and eat every-
thing we had. We traveld on all day without
anything to eat, and that evening we Caught up
with a sheep train of eight wagons. We traveld
with them till we arrived at the settlements ; and
know I am safe in California, and got to good
home, and going to school.

"Jerry is working in . // is a good

country. You can get from 50 to 60 and 75 Dol-
lars for cooking. Tell me all about the affairs in
the States, and how all the folks get along."

And so ends this artless narrative. The little
man was at school again, God bless him, while
his brother lay scalped upon the deserts.

FELLOW-PASSENGERS.

At Ogden we changed cars from the Union
Pacific to the Central Pacific line of railroad-

58 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

The change was doubly welcome; for, first, we
had better cars on the new line; and, second,
those in which we had been cooped for more
than ninety hours had begun to stink abomin-
ably. Several yards away, as we returned, let
us say from dinner, our nostrils were assailed by
rancid air. I have stood on a platform while the
whole train was shunting; and as the dwelling-
cars drew near, there would come a whiff of pure
menagerie, only a little sourer, as from men in-
stead of monkeys. I think we are human only
in virtue of open windows. Without fresh air,
you only require a bad heart, and a remarkable
command of the Queen's English, to become
such another as Dean Swift; a kind of leering,
human goat, leaping and wagging your scut on
mountains of offence. I do my best to keep my
head the other way, and look for the human
rather than the bestial in this Yahoo-like busi-
ness of the emigrant train. But one thing I must
say, the car of the Chinese was notably the least
offensive.

The cars on the Central Pacific were nearly
twice as high, and so proportionally airier; they
were freshly varnished, which gave us all a sense
of cleanliness as though we had bathed; the seats
drew out and joined in the centre, so that there

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 59

was no more need for bed boards; and there was
an upper tier of berths which could be closed by
day and opened at night.

I had by this time some opportunity of seeing
the people whom I was among. They were in
rather marked contrast to the emigrants I had
met on board ship while crossing the Atlantic.
They were mostly lumpish fellows, silent and
noisy, a common combination; somewhat sad, I
should say, with an extraordinary poor taste in
humour, and little interest in their fellow-crea-
tures beyond that of a cheap and merely ex-
ternal curiosity. If they heard a man's name
and business, they seemed to think they had the
heart of that mystery; but they were as eager to
know that much as they were indifferent to the
rest. Some of them were on nettles till they
learned your name was Dickson and you a
journeyman baker; but beyond that, whether you
were Catholic or Mormon, dull or clever, fierce
or friendly, was all one to them. Others who
were not so stupid, gossiped a little, and, I am
bound to say, unkindly. A favourite witticism
was for some lout to raise the alarm of "All
aboard ! " while the rest of us were dining, thus
contributing his mite to the general discomfort.
Such a one was always much applauded for his

6O ACROSS THE PLAINS.

high spirits. When I was ill coming through
Wyoming, I was astonished — fresh from the eager
humanity on board ship — to meet with little but
laughter. One of the young men even amused
himself by incommoding me, as was then very
easy; and that not from ill-nature, but mere clod-
like incapacity to think, for he expected me to
join the laugh. I did so, but it was phantom
merriment. Later on, a man from Kansas had
three violent epileptic fits, and though, of course,
there were not wanting some to help him, it was
rather superstitious terror than sympathy that his
case evoked among his fellow-passengers. "Oh,
I hope he's not going to die!" cried a woman;
"it would be terrible to have a dead body!" And
there was a very general movement to leave the
man behind at the next station. This, by good
fortune, the conductor negatived.

There was a good deal of story-telling in
some quarters; in others, little but silence. In
this society, more than any other that ever I was
in, it was the narrator alone who seemed to
enjoy the narrative. It was rarely that any one
listened for the listening. If he lent an ear to
another man's story, it was because he was in
immediate want of a hearer for one of his own.
Food and the progress of the train were the sub-

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 6 I

jects most generally treated; many joined to dis-
cuss these who otherwise would hold their tongues.
One small knot had no better occupation than to
worm out of me my name; and the more they
tried, the more obstinately fixed I grew to baffle
them. They assailed me with artful questions
and insidious offers of correspondence in the
future; but I was perpetually on my guard, and
parried their assaults with inward laughter. I
am sure Dubuque would have given me ten dol-
lars for the secret. He owed me far more,
had he understood life, for thus preserving him
a lively interest throughout the journey. I met
one of my fellow-passengers months after, driving
a street tramway car in San Francisco; and, as
the joke was now out of season, told him my
name without subterfuge. You never saw a
man more chapfallen. But had my name been
Demogorgon, after so prolonged a mystery he
had still been disappointed.

There were no emigrants direct from Europe
— save one German family and a knot of Cornish
miners who kept grimly by themselves, one read-
ing the New Testament all day long through
steel spectacles, the rest discussing privately the
secrets of their old-world, mysterious race. Lady
Hester Stanhope believed she could make some-

62 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

thing great of the Cornish; for my part, I can
make nothing of them at all. A division of races,
older and more original than that of Babel, keeps
this close, esoteric family apart from neighbouring
Englishmen. Not even a Red Indian seems more
foreign in my eyes. This is one of the lessons
of travel — that some of the strangest races dwell
next door to you at home.

The rest were all American born, but they
came from almost every quarter of that Con-
tinent. All the States of the North had sent out
a fugitive to cross the plains with me. From
Virginia, from Pennsylvania, from New York, from
far western Iowa and Kansas, from Maine that
borders on the Canadas, and from the Canadas
themselves — some one or two were fleeing in
quest of a better land and better wages. The
talk in the train, like the talk I heard on the
steamer, ran upon hard times, short commons,
and hope that moves ever westward. I thought of
my shipful from Great Britain with a feeling of
despair. They had come 3000 miles, and yet
not far enough. Hard times bowed them out of
the Clyde, and stood to welcome them at Sandy
Hook. Where were they to go? Pennsylvania,
Maine, Iowa, Kansas? These were not places for
immigration, but for emigration, it appeared; not

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 63

one of them, but I knew a man who had lifted
up his heel and left it for an ungrateful country.
And it was still westward that they ran. Hunger,
you would have thought, came out of the east like
the sun, and the evening was made of edible
gold. And, meantime, in the car in front of me,
were there not half a hundred emigrants from
the opposite quarter? Hungry Europe and hungry
China, each pouring from their gates in search of
provender, had here come face to face. The two
waves had met; east and west had alike failed;
the whole round world had been prospected and
condemned; there was no El Dorado anywhere;
and till one could emigrate to the moon, it
seemed as well to stay patiently at home. Nor
was there wanting another sign, at once more
picturesque and more disheartening; for, as we
continued to steam westward toward the land of
gold, we were continually passing other emigrant
trains upon the journey east; and these were as
crowded as our own. Had all these return
voyagers made a fortune in the mines? Were
they all bound for Paris, and to be in Rome by
Easter? It would seem not, for, whenever we
met them, the passengers ran on the platform
and cried to us through the windows, in a kind
of wailing chorus, to "come back." On the

64 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

plains of Nebraska, in the mountains of Wyoming,
it was still the same cry, and dismal to my
heart, "Come back!" That was what we heard
by the way "about the good country we were
going to." And at that very hour the Sand-
lot of San Francisco was crowded with the un-
employed, and the echo from the other side
of Market Street was repeating the rant of de-
magogues.

If, in truth, it were only for the sake of wages
that men emigrate, how many thousands would
regret the bargain! But wages, indeed, are only
one consideration out of many; for we are a race
of gipsies, and love change and travel for them-
selves.

DESPISED RACES.

Of all stupid ill-feelings, the sentiment of my
fellow-Caucasians towards our companions in the
Chinese car was the most stupid and the worst.
They seemed never to have looked at them,
listened to them, or thought of them, but hated
them a priori. The Mongols were their enemies
in that cruel and treacherous battle-field of money.
They could work better and cheaper in half a
hundred industries, and hence there was no
calumny too idle for the Caucasians to repeat,

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 65

and even to believe. They declared them hideous
vermin, and affected a kind of choking in the
throat when they beheld them. Now, as a
matter of fact, the young Chinese man is so like
a large class of European women, that on raising
my head and suddenly catching sight of one at a
considerable distance, I have for an instant been
deceived by the resemblance. I do not say it is
the most attractive class of our women, but for
all that many a man's wife is less pleasantly
favoured. Again, my emigrants declared that the
Chinese were dirty. I cannot say they were clean,
for that was impossible upon the journey; but in
their efforts after cleanliness they put the rest of
us to shame. We all pigged and stewed in one
infamy, wet our hands and faces for half a minute
daily on the platform, and were unashamed. But
the Chinese never lost an opportunity, and you
would see them washing their feet — an act not
dreamed of among ourselves — and going as far
as decency permitted to wash their whole bodies.
I may remark by the way that the dirtier people
are in their persons the more, delicate is their
sense of modesty. A clean man strips in a
crowded boathouse; but he who is unwashed
slinks in and out of bed without uncovering an
inch of skin. Lastly, these very foul and mal-

Across the Plains, etc. 5

66 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

odorous Caucasians entertained the surprising il-
lusion that it was the Chinese waggon, and that
alone, which stank. I have said already that it
was the exception, and notably the freshest of the
three.

These judgments are typical of the feeling in
all Western • America. The Chinese are con-
sidered stupid, because they are imperfectly ac-
quainted with English. They are held to be
base, because their dexterity and frugality enable
them to underbid the lazy, luxurious Caucasian.
They are said to be thieves; I am sure they have
no monopoly of that. They are called cruel; the
Anglo-Saxon and the cheerful Irishman may each
reflect before he bears the accusation. I am told,
again, that they are of the race of river pirates,
and belong to the most despised and dangerous
class in the Celestial Empire. But if this be
so, what remarkable pirates have we here! and
what must be the virtues, the industry, the educa-
tion, and the intelligence of their superiors at
home!

Awhile ago it was the Irish, now it is the
Chinese that must go. Such is the cry. It
seems, after all, that no country is bound to sub-
mit to immigration any more than to invasion:
each is war to the knife, and resistance to either

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 67

but legitimate defence. Yet we may regret the
free tradition of the republic, which loved to de-
pict herself with open arms, welcoming all un-
fortunates. And certainly, as a man who be-
lieves that he loves freedom, I may be excused
some bitterness when I find her sacred name
misused in the contention. It was but the other
day that I heard a vulgar fellow in the Sand-
lot, the popular tribune of San Francisco, roaring
for arms and butchery. "At the call of Abreham
Lincoln," said the orator, "ye rose in the name
of freedom to set free the negroes; can ye not
rise and liberate yourselves from a few dhirty
Mongolians?"

For my own part, I could not look but with
wonder and respect on the Chinese. Their fore-
fathers watched the stars before mine had begun
to keep pigs. Gunpowder and printing, which
the other day we imitated, and a school of man-
ners which we never had the delicacy so much
as to desire to imitate, were theirs in a long-past
antiquity. They walk the earth with us, but it
seems they must be of different clay. They hear
the clock strike the same hour, yet surely of a
different epoch. They travel by steam con-
veyance, yet with such a baggage of old Asiatic
thoughts and superstitions as might check the

5*

68 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

locomotive in its course. Whatever is thought
within the circuit of the Great Wall; what the
wry-eyed, spectacled schoolmaster teaches in the
hamlets round Pekin; religions so old that our
language looks a halfling boy alongside; philosophy
so wise that our best philosophers find things
therein to wonder at; all this travelled alongside
of me for thousands of miles over plain and
mountain. Heaven knows if we had one common
thought or fancy all that way, or whether our
eyes, which yet were formed upon the same de-
sign, beheld the same world out of the railway
windows. And when either of us turned his
thoughts to home and childhood, what a strange
dissimilarity must there not have been in these
pictures of the mind — when I beheld that old,
gray, castled city, high throned above the firth,
with the flag of Britain flying, and the red-coat
sentry pacing over all; and the man in the next
car to me would conjure up some junks and a
pagoda and a fort of porcelain, and call it, with
the same affection, home.

Another race shared among my fellow-pas-
sengers in the disfavour of the Chinese; and that,
it is hardly necessary to say, was the noble red
man of old story — he over whose own hereditary
continent we had been steaming all these days

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 69

I saw no wild or independent Indian; indeed, I
hear that such avoid the neighbourhood of the
train; but now and again at way stations, a hus-
band and wife and a few children, disgracefully
dressed out with the sweepings of civilisation,
came forth and stared upon the emigrants. The
silent stoicism of their conduct, and the pathetic
degradation of their appearance, would have
touched any thinking creature, but my fellow-
passengers danced and jested round them with a
truly Cockney baseness. I was ashamed for the
thing we call civilisation. We should carry upon
our consciences so much, at least, of our fore-
fathers' misconduct as we continue to profit by
ourselves.

If oppression drives a wise man mad, what
should be raging in the hearts of these poor
tribes, who have been driven back and back, step
after step, their promised reservations torn from
them one after another as the States extended
westward, until at length they are shut up into
these hideous mountain deserts of the centre —
and even there find themselves invaded, insulted,
and hunted out by ruffianly diggers? The evic-
tion of the Cherokees (to name but an instance),
the extortion of Indian agents, the outrages of
the wicked, the ill-faith of all, nay, down to the

7O ACROSS THE PLAINS.

ridicule of such poor beings as were here with
me upon the train, make up a chapter of in-
justice and indignity such as a man must be in
some ways base if his heart will suffer him to
pardon or forget. These old, well-founded, his-
torical hatreds have a savour of nobility for the
independent. That the Jew should not love the
Christian, nor the Irishman love the English, nor
the Indian brave tolerate the thought of the
American, is not disgraceful to the nature of man;
rather, indeed, honourable, since it depends on
wrongs ancient like the race, and not personal to
him who cherishes the indignation.

TO THE GOLDEN GATES.

A little corner of Utah is soon traversed, and
leaves no particular impressions on the mind. By
an early hour on Wednesday morning we stopped
to breakfast at Toano, a little station on a bleak,
high-lying plateau in Nevada. The man who
kept the station eating-house was a Scot, and
learning that I was the same, he grew very friendly,
and gave me some advice on the country I was
now entering. "You see," said he, "I tell you
this, because I come from your country." Hail,
brither Scots!

His most important hint was on the moneys

ACROSS THE PLAINS. Ji

of this part of the world. There is something
in the simplicity of a decimal coinage which is
revolting to the human mind; thus the French,
in small affairs, reckon strictly by halfpence; and
you have to solve, by a spasm of mental arith-
metic, such posers as thirty-two, forty-five, or even
a hundred halfpence. In the Pacific States they
have made a bolder push for complexity, and
settle their affairs by a coin that no longer exists
— the bit, or old Mexican real. The supposed
value of the bit is twelve and a half cents, eight
to the dollar. When it comes to two bits, the
quarter-dollar stands for the required amount.
But how about an odd bit? The nearest coin to
it is a dime, which is short by a fifth. That,
then, is called a short bit. If you have one, you
lay it triumphantly down, and save two and a half
cents. But if you have not, and lay down a
quarter, the bar-keeper or shopman calmly tenders
you a dime by way of change; and thus you have
paid what is called a long bit, and lost two and
a half cents, or even, by a comparison with a
short bit, five cents. In country places all over
the Pacific coast, nothing lower than a bit is ever
asked or taken, which vastly increases the cost of
life; as even for a glass of beer you must pay
fivepence or sevenpence-halfpenny, as the case

72 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

may be. You would say that this system of
mutual robbery was as broad as it was long; but
I have discovered a plan to make it broader, with
which I here endow the public. It is brief and
simple — radiantly simple. There is one place
where five cents are recognised, and that is the
post-office. A quarter is only worth two bits, a
short and a long. Whenever you have a quarter,
go to the post-office and buy five cents' worth of
postage-stamps; you will receive in change two
dimes, that is, two short bits. The purchasing
power of your money is undiminished. You can
go and have your two glasses of beer all the
same; and you have made yourself a present of
five cents' worth of postage-stamps into the bar-
gain. Benjamin Franklin would have patted me
on the head for this discovery.

From Toano we travelled all day through
deserts of alkali and sand, horrible to man, and
bare sage-brush country that seemed little kindlier,
and came by supper-time to Elko. As we were
standing, after our manner, outside the station, I
saw two men whip suddenly from underneath the
cars, and take to their heels across country. They
were tramps, it appeared, who had been riding
on the beams since eleven of the night before;
and several of my fellow-passengers had already

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 73

seen and conversed with them while we broke
our fast at Toano. These land stowaways play
a great part over here in America, and I should
have liked dearly to become acquainted with
them.

At Elko an odd circumstance befell me. I
was coming out from supper, when I was stopped
by a small, stout, ruddy man, followed by two
others taller and ruddier than himself.

"Ex-cuse me, sir," he said, "but do you happen
to be going on?"

I said I was, whereupon he said he hoped to
persuade me to desist from that intention. He
had a situation to offer me, and if we could come
to terms, why, good and well. "You see," he con-
tinued, "I'm running a theatre here, and we're a
little short in the orchestra. You're a musician,
I guess?"

I assured him that, beyond a rudimentary
acquaintance with "Auld Lang Syne" and "The
Wearing of the Green," I had no pretension what-
ever to that style. He seemed much put out of
countenance; and one of his taller companions
asked him, on the nail, for five dollars.

"You see, sir," added the latter to me, "he
bet you were a musician; I bet you weren't. No
offence, I hope?"

74 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

"None whatever," I said, and the two with-
drew to the bar, where I presume the debt was
liquidated.

This little adventure woke bright hopes in my
fellow-travellers, who thought they had now come
to a country where situations went a-begging. But
I am not so sure that the offer was in good faith.
Indeed, I am more than half persuaded it was
but a feeler to decide the bet.

Of all the next day I will tell you nothing,
for the best of all reasons, that I remember no
more than that we continued through desolate
and desert scenes, fiery hot and deadly weary.
But some time after I had fallen asleep that night,
I was awakened by one of my companions. It
was in vain that I resisted. A fire of enthusiasm
and whisky burned in his eyes; and he declared
we were in a new country, and I must come forth
upon the platform and see with my own eyes.
The train was then, in its patient way, standing
halted in a by- track. It was a clear, moonlit
night; but the valley was too narrow to admit the
moonshine direct, and only a diffused glimmer
whitened the tall rocks and relieved the black-
ness of the pines. A hoarse clamour filled the
air; it was the continuous plunge of a cascade
somewhere near at hand among, the mountains.

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 75

The air struck chill , but tasted good and vigor-
ous in the nostrils — a fine, dry, old mountain
atmosphere. I was dead sleepy, but I returned
to roosf, with a grateful mountain feeling at my
heart.

When I awoke next morning, I was puzzled
for a while to know if it were day or night, for
the illumination was unusual. I sat up at last, and
found we were grading slowly downward through
a long snowshed; and suddenly we shot into an
open; and before we were swallowed into the
next length of wooden tunnel, I had one glimpse
of a huge pine- forested ravine upon my left, a
foaming river, and a sky already coloured with
the fires of dawn. I am usually very calm over
the displays of nature; but you will scarce believe
how my heart leaped at this. It was like meet-
ing one's wife. I had come home again — home
from unsightly deserts to the green and habitable
corners of the earth. Every spire of pine along
the hill-top, every trouty pool along that mountain
river, was more dear to me than a blood relation.
Few people have praised God more happily than
I did. And thenceforward, down by Blue Canon,
Alta, Dutch Flat, and all the old mining camps,
through a sea of mountain forests, dropping thou-
sands of feet toward the far sea-level as we went,

76 ACROSS THE PLAINS.

not I only, but all the passengers on board, threw
off their sense of dirt and heat and weariness,
and bawled like schoolboys, and thronged with
shining eyes upon the platform and became new
creatures within and without. The sun no longer
oppressed us with heat, it only shone laughingly
along the mountain-side, until we were fain to
laugh ourselves for glee. At every turn we could
see farther into the land and our own happy
futures. At every town the cocks were tossing
their clear notes into the golden air, and crowing
for the new day and the new country. For this
was indeed our destination; this was "the good
country" we had been going to so long.

By afternoon we were at Sacramento, the city
of gardens in a plain of corn; and the next day
before the dawn we were lying to upon the Oak-
land side of San Francisco Bay. The day was
breaking as we crossed the ferry; the fog was
rising over the citied hills of San Francisco; the
bay was perfect — not a ripple, scarce a stain,
upon its blue expanse; everything was waiting,
breathless, for the sun. A spot of cloudy gold
lit first upon the head of Tamalpais, and then
widened downward on its shapely shoulder; the
air seemed to awaken, and began to sparkle; and
sudd.enly

ACROSS THE PLAINS. 77

"The tall hills Titan discovered,"

and the city of San Francisco, and the bay of
gold and corn, were lit from end to end with
summer daylight.

[I8-79-]

n.

THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL:

THE WOODS AND THE PACIFIC.

THE Bay of Monterey has been compared by
no less a person than General Sherman to a bent
fishing-hook; and the comparison, if less important
than the march through Georgia, still shows the
eye of a soldier for topography. Santa Cruz sits
exposed at the shank; the mouth of the Salinas
river is at the middle of the bend; and Monterey
itself is cosily ensconced beside the barb. Thus
the ancient capital of California faces across the
bay, while the Pacific Ocean, though hidden by
low hills and forest, bombards her left flank and
rear with never-dying surf. In front of the town,
the long line of sea-beach trends north and north-
west, and then westward to enclose the bay. The
waves which lap so quietly about the jetties of
Monterey grow louder and larger in the distance;
you can see the breakers leaping high and white

THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL. 79

by day; at night, the outline of the shore is traced
in transparent silver by the moonlight and the
flying foam; and from all round, even in quiet
weather , the low, distant, thrilling roar of the
Pacific hangs over the coast and the adjacent
country like smoke above a battle.

These long beaches are enticing to the idle
man. It would be hard to find a walk more
solitary and at the same time more exciting to
the mind. Crowds of ducks and sea-gulls hover
over the sea. Sandpipers trot in and out by
troops after the retiring waves, trilling together in
a chorus of infinitesimal song. Strange sea-
tangles, new to the European eye, the bones of
whales, or sometimes a whole whale's carcase,
white with carrion-gulls and poisoning the wind,
lie scattered here and there along the sands. The
waves come in slowly, vast and green, curve their
translucent necks, and burst with a surprising
uproar, that runs, waxing and waning, up and
down the long key-board of the beach. The
foam of these great ruins mounts in an instant to
the ridge of the sand glacis, swiftly fleets back
again, and is met and buried by the next breaker.
The interest is perpetually fresh. On no other
coast that I know shall you enjoy, in calm, sunny
weather, such a spectacle of Ocean's greatness,

8O THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL.

such beauty of changing colour, or such degrees
of thunder in the sound. The very air is more
than usually salt by this Homeric deep.

Inshore, a tract of sand-hills borders on the
beach. Here and there a lagoon, more or less
brackish, attracts the birds and hunters. A rough,
spotty undergrowth partially conceals the sand.
The crouching, hardy, live-oaks flourish singly or
in thickets — the kind of wood for murderers to
crawl among — and here and there the skirts of
the forest extend downward from the hills with a
floor of turf and long aisles of pine-trees hung
with Spaniard's Beard. Through this quaint desert
the railway cars drew near to Monterey from the
junction at Salinas City — though that and so
many other things are now for ever altered — and
it was from here that you had the first view of
the old township lying in the sands, its white
windmills bickering in the chill, perpetual wind,
and the first fogs of the evening drawing drearily
around it from the sea.

The one common note of all this country is
the haunting presence of the ocean. A great
faint sound of breakers follows you high up into
the inland canons; the roar of water dwells in
the clean, empty rooms of Monterey as in a shell
upon the chimney; go where you will, you have

THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL. 8 I

but to pause and listen to hear the voice of the
Pacific. You pass out of the town to the south-
west, and mount the hill among pine woods.
Glade, thicket, and grove surround you. You
follow winding sandy tracks that lead nowhither.
You see a deer; a multitude of quail arises. But
the sound of the sea still follows you as you ad-
vance, like that of wind among the trees, only
harsher and stranger to the ear; and when at
length you gain the summit, out breaks on every
hand and with freshened vigour that same un-
ending distant, whispering rumble of the ocean;
for now you are on the top of Monterey peninsula,
and the noise no longer only mounts to you from
behind along the beach towards Santa Cruz, but
from your right also, round by Chinatown and
Pinos lighthouse, and from down before you to
the mouth of the Carmello river. The whole
woodland is begirt with thundering surges. The
silence that immediately surrounds you where you
stand* is not so much broken as it is haunted by
this distant, circling rumour. It sets your senses
upon edge; you strain your attention; you are
clearly and unusually conscious of small sounds
near at hand; you walk listening like an Indian
hunter; and that voice of the Pacific is a sort of
disquieting company to you in your walk.

Across the Plains, etc, 6

82 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL.

When once I was in these woods I found it
difficult to , turn homeward. All woods lure a
rambler onward; but in those of Monterey it was
the surf that particularly invited me to prolong
my walks. I would push straight for the shore
where I thought it to be nearest. Indeed, there
was scarce a direction that would not, sooner or
later, have brought me forth on the Pacific. The
emptiness of the woods gave me a sense of
freedom and discovery in these excursions. I
never in all my visits met but one man. He was
a Mexican, very dark of hue, but smiling and fat,
and he carried an axe, though his true business
at that moment was to seek for straying cattle. I
asked him what o'clock it was, but he seemed
neither to know nor care; and when he in his
turn asked me for news of his cattle, I showed
myself equally indifferent. We stood and smiled
upon each other for a few seconds, and then
turned without a word and took our several ways
across the forest.

One day — I shall never forget it — I had taken
a trail that was new to me. After a while the
woods began to oj^en, the sea to sound nearer at
hand. I came upon a road, and, to my surprise,
a stile. A step or two farther, and, without leav-
ing the woods, I found myself among trim houses.

THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL. 83

I walked through street after street, parallel and
at right angles, paved with sward and dotted with
trees, but still undeniable streets, and each with
its name posted at the corner, as in a real town.
Facing down the main thoroughfare — "Central
Avenue," as it was ticketed — I saw an open-air
temple, with benches and sounding-board, as
though for an orchestra. The houses were all
tightly shuttered; there was no smoke, no sound
but of the waves, no moving thing. I have never
been in any place that seemed so dreamlike.
Pompeii is all in a bustle with visitors, and its
antiquity and strangeness deceive the imagination;
but this town had plainly not been built above a year
or two, and perhaps had been deserted overnight.
Indeed, it was not so much like a deserted town as
like a scene upon the stage by daylight, and with
no one on the boards. The barking of a dog
led me at last to the only house still occupied,
where a Scotch pastor and his wife pass the
winter alone in this empty theatre. The place
was "The Pacific Camp Grounds, the Christian
Seaside Resort." Thither, in the warm season,
crowds come to enjoy a life of teetotalism, religion,
and flirtation, which I am willing to think blame-
less and agreeable. The neighbourhood at least
is well selected. The Pacific booms in front.

6*

84 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL.

Westward is Point Pinos, with the lighthouse in a
wilderness of sand, where you will find the light-
keeper playing the piano, making models and bows
and arrows, studying dawn and sunrise in amateur
oil-painting, and with a dozen other elegant pursuits
and interests to surprise his brave, old-country
rivals. To the east, and still nearer, you will
come upon a space of open down, a hamlet, a
haven among rocks, a world of surge and scream-
ing sea-gulls. Such scenes are very similar in
different climates; they appear homely to the eyes
of all; to me this was like a dozen spots in Scot-
land. And yet the boats that ride in the haven
are of strange outlandish design; and, if you walk
into the hamlet, you will behold costumes and
faces and hear a tongue that are unfamiliar to
the memory. The joss-stick burns, the opium
pipe is smoked, the floors are strewn with slips of
coloured paper — prayers, you would say, that had
somehow missed their destination — and a man
guiding his upright pencil from right to left across
the sheet, writes home the news of Monterey to
the Celestial Empire.

The woods and the Pacific rule between them
the climate of this seaboard region. On the
streets of Monterey, when the air does not smell
salt from the one, it will be blowing perfumed

THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL. 85

from the resinous tree-tops of the other. For
days together a hot, dry air will overhang the
town, close as from an oven, yet healthful and
aromatic in the nostrils. The cause is not far to
seek, for the woods are afire, and the hot wind is
blowing from the hills. These fires are one of
the great dangers of California. I have seen
from Monterey as many as three at the same
time, by day a cloud of smoke, by night a red
coal of conflagration in the distance. A little
thing will start them, and, if the wind be favour-
able, they gallop over miles of country faster than
a horse. The inhabitants must turn out and work
like demons, for it is not only the pleasant groves
that are destroyed; the climate and the soil are
equally at stake, and these fires prevent the rains
of the next winter and dry up perennial fountains.
California has been a land of promise in its time,
like Palestine; but if the woods continue so swiftly
to perish, it may become, like Palestine, a land of
desolation.

To visit the woods while they are languidly
burning is a strange piece of experience. The
fire passes through the underbrush at a run.
Every here and there a tree flares up instant-
aneously from root to summit, scattering tufts
of flame, and is quenched, it seems, as quickly.

86 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL.

But this last is only in semblance. For after
this first squib-like conflagration of the dry moss
and twigs, there remains behind a deep-rooted
and consuming fire in the very entrails of the
tree. The resin of the pitch-pine is principally
condensed at the base of the bole and in the
spreading roots. Thus, after the light, showy,
skirmishing flames, which are only as the match
to the explosion, have already scampered down
the wind into the distance, the true harm is but
beginning for this giant of the woods. You may
approach the tree from one side, and see it,
scorched indeed from top to bottom, but ap-
parently survivor of the peril. Make the circuit,
and there, on the other side of the column, is a
clear mass of living coal, spreading like an ulcer;
while underground, to their most extended fibre,
the roots are being eaten out by fire, and the
smoke is rising through the fissures to the sur-
face. A little while, and, without a nod of warn-
ing, the huge pine-tree snaps off short across the
ground and falls prostrate with a crash. Mean-
while the fire continues its silent business; the
roots are reduced to a fine ash; and long after-
wards, if you pass by, you will find the eartli
pierced with radiating galleries, and preserving
the design of all these subterranean spurs, as

THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL. 87

though it were the mould for a new tree instead
of the print of an old one. These pitch-pines of
Monterey are, with the single exception of the
Monterey cypress, the most fantastic of forest
trees. No words can give an idea of the con-
tortion of their growth; they might figure without
change in a circle of the nether hell as Dante
pictured it; and at the rate at which trees grow,
and at which forest fires spring up and gallop
through the hills of California, we may look for-
ward to a time when there will not be one of
them left standing in that land of their nativity.
At least they have not so much to fear from the
axe, but perish by what may be called a natural
although a violent death; while it is man in his
short-sighted greed that robs the country of the
nobler redwood. Yet a little while and perhaps
all the hills of seaboard California may be as
bald as Tamalpais.

I have an interest of my own in these forest
fires, for I came so near to lynching on one oc-
casion, that a braver man might have retained
a thrill from the experience. I wished to be cer-
tain whether it was the moss, that quaint funereal
ornament of Californian forests, which blazed up
so rapidly when the flame first touched the tree.
I suppose I must have been under the influence

88 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL.

of Satan, for instead of plucking off a piece for
my experiment, what should I do but walk up to
a great pine tree in a portion of the wood which
had escaped so much as scorching, strike a match,
arid apply the flame gingerly to one of the tassels.
The tree went off simply like a rocket; in three
seconds it was a roaring pillar of fire. Close by
I could hear the shouts of those who were at
work combating the original conflagration. I
could see the waggon that had brought them
tied to a live oak in a piece of open; I could
even catch the flash of an axe as it swung up
through the underwood into the sunlight. Had
any one observed the result of my experiment
my neck was literally not worth a pinch of snuff;
after a few minutes of passionate expostulation
I should have been run up to a convenient
bough.

To die for faction is a common evil;

But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil.

I have run repeatedly, but never as I ran that
day. At night I went out of town, and there
was my own particular fire, quite distinct from
the other, and burning as I thought with even
greater vigour.

But it is the Pacific that exercises the most
direct and obvious power upon the climate. At

THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL. 89

sunset, for months together, vast, wet, melancholy
fogs arise and come shoreward from the ocean.
From the hill-top above Monterey the scene is
often noble, although it is always sad. The upper
air is still bright with sunlight; a glow still rests
upon the Gabelano Peak; but the fogs are in
possession of the lower levels; they crawl in
scarves among the sandhills; they float, a little
higher, in clouds of a gigantic size and often of
a wild configuration; to the south, where they
have struck the seaward shoulder of the moun-
tains of Santa Lucia, they double back and spire
up skyward like smoke. Where their shadow
touches, colour dies out of the world. The air
• grows chill and deadly as they advance. The
trade- wind freshens, the trees begin to sigh, and
all the windmills in Monterey are whirling and
creaking and filling their cisterns with the brackish
water of the sands. It takes but a little while
till the invasion is complete. The sea, in its
lighter order, has submerged the earth. Monterey
is curtained in for the night in thick, wet, salt,
and frigid clouds, so to remain till day returns;
and before the sun's rays they slowly disperse
and retreat in broken squadrons to the bosom of
the sea. And yet often when the fog is thickest
and most chill, a few steps out -of the town and

QO THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL.

up the slope, the night will be dry and warm and
full of inland perfume.

MEXICANS, AMERICANS, AND INDIANS.

The history of Monterey has yet to be
written. Founded by Catholic missionaries, a
place of wise beneficence to Indians, a place of
arms, a Mexican capital continually wrested by
one faction from another, an American capital
when the first House of Representatives held its
deliberations, and then falling lower and lower
from the capital of the State to the capital of a
county, and from that again, by the loss of its
charter and town lands, to a mere bankrupt
village, its rise and decline is typical of that of
all Mexican institutions and even Mexican families
in California.

Nothing is stranger in that strange State than
the rapidity with which the soil has changed
hands. The Mexicans, you may say, are all poor
and landless, like their former capital; and yet
both it and they hold themselves apart and pre-
serve their ancient customs and something of their
ancient air.

The town, when I was there, was a place of
two or three streets, economically paved with sea-
sand, and two or three lanes, which were water-

THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL. QI

courses in the rainy season, and were, at all times,
rent up by fissures four or five feet deep. There
were no street lights. Short sections of wooden
sidewalk only added to the dangers of the night,
for they were often high above the level of the
roadway, and no one could tell where they would
be likely to begin or end. The houses were, for
the most part, built of unbaked adobe brick,
many of them old for so new a country, some of
very elegant proportions, with low, spacious,
shapely rooms, and walls so thick that the heat
of summer never dried them to the heart. At the
approach of the rainy season a deathly chill and
a graveyard smell began to hang about the lower
floors; and diseases of the chest are common and
fatal among house-keeping people of either sex.

There was no activity but in and around the
saloons, where people sat almost all day long
playing cards. The smallest excursion was made
on horseback. You would scarcely ever see the
main street without a horse or two tied to posts,
and making a fine figure with their Mexican
housings. It struck me oddly to come across
some of the Cornhill illustrations to Mr. Black-
more's Erema, and see all the characters astride
on English saddles. As a matter of fact, an Eng-
lish saddle is a rarity even in San Francisco, and,

C/2 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL.

you may say, a thing unknown in all the rest of
California. In a place so exclusively Mexican as
Monterey, you saw not only Mexican saddles but
true Vaquero riding — men always at the hand-
gallop up hill and down dale, and round the
sharpest corner, urging their horses with cries and
gesticulations and cruel rotatory spurs, checking
them dead with a touch, or wheeling them right-
about-face in a square yard. The type of face
and character of bearing are surprisingly un-
American. The first ranged from something like
the pure Spanish, to something, in its sad fixity,
not unlike the pure Indian, although I do not
suppose there was one pure blood of either race
in all the country. As for the second, it was a
matter of perpetual surprise to find, in that world
of absolutely mannerless Americans, a people full
of deportment, solemnly courteous, and doing all
'things with grace and decorum. In dress they
ran to colour and bright sashes. Not even the
most Americanised could always resist the tempta-
tion to stick a red rose into his hatband. Not
even the most Americanised would descend to
wear the vile dress hat of civilisation. Spanish
was the language of the streets. It was difficult
to get along without a word or two of that
language for 'an occasion. The only communica-

THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL. Q3

tions in which the population joined were with a
view to amusement. A weekly public ball took
place with great etiquette, in addition to the
numerous fandangoes in private houses. There
was a really fair amateur brass band. Night after
night serenaders would be going about the street,
sometimes in a company and with several instru-
ments and voices together, sometimes severally,
each guitar before a different window. It was a
strange thing to lie awake in nineteenth-century
America, and hear the guitar accompany, and one
of these old, heart-breaking Spanish love songs
mount into the night air, perhaps in a deep bari-
tone, perhaps in that high-pitched, pathetic,
womanish alto which is so common among Mexi-
can men, and which strikes on the unaccustomed
ear as something not entirely human but alto-
gether sad.

The town, then, was essentially and wholly
Mexican; and yet almost all the land in the neigh-
bourhood was held by Americans, and it was from
the same class, numerically so small, that the
principal officials were selected. This Mexican
and that Mexican would describe to you his old
family estates, not one rood of which remained to
him. You would ask him how that came about,
and elicit some tangled story back-foremost, from

94 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL.

which you gathered that the Americans had been
greedy like designing men, and the Mexicans
greedy like children, but no other certain fact.
Their merits and their faults contributed alike to
the ruin of the former landholders. It is true they
were improvident, and easily dazzled with the sight
of ready money; but they were gentlefolk besides,
and that in a way which curiously unfitted them
to combat Yankee craft. Suppose they have a
paper to sign, they would think it a reflection on
the other party to examine the terms with any
great minuteness; nay, suppose them to observe
some doubtful clause, it is ten to one they would
refuse from delicacy to object to it. I know I am
speaking within the mark, for I have seen such a
case occur, and the Mexican, in spite of the ad-
vice of his lawyer, has signed the imperfect paper
like a lamb. To have spoken in the matter, he
said, above all to have let the other party guess
that he had seen a lawyer, would have "been like
doubting his word." The scruple sounds oddly
to one of ourselves, who have been brought up
to understand all business as a competition in
fraud, and honesty itself to be a virtue which re-
gards the carrying out but not the creation of
agreements. This single unworldly trait will ac-
count for much of that revolution of which we are

THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL. 95

speaking. The Mexicans have the name of being
great swindlers, but certainly the accusation cuts
both ways. In a contest of this sort, the entire
booty would scarcely have passed into the hands
of the more scrupulous race.

Physically the Americans have triumphed; but
it is not entirely seen how far they have them-
selves been morally conquered. This is,., of course,
but a part of a part of an extraordinary problem
now in the course of being solved in the various
States of the American Union. I am reminded
of an anecdote. Some years ago, at a great sale
of wine, all the odd lots were purchased by a
grocer in a small way in the old town of Edin-
burgh. The agent had the curiosity to visit him
some time after and inquire what possible use he
could have for such material. He was shown, by
way of answer, a huge vat where all the liquors,
from humble Gladstone to imperial Tokay, were
fermenting together. "And what," he asked, "do
you propose to call this?" "I'm no very sure,"
replied the grocer, "but -I think it's going to turn
out port." In the older Eastern States, I think
we may say that this hotch-potch of races is going
to turn out English, or thereabout. But the
problem is indefinitely varied in other zones. The
elements are differently mingled in the south, in

Q 6 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL.

what we may call the Territorial belt, and in the
group of States on the Pacific coast. Above all,
in these last, we may look to see some monstrous
hybrid — whether good or evil, who shall forecast?
but certainly original and all their own. In my
little restaurant at Monterey, we have sat down
to table day after day, a Frenchman, two Portu-
guese, an Italian, a Mexican, and a Scotchman:
we had for common visitors an American from
Illinois, a nearly pure blood Indian woman, and a
naturalised Chinese; and from time to time a
Switzer and a German came down from country
ranches for the night. No wonder that the Pacific
coast is a foreign land to visitors from the Eastern
States, for each race contributes something of its
own. Even the despised Chinese have taught the
youth of California, none indeed of their virtues,
but the debasing use of opium. And chief among
these influences is that of the Mexicans.

The Mexicans although in the State are out
of it. They still preserve a sort of international
independence, and keep their affairs snug to them-
selves. Only four or five years ago Vasquez, the
bandit, his troops being dispersed and the hunt
too hot for him in other parts of California, re-
turned to his native Monterey, and was seen
publicly in her streets and saloons, fearing no man.

THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL. Q7

The year that I was there there occurred two re-
puted murders. As the Montereyans are excep-
tionally vile speakers of each other and of every
one behind his back, it is not possible for me to
judge how much truth there may have been in
these reports; but in the one case every one be-
lieved, and in the other some suspected, that there
had been foul play; and nobody dreamed for an
instant of taking the authorities into their counsel.
Now this is, of course, characteristic enough of
the Mexicans; but it is a noteworthy feature that
all the Americans in Monterey acquiesced without
a word in this inaction. Even when I spoke to
them upon the subject, they seemed not to under-
stand my surprise; they had forgotten the tradi-
tions of their own race and upbringing, and become,
in a word, wholly Mexicanised.

Again, the Mexicans, having no ready money
to speak of, rely almost entirely in their business
transactions upon each other's worthless paper.
Pedro the penniless pays you with an I O U from
the equally penniless Miguel. It is a sort of
local currency by courtesy. Credit in these parts
has passed into a superstition. I have seen a
strong, violent man struggling for months to re-
cover a debt, and getting nothing but an ex-
change of waste paper. The very storekeepers

Across the Plains, etc. 7

98 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL.

are averse to asking for cash payments, and are
more surprised than pleased when they are of-
fered. They fear there must be something under
it, and that you mean to withdraw your custom
from them. I have seen the enterprising chemist
and stationer begging me with fervour to let my
account run on, although I had my purse open in
my hand; and partly from the commonness of
the case, partly from some remains of that gener-
ous old Mexican tradition which made all men
welcome to their tables, a person may be noto-
riously both unwilling and unable to pay, and still
find credit for the necessaries of life in the stores
of Monterey. Now this villainous habit of living
upon "tick" has grown into California!! nature. I
do not mean that the American and European
storekeepers of Monterey are as lax as Mexicans;
I mean that American farmers in many parts of
the State expect unlimited credit, and profit by
it in the meanwhile, without a thought for con-
sequences. Jew storekeepers have already learned
the advantage to be gained from this; they lead
on the farmer into irretrievable indebtedness, and
keep him ever after as their bond-slave hopelessly
grinding in the mill. So the whirligig of time
brings in its revenges, and except that the Jew
knows better than to foreclose, you may see

THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL. 99

Americans bound in the same chains with which
they themselves had formerly bound the Mexican.
It seems as if certain sorts of follies, like certain
sorts of grain, were natural to the soil rather
than to the race that holds and tills it for the
moment.

In the meantime, however, the Americans rule
in Monterey County. The new county seat, Salinas
City, in the bald, corn-bearing piain under the
Gabelano Peak, is a town of a purely American
character. The land is held, for the most part,
in those enormous tracts which are another legacy
of Mexican days, and form the present chief
danger and disgrace of California; and the holders
are mostly of American or British birth. We have
here in England no idea of the troubles and in-
conveniences which flow from the existence of
these large landholders — land-thieves, land-sharks,
or land-grabbers, they are more commonly and
plainly called. Thus the townlands of Monterey
are all in the hands of a single man. How they
came there is an obscure, vexatious question, and,
rightly or wrongly, the man is hated with a great
hatred. His life has been repeatedly in danger.
Not very long ago, I was told, the stage was
stopped and examined three evenings in succes-
sion by disguised horsemen thirsting for his blood.

I OO THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL.

A certain house on the Salinas road, they say, he
always passes in his buggy at full speed, for the
squatter sent him warning long ago. But a year
since he was publicly pointed out for death by
no less a man than Mr. Dennis Kearney. Kearney
is a man too well known in California, but a word
of explanation is required for English readers.
Originally an Irish drayman, he rose, by his com-
mand of bad language, to almost dictatorial
authority in the State; throned it there for six
months or so, his mouth full of oaths, gallowses,
and conflagrations; was first snuffed out last
winter by Mr. Coleman, backed by his San Fran-
cisco Vigilantes and three gatling guns; completed
his own ruin by throwing in his lot with the
grotesque Greenbacker party; and had at last to
be rescued by his old enemies, the police, out of
the hands of his rebellious followers. It was while
he was at the top of his fortune that Kearney
visited Monterey with his battle-cry against Chinese
labour, the railroad monopolists, and the land-
thieves; and his one articulate counsel to the
Montereyans was to "hang David Jacks." Had
the town been American, in my private opinion,
this would have been done years ago. Land is a
subject on which there is no jesting in the West,
and I have seen my friend the lawyer drive out

THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL. IOI

of Monterey to adjust a competition of titles with
the face of a captain going into battle and his
Smith-and-Wesson convenient to his hand.

On the ranche of another of these land-
holders you may find our old friend, the truck
system, in full operation. Men live there, year
in year out, to cut timber for a nominal wage,
which is all consumed in supplies. The longer
they remain in this desirable service the deeper
they will fall in debt — a burlesque injustice in
a new country, where labour should be precious,
and one of those typical instances which explains
the prevailing discontent and the success of the
demagogue Kearney.

In a comparison between what was and what
is in California, the praisers of times past will fix
upon the Indians of Carmel. The valley drained
by the river so named is a true Californian valley,
bare, dotted with chaparal, overlooked by quaint,
unfinished hills. The Carmel runs by many
pleasant farms, a clear and shallow river, loved
by wading kine; and at last, as it is falling to-
wards a quicksand and the great Pacific, passes a
ruined mission on a hill. From the mission church
the eye embraces a great field of ocean, and the
ear is filled with a continuous sound of distant
breakers on the shore. But the day of the Jesuit

IO2 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL.

has gone by, the day of the Yankee has suc-
ceeded, and there is no one left to care for the
converted savage. The church is roofless and
ruinous, sea-breezes and sea- fogs, and the altern-
ation of the rain and sunshine, daily widening
the breaches and casting the crockets from the
wall. As an antiquity in this new land, a quaint
specimen of missionary architecture, and a me-
morial of good deeds, it had a triple claim to
preservation from all thinking people; but neglect
and abuse have been its portion. There is no
sign of American interference, save where a head-
board has been torn from a grave to be a mark
for pistol bullets. So it is with the Indians for
whom it was erected. Their lands, I was told,
are being yearly encroached upon by the neigh-
bouring American proprietor, and with that ex-
ception no man troubles his head for the Indians
of Carmel. Only one day in the year, the day
before our Guy Fawkes, the padre drives over the
hill from Monterey; the little sacristy, which is the
only covered portion of the church, is filled with
seats and decorated for the service; the Indians
troop together, their bright dresses contrasting
with their dark and melancholy faces; and there,
among a crowd of somewhat unsympathetic holi-
day-makers, you may hear God served with per-

THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL. 1 03

haps more touching circumstances than in any
other temple under heaven. An Indian, stone-
blind and about eighty years of age, conducts the
singing; other Indians compose the choir; yet
they have the Gregorian music at their finger
ends, and pronounce the Latin so correctly that
I could follow the meaning as they sang. The
pronunciation was odd and nasal, the singing hur-
ried and staccato. "In ssecula saeculo-hohorum,"
they went, with a vigorous aspirate to every ad-
ditional syllable. I have never seen faces more
vividly lit up with joy than the faces of these
Indian singers. It was to them not only the
worship of God, nor an act by which they re-
called and commemorated better days, but was
besides an exercise of culture, where all they
knew of art and letters was united and expressed.
And it made a man's heart sorry for the good
fathers of yore who had taught them to dig and
to reap, to read and to sing, who had given them
European mass-books which they still preserve and
study in their cottages, and who had now passed
away from all authority and influence in that land
— to be succeeded by greedy land-thieves and
sacrilegious pistol-shots. So ugly a thing may
our Anglo-Saxon Protestantism appear beside the
doings of the Society of Jesus.

104 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL.

But revolution in this world succeeds to re-
volution. All that I say in this paper is in a
paulo-past tense. The Monterey of last year
exists no longer. A huge hotel has sprung up
in the desert by the railway. Three sets of diners
sit down successively to table. Invaluable toilettes
figure along the beach and between the live oaks;
and Monterey is advertised in the newspapers, and
posted in the waiting-rooms at railway stations, as
a resort for wealth and fashion. Alas for the
little town! it is not strong enough to resist the
influence of the flaunting caravanserai, and the
poor, quaint, penniless native gentlemen of Mon-
terey must perish, like a lower race, before the
millionaire vulgarians of the Big Bonanza.

[1880.]

m.

FONTAINEBLEAU.

VILLAGE COMMUNITIES OF PAINTERS.
I.

THE charm of Fontainebleau is a thing apart,
it is a place that people love even more than they
admire. The vigorous forest air, the silence, the
majestic avenues of highway, the wilderness of
tumbled boulders, the great age and dignity of
certain groves— these are but ingredients, they
are not the secret of the philtre. The place is
sanative; the air, the light, the perfumes, and the
shapes of things concord in happy harmony. The
artist may be idle and not fear the "blues." He
may dally with his life. Mirth, lyric mirth, and
a vivacious classical contentment are of the very
essence of the better kind of art; and these, in
that most smiling forest, he has the chance to
learn or to remember. Even on the plain of
Biere, where the Angelus of Millet still tolls upon

IO6 FONTAINEBLEAU.

the ear of fancy, a larger air, a higher heaven,
something ancient and healthy in the face of
nature, purify the mind alike from dulness and
hysteria. There is no place where the young are
more gladly conscious of their youth, or the old
better contented with their age.

The fact of its great and special beauty further
recommends this country to the artist. The field
was chosen by men in whose blood there still
raced some of the gleeful or solemn exultation of
great art — Millet who loved dignity like Michel-
angelo, Rousseau whose modern brush was dipped
in the glamour of the ancients. It was chosen
before the day of that strange turn in the history
of art, of which we now perceive the culmination
in impressionistic tales and pictures — that volun-
tary aversion of the eye from all speciously strong
and beautiful effects — that disinterested love of
dulness which has set so many Peter Bells to
paint the river-side primrose. It was then chosen
for its proximity to Paris. And for the same
cause, and by the force of tradition, the painter
of to-day continues to inhabit and to paint it.
There is in France scenery incomparable for
romance and harmony. Provence, and the valley
of the Rhone from Vienne to Tarascon, are one
succession of masterpieces waiting for the brush.

FONTAINEBLEAU. IOy

The beauty is not merely beauty; it tells, besides,
a tale to the imagination, and surprises while it
charms. Here you shall see castellated towns
that would befit the scenery of dreamland; streets
that glow with colour like cathedral windows; hills
of the most exquisite proportions; flowers of every
precious colour, growing thick like grass. All
these, by the grace of railway travel, are brought
to the very door of the modern painter; yet he
does not seek them; he remains faithful to
Fontainebleau, to the eternal bridge of Gretz, to
the watering-pot cascade in Cernay valley. Even
Fontainebleau was chosen for him; even in
Fontainebleau he shrinks from what is sharply
charactered. But one thing, at least, is certain,
whatever he may choose to paint and in whatever
manner, it is good for the artist to dwell among
graceful shapes. Fontainebleau, if it be but quiet
scenery, is classically graceful; and though the
student may look for different qualities, this
quality, silently present, will educate his hand and
eye.

But, before all its other advantages — charm,
loveliness, or proximity to Paris — comes the great
fact that it is already colonised. The institution
of a painters' colony is a work of time and tact.
The population must be conquered. The inn-

I O 8 FONTAINEBLEAU.

keeper has to be taught, and he soon learns, the
lesson of unlimited credit; he must be taught to
welcome as a favoured guest a young gentleman
in a very greasy coat, and with little baggage
beyond a box of colours and a canvas; and he
must learn to preserve his faith in customers who
will eat heartily and drink of the best, borrow
money to buy tobacco, and perhaps not pay a
stiver for a year. A colour merchant has next to
be attracted. A certain vogue must be given to
the place, lest the painter, most gregarious of
animals, should find himself alone. And no
sooner are these first* difficulties overcome, than
fresh perils spring up upon the other side; and
the bourgeois and the tourist are knocking at the
gate. This is the crucial moment for the colony.
If these intruders gain a footing, they not only
banish freedom and amenity; pretty soon, by
means of their long purses, they will have undone
the education of the innkeeper; prices will rise
and credit shorten; and the poor painter must
fare farther on and find another hamlet. "Not
here, O Apollo!" will become his song. Thus
Trouville and, the other day, St. Raphael were
lost to the arts. Curious and not always edifying
are the shifts that the French student uses to
defend his lair; like the cuttlefish, he must some-

FONTAINEBLE AU. I O Q

times blacken the waters of his chosen pool; but
at such a time and for so practical a purpose
Mrs. Grundy must allow him licence. Where his
own purse and credit are not threatened, he will
do the honours of his village generously. Any
artist is made welcome, through whatever medium
he may seek expression; science is respected;
even the idler, if he prove, as he so rarely does,
a gentleman, will soon begin to find himself at
home. And when that essentially modern
creature, the English or American girl-student,
began to walk calmly into his favourite inns as if
into a drawing-room at home, the French painter
owned himself defenceless; he submitted or he
fled. His French respectability, quite as precise
as ours, though covering different provinces of
life, recoiled aghast before the innovation. But
the girls were painters; there was nothing to be
done; and Barbizon, when I last saw it and for
the time at least, was practically ceded to the
fair invader. Paterfamilias, on the other hand,
the common tourist, the holiday shopman, and the
cheap young gentleman upon the spree, he
hounded from his villages with every circum-
stance of contumely.

This purely artistic society is excellent for the
young artist. The lads are mostly fools; they

I I O FONTAINEBLEAU.

hold the latest orthodoxy in its crudeness; they
are at that stage of education, for the most part,
when a man is too much occupied with style to
be aware of the necessity for any matter; and this,
above all for the Englishman, is excellent. To
work grossly at the trade, to forget sentiment, to
think of his material and nothing else, is, for
awhile at least, the king's highway of progress.
Here, in England, too many painters and writers
dwell dispersed, unshielded, among the intelligent
bourgeois. These, when they are not merely in-
different, prate to him about the lofty aims and
moral influence of art. And this is the lad's
ruin. For art is, first of all and last of all, a
trade. The love of words and not a desire to
publish new discoveries, the love of form and not
a novel reading of historical events, mark the
vocation of the writer and the painter. The
arabesque, properly speaking, and even in litera-
ture, is the first fancy of the artist; he first plays
with his material as a child plays with a kaleido-
scope; and he is already in a second stage when
he begins to use his pretty counters for the end
of representation. In that, he must pause long
and toil faithfully; that is his apprenticeship; and
it is only the few who will really grow beyond it,
and go forward, fully equipped, to do the busi-

FONTAINEBLEAU. I I I

ness of real art — to give life to abstractions and
significance and charm to facts. In the mean-
while, let him dwell much among his fellow- crafts-
men. They alone can take a serious interest in
the childish tasks and pitiful successes of these
years. They alone can behold with equanimity
this fingering of the dumb keyboard, this polish-
ing of empty sentences, this dull and literal paint-
ing of dull and insignificant subjects. Outsiders
will spur him on. They will say, "Why do you
not write a great book? paint a great picture?"
If his guardian angel fail him, they may even
persuade him to the attempt, and, ten to one, his
hand is coarsened and his style falsified for life.

And this brings me to a warning. The life
of the apprentice to any art is both unstrained
and pleasing; it is strewn with small successes in
the midst of a career of failure, patiently sup-
ported; the heaviest scholar is conscious of a
certain progress; and if he come not appreciably
nearer to the art of Shakespeare, grows letter-
perfect in the domain of A-B, ab. But the
time comes when a man should cease prelusory
gymnastic, stand up, put a violence upon his will,
and, for better or worse, begin the business of
creation. This evil day there is a tendency con-
tinually to postpone: above all with painters.

I I 2 FONTAINEBLEAU.

They have made so many studies that it has be-
come a habit; they make more, the walls of ex-
hibitions blush with them; and death finds these
aged students still busy with their horn-book.
This class of man finds a congenial home in artist
villages; in the slang of the English colony at
Barbizon we used to call them "Snoozers." Con-
tinual returns to the city, the society of men
farther advanced, the study of great works, a
sense of humour or, if such a thing is to be had,
a little religion or philosophy, are the means of
treatment. It will be time enough to think of
curing the malady after it has been caught; for
to catch it is the very thing for which you seek
that dream-land of the painters' village. " Snoozing "
is a part of the artistic education; and the rudi-
ments must be learned stupidly, all else being
forgotten, as if they were an object in themselves.
Lastly, there is something, or there seems to
be something, in the very air of France that com-
municates the love of style. Precision, clarity,
the cleanly and crafty employment of material, a
grace in the handling, apart from any value in
the thought, seem to be acquired by the mere
residence; or if not acquired, become at least the
more appreciated. The air of Paris is alive with
this technical inspiration. And to leave the airy

FONTAINEBLEAU. 1 1 3

city and awake next day upon the borders of the
forest is but to change externals. The same spirit
of dexterity and finish breathes from the long
alleys and the lofty groves, from the wildernesses
that are still pretty in their confusion, and the
great plain that contrives to be decorative in its
emptiness.

n.

IN spite of its really considerable extent, the
forest of Fontainebleau is hardly anywhere tedious.
I know the whole western side of it with what, I
suppose, I may call thoroughness; well enough at
least to testify that there is no square mile without
some special character and charm. Such quarters,
for instance, as the Long Rocher, the Bas-Breau,
and the Reine Blanche, might be a hundred miles
apart; they have scarce a point in common beyond
the silence of the birds. The two last are really
conterminous; and in both are tall and ancient
trees that have outlived a thousand political
vicissitudes. But in the one the great oaks prosper
placidly upon an even floor; they beshadow a
great field; and the air and the light are very
free below their stretching boughs. In the other
the trees find difficult footing; castles of white

Across the Plains, etc.

II 4 FONTAINEBLE AU.

rock lie tumbled one upon another, the foot slips,
the crooked viper slumbers, the moss clings in the
crevice; and above it all the great beech goea
spiring and casting forth her arms, and with a grace
beyond church architecture, canopies this rugged
chaos. Meanwhile, dividing the two cantons, the
broad white causeway of the Paris road runs in an
avenue: a road conceived for pageantry and for
triumphal marches, an avenue for an army; but, its
days of glory over, it now lies grilling in the sun be-
tween cool groves, and only at intervals the vehicle
of the cruising tourist is seen far away and faintly
audible along its ample sweep. A little upon one
side, and you find a district of sand and birch
and boulder; a little upon the other lies the valley
of Apremont, all juniper and heather; and close
beyond that you may walk into a zone of pine
trees. So artfully are the ingredients mingled.
Nor must it be forgotten that, in all this part, you
come continually forth upon a hill-top, and behold
the plain, northward and westward, like an un-
refulgent sea; nor that all day long the shadows
keep changing; and at last, to the red fires of
sunset, night succeeds, and with the night a new
forest, full of whisper, gloom, and fragrance. There
are few things more renovating than to leave
Paris, the lamplit arches of the Carrousel, and the

FONTAINEBLEAU. 115

long alignment of the glittering streets, and to
bathe the senses in this fragrant darkness of the
wood.

In this continual variety the mind is kept
vividly alive. It is a changeful place to paint, a
stirring place to live in, As fast as your foot
carries you, you pass from scene to scene, each
vigorously painted in the colours of the sun, each
endeared by that hereditary spell of forests on
the mind of man who still remembers and salutes
the ancient refuge of his race.

And yet the forest has been civilised through-
out. The most savage corners bear a name, and
have been cherished like antiquities; in the most
remote, Nature has prepared and balanced her
effects as if with conscious art; and man, with
his guiding arrows of blue paint, has counter-
signed the picture. After your farthest wander-
ing, you are never surprised to come forth upon
the vast avenue of highway, to strike the centre
point of branching alleys, or to find the aqueduct
trailing, thousand-footed, through the brush." It is
not a wilderness; it is rather a preserve. And,
fitly enough, the centre of the maze is not a
hermit's cavern. In the midst, a little mirthful
town lies sunlit, humming with the business of
pleasure; and the palace, breathing distinction

8*

I I 6 FONTAINEBLEAU.

and peopled by historic names, stands smokeless
among gardens.

Perhaps the last attempt at savage life was
that of the harmless humbug who called himself
the hermit. In a great tree, close by the high-
road, he had built himself a little cabin after the
manner of the Swiss Family Robinson; thither he
mounted at night, by the romantic aid of a rope
ladder; and if dirt be any proof of sincerity, the
man was savage as a Sioux. I had the pleasure
of his acquaintance; he appeared grossly stupid,
not in his perfect wits, and interested in nothing
but small change; for that he had a great avidity.
In the course of time he proved to be a chicken-
stealer, and vanished from his perch; and per-
haps from the first he was no true votary of
forest freedom, but an ingenious, theatrically-
minded beggar, and his cabin in the tree was
only stock-in-trade to beg withal. The choice of
his position would seem to indicate so much; for
if in the forest there are no places still to be dis-
covered, there are many that have been for-
gotten, and that lie unvisited. There, to be sure,
are the blue arrows waiting to reconduct you,
now blazed upon a tree, now posted in the corner
of a rock. But your security from interruption is
complete; you might camp for weeks, if there

FONTAINEBLEAU. 117

were only water, and not a soul suspect your
presence; and if I may suppose the reader to
have committed some great crime and come to
me for aid, I think I could still find my way to
a small cavern, fitted with a hearth and chimney,
where he might lie perfectly concealed. A con-
federate landscape-painter might daily supply him
with food; for water, he would have to make a
nightly tramp as far as to the nearest pond; and
at last, when the hue and cry began to blow
over, he might get gently on the train at some
side station, work round by a series of junctions,
and be quietly captured at the frontier.

Thus Fontainebleau, although it is truly but
a pleasure-ground, and although, in favourable
weather, and in the more celebrated quarters, it
literally buzzes with the tourist, yet has some of
the immunities and offers some of the repose of
natural forests. And the solitary, although he
must return at night to his frequented inn, may
yet pass the day with his own thoughts in the
companionable silence of the trees. The demands
of the imagination vary; some can be alone in a
back garden looked upon by windows; others, like
the ostrich, are content with a solitude that meets
the eye; and others, again, expand in fancy to
the very borders of their desert, and are irritably

Il8 FONTAlNEBLEAtf.

conscious of a hunters camp in an adjacent
county. To these last, of course, Fontainebleau
will seem but an extended tea-garden: a Rosher-
ville on a by-day. But to the plain man it offers
solitude: an excellent thing in itself, and a good
whet for company.

III.

I WAS for some time a consistent Barbizoni an;
et ego in Arcadia vixi, it was a pleasant season;
and that noiseless hamlet lying close among the
borders of the wood is for me, as for so many
others, a green spot in memory. The great Millet
was just dead, the green shutters of his modest
house were closed; his daughters were in mourn-
ing. The date of my first visit was thus an epoch
in the history of art: in a lesser way, it was an
epoch in the history of the Latin Quarter. The
Petit Ce'nade was dead and buried; Murger and
his crew of sponging vagabonds were all at rest
from their expedients; the tradition of their real
life was nearly, lost; and the petrified legend of
the Vie de Boheme had become a sort of gospel,
and. still gave the cue to zealous imitators. But
if the book be written in rose-water, the imitation
was still farther expurgated; honesty was the rule;
the innkeepers gave, as I have said, almost un-

FONTAINEBLEAU. I I Q

limited credit; they suffered the seediest painter to
depart, to take all his belongings, and to leave his
bill unpaid; and if they sometimes lost, it was by
English and Americans alone. At the same time,
the great influx of Anglo-Saxons had begun to
affect the life of the studious. There had been
disputes; and, in one instance at least, the Eng-
lish and the Americans had made common cause
to prevent a cruel pleasantry. It would be well
if nations and races could communicate their
qualities; but in practice when they look upon
each other, they have an eye to nothing but de-
fects. The Anglo-Saxon is essentially dishonest;
the French is devoid by nature of the principle
that we call "Fair Play." The Frenchman mar-
velled at the scruples of his guest, and, when that
defender of innocence retired over-seas and left
his bills unpaid, he marvelled once again; the
good and evil were, in his eyes, part and parcel
of the same eccentricity; a shrug expressed his
judgment upon both.

At Barbizon there was no master, no pontiff
in the arts. Palizzi bore rule at Gretz — urbane,
superior rule — his memory rich in anecdotes of
the great men of yore, his mind fertile in theories;
sceptical, composed, and venerable to the eye;
and yet beneath these outworks, all twittering with

120 FONTAINEELEAU.

Italian superstition, his eye scouting for omens,
and the whole fabric of his manners giving way
on the appearance of a hunchback. Cernay had
Pelouse, the admirable, placid Pelouse, smilingly
critical of youth, who, when a full-blown com-
mercial traveller suddenly threw down his samples,
bought a colour-box, and became the master
whom we have all admired. Marlotte, for a cen-
tral figure, boasted Olivier de Penne. Only Bar-
bizon, since the death of Millet, was a headless
commonwealth. Even its secondary lights, and
thpse who in my day made the stranger welcome,
have since deserted it The good Lachevre has
departed, carrying his household gods; and long
before that Gaston Lafenestre was taken from our
midst by an untimely death. He died before he
had deserved success; it may be, he would never
have deserved it; but his kind, comely, modest
countenance still haunts the memory of all who
knew him. Another — whom I will not name —
has moved farther on, pursuing the strange
Odyssey of his decadence. His days of royal
favour had departed even then; but he still re-
tained, in his narrower life at Barbizon, a certain
stamp of conscious importance, hearty, friendly,
filling the room, the occupant of several chairs;
nor had he yet ceased his losing battle, still

FONTAINEBLEAU. 1 2 I

labouring upon great canvases that none would
buy, still waiting the return of fortune. But these
days also were too good to last; and the former
favourite of two sovereigns fled, if I heard the
truth, by night. There was a time when he was
counted a great man, and Millet but a dauber;
behold, how the whirligig of time brings in his
revenges! To pity Millet is a piece of arrogance;
if life be hard for such resolute and pious spirits,
it is harder still for us, had we the wit to under-
stand it; but we may pity his unhappier rival,
who, for no apparent merit, was raised to opu-
lence and momentary fame, and, through no ap-
parent fault, was suffered step by step to sink
again to nothing. No misfortune can exceed the
bitterness of such back- foremost progress, even
bravely supported as it was; but to those also
who were taken early from the easel, a regret is
due. From all the young men of this period, one
stood out by the vigour of his promise; he was in
the age of fermentation, enamoured of eccen-
tricities. "II faut faire de la peinture nouvelle,"
was his watchword; but if time and experience
had continued his education, if he had been
granted health to return from these excursions to
the steady and the central, I must believe that
the name of Hills had become famous.

122 FONTAINEBLEAU.

Siron's inn, that excellent artists' barrack, was
managed upon easy principles. At any hour of
the night, when you returned from wandering in
the forest, you went to the billiard-room and
helped yourself to liquors, or descended to the
cellar and returned laden with beer or wine. The
Sirons were all locked in slumber; there was none
to check your inroads; only at the week's end a
computation was made, the gross sum was divided,
and a varying share set down to every lodger's
name under the rubric: estrats. Upon the more
long-suffering the larger tax was levied; and your
bill lengthened in a direct proportion to the easi-
ness of your disposition. At any hour of the
morning, again, you could get your coffee or cold
milk, and set forth into the forest. The doves
had perhaps wakened you, fluttering into your
chamber; and on the threshold of the inn you
were met by the aroma of the forest. Close by
were the great aisles, the mossy boulders, the in-
terminable field of forest shadow. There you
were free to dream and wander. And at noon,
and again at six o'clock, a good meal awaited you
on Siron's table. The whole of your accommoda-
tion, set aside that varying item of the estrats,
cost you five francs a day; your bill was never
offered you until you asked it; and if you were

FONTAINEBLEAU. 123

out of luck's way, you might depart for where you
pleased and leave it pending.

IV.

THEORETICALLY, the house was open to all
comers; practically, it was a kind of club. The
guests protected themselves, and, in so doing,
they protected Siron. Formal manners being laid
aside, essential courtesy was the more rigidly
exacted; the new arrival had to feel the pulse of
the society; and a breach of its undefined ob-
servances was promptly punished. A man might
be as plain, as dull, as slovenly, as free of speech
as he desired; but to a touch of presumption or
a word of hectoring these free Barbizonians were
as sensitive as a tea-party of maiden ladies. I
have seen people driven forth from Barbizon; it
would be difficult to say in words what they had
done, but they deserved their fate. They had
shown themselves unworthy to enjoy these cor-
porate freedoms; they had pushed themselves;
they had "made their head"; they wanted tact
to appreciate the "fine shades" of Barbizonian
etiquette. And once they were condemned, the
process of extrusion was ruthless in its cruelty;
after one evening with the formidable Bodmer,
the Baily of our commonwealth, the erring stranger

124 FONTA1NEBLEAU.

was beheld no more; he rose exceeding early the
next day, and the first coach conveyed him from
the scene of his discomfiture. These sentences
of banishment were never, in my knowledge, de-
livered against an artist; such would, I believe,
have been illegal; but the odd and pleasant fact
is this, that they were never needed. Painters,
sculptors, writers, singers, I have seen all of these
in Barbizon; and some were sulky, and some
blatant and inane; but one and all entered at
once into the spirit of the association. This
singular society is purely French, a creature of
French virtues, and possibly of French defects. It
cannot be imitated by the English. The rough-
ness, the impatience, the more obvious selfishness,
and even the more ardent friendships of the
Anglo-Saxon, speedily dismember such a common-
wealth. But this random gathering of young
French painters, with neither apparatus nor parade
of government, yet kept the life of the place upon
a certain footing, insensibly imposed their etiquette
upon the docile, and by caustic speech enforced
their edicts against the unwelcome. To think of
it is to wonder the more at the strange failure of
their race upon the larger theatre. This inbred
civility — to use the word in its completest mean-
ing— this natural and facile adjustment of con-

PONTAINEBLEAU. 125

tending liberties, seems all that is required to
make a governable nation and a just and prosper-
ous country.

Our society, thus purged and guarded, was
full of high spirits, of laughter, and of the initia-
tive of youth. The few elder men who joined us
were still young at heart, and took the key from
their companions. We returned from long stations
in the fortifying air, our blood renewed by the
sunshine, our spirits refreshed by the silence
of the forest; the Babel of loud voices sounded
good; we fell to eat and play like the natural
man; and in the high inn chamber, panelled with
indifferent pictures and lit by candles guttering in
the night air, the talk and laughter sounded far
into the night. It was a good place and a good
life for any naturally-minded youth; better yet
for the student of painting, and perhaps best of
all for the student of letters. He, too, was
saturated in this atmosphere of style; he was
shut out from the disturbing currents of the
world, he might forget that there existed other
and more pressing interests than that of art. But,
in such a place, it was hardly possible to write;
he could not drug his conscience, like the painter,
by the production of listless studies; he saw him-
self idle among many who were apparently, and

126 FONTAINEBLEAU.

some who were really, employed; and what with
the impulse of increasing health and the con-
tinual provocation of romantic scenes, he became
tormented with the desire to work. He enjoyed
a strenuous idleness full of visions, hearty meals,
long, sweltering walks, mirth among companions;
and still floating like music through his brain,
foresights of great works -that Shakespeare might
be proud to have conceived, headless epics,
glorious torsos of dramas, and words that were
alive with import So in youth, like Moses from
the mountain, we have sights of that House
Beautiful of art which we shall never enter. They
are dreams and unsubstantial; visions of style
that repose upon no base of human meaning; the
last heart-throbs of that excited amateur who has
to die in all of us before the artist can be born.
But they come to us in such a rainbow of glory
that all subsequent achievement appears dull and
earthly in comparison. We were all artists; al-
most all in the age of illusion, cultivating an
imaginary genius, and walking to the strains of
some deceiving Ariel; small wonder, indeed, if we
were happy! But art, of whatever nature, is a
kind mistress; and though these dreams of youth
fall by their own baselessness, others succeed,
graver and more substantial; the symptoms change,

FONTAINEBLEAU. 127

the amiable malady endures; and still, at an
equal distance, the House Beautiful shines upon
its hill-top.

V.

GRETZ lies out of the forest, down by the
bright river. It boasts a mill, an ancient church,
a castle, and a bridge of many sterlings. And
the bridge is a piece of public property; anony-
mously famous; beaming on the incurious dilet-
tante from the walls of a hundred exhibitions. I
have seen it in the Salon; I have seen it in the
Academy; I have seen it in the last French Ex-
position, excellently done by Bloomer; in a black-
and-white by Mr. A. Henley, it once adorned this
essay in the pages of the Magazine of Art. Long-
suffering bridge! And if you visit Gretz to-mor-
row, you shall find another generation, camped
at the bottom of Chevillon's garden under their
white umbrellas, and doggedly painting it again.

The bridge taken for granted, Gretz is a less
inspiring place than Barbizon. I give it the palm
over Cernay. There is something ghastly in the
great empty village square of Cernay, with the
inn tables standing in one corner, as though the
stage were set for rustic opera, and in the early
morning all the painters breaking their fast upon

128 FONTAINEBLEAU.

white wine under the windows of the villagers.
It is vastly different to awake in Gretz, to go
down the green inn-garden, to find the river
streaming through the bridge, and to see the
dawn begin across the poplared level. The meals
are laid in the cool arbour, under fluttering
leaves. The splash of oars and bathers, the
bathing costumes out to dry, the trim canoes be-
side the jetty, tell of a society that has an eye to
pleasure. There is "something to do" at Gretz.
Perhaps, for that very reason, I can recall no such
enduring ardours, no such glories of exhilaration,
as among the solemn groves and uneventful hours
of Barbizon. This "something to do" is a great
enemy to joy; it is a way out of it; you wreak
your high spirits on some cut-and-dry employ-
ment, and behold them gone! But Gretz is a
merry place after its kind: pretty to see, merry to
inhabit The course of its pellucid river, whether
up or down, is full of gentle attractions for the
navigator: islanded reed-mazes where, in autumn,
the red berries cluster; the mirrored and inverted
images of trees; lilies, and mills, and the foam
and thunder of weirs. And of all noble sweeps
of roadway, none is nobler, on a windy dusk, than
the highroad to Nemours between its lines of talk-
ing poplar.

FONTAINEBLEAU. I 2 Q

But even Gretz is changed. The old inn,
long shored and trussed and buttressed, fell at
length under the mere weight of years, and the
place as it was is but a fading image in the
memory of former guests. They, indeed, recall
the ancient wooden stair; they recall the rainy
evening, the wide hearth, the blaze of the twig
fire, and the company that gathered round the
pillar in the kitchen. But the material fabric is
now dust; soon, with the last of its inhabitants,
its very memory shall follow; and they, in their
turn, shall suffer the same law, and, both in name
and lineament, vanish from the world of men.
"For remembrance of the old house' sake," as
Pepys once quaintly put it, let me tell one story.
When the tide of invasion swept over France, two
foreign painters were left stranded and penniless
in Gretz; and there, until the war was over, the
Chevillons ungrudgingly harboured them. It was
difficult to obtain supplies; but the two waifs were
still welcome to the best, sat down daily with
the family to table, and at the due intervals
were supplied with clean napkins, which they
scrupled to employ. Madame Chevillon observed
the fact and reprimanded them. But they stood
firm; eat they must, but having no money they
would soil no napkins.

Across the Plains, etc. 9

1 30 FONTAINEBLEAU.

VI.

Nemours and Moret, for all they are so pic-
turesque, have been little visited by painters.
They are, indeed, too populous; they have man-
ners of their own, and might resist the drastic
process of colonisation. Montigny has been some-
what strangely neglected, I never knew it in-
habited but once, when Will H. Low installed
himself there with a barrel of piquette, and enter-
tained his friends in a leafy trellis above the
weir, in sight of the green country and to the
music of the falling water. It was a most airy,
quaint, and pleasant place of residence, just too
rustic to be stagey; and from my memories of
the place in general, and that garden trellis in
particular — at morning, visited by birds, or at
night, when the dew fell and the stars were of
the party — I am inclined to think perhaps too
favourably of the future of Montigny. Chailly-en-
Biere has outlived all things, and lies dustily
slumbering in the plain — the cemetery of itself.
The great road remains to testify of its former
bustle of postilions and carriage bells; and, like
memorial tablets, there still hang in the inn room
the paintings of a former generation, dead or de-
corated long ago. In my time, one man only,

FONTAINEBLEAU. I 3 I

greatly daring, dwelt there. From time to time
he would walk over to Barbizon, like a shade
revisiting the glimpses of the moon, and after
some communication with flesh and blood return
to his austere hermitage. But even he, when I
last revisited the forest, had come to Barbizon
for good, and closed the roll of Chaillyites. It
may revive — but I much doubt it. Acheres and
Recloses still wait a pioneer; Bourron is out of
the question, being merely Gretz over again, with-
out the river, the bridge, or the beauty; and of
all the possible places on the western side, Mar-
lotte alone remains to be discussed. I scarcely
know Marlotte, and, very likely for that reason,
am not much in love with it. It seems a glaring
and unsightly hamlet. The inn of Mother An-
tonie unattractive; and its more reputable rival,
though comfortable enough, is commonplace. Mar-
lotte has a name; it is famous; if I were the
young painter I would leave it alone in its
glory.

VII.

These are the words of an old stager; and
though time is a good conservative in forest
places, much may be untrue to-day. Many of us

9*

132 FONTAINEBLEAU.

have passed Arcadian days there and moved on,
but yet left a portion of our souls behind us
buried in the woods. I would not dig for these
reliquiae; they are incommunicable treasures that
will not enrich the finder; and yet there may lie,
interred below great oaks or scattered along forest
paths, stores of youth's dynamite and dear re-
membrances. And as one generation passes on
and renovates the field of tillage for the next, I
entertain a fancy that when the young men of to-
day go forth into the forest they shall find the
air still vitalised by the spirits of their prede-
cessors, and, like those "unheard melodies" that
are the sweetest of all, the memory of our
laughter shall still haunt the field of trees. Those
merry voices that in woods call the wanderer
farther, those thrilling silences and whispers of
the groves, surely in Fontainebleau they must be
vocal of me and my companions? We are not
content to pass away entirely from the scenes of
our delight; we would leave, if but in gratitude,
a pillar and a legend.

One generation after another fall like honey-
bees upon this memorable forest, rifle its sweets,
pack themselves with vital memories, and when
the theft is consummated depart again into life
richer, but poorer also. The forest, indeed, they

FONTAINEBLEAU. 133

have possessed, from that day forward it is theirs
indissolubly, and they will return to walk in it at
night in the fondest of their dreams, and use it
for ever in their books and pictures. Yet when
they made their packets, and put up their notes
and sketches, something, it should seem, had been
forgotten. A projection of themselves shall appear
to haunt unfriended these scenes of happiness,
a natural child of fancy, begotten and forgotten
unawares. Over the whole field of our wanderings
such fetches are still travelling like indefatigable
bagmen; but the imps of Fontainebleau, as of all
beloved spots, are very long of life, and memory
is piously unwilling to forget their orphanage. If
anywhere about that wood you meet my airy
bantling, greet him with tenderness. He was a
pleasant lad, though now abandoned. And when
it comes to your own turn to quit the forest, may
you leave behind you such another; no Antony or
Werther, let us hope, no tearful whipster, but, as
becomes this not uncheerful and most active age
in which we figure, the child of happy hours.

No art, it may be said, was ever perfect, and
not many noble, that has not been mirthfully
conceived. And no man, it may be added, was
ever anything but a wet blanket and a cross to
his companions who boasted not a copious spirit

134 FONTAINEBLEAU.

of enjoyment Whether as man or artist, let the
youth make haste to Fontainebleau, and once
there let him address himself to the spirit of the
place; he will learn more from exercise than from
studies, although both are necessary; and if he
can get into his heart the gaiety and inspiration
of the woods he will have gone far to undo the
evil of his sketches. A spirit once well strung up
to the concert-pitch of the primeval out-of-doors
will hardly dare to finish a study and magni-
loquently ticket it a picture. The incommunicable
thrill of things, that is the tuning-fork by which
we test the flatness of our art Here it is that
Nature teaches and condemns, and still spurs up
to further effort and new failure. Thus it is that
she sets us blushing at our ignorant and tepid
works; and the more we find of these inspiring
shocks the less shall we be apt to love the literal
in our productions. In all sciences and senses
the letter kills; and to-day, when cackling human
geese express their ignorant condemnation of all
studio pictures, it is a* lesson most useful to be
learnt. Let the young painter go to Fontainebleau,
and while he stupefies himself with studies that
teach him the mechanical side of his trade, let
him walk in the great air, and be a servant of
mirth, and not pick and botanise, but wait upon

FONTAINEBLEAU. 135

the moods of nature. So he will learn — or learn
not to forget — the poetry of life and earth, which,
when he has acquired his track, will save him
from joyless reproduction.

[1882.]

IV.

EPILOGUE

TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE."*

THE country where they journeyed, that green,
breezy valley of the Loing, is one very attractive
to cheerful and solitary people. The weather
was superb; all night it thundered and lightened,
and the rain fell in sheets; by day, the heavens
were cloudless, the sun fervent, the air vigorous
and pure. They walked separate: the Cigarette
plodding behind with some philosophy, the lean
Arethusa posting on ahead. Thus each enjoyed
his own reflections by the way; each had perhaps
time to tire of them before he met his comrade
at the designated inn; and the pleasures of
society and solitude combined to fill the day.
The Arethusa carried in his knapsack the works
of Charles of Orleans, and employed some of the
hours of travel in the concoction of English

* See An Inland Voyage% by Robert Louis Stevenson,
1878.

EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE." 137

roundels. In this path, he must thus have pre-
ceded Mr. Lang, Mr. Dobson, Mr. Henley, and all
contemporary roundeleers; but for good reasons,
he will be the last to publish the result. The
Cigarette walked burthened with a volume of
Michelet. And both these books, it will be seen,
played a part in the subsequent adventure.

The Arethusa was unwisely dressed. He is
no precisian in attire; but by all accounts, he
was never so ill-inspired as on that tramp; having
set forth indeed, upon a moment's notice, from the
most unfashionable spot in Europe, Barbizon. On
his head he wore a smoking-cap of Indian work,
the gold lace pitifully frayed and tarnished. A
flannel shirt of an agreeable dark hue, which the
satirical called black; a light tweed coat made by
a good English tailor; ready-made cheap linen
trousers and leathern gaiters completed his array.
In person, he is exceptionally lean; and his face
is not, like those of happier mortals, a certificate.
For years he could not pass a frontier or visit a
bank without suspicion; the police everywhere,
but in his native city, looked askance upon him;
and (though I am sure it will not be credited) he
is actually denied admittance to the casino of
Monte Carlo. If you will imagine him, dressed
as above, stooping under his 'knapsack, walking

138 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE."

nearly five miles an hour with the folds of the
ready-made trousers fluttering about his spindle
shanks, and still looking eagerly round him as if
in terror of pursuit — the figure, when realised, is
far from reassuring. When Villon journeyed (per-
haps by the same pleasant valley) to his exile at
Roussillon, I wonder if he had not something of
the same appearance. Something of the same
preoccupation he had beyond a doubt, for he too
must have tinkered verses as he walked, with
more success than his successor. And if he had
anything like the same inspiring weather, the
same nights of uproar, men in armour rolling and
resounding down the stairs of heaven, the rain
hissing on the village streets, the wild bull's-eye
of the storm flashing all night long into the bare
inn-chamber — the same sweet return of day, the
same unfathomable blue of noon, the same high-
coloured, halcyon eves — and above all, if he had
anything like as good a comrade, anything like
as keen a relish for what he saw, and what he
ate, and the rivers that he bathed in, and the
rubbish that he wrote, I would exchange estates
to-day with the poor exile, and count myself a
gainer.

But there was another point of similarity be-
tween the two journeys, for which the Arethusa

EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE." I3Q

was to pay dear: both were gone upon in days of
incomplete security. It was not long after the
Franco-Prussian war. Swiftly as men forget, that
country-side was still alive with tales of uhlans,
and outlying sentries, and hairbreadth 'scapes from
the ignominious cord, and pleasant momentary
friendships between invader and invaded. A year,
at the most two years later, you might have tramped
all that country over and not heard one anecdote.
And a year or two later, you would — if you were
a rather ill-looking young man in nondescript array
— have gone your rounds in greater safety; for
along with more interesting matter, the Prussian
spy would have somewhat faded from men's
imaginations..

For all that, our voyager had got beyond
Chateau Renard before he was conscious of
arousing wonder. On the road between that
place and Chatillon-sur-Loing, however, he en-
countered a rural postman; they fell together in
talk, and spoke of a variety of subjects; but
through one and all, the postman was still visibly
preoccupied, and his eyes were faithful to the
Arethusa's knapsack. At last, with mysterious
roguishness, he inquired what it contained, and
on being answered, shook his head with kindly
incredulity. "Non," said he, "non, vous avez

140 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE."

des portraits." And then with a languishing
appeal, "Voyons, show me the portraits!" It was
some little while before the Arethusa, with a shout
of laughter, recognised his drift. By portraits he
meant indecent photographs; and in the Arethusa,
an austere and rising author, he thought to have
identified a pornographic colporteur. When country-
folk in France have made up their minds as to
a person's calling, argument is fruitless. Along
all the rest of the way, the postman piped and
fluted meltingly to get a sight of the collection;
now he would upbraid, now he would reason —
"Voyons, I will tell nobody"; then he tried cor-
ruption, and insisted on paying for a glass of
wine; and, at last when their ways separated —
"Non," said he, ffce n'cst pas bien de votre part.
O non, ce n'est pas bien." And shaking his head
with quite a sentimental sense of injury, he de-
parted unrefreshed.

On certain little difficulties encountered by
the Arethusa at Chatillon-sur-Loing, I have not
space to dwell; another Chatillon, of grislier
memory, looms too near at hand. But the next
day, in a certain hamlet called La Jussiere, he
stopped to drink a glass of syrup in a very poor,
bare drinking shop. The hostess, a comely woman,
suckling a child, examined the traveller with kindly

EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE." 14!

and pitying eyes. "You are not of this depart-
ment?" she asked. The Arethusa told her he
was English. "Ah!" she said, surprised. "We
have no English. We have many Italians, how-
ever, and they do very well; they do not complain
of the people of hereabouts. An Englishman may
do very well also; it will be something new."
Here was a dark saying, over which the Arethusa
pondered as he drank his grenadine; but when
he rose and asked what was to pay, the light
came upon him in a flash. "O, pour vous/'
replied the landlady, "a halfpenny!" Pour vous?
By heaven, she took him for a beggar! He paid
his halfpenny, feeling that it were ungracious to
correct her. , But when he was forth again upon
the road, he became vexed in spirit. The con-
science is no gentleman, he is a rabbinical fellow;
and his conscience told him he had stolen the
syrup.

That night the travellers slept in Gien; the
next day they passed the river and set forth
(severally, as their custom was) on a short stage
through the green plain upon the Berry side, to
Chatillon-sur-Loire. It was the first day of the
shooting; and the air rang with the report of fire-
arms and the admiring cries of sportsmen. Over-
head the birds were in consternation, wheeling in

142 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE."

clouds, settling and re-arising. And yet with all
this bustle on either hand, the road itself lay
solitary. The Arethusa smoked a pipe beside a
milestone, and I remember he laid down very
exactly all he was to do at Chatillon: how he
was to enjoy a cold plunge, to change his shirt,
and to await the Cigarette's arrival, in sublime
inaction, by the margin of the Loire. Fired by
these ideas, he pushed the more rapidly forward,
and came, early in the afternoon and in a breath-
ing heat, to the entering-in of that ill-fated town.
Childe Roland to the dark tower came.

A polite gendarme threw his shadow on the
path.

"Monsieur est voyageur?" he asked..

And the Arethusa, strong in his innocence,
forgetful of his vile attire, replied — I had almost
said with gaiety: "So it would appear."

"His papers are in order?" said the gendarme.
And when the Arethusa, with a slight change of
voice, admitted he had none, he was informed
(politely enough) that he must appear before the
Commissary.

The Commissary sat at a table in his bed-
room, stripped to the shirt and trousers, but still
copiously perspiring; and when he turned upon
the prisoner a large meaningless countenance, that

EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE." 143

was (like Bardolph's) "all whelks and bubuckles,"
the dullest might have been prepared for grief.
Here was a stupid man, sleepy with the heat and
fretful at the interruption, whom neither appeal
nor argument could reach.

THE COMMISSARY. You have no papers?

THE ARETHUSA. Not here.

THE COMMISSARY. Why?

THE ARETHUSA. I have left them behind in
my valise.

THE COMMISSARY. You know, however, that
it is forbidden to circulate without papers?

THE ARETHUSA. Pardon me: I am convinced
of the contrary. I am here on my rights as an
English subject by international treaty.

THE COMMISSARY (with scorn). You call your-
self an Englishman?

THE ARETHUSA. I do.

THE COMMISSARY. Humph. — What is your
trade?

THE ARETHUSA. I am a Scotch Advocate.

THE COMMISSARY (with singular annoyance).
A Scotch advocate! Do you then pretend to sup-
port yourself by that in this department?

The Arethusa modestly disclaimed the pre-
tension. The Commissary had scored a point.

THE COMMISSARY. Why, then, do you travel?

144 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE."

THE ARETHUSA. I travel for pleasure.

THE COMMISSARY (pointing to the knapsack*
and with sublime incredulity) . Avec f.aP Voyez-
vouSy je suis un homme intelligent! (With that?
Look here, I am a person of intelligence!)

The culprit remaining silent under this home
thrust, the Commissary relished his triumph for a
while, and then demanded (like the postman, but
with what different expectations!) to see the con-
tents of the knapsack. And here the Arethusa,
not yet sufficiently awake to his position, fell into
a grave mistake. There was little or no furniture
in the room except the Commissary's chair and
table; and to facilitate matters, the Arethusa (with
all the innocence on earth) leant the knapsack on
a corner of the bed. The Commissary fairly
bounded from his seat; his face and neck flushed
past purple, almost into blue; and he screamed to
lay the desecrating object on the floor.

The knapsack proved to contain a change of
shirts, of shoes, of socks, and of linen trousers, a
small dressing-case, a piece of soap in one of the
shoes, two volumes of the Collection Jannet lettered
Poesies de Charles d' Orleans^ a map, and a version
book containing divers notes in prose and the re-
markable English roundels of the voyager, still to
this day unpublished: the Commissary of Ch^tillon

EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE.-' 145

is the only living man who has clapped an eye
on these artistic trifles. He turned the assortment
over with a contumelious finger; it was plain from
his daintiness that he regarded the Arethusa and
all his belongings as the very temple of infection.
Still there was nothing suspicious about the map,
nothing really criminal except the roundels; as
for Charles of Orleans, to the ignorant mind of
the prisoner, he seemed as good as a certificate;
and it was supposed the farce was nearly over.

The inquisitor resumed his seat.

THE COMMISSARY (after a pause). Eh bien, je
vat's vous dire ce que vous etes. Vous etes allemand
et vous venez chanter a la foire. (Well, then, I will
tell you what you are. You are a German and
have come to sing at the fair.)

THE ARETHUSA. Would you like to hear me
sing? I believe I could convince you of the
contrary.

THE COMMISSARY. Pas de plaisanterie, mon-
sieur!

THE ARETHUSA. Well, sir, oblige me at least
by looking at this book. Here, I open it with my
eyes shut. Read one of these songs — read this
one — and tell me, you who are a man of in-
telligence, if it would be possible to sing it at a-
fair?

Across the Plains, etc* IO

IJT6 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE/'

THE COMMISSARY (critically). Mais oui. Tres
bien.

THE ARETHUSA. Comment, monsieur! What!
But do you not observe it is antique. It is diffi-
cult to understand, even for you and me; but for
the audience at a fair, it would be meaningless.

THE COMMISSARY (taking a pen). Enfin, il
faut en finir. What is your name?

THE ARETHUSA (speaking with the swallowing
vivacity of the English). Robert-Louis- Stev'ns'n.

THE COMMISSARY (aghast). He! Quoi?

THE ARETHUSA (perceiving and improving his
advantage). Rob'rt-Lou's-Stev'ns'n.

THE COMMISSARY (after several conflicts ivith
his pen). Eh bien, il faut se passer du nom. fa
ne s'tcrit pas. (Well, we must do without the
name: it is unspellable.)

The above is a rough summary of this mo-
mentous conversation, in which I have been chiefly
careful to preserve the plums of the Commissary;
but the remainder of the scene, perhaps because
of his rising anger, has left but little definite in
the memory of the Arethusa. The Commissary
was not, I think, a practised literary man; no
sooner, at least, had he taken pen in hand and
embarked on the composition of the proces-verbal,
than he became distinctly more uncivil and began

LPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE. 147

to show a predilection for that simplest of all
forms of repartee; "You lie!" Several times the
Arethusa let it pass, and then suddenly flared up,
refused to accept more insults or to answer further
questions, defied the Commissary to do his worst,
and promised him, if he did, that he should
bitterly repent it. Perhaps if he had worn this
proud front from the first, instead of beginning
with a sense of entertainment and then going on
to argue, the thing might have turned otherwise;
for even at this eleventh hour the Commissary
was visibly staggered. But it was too late; he
had been challenged; the proces-verbal was
begun; and he again squared his elbows over his
writing, and the Arethusa was led forth a prisoner.

A step or two down the hot road stood the
gendarmerie. Thither was our unfortunate con-
ducted, and there he was bidden to empty forth
the contents of his pockets. A handkerchief, a
pen, a pencil, a pipe and tobacco, matches, and
some ten francs of change: that was all. Not a
file, not a cipher, not a scrap of writing whether
to identify or to condemn. The very gendarme
was appalled before such destitution.

"I regret," he said, "that I arrested you, for I
see that you are no voyou" And he promised
him every indulgence,

10*

148 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE."

The Arethusa, thus encouraged, asked for his
pipe. That he was told was impossible, but if
he chewed, he might have some tobacco. He did
not chew, however, and asked instead to have his
handkerchief.

(( No?2/J said the gendarme. "Nous avous
eu des histoires de gens qui se sont pendus." (No,
we have had histories of people who hanged
themselves.)

"What," cried the Arethusa. "And is it for
that you refuse me my handkerchief? But see
how much more easily I could hang myself in
my trousers!"

The man was struck by the novelty of the
idea; but he stuck to his colours, and only con-
tinued to repeat vague offers of service.

"At least," said the Arethusa, "be sure that
you arrest my comrade; he will follow ere long
on the same road, and you can tell him by the
sack upon his shoulders."

This promised, the prisoner was led round
into the back court of the building, a cellar door
was opened, he was motioned down the stair, and
bolts grated and chains clanged behind his
descending person.

The philosophic and still more the imaginative
mind is apt to suppose itself prepared for any

EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE. 149

mortal accident. Prison, among other ills, was
one that had been often faced by the undaunted
Arethusa. Even as he went down the stairs, he
was telling himself that here was a famous occa-
sion for a roundel, and that like the committed
linnets of the tuneful cavalier, he too would make
his prison musical. I will tell the truth at once:
the roundel was never written, or it should be
printed in this place, to raise a smile. Two
reasons interfered; the first moral, the second
physical.

It is one of the curiosities of human nature,
that although all men are liars, they can none
of them bear to be told so of themselves. To
get and take the lie with equanimity is a stretch
beyond the stoic; and the Arethusa, who had
been surfeited upon that insult, was blazing in-
wardly with a white heat of smothered wrath.
But the physical had also its part. The cellar
in which he was confined was some feet under-
ground, and it was only lighted by an unglazed,
narrow aperture high up in the wall and
smothered in the leaves of a green vine. The
walls were of naked masonry, the floor of bare
earth; by way of furniture there was an earthen-
ware basin, a water-jug, and a wooden bedstead
with a blue -gray cloak for bedding. To be

150 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE."

taken from the hot air of a summer's afternoon,
the reverberation of the road and the stir of rapid
exercise, and plunged into the gloom and damp
of this receptacle for vagabonds, struck an instant
chill upon the Arethusa's blood. Now see in how
small a matter a hardship may consist: the floor
was exceedingly uneven underfoot, with the very
spade-marks, I suppose, of the labourers who dug
the foundations of the barrack; and what with
the poor twilight and the irregular surface, walking
was impossible. The caged author .resisted for a
good while; but the chill of the place struck
deeper and deeper; and at length, with such
reluctance as you may fancy, he was driven to
climb upon the bed and wrap himself in the
public covering. There, then, he lay upon the
verge of shivering, plunged in semi-darkness,
wound in a garment whose touch he dreaded like
the plague, and (in a spirit far removed from
resignation) telling the roll of the insults he had
just received. These are not circumstances favour-
able to the muse.

Meantime (to look at the upper surface where
the sun was still shining and the guns of sports-
men were still noisy through the tufted plain) the
Cigarette was drawing near at his more philosophic
pace. In those days of liberty and health he was

EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE." 15!

the constant partner of the Arethusa, and had
ample opportunity to share in that gentleman's
disfavour with the police. Many a bitter bowl
had he partaken of with that disastrous comrade.
He was himself a man born to float easily through
life, his face and manner artfully recommending
him to all. There was but one suspicious circum-
stance he could not carry off, and that was his
companion. He will not readily forget the Com-
missary in what is ironically called the free town
of Frank fort-on-the-Main; nor the Franco-Belgian
frontier; nor the inn at La Fere; last, but not least,
he is pretty certain to remember Chatillon-sur-
Loire.

At the town entry, the gendarme culled him
like a wayside flower; and a moment later, two
persons, in a high state of surprise, were con-
fronted in the Commissary's office. For if the
Cigarette was surprised to be arrested, the Com-
missary was no less taken aback by the appearance
and appointments of his captive. Here was a man
about whom there could be no mistake: a man
of an unquestionable and unassailable manner, in
apple-pie order, dressed not with neatness merely
but elegance, ready with his passport, at a word,
and well supplied with money: a man the Com-
missary would have doffed his hat to on chance

152 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE."

upon the highway; and this beau cavalier un-
blushingly claimed the Arethusa for his comrade!
The conclusion of the interview was foregone; of
its humours, I remember only one. "Baronet?"
demanded the magistrate, glancing up from the
passport. ft Alors, monsieur, vous etes le fils d'un
baron?'' And when the Cigarette (his one mis-
take throughout the interview) denied the soft
impeachment, "Alors" from the Commissary " ce
n'est pas votre passeport!" But these were in-
effectual thunders; he never dreamed of laying
hands upon the Cigarette; presently he fell into
a mood of unrestrained admiration, gloating over
the contents of the knapsack, commending our
friend's tailor. Ah, what an honoured guest was
the Commissary entertaining! what suitable clothes
he wore for the warm weather! what beautiful
maps, what an attractive work of history he
carried in his knapsack! You are to understand
there was now but one point of difference between
them: what was to be done with the Arethusa?
the Cigarette demanding his release, the Com-
missary still claiming him as the dungeon's own.
Now it chanced that the Cigarette had passed
some years of his life in Egypt, where he had
made acquaintance with two very bad things,
cholera morbus and pashas; and in the eye of

EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE." 153

V

the Commissary, as he fingered the volume of
Michelet, it seemed to our traveller there was
something Turkish. I pass over this lightly; it is
highly possible there was some misunderstanding,
highly possible that the Commissary (charmed
with his visitor) supposed the attraction to be
mutual and took for an act of growing friendship
what the Cigarette himself regarded as a bribe.
And at any rate, was there ever a bribe more
singular than an odd volume of Michelet's history?
The work was promised him for the morrow, be-
fore our departure; and presently after, either be-
cause he had his price, or to show that he was
not the man to be behind in friendly offices —
"Eh bien," he said, "je suppose qu'il faut lacker
votre camarade." And he tore up that feast of
humour, the unfinished proces-verbal. Ah, if he had
only torn up instead the Arethusa's roundels ! There
were many works burnt at Alexandria, there are
many treasured in the British Museum, that I could
better spare than the proces-verbal of Chatillon.
Poor bubuckled Commissary! I begin to be sorry
that he never had his Michelet: perceiving in him
fine human traits, a broad-based stupidity, a gusto in
his magisterial functions, a taste for letters, a ready
admiration for the admirable. And if he did not
admire the Arethusa, he was not alone in that

154 EPILOGUE TO

•

To the imprisoned one, shivering under the
public covering, there came suddenly a noise of
bolts and chains. He sprang to his feet, ready
to welcome a companion in calamity; and instead
of that, the door was flung wide, the friendly
gendarme appeared above in the strong daylight,
and with a magnificent gesture (being probably a
student of the drama) — "Vous etes librc!" he
said. None too soon for the Arethusa. I doubt
if he had been half an hour imprisoned; but by
the watch in a man's brain (which was the only
watch he carried) he should have been eight
times longer; and he passed forth with ecstasy
up the cellar stairs into the healing warmth of
the afternoon sun; and the breath of the earth
came as sweet as a cow's into his nostril; and he
heard again (and could have laughed for pleasure)
the concord of delicate noises that we call the
hum of life.

And here it might be thought that my his-
tory ended; but not so, this was act-drop and
not the curtain. Upon what followed in front of
the barrack, since there was a lady in the case, I
scruple to expatiate. The wife of the Marechal-
'des-logis was a handsome woman, and yet the
Arethusa was not sorry to be gone from her
society. Something of her image, cool as a peach

EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE." 155

on that hot afternoon, still lingers in his memory:
yet more of her conversation. "You have there a
very fine parlour," said the poor gentleman.—
"Ah," said Madame la Marechale (des-logis), "you
are very well acquainted with such parlours!"
And you should have seen, with what a hard
and scornful eye she measured the vagabond be-
fore her! I do not think he ever hated the Com-
missary; but before that interview was at an end,
he hated Madame la Marechale. His passion (as
I am led to understand by one who was present)
stood confessed in a burning eye, a pale cheek,
and a trembling utterance; Madame meanwhile
tasting the joys of the matador, goading him with
barbed words and staring him coldly down.

It was certainly good to be away from this
lady, and better still to sit down to an excellent
dinner in the inn. Here, too, the despised travel-
lers scraped acquaintance with their next neigh-
bour, a gentleman of these parts, returned from
the day's sport, who had the good taste to find
pleasure in their society. The dinner at an end,
the gentleman proposed the acquaintance should
be ripened in the cafe.

The cafe was crowded with sportsmen con-
clamantly explaining to each other and the world
the smallness of their bags. About the centre of

156 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE/'

the room, the Cigarette and the Arethusa sat
with their new acquaintance; a trio very well
pleased, for the travellers (after their late ex-
perience) were greedy of consideration, and their
sportsman rejoiced in a pair of patient listeners.
Suddenly the glass door flew open with a crash;
the Marechal-des-logis appeared in the interval,
gorgeously belted and befrogged, entered without
salutation, strode up the room with a clang of
spurs and weapons, and disappeared through a
door at the far end. Close at his heels followed
the Arethusa's gendarme of the afternoon, imitat-
ing, with a nice shade of difference, the imperial
bearing of his chief; only, as he passed, he struck
lightly with his open hand on the shoulder of his
late captive, and with that ringing, dramatic
utterance of which he had the secret — ' Suivez!'
said he.

The arrest of the members, the oath of the
Tennis Court, the signing of the declaration of
independence, Mark Antony's oration, all the
brave t scenes of history, I conceive as having
been not unlike that evening in the cafe at
Chatillon. Terror breathed upon the assembly.
A moment later, when the Arethusa had followed
his recaptors into the farther part of the house,
the Cigarette found himself alone with his coffee

EPILOGUE TO 4*AN INLAND VOYAGE." , 157

in a ring of empty chairs and tables, all the lusty
sportsmen huddled into corners, all their clamorous
voices hushed in whispering, all their eyes shoot-
ing at him furtively as at a leper.

And the Arethusa? Well, he had a long,
sometimes a trying, interview in the back kitchen.
The Marechal-des-logis, who was a very handsome
man, and I believe both intelligent and honest,
had no clear opinion on the case. He thought
the Commissary had done wrong, but he did not
wish to get his subordinates into trouble; and he
proposed this, that, and the other, to all of which
the Arethusa (with a growing sense of his posi-
tion) demurred.

"In short," suggested the Arethusa, "you
want to wash your hands of further responsibility?
Well, then, let me go to Paris."

The Marechal-des-logis looked at his. watch.

"You may leave," said he, "by the ten o'clock
train for Paris."

And at noon the next day the travellers were
telling their misadventure in the dining-room at
Siron's.

V.
RANDOM MEMORIES.

L— THE COAST OF FIFE.
MANY writers have vigorously described the
pains of the first day or the first night at school;
to a boy of any enterprise, I believe, they are
more often agreeably exciting. Misery — or at
least misery unrelieved — is confined to another
period, to the days of suspense and the "dreadful
looking-for" of departure; when the old life is
running to an end, and the new life, with its new
interests, not yet begun; and to the pain of an
imminent parting, there is added the unrest of a
state of conscious pre-existence. The area rail-
ings, the beloved shop-window, the smell of semi-
suburban tanpits, the song of the church bells
upon a Sunday, the thin, high voices of com-
patriot children in a playing-field — what a sudden,
what an overpowering pathos breathes to him
from each familiar circumstance! The assaults of
sorrow come not from within, as it seems to him,

RANDOM MEMORIES. 159

but from without. I was proud and glad to go
to school; had I been let alone, I could have
borne up like any hero; but there was around
me, in all my native town, a conspiracy of
lamentation: "Poor little boy, he is going away —
unkind little boy, he is going to leave us"; so the
unspoken burthen followed me as I went, with
yearning and reproach. And at length, one
melancholy afternoon in the early autumn, and at
a place where it seems to me, looking back, it
must be always autumn and generally Sunday,
there came suddenly upon the face of all I saw
— the long empty road, the lines of the tall
houses, the church upon the hill, the woody hill-
side garden — a look of such a piercing sadness
that my heart died; and seating myself on a
door-step, I shed tears of miserable sympathy.
A benevolent cat cumbered me the while with
consolations — we two were alone in all that was
visible of the London Road: two poor waifs who
had each tasted sorrow — and she fawned upon
the weeper, and gambolled for the entertainment,
watching the effect, it seemed, with motherly
eyes.

For the sake of the cat, God bless her! I
confessed at home the story of my weakness, and
so it comes about that I owed a certain journey,

l6o RANDOM MEMORIES.

and the reader owes the present paper, to a cat
in the London Road. It was judged, if I had
thus brimmed over on the public highway, some
change of scene was (in the medical sense) in-
dicated; my father at the time was visiting the
harbour lights of Scotland; and it was decided
he should take me along with him around a por-
tion of the shores of Fife; my first professional
tour, my first journey in the complete character
of man, without the help of petticoats.

The Kingdom of Fife (that royal province)
may be observed by the curious on the map, oc-
cupying a tongue of land between the firths of
Forth and Tay. It may be continually seen from
many parts of Edinburgh (among the rest, from
the windows of my father's house) dying away
into the distance and the easterly haar with one
smoky seaside town beyond another, or in winter
printing on the gray heaven some glittering hill-
tops. It has no beauty to recommend it, being a
low, sea-salted, wind- vexed7 promontory; trees very
rare, except (as common on the east coast) along
the dens of rivers; the fields well cultivated, I
understand, but not lovely to the eye. It is of
the coast I speak: the interior may be the garden
of Eden. History broods over that part of the
world like the easterly haar. Even on the map,

RANDOM MEMORIES. l6l

its long row of Gaelic place-names bear testimony
to an old and settled race. Of these little towns,
posted along the shore as close as sedges, each
with its bit of harbour, its old weather-beaten
church or public building, its flavour of decayed
prosperity and decaying fish, not one but has its
legend, quaint or tragic: Dunfermline, in whose
royal towers the king may be still observed (in
the ballad) drinking the blood-red wine; somnolent
Inverkeithing, once the quarantine of Leith; Aber-
dour, hard by the monastic islet of Inchcolm, hard
by Donibristle where the "bonny face was spoiled";
Burntisland where, when Paul Jones was off the
coast, the Reverend Mr. Shirra had a table car-
ried between tide-marks, and publicly prayed
against the rover at the pitch of his voice and
his broad lowland dialect; Kinghorn, where
Alexander "brak's neckbane" and left Scotland
to the English wars; Kirkcaldy, where the witches
once prevailed extremely and sank tall ships and
honest mariners in the North Sea; Dysart, famous
— :well famous at least to me for the Dutch ships
that lay in its harbour, painted like toys and with
pots of flowers and cages of song-birds in the
cabin windows, and for one particular Dutch
skipper who would sit all day in slippers on the
break of the poop, smoking a long German pipe;

Across the Plains t etc. 1 1

I 62 RANDOM MEMORIES.

Wemyss (pronounce Weems) with its bat-haunted
caves, where the Chevalier Johnstone, on his flight
from Culloden, passed a night of superstitious
terrors; Leven, a bald, quite modern place, sacred
to summer visitors, whence there has gone but
yesterday the tall figure and the white locks of
the last Englishman in Delhi, my uncle Dr. Bal-
four, who was still walking his hospital rounds,
while the troopers from Meerut clattered and
cried "Deen Deen" along the streets of the im-
perial city, and Willoughby mustered his handful
of heroes at the magazine, and the nameless brave
one in the telegraph office was perhaps already
fingering his last despatch; and just a little beyond
Leven, Largo Law and the smoke of Largo town
mounting about its feet, the town of Alexander
Selkirk, better known under the name of Robin-
son Crusoe. So on, the list might be pursued
(only for private reasons, which the reader will
shortly have an opportunity to guess) by St. Mo-
nance, and Pittenweem, and the two An stru triers,
and Cellardyke, and Crail, where Primate Sharpe
was once a humble and innocent country minister:
on to the heel of the land, to Fife Ness, over-
looked by a seawood of matted elders and the
quaint old mansion of Balcomie, itself overlooking
but the breach or the quiescence of the deep—

RANDOM MEMORIES. 163

the Carr Rock beacon rising close in front, and
as night draws in, the star of the Inchcape reef
springing up on the one hand, and the star of
May Island on the other, and farther off yet a
third and a greater on the craggy foreland of
St. Abb's. And but a little way round the* corner
of the land, imminent itself above the sea, stands
the gem of the province and the light of mediaeval
Scotland, St. Andrews, where the great Cardinal
Beaton held garrison against the world, and the
second of the name and title perished (as you
may read in Knox's jeering narrative) under the
knives of true-blue Protestants, and to this day
(after so many centuries) the current voice of the
professor is not hushed.

Here it was that my first tour of inspection
began, early on a bleak easterly morning. There
was a crashing run of sea upon the shore, I
recollect, and my father and the man of the
harbour light must sometimes raise their voices
to be audible. Perhaps it is from this circum-
stance, that I always imagine St. Andrews to be
an ineffectual seat of learning, and the sound of
the east wind and the bursting surf to linger in
its drowsy class-rooms and confound the utterance
of the professor, until teacher and taught are alike
drowned in oblivion, and only the sea-gull beats

164 RANDOM MEMORIES.

on the windows and the draught of the sea-air
rustles in the pages of the open lecture. But
upon all this, and the romance of St. Andrews in
general, the reader must consult the works of
Mr. Andrew Lang; who has written of it but the
other day in his dainty prose and with his in-
communicable humour, and long ago in one of
his best poems, jsvith grace, and local truth and
a note of unaffected pathos. Mr. Lang knows all
about the romance, I say, and the educational
advantages, but I doubt if he had turned his at-
tention to the harbour lights; and it may be news
even to him, that in the year 1863 their case was
pitiable. Hanging about with the east wind
humming in my teeth, and my hands (I make no
doubt) in my pockets, I looked for the first time
upon that tragi-comedy of the visiting engineer
which I have seen so often re-enacted on a more
important stage. Eighty years ago, I find my
grandfather writing: "It is the most painful thing
that can occur to me to have a correspondence
of this kind with any of the keepers, and when I
come to the Light House, instead of having the
satisfaction to meet them with approbation and
welcome their Family, it is distressing when one
is obliged to put on a most angry countenance
and demeanour." This painful obligation has

RANDOM MEMORIES. 165

been hereditary in my race. I have myself, on a
perfectly amateur and unauthorised inspection of
Turnberry Point, bent my brows upon the keeper
on the question of storm-panes; and felt a keen
pang of self-reproach, when we went down stairs
again and I found he was making a coffin for his
infant child; and then regained my equanimity
with the thought that I had done the man a ser-
vice, and when the proper inspector came, he
would be readier with his panes. The human
race is perhaps credited with more duplicity than
it deserves. The visitation of a lighthouse at
least is a business of the most transparent nature.
As soon as the boat grates on the shore, and the
keepers step forward in their uniformed coats, the
very slouch of the fellows' shoulders tells their
story, and the engineer may begin at once to as-
sume his "angry countenance." Certainly the
brass of the handrail will be clouded; and if the
brass be not immaculate, certainly all will be to
match — the reflectors scratched, the spare lamp
unready, the storm-panes in the storehouse. If a
light is not rather more than middling good, it
will be radically bad. Mediocrity (except in
literature) appears to be unattainable by man.
But of course the unfortunate of St. Andrews was
only an amateur, he was not in the Service, he

I 66 RANDOM MEMORIES.

had no uniform coat, he was (I believe) a plumber by
his trade and stood (in the mediaeval phrase) quite
out of the danger of my father; but he had a pain-
ful interview for all that, and perspired extremely.
From St. Andrews, we drove over Magus Muir.
My father had announced we were "to post," and
the phrase called up in my hopeful mind visions
of top-boots and the pictures in Rowlandson's
Dance of Death; but it was only a jingling cab
that came to the inn door, such as I had driven
in a thousand times at the low price of one shilling
on the streets of Edinburgh. Beyond this dis-
appointment, I remember nothing of that drive.
It is a road I have often travelled, and of not one
of these journeys do I remember any single trait.
The fact has not been suffered to encroach on
the truth of the imagination. I still see Magus
Muir two hundred years ago ; a desert place, quite
uninclosed; in the midst, the primate's carriage
fleeing at the gallop; the assassins loose-reined in
pursuit, Burley Balfour, pistol in hand, among the
first. No scene of history has ever written itself
so deeply on my mind; not because Balfour, that
questionable zealot, was an ancestral cousin of my
own; not because of the pleadings of the victim
and his daughter; not even because of the live
bum-bee that flew out of Sharpe's 'bacco-box,

RANDOM MEMORIES. 167

thus clearly indicating his complicity with Satan;
nor merely because, as it was after all a crime of
a fine religious flavour, it figured in Sunday books
and afforded a grateful relief from Ministering
Children or the Memoirs of Mrs. Katharine Wins-
/owe. The figure that always fixed my attention
is that of Hackston of Rathillet, sitting in the
saddle with his cloak about his mouth, and
through all that long, bungling, vociferous hurly-
burly, revolving privately a case of conscience.
He would take no hand in the deed, because he
had a private spite against the victim, and "that
action" must be sullied with no suggestion of a
worldly motive; on the other hand, "that action,"
in itself was highly justified, he had cast in his
lot with "the actors," and he must stay there,
inactive but publicly sharing the responsibility.
"You are a gentleman — you will protect me!"
cried the wounded old man, crawling towards
him. "I will never lay a hand on you," said
Hackston, and put his cloak about his mouth.
It is an old temptation with me, to pluck away
that cloak and see the face — to open that bosom
and to read the heart. With incomplete romances
about Hackston, the drawers of my youth were
lumbered. I read him up in every printed book
that I could lay my hands on. I even dug among

I 68 RANDOM MEMORIES.

the Wodrow manuscripts, sitting shame-faced in the
very room where my hero had been tortured two
centuries before, and keenly conscious of my youth
in the midst of other and (as I fondly thought)
more gifted students. All was vain: that he had
passed a riotous nonage, -that he was a zealot,
that he twice displayed (compared with his
grotesque companions) some tincture of soldierly
resolution and even of military common sense,
and that he figured memorably in the scene on
Magus Muir, so much and no more could I make
out. But whenever I cast my eyes backward, it
is to see him like a landmark on the plains of
history, sitting with his cloak about his mouth,
inscrutable. How small a thing creates an im-
mortality! I do not think he can have been a
man entirely commonplace; but had he not
thrown his cloak about his mouth, or had the
witnesses forgot to chronicle the action, he would
not thus have haunted the imagination of my
boyhood, and to-day he would scarce delay me
for a paragraph. An incident, at once romantic
and dramatic, which at once awakes the judg-
ment and makes a picture for the eye, how little
do we realise its perdurable power! Perhaps no
one does so but the author, just as none but he
appreciates the influence of jingling words; so

RANDOM MEMORIES. 169

that he looks on upon life, with something of a
covert smile, seeing people led by what they
fancy to be thoughts and what are really the
accustomed artifices of his own trade, or roused
by what they take to be principles and are really
picturesque effects. In a pleasant book about a
school-class club, Colonel Fergusson has recently
told a little anecdote. A "Philosophical Society"
was formed by some Academy boys — among them,
Colonel Fergusson himself, Fleeming Jenkin, and
Andrew Wilson, the Christian Buddhist and author
of The Abode of Snow. Before these learned
pundits, one member laid the following ingenious
problem: "What would be the result of putting a
pound of potassium in a pot of porter?" "I
should think there would be a number of interest-
ing bi-products," said a smatterer at my elbow;
but for me the tale itself has a bi-product, and
stands as a type of much that is most human.
For this inquirer who conceived himself to burn
with a zeal entirely chemical, was really immersed
in a design of a quite different nature; uncon-
sciously to his own recently breeched intelligence,
he was engaged in literature. Putting, pound,
potassium, pot, porter; initial p, mediant t — that
was his idea, poor little boy! So with politics
and that which excites men in the present, so

I7O RANDOM MEMORIES.

with history and that which rouses them in the
past: there lie at the root of what appears, most
serious unsuspected elements.

The triple town of Anstruther Wester, An-
struther Easter, and Cellardyke, all three Royal
Burghs-^or two Royal Burghs and a less dis-
tinguished suburb, I forget which — lies con-
tinously along the seaside, and boasts of either
two or three separate parish churches, and either
two or three separate harbours. These ambiguities
are painful; but the fact is (although it argue me
uncultured), I am but poorly posted upon Cel-
lardyke. My business lay in the two Anstruthers.
A tricklet of a stream divides them, spanned by
a bridge; and over the bridge at the time of my
knowledge, the celebrated Shell House stood out-
post on the west. This had been the residence
of an agreeable eccentric; during his fond tenancy,
he had illustrated the outer walls, as high (if I
remember rightly) as the roof, with elaborate
patterns and pictures, and snatches of verse in
the vein of txegi monumentum; shells and pebbles,
artfully contrasted and conjoined, had been his
medium; and I like to think of him standing back
upon the bridge, when all was finished, drinking
in the general effect and (like Gibbon) already
lamenting his employment

RANDOM MEMORIES. 17 I

The same bridge saw another sight in the
seventeenth century. Mr. Thomson, the "curat"
of Anstruther Easter, was a man highly obnoxious
to the devout: in the first place, because he was
a "curat"; in the second place, because he was
a person of irregular and scandalous life; and in
the third place, because he was generally suspected
of dealings with the Enemy of Man. These three
disqualifications, in the popular literature of the
time, go hand in hand; but the end of Mr. Thomson
was a thing quite by itself, and in the proper
phrase, a manifest judgment. He had been at a
friend's house in Anstruther Wester, where (and
elsewhere, I suspect,) he had partaken of the
bottle; indeed, to put the thing in our cold mo-
dern way, the reverend gentleman was on the
brink of delirium tremens. It was a dark night,
it seems; a little lassie came carrying a lantern
to fetch the curate home; and away they went
down the street of Anstruther Wester, the lantern
swinging a bit in the child's hand, the barred
lustre tossing up and down along the front of
slumbering houses, and Mr. Thomson not alto-
gether steady on his legs nor (to all appearance)
easy in his mind. The pair had reached the
middle of the bridge when (as I conceive the
scene) the poor tippler started in some baseless

172 RANDOM MEMORIES.

fear and looked behind him; the child, already
shaken by the minister's strange behaviour, started
also; in so doing, she would jerk the lantern; and
for the space of a moment the lights and the
shadows would be all confounded. Then it was
that to the unhinged toper and the twittering
child, a huge bulk of blackness seemed to sweep
down, to pass them close by as they stood upon
the bridge, and to vanish on the farther side in
the general darkness of the night. "Plainly the
devil come for Mr. Thomson!" thought the child.
What Mr. Thomson thought himself, we have no
ground of knowledge; but he fell upon his knees
in the midst of the bridge like a man praying.
On the rest of the journey to the manse, history
is silent; but when they came to the door, the
poor caitiff, taking the lantern from the child,
looked upon her with so lost a countenance that
her little courage died within her, and she fled
home screaming to her parents. Not a soul
would venture out; all that night, the minister
dwelt alone with his terrors in the manse; and
when the day dawned, and men made bold to go
about the streets, they found the devil had come
indeed for Mr. Thomson.

This manse of Anstruther Easter has another
and a more cheerful association. It was early in

RANDOM MEMORIES. 173

the morning, about a century before the days of
Mr. Thomson, that his predecessor was called out
of bed to welcome a Grandee of Spain, the Duke
of Medina Sidonia, just landed in the harbour
underneath. But sure there was never seen a
more decayed grandee; sure there was never a
duke welcomed from a stranger place of exile.
Half-way between Orkney and Shetland, there lies
a certain isle; on the one hand the Atlantic, on
.the other the North Sea, bombard its pillared
cliffs; sore-eyed, short-living, inbred fishers and
their families herd in its few huts; in the grave-
yard pieces of wreck-wood stand for monuments;
there is nowhere a more inhospitable spot. Belle-
Isle-en-Mer — Fair-Isle-at-Sea — that is a name that
has always rung in my mind's ear like music; but
the only "Fair Isle" on which I, ever set my foot,
was this unhomely, rugged turret-top of submarine
sierras. Here, when his ship was broken, my
lord Duke joyfully got ashore; here for long
months he and certain of his men were harboured;
and it was from this durance that he landed at
last to be welcomed (as well as such a papist
deserved, no doubt) by the godly incumbent of
Anstruther Easter; and after the Fair Isle, what a
fine city must that have appeared! and after the
island diet, what a hospitable spot the minister's

174 RANDOM MEMORIES.

»

table! And yet he must have lived on friendly
terms with his outlandish hosts. For to this day
there still survives a relic of the long winter even-
ings when the sailors of the great Armada
crouched about the hearths of the Fair-Islanders,
the planks of their own lost galleon perhaps light-
ing up the scene, and the gale and the surf that
beat about the coast contributing their melancholy
voices. All the folk of the north isles are great
artificers of knitting: the Fair-Islanders alone dye
their fabrics in the Spanish manner. To this day,
gloves and nightcaps, innocently decorated, may
be seen for sale in the Shetland warehouse at
Edinburgh, or on the Fair Isle itself in the cate-
chist's house; and to this day, they tell the story
of the Duke of Medina Sidonia's adventure.

It would seem as if the Fair Isle had some
attraction for "persons of quality." When I
landed there myself, an elderly gentleman, un-
shaved, poorly attired, his shoulders wrapped in a
plaid, was seen walking to and fro, with a book
in his hand, upon the beach. He paid no heed
to our arrival, which we thought a strange thing
in itself; but when one of the officers of the
Pharos, passing narrowly by him, observed his
book to be a Greek Testament, our wonder and
interest took a higher flight. The catechist was

RANDOM MEMORIES. 175

cross-examined; he said the gentleman had been
put across some time before in Mr. Bruce of
Sumburgh's schooner, the only link between the
Fair Isle and the rest of the world; and that he
held services and was doing "good." So much
came glibly enough; but when pressed a little
farther, the catechist displayed embarrassment.
A singular diffidence appeared upon his face:
"They tell me," said he, in low tones, "that he's
a lord." And a lord he was; a peer of the realm
pacing that inhospitable beach with his Greek
Testament, and his plaid about his shoulders, set
upon doing good, as he understood it, worthy man !
And his grandson, a good-looking little boy, much
better dressed than the lordly evangelist, and
speaking with a silken English accent very foreign
to the scene, accompanied me for a while in my
exploration of the island. I suppose this little
fellow is now my lord, and wonder how much he
remembers of the Fair Isle. Perhaps not much;
for he seemed to accept very quietly his savage
situation; and under such guidance, it is like that
this was not his first nor yet his last adventure.

VI.
RANDOM MEMORIES.

II.— THE EDUCATION OF AN ENGINEER.

ANSTRUTHER is a place sacred to the Muse;
she inspired (really to a considerable extent) Ten-
nant's vernacular poem Anst'er Fair; and I have
there waited upon her myself with much devotion.
This was when I came as a young man to glean
engineering experience from the building of the
breakwater. What I gleaned, I am sure I do not
know; but indeed I had already my own private
determination to be an author; I loved the art of
words and the appearances of life; and travellers,
and headers, and rubble, and polished ashlar, and
pierres perdues, and even the thrilling question of
the string- course, interested me only (if they inter-
ested me at all) as properties for some possible
romance or as words to add to my vocabulary.
To grow a little catholic is the compensation of
years; youth is one-eyed; and in those days,
though I haunted the breakwater by day, and

RANDOM MEMORIES. 177

even loved the place for the sake of the sunshine,
the thrilling seaside air, the wash of waves on the
sea-face, the green glimmer of the divers' helmets
far below, and the musical chinking of the masons,
my one genuine pre-occupation lay elsewhere, and
my only industry was in the hours when I was
not on duty. I lodged with a certain Bailie
Brown, a carpenter by trade; and there, as soon
as dinner was despatched, in a chamber scented
with dry rose-leaves, drew in my chair to the
table and proceeded to pour forth literature, at
such a speed, and with such intimations of early
death and immortality, as I now look back upon
with wonder. Then it was that I wrote Voces
Fidelium, a series of dramatic monologues in verse;
then that I indited the bulk of a covenanting
novel — like so many others, never finished. Late
I sat into the night, toiling (as I thought) under
the very dart of death, toiling to leave a memory
behind me. I feel moved to thrust aside the cur-
tain of the years, to hail that poor feverish idiot,
to bid him go to bed and clap Voces Fidelium on
the fire before he goes; so clear does he appear
before me, sitting there between his candles in
the rose-scented room and the late night; so
ridiculous a picture (to my elderly wisdom) does
the fool present! But he was driven to his bed

Across the Plains^ etc. 12

178 RANDOM MEMORIES.

at last without miraculous intervention; and the
manner of his driving sets the last touch upon
this eminently youthful business. The weather
was then so warm that I must keep the windows
open; the night without was populous with moths.
As the late darkness deepened, my literary tapers
beaconed forth more brightly; thicker and thicker
came the dusty night-fliers, to gyrate for one bril-
liant instant round the flame and fall in agonies
upon my paper. Flesh and blood could not en-
dure the spectacle; to capture immortality was
doubtless a noble enterprise, but not to capture it
at such a cost of suffering; and out would go the
candles, and off would I go to bed in the dark-
ness, raging to think that the blow might fall on
the morrow, and there was Voces Fidelium still
incomplete. Well, the moths are all gone, and
Voces Fidelium along with them; only the fool is
still on hand and practises new follies.

Only one thing in connection with the harbour
tempted me, and that was the diving, an experience
I burned to taste of. But this was not to be, at
least in Anstruther; and the subject involves a
change of scene to the sub-arctic town of Wick.
You can never have dwelt in a country more un-
sightly than that part of Caithness, the land faintly
swelling, faintly falling, not a tree, not a hedgerow,

RANDOM MEMORIES. 179

the fields divided by single slate stones set upon
their edge, the wind always singing in your ears
and -(down the long road that led nowhere) thrum-
ming in the telegraph wires. Only as you ap-
proached the coast was there anything to stir the
heart. The plateau broke down to the North Sea
in formidable cliffs, the tall out-stacks rose like
pillars ringed about with surf, the coves were over-
brimmed with clamorous froth, the sea-birds
screamed, the wind sang in the thyme on the
cliff's edge; here and there, small ancient castles
toppled on the brim; here and there, it was pos-
sible to dip into a dell of shelter, where you might
lie and tell yourself you were a little warm, and
hear (near at hand) the whin-pods bursting in the
afternoon sun, and (farther off) the rumour of the
turbulent sea. As for Wick itself, it is one of the
meanest of man's towns, and situate certainly on
the baldest of God's bays. It lives for herring,
and a strange sight it is to see (of an afternoon)
the heights of Pulteney blackened by seaward-
looking fishers, as when a city crow.ds to a review
— or, as when bees have swarmed, the ground is
horrible with lumps and clusters; and a strange
sight, and a beautiful, to see the fleet put silently
out against a rising moon, the sea-line rough as a
wood with sails, and ever and again and one after

l8o RANDOM MEMORIES.

another, a boat flitting swiftly by the silver disk.
This mass of fishers, this great fleet of boats, is
out of all proportion to the town itself; and the
oars are manned and the nets hauled by immi-
grants from the Long Island (as we call the outer
Hebrides), who come for that season only, and
depart again, if "the take" be poor, leaving debts
behind them. In a bad year, the end of the
herring fishery is therefore an exciting time; fights
are common, riots often possible; an apple knocked
from a child's hand was once the signal for some-
thing like a war; and even when I was there, a
gunboat lay in the bay to assist the authorities.
To contrary interests, it should be observed, the
curse of Babel is here added; the Lews men are
Gaelic speakers. Caithness has adopted English ;
an odd circumstance, if you reflect that both must
be largely Norsemen by descent. I remember
seeing one of the strongest instances of this divi-
sion: a thing like a Punch-and-Judy box erected
on the flat grave-stones of the churchyard; from
the hutch or proscenium — I know not what to call
it — an eldritch-looking preacher laying down the
law in Gaelic about some one of the name of
Fowl, whom I at last divined to be the apostle to
the Gentiles; a large congregation of the Lews
men very devoutly listening; and on the outskirts

RANDOM MEMORIES. l8l

of the crowd, some of the town's children (to
whom the whole affair was Greek and Hebrew)
profanely playing tigg. The same descent, the
same country, the same narrow sect of the same
religion, and all these bonds made very largely
nugatory by an accidental difference of dialect!

Into the bay of Wick stretched the dark length
of the unfinished breakwater, in its cage of open
staging; the travellers (like frames of churches)
over-plumbing all; and away at the extreme end,
the divers toiling unseen on the foundation. On
a platform of loose planks, the assistants turned
their air-mills; a stone might be swinging between
wind and water; underneath the swell ran gaily;
and from time to time, a mailed dragon with a
window-glass snout came dripping up the ladder.
Youth is a blessed season after all; my stay at
Wick was in the year of Voces Fidelium and the
rose-leaf room at Bailie Brown's: and already I did
not care two straws for literary glory. Posthumous
ambition perhaps requires an atmosphere of roses;
and the more rugged excitant of Wick east winds
had made another boy of me. To go down in
the diving-dress, that was my absorbing fancy;
and with the countenance of a certain handsome
scamp of a diver, Bob Bain by name, I gratified
the whim.

1 82 RANDOM MEMORIES.

It was gray, harsh, easterly weather, the swell
ran pretty high, and out in the open there were
"skipper's daughters," when I found myself at last
on the diver's platform, twenty pounds of lead
upon each foot and my whole person swollen with
ply and ply of woollen underclothing. One mo-
ment, the salt wind was whistling round my night-
capped head; the next, I was crushed almost
double, under the weight of the helmet As that
intolerable burthen was laid upon me, I could
have found it in my heart (only for shame's sake)
to cry off from the whole enterprise. But it was
too late. The attendants began to turn the hurdy-
gurdy, and the air to whistle through the tube;
some one screwed in the barred window of the
vizor; and I was cut off in a moment from my
fellow-men; standing there in their midst, but
quite divorced from intercourse: a creature deaf
and dumb, pathetically looking forth upon them
from a climate of his own. Except that I could
move and feel, I was like a man fallen in a cata-
lepsy. But time was scarce given me to realise
my isolation; the weights were hung upon my back
and breast, the signal rope was thrust into my un-
resisting hand; and setting a twenty-pound foot
upon the ladder, I began ponderously to descend.

Some twenty rounds below the platform, twi-

RANDOM MEMORIES. 1 83

light fell. Looking up, I saw a low green heaven
mottled with vanishing bells of white; looking
around, except for the weedy spokes and shafts
of the ladder, nothing but a green gloaming,
somewhat opaque but very restful and delicious.
Thirty rounds lower, I stepped off on the pierres
perdues of the foundation; a dumb helmeted figure
took me by the hand, and made a gesture (as I
read it) of encouragement; and looking in at the
creature's window, I beheld the face of Bain.
There we were, hand to hand and (when it pleased
us) eye to eye; and either might have burst him-
self with shouting, and not a whisper come to his
companion's hearing. Each, in his own little world
of air, stood incommunicably separate.

Bob had told me ere this a little tale, a five
minutes' drama at the bottom of the sea, which
at that moment possibly shot across my mind. He
was down with another, settling a stone of the
sea-wall. They had it well adjusted, Bob gave
the signal, the scissors were slipped, the stone set
home; and it was time to turn to something else.
But still his companion remained bowed over the
block like a mourner on a tomb, or only raised
himself to make absurd contortions and mysterious
signs unknown to the vocabulary of the diver.
There, then, these two stood for awhile, like the

184 RANDOM MEMORIES.

dead and the living; till there flashed a fortunate
thought into Bob's mind, and he stooped, peered
through the window of that other world, and be-
held the face of its inhabitant wet with streaming
tears. Ah! the man was in pain! And Bob,
glancing downward, saw what was the trouble:
the block had been lowered on the foot of that
unfortunate — he was caught alive at the bottom
of the sea under fifteen tons of rock.

That two men should handle a stone so heavy,
even swinging in the scissors, may appear strange
to the inexpert. These must bear in mind the
great density of the water of the sea, and the sur-
prising results of transplantation to that medium.
To understand a little what these are, and how a
man's weight, so far from being an encumbrance,
is the very ground of his agility, was the chief
lesson of my submarine experience. The know-
ledge came upon me by degrees. As I began to
go forward with the hand of my estranged com-
panion, a world of tumbled stones was visible,
pillared with the weedy uprights of the staging:
overhead, a flat roof of green; a little in front,
the sea-wall, like an unfinished rampart. And
presently in our upward progress, Bob motioned
me to leap upon a stone; I looked to see if he
were possibly in earnest, and he only signed to

RANDOM MEMORIES. 185

me the more imperiously. Now the block stood
six feet high; it would have been quite a leap to
me unencumbered; with the breast and back
weights, and the twenty pounds upon each foot,
and the staggering load of the helmet, the thing
was out of reason. I laughed aloud in my tomb;
and to prove to Bob how far he was astray, I
gave a little impulse from my toes. Up I soared
like a bird, my companion soaring at my side. As
high as to the stone, and then higher, I pursued
my impotent and empty flight. Even when the
strong arm of Bob had checked my shoulders,
my heels continued their ascent; so that I blew
out sideways like an autumn leaf, and must be
hauled in, hand over hand, as sailors haul in the
slack of a sail, and propped upon my feet again
like an intoxicated sparrow. Yet a little higher
on the foundation, and we began to be affected
by the bottom of the swell, running there like a
strong breeze of wind. Or so I must suppose;
for, safe in my cushion of air, I was conscious of
no impact; only swayed idly like a weed, and was
now borne helplessly abroad, and now swiftly—
and yet with dream-like gentleness — impelled,
against my guide. So does a child's balloon
divagate upon the currents of the air, and touch
and slide off again from every obstacle. So must

I 86 RANDOM MEMORIES.

have ineffectually swung, so resented their in-
efficiency, those light crowds that followed the
Star of Hades, and uttered exiguous voices in the
land beyond Cocytus.

There was something strangely exasperating,
as well as strangely wearying, in these uncom-
manded evolutions. It is bitter to return to in-
fancy, to be supported, and directed, and per-
petually set upon your feet, by the hand of some
one else. The air besides, as it is supplied to
you by the busy millers on the platform, closes
the eustachian tubes and keeps the neophyte per-
petually swallowing, till his throat is grown so dry
that he can swallow no longer. And for all these
reasons — although I had a fine, dizzy, muddle-
headed joy in my surroundings, and longed, and
tried, and always failed, to lay hands on the fish
that darted here and there about me, swift as
humming-birds — yet I fancy I was rather relieved
than otherwise when Bain brought me back to
the ladder and signed to me to mount. And
there was one more experience before me even
then. Of a sudden, my ascending head passed
into the trough of a swell. Out of the green,
I shot at once into a glory of rosy, almost of
sanguine light — the multitudinous seas incarna-
dined, the heaven above a vault of crimson. And

RANDOM MEMORIES. 187

then the glory faded into the hard, ugly daylight
of a Caithness autumn, with a low sky, a gray
sea, and a whistling wind.

Bob Bain had five shillings for his trouble,
and I had done what I desired. It was one of
the best things I got from my education as an
engineer: of which however, as a way of life, I
wish to speak with sympathy. It takes a man
into the open air; it keeps him hanging about
harbour-sides, which is the richest form of idling;
it carries him to wild islands; it gives him a taste
of the genial dangers of the sea; it supplies him
with dexterities to exercise; it makes demands
upon his ingenuity; it will go far to cure him of
any taste (if ever he had one) for the miserable
life of cities. And when it has done so, it carries
him back and shuts him in an office! From the
roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing
boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with a
memory full of ships, an<J seas, and perilous head-
lands, and the shining pharos, he must apply his
long-sighted eyes to the petty niceties of drawing,
or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages of
consecutive figures. He is a wise youth, to be sure,
who can balance one part of genuine life against
two parts of drudgery between four walls, and for
the sake of the one, manfully accept the other.

I 88 RANDOM MEMORIES.

Wick was scarce an eligible place of. stay.
But how much better it was to hang in the cold
wind upon the pier, to go down with Bob Bain
among the roots of the staging, to be all day in
a boat coiling a wet rope and shouting orders —
not always very wise — than to be_ warm and dry,
and dull, and dead-alive, in the most comfortable
office. And Wick itself had in those days a note
of originality. It may have still, but I misdoubt
it much. The old minister of Keiss would not
preach, in these degenerate times, for an hour
and a half upon the clock. The gipsies must be
gone from their cavern; where you might see,
from the mouth, the women tending their fire, like
Meg Merrilies, and the men sleeping off their
coarse potations; and where in winter gales, the
surf would beleaguer them closely, bursting in
their very door. A traveller to-day upon the
Thurso coach would scarce observe a little cloud
of smoke among the moorlands, and be told, quite
openly, it marked a private still. He would not
indeed make that journey, for there is now no
Thurso coach. And even if he could, one little
thing that happened to me could never happen
to him, or not with the same trench ancy of con-
trast.

We had been upon the road all evening; the

RANDOM MEMORIES. I 89

coach-top was crowded with Lews fishers going
home, scarce anything but Gaelic had sounded in
my ears; and our way had lain throughout over
a moorish country very northern to behold. Latish
at night, though it was still broad day in our
subarctic latitude, we came down upon the shores
of the roaring Pentland Firth, that grave of
mariners; on one hand, the cliffs of Dunnet Head
ran seaward; in front was the little bare, white
town of Gastleton, its streets full of blowing sand;
nothing beyond, but the North Islands, the great
deep, and the perennial ice-fields of the Pole.
And here, in the last imaginable place, there
sprang up young outlandish voices and a chatter
of some foreign speech; and I saw, pursuing the
coach with its load of Hebridean fishers — as they
had pursued vetturini up the passes of the Apen-
nines or perhaps along the grotto under Virgil's
tomb — two little dark-eyed, white-toothed Italian
vagabonds, of twelve to fourteen years of age, one
with a hurdy-gurdy, the other with a cage of
white mice. The coach passed on, and their
small Italian chatter died in the distance; and I
was left to marvel how they had wandered into
that country, and how they fared in it, and what
they thought of it, and when (if ever) they should
see again the silver wind-breaks run among the

RANDOM MEMORIES.

olives, and the stone-pine stand guard upon
Etruscan sepulchres.

Upon any American, the strangeness of this
incident is somewhat lost For, as far back as he
goes in his own land, he will find some alien
camping there; the Cornish miner, the French or
Mexican half-blood, the negro in the South, these
are deep in the woods and far among the moun-
tains. But in an old, cold, and rugged country
such as mine, the days of immigration are long
at an end; and away up there, which was at that
time far beyond the northernmost extreme of rail-
ways, hard upon the shore of that ill-omened strait
of whirlpools, in a land of moors where no stranger
came, unless it should be a sportsman to shoot
grouse or an antiquary to decipher runes, the
presence of these small pedestrians struck the
mind as though a bird-of-paradise had risen from
the heather or an albatross come fishing in the
bay of Wick. They were as strange to their
surroundings as my lordly evangelist or the old
Spanish grandee on the Fair Isle.

VII.
THE LANTERN-BEARERS.

i.

THESE boys congregated every autumn about
a certain easterly fisher-village, where they tasted
in a high degree the glory of existence. The
place was created seemingly on purpose for the
diversion of young gentlemen. A street or two
of houses, mostly red and many of them tiled;
a number of fine trees clustered about the manse
and the kirkyard, and turning the chief street
into a shady alley; many little gardens more than
usually bright with flowers; nets a-drying, and
fisher- wives scolding in the backward parts; a
smell of fish, a genial smell of seaweed; whiffs of
blowing sand at the street-corners; shops with
golf-balls and bottled lollipops; another shop with
penny pickwicks (that remarkable cigar) and the
London Journal, dear to me for its startling pic-
tures, and a few novels, dear for their suggestive
names: such, as well as memory serves me, were

IQ2 THE LANTERN-BEARERS.

the ingredients of the town. These you are to
conceive posted on a spit between two sandy bays,
and sparsely flanked with villas — enough for the
boys to lodge in with their subsidiary parents,
not enough (not yet enough) to cocknify the scene:
a haven in the rocks in front: in front of that, a
file of gray islets: to the left, endless links and
sand wreaths, a wilderness of hiding-holes, alive
with popping rabbits and soaring gulls: to the
right, a range of seaward crags, one rugged brow
beyond another; the ruins of a mighty and an-
cient fortress on the brink of one; coves between
— now charmed into sunshine quiet, now whistling
with wind and clamorous with bursting surges;
the dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thyme
and southernwood, the air at the cliff's edge brisk
and clean and pungent of the sea — in front of
all, the Bass Rock, tilted seaward like a doubtful
bather, the surf ringing it with white, the solan-
geese hanging round its summit like a great and
glittering smoke. This choice piece of seaboard
was sacred, besides, to the wrecker; and the Bass,
in the eye of fancy, still flew the colours of King
James; and in the ear of fancy the arches of
Tantallon still rang with horse-shoe iron , and
echoed to the commands of Bell-the-Cat.

There was nothing to mar your days, if you

THE LANTERN-BEARERS. I 93

were a boy summering in that part, but the
embarrassment of pleasure. You might golf if
you wanted; but I seem to have been better
employed. You might secrete yourself in the
Lady's Walk, a certain sunless dingle of elders,
all mossed over by the damp as green as grass,
and dotted here and there by the stream-side
with roofless walls, the cold homes of anchorites.
To fit themselves for life, and with a special eye
to acquire the art of smoking , it was even com-
mon for the boys to harbour there; and you might
have seen a single penny pickwick, honestly
shared in lengths with a blunt knife, bestrew the
glen with these apprentices. Again, you might
join our fishing parties, where we sat perched as
thick as solan-geese, a covey of little anglers, boy
and girl, angling over each other's heads, to the
much entanglement of lines and loss of podleys
and consequent shrill recrimination — shrill as the
geese themselves. Indeed, had that been all,
you might have done this often; but though fish-
ing be a fine pastime, the podley is scarce to be
regarded as a dainty for the table; and it was a
point of honour that a boy should eat all that he
had taken. Or again, you might climb the Law,
where the whale's jawbone stood landmark in the
buzzing wind, and behold the face of many

Across the Plains, etc. 13

IQ4 THE LANTERN-BEARERS.

counties, and the smoke and spires of many
towns, and the sails of distant ships. You might
bathe, now in the flaws of fine weather, that we
pathetically call our summer, now in a gale of
wind, with the sand scourging your bare hide,
your clothes thrashing abroad from underneath
their guardian stone, the froth of the great
breakers casting you headlong ere it had drowned
your knees. Or you might explore the tidal rocks,
above all in the ebb of springs, when the very
roots of the hills were for the nonce discovered;
following my leader from one group to another,
groping in slippery tangle for the wreck of ships,
wading in pools after the abominable creatures of
the sea, and ever with an eye cast backward on
the march of the tide and the menaced line of
your retreat. And then you might go Crusoeing,
a word that covers all extempore eating in the
open air: digging perhaps a house under the
margin of the links, kindling a fire of the
sea-ware, and cooking apples there — if they
were truly apples, for I sometimes suppose
the merchant must have played us off with
some inferior and quite local fruit, capable of
resolving, in the neighbourhood of fire, into
mere sand and smoke and iodine; or perhaps
pushing to Tantallon, you might lunch on sand-

THE LANTERN- BEARERS. IQ5

wiches and visions in the grassy court, while the
wind hummed in the crumbling turrets; or
clambering along the coast, eat geans* (the worst,
I must suppose, in Christendom) from an ad-
venturous gean tree that had taken root under a
cliff, where it was shaken with an ague of east
wind, and silvered after gales with salt, and grew
so foreign among its bleak surroundings that to
eat of its produce was an adventure in itself.

There are mingled some dismal memories
with so many that were joyous. Of the fisher-
wife, for instance, who had cut her throat at
Canty Bay; and of how I ran with the other
children to the top of the Quadrant, and beheld
a posse of silent people escorting a cart, and on
the cart, bound in a chair, her throat bandaged,
and the bandage all bloody — horror! — the fisher-
wife herself, who continued thenceforth to hag-
ride my thoughts, and even to-day (as I recall the
scene) darkens daylight. She was lodged in the
little old jail in the chief street; but whether or
no she died there, with a wise terror of the worst,
I never inquired. She had been tippling; it was
but a dingy tragedy; and it seems strange and
hard that, after all these years, the poor crazy
sinner should be still pilloried on her cart in the
* Wild cherries.

13*

196 THE LANTERN-BEARERS.

scrap-book of my memory. Nor shall I readily
forget a certain house in the Quadrant where a
visitor died, and a dark old woman continued to
dwell alone with the dead body; nor how this old
woman conceived a hatred to myself and one of
my cousins, and in the dread hour of the dusk,
as we were clambering on the garden-walls, opened
a window in that house of mortality and cursed
us in a shrill voice and with a marrowy choice of
language. It was a pair of very colourless urchins
that fled down the lane from this remarkable ex-
perience! But I recall with a more doubtful
sentiment, compounded out of fear and exultation,
the coil of equinoctial tempests; trumpeting squalls,
scouring flaws of rain; the boats with their reefed
lugsails scudding for the harbour mouth, where
danger lay, for it was hard to make when the
wind had any east in it; the wives clustered with
blowing shawls at the pier-head, where (if fate
was against them) they might see boat and hus-
band and sons — their whole wealth and their
whole family — engulfed under their eyes; and
(what I saw but once) a troop of neighbours
forcing such an unfortunate homeward, and she
squalling and battling in their midst, a figure
scarcely human, a tragic Maenad.

These are things that I recall with interest;

THE LANTERN-BEARERS. 1 97

but what my memory dwells upon the most, I
have been all this while withholding. It was a
sport peculiar to the place, and indeed to a
week or so of our two months' holiday there.
Maybe it still flourishes in its native spot; for
boys and their pastimes are swayed by periodic
forces inscrutable to man; so that tops and
marbles reappear in their due season, regular
like the sun and moon; and the harmless art of
knucklebones has seen the fall of the Roman
empire and the rise of the United States. It may
still flourish in its native spot, but nowhere else,
I am persuaded; for I tried myself to introduce it
on Tweedside, and was defeated lamentably; its
charm being quite local, like a country wine that
cannot be exported.

The idle manner of it was this: —
Toward the end of September, when school-
time was drawing near and the nights were
already black, we would begin to sally from our
respective villas, each equipped with a tin bulPs-
eye lantern. The thing was so well known that it
had worn a rut in the commerce of Great
Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, be-
gan to garnish their windows with our particular
brand of luminary. We wore them buckled to
the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them,

198 THE LANTERN-BEARERS.

such was the rigour of the game, a buttoned top-
coat. They smelled noisomely of blistered tin;
they never burned aright, though they would
always burn our fingers; their use was naught;
the pleasure of them merely fanciful; and yet a
boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for
nothing more. The fishermen used lanterns about
their boats, and it was from them, I suppose, that
we had got the hint; but theirs were not bull's-
eyes, nor did we ever play at being fishermen.
The police carried them at their belts, and we
had plainly copied them in that; yet we did not
pretend to be policemen. Burglars, indeed, we
may have had some haunting thoughts of; and
we had certainly an eye to past ages when lanterns
were more common, and to certain story-books
in which we had found them to figure very
largely. But take it for all in all, the pleasure
of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy
with a bull's eye under his top-coat was good
enough for us.

When two of these asses met, there would
be an anxious "Have you got your lantern?"
and a gratified "Yes!" That was the shibboleth,
and very needful too; for, as it was the rule to
keep our glory contained, none could recognise
a lantern-bearer, unless (like the polecat) by the

THE LANTERN-BEARERS. IQQ

smell. Four or five would sometimes climb into
the belly of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but
the thwarts above them — for the cabin was
usually locked, or choose out some hollow of the
links where the wind might whistle overhead.
There the coats would be unbuttoned and the
bull's-eyes discovered; and in the chequering
glimmer, under the huge windy hall of the night,
and cheered by a rich steam of toasting tinware,
these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch
together in the cold sand of the links or on
the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and delight
themselves with inappropriate talk. Woe is me
that I may not give some specimens — some of
their foresights of life, or deep inquiries into the
rudiments of man and nature, these were so fiery
and so innocent, they were so richly silly, so
romantically young. But the talk, at any rate,
was but a condiment; and these gatherings them-
selves only accidents in the career of the lantern-
bearer. The essence of this bliss was to walk
by yourself in the black night; the slide shut,
the top -coat buttoned; not a ray escaping,
whether to conduct your footsteps or to make
your glory public: a mere pillar of darkness in
the dark; and all the while, deep down in the
privacy of your fool's heart, to know you had a

2OO THE LANTERN-BEARERS.

bulPs-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over
the knowledge.

II.

It is said that a poet has died young in the
breast of the most stolid. It may be contended,
rather, that this (somewhat minor) bard in almost
every case survives, and is the spice of life to
his possessor. Justice is not done to the ver-
satility and the unplumbed childishness of man's
imagination. His life from without may seem
but a rude mound of mud; there will be some
golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he
dwells delighted; and for as dark as his pathway
seems to the observer, he will have some kind of
a bulPs-eye at his belt.

It would be hard to pick out a career more
cheerless than that of Dancer, the miser, as he
figures in the "Old Bailey Reports," a prey to
the most sordid persecutions, the butt of his
neighbourhood, betrayed by his hired man, his
house beleaguered by the impish school-boy,
and he himself grinding and fuming and im-
potently fleeing to the law against these pin-
pricks. You marvel at first that any one should
willingly prolong a life so destitute of charm and
dignity; and then you call to memory that had

THE LANTERN-BEARERS. 2OI

he chosen, had he ceased to be a miser, he
could have been freed at once from these trials,
and might have built himself a castle and gone
escorted by a squadron. For the love of more
recondite joys, which we cannot estimate, which,
it may be, we should envy, the man had will-
ingly foregone both comfort and consideration.
"His mind to him a kingdom was"; and sure
enough, digging into that mind, which seems
at first a dust-heap, we unearth some priceless
jewels. For Dancer must have had the love of
power and the disdain of using it, a noble char-
acter in itself; disdain of many pleasures, a chief
part of what is commonly called wisdom; disdain
of the inevitable end, that finest trait of mankind;
scorn of men's opinions, another element of
virtue; and at the back of all, a conscience just
like yours and mine, whining like a cur, swindling
like a thimble-rigger, but still pointing (there or
thereabout) to some conventional standard. Here
were a cabinet portrait to which Hawthorne per-
haps had done justice; and yet not Hawthorne
either, for he was mildly minded, and it lay not
in him to create for us that throb of the miser's
pulse, his fretful energy of gusto, his vast arms
of ambition clutching in he knows not what: in-
satiable, insane, a god with a muck-rake. Thus,

2O2 THE LANTERN-BEARERS.

at least, looking in the bosom of the miser, con-
sideration detects the poet in the full tide of life,
with more, indeed, of the poetic fire than usually
goes to epics; and tracing that mean man about
his cold hearth, and to and fro in his discom-
fortable house, spies within him a blazing bonfire
of delight. And so with others, who do not live
by bread alone, but by some cherished and per-
haps fantastic pleasure; who are meat salesmen
to the external eye, and possibly to themselves
are Shakespeares, Napoleons, or Beethovens; who
have not one virtue to rub against another in
the field of active life, and yet perhaps, in the
life of contemplation, sit with the saints. We
see them on the street, and we can count their
buttons; but heaven knows in what they pride
themselves! heaven knows where they have set
their treasure!

There is one fable that touches very near the
quick of life: the fable of the monk who passed
into the woods, heard a bird break into song,
hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself on
his return a stranger at his convent gates; for he
had been absent fifty years, and of all his com-
rades there survived but one to recognise him. It
is not only in the woods that this enchanter carols,
though perhaps he is native there. He sings in

THE LANTERN-BEARERS. 2O3

the most doleful places. The miser hears him
and chuckles, and the days are moments. With
no more apparatus than an ill-smelling lantern I
have evoked him on the naked links. All life
that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two
strands: seeking for that bird and hearing him.
And it is just this that makes life so hard to
value, and the delight of each so incommunicable.
And just a knowledge of this, and a remembrance
of those fortunate hours in which the bird has
sung to us, that fills us with such wonder when
we turn the pages of the realist. There, to be
sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it con-
sists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and
cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to re-
member and that which we are careless whether
we forget; but of the note of that time-devouring
nightingale we hear no news.

The case of these writers of romance is most
obscure. They have been boys and youths; they
have lingered outside the window of the beloved,
who was then most probably writing to some one
else; they have sat before a sheet of paper, and
felt themselves mere continents of congested
poetry, not one line of which would flow; they
have walked alone in the woods, they have walked
in cities under the countless lamps; they have

2O4 THE LANTERN-BEARERS.

been to sea, they have hated, they have feared,
they have longed to knife a man, and maybe
done it; the wild taste of life has stung their pa-
late. Or, if you deny them all the rest, one
pleasure at least they have tasted to the full —
their books are there to prove it — the keen
pleasure of successful literary composition. And
yet they fill the globe with volumes, whose clever-
ness inspires me with despairing admiration, and
whose consistent falsity to all I care to call ex-
istence, with despairing wrath. If I had no better
hope than to continue to revolve among the dreary
and petty businesses, and to be moved by the
paltry hopes and fears with which they surround
and animate their heroes, I declare I would die
now. But there has never an hour of mine gone
quite so dully yet; if it were spent waiting at a
railway junction, I would have some scattering
thoughts, I could count some grains of memory,
compared to which the whole of one of these
romances seems but dross.

These writers would retort (if I take them
properly) that this was very true; that it was the
same with themselves and other persons of (what
they call) the artistic temperament; that in this
we were exceptional, and should apparently be
ashamed of ourselves; but that our works must

THE LANTERN-BEARERS. 2 05

deal exclusively with (what they call) the average
man, who was a prodigious dull fellow, and quite
dead to all but the paltriest considerations. I ac-
cept the issue. We can only know others by our-
selves. The artistic temperament (a plague on
the expression!) does not make us different from
our fellow-men, or it would make us incapable of
writing novels; and the average man (a murrain
on the word!) is just like you and me, or he
-would not be average. It was Whitman who
stamped a kind of Birmingham sacredness upon
the latter phrase; but Whitman knew very well,
and showed very nobly, that the average man was
full of joys and full of a poetry of his own. And
this harping on life's dulness and man's mean-
ness is a loud profession of incompetence; it is
one of two things: the cry of the blind eye, I can-
not see, or the complaint of the dumb tongue,
/ cannot utter. To draw a life without delights
is to prove I have not realised it. To picture a
man without some sort of poetry — well, it goes
near to prove my case, for it shows an author
may have little enough. To see Dancer only as
a dirty, old, small-minded, impotently fuming man,
in a dirty house, besieged by Harrow boys, and
probably beset by small attorneys, is to show my-
self as keen an observer as ... the Harrow boys.

2O6 THE LANTERN-BEARERS.

But these young gentlemen (with a more becom-
ing modesty) were content to pluck Dancer by
the coat-tails; they did not suppose they had sur-
prised his secret or could put him living in a
book: and it is there my error would have lain.
Or say that in the same romance — I continue to
call these books romances, in the hope of giving
pain — say that in the same romance, which now
begins really to take shape, I should leave to
speak of Dancer, and follow instead the Harrow
boys; and say that I came on some such busi-
ness as that of my lantern-bearers on the links;
and described the boys as very cold, spat upon
by flurries of rain, and drearily surrounded, all of
which they were; and their talk as silly and in-
decent, which it certainly was. I might upon
these lines, and had I Zola's genius, turn out, in
a page or so, a gem of literary art, render the
lantern-light with the touches of a master, and lay
on the indecency with the ungrudging hand of
love; and when all was done,' what a triumph
would my picture be of shallowness and dulness!
how it would have missed the point! how it would
have belied the boys! To the ear of the steno-
grapher, the talk is merely silly and indecent; but
ask the boys themselves, and they are discussing
(as it is highly proper they should) the possibilities

THE LANTERN-BEARERS. 2OJ

of existence. To the eye of the observer they are
wet and cold and drearily surrounded; but ask
themselves, and they are in the heaven of a re-
condite pleasure, the ground of which is an ill-
smelling lantern.

III.

FOR, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is
often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a
mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside,
like Dancer's, in the mysterious inwards of
psychology. It may consist with perpetual failure,
and find exercise in the continued chase. It has
so little bond with externals (such as the ob-
server scribbles in his note-book) that it may even
touch them not; and the man's true life, for which
he consents to live, lie altogether in the field of
fancy. The clergyman, in his spare hours, may
be winning battles, the farmer sailing ships, the
banker reaping triumph in the arts: all leading
another life, plying another trade from that they
chose; like the poet's housebuilder, who, after all
is cased in stone,

"By his fireside, as impotent fanpy prompts,
Rebuilds it to his liking."

In such a case the poetry runs underground. The
observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all

2O8 THE LANTERN-BEARERS.

abroad. For to look at the man is but to court
deception. We shall see the trunk from which
he draws his nourishment; but he himself is
above and abroad in the green dome of foliage,
hummed through by winds and nested in by
nightingales. And the true realism were that of
the poets, to climb up after him like a squirrel,
and catch some glimpse of the heaven for which
he lives. And the true realism, always and every-
where, is that of the poets: to find out where
joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond
singing.

For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the
joy of the actors lies the sense of any action.
That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one
who has not the secret of the lanterns, the scene
upon the links is meaningless. And hence the
haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic
books. Hence, when we read the English realists,
the incredulous wonder with which we observe
the hero's constancy under the submerging tide
of dulness, and how he bears up with his jibbing
sweetheart, and endures the chatter of idiot girls,
and stands by his whole unfeatured wilderness of
an existence, instead of seeking relief in drink or
foreign travel. Hence in the French, in that
meat-market of middle-aged sensuality, the dis-

THE LANTERN-BEARERS. 2OQ

gusted surprise with which we see the hero drift
sidelong, and practically quite untempted, into
every description of misconduct and dishonour.
In each, we miss the personal poetry, the en-
chanted atmosphere, that rainbow work' of fancy
that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble
what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough,
instead of soaring away like a balloon into the
colours of the sunset; each is true, each incon-
ceivable; for no man lives in the external truth,
among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantas-
magoric chamber of his brain, with the painted
windows and the storied walls.

Of this falsity we have had a recent example
from a man who knows far better — Tolstoi's
Powers of Darkness. Here is a piece full of force
and truth, yet quite untrue. For before Mikita
was led into so dire a situation he was tempted,
and temptations are beautiful at least in part; and
a work which dwells on the ugliness of crime and
gives no hint of any loveliness in the temptation,
sins against the modesty of life, and even when
a Tolstoi writes it, sinks to melodrama. The
peasants are not understood; they saw their life
in fairer colours; even the deaf girl was clothed
in poetry for Mikita, or he had never fallen. And
so, once again, even an Old Bailey melodrama,

Across the Plains, etc. 14

2IO THE LANTERN-BEARERS.

without some brightness of poetry and lustre of
existence, falls into the inconceivable and ranks
with fairy tales.

IV.

IN nobler books we are moved with something
like the emotions of life; and this emotion is very
variously provoked. We are so moved when
Levine labours in the field, when Andr6 sinks
beyond emotion, when Richard Feverel and Lucy
Desborough meet beside the river, when Antony,
"not cowardly, puts off his helmet," when Kent
has infinite pity on the dying Lear, when, in
Dostoieffky's Despised and Rejected, the uncom-
plaining hero drains his cup of suffering and
virtue. These are notes that please the great
heart of man. Not only love, and the fields, and
the bright face of danger, but sacrifice and death
and unmerited suffering humbly supported, touch
in us the vein of the poetic. We love to think of
them, we long to try them, we are humbly hopeful
that we may prove heroes also.

We have heard, perhaps, too much of lesser
matters. Here is the door, here is the open air.
Itur in antiquam silvam.

VIII.
A CHAPTER ON DREAMS.

THE past is all of one texture — whether
feigned or suffered — whether acted out in three
dimensions, or only witnessed in that small theatre
of the brain which we keep brightly lighted all
night long, after the jets are down, and darkness
and sleep reign undisturbed in the remainder of
the body. There is no distinction on the face of
our experiences; one is vivid indeed, and one
dull, and one pleasant, and another agonising to
remember; but which of them is what we call
true, and which a dream, there is not one hair
to prove. The past stands on a precarious
footing; another straw split in the field of
metaphysic, and behold us robbed of it. There
is scarce a family that can count four generations
but lays a claim to some dormant title or some
castle and estate : a claim not prosecutable in any
court of law, but flattering to the fancy and a
great alleviation of idle hours. A man's claim to

'4*

212 A CHAPTER ON DRfeAMS.

his own past is yet less valid. A paper might
turn up (in proper story-book fashion) in the
secret drawer of an old ebony secretary, and
restore your family to its ancient honours, and
reinstate mine in a certain West Indian islet (not
far from St. Kitt's, as beloved tradition hummed
in my young ears) which was once ours, and is
now unjustly some one else's, and for that matter
(in the state of the sugar trade) is not worth any-
thing to anybody. I do not say that these revolu-
tions are likely; only no man can deny that they are
possible; and the past, on the other hand, is lost for
ever: our old days and deeds, our old selves, too,
and the very world in which these scenes were
acted, all brought down to the same faint re-
siduum as a last night's dream, to some incon-
tinuous images, and an echo in the chambers of
the brain. Not an hour, not a mood, not a
glance of the eye, can we revoke; it is all gone,
past conjuring. And yet conceive us robbed of
it, conceive that little thread of memory that we
trail behind us broken at the pocket's edge; and
in what naked nullity should we be left! for we
only guide ourselves, and only know ourselves, by
these air-painted pictures of the past.

Upon these grounds, there are some among
us who claim to have lived longer and more

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS. 213

richly than their neighbours; when they lay
asleep they claim they were still active; and
among the treasures of memory that all men
review for their amusement, these count in no
second place the harvests of their dreams. There
is one of this kind whom I have in my eye, and
whose case is perhaps unusual enough to be
described. He was from a child an ardent and
uncomfortable dreamer. When he had a touch
of fever at night, and the room swelled and
shrank, and his clothes, hanging on a nail, now
loomed up instant to the bigness of a church,
and now drew away into a horror of infinite
distance and infinite littleness, the poor soul was
very well aware of what must follow, and struggled
hard against the approaches of that slumber which
was the beginning of sorrows. But his struggles
were in vain; sooner or later the night-hag would
have him by the throat, and pluck him, strang-
ling and screaming, from his sleep. His dreams
were at times commonplace enough, at times very
strange: at times they were almost formless, he
would be haunted, for instance, by nothing more
definite than a certain hue of brown, which he
did not mind in the least while he was awake,
but feared and loathed while he was dreaming;
at times, again, they took on every detail of cir-

214 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS.

cumstance, as when once he supposed he must
swallow the populous world, and awoke screaming
with the horror of the thought. The two chief
troubles of his very narrow existence — the practical
and everyday trouble of school tasks and the
ultimate and airy one of hell and judgment — were
often confounded together into one appalling
nightmare. He seemed to himself to stand be-
fore the Great White Throne; he was called on,
poor little devil, to recite some form of words, on
which his destiny depended; his tongue stuck,
his memory was blank, hell gaped for him; and
he would awake, clinging to the curtain-rod with
his knees to his chin.

These were extremely poor experiences, on
the whole; and at that time of life my dreamer
would have very willingly parted with his power
of dreams. But presently, in the course of his
growth, the cries and physical contortions passed
away, seemingly for ever; his visions were stilt for
the most part miserable, but they were more con-
stantly supported; and he would awake with no
more extreme symptom than a flying heart, a
freezing scalp, cold sweats, and the speechless
midnight fear. His dreams, too, as befitted a
mind better stocked with particulars, became
more circumstantial, and had more the air and

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS. 2 I 5

continuity of life. The look of the world be-
ginning to take hold on his attention, scenery
came to play a part in his sleeping as well as in
his waking thoughts, so that he would take long,
uneventful journeys and see strange towns and
beautiful places as he lay in bed. And, what is
more significant, an odd taste that he had for
the Georgian costume and for stories laid in that
period of English history, began to rule the features
of his dreams; so that he masqueraded there in
a three-cornered hat, and was much engaged with
Jacobite conspiracy between the hour for bed and
that for breakfast. About the same time, he
began to read in his dreams — tales, for the most
part, and for the most part after the manner of
G. P. R. James, but so incredibly more vivid and
moving than any printed book, that he has ever
since been malcontent with literature.

And then, while he was yet a student, there
came to him a dream- adventure which he has no
anxiety to repeat; he began, that is to say, to
dream in sequence and thus to lead a double
life — one of the day, one of the night — one that
he had every reason to believe was the true one,
another that he had no means of proving to be
false. I should have said he studied, or was by
way of studying, at Edinburgh College, which (it

2l6 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS.

may be supposed) was how I came to know him.
Well, in his dream-life, he passed a long day in
the surgical theatre, his heart in his mouth, his
teeth on edge, seeing monstrous malformations
and the abhorred dexterity of surgeons. In a
heavy, rainy, foggy evening he came forth into
the South Bridge, turned up the High Street, and
entered the door of a tall land, at the top of
which he supposed himself to lodge. All night
long, in his wet clothes, he climbed the stairs,
stair after stair in endless series, and at every
second flight a flaring lamp with a reflector. All
night long, he brushed by single persons passing
downward — beggarly women of the street, great,
weary, muddy labourers, poor scarecrows of men,
pale parodies of women — but all drowsy and
weary like himself, and all single, and all brush-
ing against him as they passed. In the end, out
of a northern window, he would see day be-
ginning to whiten over the Firth, give up the
ascent, turn to descend, and in a breath be back
again upon the streets, in his wet clothes, in the
wet, haggard dawn, trudging to another day of
monstrosities and operations. Time went quicker
in the life of dreams, some seven hours (as near
as he can guess) to one; and it went, besides,
more intensely, so that the gloom of these fancied

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS. 217

experiences clouded the day, and he had not
shaken off their shadow ere it was time to lie
down and to renew them. I cannot tell how long
it was that he endured this discipline; but it was
long enough to leave a great black blot upon his
memory, long enough to send him, trembling for
his reason, to the doors of a certain doctor;
whereupon with a simple draught he was restored
to the common lot of man.

The poor gentleman has since been troubled
by nothing of the sort; indeed, his nights were
for some while like other men's, now blank, now
chequered with dreams, and these sometimes
charming, sometimes appalling, but except for
an occasional vividness, of no extraordinary kind.
I will just note one of these occasions, ere I pass
on to what makes my dreamer truly interesting.
It seemed to him that he was in the first floor
of a rough hill-farm. The room showed some
poor efforts at gentility, a carpet on the floor, a
piano, I think, against the wall; but, for all these
refinements, there was no mistaking he was in a
moorland place, among hillside people, and set
in miles of heather. He looked down from the
window upon a bare farmyard, that seemed to
have been long disused. A great, uneasy still-
ness lay upon the world. There was no sign of

2 I 8 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS.

the farm-folk or of any live stock, save for an
old, brown, curly dog of the retriever breed, who
sat close in against the wall of the house and
seemed to be dozing. Something about this dog
disquieted the dreamer; it was quite a nameless
feeling, for the beast looked right enough — in-
deed, he was so old and dull and dusty and
broken-down, that he should rather have awakened
pity; and yet the conviction came and grew upon
the dreamer that this was no proper dog at all,
but something hellish. A great many dozing
summer flies hummed about the yard; and
presently the dog thrust forth his paw, caught a
fly in his open palm, carried it to his mouth like
an ape, and looking suddenly up at the dreamer
in the window, winked to him with one eye. The
dream went on, it matters not how it went; it
was a good dream as dreams go; but there was
nothing in the sequel worthy of that devilish
brown dog. And the point of interest for me
lies partly in that very fact: that having found so
singular an incident, my imperfect dreamer
should prove unable to carry the tale to a fit end
and fall back on indescribable noises and indis-
criminate horrors. It would be different now; he
knows his business better!

For, to approach at last the point: This

A CHAFFER ON DREAMS.

honest fellow had long been in the custom of
setting himself to sleep with tales, and so had
his father before him; but these were irrespon-
sible inventions, told for the teller's pleasure,
with no eye to the crass public or the thwart re-
viewer: tales where a thread might be dropped,
or one adventure quitted for another, on fancy's
least suggestion. So that the little people who
manage man's internal theatre had not as yet
received a very rigorous training; and played
upon their stage like children who should have
slipped into the house and found it empty, rather
than like drilled actors performing a set piece to
a huge hall of faces. But presently my dreamer
began to turn his former amusement of story-
telling to (what is called) account; by which I
mean that he began to write and sell his tales.
Here was he, and here the little people who did
that part of his business, in quite new conditions.
The stories must now be trimmed and pared
and set upon all fours, they must run from a be-
ginning to an end and fit (after a manner) with
the laws of life; the pleasure, in one word, had
become a business; and that not only for the
dreamer, but for the little people of his theatre.
These understood the change as well as he.
When he lay down to prepare himself for sleep,

22O A CHAPTER ON DREAMS.

he no longer sought amusement, but printable
and profitable tales; and after he had dozed off
in his box-seat, his little people continued their
evolutions with the same mercantile designs. All
other forms of dream deserted him but two: he
still occasionally reads the most delightful books,
he still visits at times the most delightful places;
and it is perhaps worthy of note that to these
same places, and to one in particular, he returns
at intervals of months and years, rinding new
field-paths, visiting new neighbours, beholding
that happy valley under new effects of noon and
dawn and sunset. But all the rest of the family
of visions is quite lost to him: the common,
mangled version of yesterday's affairs, the raw-
head-and-bloody-bones nightmare, rumoured to
be the child of toasted cheese — these and their
like are gone; and, for the most part, whether
awake or asleep, he is simply occupied — he or
his little people — in consciously making stories
for the market. This dreamer (like many other
persons) has encountered some trifling vicissi-
tudes of fortune. When the bank begins to send
letters and the butcher to linger at the back
gate, he sets to belabouring his brains after a
story, for that is his readiest money- winner; and,
behold! at once the little people begin to bestir

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS. 221

themselves in the same quest, and labour all
night long, and all night long set before him
truncheons of tales upon their lighted theatre.
No fear of his being frightened now; the flying
heart and the frozen scalp are things bygone;
applause, growing applause, growing interest,
growing exultation in his own cleverness (for he
takes all the credit), and at last a jubilant leap
to' wakefulness, with the cry, "I have it, that'll
do!" upon his lips: with such and similar emo-
tions he sits at these nocturnal dramas, with such
outbreaks, like Claudius in the play, he scatters
the performance in the midst. Often enough the
waking is a disappointment: he has been too deep
asleep, as I explain the thing; drowsiness has
gained his little people, they have gone stumbling
and maundering through their parts; and the
play, to the awakened mind, is seen to be a
tissue of absurdities. And yet how often have
these sleepless Brownies done him honest service,
and given him, as he sat idly taking his pleasure
in the boxes, better tales than he could fashion
for himself.

Here is one, exactly as it came to him. It
seemed he was the son of a very rich and wicked
man, the owner of broad acres and a most
damnable temper. The dreamer (and that was

222 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS.

the son) had lived much abroad, on purpose to
avoid his parent; and when at length he returned
to England, it was to find him married again to
a young wife, who was supposed to suffer cruelly
and to loathe her yoke. Because of this marriage
(as the dreamer indistinctly understood) it was
desirable for father and son to have a meeting;
and yet, both being proud and both angry, neither
would condescend upon a visit. Meet they did
accordingly, in a desolate, sandy country by the
sea; and there they quarrelled, and the son,
stung by some intolerable insult, struck down the
father dead. No suspicion was aroused; the
dead man was found and buried, and the dreamer
succeeded to the broad estates, and found himself
installed under the same roof with his father's
widow, for whom no provision had been made.
These two lived very much alone, as people may
after a bereavement, sat down to table together,
shared the long evenings, and grew daily better
friends; until it seemed to him of a sudden that
she was prying about dangerous matters, that she
had conceived a notion of his guilt, that she
watched him and tried him with questions. He
drew back from her company as men draw back
from a precipice suddenly discovered; and yet so
strong was the attraction that he would drift

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS. 223

again and again into the old intimacy, and again
and again be startled back by some suggestive
question or some inexplicable meaning in her
eye. So they lived at cross purposes, a life full
of broken dialogue, challenging glances, and sup-
pressed passion; until, one day, he saw the woman
slipping from the house in a veil, followed her to
the station, followed her in the train to the sea-
side country, and out over the sandhills to the
very place where the murder was done. There
she began to grope among the bents, he watching
her, flat upon his face; and presently she had
something in her hand — I cannot remember what
it was, but it was deadly evidence against the
dreamer — and as she held it up to look at it,
perhaps from the shock of the discovery, her
foot slipped, and she hung at some peril on the
brink of the tall sand-wreaths. He had no
thought but to spring up and rescue her; and there
they stood face to face, she with that deadly
matter openly in her hand — his very presence on
the spot another link of proof. It was plain she
was about to speak, but this was more than he
could bear — he could bear to be lost, but not to
talk of it with his destroyer; and he cut her
short with trivial conversation. Arm in arm, they
returned together to the train, talking he knew

224 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS.

not what, made the journey back in the same
carriage, sat down to dinner, and passed the
evening in the drawing-room as in the past. But
suspense and fear drummed in the dreamer's
bosom. "She has not denounced me yet" — so
his thoughts ran — "when will she denounce me?
Will it be to-morrow?" And it was not to-
morrow, or the next day, nor the next; and their
life settled back on the old terms, only that she
seemed kinder than before, and that, as for him,
the burthen of his suspense and wonder grew
daily more unbearable, so that he wasted away
like a man with a disease. Once, indeed, he
broke all bounds of decency, seized an occasion-
when she was abroad, ransacked her room, and
at last, hidden away among her jewels, found the
damning evidence. There he stood, holding this
thing, which was his life, in the hollow of his
hand, and marvelling at her inconsequent be-
haviour, that she should seek, and keep, and yet
not use it; and then the door opened, and behold
herself. So, once more, they stood, eye to eye,
with the evidence between them; and once more
she raised to him a face brimming with some
communication; and once more he shied away
from speech and cut her off. But before he left
the room, which he had turned upside down, he

225

laid back his death-warrant where he had found
it; and at that, her face lighted up. The -next
thing he heard, she was explaining to her maid,
with some ingenious falsehood, the disorder of
her things. Flesh and blood could bear the
strain no longer; and I think it was the next
morning (though chronology is always hazy in the
theatre of the mind) that he burst from his
reserve. They had been breakfasting together in
one corner of a great, parqueted, sparely-furnished
room of many windows; all the time of the meal
she had tortured him with sly allusions; and no
sooner were the servants gone, and these two
protagonists alone together, than he leaped to his
feet. She too sprang up, with a pale face; with
a pale face, she heard him as he raved out his
complaint: Why did she torture him so? she knew
all, she knew he was no enemy to her; why did
she not denounce him at once? what signified her
whole behaviour? why did she torture him? and
yet again, why did she torture him? And when
he had done, she fell upon her knees,, and with
outstretched hands: "Do you not understand?"
she cried. "I love you!"

Hereupon, with a pang of wonder and mer-
cantile delight, the dreamer awoke. His mercantile
delight was not of long endurance; for it soon be-

Across the Plains, etc. 1 5

226 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS.

came plain that in this spirited tale there were
unmarketable ejements; which is just the reason
why you have it here so briefly told. But his
wonder has still kept growing; and I think the
reader's will also, if he consider it ripely. For
now he sees why I speak of the little people as
of substantive inventors and performers. To the
end they had kept their secret. I will go bail
for the dreamer (having excellent grounds for
valuing his candour) that he had no guess what-
ever at the motive of the woman — the hinge of
the whole well-invented plot — until the instant of
that highly dramatic declaration. It was not his
tale; it was the little people's! And observe: not
only was the secret kept, the story was told with
really guileful craftsmanship. The conduct of
both actors is (in the cant phrase) psychologically
correct, and the emotion aptly graduated up to
the surprising climax. I am awake now, and I
know this trade; and yet I cannot better it I am
awake, and I live by this business; and yet I
could not outdo — could not perhaps equal — that
crafty artifice (as of some old, experienced car-
penter of plays, some Dennery or Sardou) by
which the same situation is twice presented and
the two actors twice brought face to face over
the evidence, only once it is in her hand, once

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS. 227

In his — and these in their due order, the least
dramatic first. The more I think of it, the more
I am moved to press upon the world my question:
Who are the Little People? They are near con-
nections of the dreamer's, beyond doubt; they
share in his financial worries and have an eye to
the bank-book; they share plainly in his training;
they have plainly learned like him to build the
scheme of a considerate story and to arrange
emotion in progressive order; only I think they
have more talent; and one thing is beyond doubt,
they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a
serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of
where they aim. Who are they, then? and who
is the dreamer?

Well, as regards the dreamer, I can answer
that, for he is no less a person than myself; —
as I might have told you from the beginning,
only that the critics murmur over my consistent
egotism; — and as I am positively forced to tell
you now, or I could advance but little farther
with my story. And for the Little People, what
shall I say but they are just my Brownies, God
bless them! who do one-half my work for me
while I am fast asleep, and in all human likeli-
hood, do the rest for me as well, when I am
wide awake and fondly suppose I do it for myself.

15*

228 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS.

That part which is done while I am sleeping is
the Brownies' part beyond contention; but that
which is done when I am up and about is by no
means necessarily mine, since all goes to show
the Brownies have a hand in it even then. Here
is a doubt that much concerns my conscience.
For myself — what I call I, my conscious ego, the
denizen of the pineal gland unless he has changed
his residence since Descartes, the man with the
conscience and the variable bank-account, the
man with the hat and the boots, and the privilege
of voting and not carrying his candidate at the
general elections — I am sometimes tempted to
suppose he is no story-teller at all, but a creature
as matter of fact as any cheesemonger or any
cheese, and a realist bemired up to the ears in
actuality; so that, by that account, the whole of
my published fiction should be the single-handed
product of some Brownie, some Familiar, some
unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked in a
back garret, while I get all the praise and he but
a share (which I cannot prevent him getting) of
the pudding. I am an excellent adviser, some-
thing like Moliere's servant; I pull back and I
cut down; and I dress the whole in the best
words and sentences that I can find and make; I
hold the pen, too; and I do the sitting at the

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS. 22Q

table which is about the worst of it; and when all
is done, I make up the manuscript and pay for the
registration; so that, on the whole, I have some
claim to share, though not so largely as I do, in
the profits of our common enterprise.

I can but give an instance or so of what part
is done sleeping and what part awake, and leave
the reader to share what laurels there are, at his
own nod, between myself and my collaborators;
and to do this I will first take a book that a
number of persons have been polite enough to
read, the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde. I had long been trying to write a story
on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, for that
strong sense of man's double being which must
at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind
of every thinking creature. I had even written
one, The Travelling Companion, which was re-
turned by an editor on the plea that it was a
work of genius and indecent, and which I burned
the other day on the ground that it was not a
work of genius, and that Jekyll had supplanted
it. Then came one of those financial fluctuations
to which (with an elegant modesty) I have hitherto
referred in the third person. For two days I went
about racking my brains for a plot of any sort;
and on the second night I dreamed the scene at

23O A CHAPTER ON DREAMS.

the window, and a scene afterward split in two,
in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the
powder and underwent the change in the pre-
sence of his pursuers. All the rest was made
awake, and consciously, although I think I can
trace in much of it the manner of my Brownies.
The meaning of the tale is therefore mine, and
had long pre-existed in my garden of Adonis,
and tried one body after another in vain; indeed,
I do most of the morality, worse luck! and my
Brownies have not a rudiment of what we call a
conscience. Mine, too, is the setting, mine the
characters. All that was given me was the matter
of three scenes, and the central idea of a volun-
tary change becoming involuntary. Will it be
thought ungenerous, after I have been so liberally
ladling out praise to my unseen collaborators, if
I here toss them over, bound hand and foot, into
the arena of the critics? For the business of
the powders, which so many have censured, is, I
am relieved to say, not mine at all but the
Brownies'. Of another tale, in case the reader
should have glanced at it, I may say a word: the
not very defensible story of Olalla. Here the
court, the mother, the mother's niche, Olalla,
Olalla's chamber, the meetings on the stair, the
broken window, the ugly scene of the bite, were

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS. 23!

all given me in bulk and detail as I have tried
to write them; to this I added only the external
scenery (for in my dream I never was beyond
the court), the portrait, the characters of Felipe
and the priest, the moral, such as it is, and the
last pages, such as, alas! they are. And I may
even say that in this case the moral itself was
given me; for it arose immediately on a com-
parison of the mother and the daughter, and
from the hideous trick of atavism in the first.
Sometimes a parabolic sense is still more un-
deniably present in a dream; sometimes I can-
not but suppose my Brownies have been aping
Bunyan, and yet in no case with what would
possibly be called a moral in a tract; never with
the ethical narrowness; conveying hints instead of
life's larger limitations and that sort of sense
which we seem to perceive in the arabesque of
time and space.

For the most part, it will be seen, my Brownies
are somewhat fantastic, like their stories hot and
hot, full of passion and the picturesque, alive
with animating incident; and they have no pre-
judice against the supernatural. But the other
day they gave me a surprise, entertaining me
with a love-story, a little April comedy, which I
ought certainly to hand over to the author of A

232 BEGGARS.

Chance Acquaintance, for he could write it as it
should be written, and I am sure (although I mean
to try) that I cannot. — But who would have sup-
posed that a Brownie of mine should invent a tale
for Mr. Howells?

IX.
BEGGARS.

i.

IN a pleasant, airy, up-hill country, it was my
fortune when I was young to make the acquaint-
ance of a certain beggar. I call him beggar,
though he usually allowed his coat and his shoes
(which were open-mouthed, indeed) to beg for
him. He was the wreck of an athletic man, tall,
gaunt, and bronzed; far gone in consumption,
with that disquieting smile of the mortally stricken
on his face; but still active afoot, still with the
brisk military carriage, the ready military salute.
Three ways led through this piece of country;
and as I was inconstant in my choice, I believe
he must often have awaited me in vain. But
often enough, he caught me; often enough, from

BEGGARS. 233

some place of ambush by the roadside, he would
spring suddenly forth in the regulation attitude,
and launching at once into his inconsequential
talk, fall into step with me upon my farther
course. "A fine morning, sir, though perhaps a
trifle inclining to rain. I hope I see you well,
sir. Why, no, sir, I don't feel as hearty myself
as I could wish, but I am keeping about my
ordinary. I am pleased to -meet you on the road,
sir. I assure you I quite look forward to one of
our little conversations." He loved the sound of
his own voice inordinately, and though (with
something too off-hand to call servility) he would
always hasten to agree with anything you said,
yet he could never suffer you to say it to an
end. By what transition he slid to his favourite
subject I have no memory; but we had never
been long together on the way before he was
dealing, in a very military manner, with the
English poets. "Shelley was a fine poet, sir,
though a trifle atheistical in his opinions. His
Quoen Mab, sir, is quite an atheistical work.
Scott, sir, is not so poetical a writer. With the
works of Shakespeare I am not so well acquainted,
but he was a fine poet. Keats — John Keats, sir
— he was a very fine poet." With such references,
such trivial criticism, such loving parade of his

234 BEGGARS.

own knowledge, he would beguile the road, strid-
ing forward up-hill, his staff now clapped to the
ribs of his deep, resonant chest, now swinging in
the air with the remembered jauntiness of the
private soldier; and all the while his toes looking
out of his boots, and his shirt looking out of
his elbows, and death looking out of his smile,
and his big, crazy frame shaken by accesses of
cough.

He would often go the whole way home with
me: often to borrow a book, and that book al-
ways a poet. Off he would march, to continue
his mendicant rounds, with the volume slipped
into the pocket of his ragged coat; and although
he would sometimes keep it quite a while, yet it
came always back again at last, not much the
worse for its travels into beggardom. And in
this way, doubtless, his knowledge grew and his
glib, random criticism took a wider range. But
my library was not the first he had drawn upon:
at our first encounter, he was already brimful of
Shelley and the atheistical Queen Mab, and
"Keats — John Keats, sir." And I have often
wondered how he came by these acquirements;
just as I often wondered how he fell to be a
beggar. He had served through the Mutiny —
of which (like so many people) he could tell

BEGGARS. 235

practically nothing beyond the names of places,
and that it was "difficult work, sir," and very
hot, or that so-and-so was "a very fine com-
mander, sir." He was far too smart a man to
have remained a private; in the nature of things,
he must have won his stripes. And yet here he
was without a pension. When I touched on this
problem, he would content himself with diffidently
offering me advice. "A man should be very care-
ful when he is young, sir. If you'll excuse me
saying so, a spirited young gentleman like your-
self, sir, should be very careful. I was perhaps
a trifle inclined to atheistical opinions myself."
For (perhaps with a deeper wisdom than we are
inclined in these days to admit) he plainly
bracketed agnosticism with beer and skittles.

Keats — John Keats, sir — and Shelley were his
favourite bards. I cannot remember if I tried
him with Rossetti; but I know his taste to a hair,
and if ever I did, he must have doted on that
author. What took him was a richness in the
speech; he loved the exotic, the unexpected
word; the moving cadence of a phrase; a vague
sense of emotion (about nothing) in the very letters
of the alphabet: the romance of language. His
honest head was very nearly empty, his intellect
like a child's; and when he read his favourite

236 BEGGARS.

authors, he can almost never have understood
what he was reading. Yet the taste was not only
genuine, it was exclusive; I tried in vain to offer
him novels; he would none of them, he cared for
nothing but romantic language that he could not
understand. The case may be commoner than
we suppose. I am reminded of a lad who was
laid in the next cot to a friend of mine in a
public hospital, and who was no sooner installed
than he sent out (perhaps with his last pence)
for a cheap Shakespeare. My friend pricked up
his ears; fell at once in talk with his new neigh-
bour, and was ready, when the book arrived, to
make a singular discovery. For this lover of
great literature understood not one sentence out
of twelve, and his favourite part was that of which
he understood the least — the inimitable, mouih-
filling rodomontade of the ghost in Hamlet. It
was a bright day in hospital when my friend ex-
pounded the sense of this beloved jargon: a task
for which I am willing to believe my friend was
very fit, though I can never regard it as an easy
one. I know indeed a point or two, on which I
would gladly question Mr. Shakespeare, that lover
of big words, could he revisit the glimpses of the
moon, or could I myself climb backward to the
spacious days of Elizabeth. But in the second

BEGGARS. 237

case, I should most likely pretermit these ques-
tionings, and take my place instead in the pit
at the Blackfriars, to hear the actor in his
favourite part, playing up to Mr. Burbage, and
rolling out— as I seem to hear him — with a pon-
derous gusto —

"Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd."
What a pleasant chance, if we could go there in
a party! and what a surprise for Mr. Burbage,
when the ghost received the honours of the
evening !

As for my old soldier, like Mr. Burbage and
Mr. Shakespeare, he is long since dead; and now
lies buried, I suppose, and nameless and quite
forgotten, in some poor city graveyard. — But not
for me, you brave heart, have you been buried!
For me, you are still afoot, tasting the sun and
air, and striding southward. By the groves of
Comiston and beside the Hermitage of Braid, by
the Hunters' Tryst, and where the curlews and
plovers cry around Fairmilehead , I see and hear
you,- stalwartly carrying your deadly sickness,
cheerfully discoursing of uncomprehended poets.

II.

The thought of the old soldier recalls that of
another tramp, his counterpart. This was a little,

238 BEGGARS.

lean, and fiery man, with the eyes of a dog and
the face of a gipsy; whom I found one morning
encamped with his wife and children and his
grinder's wheel, beside the burn of Kinnaird. To
this beloved dell I went, at that time, daily; and
daily the knife-grinder and I (for as long as his
tent continued pleasantly to interrupt my little
wilderness) sat on two stones, and smoked, and
plucked grass, and talked to the tune of the
brown water. His children were mere whelps,
they fought and bit among the fern like vermin.
His wife was a mere squaw; I saw her gather
brush and tend the kettle, but she never ventured
to address her lord while I was present. The
tent was a mere gipsy hovel, like a sty for pigs.
But the grinder himself had the fine self-suf-
ficiency and grave politeness of the hunter and
the savage; he did me the honours of this dell,
which had been mine but the day before, took
me far into the secrets of his life, and used me
(I am proud to remember) as a friend.

Like my old soldier, he was far gone in the
national complaint. Unlike him, he had a vulgar
taste in letters; scarce flying higher than the story
papers; probably finding no difference, certainly
seeking none, between Tannahill and Burns; his
noblest thoughts/ whether of poetry or music,

BEGGARS. 239

adequately embodied in that somewhat obvious

ditty,

"Will ye gang, lassie, gang
To the braes o' Balquidder : "

— which is indeed apt to echo in the ears of
Scottish children, and to him, in view of his ex-
perience, must have found a special directness
of address. But if he had no fine sense of poetry
in letters, he felt with a deep joy the poetry of
life. You should have heard him speak of what
he loved; of the tent pitched beside the talking
water; of the stars overhead at night; of the blest
return of morning, the peep of day over the
moors, the awaking birds among the birches; how
he abhorred the long winter shut in cities; and
with what delight, at the return of the spring, he
once more pitched his camp in the living out-of-
doors. But we were a pair of tramps; and to
you, who are doubtless sedentary and a consistent
first-class passenger in life, he would scarce have
laid himself so open; — to you, he might have
been content to tell his story of a ghost — that of
a buccaneer with his pistols as he lived — whom
he had once encountered in a seaside cave near
Buckie; and that would have been enough, for
that would have shown you the mettle of the
man. Here was a piece of experience solidly

240 BEGGARS.

and livingly built up in words, here was a story
created, teres atque rotundus.

And to think of the old soldier, that lover of
the literary bards! He had visited stranger spots
than any seaside cave; encountered men more
terrible than any spirit; done and dared and suf-
fered jn that incredible, unsung epic of the
Mutiny War; played his part with the field force
of Delhi, beleaguering and beleaguered; shared
in that enduring, savage anger and contempt of
death and decency that, for long months to-
gether, bedevil'd and inspired the army; was
hurled to and fro in the battle-smoke of the as-
sault; was there, perhaps, where Nicholson fell;
was there when the attacking column, with hell
upon every side, found the soldier's enemy —
strong drink, and the lives of tens of thousands
trembled in the scale, and the fate of the flag of
England staggered. And of all this he had no
more to say than "hot work, sir," or "the army
suffered a great deal, sir," or "I believe General
Wilson, sir, was not very highly thought of in the
papers." His life was naught to him, the vivid
pages of experience quite blank: in words his
pleasure lay — melodious, agitated words — printed
words, about that which he had never seen and
was connatally incapable of comprehending. We

BEGGARS. 241

have here two temperaments face to face; both
untrained, unsophisticated, surprised (we may say)
in the egg; both boldly charactered: — that of the
artist, the lover and artificer of words; that of the
maker, the seeer, the lover and forger of ex-
perience. If the one had a daughter and the
other had a son, and these married, might not
some illustrious writer count descent from the
beggar- soldier and the needy knife-grinder?

III.

Every one lives by selling something, what-
ever be his right to it. The burglar sells at the
same time his own skill and courage and my
silver plate (the whole at the most, moderate
figure) to a Jew receiver. The bandit sells the
traveller an article of prime necessity: that travel-
ler's life. And as for the old soldier, who stands
for central mark to my capricious figures of eight,
he dealt in a specialty; for he was the only beggar
in the world who ever gave me pleasure for my
money. He had learned a school of manners in
the barracks and had the sense to cling to it, ac-
costing strangers with a regimental freedom, thank-
ing patrons with a merely regimental difference,
sparing you at once the tragedy of his position
and the embarrassment of yours. There was not

Across the Plains, etc* 1 6

242 BEGGARS.

one hint about him of the beggar's emphasis, the
outburst of revolting gratitude, the rant and cant,
the "God bless you, Kind, Kind gentleman,"
which insults the smallness of your alms by dis-
proportionate vehemence, which is so notably
false, which would be so unbearable if it were
true. I am sometimes tempted to suppose this
reading of the beggar's part, a survival of the
old days when Shakespeare was intoned upon the
stage and mourners keened beside the death-bed;
to think that we cannot now accept these strong
emotions unless they be uttered in the just note
of life; nor (save in the pulpit) endure these
gross conventions. They wound us, I am tempted
to say, like mockery; the high voice of keening
(as it yet lingers on) strikes in the face of sorrow
like a buffet; and the rant and cant of the staled
beggar stirs in us a shudder of disgust. But the
fact disproves these amateur opinions. The
beggar lives by his knowledge of the average man.
He knows what he is about when he bandages
his head, and hires and drugs a babe, and
poisons life with Poor Mary Ann or Long, long
ago; he knows what he is about when he loads
the critical ear and sickens the nice conscience
with intolerable thanks; they know what they are
about, he and his crew, when they pervade the

BEGGARS. 243

slums of cities, ghastly parodies of suffering, hate-
ful parodies of gratitude. This trade can scarce
be called an imposition; it has- been so blown
upon with exposures; it flaunts its fraudulence so
nakedly. We pay them as we pay those who
show us, in huge exaggeration, the monsters of
our drinking-water; or those who daily predict
the fall of Britain. We pay them for the pain
they inflict, pay them, and wince, and hurry on.
And truly there is nothing that can shake the
conscience like a beggar's thanks; and that polity
in which such protestations can be purchased for
a shilling, seems no scene for an honest man.

Are there, then, we may be asked, no genuine
beggars? And the answer is, Not one. My old
soldier was a humbug like the rest; his ragged
boots were, in the stage phrase, properties; whole
boots were given him again and again, and always
gladly accepted; and the next day, there he was
on the road as usual, with toes exposed. His
boots were his method; they were the man's
trade; without his boots he would have starved;
he did not live by charity, but by appealing to a
gross taste in the public, which loves the lime-
light on the actor's face, and the toes out of the
beggar's boots. There is a true poverty, which
no one sees: a false and merely mimetic poverty,

16"

244 BEGGARS.

which usurps its place and dress, and lives and
above all drinks, on the fruits of the usurpation.
The true poverty does not go into the streets; the
banker may rest assured, he has never put a
penny in its hand. The self-respecting poor beg
from each other; never from the rich. To live in
the frock-coated ranks of life, to hear canting
scenes of gratitude rehearsed for twopence, a man
might suppose that giving was a thing gone out
of fashion; yet it goes forward on a scale so great
as to fill me with surprise. In the houses of the
working class, all day long there will be a foot
upon the stair; all day long there will be a knock-
ing at the doors; beggars come, beggars go, with-
out stint, hardly with intermission, from morning
till night; and meanwhile, in the same city and
but a few streets off, the castles of the rich stand
unsummoned. Get the tale of any honest tramp,
you will find it was always the poor who helped
him; get the truth from any \7orkman who has
met misfortunes, it was always next door that he
would go for help, or only with such exceptions
as are said to prove a rule; look at the course of
the mimetic beggar, it is through the poor
quarters that he trails his passage, showing his
bandages to every window, piercing even to the
attics with his nasal song. Here is a remarkable

BEGGARS. 245

state of things in our Christian commonwealths,
that the poor only should be asked to give.

IV.

THERE is a pleasant tale of some worthless,
phrasing Frenchman, who was taxed with in-
gratitude: <ell faut savoir garder I'inde'pendance
du cceur/' cried he. I own I feel with him.
Gratitude without familiarity, gratitude otherwise
than as a nameless element in a friendship, is a
thing so near to hatred that I do not care to
split the difference. Until I find a man who is
pleased to receive obligations, I shall continue to
question the tact of those who are eager to confer
them. What an art it is, to give, even to our
nearest friends! and what a test of manners,, to
receive! How, upon either side, we smuggle
away the obligation, blushing for each other; how
bluff and dull we make the giver; how hasty,
how falsely cheerful, the receiver! And yet an
act of such difficulty and distress between near
friends, it is supposed we can perform to a total
stranger and leave -the man transfixed with grate-
ful emotions. The last thing you can do to a
man is to burthen him with an obligation, and it
is what we propose to begin with! But let us
not be deceived: unless he is totally degraded to

246 BEGGARS.

his trade, anger jars in his inside, and he grates
his teeth at our gratuity.

We should wipe two words from our vocabu-
lary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is
given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is
received from the hand of friendship, or it is re-
sented. We are all too proud to take a naked
gift: we must seem to pay it, if in nothing else,
then with the delights of our society. Here, then,
is the pitiful fix of the rich man; here is that
needle's eye in which he stuck already in the
days of Christ, and still sticks to-day, firmer, if
possible, than ever: that he has the money and
lacks the love which should make his money ac-
ceptable. Here and now, just as of old in Pales-
tine, he has the rich to dinner, it is with the rich
that he takes his pleasure: and when his turn
comes to be charitable, he looks in vain for a
recipient. His friends are not poor, they do not
want; the poor are not his friends, they will not
take. To whom is he to give? Where to find —
note this phrase — the Deserving Poor? Charity
is (what they call) centralised; offices are hired;
societies founded, with secretaries paid or unpaid :
the hunt of the Deserving Poor goes merrily for-
ward. I think it will take more than a merely
human secretary to disinter that character. What!

BEGGARS. 247

a class that is to be in want from no fault of its
own, and yet greedily eager to receive from
strangers; and to be quite respectable, and at the
same time quite devoid of self-respect; and play
the most delicate part of friendship, and yet never
be seen; and wear the form of man, and yet fly
in the face of all the laws of human nature: —
and all this, in the hope of getting a belly-god
Burgess through a needle's eye! O, let him
stick, by all means: and let his polity tumble in
the dust; and let his epitaph and all his literature
(of which my own works begin to form no in-
considerable part) be abolished even from the
history of man ! For a fool of this monstrosity of
dulness, there can be no salvation: and the fool
who looked for the elixir of life Was an angel of
reason to the fool who looks for the Deserving Poor !

V.

AND yet there is one course which the un-
fortunate gentleman may take. He may subscribe
to pay the taxes. There were the true charity,
impartial and impersonal, cumbering none with
obligation, helping all. There were a destination
for loveless gifts; there were the way to reach the
pocket of the deserving poor, and yet save the
time of secretaries! But, alas! there is no colour of

248 LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN.

romance in such a course; and people nowhere de-
mand the picturesque so much as in their virtues.

X.

LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN
WHO PROPOSES TO EMBRACE
THE CAREER OF ART.

WITH the agreeable frankness of youth, you
address me on a point of some practical im-
portance to yourself and (it is even conceivable)
of some gravity to the world: Should you or
should you not become an artist? It is one
which you must decide entirely for yourself; all
that I can do is to bring under your notice some
of the materials of that decision; and I will begin,
as I shall probably conclude also, by assuring you
that all depends on the vocation.

To know what you like is the beginning of
wisdom and of old age; Youth is wholly ex-
perimental. The essence and charm of that un-
quiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as
well as ignorance of life. These two unknowns
the young man brings together again and again,

LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN. 249

now in the airiest touch, now with a bitter hug;
now with exquisite pleasure, now with cutting
pain; but never with indifference, to which he is
a total stranger, and never with that near kinsman
of indifference, contentment. If he be a youth of
dainty senses or a brain easily heated, the in-
terest of this series of experiments grows upon
him out of all proportion to the pleasure he re-
ceives. It is not beauty that he loves, nor
pleasure that he seeks, though he may think so;
his design and his sufficient reward is to verify
his own existence and taste the variety of human
fate. To him, before the razor-edge of curiosity
is dulled, all that is not actual living and the hot
chase of experience wears a face of a disgusting
dryness difficult to recall in later days; or if there
be any exception — and here destiny steps in — it
is in those moments when, wearied or surfeited of
the primary activity of the senses, he calls up be-
fore memory the image of transacted pains and
pleasures. Thus it is that such an one shies
from all cut-and-dry professions, and inclines in-
sensibly toward that career of art which consists
only in the tasting and recording of experience.

This, which is not so much a vocation for art
as an impatience of all other honest trades, fre-
quently exists alone; and so existing, it will pass

25O LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN.

gently 'away in the course of years. Emphatically,
it is not to be regarded; it is not a vocation, but
a temptation; and when your father the other day
so fiercely and (in my view) so properly discouraged
your ambition, he was recalling not improbably
some similar passage in his own experience. For
the temptation is perhaps nearly as common as
the vocation is rare. But again we have vocations
which are imperfect; we have men whose minds
are bound up, not so much in any art, as in the
general ars artium and common base of all
creative work; who will now dip into painting, and
now study counterpoint, and anon will be inditing a
sonnet: all these with equal interest, all often with
genuine knowledge. And of this temper, when it
stands alone, I find it difficult to speak; but I
should counsel such an one to take to letters,
for in literature (which drags with so wide a
net) all his information may be found some
day useful, and if he should go on as he has
begun, and turn at last into the critic, he will
have learned to use the necessary tools. Lastly
we come to those vocations which are at
once decisive and precise; to the men who are
born with the love of pigments, the passion of
drawing, the gift of music, or the impulse to
create with words, just as other and perhaps the

LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN. 251

same men are born with the love of hunting, or
the sea, or horses, or the turning-lathe. These
are predestined; if a man love the labour of any
trade, apart from any question of success or fame,
the gods have called him. He may have the
general vocation too: he may have a taste for all
the arts, and I think he often has; but the mark
of his calling is this laborious partiality for one,
this inextinguishable zest in its technical successes,
and (perhaps above all) a certain candour of
mind, to take his very trifling enterprise with a
gravity that would befit the cares of empire, and
to think the smallest improvement worth accom-
plishing at any expense of time and industry.
The book, the statue, the sonata, must be gone
upon with unreasoning good faith and the un-
flagging spirit of children at their play. Is it
worth doing? — when it shall have occurred to any
artist to ask himself that question, it is implicitly
answered in the negative. It does not occur to
the child as he plays at being a pirate on the
dining-room sofa, nor to the hunter as he pursues
his quarry; and the candour of the one and the
ardour of the other should be united in the bosom
of the artist.

If you recognise in yourself some such deci-
sive taste, there is no room for hesitation: follow

252 LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN.

your bent And observe (lest I should too much
discourage you) that the disposition does not usu-
ally burn so brightly at the first, or rather not so
constantly. Habit and practice sharpen gifts; the
necessity of toil grows less disgusting, grows even
welcome, in the course of years; a small taste (if
it be only genuine) waxes with indulgence into an
exclusive passion. Enough, just now, if you can
look back over a fair interval, and see that your
chosen art has a little more than held its own
among the thronging interests of youth. Time
will do the rest, if devotion help it; and soon your
every thought will be engrossed in that beloved
occupation.

But even with devotion, you may remind me,
even with unfaltering and delighted industry,
many thousand artists spend their lives, if the re-
sult be regarded, utterly in vain: a thousand
artists, and never one work of art. But the vast
mass of mankind are incapable of doing anything
reasonably well, art among the rest. The worth-
less artist would not improbably have been a quite
incompetent baker. And the artist, even if he
does not amuse the public, amuses himself; so
that there will always be one man the happier for
his vigils. This is the practical side of" art: its
inexpugnable fortress for the true practitioner,

LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN. 253

The direct returns — the wages of the trade — are
small, but the indirect — the wages of the life —
are incalculably great. No other business offers
a man his daily bread upon such joyful terms.
The soldier and the explorer have moments of a
worthier excitement, but they are purchased by
cruel hardships and periods of tedium that beggar
language. In the life of the artist there need be
no hour without its pleasure. I take the author,
with whose career I am best acquainted; and it is
true he works in a rebellious material, and that
the act of writing is cramped and trying both to
the eyes and the temper; but remark him in his
study, when matter crowds upon him and words
are not wanting — in what a continual series of
small successes time flows by; with what a sense
of power as of one moving mountains, he marshals
his petty characters; with what pleasures, both of
the ear and eye, he sees his airy structure grow-
ing on the page; and how he labours in a craft
to which the whole material of his life is tribu-
tary, and which opens a door to all his tastes, his
loves, his hatreds, and his convictions, so that
what he writes is only what he longed to utter.
He may have enjoyed many things in this big,
tragic play-ground of the world; but what shall he
have enjoyed more fully than a morning of sue-

254 LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN.

cessful work? Suppose it ill paid: the wonder is
it should be paid at all. Other men pay, and
pay dearly, for pleasures less desirable.

Nor will the practice of art afford you pleasure
only; it affords besides an admirable training.
For the artist works entirely upon honour. The
public knows little or nothing of those merits in
the quest of which you are condemned to spend
the bulk of your endeavours. Merits of design,
the merit of first-hand energy, the merit of a cer-
tain cheap accomplishment which a man of the
artistic temper easily acquires — these they can re-
cognise, and these they value. But to those more
exquisite refinements of proficiency and finish,
which the artist so ardently desires and so keenly
feels, for which (in the vigorous words of Balzac)
he must toil "like a miner buried in a landslip,"
for which, day after day, he recasts and revises
and rejects — the gross mass of the public must
be ever blind. To those lost pains, suppose you
attain the highest pitch of merit, posterity may
possibly do justice; suppose, as is so probable,
you fail by even a hair's breadth of the highest,
rest certain they shall never be observed. Under
the shadow of this cold thought, alone in his
studio, the artist must preserve from day to day
his constancy to the ideal. It is this which makes

LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN. 255

his life noble; it is by this that the practice of his
craft strengthens and matures his character; it is
for this that even the serious countenance of the
great emperor was turned approvingly (if only for
a moment) on the followers of Apollo, and that
sternly gentle voice bade the artist cherish his
art.

And here there fall two warnings to be made.
First, if you are to continue to be a law to your-
self, you must beware of the first signs of laziness.
This idealism in honesty can only be supported
by perpetual effort; the standard is easily lowered,
the artist who says "It will do," is on the down-
ward path; three or four pot-boilers are enough
at times (above all at wrong times) to falsify a
talent, and by the practice of journalism a man
runs the risk of becoming wedded to cheap finish.
This is the danger on the one side; there is not
less upon the other. The consciousness of how
much the artist is (and must be) a law to himself,
debauches the small heads. Perceiving recondite
merits very hard to attain, making or swallowing
artistic formulae, or perhaps falling in love with
some particular proficiency of his own, many
artists forget the end of all art: to please. It is
doubtless tempting to exclaim against the ignorant
bourgeois; yet it should not be forgotten, it is he

256 LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN.

who is to pay us, and that (surely on the face of
it) for services that he shall desire to have per-
formed. Here also, if properly considered, there
is a question of transcendental honesty. To give
the public what they do not want, and yet expect
to be supported: we have there a strange preten-
sion, and yet not uncommon, above all with painters.
The first duty in this world is for a man to pay
his way; when that is quite accomplished, he
may plunge into what eccentricity he likes; but
emphatically not till then. Till then, he must pay
assiduous court to the bourgeois who carries the
purse. And if in the course of these capitulations
he shall falsify his talent, it can never have been
a strong one, and he will have preserved a better
thing than talent — character. Or if he be of a
mind so independent that he cannot stoop to this
necessity, one course is yet open: he can desist
from art, and follow some more manly way of life.
I speak of a more manly way of life, it is a
point on which I must be frank. To live by a
pleasure is not a high calling; it involves patronage,
however veiled; it numbers the artist, however
ambitious, along with dancing girls and billiard
markers. The French have a romantic evasion
for one employment, and call its practitioners the
Daughters of Joy. The artist is of the same

LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN. 257

family, he is of the Sons of Joy, chose his trade
to please himself, gains his livelihood by pleasing
others, and has parted with something of the
sterner dignity of man. Journals but a little while
ago declaimed against the Tennyson peerage; and
this Son of Joy was blamed for condescension
when he followed the example of Lord Lawrence
and Lord Cairns and Lord Clyde. The poet was
more happily inspired; with a better modesty he
accepted the honour; and anonymous journalists
have not yet (if I am to believe them) recovered
the vicarious disgrace to their profession. When
it comes to their turn, these gentlemen can do
themselves more justice; and I shall be glad to
think of it; for to my barbarian eyesight, even
Lord Tennyson looks somewhat out of place in
that assembly. There should be no honours for
the artist; he has already, in the practice of his
art, more than his share of the rewards of life;
the honours are pre-empted for other trades, less
agreeable and perhaps more useful.

But the devil in these trades of pleasing is to
fail to please. In ordinary occupations, a man
offers to do a certain thing or to produce a cer-
tain article with a merely conventional accomplish-
ment, a design in which (we may almost say) it
is difficult to fail. But the artist steps forth out

Across the Plains, etc. 1 7

258 LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN.

of the crowd and proposes to delight: an im-
pudent design, in which it is impossible to fail
without odious circumstances. The poor Daughter
of Joy, carrying her smiles and finery quite un-
regarded through the crowd, makes a figure which
it is impossible to recall without a wounding pity.
She is the type of the unsuccessful artist. The
actor, the dancer, and the singer must appear like
her in person, and drain publicly the cup of
failure. But though the rest of us escape this
crowning bitterness of the pillory, we all court in
essence the same humiliation. We all profess to
be able to delight. And how few of us are ! We
all pledge ourselves • to be able to continue to
delight. And the day will come to each, and
even to the most admired, when the ardour shall
have declined and the cunning shall be lost, and
he shall sit by his deserted booth ashamed. Then
shall he see himself condemned to do work for
which he blushes to take payment. Then (as if
his lot were not already cruel) he must lie ex-
posed to the gibes of the wreckers of the press,
who earn a little bitter bread by the condemna-
tion of trash which they have not read, and the
praise of excellence which they cannot under-
stand.

And observe that this seems almost the

LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN. 259

necessary end at least of writers. Les Blancs et
les Bleus (for instance) is of an order of merit
very different from Le Vicomte dt Bragelonne;
and if any gentleman can bear to spy upon the
nakedness of Castle Dangerous, his name I think
is Ham: let it be enough for the rest of us to
read of it (not without tears) in the pages of
Lockhart. Thus in old age, when occupation
and comfort are most needful, the writer must
lay aside at once his pastime and his breadwinner.
The painter indeed, if he succeed at all in en-
gaging the attention of the public, gains great
sums and can stand to his easel until a great age
without dishonourable failure. The writer has the
double misfortune to be ill-paid while he can
work, and to be incapable of working when he is
old. It is thus a way of life which conducts
directly to a false position.

For the writer (in spite of notorious examples
to the contrary) must look to be ill-paid. Tenny-
son and Montepin make handsome livelihoods;
but we cannot all hope to be Tennyson, and we
do not all perhaps desire to be Montepin. If you
adopt an art to be your trade, weed your mind
at the outset of all desire of money. What you
may decently expect, if you have some talent and
much industry, is such an income as a clerk will

17*

260 LETTER TO A YOUNG. GENTLEMAN.

earn with a tenth or perhaps a twentieth of your
nervous output. Nor have you the right to look
for more; in the wages of the life, not in the
wages of the trade, lies your reward; the work is
here the wages. It will be seen I have little
sympathy with the common lamentations of the
artist class. Perhaps they do not remember the
hire of the field labourer; or do. they think no
parallel will lie? Perhaps they have never ob-
served what Is the retiring allowance of a field
officer; or do they suppose their contributions to
the arts of pleasing more important than the ser-
vices of a colonel? Perhaps they forget on how
little Millet was content to live; or do they think,
because they have less genius, they stand excused
from the display of equal virtues? But upon one
point there should be no dubiety: if a man be
not frugal, he has no business in the arts. If he
be not frugal, he steers directly for that last tragic
scene of le vieux saltimbanque ; if he be not
frugal, he will find it hard to continue to be
honest. Some day, when the butcher is knocking
at the door, he may be tempted, he may be
obliged, to turn out and sell a slovenly piece of
work. If the obligation shall have arisen through
no wantonness of his own, he is even to be com-
mended; for words cannot describe how far more

LETTER Tb A YOUNG GENTLEMAN. 26 1

necessary it is that a man should support his
family, than that he should attain to — or preserve
— distinction in the arts. But if the pressure
comes through his own fault, he has stolen, and
stolen under trust, and stolen (which is the worst
of all) in such a way that no law can reach him.
And now you may perhaps ask me, if the
debutant artist is to have no thought of money,
and if (as is implied) he is to expect no honours
from the State, he may not at least look forward
to the delights of popularity? Praise, you will
tell me, is a savoury dish. And in so far as you
may mean the countenance of other artists, you
would put your finger on one of the most essential
and enduring pleasures of the career of art. But
in so far as you should have an eye to the com-
mendations of the public or the notice of the
newspapers, be sure you would but be cherishing
a dream. It is true that in certain esoteric journals
the author (for instance) is duly criticised, and
that he is often praised a great deal more than
he deserves, sometimes for qualities which he
prided himself on eschewing, and sometimes by
ladies and gentlemen who have denied themselves
the privilege of reading his work. But if a man
be sensitive to this wild praise, we must suppose
him equally alive to that which often accompanies

262 PULVIS ET UMBRA.

and always follows it — wild ridicule. A man may
have done well for years, and then he may fail;
he will hear of his failure. Or he may have
done well for years, and still do well, but the
critics may have tired of praising him, or there
may have sprung up some new idol of the in-
stant, some "dust a little gilt/' to whom they now
prefer to offer sacrifice. Here is the obverse and
the reverse of that empty and ugly thing called
popularity. Will any man suppose it worth the
gaining?

XI.
PULVIS ET UMBRA.

WE look for some reward of our endeavours
and are disappointed; not success, not happiness,
not even peace of conscience, crowns our ineffectual
efforts to do well. Our frailties are invincible, our
virtues barren; the battle goes sore against us to
the going down of 'the sun. The canting moralist
tells us of right and wrong; and we look abroad,
even on the face of our small earth, and find them
change with every climate, and no country where
some action is not honoured for a virtue and none

PULVIS ET UMBRA. 263

where it is not branded for a vice; and we look
in our experience, and find no vital congruity in
the wisest rules, but at the best a municipal fit-
ness. It is not strange if we are tempted to de-
spair of good. We ask too much. Our religions
and moralities have been trimmed to flatter us,
till they are all emasculate and sentimentalised,
and only please and weaken. Truth is of a
rougher strain. In the harsh face of life, faith
can read a bracing gospel. The human race is
a thing more ancient than the ten commandments;
and the bones and revolutions of the Kosmos, in
whose joints we are but moss and fungus, more
ancient still.

I.

OF the Kosmos in the last resort, science
reports many doubtful things and all of them
appalling. There seems no substance to this
solid globe on which we stamp: nothing but
symbols and ratios. Symbols and ratios carry
us and bring us forth and beat us down; gravity
that swings the incommensurable suns and worlds
through space, is but a figment varying inversely
as the squares of distances; and the suns and
worlds themselves, imponderable figures of ab-
straction, NH3 and H3O. Consideration dares not

264 PULVIS ET UMBRA.

dwell upon this view; that way madness lies; science
carries us into zones of speculation, where there is
no habitable city for the mind of man.

But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as
our senses give it us. We behold space sown with
rotatory islands, suns and worlds and the shards
and wrecks of systems: some, like the sun, still
blazing; some rotting, like the earth; others, like
the moon, stable in desolation. All of these we
take to be made of something we call matter: a
thing which no analysis can help us to conceive;
to whose incredible properties no familiarity can
reconcile our minds. This stuff, when not purified
by the lustration of fire, rots uncleanly into some-
thing we call life; seized through all its atoms
with a pediculous malady; swelling in tumours
that become independent, sometimes even (by an
abhorrent prodigy) locomotory; one splitting into
millions, millions cohering into one, as the malady
proceeds through varying stages. This vital
putrescence of the dust, used as we are to it, yet
strikes us with occasional disgust, and the pro-
fusion of worms in a piece of ancient turf, or the
air of a marsh darkened with insects, will some-
times check our breathing so that we aspire for
cleaner places. But none is clean: the moving
sand is infected with lice; the pure spring, where

PULVIS ET UMBRA. 265

it bursts out of the mountain, is a mere issue of
worms; even in the hard rock the crystal is
forming.

In two main shapes this eruption covers the
countenance of the earth: the animal and the
vegetable: one in some degree the inversion of
the other: the second rooted to the spot; the first
coming detached out of its natal mud, and scurry-
ing abroad with the myriad feet of insects or
towering into the heavens on the wings of birds:
a thing so inconceivable that, if it be well con-
sidered, the heart stops. To what passes with
the anchored vermin, we have little clue: doubt-
less they have their joys and sorrows, their delights
and killing agonies: it appears not how. But of
the locomotory, to which we ourselves belong, we
can tell more. These share with us a thousand
miracles : the miracles of sight, of hearing, of the
projection of sound, things that bridge space; the
miracles of memory and reason, by which the
present is conceived, and when it is gone, its
image kept living in the brains of man and brute;
the miracle of reproduction, with its imperious
desires and staggering consequences. And to put
the last touch upon this mountain mass of the
revolting and the inconceivable, all these prey
upon each other, lives tearing other lives in pieces,

266 PULVIS ET UMBRA.

cramming them inside themselves, and by that
summary process, growing fat: the vegetarian, the
whale, perhaps the tree, not less than the lion of
the desert; for the vegetarian is only the eater of
the dumb.

Meanwhile our rotatory island loaded with
predatory life, and more drenched with blood,
both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied
ship, scuds through space with unimaginable speed,
and turns alternate cheeks to the reverberation of
a blazing world, ninety million miles away.

II.

WHAT a monstrous spectre is this man, the
disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate
feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feed-
ing, growing, bringing forth small copies of him-
self; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with
eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing to
set children screaming; — and yet looked at nearlier,
known as his fellows know him, how surprising
are his attributes! Poor soul, here for so little,
cast among so many hardships, filled with desires
so incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely
surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably con-
demned to prey upon his fellow lives: who should
have blamed him had he been of a piece with his

PULVIS ET UMBRA. 267

destiny and a being merely barbarous? And we
look and behold him instead filled with imperfect
virtues : infinitely childish, often admirably valiant,
often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his
momentary life, to debate of right and wrong and
the attributes of the deity; rising up to do battle
for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his
friends and his mate with cordial affection; bring-
ing forth in pain, rearing with long-suffering
solicitude, his young. To touch the heart of his
mystery, we find in him one thought, strange to
the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the
thought of something owing to himself, to his
neighbour, to his God: an ideal of decency, to
which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of
shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not
stoop. The design in most men is one of con-
formity; here and there, in picked natures, it
transcends itself and soars on the other side,
arming martyrs with independence; but in all, in
their degrees, it is a bosom thought: — Not in man
alone, for we trace it in dogs and cats whom we
know fairly well, and doubtless some similar point
of honour sways the elephant, the oyster, and the
louse, of whom we know so little: — But in man,
at least, it sways with so complete an empire that
merely selfish things come second, even with the

268 PULVIS ET UMBRA.

selfish: that appetites are starved, fears are con-
quered, pains supported; that almost the dullest
shrinks from the reproof of a glance, although it
were a child's; and all but the most cowardly
stand amid the risks of war; and the more noble,
having strongly conceived an act as due to their
ideal, affront and embrace death. Strange enough
if, with their singular origin and perverted practice,
they think they are to be rewarded in some future
life: stranger still, if they are persuaded of the
contrary, and think this blow, which they solicit,
will strike them senseless for eternity. I shall be
Aeminded what a tragedy of misconception and
misconduct man at large presents: of organised
injustice, cowardly violence and treacherous crime;
and of the damning imperfections of the best.
They cannot be too darkly drawn. Man is in-
deed marked for failure in his efforts to do right.
But where the best consistently miscarry, how
tenfold more remarkable that all should continue
to strive; and surely we should find it both touch-
ing and inspiriting, that in a field from which
success is banished, our race should not cease to
labour.

If the first view of this creature, stalking in
his rotatory isle, be a thing to shake the courage
of the stoutest, on this nearer sight, he startles us

PULVIS Et UMBRA. 269

with an admiring wonder. It matters not where
we look, under what climate we observe him, in
what stage of society, in what depth of ignorance,
burthened with what erroneous morality; by camp-
fires in Assiniboia, the snow powdering his shoulders,
the wind plucking his blanket, as he sits, passing
the ceremonial calumet and uttering his grave
opinions like a Roman senator; in ships at sea,
a man inured to hardship and vile pleasures, his
brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern and a bedizened
trull who sells herself to rob him, and he for all
that simple, innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child,
constant to toil, brave to drown, for others; in the
slums of cities, moving among indifferent millions
to mechanical employments, without hope of
change in the future, with scarce a pleasure in
the present, and yet true to his virtues, honest up
to his lights, kind to his neighbours, tempted per-
haps in vain by the bright gin-palace, perhaps
long-suffering with the drunken wife that ruins
him; in India (a woman this time) kneeling with
broken cries and streaming tears, as she drowns
her child in the sacred river; in the brothel, the
discard of society, living mainly on strong drink,
fed with affronts, a fool, a thief, the comrade of
thieves, and even here keeping the point of honour
and the touch of pity, often repaying the world's

PULVIS ET UMBRA.

scorn with service, often standing firm upon a
scruple, and at a certain cost, rejecting riches: —
everywhere some virtue cherished or affected,
everywhere some decency of thought and car-
riage, everywhere the ensign of man's ineffectual
goodness: — ah! if I could show you this! if I
could show you these men and women, all the
world over, in every stage of history, under every
abuse of error, under every circumstance of failure,
without hope, without help, without thanks, still
obscurely righting the lost fight of virtue, still
clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to
some rag of honour, the poor jewel of their souls!
They may seek to escape, and yet they cannot;
it is not alone their privilege and glory, but their
doom; they are condemned to some nobility; all
their lives long, the desire of good is at their
heels, the implacable hunter.

Of all earth's meteors, here at least is the
most strange and consoling: that this ennobled
lemur, this hair-crowned bubble of the dust, this
inheritor of a few years and sorrows, should yet
deny himself his rare delights, and add to his
frequent pains, and live for an ideal, however mis-
conceived. Nor can we stop with man. A new
doctrine, received with screams a little while ago
by canting moralists, and still not properly worked

PULVIS ET UMBRA. 2JI

into the body of our thoughts, lights us a step
farther into the heart of this rough but noble
universe. For nowadays the pride of man denies
in vain his kinship with the original dust. He
stands no longer like a thing apart. Close at his
heels we see the dog, prince of another genus:
and in him too, we see dumbly testified the same
cultus of an unattainable ideal, the same con-
stancy in failure. Does it stop with the dog? We
look at our feet where the ground is -blackened
with the swarming ant : a creature so small, so far
from us in the hierarchy of brutes, that we can
scarce trace and scarce comprehend his doings;
and here also, in his ordered polities and rigorous
justice, we see confessed the law of duty and the
fact of individual sin. Does it stop, then, with
the ant? Rather this desire of well-doing and this
doom of frailty run through all the grades of life:
rather is this earth, from the frosty top of Everest
to the next margin of the internal fire, one stage
of ineffectual virtues and one temple of pious tears
and perseverance. The whole creation groaneth
and travaileth together. It is the common and
the god-like law of life. The browsers, the biters,
the barkers, the hairy coats of field and forest,
the squirrel in the oak, the thousand -footed
creeper in the dust, as they share with us the

2/2 PULVIS ET UMBRA.

gift of lite, share with us the love of an ideal:
strive like us — like us are tempted to grow weary
of the struggle — to do well; like us receive at
times unmerited refreshment, visitings of support,
returns of courage; and are condemned Jike us to
be crucified between that double law of the mem-
bers and the will. Are they like us, I wonder, in
the timid hope of some reward, some sugar with
the drug? do they, too, stand aghast at un-
rewarded-virtues, at the sufferings of those whom,
in our partiality, we take to be just, and the
prosperity of such as, in our blindness, we call
wicked? It may be, and yet God knows what
they should look for. Even while they look, even
while they repent, the foot of man treads them
by thousands in the dust, the yelping hounds
burst upon their trail, the bullet speeds, the
knives are heating in the den of the vivisec-
tionist; or the dew falls, and the generation of a
day is blotted out. For these are creatures, com-
pared with whom our weakness is strength, Qur
ignorance wisdom, our brief span eternity.

And as we dwell, we living things, in our isle
of terror and under the imminent hand of death,
God forbid it should be man the erected, the
reasoner, the wise in his own eyes — God forbid it
should be man that wearies in well-doing that

A CHRISTMAS SERMON. 273

despairs of unrewarded effort, or utters the lan-
guage of complaint. Let it be enough for faith,
that the whole creation groans in mortal frailty,
strives with unconquerable constancy: Surely not
all in vain.

XII.
A CHRISTMAS SERMON.

BY the time this paper appears, I shall have
been talking for twelve months;* and it is thought
I should take my leave in a formal and season-
able manner. Valedictory eloquence is rare, and
death-bed sayings have not often hit the mark of
the occasion. Charles Second, wit and sceptic, a
man whose life had been one long lesson in
human incredulity, an easy-going comrade, a
manoeuvring king — remembered and embodied
all his wit and scepticism along with more than
his usual good humour in the famous "I am
afraid, gentlemen, I am an unconscionable time
a-dying."

* *>. in the pages of Scribner's Magazine (1888).
. Across the Plains % etc* 1 8

274 A CHRISTMAS SERMON,

I.

AN unconscionable time a-dying — there is the
picture ("I am afraid, gentlemen,") pf your life
and of mine. The sands run out, and the hours
are "numbered and imputed," and the days go
by; and when the last of these finds us, we have
been a long time dying, and what else? The
very length is something, if we reach that hour of
separation undishonoured; and to have lived at
all is doubtless (in the soldierly expression) to
have served. There is a tale in Tacitus of how
the veterans mutinied in the German wilderness;
of how they mobbed Germanicus, clamouring to
go home; and of how, seizing their general's hand,
these old, war-worn exiles passed his finger along
their toothless gums. Sunt lacrymce rerum: this
was the most eloquent of the songs of Simeon.
And when a man has lived to a fair age, he
bears his marks of service. He may have never
been remarked upon the breach at the head of
the army; at least he shall have lost his teeth on
the camp bread.

The idealism of serious people in this age of
ours is of a noble character. It never seems to
them that they have served enough; they have a
fine impatience of their virtues. It were perhaps

A CHRISTMAS SERMON. 275

more modest to be singly thankful that we are no
worse. It is not only our enemies, those desperate
characters — it is we ourselves who know not what
we do; — thence springs the glimmering hope that
perhaps we do better than we think: that to
scramble through this random business with
hands reasonably clean, to have played the part
of a man or woman with some reasonable ful-
ness, to have often resisted the diabolic, and at
the end to be still resisting it, is for the poor
human soldier to have done right well. To ask
to see some fruit of our endeavour is but a
transcendental way of serving for reward; and
what we take to be contempt of self is only greed
of hire.

And again if we require so much of ourselves,
shall we not require much of others? If we do
not genially judge our own deficiencies, is it not
to be feared we shall be even stern to the tres-
passes of others? And he who (looking back upon
his own life) can see no more than that he has
been unconscionably long a- dying, will he not be
tempted to think his neighbour unconscionably
long of getting hanged? It is probable that nearly
all who think of conduct at all, think of it too
much; it is certain we all think too much of sin.
We are not damned for doing wrong, but for not

18*

276 A CHRISTMAS SERMON.

doing right; Christ would never hear of negative
morality; thou shalt was ever his word, with which
he superseded thou shalt not. To make our idea
of morality centre on forbidden acts is < to defile
the imagination and to introduce into our judg-
ments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto.
If a thing is wrong for us, we should not dwell
upon the thought of it; or we shall soon dwell
upon it with inverted pleasure. If we cannot
drive it from our minds — one thing of two: either
our creed is in the wrong and we must more in-
dulgently remodel it; or else, if our morality be
in the right, we are criminal lunatics and should
place our persons in restraint. A mark of such
un wholesomely divided minds is the passion for
interference with others: the Fox without the Tail
was of this breed, but had (if his biographer is
to be trusted) a certain antique civility now out
of date. A man may have a flaw, a weakness,
that unfits him for the duties of life, that spoils
his temper, that threatens his integrity, or that
betrays him into cruelty. It has to be conquered;
but it must never be suffered to engross his
thoughts. The true duties lie all upon the farther
side, and must be attended to with a whole mind
so soon as this preliminary clearing of the decks
has been effected. In order that he may be kind

A CHRISTMAS SERMON. 277

and honest, it may be needful he should become
a total abstainer; let him become so then, and
the next day let him forget the circumstance.
Trying to be kind and honest will require all his
thoughts; a mortified appetite is never a wise
companion; in so far as he has had to mortify an
appetite, he will still be the worse man; and of
such an one a great deal of cheerfulness will be
required in judging life, and a great deal of
humility in judging others.

It may be argued again that dissatisfaction
with our life's endeavour springs in some degree
from dulness. We require higher tasks, because
we do not recognise the height of those we have.
Trying to be kind and honest seems an affair too
simple and too inconsequential for gentlemen of
our heroic mould; we had rather set ourselves to
something bold, arduous, and conclusive; we had
rather found a schism or suppress a heresy, cut
off a hand or mortify an appetite. But the task
before us, which is to co-endure with our existence,
is rather one of microscopic fineness, and the
heroism required is that of patience. There is no
cutting of the Gordian knots of life; each must be
smilingly unravelled.

To be honest, to be kind — to earn a little
and to. spend a little less, to make upon the

278 A CHRISTMAS SERMOtf.

whole a family happier for his presence, to
renounce when that shall be necessary and not
be embittered, to keep a .few friends but these
without capitulation — above all, on the same grim
condition, to keep friends with himself — here is a
task for all that a man has of fortitude and
delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would
ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should
look in such an enterprise to be successful. There
is indeed one element in human destiny that not
blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we
are intended to do, we are not intended to suc-
ceed; failure is the fate allotted. It is so in every
art and study; it is so above all in the continent
art of living well. Here is a pleasant thought for
the year's end or for the end of life: Only self-
deception will be satisfied, and there need be no
despair for the despairer.

II.

BUT Christmas is not only the mile-mark of
another year, moving us to thoughts of self-
examination: it is a season, from all its associa-
tions, whether domestic or religious, suggesting
thoughts of joy. A man dissatisfied with his
endeavours is a man tempted to sadness. And
in the midst of the winter, when his life runs

A CHRISTMAS SERMON. 279

lowest and he is reminded of the empty chairs
of his beloved, it is well he should be condemned
to this fashion of the smiling face. Noble dis-
appointment, noble self-denial, are not to be ad-
mired, not even to be pardoned, if they bring
bitterness. It is one thing to enter the kingdom
of heaven maim; another to maim yourself and
stay without And the kingdom of heaven is of
the childlike, of those who are easy to please,
who love and who give pleasure. Mighty men
of their hands, the smiters and the builders and
the judges, have lived long and done sternly and
yet preserved this lovely character; and among
our carpet interests and twopenny concerns, the
shame were indelible if we should lose it. Gentle-
ness and cheerfulness, these come before all
morality; they are the perfect duties. And it is
the trouble with moral men that they have neither
one nor other. It was the moral man, the Pharisee,
whom Christ could not away with. If your morals
make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong.
I do not say "give them up," for they may be all
you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest
they should spoil the lives of better and simpler
people.

A strange temptation attends upon man: to
keep his eye on pleasures, even when he will not

2 So A CHRISTMAS SERMON.

share in them; to aim all his morals against
them. This very year a lady (singular icono-
clast!) proclaimed a crusade against dolls; and
the racy sermon against lust is a feature of the
age. I venture to call such moralists insincere.
At any excess or perversion of a natural appetite,
their lyre sounds of itself with relishing denuncia-
tions; but for all displays of the truly diabolic —
envy, malice, the mean lie, the mean silence, the
calumnious truth, the backbiter, the petty tyrant,
the peevish poisoner of family life — their standard
is quite different These are wrong, they will
admit, yet somehow not so wrong; there is no
zeal in their assault on them, no secret element
of gusto warms up the sermon; it is for things
not wrong in themselves that they reserve the
choicest of their indignation, A man may naturally
disclaim all moral kinship with the Reverend Mr.
Zola or the hobgoblin old lady of _the dolls; for
these are gross and naked instances. And yet in
each of us some ' similar element resides. The
sight of a pleasure in which we cannot or else
will not share moves us to a particular impatience.
It may be because we are envious, or because we
are sad, or because we dislike noise and romping
— being so refined, or because — being so philo-
sophic— we have an overweighing sense of life's

A CHRISTMAS SERMON. 28 I

gravity: at least, as we go on in years, we are all
tempted to frown upon our neighbour's pleasures.
People are nowadays so fond of resisting tempta-
tions; here is one to be resisted. They are fond
of self-denial ; here is a propensity that cannot be
too peremptorily denied. There is an idea abroad
among moral people that they should make their
neighbours good. One person I have to make
good: myself. But my duty to my neighbour is
much more nearly expressed by saying that I
have to make him happy — if I may.

III.

HAPPINESS and goodness, according to canting
moralists, stand in the relation of effect and cause.
There was never anything less proved or less
probable: our happiness is never in our own
hands; we inherit our constitution; we stand buffet
among friends and enemies; we may be so built
as to feel a sneer or an aspersion with unusual
keenness, and so circumstanced as to be unusually
exposed to them; we may have nerves very sen-
sitive to pain, and be afflicted with a disease very
painful. Virtue will not help us, and it is not
meant to help us. It is not even its own reward,
except for the self-centred and — I had almost
said — the unamiable. No man can pacify his

282 A CHRISTMAS SERMON.

conscience; if quiet be what he want, he shall do
better to let that organ perish from disuse. And
to avoid the penalties of the law, and the minor
capitis diminutio of social ostracism, is an affair
of wisdom — of cunning, if you will — and not of
virtue.

In his own life, then, a man is not to expect
happiness, only to profit by it gladly when it shall
arise; he is on duty here; he knows not how or
why, and does not need to know; he knows not
for what hire, and must not ask. Somehow or
other, though he does not know what goodness
is, he must try to be good; somehow or other,
though he cannot tell what will do it, he must
try to give happiness to others. And no doubt
there comes in here a frequent clash of duties.
How far is he to make his neighbour happy?
How far must he respect that smiling face, so
easy to cloud, so hard to brighten again? And
how far, on the other side, is he bound to be his
brother's keeper and the prophet of his own
morality? How far must he resent evil?

The difficulty is that we have little guidance;
Christ's sayings on the point being hard to recon-
cile with each other, and (the most of them)
hard to accept. But the truth of his teachirg
would seem to be this: in our own person and

A CHRISTMAS SERMON. 283

fortune, we should be ready to accept and to
pardon all; it is our cheek we are to turn, our
coat that we are to give away to the man who
has taken our cloak. But when another's face is
buffeted, perhaps a little of the lion will become
us best. That we are to suffer others to be in-
jured, and stand by, is not conceivable and surely
not desirable. Revenge? says Bacon, is a kind of
wild justice; its judgments at least are delivered
by an insane judge; and in our own quarrel we
can see nothing truly and do nothing wisely. But
in the quarrel of our neighbour, let us be more
bold. One person's happiness is as sacred as
another's; when we cannot defend both, let us
defend one with a stout heart. It is only in so
far as we are doing this, that we have any right
to interfere: the defence of B is our only ground
of action against A. A has as good a right to
go to the devil, as we to go to glory; and neither
knows what he does.

The truth is that all these interventions and
denunciations and militant mongerings of moral
half-truths, though they be sometimes needful,
though they are often enjoyable, do yet belong
to an inferior grade of duties. Ill-temper and
envy and revenge find here an arsenal of pious
disguises; this is the playground of inverted lusts.

284 A CHRISTMAS SERMON.

With a little more patience and a little less temper,
a gentler and wiser method might be found in
almost every case; and the knot that we cut by
some fine heady quarrel-scene in private life, or,
in public affairs, by some denunciatory act against
what we are pleased to call our neighbour's vices,
might yet have been unwoven by the hand X>f
sympathy.

IV.

To look back upon the past year, and see
how little we have striven and to what small
purpose; and how often we have been cowardly
and hung back, or temerarious and rushed un-
wisely in; and how every day and all day long
we have transgressed the law of kindness; — it
may seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of
these discoveries, a certain consolation resides.
Life is not designed to minister to a man's
vanity. He goes upon his long business most of
the time with a hanging head, and all the time
like a blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures
as it is — so that to see the day break or the
moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the
dinner-call when he is hungry, fills him with
surprising joys — this world is yet for him no
abiding city. Friendships fall through, health

A CHRISTMAS SERMON. 285

fails, weariness assails him; year after year, he
must thumb the hardly varying record of his
own weakness and folly. It is a friendly process
of detachment. When the time comes that he
should go, there need be few illusions left about
himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a
little, failed much: — surely.. that may be his
epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed. Nor
will he complain at the summons which calls a
defeated soldier from the field: defeated, ay, if
he were Paul or Marcus Aurelius! — but if there
is still one inch of fight in his old spirit, undis-
honoured. The faith which sustained him in his
life-long blindness and life-long disappointment
will scarce even be required in this last formality
of laying down his arms. Give him a march
with his old bones; there, out of the glorious sun-
coloured earth, out of the day and the dust and
the ecstasy — there goes another Faithful Failure!
From a recent book of verse, where there is
more than one such beautiful and manly poem,
I take this memorial piece: it says, better than I
can, what I love to think; let it be our parting word.

"A late lark twitters from the quiet sides;
And from the west,
Where the sun, his day's work ended,
Lingers as in content,

286 A CHRISTMAS SERMON.

There falls on the old, gray city
An influence luminous and serene,
A shining peace.

"The smoke ascends
In a rosy-and-golden haze. The spires
Shine, and are changed. In the valley
Shadows rise. The lark sings on. The sun,
Closing his benediction,
Sinks, and the darkening air
Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night-
Night, with her train of stars
And her great gift of sleep.

"So be my passing!

My task accomplished and the long day done,
My wages taken, and in my heart
Some late lark singing,
Let me be gathered to the quiet west,
The sundown splendid and serene,
Death."*

* From A Book of Verses by William Ernest Henley.
D. Nutt, 1888.

[1888.]

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