A 921,404
PAPERS
ROBERT
BEATCHFORD
THE NUNQUAM
PAPERS
828
B6448 nu
WALTER
R. BLATCHFORD

:
OF
University of
Michigan
Libraries
#
1817
ARTES SCIENTIA VERITAS
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
1
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
BY
ROBERT BLATCHFORD.
1895:
“CLARION" Newspaper Co., 72, FLEET STREET, London, E.C.
828
B6448 nu

Stacks
fir
Katanka
1934-390704
5-18-641
CONTENTS.
PAGE
ARTIST AND CYNIC
9
NOBODY........
15
THE LUCKY SHILLING
20
ZELIE.....
27
NAILROD
41
.....
UNEMPLOYED
SOME OLD WAR-DOGS...
THE INDIAN MUTINY
WATERS..
THE OLD MAN OF THE SEA
53
57
65
73
78
THE OLD OAK ROOM
84
THE PRESUMPTION OF YUSSUF......
87
THE DEAD SEASON
91
.....
THE CHILDREN
94
SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN.........
99
DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN..
103
HADDON HALL…………..
107
THE GOOD OLD TIMES
115
A DREAM CITY
127
A TALE OF A DRAGON..
136
IN WONDERLAND
141
ON HEROES
148
A SPRING RAMBLE
153
THE MERRY BARD...
163
OLD COMIC SONGS
167
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
THE ARTIST AND THE CYNIC.
I'
T was the end of a winter's day in Dullborough. In the
west, behind the workhouse roofs, the setting sun had
left some smears of coppery red upon the smoky sky.
The dirty snow upon the dirty trees and narrow, flat
fields looked dirtier still in the sallow twilight. A few
draggle-plumed starlings and mangy sparrows were quarrel-
ling in the Artist's patch of garden for the remnants of
the crumbs he had thrown there. Along the main road,
where the first lamps blinked feebly through the mist, the
tramcar jingled on its way, the tired horses panting and
steaming as they pawed the slippery stones. Eastwards
hung a great cloud of tawny mist-the smoke canopy under
which the great town wrought and sweated and chaffered
and choked, with all its joy and grief, and folly and shame;
with love struggling for life and heroism dying hard, in the
tragi-comic way common to such thriving centres.
The Artist stood before the clear red fire in his sparely-
furnished room, his hands thrust into the pockets of his
canvas jacket, a black clay pipe between his teeth, his cheek
still flushed, his eyes still bright with the excitement of the
work he had just relinquished, the work of painting the
figure piece now standing on the easel.
The Cynic lounged in a basket chair, trim, spruce, well
dressed, and supercilious, holding in his gloved left hand
a fragrant Havannah. He was peering, in the dim light, at
the picture. The Artist was looking through the window
at the shadowy outlines of the pollard oaks against the
darkening sky.
"You've been at it all day," said the Cynic.
"Yes."
10
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
i!
"Dined?"
"Bread and cheese and tea."
"How many hours?"
66
Ten, so far."
"How many more to-night?"
"Five or six-or so."
"That is what you call a day's work?"
"So."
"How many days a week?"
"Seven."
"Why do you work so hard?”
"I don't know."
"Pooh. You have a motive. What is it? Money?
I doubt if you'll ever make much."
"I shall never make much."
"But you go on, on the chance. Eh?"
"I don't want money."
"H'm. Then you want praise."
"I detest praise.
""
Ho, ho! Then what induces you to work? What is
the attraction?”
"The work itself."
"And where is the reward?
"In the work."
"What a humbug you are.
be expressed in one word."
"Yes: Art.”
"No: Vanity."
35
"You are morally wall-eyed.”
All this cant about art may
“You have a moral squint. If you were the only man in
the world would you go on painting?"
"Perhaps not."
“No.
work."
"
""
Because there would be no one to admire your
'Suppose we say there would be no one to derive
pleasure from the work."
"Do you mean to say that is your sole motive; to give
pleasure to others?"
"No. I think not. I think I paint to please myself."
"Do you please yourself?"
"I hardly know. I think, as I said just now, the
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
11
pleasure is in the work. I mean in the effort to do good
work. When it is done it never gives me pleasure. I
cannot enjoy the few merits for grieving over the many
faults."
"Then I understand that the process of the work is a
process of false hopes, and the inevitable result disappoint-
ment."
"I'm afraid that's true."
"Then you actually tell me that you waste all your time
and powers in chasing a light which you know to be a will-
o'-the-wisp, and which is sure to land you in a bog.
"}
No; not quite that. I'm not good at talking. Don't
get any practice at it, and the question is difficult. There
seems to be a power-I don't know what-an impelling
power from within-not an attracting power from without
I feel as if something seems to tell me there is a work-I
cannot say what work-that must be done: that can be done;
that I am obliged to try to do."
"This sounds like mysticism, and mysticism is nothing
but muddy thinking or charlatanism."
"No. There is something to tell, something to express.
The hand ought to mould or the tongue to speak some
message."
"Bunthorne."
"No. Light me the gas. Now; look at this figure. It
is an old peasant woman carrying a faggot of sticks."
(6
Very good. Very good indeed."
"Bah! Tell me what you see."
"An old woman carrying sticks."
"Does it suggest nothing?"
"It suggests corns, bunions, chalk-stones, rheumatism,
asthma, boredom, weak tea, a damp cottage, and dinner in
a basin."
"Nothing else?"
"There's a certain sentiment about it; but it is false."
"Why false?'
"Because no doubt the old woman is very prosy and un-
interesting. Takes snuff, has a weakness for gin, croaks
continually about her ailments, and talks scandal about the
neighbours."
"Well?"
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THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
"I don't believe in any romantic humbug. The fairy
matchseller and the old saint with the bundle of sticks are
frauds. You fellows don't tell the truth. You paint a
poppy for its colour, and ignore the poison-and the smell."
"That is better than concentrating the mind upon the
smell and neglecting the colour."
"All idealism is lies."
"All cynicism is brutish. Return to the picture. There
is something noble, something beautiful, something pathetic
in old age, in poverty, in labour, even in the follies and the
sins of human nature. Every old woman is a poem and a
tragedy. I cannot put my idea into words. I cannot even
put it on the canvas; but I have tried."
((
Suppose you succeed. What then?
"The message will be given.” ·
"But it can only be read by those who know it. To the
great mass of mankind it will be an unintelligible hiero-
glyphic. The man who already feels what you feel will see
the tragedy and the poem.
The other man will see an
old woman carrying sticks."
66
Well, it may give some pleasure."
""
'Why, you humbug, your object is to give pain.
Besides, has not this sort of thing been done by Millet?
"Yes."
"Do you hope to do it better? ”
"Never half so well."
"Did Millet give the 'Message'?'
"No man ever gave it fully."
>>
Then, if Millet failed, and you know he got nearer than
you will ever get, you must see that you cannot succeed.
Under these circumstances, you must be an ass to try."
"I am an ass. I know that."
(C
My dear fellow, let us clear our minds of cant. You
paint, partly from vanity, but partly for amusement, as a
child builds sand castles or blows bubbles. But the child
has more sense than you have. He knows that his bubbles
will break, and that his castle will be washed away by the
tide. You flatter yourself that your trifles will endure, and
will help to improve the world.'
"Your figure is not a fair one. You see an organ-
grinder in the street. His music is not very fine, his
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
13
character is possibly bad, but he is useful.
Watch the little
gutter-snipes dance round him. He is their quadrille
party, and grand opera; he makes their feet dance, and
their hearts dance with them. He does not improve or
elevate anybody. But he pleases a lot of poor little
wretches whose lives are gloomy."
C
"Most eloquent. But the organ-man claims to have no
message. If you put yourself on a level with the nigger
minstrel and the dissolving-view artist, I have no quarrel
with you.
You are a public entertainer, and do useful
work. But you are a fool to work so hard, and doubly
foolish to waste your vitality in seeking for a message.
You might as well listen to the surging in a shell: con-
strue that into a 'message,' and try to convey it. You know
that the murmur of the shell is the echo of your own
pulse. So is your other 'message,' or yearning for one, a
mere echo of your own vanity and egotism."
(6 Confound your cynicism.
""
"Confound your cant. Go and shave your stubbly chin.
Put on the white shirt of a blameless life, and come with
me to town."
"What will you give me?'
'Folly, and words, and wine."
"I will stay at home. I have some charcoal. I will
make some studies of old boots.
"Come and enjoy yourself."
"I shall enjoy myself. You will not."
There is no
"I hope every separate boot will kick you.
such thing as enjoyment, but I shall be less bored than you.'
"No, Sometimes I am quite happy. Once I painted a
flag. It was a study of a torn French ensign for a picture
of a battle-field. I just happened to get it right. It was
about two o'clock one morning, and I was alone. Do you
know, I was so pleased that I rolled on the floor like a big
dog, and kicked with delight."
"And next day showed it to all you knew."
"And next day painted it out. I wanted the canvas."
"You are hopeless. I leave you to your boots. Good-
night, and pray for a little common sense.”
CC
Good-night. Go to your small-talk and champagne.
There is nothing like leather."
14
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
1:
The two men shook hands, and parted. The Cynic
made for the main road where the trams were jingling on
their way. He glanced back once at the ruddy light of the
Artist's window, and muttered to himself, "He's a fool,
and his works are folly, but-who is wise?"
The Artist did not study the old boots. For two or three
hours he sat before his fire, smoking, and looking at the
blaze. Then he got up, took a candle from the table, and
stood a long time gazing at his picture. There was his
work;
the damp pathway, littered with fallen leaves, the
dim wood, the stagnant pool mantled with green weed and
fringed with rushes, the bent form of the old woman, the
wooden shoes, the patched skirt, the faded shawl, the heavy
burden; there was the wrinkled face; there were the sad
eyes, pleading.
"It
The artist knelt down and eyed the canvas closely.
lacks warmth," he said, "and breadth. It lacks force."
He went back to the table, set down the light, glanced
again at the canvas, and said, gravely and aloud:
"No.
I am right, and he is wrong. Let him talk as he will.
I feel that this is good."
The Cynic dined well at the Forum Club, and having
dined stepped forth into the busy street. At the first
corner he met an old woman carrying a bundle of coke
upon her shoulders. He passed her, stopped, looked back,
smiled, went on, turned again, and following her, put
a shilling into her hand, then hailing a hansom, started for
a smoking concert at the "Grecian."
66
"That," growled the Cynic, as the cab went lumbering
through the snow, comes of talking to sentimentalists.
If I had met that old hag last night, I should have told
her to go to the devil. Confound him and his picture.
I cannot forget the thing. I must cut that fellow, or
I shall soon be as big a fool as he."
There was the usual array of amateur talent at the
"smoker"; but for some reason or other the affair fell flat,
and the Cynic went home in a bad temper, and threw
a French novel at his dog, and bit the end off his cigar-
holder, so that the last word he uttered that night was
!
THE NUNQUAM TAPERS.
15
O
NOBODY.
N the very first page of his "Heroes and Hero
Worship," Carlyle says:-
For, as I take it, universal history, the history of what
man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the
history of the great men who have worked here.
Is it? The hero is a fine man in a ballad-book or
historical painting. He looks very imposing done in marble,
rather more than life-size, and mounted on a big steed at a
street corner.
He is useful also to boast about in an after-
dinner speech, or to point a moral, or adorn a tale in a
Sunday-school lecture. But, regarded calmly, and with a
cold eye, when the glamour of his deeds has faded, and our
hero stands his trial at the bar of History, I am inclined to
think the hero a good deal of a fraud and a failure. Heroes
accomplish much brilliant butchery; they are great dust-
raisers and provokers of tumult; they find employment for
the players on brazen instruments, and the perpetrators of
heroic verse; but there are precious few of them in history
who do not fill places that would have been better filled if
they had left them vacant.
Ålexander wept because he had no more worlds to conquer;
but I don't think the world would have wept if there had
been no Alexander to conquer it. After all, few people
seem to enjoy being conquered.
When I read about the courage and prowess of Edward,
the Black Prince, or the genius of Marlborough, I am
tempted to wish that the former had died of measles, and
the latter remained a Court page. These heroes, I submit,
are a good deal of a nuisance, and the age and country that
have fewest of them are the best to live in. There is a useful
kind of hero, such as Washington, or Stephen Langton;
but he is only useful because he saves honest men from
another kind of hero, who wants to eat them up without
salt.
16
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
Relieve the world of its Buonapartes and Charles Stuarts,
and we can spare the Wellingtons and Cromwells. Most of
these heroes are "feast-troublers" and "marrers of mirth,"
sowers of the seeds of strife; "wilful disturbers of the
people's ease."
Give me Nobody!
The Nobodies of the world are the most comely, the most
pleasant, the most useful, and the most kindly people in it.
The things that are best worth having-the daily bread,
the sweet rest that comes to weary limbs, the solace of
friendship and delights of love, the singing of wild birds,
the odour of field flowers, the invigorating air, the majesty
of the ocean, the pageantry of the skies, and all the beauties
of the shady wood and rolling hill and dimpled stream-can
be obtained, and, which is still better, can be kept and
enjoyed, without the advice or assistance of any great man
whatever. I suppose, also, that music, and the arts, and
the richest treasures of tradition, romance and fairy lore, as
well as most of the handicrafts, and much of the useful kind
of learning, are less due to the labours of the heroes than to
the slow accumulation of the added mites of long generations
of Nobodies.
Don't the Nobodies do all the world's work-from laying
Atlantic cables to bottling pickled onions? Don't the
Nobodies feed us, clothe us, nurse us, doctor us, tease us,
please us, marry us, lecture us, run us in, send us for trial,
sentence us, and set us to picking oakum? Don't the Nobodies
act for us, sing to us, play with us, preach at us, clean our
boots, draw our teeth, collect our taxes, dance with us,
make love to us, punch our heads, buy our newspapers, sell
us two-shilling tea and thirteen-shilling trousers, laugh with
us, quarrel with us, kiss us, coax us, fool us, shake us by the
hand, put us to bed, give us our physic, bury us, cry for us,
and forget us?
Who plays all the jolly country cricket matches, where
the umpire sits on a bat and the long-field lies down to
wait for catches-where the wicket is not of the best, but
the luncheon is? Who writes all the powerful leading
articles, and the subtle criticisms, and the thrilling murder
trials, and attractive advertisements in the great news-
papers? The Nobodies!
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
17
Who does all the loading and firing, and charging and
cheering, on the battle-field? The Nobodies! Who de-
fended the pass at Thermopyla, and the biscuit-box breast-
work at Rorke's Drift? The Nobodies! Who invented
needles, and files, and umbrellas, and meerschaum pipes,
and soap, and blotting pads, and beefsteak puddings, and
the Greek mythology, and warming pans, and double stout,
and lucifer matches, and the Norse Edda, and kippered
herrings, and kissing, and divided skirts, and the Union
Jack of Old England, and THE CLARION? The Nobodies!
Who wrote Shakespeare's plays- -!
Take all the Bismarcks and Jay Goulds, the Ricardos,
and Salisburys, out of the world, and they never would be
missed. But imagine the world denuded of its Nobodies,
and what sorry figures would its heroes cut. They could
not so much as darn their own hose, or dig their own
potatoes, or make their own beds. The only living creatures
to be seen in the crumbling and deserted streets, and deso-
late weed-grown fields of such a world, would be a few fat
and fussy old gentlemen, clothed in skins ill-cured and
mats ill-knit, scratching their feeble hands in the effort to
pluck wild fruits, or eating husks with swine. There would
be no laughter but that of doddering senility, no beauty
but of dumb things, no music other than the mutterings of
the pitiful wretches whose work, forsooth, "makes up the
history of the world.”
A hero is but a pigmy on a giant's shoulders. He owes
his superior altitude to that he stands on,-and he stands
on the Nobodies!
For what does the great man struggle and sweat and
slave, and too often cheat and lie? For fame! And what
is fame? The approval of the Nobodies! What returns a
statesman to power? The votes of the Nobodies! What
are great reforms? The wishes of the Nobodies expressed
in legal terms. Of what stuff do our novelists, poets,
orators, and painters weave their spells? Of the loves and
trials, the smiles and tears, the follies and the heroisms of the
Nobodies. The more closely a hero is akin to a Nobody,
the more of the common humanity he has in him, the more
is he beloved, the nobler and less hurtful is his life, and the
B
18
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
sweeter is his memory. The picture of a great hero doing a
great deed is neither so pleasing nor so touching as that of
the peasants dancing, or the casuals huddled on the work-
house steps, or the pretty girl looking unutterable sorrow
and affection into the eyes of her Huguenot lover, or the
seamstress toiling in her garret; because the seamstress and
the Huguenot, and the casuals and the peasants are―
Nobodies.
Nobody at the anvil; Nobody at the plough; Nobody
clanging in her wooden shoon along the frosty pavement to
her daily toil; Nobody in an old red nightcap and leather
apron clumping boots in his wooden stall under the scented
lime; Nobody with the colours wrapped round his brave
breast and his sword in his sturdy English hand facing a
mob of gallant Zulus under the Afric sun; Nobody sobbing
over the empty cradle; Nobody smiling through a white
veil before the altar; Nobody nursing other Nobodies in
fever wards and field hospitals; Nobody pulling out the
lifeboat to the sinking ship; Nobody, bent and bowed, and
weak of sight and sad of heart, limping painfully through
the workhouse ward; Nobody rushing through the winning
goal in a cup-tie; -Nobody hopeful; Nobody desperate;
Nobody triumphant; Nobody defeated; Nobody sleeping
placidly in the silent cemetery under the forgotten mound-
how much homelier, sweeter, better, and more charming are
these pictures than a theatrical and over-coloured group, such
as Cromwell refusing the crown, or Napoleon at the Bridge
of Lodi?
Go into the ballroom; the master of the ceremonies is
Somebody. He is generally corpulent and bald-headed, and
tediously solemn; but the graceful, smiling, saucy, delightful,
rosy, bright-eyed girls, and the manly, well-spoken, good-
humoured young men, who do the dancing and flirting,
who eat the ices and talk the scandal, and provide the
colour and animation of the scene, are-Nobodies.
Go to the political meeting; the hawk-eyed, vulture-
nosed, eager, sarcastic, smooth-tongued old man on the
platform is Lord Somebody. He supplied the jokes (God
wot !), the quips, the metaphor, the flattery, the sophistry,
the bunkum. But the hearty cheers, the beaming smiles,
the waving handkerchiefs, and rippling laughter-all the
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
19
enthusiasm and human interest of the meeting, come
from-the Nobodies.
Read your histories. You will find that the Some-
bodies—the heroes have conspired and rebelled, and lied
and fought, and usurped, and shed blood, and filled the
gaols with innocent victims, and drenched the battle-field
and the scaffold with the blood of good and true men.
But the Nobodies?
I say the Nobodies have been cajoled and hoodwinked
and cozened and misled; they have been mistaken, they
have been foolish, they have been rash; but they have
seldom been innately bad, have seldom fought but for what
they held to be right, have seldom committed acts of
deliberate wickedness.
If the heads of the Nobodies have been crazy or weak at
times, their hearts have been, and I hope and trust still
are, for the most part, sound.
Therefore I admire the Nobodies; I honour the No-
bodies; I love the Nobodies. Of them are the happy and
innocent children, the gentle and lovely women, the kind,
the brave, the honest men-the workers, the helpers, the
comforters, and the lovers of the world.
Selah! Long live the Nobodies!
20
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
Y
THE LUCKY SHILLING.
ES, I was dreaming. I had been sitting before the
fire, with an old King George shilling in my hand,
wondering what strange tales it might tell if it
could speak, when-I fell asleep.
And I dreamed that the shilling rolled out of my hand,
and that as I rose to recover it I saw a little white-faced,
bald-headed, rotund old gentleman seated in the chair at the
other side of the hearth.
One is never surprised at anything in dreams, and so I
was not at all surprised when the stranger, with cool
politeness, observed: "You are right, sir, mine has been an
eventful history. Ahem! It is not for me to say that it is
worth hearing."
""
"I should be delighted to hear it," I answered.
"You shall, sir, you shall," said the old gentleman, and
proceeded as follows:-
"I am sixty-five years old, sir, and have been passing
from hand to hand for fifty years of the time, often changing
owners, as many as twenty times in a day. You could not
give the bare facts of my experience in a volume as big as
Gil Blas,' let alone my reflections, which I think I say I
think, though doubtless that is my vanity-are sometimes
worth preserving.
"Early on in my career I had the misfortune to be
hoarded. I fell into the hands of a horrid miser, an
eccentric old tailor, living in Coventry. This old man put
me into a big tin teapot, along with many other coins of
silver and gold, and kept me close prisoner for five-and-
twenty years.
"That was a dreadful time. You have never been
confined in a teapot, sir? No? It is painfully slow, sir.
The old miser had dug a hole in his cellar, in which he used
to put the teapot, covering it up with coals. Every night
when he came home from work he would creep down into
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
21
the cellar with a flaring tallow candle, dig up the teapot, and
count us over.
"Oh, how I prayed for a thief to come and steal us;
but none came, and there we pined for a quarter of a
century. At the end of that dreary period of our captivity
the miser was found dead on his bed, and a nephew of his came
and searched the house for treasure. He found us at last,
and I shall not soon forget how he tumbled us out on the
deal table in the dirty, miserable kitchen, saying, as he did
so, to a friend of his, a blotchy young fellow with red hair:
'Devil take me, Charlie, if it's not more than half goold.
Lookee, lookee, my lad. By the Lord, we'll be drunk for a
year.' And with that he strewed us out on the table, and
the two friends fell to drinking rum out of teacups.
"I don't know how long the hoard held out, but I know
I was spent the same night on some long pipes and
cavendish tobacco. And right glad I was to get back into
circulation.
"But you mustn't suppose that all my adventures have
been among the vulgar poor. No, sir, I have been in the
best families. I have been spent-not always wisely or
well-by Dukes and Earls. I have been paid to Generals
and Prime Ministers. I have slept in an Archbishop's fob,
aud have passed through the fair fingers of Jenny Lind,
Madame Celeste, Mrs. Hemans, Florence Nightingale, the
Princess of T, and other titled and distinguished
ladies. Yes, and some of the queerest experiences I have
had have been amongst the aristocracy. H'm! I'll tell
you a very droll thing that happened to me.
"I was given in change one night at a club to Lord
Bagnigge. His lordship, as I soon discovered, was carrying
on an amour with an opera-dancer. One day he went to a
jeweller's shop in Bond Street, and bought a costly bracelet.
He paid me away amongst the odd shillings which made the
guineas. The bracelet was for the dancer.
"The very same day-not two hours after I dropped into
the jeweller's till-who should come to the shop but my
Lady Bagnigge. Her errand was very different from that
of her noble husband. She came to pawn a valuable bracelet
of her own to pay a milliner's bill, which was so heavy that
she dared not show it to his lordship. Indeed, his lordship
22
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
was rather near in such matters, and often rebuked my lady
for her extravagance. Well, the jeweller lent seven guineas
upon the bracelet, and he paid it with a five-pound note,
two sovereigns, two half-crowns, and me.
"The same night Lord and Lady Bagnigge went to the
theatre. As they walked to ther seats his lordship said:
'Have you any silver, my love? If you have, please to pay
for the programme.' And her ladyship took me out of her
purse, and put me into her husband's hand with a smile.
"But if only those two had known the history of the
business I had done that day!
"To give you an idea of the startling variety of circula-
tion experiences, I may say that the same night I was given
in change to a dramatic critic, who paid me away to a
newsboy. That the newsboy lost me at pitch-and-toss on
the muddy pavement to an errand lad of his acquaintance,
and that the errand boy stood treat with me at a con-
fectioner's shop in the Strand.
"The confectioner passed me on to an old lady who
drove up in a carriage and bought six muffins, and the lady
gave me with some gold to her hopeful son, Lord Arthur
Goahead, who took me to his club, where I enjoyed the
intellectual conversation of several young British noblemen
over the card-table. Goahead's set were what is called fast.
“I will not inflict upon you a résumé of their conversa-
tion. It was chiefly about horses and ladies-all of whom
seemed fast enough for these fast young men. And there
was a good deal of swearing and a good deal of drinking,
and Lord Goahead bet Lord Looserein a pony that he,
Lord Looserein, could not jump over four of the club
chairs, and Lord L. tried, and succeeded in barking his
shins and breaking a decanter, at which the other noblemen
laughed, and said, 'Well done, Gaiters,' which was the
name they gave him because his father was a Dean-or a
Bishop, I forget which. And after this frolic the young
men went off shouting and swearing, and trying to smash
each other's hats with their canes; and Goahead called a
hansom and bade the man drive to 'the Cri,' where he paid
with me.
CC
Directly the cabby got back to the rank he went into
the Three Tuns and spent me for a pot of porter, and the
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
23
barmaid gave me in change almost at the same moment to a
rakish-looking man in a white hat, who was talking very
loudly and swearing very freely about some horserace, in
which, I gathered from his remarks, he had had it down on
Tom Galloway's dead cert, and the rotter had come in a bad
third."
"Better than my damn luck,' said a stout, florid man.
'I backed five seconds in three days. Never was such damn
luck as mine. I'd have put my shirt on "Candlemas
the cup, an' the beast lost by half a nose.'
666
for
Well,' said the man who had just taken me, 'I had old
Blewit last week on toast. I'd had the tip that "Rush-
light" had gone rocky, and I met Blewit and laid him the
odds. I got a tenner" out of him, and might have made
it a pony if I'd stuck to him.'
(4
"Then the stout man laughed, and my man went out
into the street. He had not walked a hundred yards when
a thin, miserable wreck of a woman, with three little
children dragging at her skirts, came and offered him a box
of matches. No,' said my man, and strode on.
"The woman followed him. Do buy a box, sir; penny
a box, sir; not sold one all evenin', sir.' The betting man
glanced at her face. 'Here,' he said, 'take this, and,
dammit, take those kids home out of the rain,' and he put
me into her shrivelled hand and walked off rapidly into the
crowd.
"The woman looked at me in a dazed kind of fashion,
bit me, rubbed me, and then, putting me into her pocket,
she gathered her rags about her and shuffled away with her
whimpering children down a side street.
"It was only an hour short of midnight when we
reached the woman's home. It was a small, dirty room, in
a small, dirty house, in a small and filthy court. There was
no fire in the rusty grate, and no furniture of any kind in
the place but a stool, an empty box, and a bundle of rags
on the floor in one corner.
"A cadaverous, sharp-featured boy of ten was crouched
amongst the rags, with a skeleton baby on his knees. The
mother asked him: 'Did you get Jim any tea?'
666
'No,' said the boy; "e were crusty, 'e were, an'
I dussn't leave 'im,'
24
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
1
"The mother did not say: 'My poor Tom, you must be
hungry; a good, kind gentleman has given me a shilling.
Let us thank God.'
"She said: "You little idiot, I told you to go out and
cadge a copper to get the kid some grub. Here, git up
with yer, an' go to Gasker's. Git a fourpenny loaf, arf a
hounce o' tea, a pennorth o' coals, an' a saveloy, an' be damn
slippy. Go to the side door if the shop's shet. An' don't
lose the change, or I'll skin yer.'
"You look pained. My good sir, such is life. The
woman was not a bad one; but poverty, misery, and
ignorance do not breed refinement. If you were out day
after day selling matches, if you fed on crusts, and slept in
rags, you would not, when you came home cold and
famished, be inclined to express yourself in pretty phrases.
I dare say the woman was fond of the boy in her way, and
the boy did not seem to feel hurt. He got up, and taking
me in his hand, went out, and in a few minutes tapped at a
side door in a shy street, and was admitted to a dirty little
chandler's shop.
"There was a lean old man in the shop.
face, thickly freckled, and wore spectacles.
"The boy gave his order.
C
He had a sharp
The man looked at him
sourly. Have you got the money, Tom Kelly?' he asked,
tartly.
"Tom held me up.
"Ah!' said the old man, 'bring the money, an' yer
can have the stuff; but I can't give no more tick. 'As yer
mother sent the one-an'-two she owes me?'
"Tom stood rubbing one bare foot over the other, and
scratching his head. 'No,' he said: 'mother ain't got none
but this. She says she'll pay as soon as she can. Jim 'ad
two fits last week, an' we 'ad to git him some physic. I
wish 'e was dead, I do-pore little beggar. 'E's always
'evin fits.'
"The shopman stood eyeing Tom for a moment, and his
face gradually relented. 'Well,' he said, 'you shall have the
things; but tell your mother I can't get no credit,' and he
took me from Tom, and threw me into the till.
"The next morning the shopman paid me away to a coal
agent; the coal agent called on Mrs. Toppington-Tiptoff,
THE NUNQUAM PAFERS.
25
of Kensington, and gave me in change. Mrs. Toppington-
Tiptoff gave me to her maid for taking a private letter to
Smuggy, the barber, about some false curls, and the maid
used me to cross the hand of a gipsy, who earned me by a
few flattering lies about a dark young man and a wedding,
and being happy ever after.
"Then the girl went off blushing and smiling with
delight, and the black-haired, sad-eyed gipsy woman, looking
on the ground, walked slowly down the road.
"The gipsy walked on, never stopping nor speaking, but
sighing rather frequently, until she reached a small strip of
common land in an elbow of the road, where three wig-
wams were standing. She entered the first of these, and
sat down on the floor. A man was lying asleep in a corner.
After half an hour the man awoke, and said, or rather
growled : 'Where the devil have you been all this time?'
"The woman answered, shortly: Getting money for
you to drink,' at the same time emptying me and a few
other coins into her hand.
"The man came and stood frowning over her. He was a
powerful man, very swarthy, and with a face that had once
been handsome, but was now hideous from its intense
expression of sensuality and vindictiveness.
"Curse you!' he said. 'You're sulking again, are you?
Give me the tin.' He took the money, counted it, and
leaned over the woman again. 'Is this all, you besom?' he
asked.
"That's all,' she replied; and he struck her with his open
hand across the mouth. She made no sign of fear or
resentment; but as he left the tent she followed him.
"Won't you give me a sixpence, Bill?' she asked. Bill
made no answer. She followed him a few paces. Then he
turned round, and struck her in the face with his clenched
fist, felling her to the earth.
"At the instant an old wrinkled woman crawled out of
the next tent. 'Ah!' she screamed, 'you coward, Devili-
skin! You'll strike my gel once too many. I'll be hanged
for you yet, I will,' and she came forward with a tent mallet
in her feeble hand.
"But the young woman rose at once, and came between
them. 'You shut up, mother,' she said. 'It's none o' your
26
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
business; an' don't you call Bill names, neither, 'cause I
don't like it. Come, you get in, and leave him alone.'
"But by this time Bill and I were well on our way down
the road, on a visit, as I guessed, to the nearest alehouse.
"Whether Bill reached the public-house or not, I cannot
say. I only know that he parted with me before he got
there in a small trade with a farmer for a rough-haired
pony, and that my new owner shortly after mounted his
cob and rode off at a brisk trot.
"Soon we were passing a row of pretty cottages, with
pretty gardens before them. A young woman, as sweet as
any flower there, stood at the gate, and in her arms was a
blue-eyed, yellow-haired, two-year-old boy.
"Alloo, Uncle Garge !" said the child, in a pleased voice.
"The farmer pulled up his cob, and patted the baby's
round, rosy face. 'Well, Toddles,' he said; want a penny?
"Penny,' said the boy, holding out his hand.
"The farmer took out his wash-leather bag, and, selecting
me, laid me in the soft, white palm. 'Say ta, Uncle George,
said the mother; but the baby was silent, looking at the
farmer with grave, steady eyes until he had trotted away,
when he called out, "Ta, ta, ta!' with great gusto, in his
shrill, sweet pipe, and was carried into the house still
shouting.
"And so, after he had put me in his milk, and thrown
me amongst the ashes under the grate, and dropped me into
the pig-trough, and rolled me under every article of furni-
ture in the room, Master Toddles was put to bed, and went
to sleep, holding me fast in his plump little hand, in a small
clean cot, in a small clean room, with roses tapping their
damp blooms against the window-pane, and a thrush singing
'Phoebe, Phoebe, Phoebe !' from a spray of the lilac tree
outside.
Yes; we see strange contrasts in course of circulation,
sir, and hear odd things. Only a few weeks since I heard.
Lord Salisbury remark to Mr. A. J. Balfour, in confi-
dence-
"Do you take snuff, sir? No? Well, his Lordship
said-
Atcha! Atcha!
"
And the old gentleman fell a-sneezing, and I awoke and
found it was a dream.
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
27
I'
ZELIE.
CHAPTER I.
T was a balmy night in the summer of '93. The village
of Dol, albeit somewhat scarred and disfigured by
grape-shot and musket-balls, looked drowsy and
tranquil in the soft moonshine. Every door was
closed, every window dark. Save the watch-fire of the
bivouac at the farm of La Bruere, not a sign of life was
visible. The scent of the yellow rose and mignonette
impregnated the warm, still air. The long village street was
given over to the flitting bats. A gaunt sentry of the
regiment called "The Scourge," stood back in the shadow
of the spire, the sole living occupant of the dim churchyard.
The splashing of the fountain in the square was the only
sound that broke the silence of the hour.
Colonel Forvargue rose from the table in the rude hut
where he had fixed his head-quarters, and began to array
himself in his military cloak.
"All is in readiness, then, Latourge?" he said, addressing
a red-bearded savage in lieutenant's uniform, who still sat
at the table writing.
Everything snug, Colonel," was the reply.
The Colonel pulled his cocked hat over his brows, and
buckled his sword-belt round him. "Tell off the firing
party to-night," he said, "and call the battue for five in the
morning."
"
"Yes, Colonel."
The Colonel opened the door of the cottage, and strode.
out into the moonlit road.
"I will go," he said, "and inspect the town, and visit the
guard before I sleep." He glanced at the clock as he spoke.
It was within a few minutes of midnight. Turning down.
the road which led to the farm of La Bruere, he set off at a
measured pace, with hands clasped behind him and eyes
bent thoughtfully upon the ground.
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THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
The army of the Republic had no braver or sterner officer
than Colonel Forvargue. A man nearly fifty years of age,
grave, cold, and gloomy, he seemed to have no ethics of life
beyond the iron laws of military discipline, nor any object
in existence save the defeat and extermination of the
enemies of the Revolution. No fighting, however furious,
shook his calmness; no scene of riot or carnage, however
harrowing, aroused his pity. But twelve short hours ago
he had met and routed a force of Royalists at a point a few
miles east of Dol, and had taken eighty prisoners. These
men, now confined at La Bruere, he had ordered to be shot
by platoon in the morning. That they were his country-
men, and poor dupes of designing nobles, was nothing to
him. They had fought against the Republic, and they
must die.
It was not of them he was thinking as he moved slowly
along the quiet road, under the quiet stars. No. It was
of the surviving Royalist enemies of yesterday. These had
fled to a village four leagues to the east, where they had
rallied, and taken up a position for defence. To complete
their discomfiture he had dispatched above half his force
that afternoon under command of his senior captain, and
now he held Dol, notoriously disaffected as it was,
with only three hundred men, bivouacked at the farm hard
by.
"It is a risk," the Colonel muttered to himself, as he
walked ; “but war is a succession of risks, and I think these
dogs of Dol are too much cowed to snatch at the chance."
As he spoke he became aware of the figure of a woman
crossing the road a few paces in his front. She had
observed him, evidently, for she drew into the shadow of
the tall hedge, and crouched there silently.
The Colonel walked straight up to her. "Who are you?"
he demanded, sternly, "and what do you, here?"
The woman made no reply, but shrank back close against
the hedge. The Colonel laid his hands upon her, pulled
back roughly the hood of her cloak, and turned her face up
to the moonlight.
As he did so he uttered a sudden cry, and started from
her as though he had been stabbed.
The two stood and regarded each other silently for a few
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
29
moments. Then the Colonel spoke in a hoarse and agitated
voice: "My God! Zelie! You!"
The answer was uttered in sweet and tremulous tones.
"It is I, Francis. It is poor Zelie! Let me go. Have
pity."
The Colonel looked at her helplessly.
His face was
white. His teeth chattered, and his whole frame quivered
with excitement.
"You-you-here?" he said, with a gasp. "I thought
you dead. I thought you false"
"No! do not say that. Francis, my hero, my king, you
did not doubt me? You know my love," the woman cried,
passionately, and, coming close to him, she laid her hand
upon his arm.
"Tell me," answered the Colonel, a shade of his usual
sternness in his eyes, although his voice still shook with
the intensity of his emotion, "why did you leave Paris,
without a word? Why are
Why are you here amongst my
enemies? Answer me, Zelie. On your peril and my own,
deceive me not."
66
Why did I leave Paris?" the woman said, with a sob.
'Why am I here? There is but one answer to both
questions-to all questions. I love you."
"Zelie!"
"I love you. I love you. I love you. Francis, kill me.
Kill me now, my darling, if you love me even a little.”
The Colonel seized her wrist in his strong grasp, and
drew her to him, His features seemed unnaturally
sharpened, his eyes flashed fiercely. "By the Mother of
God," he exclaimed, speaking in short, panting gasps, "I
love you better than my soul-better than my honour-
better than I loved you when I saw you first."
She uttered a faint cry of joy. She threw herself upon
his breast. He wound his arms about her, and kissed her
fervently upon her trembling mouth.
And at that moment a shadow glided across the field
behind him, and disappeared in the direction of Dol.

30
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CHAPTER II.
It was not yet one o'clock by the timepiece in Zelie's
boudoir, but what a change had that short hour wrought in
the appearance and demeanour of the fierce commandant of
the regiment called "The Scourge."
The veteran sat on a low arm-chair, over the back of
which hung his cloak and sword. At his feet knelt Zelie,
a small, fair girl; dainty, delicate, and beautiful. She wore
a low-cut dress of black satin, "faced," as the Colonel
would have called it, with amber and gold. Her white,
slim arm reclined upon his knee; her bright, spiritual face
was raised to his. He held her chin in one of his broad
palms, and with the other stroked her flossy hair, gazing
into her eyes the while, with a look of wistful tenderness
of which only Zelie knew him to be capable.
Francis," said the girl, softly, "you believe that I love
you, do you not ?”
"
My darling," answered the Colonel, "I know nothing
but that you are here. You: my Zelie."
"How could you doubt me, dearest?" asked the girl,
"how could you? How could you?"
Every word she spoke was a caress, and all the while her
sweet eyes looked unutterable love.
66
Zelie," said the Colonel, "it is not that I am blind to
your goodness, or insensible to your truth; but it is hard
to realise that you love me. You, so beautiful; I so ill-
favoured."
Zelie shook her head, and smiling with her eyes, said:
"Do you
think me so foolish as to wish for a lover with the
face of a baby, and the mind of a girl? You are brave ;
you are clever; you are handsomer than all the boys in
France."
The Colonel laughed sardonically. "Beauty," said he,
"lies in the eye of the beholder. Child, you are not twenty-
four, and I-am fifty."
"Francis! You are not forty-nine."
"A world-weary, weather-beaten, war-worn, old, old
man.
""
"I love you."
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
31
"Morose, bitter, dull."
"I love you.'
"}
"Proud, poor, and wicked."
"I love you. ">
"Ah! Zelie, Zelie, if do
you
- ?"
"If I do. What then, if I do ?"
"The pity of it, darling; the pity of it."
"Colonel Forvargue"-the girl clenched her hand,-
"had anyone but you said half the dreadful things you
have now said, I would
""
"
What, Zelie? What would you do--with that little
hand ?"
Zelie, giving him a smile of ineffable love, leaned her
flushed face down upon his breast, saying, softly,
"For
your sake this little hand could do deeds of-of-
>>
The Colonel kissed her silky curls and stroked her taper
fingers fondly. "Zelie," he said, "in those little hands I
am as wax. But tell me now, my darling, why you forsook
Paris, and the opera, and-poor me."
"I left Paris because my soul shuddered at the deeds of
blood I saw there. I left the opera because I could not
sing gay songs under the wings of death.
I left you
because-because-"
"Because, because. Zelie; tell me."
The girl clung closely to him, whispering, hurriedly,
"Because I loved you, and—one in power desired me to
love him, and, had he guessed our secret, would have killed
you."
"Zelie !"
"Hush! It is true, but ask me now no more. For
months I lay concealed at the house of a relative, near
Alençon. But latterly, anxious for your safety, and pining
for a sight of your dear old sad and handsome face, I have
lived at Dol, that while you were in danger I might be near
you, though unseen.'
"You are to blame, Zelie. Nay, I am angry. You
must go hence immediately; should the Republican arms
experience a reverse
"}
"Don't, dearest. Don't speak of sending me away. I
cannot live out of your sight.'
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THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
The Colonel shook his head and knit his brows in anxious
thought.
The girl stole a swift glance at his face, then nestled to
him, saying, faintly: "Moreover, Francis, I cannot think
of such a dreadful thing as that you mentioned. There is
no danger to our forces. Tell me there is none.'
"I cannot tell. I hope not."
"}
"Francis. Do not despise my weakness. But these
scenes of violence and carnage terrify me.
Is it true, my
dear, that half our little force was sent away to-day in
pursuit of the enemy?"
"Yes, dear Zelie; but, nevertheless, have no fear."
I cannot help it, Francis; I am not brave like you."
She shuddered, and hid her face upon his shoulder.
"Zelie. Look up, my love. Let me see your eyes.
Let me kiss you."
"Francis. I will kiss you-now. Do you love me ?”
"You know it."
"Will you, for my sake, do a very little thing?"
"You know it."
"Francis-those prisoners.
horrible! When do they die ?"
It is horrible-oh, it is
The Colonel frowned, and bit his lip. The girl looked
up beseechingly, her bright eyes dimmed with tears.
"In the morning," said the Colonel, "at five."
"Francis!" She put her arms round his neck, and
brought her lips close to his stern face. "Not to-morrow,
dearest, I cannot bear it. The sound of the platoon-the
fearful thought of it. Spare me that. On Monday I will
go away. Do not refuse me, Francis. Give these poor
dupes another day of life. Spare me this horrible trial.
You will-I know you will."
The Colonel tried to resist. But the warm arm was
about his neck, the ripe lips were pressing his, the soft
breast was palpitating against his heart, the fluty voice was
murmuring, "Promise me, darling-promise-promise."
And he promised.
For a few moments the girl held him close in her
embrace, kissing him repeatedly, and calling him by all the
endearing epithets that love could prompt; then, with a
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
33
sigh, she knelt again upon the rug at his feet, and glancing
towards the clock, said: "See, my Francis, how the envious.
minutes steal away. You must go, dearest. Almost
immediately my people will return, and we must not be
seen together. In these sad times one cannot trust one's
own kin. 'Tis terrible to think that my love is your peril;
but that thought nerves me to my duty. Leave me, my
brave soldier, and take my blessing with you."
Reluctantly the Colonel rose. "When shall I return to
life again, my darling?" he asked, ruefully.
Zelie stood beside him, holding his hands in hers, and
gazing at him affectionately. "To-morrow," she said, "and
here at nine. I will send my people away, and we will
sit and look into each other's eyes, and say, 'I love you,'
and I love you,' all the hours we have.'
""
The Colonel stooped to kiss her. Zelie," he said,
"Zelie, Zelie, in your eyes are the life, and the world, and
the life beyond the world. When their light is taken from
me, I am blind; when their fire ceases to warm me, I am
ice. God bless you, sweetheart, and adieu!"
Zelie clasped her dainty hands about his neck, and
rubbing her soft cheek tenderly against his rough face,
said: "You believe me that I love you. Are you sure?"
"Thank God, yes," replied the Colonel, fervently; and
then she buckled on his sword, rolled his cloak about him,
kissed him once more, and, pushing him gently from her,
said, "Good-bye, my love; God guard you ever.'
""
The Colonel walked swiftly back across the bridge, and
round by the road to the farm of La Bruere.
66
Bonnimere," he said to the captain in command, "post-
pone the battue for twenty-four hours."
"Yes, Colonel."
“And send at once a mounted orderly to our detachment
at Pontorson with orders to return hither as quickly as
possible."
The Captain saluted. The orderly was at once dispatched,
aud in half an hour the Colonel was riding home to his
quarters.
"That is well," he said, as he galloped over the moonlit
highway. "That is very well. To-morrow all our forces
0
34
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
will be reunited. I cannot run risks with Zelie here.
There must be no more fighting until she is bestowed in
safety-my darling, my darling.'
CHAPTER III.
Again the mellow moonlight whitened the streets of Dol,
again the watch-fire at La Bruere glowed through the
sombre orchard, again the whole world seemed steeped in
slumber, again the Colonel of the regiment called "The
Scourge" went striding over the bridge, his hat pressed
low upon his brows, and his sabre clanking at his heels.
Well has Robert Browning said :
God be praised, the meanest of His creatures
Has two soul sides: one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her.
The side the Colonel faced the world with was as iron
that he showed to Zelie was as wax. A stern, unyielding
man; embittered, saddened, disappointed; as merciless to
himself as to his enemies, his love for this soft-voiced,
sweet-eyed, fragile woman had become a passion so absorb-
ing that the world was hateful, unendurable without her.
No drunkard ever so loved brandy, nor miser gold, nor
mother child. He only lived when in her presence. He
only thought of her. He was thinking of her then, and
repeating her name in his soul with every soft inflection, as
he hurried through the silent town. "Zelie, Zelie, Zelie,"
the passionate refrain adapted itself to the rhythm of his
footsteps; "Zelie, Zelie, Zelie," it moved with the pulsing
of his heart. And he should see her; he should hear her
speak. He should look into her lustrous eyes, and "suck
the music of her honey vows." In a moment; now!
Already he had entered the square wherein she lodged.
He could see her lattice, the light in her window. He
quickened his pace, his hand was on the lintel of the door,
when, like the crack of a whip, from the bivouac at La
Bruere came the sound of a musket-shot.
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
35
The Colonel stood still, his lips parted, his hand still on
the bell, his ear straining for the sound he dreaded to
hear.
In an instant he heard it-the crash of a volley of fifty
files. La Bruere was attacked.
With a muttered curse the commandant of the regiment
called "The Scourge" turned away from the gate of his
heaven, and ran towards the darkness, where hell had
broken loose.
The drums were rolling the alarm at La Bruere. The
tocsin was pealing. The black mass of the homestead was
spitting fire. The hill beyond was girdled with a' quivering
belt of flame. It was no mere feint, but an attack in force.
With ceaseless clangour the ringing detonations split the
drowsy air, sending hollow echoes reverberating through
the sleepy woods.
"The dogs, the Royalist hounds," muttered Forvargue,
"they have snatched at the chance, and are barking like the
curs they are." He ran across the bridge, turned into the
high road, and on the instant found himself surrounded,
pinioned, and disarmed.
"Ah, regicide, we have thee!" said a gigantic hind,
armed with a pole-axe, and dressed in ragged sheepskins,
"and soon shall have the assassins who follow thee. Now
with us, to the Captain. Attempt to call out, and we will
gag thee. For the rest thy life is safe-at present."
A roar of savage laughter followed this speech, and the
Colonel was hurried away in the direction of the battle.
The attack had been as fierce as sudden, and the men of
"The Scourge "-out-numbered and surprised--had already
been driven from the homestead, and were hastily estab-
lishing themselves in the orchard and outbuildings in the
rear.
Veterans, used to all emergencies, they quickly barri-
caded the doors of the barns and dairies, picked out the
closest cover amongst the trees, placed flanking parties to
guard against surprise, and opened a steady fire from every
grid and window, and from every trunk and boulder on the
main building of the farm, from the windows of which the
Royalists replied.
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THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
This was the state of affairs when Forvargue was dragged
through the ruined garden, and up the main staircase of La
Bruere, the man with the pole-axe threatening him at every
step, and his minions displaying an eager desire to tear him
to pieces.
"This way, brigand," said he of the pole-axe. He threw
open, as he spoke, the door of the great room on the first
floor, the room where Forvargue had slept when he took
possession of La Bruere a month ago.
They entered the room. It was long, and low, and narrow,
the floor of polished oak, the walls of the same wood,
panelled. From the first window two men were firing, two
others standing behind them loading their muskets. The
second window, which had been beaten out with an axe,
was occupied in the same way. The third window was
enveloped in smoke. A peasant, dressed in blouse and sabots,
lay face downwards on the floor, close by the threshold,
dead. Upon the heavy black oak bedstead a wounded
man, his face one mass of clotted blood, writhed in agony.
A torch nailed against the wooden mantel-shelf, cast a lurid
light through the room, the ceiling and one half the walls.
of which were covered with a creeping veil of smoke.
Burning cartridge paper littered the floor, and the bullets
from the enemy in the barn across the yard kept splintering
the wainscoting and window frames, and scattering the glass
in jingling showers.
"Here's a prisoner, Captain-the head butcher," said the
man of the pole-axe.
A short, burly man, wearing a wide white sash, turned
from the first window, his musket, from which the smoke
was still streaming, in his hand. The lower part of his
face was covered with a thick black beard, through which
his white teeth gleamed savagely. His forehead and left
eye were hidden by a bloody bandage, and blood was
trickling down his face and neck. He cast one look of
hatred at the Colonel, and saying, "Curse him, bind him to
the bedpost," snatched a loaded musket from the hand of
a companion, and turned to take aim again through the
window.
They bound Forvargue to the bedstead, hand and foot,
and left him to his reflections, in the line of fire behind
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37
the centre window. He stood impassive, pleased, if
anything, to note that the fusillade from without con-
tinued brisk and steady. A bullet grazed his temple, and
buried itself in the oaken post with a dull thud. Another
struck the footboard close to his left hand, scattered a
cloud of splinters, and killed the wounded man on the bed
behind him. Another struck the broken window before him,
and cut his face with the flying glass. He never stirred a
muscle. A wounded man was dragged out of the smoke-
cloud at the third window, and laid upon the bed beside
the corpse. The burly captain at the first window was hit
in the forehead, and fell dead without a word. One of the
loaders took his place. The torch was extinguished over
the mantel-shelf. Some one relighted it. A flying splinter
struck the Colonel's right hand, and laid the knuckles bare.
A man turned shrieking from the hidden window, and
threw himself screaming with anguish on the ground.
Forvargue stood calm and stolid.
Then, from out of the smoke-cloud at the third window,
emerged the figure of a woman. Forvargue looked at her
keenly. His jaw fell, his heart seemed to stop beating.
It was Zelie.
Yes, it was Zelie. Her golden hair was disordered and
smirched with dust, her fair skin grimed with powder, her
red lips blackened with the biting of cartridges, her eyes.
enringed with smoky smears. But it was she.
She wore the same black and amber bodice she had on
the night before, and a short skirt of red serge. In her
right hand was a carbine, in her girdle a naked knife, over
her round bust and shapely shoulder a common military
belt, with open cartridge box slung before her.
She walked straight up to Forvargue, and looking him
full in the face, said, "So, dear Colonel, it is thus we
meet."
Forvargue stood spellbound, staring blankly. "Zelie!"
That was all that he could say.
Zelie," said the girl, resting the smoking carbine in the
hollow of her shapely arm. "Zelie is an aristocrat, and an
enemy. Zelie comes from shooting the ruffians of The
Scourge.' Zelie only lives to revenge her father, her
38
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
brother, her two sisters, murdered by the accursed Republic
of fratricide, tyranny, and oppression. Zelie is a fiend, a
fury, a slayer of men. Such things her little hands can do."
The Colonel groaned. His head sank on his breast.
"Kill me," he said. For the sake of the Zelie I loved
and trusted; kill me
e !"
As he spoke, a great shouting arose in the rooms below.
The fire ceased on the Royalist side. The men fell back
from the window gesticulating, agitated; and from the
orchard, and from the barns and sheds where the soldiers
of "The Scourge" were posted, arose the sound of song:
You Frenchmen, you they would enchain :
Doth not the thought your bosoms fire?
The ancient bondage they desire
To force upon your necks again.
And then, amidst shrieks and curses and the roar of
musketry, from front and rear broke out the terrible
refrain :-
Then up and form your ranks, the hireling foe withstand;
March on--his craven blood must fertilise the land.
It was the Marseillaise. In headlong panic the Royalists
rushed out of the room. All save the giant with the pole-
axe, who still stood by the door, and Zelie, with her
carbine resting on her arm, who remained calmly looking
at the Colonel.
"It is your men returned," she said.
away from here.
together."
"Come, we must
If this is the time, then let us die
She cut the cords which bound him to the bedstead, and
the giant led him, still pinioned, from the room, Zelie
following. They went into the garden, and across the
road to the skirt of the wood where the Royalists had
rallied.
The
Forvargue guessed rightly what had happened.
other wing of "The Scourge" had arrived from Pontorson.
The Royalists, attacked left, right, and centre, were
retreating through the wood, firing as they ran.
He and Zelie followed them. They were hard pressed.
The Republican line of advance was scarcely two hundred
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS,
39
yards behind them. The fire was close. The bullets
pattered on the clay and whistled through the trees, like
hail. The giant on one side and Zelie on the other
dragged the Colonel along. The latter had thrown down
her carbine, and carried her knife in her hand. Forvargue
saw it.
"Strike," he said, in a broken voice. "Stab me, Zelie.
Now. For God's sake, let me die.”
66
No,” replied the girl; then, throwing the dagger from
her, she clasped her hands upon her breast, and gasping,
"I am shot!" fell forward to the ground.
Forvargue strove to burst his bonds, in vain. The giant
drew a knife, cut him loose, and disappeared amongst the
trees. The cries of the men of "The Scourge" drew
nearer.
Forvargue knelt down and raised the dying girl in his
arms. "Zelie," he said, with a sob in his voice, "Zelie,
speak to me-darling.'
""
Zelie turned her white face slowly to him, laid one hand,
reeking with her life-blood, on his breast, and whispered,
"Do you-hate-me-very-much?"
66
'No, Zelie, no. Oh! is there no hope?"
"I de-ceived you. Be-trayed you. You-will-
curse me-when-I am dead!
"Never."
The shouts were coming very close. The girl's head
sank forward. Her eyes closed. Forvargue took a flask
from his breast, and with a shaking hand poured the brandy
into her mouth and over her lips and throat. She rallied,
laid her head against his shoulder, and said, in a shivering
voice: "You loved me. You believed that I loved you,
Francis."
"}
"Do not speak of it, darling. I was a fool, that is all."
"No, no, no. I—I.
I—I— She faltered. Her head hung
heavily against him.
A dozen furious soldiers of "The Scourge " burst through
the underwood, and surrounded them.
The Colonel never looked their way.
Kissing the dying
girl upon her pallid lips, he said, frantically, "Speak, my
darling, speak!
"}
40
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS,
Zelie shuddered in his arms. Opened her eyes. Looked
at him blankly, and then, with a faint smile, whispered,
"It was true," and died.
* * * *
When, in the natural order of things under the Terror,
Colonel Francis Forvargue, having been a brave and faithful
soldier of the Republic, was brought to execution, the few
amongst the crowd who were sober, or humane, enough to
notice, said that his demeanour was strangely beautiful and
gentle. Standing on the bloody scaffold, with the reeking
axe poised above him ready for his life, he looked toward
the wintry sky, raised his hands, and said, smiling like one
in a dream, "It was true."

THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
41
NAILROD.
AN EPISODE FROM THE UNFINISHED NOVEL "CUFFY."
was a cold morning in January. The pale sunlight,
discoloured by its progress through much sooty mist,
created a sallow twilight in the consulting-room of
Mr. Daper, of Clement's Inn.
Mr. Daper was a "confidential" lawyer, with a consider-
able East-end connection; a man esteemed by his clients
for his secrecy and shrewdness, and famous throughout the
profession for his successful conduct of numerous cases
for the defence."
(C
Mr. Daper sat behind his desk, leaning back in his rigid
uncushioned armchair, with his thumbs in his waistcoat
pockets, his legs crossed, his head inclined a little to the
right, and his keen little grey eyes peering from under
their prominent and bony brows, at a client, who sat in
another rigid armchair on the opposite side of the desk.
The client was tall and spare, with long grey hair, and a
shaggy white beard. His face was sharp and nervous, his
skin tanned by much wind and weather, and his left cheek
disfigured by a white zig-zag scar. He wore a semi-
nautical costume of dark blue cloth, a grey flannel shirt,
and red necktie, and held in his hand a soft felt hat, which
he kept turning round and back again, as if he fancied
himself the man at the wheel.
"Now, Mr. Williams," said the lawyer, "I think we
may get to business; eh?"
The stranger glanced significantly at the door.
"Quite safe," said the lawyer, dryly. 'You would
notice that there are double doors. They lock themselves
when closed, and can only be opened by pressing this
knob. There are no eavesdroppers here."
"Very good, sir," said the stranger, gravely. "Then I
would ask you if the case is making any progress."
(C
The case is finished," said the lawyer.
42
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
"What?" The stranger looked up eagerly. "Have you
found them?”
Mr. Daper settled himself in his chair, and replied with
professional phlegm: "You commissioned me to trace the
two children of George and Mary Boyse, of Lower Marsh,
Lambeth, missing since 1841. I hold your deposit of one
hundred pounds for expenses, and your agreement to pay
such other costs and fees as I may charge."
"Yes."
"My charge is one hundred pounds, in addition to the
original deposit."
The stranger produced a leather bag, and counted out
one hundred sovereigns, which the lawyer swept into a
drawer and locked up.
The lawyer then resumed his easy attitude, and said,
"The father of these children

"}
"Never mind the father," interrupted the client.
"The father," continued the lawyer, calmly, "George
Boyse, alias Nailrod,' was convicted on a charge of
burglary in 1840, and sentenced to transportation for
life."
The two men looked steadily into each other's faces.
The client said, "Go on, sir."
The lawyer continued: "Boyse was a notorious burglar,
and had spent a good deal of his life in prison. He was a
tall man, five feet eleven, of spare build, but very wiry and
strong; hair, dark brown; eyes, dark brown; nose,
aquiline; marks--a deep scar on left cheek."
"The children, sir?" said the client, impatiently.
"The mother," continued the lawyer, "died in Lambeth,
in February, 1842. There was an inquest: verdict, 'Death
from exposure and insufficient nourishment.""
"Starved to death ?" said the client, in a deep voice.
"The medical evidence does, prima facie, support such a
view," said the lawyer.
The client dropped his hat upon the floor, and covered his
face with his hands.
"The boy," resumed the lawyer, "Thomas Boyse, was
taken into the Lambeth workhouse, but after four years,
and at the age of nine, he ran away, and having spent about
twelve months in a way which cannot be traced, came to
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43
the surface again at Bristol, where he appears to have been
adopted by a rope-maker, named Blenkiron.
"The girl, Nancy Royse, was sent into service, although
under twelve years of age, and remained there until 1847,
when she married John Flanges, captain and owner of the
'Emma Anna,' collier, of London.
"So far the case presents no features out of the common,
but from this point it becomes quite romantic-er—in fact,
very romantic indeed."
His
Mr. Daper stopped, and took out his snuff-box.
client, detecting a change in his manner, said, hastily, “Go
on, sir; go on.
""
"Early in 1847," said the lawyer, "the boy Thomas,
then in his eleventh year, was sent by the Blenkirons aboard
the 'Emma Anna,' collier, captain and owner John Flanges,
and served as ship's boy for four years.
That was a
coincidence, a very curious coincidence, dear me."
Mr. Daper took snuff and looked keenly at his client.
"Go on, sir," said the client.
"I regret to say," the lawyer continued, "that in the
winter of 1851, Thomas Boyse was reported to have gone
overboard off Gravesend, and that he has never since been
heard of."
"Drowned, my God, drowned!" said the client; then
asked, anxiously, "His sister? Tell me, tell me ! "
66
but-
Nancy Flanges is alive, and is living in Shadwell,
"}
"But what?"
The lawyer sat forward, picked up a pen, and pointing it
at his client said, with great solemnity: "But you will
remember I merely suggest, and do not assert there
appears to be something not wholly satisfactory about this
story as to the boy's disappearance. A deck hand of the
collier, named Eaves, has been sounded, and has acknow-
ledged that, on the fatal night, Boyse had interfered to
protect his sister from the captain's violence, and there had
been a struggle, during which the captain drew a knife, and
'offered' to kill the boy, but was prevented. Later the
boy was left alone at the wheel, and has never been seen since."
The client, now pale and quivering with excitement,
nodded his head, and said, "I see, I see.
44
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
"Mind," exclaimed the lawyer, "I make no charges.
The boy may have fallen overboard. He may have jumped
overboard. He may have been thrown overboard.
"You will understand that the brother and sister never
met but on that one occasion, and that was late at night.
Mrs. Flanges is still ignorant of the fact that the lost boy
was her brother, and Captain Flanges, of course, knows no
more than she.'
"And does-does Nancy-the girl-is she still living
with this this Flanges?"
"N-o. Not actually living with him. It seems he is a
bad fellow, and has brutally ill-treated her, so that they are
often separated for months at a time. Mrs. Flanges, like
so many women of her class, forgives the rascal all his savage
violence, and is constantly trying to win him back to her.
Under these circumstances it will be hardly necessary for
me to add that the scamp is at present living with another
woman."
"Is that all, sir ?" the client asked, quietly.
Yes," said the lawyer, "that is the whole case. Here
is the address of Mrs. Flanges." He handed the client a card.
The client buttoned his pilot jacket,
The lawyer, standing with his back
him, in a serious and impressive
The two men rose.
and picked up his hat.
to the fire, addressed
manner, as follows
"I ask no questions. I never ask questions. But I am
within my professional sphere of duty in tendering you a
little advice. If, for any reason unknown to me, and
which I do not wish to know, you are interested in the
welfare of Mrs. Flanges, you would do well to seek
her out, and recall to her her brother's history. That
should suffice to break off her connection with the ruffian
she is married to. And, remember, this poor girl is
penniless and friendless. Her brother is dead. Her mother
is dead. Her husband is a scoundrel. Her father is a
convict in Australia, and even if he could escape from that
place would be helpless, as the penalty of his return to
England would be death."
The two men looked steadily at each other. The client
said: "Thank you, sir, I'm much obliged to you. I'll say
good-morning, sir.'
""
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
45
"Good-morning," said the lawyer, as he touched the
knob to release the catch of the door, "and don't forget what
I have told you."
"I shall not forget," said the client, and left the office.
CHAPTER II.
The "office" of John Flanges, captain and shipowner, of
Shadwell, was deserted. No; not quite. Some brown
rats glided stealthily about the rotten floor, in the dim zone
betwixt the radius of ruddy light from the stove and the
heavy shadow-masses cast by the lumber piled against the
walls.
As the clock of the neighbouring church struck ten,
these furtive rodents slid noiselessly out of sight. It was
not the boom of the bell, neither was it the rattle of the
rain upon the sloping roof, nor the whistling of the wind
through the crazy casement that disturbed them. Their
quick ears had caught another sound: the sound of a
distant footstep mounting from the gloomy quay below
towards the firelit attic where they kept their impish watch
above.
The steps drew nearer. For a few moments quick
points of yellow light flickered amid the shadow-masses
round the attic. The steps drew nearer. The lurid sparks
went out. The rats had retreated deeper into the gloom.
The steps drew nearer, stumbled on the last landing, and
halted at the threshold.
Then, through the noise of the wind at the casement,
and the rain upon the roof, came a low "tap, tap, tapping
at the door. Then a pause, and only the hissing of the
rain. Then, again, "tap, tap, tap," a bit more sharply;
and, after a second's pause, the sound of a hand groping
over the panel in search of a latch.
Crash came a heavier burst of rain upon the skylight.
"Ah-o-h!" sighed the wet wind from the foggy river.
And then, after a little clicking and fumbling, the door
opened about a foot, and through it came a ghastly head,
its haggard face surrounded by a rough, white beard, and
its black eyes gleaming under a shock of long grey hair.
46
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
It was a fearful head; such an one as in the old bloody days
might have stared out, blanched and stony, from a spike
above the Traitors' Gate or Temple Bar; such an one as
would have made John Flanges shudder, desperado as he
was, had he been where the black eyes sought him.
"Is there anyone at home?" said the head, in a deep,
unsteady voice.
The wail of the wind and the rattle of the rain was the
only answer.
Slowly the spectral head turned right and left; slowly
the fierce eyes rolled in their search round the fire-lit attic.
Then the door opened wider, and a tall figure followed the
head into the room. The figure was clad in a fisherman's
jersey, fustian trousers, and sea boots, and held in its hand
a dripping sou'-wester.
It was the figure of Lawyer Daper's client, Williams.
For a moment this man stood quite still, peering keenly
out into the sombre shadows, where the rats were hid.
Then he advanced to a small table which stood near the
stove, and took up a candlestick, but presently set it down
again, and lighting a match, said, as he held it up: "I beg
pardon. Anybody at home?"
The casement shook, the wind sighed, and the rain
rattled on the roof.
The stranger stood motionless, and let the match burn
down to his fingers unnoticed. For a full minute he
remained in the same position, with right hand raised,
head bent forward, and eyes fixed on the shadow. Then
his arm fell slowly to his side, and he stood motionless,
with a rigid face, set teeth, and eyes dilated as in some
dreadful trance.
Suddenly his expression changed. He was listening.
He had heard a step. His eyes turned slowly towards the
door; a smile, a horrid smile distorted his mouth, like a
spasm; then, treading cautiously, he crossed the floor and
concealed himself behind a piece of sailcloth which hung
over a spar against the farther wall. Here he crouched
upon his hands and knees, as silent and watchful as the
rats he had disturbed.
Scarcely had he concealed himself when the door was
thrown violently open, and a big burly man, clad in pilot
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
47
jacket, fur cap, and oilskin overalls, strode into the room,
lighted the candle by thrusting it against the stove, and
setting it upon the table said, in a voice like the growl of a
dog: "Come in, curse you. Don't stand snivelling there."
Williams, peeping through a slit he had cut in the
canvas, discerned the figure of a woman in the doorway.
After a brief hesitation this woman came forward, timidly,
and stood by the stove. She was bare-headed, her shoulders
only covered by a thin shawl. She was shivering violently;
wet through; the rain standing in beads upon her hair and
face, and trickling in dirty streams from her skirts as she
stood.
The man half-filled a tumbler with rum from a bottle on
the table, and gulped some of it down. Then he drew off
his oilskins and pilot jacket, threw his cap across the room,
and sat down near the table.
""
"What do you want here, you jade ?" he asked, roughly.
The woman drew her hand across her eyes. "Oh, Jack,
she said, in a broken voice, "I want you. What should I
want?
"}
"I don't know what you should want, but I know what
you will get if you shadow me," said the man. Then,
dashing his fist on the table, he yelled:
"Damn you; stop snivelling. Stop it."
The woman tried hard to check her tears. "I can't-
help it-Jack. I'll stop-I will. Jack, I'm so weak, and
ill. It's six months since you left me. I haven't any
work. Jack, for God's sake, don't send me away
66
""
The man sprang up.
Now look here," he said, fiercely,
"you know the weight of my fist. Another word and you
feel it."
The woman bit her lips to control her sobs, but neither
spoke nor quailed.
The man behind the canvas set his teeth, and moved his
right hand behind him to his hip.
The rain dashed furiously upon the roof: the wind
moaned past the window.
Jack," said the woman at last, "tell me what I've done
to turn you agen me."
Jack threw himself down in his chair, and drank more
"Go on, you infernal magpie," he said. "You'll
rum.
48
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
say your lesson if you die for it. Get it said, then, and
get out."
The man behind the canvas put his right hand down
again.
The woman crept a little nearer.
"I know I'm a trial at times," she said; "but I've been a
good wife to you, Jack. I never done nothing wrong. I
never went back on you, nor went agen you; don't throw
me off, Jack; take me with you. Thrash me, curse me,
starve me; but don't, Jack, don't leave me.'
"Thrash you?" cried the ruffian, rising again.
"Curse
you? By God's cannon, if you don't begone I'll knife you,”
and lifting his heavy fist he struck her in the face, so that
she reeled and fell.
The man behind the canvas rose suddenly on one knee
and drew a pistol from his hip pocket. His face was deathly
in its paleness. His eyes blazed with anger; but ere he
could fire the woman had crawled to the ruffian's feet, and
embracing his knees, began in a passionate voice, her words
shattered by her sobs, to plead for pardon.
"Jack-I-I-couldn't help crying. Ta-take me
back-boy; forgive me, Jack. What have I have I
done ?"
The man dragged her to her feet, and threw her roughly
from him.
"What!" he said. "You're not satisfied yet. Blows
don't content you. You want an answer.
Eh ?"
"Yes," said the woman, faintly. She leant upon the
table, her head bowed down, the picture of misery and
submission.
The rain rattled steadily upon the roof. The wind
sighed drearily. The man behind the canvas held his
breath and put his pistol half-way back into his pocket.
Jack drank some more rum, gave the woman a wicked
look, and said, in slow, deliberate tones :
"I don't want to see you any more.
I'm sick of you.
Go to the devil. Go and die in a ditch. I've got another
woman.
A pause. The rain fell less heavily, the wind had almost
died away.
The woman, still with bent head and bowed
figure, uttered the one word:
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49
"What?"
The sound was little louder than a whisper; but so clear,
so piercing, that the ruffian started and turned half round,
while the man behind the canvas drew his pistol, cocked it
silently, and kept in readiness to fire.
The woman stood up, cast away her shawl, and looked
the ruffian in the face. Her own face was bloodless; her
eyes dilated, the blood flowing from her mouth.
"Do you tell me, Jack Flanges?" she asked, in a low,
tremulous voice--" Do you tell me that to my face?"
The man tried to speak, but she lifted her thin hand and
went on: "Do you tell me that you are sick of me ?
That you have another woman! another woman! another
woman !”
Her voice rose up at each word, louder, wilder, shriller,
until it was a shriek.
"Another woman! You tell me that-that! You-you
coward you white-blooded vermin-you-
39
"Silence!" roared the bully, clenching his fist.
The man at the canvas followed him steadily with his
eye.
The woman uttered a wild and terrible laugh. "Ha,
ha, ha! Silence ?" she screamed. "Silence me, Nancy
Flanges? For what? and for whom? That a coward!
the coward and bully, Jack Flanges, may take another
woman; another to bully and beat; another to savage and
rob; another woman-woman-ha! ha! while broken
Nancy dies! dies! dies-in a ditch
"}
"You she-devil," roared the man, "do you dare?" He
seized the heavy chair by the back.
Again the woman laughed. "Ha ha ha! Look at
him" she shrieked; her whole frame shaken with rage,
her teeth gnashing foam and blood. "Look at him!
Black Jack! Black Jack the cur. Black Jack the liar!
Black Jack the thief! The murd
"">
"You devil!" the man hissed. He drew aside the
table; he took a knife from his pocket, and began to open it
with his teeth.
Then the woman ceased speaking;
clasped her hands behind her, spat
feet, and said: "I spit upon you!
took a pace forward,
upon the floor at his
I curse you! I defy
D
50
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
you! And, by God, if I live to leave this house, I will
kill you!"
The ruffian stood like a wild beast at bay. The reckless
daring, the scalding scorn, the flaming rage of the woman
gave him pause.
"You'd best go while
want to swing for you."
you're safe," he said. "I don't
The woman stood still.
The man shook with rage.
"Who is it?”
"Who is it ?" she asked.
"Will you go?"
Again that wicked look came into the fellow's face.
(C
Now, once for all," he said, "this is my answer, and,
when given, if you stay ten seconds I'll cut your throat:
I have done with you; you are not my wife. You never
were my wife. I had a wife living when I married you,
and she's living now."
:
These words produced a surprising effect. Nancy
staggered back, threw up her arms, gasped, and, breaking
into a storm of hysterical sobs, went wailing from the room.
Flanges stood astounded, listening to the heartrending
sobs and cries of the desperate woman as she descended
the stairs.
Then he shut the door, returned the closed knife to his
pocket, came back to the table, and was in the act of re-
filling the tumbler with rum, when he saw the stranger
standing right in front of him, before the canvas sail !
The rain beat steadily upon the roof, the wind sighed
drearily outside the window.
The two men regarded each other silently. The elder
man calm and steady, the younger stupefied with amaze-
ment. At last the stranger spoke. He said:
"You are John Flanges, captain and owner of the 'Emma
Anna !'"
Yes, I am," replied the captain, "and who the devil are
you ? "
The stranger answered, calmly: "I am George Boyse,
alias Nailrod, the burglar. An escaped convict from
Australia."
"Indeed ?” said Flanges, frowning, and glancing anxiously
at the stranger's hands. "And might I make bold to ask
what the blazes you're doing here?"
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51
"Sit down," said Nailrod, in the same quiet tone, "I
have something to tell you."
Black Jack hesitated, but the other man's stern and
steady gaze controlled him. He sat down in the chair near
the table.
The stranger fetched another chair from the end of the
room, and sat down opposite to him, at a distance of some
four paces.
The rain beat furiously upon the roof. The wind wailed
at the window like an echo of the weeping woman's voice.
"Now," said the captain, "if you're quite ready, what
do you want of me?"
And the other man answered, steadily, "I want your
life."
The captain half rose from his chair, clutching the back
in his powerful hand.
Nailrod coolly produced a revolver, and set it at full
cock.
Are you a lunatic ?" said the captain.
Nailrod looked at him steadily for a few moments, then
said:
In your mind you're looking at the door. You'll never
pass it again alive."
"You are mad," said the captain.
He tried to appear
cool, but his heart beat rapidly, and his soul seemed to turn
and turn, searching for escape, like a wild beast in a trap.
"In December, 1852," said Nailrod, "you killed a cabin
boy, name of Cuffy."
"It's a lie," groaned the captain.
"You
To-night you did worse," continued Nailrod.
struck a woman with your fist, and you stung her with
your lying tongue."
The captain was silent, watching for an opening.
"On them two counts," continued the convict, in the
same calm, relentless manner, "I, George Boyse, sentence
you, John Flanges, to death."
He sat with his eyes fixed on the captain's face. Those
eyes glared like a panther's.
Still the captain was silent.
The wind wrenched at the
casement with a shriek. The rain battered on the roof and
skylight.
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1
The convict spoke again: "Because you killed Cuffy,
which was my son, I would shoot you like a dog; and
come here for to do it. But then, you struck my girl, my
Nancy, my daughter, as I come thousands of miles to see;
and, you die."
He rose.
The captain sprang up, seized his chair with
both hands, and whirling it above his head, rushed forward.
Too late. Nailrod took a steady aim, and fired.
A sharp bang; a heavy crash; the smoke floated off into
the shadows in a thin spiral; and Nailrod stood, the pistol
still raised in his hand, looking down upon the body of his
enemy.
The rain beat heavily upon the roof, the wind moaned
drearily outside the casement.
Nailrod stood motionless. His eyes were fixed upon the
body. His face seemed turned to stone.
Then came a shriek, as the wet wind bored its way
again through the cranny in the window.
Nailrod shuddered. He glanced towards the door. The
body lay between him and it. A thin black line was
stealing from the body towards the radius of dull light
round the stove. He felt that he could not bear to see
that creeping horror cross the edge of the lurid ring. He
moved away, cautiously, keeping close to the walls, the
pistol still grasped in his hand, and his eyes still on the
huddled heap in the centre of the floor.
Slowly, stealthily, he moved round the room until he
reached the door, and then, with a frantic dash, he gained
the landing, and tumbled rather than ran down the stair-
case, and out into the darkness and the storm.
And the door swung to; and the candle burned down in
the socket; and the fire died out; and the rain rattled
rapidly upon the roof; and the wind wailed drearily
outside the window.
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53
UNEMPLOYED.

was a doleful night; there had been a heavy snow, a
partial thaw, a sharp frost, and now, after dark, there
was a blood-curdling "Robin Hood wind," and the
unflagged footpath in our new street was ankle deep
in icy slush.
My wife was out shopping, my children were in bed, and
I sat by the fire drowsily reading an account in an English
paper of how the Socialists of Liverpool had hooted their
Lord Mayor for bidding the unemployed "Go to the devil,"
and of how Lord Cross had inquired what the hooting
meant, and on being told had "laughed heartily."
Somebody rang the bell. It would be old Alec coming
in for a gossip. I rose lazily with my black clay pipe in my
mouth, stepped into the draughty passage and opened the
door.
The burly form of my friend was not there, but instead,
I beheld the shadowy figure of a woman, with her pale oval
face, young and pretty, faintly discernible against the back-
ground of dark brown fog.
The figure said, "Is Mrs. Scribe at home, please?"
I replied that she was not. The figure said, modestly,
"I am Miss Davis, the music teacher."
"Will you come in, Miss Davis?”
Oh, no, thank you.
I only called to ree-Mrs.
Scribe I called this morning to ask if your little girl was
taking lessons."
"Mrs. Scribe told me," I said; adding, "Yes, of course,
Miss Davis, Annie shall come.”
(C
Oh, thank you," said Miss Davis; then, with blended
shyness and frankness, "I'm sorry to be so importunate,
but it is so hard to get pupils, and I was anxious to be in
time. The competition is terribly sharp; there are so
many music-teachers."
"There are so many of everything," I answered, glumly;
#
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THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
ช
and, with a smile and a bow, my wistful little visitor dis-
appeared in the darkness.
I went back through the draughty passage into the cosy
room, and puffed slowly at the black clay pipe.
"The competition is so terribly sharp; there are so many
music teachers."
I stared moodily into the fire. My two little daughters
were sound asleep upstairs. I knew how Polly would be
lying, with her chubby cheek nestled into her chubby
hand, and the shadow of a smile upon her bud of a mouth.
"The competition is so terribly sharp." I glanced at
the mirror. A grim, anxious face looked back at me.
Brow lined and creased hair, grey and thin.
I am
forty- ? h'm!
That Miss Davis seemed a nice little body. My wife
had told me about her. She had been educated on the
Continent. She was very anxious to get pupils. She had
not got one yet; and her education had cost her mother so
much. Her terms were only half-a-guinea a quarter.
There was so much competition that it was useless to ask
more. One must live-if one could.
She had come twice through the fog and the slush and
the "Robin Hood wind," to ask if she might teach my
daughter piano-playing-for tenpence a week, and she had
been quite grateful when I said yes.
Thinking of these things as I stood before the fire, a sense
of personal shame came over me.
I felt humiliated; my
manhood winced under the sting as I thought of that brave,
clever, and refined lady-I use the word in its highest
sense-bringing her talent to my door to sell for a fraction
of its value, because "competition is so terribly sharp."
And then I sat down and let my pipe out, thinking of the
bitter lot of the numerous poor governesses, music teachers,
and other educated women who are doomed to wage the
battle for existence in a society where the competition is
terribly sharp, and where there are too many of those
priceless treasures-good musicians.
What a cruel fight it is, that of the educated poor woman
of the middle class; with what silent heroism is it main-
tained; in what sad defeat must it too often end.
These frail, precious, human creatures, battling so
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
55
gallantly, yet so hopelessly amid the rude billows of our
cruel commercial sea; these spoiled melodies and trodden
blooms, are they also to "go to the devil"
{ " ?
Tenpence a week! For this a trained and cultured
musician is to sell her skill-and be grateful.
art.
And Socialism, we are told, will destroy the incentive to
The incentive to art! Tenpence a week after years of
study and labour and hundreds of pounds in expense!
And a refined and clever woman has to walk through
the snow-slush and the fog to my door to ask for tenpence
a week. And I cannot prevent it-have to endure it.
I feel as if I couldn't look my own daughter in the face.
* * * * *
When the little music-teacher was gone, and when I had
finished my growl, and when the blush had melted out of
my face, I sat down and let my imagination take its way
with me.
Then the snow-slush melted and the fog lifted, and out
came the sun of a fair May morning to shine upon the
blossomed thorns and the dancing brook and the flowery
meadows of a "Merrie English" landscape.
The young roses were budding upon the homestead
walls. The pigeons fluttered like showers of flower-petals
above its roofs and gables, the swallows built under its
shady eaves.
Across the well-kept lawn, erect with a free and buoyant
step, there came an English girl. She wore a simple dress.
of pale lavender, decorated with self-coloured flowers of a
lighter tint, and a large white linen hood, under which her
ripe lips, gleaming teeth, rosy cheeks, and lustrous dark
eyes showed, as all fair things must, the lovelier against a
plain foil.
Blithely she sang, this bonny English maid, as she
tripped among the budding daisies with the milk-pail
clasped in her shapely arm:
Merrily, merrily, shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough,
until, at the sound of her voice, another girl, smaller, and
with dark hair and grey eyes, came out through the leafy
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THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
curtain at the window, and, with her face all dimpled with
smiles, exclaimed :
(6
Why, Winnie, how slow you've been with the milking
this morning.'
""
رو
To this the latter girl replied, "Yes, dear, I've been
dreaming with my head in dear old Dapple's side-dream-
ing about that wonderful opera of Ransom's we saw last
night. I could not drive the picture of the forest festival
from my eyes, nor the refrain of the elf song from my ears.
Yes," said the dark girl, "how that number haunts
But come in now, dear. Bertha has just run over
from the fruit garden, and we are going to practise a new
quartette before breakfast. Your brother Frank will take
the 'cello part."
one.
The two girls went in together, and I heard a chord
struck on the piano, and then the dark girl's voice saying,
with a sigh, "The competition is so terribly sharp"
*
*
* *
Of course, that fancy of mine is very foolish. You can
never have milkmaids able to play quartettes, nor cultured
players able to milk cows-except under Socialism. And
Socialism is impossible.
Socialism is quite impossible, because, naturally, the
wealthy men who own the land and the capital will not
consent to part with them.
So the competition must grow sharper and sharper, and
the players of sweet music sadder and sadder, and the poor
more listless, torpid, hopeless !
Unless-to learn from the Lord Mayor of Liverpool-
unless we take heart of grace and tell our rich men to go to
the devil. Perhaps will someday.
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57
SOME OLD WAR-DOGS.
has often happened during my wanderings through
the streets of London, that I have noticed certain
straight-backed, grizzled men attired in semi-military
dress, who saunter along as though wating for a 'bus
that never comes. These veterans belong to the corps of
Commissionaires. They are all of them old soldiers or
sailors of good character, mostly in receipt of pensions, and
their present walk in life—an apt phrase in their case-is
to carry messages or go errands at the modest rate of
sixpence an hour, or threepence a mile.
Now, as I said before, I have often marked these men,
and have seen that many of them wear war medals on their
stout old chests, and then it has occurred to me that they
should have good tales to tell.
Quiet and civil as they are, and inoffensive as they look,
these fellows must at some time have sought the bubble
reputation or, at least, the humble pension-at the
cannon's mouth. Perhaps the hand that gently takes your
threepence may once have roughly taken life. Perhaps
yonder short-waisted, double-chinned man now threading
his way through the London traffic, stepping gingerly lest
the mud should soil his shiny boots, has in his time rushed
through the fierce melée of a bayonet charge with never a
thought for the red blood splashing upward in his path.
Perhaps but why guess and wonder, when the proof is at
hand? Yonder goes one of the veterans into a public-house
hard by, and I will after him and get his history.
So I enter the tavern and approach my prey.
He is a big, burly man, with a great, round face of claret
colour, shaded with purple. He is badly pitted with small-
pox, and has several ugly scars on his mottled neck. Not
a handsome man; but a certain deep wrinkle beside the
iron-grey moustache, and a certain latent twinkle in the
small steely eyes, should mean good-humour. In fact, from
his great wide shoes to his shiny, bald pate, he is as jovial
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THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
and as hearty a man as one need wish to see. There are
four medals on his breast; amongst them I notice the
watery-blue ribbon and curly clasps of the Crimea.
straight up to him and open the attack. A little Free-
masonry passes, and he surrenders at discretion. A quart
of ale is brought, and he lifts it from the counter, and with
a smile that is half a frown and a frown that is half a smile
says, "Here's fortune," and drinks.
"You wear the Crimean medal," I say, interrogatively.
He puts down his pot and touches first his right ear, of
which only half remains, then the left side of his neck,
where is a big, ugly scar, and then holds up his left hand,
minus two fingers, accompanying these actions by the
significant words, "Alma," "Inkerman," and "Attack on
the Re-dan." This done, he laughs a low, rich, oily laugh
that sounds like old port gurgling from a bottle, winks
a slow, wise wink, and subsides into silence. I return to
the attack, and the following sharp skirmish ensues :—
"Left the army long?"
"Seventy-four."
"What regiment ?"
"Granidears."
"How long were you in the service?"
"Did my twenty-one."
"Pension?"
(C
Thirteenpence a day."
A pause. Then I say, softly, "I suppose you have seen
rough times."
The veteran gives another subterranean chuckle, and
says, "Rather." Then he stands and looks gravely out at
the traffic in Oxford Street. He is turning back to the
days when he was a slim young lad in a tight tunic. I
don't hurry him, but wait with patience, and he soon begins
of his own accord the following statement:-
"Ours is a military family. Me father was drum-major
of the Old Flat-feet; a real old buffstick, and brought us up
very stern. There was nine of us; five boys. We all
carried the knapsack. I was the youngest. The others are
all gone, poor lads. Dick, he died of dy-sentry at Scutari.
Tom was shot in the 'tack on the Re-dan. Bill an' George
was both wounded at Inkerman, where I got this slit in the
i
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59
weazan. Bill, he shut his knife, but George got better and
served till '63, when he kicked out with cholera at Morar.
He was sergeant-major when he died.
"Three of me sisters is living. The old woman was a
good one. She was a sergeant's daughter, and as good a
soldier as any of us. She was feared of nothing in the
wide world-except my father. Not as he ever hurt
her, but he had a piercing eye-and that would tame the
old woman. I've often heard father tell how she waited on
the wounded in the Sikh war. I was a nipper then. The
Sikhs are fine men, and'll fight like the Earl of Hell's
sheriffs. They had pushed up one day rather close to the
field hospital. It was back of some rising ground. The
doctor wanted some water, and told a drummer lad to fetcli
it. But the well was under fire, and the lad funked it.
'Go at once, ye young whelp,' says the doctor, but me
mother ups and takes the bucket out of the boy's hand, and
says she, 'Ye'll be a man some day, Dennis, and'll do a
man's duty,' and she fetched the water with the bullets
whistling round her ears, and flopped it down aside of the
doctor, an' says she, saucy like, for she was a handsome
woman and a favourite, says she, 'Is there any other
service in a woman's way, sir?' And the doctor he smiles,
and says he, 'I wish I was the General,' he says, 'and you
should have a company.
999
Here some symptoms of the port-winey chuckle manifest
themselves, and the veteran drowns them out with a deep
draught of ale.
"The Crimea ! The Crimea! Ay, ay; through it I was.
The Alma! I'm like as I could see it all now, like a picture,
with live figures in it. Lord! what a day we had, and how
our regiment did catch it; and how our old colonel did hold
his chin up, and set his shoulders back, and seem to enjoy
hisself-a-taking it easy. Oh! he was a perisher. Why,
look you, we was a-going up that infernal hill with the
shells a-whizzing, and the shot a-singing, and the grape and
canister a-tearing up the ground, and there was the little
Frenchmen away on our right a-skipping like goats and
a-yelling like jays, and us a-stepping out in quick time,
thirty inches to the pace, and a hundred and sixteen paces
to the minute, like a review march past, when a feller
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named Donovan, an Irishman, who was anxious to be at 'em,
gets about a pace in front of the line.
"Well, the Colonel he squints down the line and he sees
the man, and he knows him, and he calls out loud and
clear, but quite cool and reg'lar, and says he, 'Dress back
there, Donovan, dress back. You'll spoil the whole affair.'
'Oh! he was a tickler, I tell you; and only for Donovan
being shot he'd have given him instruction drill as soon as
the battle was over. But Donovan got his discharge along
with a many more good soldiers that day. For it cost
dear, did the Alma business, though it didn't last long."
The sergeant drinks again, and looks thoughtful.
"Curious thing," he says, "how I can remember Alma. I
suppose it's with being my first brush. The first man I
ever saw killed was killed that day, and not many paces
from me. He was a colour-sergeant of B Company. A
fat fellow; fatter than I am now. A twenty-four pound
shot hit the ground about a yard in his front, and went
under his feet. It shot him up a yard in the air, and he
fell down dead. I suppose he must have ruptured his heart
with the shock. It was getting warm about then, and soon
got warmer. The officers kept saying, 'Close up, close up;'
and the fellows kept dropping. That's where I lost the
top of my ear. I suppose it was shot off with a rifle ball.
But I never knew till after the business was over.
"Then there was the 'tack on the Re-dan. That was a
devil of a mess. It was an infantry Balaklava. We sent
8,000 to take a fort twice as strong as the Malakoff, and
that cost the French some trouble, though they was 24,000
strong. Me brother Tom was shot through the lungs and
head twice. I got my two fingers cut off by a Russian
officer. One of our men, Boss-eyed Bates we called him,
bayoneted the officer. Bates was killed too. He was shot
when he was retiring. Inkerman, now, I can't tell you any-
thing about. I got hit under the jaw with a bit of shrapnel
just after it began, and it knocked me out of time for the
next three months. But there's a man over there by the
door can tell you all about it."
I look round and see a tall, thin Commissionaire, with a
long grizzled moustache and a sullen, taciturn expression
of face, a man who might have stood as a model for the
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61
Knight of the Rueful Countenance. My first friend hails
him, saying "Ho! Gabriel, just a minute." "His name
aint Gabriel, it's Tom Riley," he whispers to me, "but we
call him the angel Gabriel. He can tell you about Inker-
man; but he is as close as an oyster." Gabriel approaches,
and my patron says, "This gentleman wants to know some-
thing about Inkerman." Gabriel eyes me under his shaggy
brows, with a doubting expression, and says, "Humph!"
"I am very fond of reading about Inkerman, Mr. Riley,
and should be delighted to hear about it from an eye-witness,"
I say, suavely. Mr. Riley again says, "Humph!"
" Will
Mr. Riley take something?" Mr. Riley takes an Irish
whisky hot, and pours it gently but firmly down his throat.
Then he coughs, and addresses me in a sad, low voice, to
this effect:-
"I can't tell you much but what you know. Not so
much, maybe. Inkerman was fought on a foggy morning.
It was cold and raw, and we turned out without getting a
bite or sup, or even striking tents. The Russians was
just eight to one; they was well fed and primed with
drink. They had more guns than we had, and our
ammunition didn't last out, and then--it was the bayonet.
I was in the Connaught Rangers.
But I can't tell you
much. The fog was so thick, I don't think the officers
rightly knowed where the men was. The Rooshians fought
steady and stubborn. We was all mixed. It was Donny-
brook-every man fighting for his own hand. I was hit in
the leg, too, and got this besides." Here he shows me
a large seal between the thumb and forefinger of the left
hand. "It was a bayonet wound, and turned to a running
sore. They often does; most always. I was in hospital a
long time with it after my leg was healed. How did I get
it? It was in one of the rushes. There was a lot of
rushing. A fellow made a point at me, and I parried, and
his bayonet slipped down my barrel and cut my hand."
"And what became of the Russian?" I ask, eagerly.
Gabriel looks fixedly at some object over my head and
mutters: "Ah, yes. Slipped down me barrel-his bayonet
did. A nasty cut. Will ye drink with me, sir?”
I repeat my inquiry about the Russian. "Did you kill
him?" I ask.
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Gabriel answers, simply: "If I hadn't he'd have killed
me," then hastily changes the subject and begins to speak
rapidly and with great bitterness and vehemence.
"It wasn't just the fighting. We was neither clothed
nor fed. And we could get no 'bacca half the time. And
it was sentry-go and trenches, and trenches and sentry-go.
And the climate is the worst God made. It was cruelly
cold. We used to wrap straw round our arms at night on
sentry to keep us from being frost-bitten. For many a
month I wore two odd boots, and had never a shirt to my
back. I had a red flannel shirt given to me by a Zouave
that I helped when he was wounded. I wore it for three
months without washing. Then I washed it and hung it on
the tent to dry, and a cussed mule ate the back off of it.
I've spent many a night on the Woronzorf road doing out-
post and sentry duty. It was no fun. You had to look
out sharp, for the Rooshians would sling a fire ball and
follow it up with a round shot. Yes, and they'd come out
of their works and drive us back on the pickets, and even out
of the advanced trenches, as often as six times in a night."
At this point another Commissionaire comes in—a small,
wiry man, with a face as hard and ruddy as a winter apple.
"Ah," he says, "Ah, Gabriel, telling the gentleman how you
bolted from the ghost at Cardiff ? ” The little man laughs,
and Gabriel gives him a withering look, and nodding to me,
retires. My burly friend goes with him, his chubby shoulders
shaking with laughter as he salutes me at parting.
I am alone now with the new-comer. His name, he says,
is Micky Harrington. He laughs, he swears, he drinks
whisky, and he chatters as only an Irishman can; and the
burden of his conversation is as follows:
"Been telling you about Inkerman, eh? Did you get
out of him about the Russian he skivered? Yes; 'tis
like drawing a tooth. He don't like mindin' of it. And
yet he was forced to kill him, begad, and begad it's the
fortune of war.
"
"Did you ever kill a man, Mr. Harrington?" I inquire.
His reply startles me.
"Did I? Sure I couldn't rest in me bed if I thought I
hadn't. But I don't know for certain. I've fired into the
thick of 'em many a time."
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63
Here he pauses, and a shade comes over his sunny face.
"Well," he continues, "I don't know, begad, that I'm any
better than Gabriel. I mind a thing once that I don't feel
proud of. 'Twas one day in '55. I was out at the Quarries
on sharp-shooting duty. There was three of us together,
and we saw a Russian sentry on a bridge inside the walls,
and we got judging distance on him.
“One said he was 900 yards off, another said 800, I said
850. So, for the sake of curiosity, we agreed each to sight
his rifle with what he thought, and all fire together.
"So we did, begad, and-and the man dropped. It's not
nice, begad, to think about; seems like killin' the feller in
cold blood, begad.
"The climate? Oh, it was a sneezer. But it was the
short commons that fettled me the worst. I was a youngster
then, with a big appetite, and a small conscience, begad.
Yes, as small a one as ever was packed in a wicked divil's
kit. I mind one night I'd been in the trenches diggin'. I
was fearfully sharp set, and I couldn't sleep for the hunger.
Jock Hunter had half a loaf in his knapsack. I saw him
stow it. I knew he'd not give a feller a bite, for he was a
Scotchman. So when he was asleep, begad, I drew his
knapsack from under his head, and got out the loaf and
broke it in two and took half. It would have been death
to eat it in the tent, begad, for the crumbs would have
betrayed me, so I crept out and sat down in the snow, begad,
and scoffed it.
"There was a gay shindy in the mornin', but Jock never
found the thief. No, begad, he never found him.”
Micky takes a drink, while I stand and try to realise that
grim picture of the starving soldier crouching out in the
snow while he ate his stingy comrade's rations. Micky then
goes on to say that there was plenty of fun at Sebastopol,
and illustrates his remark with the following highly comic
incident :-
"The advanced parallels were close up to the walls. The
divil a one durst show his head. When we wanted a shot
we'd hold up a hat on a ramrod and draw the Russian fire,
begad; then pop up and take our shot, down again sharp,
begad. Well, one day a French doctor came up to the
angle where I was. You could see into Sebastopol from
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there, and he wanted badly to look. So we told him if he
did he'd be shot, begad; and he said, 'Pooh, pooh!' says he,
'I must look,' says he; and, begad, he did look, and, begad,
he was shot-shot through the head.
(C
Well, we heard that his brother was a colonel, and we
carried his body about four miles until we found his brother.
He was a fine-looking gentleman, the colonel. He said we
were 'two fine fellows, and very kind Anglais,' begad, and
he gave us a bottle of wine and a cake of tobacco apiece,
and some money, and said his poor brother was 'over valiant.'
"I thought his brother was a blighted fool. For I said,
You'll be shot if you do, begad,' and he looked, begad, and
he was shot dead."
Here Micky finishes his liquor, touches his cap lightly,
and, remarking that he will see me again some day and tell
me how the ghost scared Gabriel, steps out into Oxford
Street in search of more threepences; while I turn home-
wards reflecting on the strange things I had heard, and
thinking how we constantly brush sleeves with misery and
with mirth, or with heroism or
or kindness, in
in the
streets of a busy city, without ever knowing or even
thinking of the tragedy or comedy bound up in those
commonplace cloth covers all around us.
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65
THE INDIAN MUTINY.
T was on a golden afternoon, of a golden summer's day,
in that golden garden of England, the Isle of Wight,
that Jack and I lay idly on the grass at the foot of
Brading Down, and smoked the pipe of peace.
The cloudless sky was blue and deep, the west wind
caressed the cheek as softly as a mother's hand, the gulls
sailed lazily over the sleepy sea, the flower-laden hedges filled
the air with sweet perfume. Jack and I were as lazy and
as happy as the gulls.
"Jack,” said I, listlessly, and half yawning, "spin me a
yarn." Jack blew a big puff of tobacco smoke and turned
on his back. His sword slipped half out of its sheath. His
medals gleamed in the sun. He was too lazy to answer me.
"You were in both Crimea and Mutiny, Jack?" Jack
grunts. I take a few whiffs, and drowsily watch the blue-
backed martens as they skim and turn, and dip and cross, a
busy crowd, above the gliding brook.
They suggest to me the idea of a lot of fairy shuttles
weaving fairy spells. I look again at Jack; his eyes are
closed, the pipe has fallen from his lips-he is going to sleep.
"Jack! Jack! rouse about, sluggard." Jack half opens
Jack, tell me, which war do you think was the
hardest war, the Crimea or the Mutiny?
his eyes.
"The Mutiny," Jack growls, and shuts his eyes. He is
going to sleep again, but I am wide awake, and he must
talk. He shall talk.
I shake him up, I throw him my tobacco pouch, I insist
upon his being sociable. "You surprise me," I say, "when
you say that the Indian Mutiny was a harder war than the
Crimea."
Jack twirls his moustache, settles his cap, and turns to
me, leaning on one elbow. He is beginning to be interested.
There is a faint gleam in his eyes as he answers:
"Not
much to choose; a case of frizzle versus freeze. In the
Crimea the cold and hunger were keener; in the Mutiny,
E
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the marching was incessant and exhausting, and the fighting
fast and furious. Both were bad enough, my lad; but the
Mutiny was the most severe." Jack smoked awhile in
silence.
"It's a curious thing, though," he resumed, "that the
Crimea should have made a much deeper impression on the
public mind than the Mutiny did. Inkerman, Balaclava,
and Alma; Sebastopol, Scutari, the Quarries, and Bomar-
sund, are all names fresh in the memory of the whole
country. But who knows or talks much about the Indian
Mutiny-except the men who were in it? The Mutiny
was since the Crimea-and God knows it was a thing to
remember-but it's as far off now, to all intents and
purposes, as Waterloo or Salamanca."
"How do you account for it, Jack?"
"I don't account for it. You know, I never try to
account for things; I wasn't sent here to account for
things. I just tell you the facts. And it's a fact that the
Indian Mutiny was about the fiercest and bloodiest war that
England ever fought. It was a bitter war. In the Crimea
our men and the Russians fought like bull-dogs. In India
we went at it like tigers. In the Crimea we cut and stabbed,
and slashed and thumped, with a sort of brutal good-
humour; we cut each other's throats or knocked out each
other's brains with stolid good-will, fought, as you may say,
under the rules of the P.R., doing our murder in accordance
with 'good order and military discipline'; but in India it
was deadly vengeance and deadly desperation. War to the
knife, and no quarter. The difference was in the enemy.
The Russians were soldiers-the Sepoys were fiends. In
Russia we often burned with battle fever, but in India we
were all the time drunk with sheer black rage.
"If the fighting had not been so hot, the Indian Mutiny
would have been no child's play. The climate, even in
times of peace, is very trying. So are the vermin. The
crows steal one's meat off the cook's tray.

The white ants
eat holes through your boxes and spoil your books and
clothes, and I have often had to fan the flies away with one
hand while I was holding up my teacup with the other.
Then there are the fleas and mosquitoes.
"Altogether, what with the buzzing and the biting, and
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67
the stifling heat, one can hardly sleep or even rest at nights.
And then it's a regular custom to turn up your boots and
shake them in the morning, or you may find a snake, or a
centipede, or a scorpion in them. What is a centipede?
A kind of caterpillar, with a hundred feet, and every foot as
hot as hell. And you get the prickly heat. A horrible,
rasping, stinging, biting, burning, itching rash. Often at
night when I had it bad, I would get up and climb into a
water tank, and fall asleep, with only my head out of water.
That must be bad for the health, and, indeed, I am subject
to ague and rheumatism at this day.
"But add all those annoyances, and the chronic fever and
ague and cholera and dysentery, and the unmerciful heat
of the sun to the conditions of a desperate war, all forced
marches and hard scrapping, and you may form some idea of
the time we had with the Sepoys.
"There never were troops that went through more
fatigues and privations, or fought with more dash or
resolution, than our troops in the Mutiny. They were
always short of food and clothing-I have lived a fortnight
on a handful of raw flour a day-the climate did its worst,
and the enemy were always ten to one. But our men
marched under those roasting suns, and through those fever-
traps and poisonous jungles, without a flinch or a grumble.
They marched the horses and the elephants off their legs.
"One hussar regiment chased a corps of black cavalry
forty miles in the heat of the sun, and then fought them-
and cut them to pieces-in the middle of a rapid river. We
all suffered alike all arms of the service. Our regiment
once came across the 8th Hussars. The men of that corps
were like bags of bones. They were almost in rags, and
filthy, too, and hardly a man with a shirt to his back. Our
fellows gave them a shirt each—we were well up then-and
we parted the best of friends.
"The Sepoys were by nature bloodthirsty, brutish, and
cruel, and they were wrought to the top pitch of fury.
They had been shamefully treated by our people, who had
kicked and cuffed and cursed them like dogs, and, besides
that, they believed all Christians to be infidels and enemies
of heaven, whom it was a holy deed to kill. When the
Mutiny broke out, at first they had it pretty much their own

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¡
way, and those first successes set their backs up, and made
them think they could throw off the yoke. Then you know
what horrible, bloody deeds they did. You know how they
murdered little children before their parents' eyes; how
they tortured women-tortured them with the malice and
the devilish ingenuity of fiends-and did other things too
shocking for telling.
"All these causes made the black devils desperate. It
was neck or nothing with them, and they fought like
wounded panthers, or like cornered rats-that will face
anything. They hated us with a white-hot hate that
nothing but blood could cool. It was to tame or slaughter
three hundred thousand such wild beasts as these that our
men were set-about thirty thousand of them-at the time
I speak of.
to us.
"So far as our men are concerned there was an equally
strong feeling. Those snake-eyed, wolf-jawed, black imps
had killed our officers, had outraged and murdered our
women, and had cut our children to pieces. We heard of
babies being thrown up in the air and caught on the
bayonets, or being taken by the feet and dashed against
stone walls. We knew that our garrisons were besieged
and blockaded by the rebels; that they were short of food,
and that they had large numbers of women and children
with them. We knew what would happen to those babies
and women if the natives got at them. We knew that we
alone could save them. There was no such thing as hardship
We marched awful distances in awful heats. We
never thought of rations or of rest. Always we had the
hate of those black brutes and the danger of our own people
-the helpless children and the women-in our minds. If
we caught any Sepoys of the rebel regiments we hanged
them or bayoneted them where they stood.
We never
offered quarter, and I don't think they ever asked it. I
have seen six of them swing from one tree. I have seen
their officers tied to the mouth of a field gun and blown to
bits. One day we, myself and about a dozen more, were
out foraging, when we found two Sepoys in a deserted
village. We took them at once, tied their hands, and stood
them up against the nearest house. There was an old man
and a young one. The young one was that scared he could
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69
scarcely stand. The old one stood up stiff enough and
cursed us in Hindostanee for all the white pigs and sons of
the devil he could think of. Our sergeant asked them if
they had anything to say why they should not be shot. The
old man cursed him for an infidel dog, and bid him shoot;
the young man sighed, but said nothing. Four of our men
then fell in and shot them, and they were left as they fell.
"Oh, I tell you there was a very great deal of bad blood
between us, and when it came to fighting it was wigs on the
green and no mistake. Our men used to go for them like
terriers among rats. They had no chance at all. I once
saw a wing of a Highland regiment go right through a Sepoy
brigade. The Sepoy regiments in that brigade had killed a
lot of English ladies a few months before. Our men were
marching up to the relief of Lucknow, where a lot more
women and children were shut up with the garrison, and a
division of the rebels tried to intercept them. The High-
landers had to march across a plain, under a murderous fire,
to reach the enemy. The blacks blazed away desperately,
and many went down; but, do you know, those Scotchmen
laughed. By the Lord they did. As they came to the
charge the whole blessed line burst into a loud laugh, and
they shook that Indian brigade, and went through them as a
runaway horse would break and scatter a band of Sunday-
school children. If you'd seen the big Highlandmen work
the bayonet, you'd never forget it. They were drunk with
excitement and rage, and the Sepoys ran like hares with
fear at the very looks of 'em. If I'd been a Sepoy that day
I'd have run too. One Highlander dashed into a whole
company of the Sepoys. He was found afterwards quite
dead. He had stabbed or brained some half-dozen of them,
and then had been run through the body with a sword by a
Sepoy officer. The Scotchman had been stabbed behind, and
had turned upon his enemy and seized him by the throat.
The two lay stiff and stark among the dead, Donald with
the sword still through his body, and his grip still tight
on the black captain's weasen. Besides the sword wound,
the Highlander had over thirty bayonet wounds and several
shot wounds on him. The burying party could not loosen
his fingers, and the two enemies would have been thrown
into one grave, but the sergeant of the fatigue said, 'No,
·
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Donald should never lie with that black pig of Satan,' and
he went and cut the flesh away from out of the dead man's
grip.
"I had my full share of all that was going. I had fever
and dysentery. I had ague and sunstroke. I had enough
marching and fighting and sentry-go to satisfy a glutton;
but I was lucky in one thing; I never got wounded but
once. That was about a month before the relief of Lucknow.
We had come across a force of the enemy near a village
that stood on the borders of a close jungle, and our
regiment and some hussars and two field guns had dislodged
them. It was a very sharp skirmish, and after we drove
them out of the village the enemy's infantry made a stand
in the copse, or jungle. We outflanked them, and followed
them a good way back, while the cavalry went after their
guns. When the engagement was over, I was sent by the
adjutant back to the village to ask for bearers to bring back
the wounded. As I was entering the jungle, I suddenly
found myself face to face with two Sepoys, an officer with
a drawn sword in his hand, and a private with rifle and
bayonet.
"It was no time for arguing the point. My rifle was
loaded, so I shot the Sepoy for a start, and then came at
once to the charge. The officer gripped his sword and stood
on guard. Neither of us spoke. Both meant to kill or be
killed. It was a duel, sword against bayonet. The Indian
understood his business. He kept his left hand ready to
seize my rifle if I made a rash point, and his own weapon
well balanced for attack and defence. I walked round him
for a while looking for an opening. At last I made a feint;
he showed the parry, and I drove at him and jumped back,
just in time to escape a sharp return cut. Then we went
to work in earnest. It was a good match, and during the
ten minutes it lasted he wounded me twice, once slightly in
the left hand and once severely in the right shoulder. I
felt the blood running down my arm as I fought, and I
pressed him close in case I should get weaker, and in one of
my attacks I broke his guard and stabbed him in the thigh.
He made a furious cut at me, but I parried it and stepped
back. His face was frightful to look at. His eyes blazed
in his head; his lips were drawn back from his teeth-he
looked like a very fury.
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71
"You damned white-fanged black-skinned beast,' I said,
'I have got you.' He just drew himself up and spat at me.
Then we resumed business with a sharper appetite than
ever. Now, I had seen many of these native swordsmen,
and I had seen them take a bayonet off a rifle with one tap
of the sword and one turn of the wrist, and I thought this
fellow would try to do it. If he did, I meant that he should
pay for it. So it turned out.
"It was just after I had made a couple of strong attacks
that he tried to lift my bayonet. He thought I should be
unprepared then. I knew he counted on that, and I
guessed that counting on that he would commit himself.
As I drew back from a point, he stepped in, and tapped the
locking ring with his point. I heard it turn, but I had
been waiting for this, and I at once disengaged, and passing
the bayonet under his sword arm, drove it up to the socket
in his chest. He made a last cut at me then, but I was
ready and sprang back, leaving the rifle with him.
He
went down like an ox under the axe, and the black blood of
him spurted out on the hot sand and trampled leaves
"I left him as he dropped, and ran on to the village to
find the doctor. He had given it me good enough, and
I was three months before I got back to duty, although we
didn't count much of a wound in those times. I have seen
a gunner work his gun for an hour after a piece of grape
shot had broken three of his ribs, and I knew a case of an
officer in the Dragoons who had his left arm broken and
half his right cheek shot away as he was mounting to
charge, but he went in with the rest, and came out also.
Yes, I could tell you a good deal about the relief of
Lucknow, although I was not engaged myself. You know
the women and children were the great anxiety. Well,
when the Highlanders got in, they were so delighted that
they began hugging all the women [and kissing all the
babies they met; and one big rough customer goes blun-
dering through the gate with his hat off and his hair all
matted, and his face streaming with blood from a flesh
wound in the scalp, and the first woman he met was
a captain's wife; but Jock stood on no ceremony, but
seized her in his arms and kissed her right before the
captain's nose. Of course he didn't know her. He was
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too much excited even to know he was wounded. But the
captain he laughed, and, says he, slapping Jock on the
back, 'You are a true soldier, my man, and a lady's man,
I see; but go now and get your wounds dressed.' The
lady laughed about it many a time after, and Jock was too
bashful to look her in the face when once his blood cooled
and he knew her rank."
Jack sighs, knocks the ashes out of his pipe, and rises.
I rise also without further question or comment. We turn
our steps to barracks, and we go our ways in the glorious
sunshine, where the larks are singing over a hundred flower-
painted fields, and where the air is heavy with the fragrance
of the lilac and the hawthorn blossoms and the scented
herbs of the earth. Peace is written on the quiet landscape,
where the dappled cows come "linkin' o'er the lea" to rest
and drink; peace is written on the drowsy windows of the
clean and quaint old Brading; peace sounds in the slow
pealing of the church bells on the distant downs, and my
friend, as he walks slowly under the orchard wall, with
yellow shafts of light laughing at him through the masses of
pink apple blossom and green foliage, looks as peaceful, as
homely, and as quiet a man as ever "shot a Sepoy for a
start," "or drove his bayonet through an officer's chest up
to the socket," or hated a rebel with a "white-hot hate that
only blood could quench.'

""
And, indeed, old Jack is a gentle and a cheerful soul, and
one, withal, more prone to pity than to slay. But gun-
powder is quiet enough if only you keep it cool, and there
is wisdom in the old King's proverb: "Beware the fury of
a patient man.

""
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73
WATERS!
HERE were three of us in the compartment, and,
like true-born Englishmen,
did the first
hundred miles without any one of us throwing a
word at another.
Then a young soldier got in and took the vacant corner.
We glanced at him with interest. The train moved on.
The man at the other end of the seat drew himself up,
produced a cigar-case, lit a cigar, and holding the match n
hand, said, with a smile, "Going on leave, soldier?
The soldier said, "Yes."
""
The man in the corner smoked awhile, then asked, "How
long have you been in the Army?"
The soldier said, "Two years.
""
"And will they let you go away so soon?" asked the man
in the corner.
The soldier said, "Yes," adding, "They'll let a man go on
furlough as soon as he's dismissed recruits' drill."
The man in the corner said, "Oh, indeed!" and smoked
reflectively.
Then the man in the other corner spoke. He said, “You'd
not get away as easy as that in the artillery."
I looked at the speaker, and he looked steadily at me.
"Been in the artillery?" I asked.
He said, "Yes."
"Where have you come from, soldier?" asked the man
in the corner.
The soldier answered, "Dover."
The artillery man looked interested.
66
Oh," he said, "have the Ramchunders got to Dover
yet?"
The soldier said, "No."
"Do you know the Ramchunders?" I asked of the
artillery man.
He said: "Very well. I lay with them in India."
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The man in the corner looked up sharply and said, “Did
you? So did I."
"When?" asked the artilleryman.
66
Seventy-eight," said the man in the corner, "at Morar."
The artilleryman smiled. "I was there," he said.
"And were you in the Ramchunders ?" I asked.
The man in the corner said: "No. I was in the Cheese-
cutters, First Battalion."
(6
Oh,”
," said I, "weren't you at Aldershot in seventy-three?"
"I was," said the Cheesecutter.
"You lay at Rushmoor Bottom."
"I did,” said he.
"The Ramchunders were camped alongside of you," I
said.
"They were," he answered.
"How did you know that?”
"Because," said I, "I was there with them."
The three old soldiers and the young soldier, thus
strangely thrown together in one compartment, smiled at
each other. The Cheeseman produced his cigar-case and
handed it round. I produced my brandy-flask and handed
that round.
a
The Cheeseman turned to me and said, "Do ye mind
fellow of ours called Kinderson, a long-distance runner?"
"Quite well," I answered. "I saw him win the mile race
at the garrison sports in '73. He ran with an angular,
machine-like action."
"That's him," said the Cheeseman, "he was a great
runner."
"As good a long-distance runner as I have seen," said I.
"True for you," assented the Cheeseman. "He ran off
with fifty pounds of my money in '75, and he's going yet."
"Backing him?" asked the gunner.
The Cheesecutter nodded an assent.
"Smart man, must have been," said the gunner.
The Cheesecutter smiled grimly and observed: "Y he
was a smart man. I should like to see him again."
"Were you at Morar with the Rams?" asked the gunner,
looking at me.
I said, "No, I have never been in India."
"Ah," said the gunner, "place is well enough, but too
damned hot."
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75
"Awful hot in eighty-one, wasn't it?" asked the Cheese-
man.
The gunner nodded. "Where were you in eighty-one?"
he inquired.
"Cawnpore."
"Never there, myself."
The Cheeseman crossed his legs on the seat, and said:
'It's worth while being there once, just to see the place.
You've heard of the Well of Cawnpore, of course-the
place the Sepoys threw the bodies of the murdered women
and children into? They've made a cemetery there on the
site of the well. It's nicely laid out, with a statue of Miss
Wheeler, General Wheeler's daughter, in the centre, and
the other tombs all round. But the oddest thing about the
place is the inscription on the gate. It says:-
Grieve not, neither remember that which has been.
I suppose that's put there to stop our fellows from feeling
revengeful. Seems to me it's the very thing to make
em so.”
"So I should say," remarked the gunner.
"Ah!" said the Cheeseman, "and I've heard some fearful
swearing done by our men in that little graveyard. First
thing, as you go in, is a tomb 'Sacred to the memory of
Captain So-and-So, his wife, and three little children,'
and so on, till, by the time a fellow has got round the
circle, he feels like shooting the first black thing he gets
sight of."
"There's a deal of bitterness left yet; I've seen it," said
the gunner.
"There is,” replied the Cheeseman, "I mind a case in
point in our own corps."
“What was it ?" asked the gunner.
“There was a man in my company named Heiler," said
the Cheeseman, "as quiet and nice a fellow as you'd meet
in a day's march; but he had the one peculiarity, that he
hated an Indian as a parson hates Old Nick.
"It seems Heiler's brother had been murdered by the
Sepoys, and that and the heat and fatigue of the hard days
of the Mutiny had touched Heiler's brain.
"Must have been so, because of two things. When
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Heiler had a little drink-though he was a steady man and
drank seldom-he would swear the most awful oaths, all in
a kind of a whisper, of the vengeance he would take on the
natives; and often enough, when he was not drinking at all,
he'd wake up in the night and burst out crying. I've heard
him many a time crying softly to himself, and saying 'poor
George'-that was his brother's name-and very curious it
made one feel, I can tell you.
Well, one day soon after we went to Cawnpore, Heiler
went up and saw the cemetery round the well; and it made
a great impression on him, so that after he came back to
barracks he never spoke a word all day.
"The next morning he got up quite calm and quiet,
washed and dressed, put on his waist belt and ball-pouch,
took his rifle out of the rack, and walked steadily out on
parade.
“About four hundred yards off there were three natives
walking-a man in the centre and a woman each side of
him. Heiler was a clinking good shot. He slipped a car-
tridge into his rifle, dropped down on his knee, and picked
the man out as clean as a whistle.
"This was in full sight of the orderly-room, outside of
which a groom was walking the adjutant's horse up and
down. The adjutant heard the shot, ran out, saw the
game, and jumped into the saddle, and made for Heiler just
as he fired again.
"This second shot killed a native postboy. As soon as he'd
fired his first shot Heiler looked round and reloaded. There
he saw a postboy going slowly along on a donkey. And
before you could have said 'mark-time' he had let fly, and
fetched that boy off the donkey—dead.
"Then he saw the adjutant galloping towards him, and
knew his time was short. In went another cartridge,
and round came the muzzle towards the adjutant. Steady
there, sir,' says Heiler; 'steady till I kill another.'
•
"But naturally the officer wasn't going to funk his duty,
so he rode right at Heiler, and Heiler fired between his
horse's legs, and killed the native groom not a yard to the
left of the orderly-room door.
"That was Heiler's last shot. He stood up to attention,
saluted, and handed his rifle to the adjutant.
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77
"He was tried for murder, and was brought in insane.
He was insane, of course, and no wonder. And there's
many a man in the ranks to-day as mad as he was, for the
Indian sun is a deadly thing, and that's a fact."
As the Cheeseman ended his story the train stopped, and
the Cheeseman, with a cordial good-bye to us, got out.
His master-the Cheeseman was a valet-was bouncing
about on the platform in a rage.
Hi, Waters! Here! Damn that fellow."
"Yessir."
"Oh, there you are! Waters, where are my trunks?
Hey! Other end of the train?' How stupid of you.
Didn't I tell you-
"Yessir."
""
"Then why the devil-
"Yessir."
""
"Double, man, double; they'll take the things on to
Crewe
>>
"Yessir."
And Waters tripped down the platform, had out the
trunks, hailed a cab, packed them on it, packed his master
into it, and went off by the driver's side as calm and cool
as if his irascible master had been giving him tips and
compliments. It is a wonderful world.
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THE OLD MAN OF THE SEA.
S we drew away from the side of "The Victory," the
Old Man of the Sea began to talk. As thus :-
"Yer sees that 'ere old craft over there away on
the port bow; that 'ere thing like a half-crown
Noah's Ark, painted yaller? That's a Spanish galoon, ast
was taken years back, in the time of Anson and Rodney.
She was filled cram full of goolden dollars. Bless yer, that's
wheer England have got all her money from, a-taking it
away from other countries." (The Old Man of the Sea has
evidently his own views as to the wealth of nations-and
they don't harmonise with Adam Smith's.) "That big
three-decker ahead on us is the 'Duke of Wellington,' as
was a flagship-time of the Crimea War. She warn't no
good, though, along of being too deep a draught to get at
the Roosian ports. But things is changed now. We don't
go for to count much on the number of guns. It's the
weight of shot and the thickness of plate as does it. The
Duke' yonder carries a 131 guns; but, bless yer dear
'art, The Glatton' there would sink her in five minutes,
although she haves only two guns aboard.
6
•
"That's 'The Glatton' on the starboard quarter-that
turret ship which- You might like to go aboard of her
sir? "
I go aboard “The Glatton,” and find her a turret ship of
the old class. She carries two 25-ton guns, and has 36 inches
of armour on her fighting tower. A very pleasant young
man, a sergeant of marines, shows me round; and I am much
interested in the new Hotchkiss gun-a useful arm, about
twelve feet long, and as thick as a man's leg, which works
with a kind of pistol handle, and is fired by a trigger like
that of a rifle.
For
The Hotchkiss gun throws a six-pound shot about three
miles, and is very rapid and exceedingly handy to use.
keeping bores off the editorial steps, or making midnight
practice at cats on the backyard fence, it would be invaluable.
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79
Returning to the boat, my guide, philosopher, and friend
resumes his conversation.
"Them guns on 'The Glatton' will do comfortable
execution with a 600lb. shell at from six to seven miles," he
said; "and I fancy Mr. Johnny Rooshia would find it out
if he went to war with us now. Besides, we have light
draught ships for shoal water. That is one up the creek
there painted grey. She carries one 18-ton gun, and can
tickle their toby at five mile range with a 400lb. pill.
"This 'ere yaller vessel as we are coming up to is the old
frigate Blonde'-her as brought home the indemnity after
the China War. I knowed the captain of the foretop very
well. He was a rare smart man and a fine sailor, but a
damned rascal. He did tell me how much silver 'The
Blonde' had stowed away in her, but I forgets now.
was a main lot. Dick Bradshaw-that's the cap'n o' the
foretop-had used to be a slaver.
It
"He was captain of a slave dhow on the West Coast.
A fine seaman, as once brought home a brig all the way
from the Cape all alone by hisself, and a boy along of 'un.
The other hands was all dead of the yaller fever, and Dick
had to steer and work the brig with the boy. He told me
as he never had his clothes off on him for three weeks;
never see the sun for over a fortnight, and got the brig
home safe; all by dead reckoning, which were a fine piece
of navigation, and no error.
"We used to chaff Dick about his slaving days. We
always said as when 'The Blonde' fell in with his dhow
as how Dick dropped the blacks down the hawse holes
so as they couldn't find 'um. Anyhow, there was none
aboard when the boats came alongside from the Queen's
ship. Dick did own up as he had hit one nigger on the
head with a sheet block, and wheer the cuss went to I
don't know,' says Dick; but I suppose he went overboard.'
Haw! haw! haw!
"He was a rum divvle was Dick, and he liked a joke, he
did. It was through being took as he got on 'The Blonde.'
When 'The Blonde's' boats boarded his dhow, Dick he shot
at his own first mate for bolting, and he set his back against
the mainmast and fought the bluejackets with the cutlass
till the lewtenant he ups and says he, Blast me, capen,'
•
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"
6
says he, 'but you're real grit, and if you're not English bred,'
he says, may I be rammed, crammed, jammed, and double-
damned into the bottom of a brass cannon and blown from
Hackney to Eh, sir? That's The Bellyruffun' out
behind The Blonde'-the ship as old Napolean Boneypart
surrendered hisself to arter the Battle of Waterloo. So
they made Dick captain of the foretop in 'The Blonde,' and
a very fine seaman he was. Ay, them there was the times,
sir, for scooping in prize money. Time of the Chaney War.
Why, Dick he told me as one day they went ashore for fire-
wood, and they found a lot of wood piled in stacks. And
when they went to lift it, it was blamed heavy, and I'll be
blowed to giblets with a torpedo, and no time allowed for
prayers, if them logs of wood wasn't cram full of silver. So
you may bet there was no time lost a-gettin' it aboard.
“And another time they had been having a afternoon's
fun a-shelling of a Chinese joss-house-that's a kind of
heathen praying shed a sort of temple, and when they
went ashore damme if there wasn't a old image of a Chinee
monk stuck up in a corner of the temple. And he'd never
got a scratch.
"The shot and shell had gone through and through the
blooming joss-house, and riddled it, and the scraps and
chips and splinters and balls had passed him to port and
starboard, fore and aft, above and below, and never drawn
his claret. So he begged on his knees for mercy, and at
last the boatswain's mate, says he, 'Let the lubber go,' he
says; so they cut his pigtail off and let him go. And I'm
blowed, sir, if the old fool didn't give them a bag of a
thousand goold pieces for a ransom. Haw! haw! haw!
And Dick Bradshaw he slipped a ivory god with a diamond
eye into his trousers pocket, and a small gold crocodile of
about two pounds weight under his shirt, for prize money.
Haw! haw! haw!
“And a rare old time he had of it when he got ashore in
Portsmouth, and plaguey soon the god went blind, and the
crocodile found hisself soup in the kettle of a landshark son
of a Jew in a lane down Landport.
"Yes; I've been in the Navy. That's where I got lamed.
It was off the West Coast of Africa-a-slaving. Warm
M.
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81
work that, and work as costs us dear.
sight o' men a-slaving.
We lose a main
"It was in 1850 as I got my gruel-takin' of a slave
dhow. Minds me of another matter, that. We had a
young officer aboard as second luff. A nasty, sneering chap
he was, an' awful strict. He was more generally detested
than any officer I ever sarved under-an' I've sarved under
some hot 'uns. He had a reg'lar down on me, and I hated
him like pison. A queer chap. Had the rummest eye as
ever looked out of a man's head-a light blue, with a cold,
keen shine in it, like cutlass steel.
He was a smart feller enough, but we liked him too
little to own it; an' many's the time the men would curse
him over their grog for a dandy snappy snob. He was a
new hand, and had never been under fire, and we all used to
wish for a brush, just to try his mettle; for we was well
sure as he was a bad-plucked one, and was bettin' odds he'd
funk like a bastard if ever he heard the whistle of a shot.
Well, one day-it was Good Friday, 1850-we heerd
tell of a big dhow a-lyin' up a creek, and the captain sent
out a boat under this officer for to cut her out.
<<
"We had to pull a good three miles up the creek under a
hot sun afore we sighted the dhow. And the second luff
he sat in the stern sheets, and he kept a-smokin' cigars;
and every now and then he'd say, 'Take it easy, men
quite pleasant; so we thought, d'ye see, as he began to feel
skeered, because in a general way, it was 'Give way, you
rascals,' or 'Pull, you dogs.'
"But at last we were close up with the dhow, and she
spoke a word with a 24 pounder. The shot fell short, and
went over us straight, and the lewtenant must have felt the
wind of it. I kept my eye on him to see what he'd do.
He didn't do nothing, but just smoked on as if he'd never
heard the gun; and we kept pulling till we was close up to
the enemy, and I kept watching the second luff.
"So we comes under the shadow of the dhow, and a shot
smashes half the oars on our port side and kills two men.
Then the officer pitches his cigar over the side, and says he,
'Way enough, me hearties; now for their gizzards,' an' he
shins up the side like a tom-cat a-chasin' a sparrer up a
apple-tree.
F
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"Gaud! how that fellow could fight! There was a big
crew on the dhow-ugly curs all. The devil's leavings from
all nations. Yellow-faced Malays, big-headed niggers, skinny,
wiry, cut-throat Spaniards, and some hard-fisted Yanks and
Englishmen. They was round him in the twinkling of a
bed-post, like dogs round a fox, and there he stood, just
looking as cool and as scornful and as vicious as he looked on
his own deck when he was abusing us poor beggars.
I was a tallish man then, and could handle a cutlass, and
I was soon at work aside of him, slashing away. So he says,
without ever taking his cold blue eye off from the men he
was fighting with, says he, 'Baker' (my name's Baker),
'Baker,' says he, 'keep cool and bide your time,' and with
that he passed his sword through a black fellow's body, and
came back to the guard in time to stop a cut from the
skipper of the dhow.
"Well, it did not last long. The mixed mongrels
couldn't stand the grin, and very soon there was only the
slaver captain and our officer and me and a big Malay at the
stern end, and the rest of our men was finishing off the
others forrard. I kept in at close quarters, as we're taught
to do with the cutlass, and that seemed to bog-founder the
nigger, and I slashed him over the sword arm so as he
dropped his weapon and fell on his knees a-begging for mercy.
"Then the luff made a point at the slaver skipper and
caught him in the stomach, but I'll be licked if the sword
didn't bend and rebound. The cuss had got a chain mail
shirt on. Ah, swords were made of steel in them days.
"
Well, the lewtenant he gave a short larf, like as a good
oarsman might if he'd caught a crab, and he feinted a cut,
and he feinted a point, and then gave a sharp turn of his
wrist, and cut the captain's throat as clean as a whistle. It
was a beautiful bit of science.
"Just as the slave captain falls, the Malay pulls a big
horse-pistol out from behind his belt and lets fly at me. It
caught me fair on the hip. I jumped up a good yard, and
then came sprawling on the deck, and the Malay sprang at
me with a knife to finish me; but the lewtenant cut him
down, and then came and asked me if I was badly hit, and I
says, 'I don't know, sir, but I think my hip is smashed.'
And so it was.
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83
"The lewtenant he behaved very well to me. He would
bring me books to read while I was laid up, and he'd talk to
me just as plain as if he had been the same rank as myself.
When I was invalided he shook hands with me, and gave
me a couple of pounds, which I don't think he could spare
it either, for he was not flush of money. And he said,
'Good-bye, Baker, and I hope you'll do well,' he said. And
another time he said, afore I went away, 'You are a good-
plucked one, and can handle a tool, and if you could keep
your temper would be as good a man as any in the fleet."
"Then," I say, "you altered your opinion of the officer,
I suppose ?"
"" of
Mr. Baker reflects for a moment. "Yes," he says;
course, I knew after that as he was true grit. But I didn't
forget his bitter words, or forgive 'em either."
"But that was wrong of you, wasn't it?" I ask.
66
Maybe it were," says Baker. "It is the nature of some
swells to be like that. They are stiff with pride. But they
has their own notions of what is right-though, mind you,
if they think they can make straight for all their jeers and
hard lines by a shake of the hand and a couple of pounds,
they're out of their reckoning. If I could have had three
rounds with the officer in the cockpit, with bare knuckles, I
could have forgiven him. That's English, that is," says Mr.
Baker, gruffly, and he pulls a few short, hard strokes.
"Mind the steps, sir; hany time as you're minded to
treat yerself to a row, sir. Thankee, sir; they're damn dull
times these, sir; and England don't seem to have no go in
her at all, sir; the British Lion's a-losing his teeth, I sez;
and the sarvice is a-goin' to the Good day to you, sir.
Helm aport, sir, through the gate. Good-day."
And I left the Old Man of the Sea behind.
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A
THE OLD OAK ROOM.

WINTER'S night in the ancient country town.
The child-man lay in his little cot in the great oak
room-alone. The fire burned dull and dim in
the grate, the gaslight shone out dim and blue, a
single speck, like a ghostly eye. Save for a faint red semi-
circle by the hearth, and a pale haze of luminous mist
under the lamp, the room was cloaked in dense and sombre
shadow.
The child-man lay still, gazing at the blue speck of light.
His unstained baby soul was troubled, his untried baby
mind fluttered its feeble wings, his big and lustrous eyes
were endeavouring to pierce into the immensities. And all
the time his baby imagination conjured up strange vague
terrors to thwart and baffle him.
Why did the men nail the Saviour on the cross? He
had done nothing wicked. Why did God allow his son to
be killed? If men were wicked, why did not God forgive
them without making his son suffer? If God could do as
he pleased, if he loved his son, why, why, why?
The blue light-speck seemed to swell. It looked like the
eye of a tiger, of a demon, of a ghost! Suppose it grew
bigger and bigger, and brighter and brighter. Suppose
the door opened, slowly, slowly, and a face peeped in-an
awful face-white and ghastly, with grinning mouth and
burning eyes! Suppose there came a soft sound of
pattering feet upon the stair, and a wolf--
-!
The child-man hid his nervous head under the friendly
bedclothes and quailed.
After some minutes the dark eyes peeped forth again.
It was better now. The fire was burning up. It flashed
and flickered and sent dancing waves of ruddy light across
the ceiling. It was cheerful, in a fitful way, but terrible,
too, for now it made the chairs, and the vases, and the
pictures start out into vivid form, and anon it plunged the
whole room into deeper depths of awful shadow.
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85
But the blue light-speck had lost its fearsome fascination,
and the blank window showed its black bars against a
liquid sky, where one star sparkled pure and lovely.
The child-man turned his great deep eyes to the lamp of
heaven, and his troubled spirit grew calm.
Calm, but sad. For now, as he thought, in a dim and
formless way, of the shadowy years to come, there settled
down upon his baby heart a strange, indefinable, inex-
pressible foreboding of future sorrow.
There was an austere fear in his regard,
As though calamity were just begun.
No words had the baby-man in which to clothe his
thoughts, but the wings of Fate were spread above him, and
he shuddered. Then, his solemn gaze relaxing, the bright
star growing dim, he lost himself in sleep.
* * * *
More than thirty years had passed. A stern-faced, sad-
eyed, melancholy, successful man crossed the market-square
of the country town, and looked up at the ancient house,
and at the narrow casement with its diamond panes sparkling
in the wintry moonshine.
"The flame-flickers dance no more on the ceiling," he
said; "the fire is quenched. There is stubble on the downy
cheek, there are wrinkles round the dewy eyes, the un-
stained soul is sullied, the dreary road draws nearer to its
mournful end, the dear, soft breast of the mother is cold;
her grave is far away!
He turned from the old house and walked across the
moonlit square and into the chill, black shadow of the
narrow streets.
* * * * *
An hour, a day, a year—what odds?
hand upon the throat of the man!
And Fate laid its
Now is the hour struck; now is the shadow fallen.
Now, for life or death, shall Jacob wrestle with the Angel,
Christian face Appolyon in the Valley of Humiliation.
The strong man, the much-loved and much-hated, the
man so proud and humble, the man so stern and so gentle,
the man so lusty and so weak-now shall he set his teeth,
and brace his thews, and rouse his soul in the death grapple
and searing agony of the great temptation.
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Once and once only shall such a struggle come to any
man. Once and once only shall the angel fall, or the devil
flee, or
-?
Who says life is short, or man little, or the spirit frail?
Never a man shall say so who has fought that awful fight.
* * * * *
Weary and worn and old, the man lay on his bed in a
foreign city, and with his dim, dark eyes looked up at the
liquid heavens, and beheld one dewy star.
By the bedside stood his youngest daughter, fair and
sweet, holding his wrinkled and feeble hand in her hand so
firm and soft and white.
"Darling," the man said, faintly, "I am weary, and would
sleep. Life is long, and the trial is bitter. Many a burden
have I eased, many a tear have I dried, many a kind word
have I spoken, many a good stroke have I struck, many a
sin have I committed. Draw me the curtain clear. The
star is growing dim. The shadows flicker on the ceiling.
I hear the patter of the wolf's feet on the stair. Be_good,
my child. Be true, be pure. God bless you. He knows
what it means. I fought the great fight, dearie. I fought,
and won. In winning did I lose? Was my fortitude
weakness? Was my courage cowardice? Yonder is the
great blue awful sky; and yonder is the changing sparkle
of the lovely star. I have done my best. If it is wrong,
may God forgive. He knows about it all. He knows. HE
knows. Be good, my girl. Be true. The star-it is
growing dim. I am very, very weary.
Ah! my love,
good-night!"
* *
* *
The moon shines on the market-square of the ancient
country town. The lattice panes of the upper windows of
the ancient house are sparkling in its beams. The fire
flickers in the worn old grate and casts fantastic shadows
on the ceilings and the walls. And in the old oak bedstead
lies a fair-haired, blue-eyed baby girl, who spreads her rosy
fingers on the cool white sheet, and laughs and prattles to
the dancing blaze.
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87
THE PRESUMPTION OF
YUSSUF.
USSUF was a learned scholar of Stamboul, and a
man puffed up with the conceit which learning too
frequently engenders in the little minds of men.
Day after day, when Yussuf spread his praying
carpet and turned up his presumptuous face to the flaming
sun, would he importune Allah to grant him favours never
yet vouchsafed to men.
"Give me, Allah, of thy goodness," this bold slave would
cry, "give me of thy goodness even the power to read the
human heart."
For many years did Yussuf pray thus; and Allah heeded
not. But at length his importunities wore out the
Prophet's patience, and a messenger was sent to Yussuf
from the fire-glory of the golden orb.
"Rise, Yussuf," cried a voice in the stillness of the
night; "rise and take from my hand the gift of Allah !
The glass of the Piercing Vision.
""
Then Yussuf arose, and met a shining messenger upon
the outer stair, and received at his hands a glass.
And when the spears of morning had driven the
battalions of night from Heaven's Field, Yussuf went forth
into the city to read the heart of man.
At the well, hard by his own house, his own wife stood.
Her white and dainty hand was on the pitcher, the dawn-
shine pencilled the outline of her gracious form with tender
light. Her eyes were soft and dreamy as she looked into
the east, where the horizon was blushing with rosy pleasure
at the advent of another day.
66
Now," quoth Yussuf, now will I read the heart of my
wife. Now shall my soul be gladdened with the gentle
thoughts of me which I shall find engraven thereon," and
he put to his eyes the holy glass, and there came to his
soul the soundless sound of words that were never spoken.
"Now do I bethink me, Selim, of thee. Long is the time,
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and weary are the years since we stood, we twain, hand-in-
hand upon the green side of the hill, and watched the dawn-
shine for the last time together.
And
"Dear one, my heart, my Selim, never since have these
sad eyes been gladdened by the light of thine.
Yussuf, my husband-he who admired but never loved
has now forgotten to admire. Ever and only dreams he of
himself, and of his virtue, and the knowledge he fain would
have. Oh, Selim
"Oh, perdition," grumbled Yussuf, "is it so?
"is it so ? In the
bosom I have rested on, and in which I have built up the
nest of my hopes, is the sweetest image that of a knife-
nosed tender of goats?" And Yussuf spat upon the ground
and walked away.
And he met on the road a very grave and solemn
Dervish, and on him turned he the glass, and in his heart
he read: "How long this masquerade, and this weariness?
How long this poor pretence of holiness? Now would I
give a hundred ages of the Paradise of the faithful for a full
quart measure of forbidden drink. Wine, wine, wine, red
wine-
""
And Yussuf turned him down a byway where lived the
poor and the wicked. And behold! there sat a woman,
one who lived in sin, and she sat upon the stairway
of a porter's house. And with this porter dwelt she in a
state of shame.
And Yussuf turned his glass upon the woman, and he
read: "Now, Allah be praised, that gave to me this day the
money wherewith to feed my dear Ali and the two small
daughters born to me and him. Lentils shall he have, for
those he loveth. And my Fatima, that now can walk most
prettily, shall go better clad. Ah, but an' if I might get
Ali a flask of wine; an' if I might for my little Ali buy
some charming toy from the bazaar, then would I be happy
indeed. But so it shall be, if I but stint myself a little
more. And I shall see smiles upon the lips of them whose
love is to me as the dew is to the lily or the sunbeam to the
rose."
Then Yussuf turned and beheld his son walking in the
shadow over against the place where Yussuf stood. And
Yussuf looked in the glass and read in his son's heart;
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89
i
“However can I marry the moon-faced Zuleika whilst that
old man lives- And Yussuf gave a great sob, and
raising the glass in his hand dashed it to fragments on the
stony way.
•
For it is written, "God and God only can endure the sight of
the naked human heart.”
And again Yussuf spread his carpet in the open court by
the steps of the fountain, and prayed to the shining sun.
And he prayed, now, that since he had gotten him much
knowledge and great wisdom, by dint of arduous study,
that Allah would grant to him to listen once to the prayers
that rise each day from the teeming earth to the tranquil
heaven.
And for years did Yussuf, the presumptuous, speak this
prayer, and for years did Allah turn away his ear. But at
last the prophet grew weary of the iteration of the prayer
of Yussuf, and again he sent a messenger from the foot of
the Glowing Throne, even to the vile streets of the sinful
Stamboul.
And Yussuf, lying uneasy in the torrid night, was ware
of the glow and glamour of the heavenly light; and he
arose and went out upon his roof, and there stood before
him a messenger in robes of light, and with a face no man
might look upon and live.
""
Then said the messenger: "Yussuf, as thou prayest, so
shall it be. Cover thine eyes, therefore, and follow me.
And Yussuf did as he was bidden, and followed the
shining presence to where there stood a fiery car.
And Yussuf entered into the car, and there was a
quivering streak of light through the sombre heavens, as of
the transit of a falling star. And the car stood still, and
Yussuf unveiled his face and looked about him.
Around him was the cold still air, and above and below
the great blue deep in all its tingling silentness, lighted by
ten thousand silver stars. And Yussuf leaned out over a
balustrade of gold, and looked down into the starry void
where the dizzy and awful depth and the solemn and
terrible silence had no end and no beginning.
And the bright-faced minion stood at his side and said,
"Listen."
And Yussuf bent his ear to hear. And the angel said:
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"Now shall your prayer be answered. Now shall the
voice of all the world's agony, and of all the world's doubt,
and of all the world's desire, reach thine ear.'
}}
And Yussuf held his breath and hearkened. And the
prayers of all the hearts of all the sons and daughters of men,
in their anguish, in their terror, in their hopes, and their
desires, rose up through the awful silentness and the un-
measured space.
And when Yussuf heard that long-drawn, quivering cry
of agony and passion from twelve hundred million souls,
and knew the sum of the sorrow and the sin and the yearn-
ings of the peoples of a world, his blood froze in his veins,
his eyes stood stark and still in their orbits, and his soul
shrivelled and perished, like as a withered leaf should be
consumed by the fierce heat of a furnace.
For the sum of a world's sorrow only God can bear.
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91
IT
THE DEAD SEASON.
T is the dead season. There is nothing in the papers.
The able editor, mounted upon his editorial perch, gazes
with lack-lustre eye over the dreary prospect, and,
like a journalistic Sister Ann, sees nothing but clouds
of dust. The brilliant leader-writer chews his pen, and, like
Alexander up to date, weeps vainly for fresh worlds to
conquer.
The smart paragraphist and the facile writer of London
Letters glare argus-eyed at the thin and bald columns of
special news, and learn a new and deeper sympathy with
the dead-and-gone Israelites once doomed to sweat and
suffer over the task of making bricks without straw.
There is nothing in the papers; there is nothing going on.
Never an able editor of them all can raise a ripple on the
prevailing stagnation; never an eloquent descriptive artist
of them all can conjure up a single picture out of the prosy
time. It is the dead season. There is no news. And for
once in a way the scribes of all parties are agreed upon
a matter of fact. No Tory, no Radical, no Unionist in the
three kingdoms is in case to deny the painful fact that
nothing is going on.
Whence this famine of incident? Whence this drouth of
news? How comes it that the abstract and brief chronicles
of the time have naught to chronicle? How comes it that
the fig-tree of life bears nothing but leaves.
Parliament is dismissed; that is one cause. The fashion-
able throng has quitted London; that is another cause.
There is no great scandal before the courts; that is another
cause. And when 'tis thus 'tis thus; and the newspaper,
'reft of its chiefest wares, is desolated, and the Pressman,
spoiled of his favourite prey, must sit perforce, like the
ogres in Bunyan, at the entrance to his cave, cursing and
mumbling dry bones.
Nothing going on! It is a grim satire on the value of
current news and the importance of Press-preaching that

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the stoppage of the Westminster windmill and the dispersal
of the legions of vanity should so strip the penny gospels of
all interest and utility; that, when Parliament's babble is
silenced, and Fashion's fools are flown, the leaders of the
people and defenders of the liberties and rights of the
nation should be reduced to the ignominy of retailing
mouldy jokes and threadbare anecdotes, and trying to feed
a population of thirty-seven millions-mostly newspaper
readers-on pickled sea-serpent and over-ripe, gigantic
gooseberries.
But such is the case, and while the dead season lasts the
fatal Ichabod must be inscribed above the portals of the
temples of wisdom from which are wont to issue the dread
voices of the oracles of modern faith.
There is nothing going on? What! nothing? Stand
the planets still in space? Turns not old earth upon its
axis? Do the fiery comets lash their endless tails no more?
Nay, it is not so bad as that, nor is the wild dream, called
life, quite over. Within the compass of this sea-washed
island there are signs of life. Nothing is going on of any
importance; but men and women still take the liberty to
exist. The great clock in the great tower of the deserted
Parliament House scarce beats one pulse but some child is
born into a weary world, some soul is given up to eternity.
In the factories, which, we are told, do so much to build up
England's greatness, the shuttles still fly, the wheels still
hum; in the mines the colliers toil to win our precious coal;
in the furnace the fierce iron glows; in forge and shed the
hammers fall, the sparks fly, the fingers of flesh make
fingers of steel; out in the fields the corn rots in the rain,
the farmer knits his brow, the servant sweats for his wage.
In the stony veins and arteries of the busy towns the
life and traffic run like fevered blood upon their courses.
Men are praying, men are cursing, men are toiling, drinking,
cheating, gambling, preaching, lying, hoping, despairing,
groaning on beds of sickness, going mad with grief or
debauchery, giving up their lives to serve their fellows,
giving up their souls to rob their fellows, selling their
health for the wages of sin, selling their happiness for the
prizes of vanity. Nothing important here; but something
is going on.
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93
Where the coke-oven and the blast-furnace spit lurid
fire at the blackened sky, where the heavy flat creeps along
the sluggish canal, where the hurrying smack leans to the
shrewish gale, something is going on; where the constable.
tramps his dreary round, where the warder jingles his
prison keys, where the surgeon handles his shining knife,
something is going on. In the labourer's cottage among
the fading roses, in the luxurious drawing-room where the
gaslight is reflected from mirrors in which he of Gath
might see himself "whole without stopping," in the gloomy
kennels of city courts, in the clean, lean hospital wards, in
the crowded theatre, the noisy casino, and the flaunting
gin-palace, something is going on.
On a thousand beds old age fights feebly for its last poor
breath, in a thousand dim rooms weak infancy utters its first
querulous cry. There is nothing in the papers; but there
is something in the world. There is nothing going on in
Parliament and the West End of London; but there is
something going on in the fields and cities, in the lanes and
streets. Life is going on, death is going on; fate, relent-
less and ironical fate, is going on with its myriad soundless
shuttles, weaving that which men must wear, weaving robes
of mourning for those that now rejoice, weaving robes of
honour for many now debased, weaving change and trial and
glory and shame for the nations, weaving the Irish web of
the future-of a future wherein Press and Parliaments of
England may not have a share, wherein other peoples, not
ours, shall hold sway; wherein other faiths and kennings
and ideals shall move the hearts and minds of men-of men
we wot not of; of men to whom our names and deeds, our
hopes, fears, failures, shames, and triumphs shall be
unknown. These things are going on; going on in the
dead season, going on in the absence of Society from
London, going on without consent of Parliament, going on
steadily, strangely, awfully-although there is nothing in
the papers.
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聊
​THE CHILDREN.
HE children, the children, the children. The loveliest,
the purest, the most helpless of created beings,
what would the world be without them? The
sternest men are soft-hearted and gentle-handed
in their dealings with these tender flowers; the most
shrewish and selfish of women fall into melting moods at
sight of them. The fresh, shrill voices and sweet laughter
of these little people are music pleasanter to all healthy
human ears than the cadences of the prima donna, or the
liquid carols of the joyous lark and melancholy nightingale.
For them the wisest bows his head; the bravest draws his
sword. After the bloody action which ended in the relief
of Lucknow, the fierce, rough Highlanders, new from the
dreadful work of slaughter, picked up the children in their
arms and kissed and cried over them. Happy the man that
hath his quiver full of them; whose beauty mocks the
highest art, whose humours are too subtle for the keenest
observer, whose pathos is too delicate for the finest poet,
whose innocence and gaiety are a reproof unanswerable to
them that preach the black doctrine of inherent sin.
The children; the pretty, dainty, unstained mortal
fairies. To study them is one of the truest pleasures of
life, as to have their confidence and their affection is one of
its highest honours.
Their quaint fancies, their sudden questions, their artless
artfulness, their splendid confidence, their hope undimmed,
and frankness without fear never pall upon their elders,
even where blood binds not; but only the parents can know
what a mystery, what a marvel, what a glory is a child of
one's
s very own, or can ever fully realise the charm and
preciousness of their neighbour's children. Nor can any
but a parent understand the yearning affection, the latent
pity which the sight even of happy children raises in the
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95
breasts of those whose feet are farther on life's road-that
half-conscious melancholy, that
Feeling of sadness and longing
That is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only
As the mist resembles rain.
That feeling, ill-defined, arising possibly from regret, that
things so fair and spotless should grow into mere men and
women-" proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences
at their beck than they have thought to put them in,
imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in."
It seems so pitiful a thing that ever the virgin snow should
be sullied by the grime and soot of the world, or that the
dainty blossom should fall brown and flaccid, and the spring
meadow-
-grass grow lush and rank. But if it be pathetic to
see a child in happiness and health, knowing what a weary
way its tripping feet have yet to run, and what heavy
burdens of grief its little back must bear, it is tenfold
bitterer to look upon the same child-one's own child, or
one like it-in sickness, in sorrow, or in death. To see the
curly head tossing in the delirium of fever, or the tender
limbs writhing in convulsions; to hear the plaintive moans
of the little sufferer, and feel one's utter helplessness to
succour or to save; to be, as it were, like the horseman in
the old German legend, who clasped his boy to his breast as
he rode through the Black Fir Forest where the Erl King
called, and who found he clasped a lifeless body. To have a
baby boy or girl, to hear its lisping talk, to watch its timid
first trial on its tiny feet, to feel the wee, soft fingers cling
to your neck, to learn to love the trusting smile, the rose-
petal cheek and sunny brown hair, and to look daily into the
dark hazel eyes, so bright, so clear, so gay, yet deep with a
gravity beyond the greatest eld, to feel that little tendril
twine and twine about your heart, closer, closer, and then-
oh, cruel is the grave-to walk through the wintry church-
yard and look upon one little mound of snow, feeling for the
first time the bitterness of that word "never.” This is a
drastic, burning lesson for the bravest heart, a stern and
terrible trial for the strongest faith.
Think ye, then, fond parents, gentle women, and kindly
men, when your babe sleeps sound and safe in its cosy cot,
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with its round cheek pressed on its dimpled hand, think ye
then of the myriads of frail and helpless infants in the
great towns and cities of this prayerful land, who go bare-
headed and hungry in the winter's rain, barefooted in the
snow-slush of the windy streets, pinched, half nude, dirty,
and uncherished, with premature age in their hollow cheeks,
and precocious cunning in their childish eyes—a wretched
shivering brood of ragged robins, living, God knows how or
where, by thievery or beggary, as the chance may run-
spurned by the passengers, hunted by the police, hustled in
the traffic of the teeming town, now sleeping feverishly in
the chill shadow of an arch, now in the noisome atmosphere
of some rookery attic, now feeding sparely in poor homes
on crusts and refuse, anon snatching fruit offal from
beneath the hucksters' barrows.
Any day in any town you may see them flitting and
skipping among the horses' feet in the roadway, like
the vagrant sparrows, dressed in the strangest and most
incongruous garments, begged of their elders or rifled from
the ashbin; you may see them skulking like jackals in the
shady places of the towns, you may perchance come upon
them in some hidden court or patch of waste land when
they are at play. It is an eerie sight so to see them caper
and dance their "Ring-a-ring of roses
Ring-a-ring of roses "-they who never
plucked a flower, unless from a market-stall-to see them
play in an elfish fashion the baby games that seem so
natural to their happier brothers and sisters, but whose
frolic graces sit on them so queerly.
"I never, whatsoever sins may be laid to my charge,
relieved a beggar in the street." So spake a bishop of the
Anglican Church. A godly man, no doubt; but could he
refuse the children, then surely he never was a father.
And had he done no greater sin, then surely he was nearer
heaven than many of his right reverend brothers. Is it,
then, so wicked to encourage these Arabs of the gutter?
Must we lay the blame of widespread want and vagrancy
and drunkenness upon the soft-hearted almsgiver, who
allays for a moment one pang of hunger or of grief, and
say nothing against the priests and prelates, the governors
and statesmen, whose duty it is to grapple with the vice
and poverty that cause those pangs, and who leave that

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duty undischarged? Oh, most scrupulous bishop, did you
never spend money worse? Did you never waste costly
wine on godless guests of "quality"? Nor beg for cash to
paint and bedizen your gorgeous church? As who should
let the lily buds droop for want of water and see the
hawthorn blossoms and young roses trodden in the mire to
spend the cost of their maintenance in artificial flowers for
the altar; as who should let the living souls of our children
be depraved, and their living bodies be consumed or twisted
by disease or vice, to lavish gold upon the sculpture of
marble angels and holy babes for the cathedral fonts and
pulpits. Why, surely, it may be a sin to fall a dupe to
your natural feelings, and a prey to the child-sharper of
the streets; but there be things, look you, less pardonable and
more revolting. And one of these things is to see a congre-
gation of smug, greasy, comfortable heathen chanting nasal
psalms in a gaudy church, while famine and shame are
playing havoc without. Convocation! the Church House!
the Sacrament of Baptism! the Court of Arches! the
doctrine of faith and works! the cant of grace—prevenient
grace! Methodism! Popery! and hole-and-corner Bethels!
all this splashing of holy water, and never a drop for the
wretched children. Shame! shame! If you are not hypocrites
and villains, get up off your knees, stop your pealing organs
and your snuffling prayers, and save the souls and bodies of
the babies dying or sinking into infamy around you. Sure,
such piety as this must make the devil laugh.
Out, then, ye canters and ranters, out into the streets,
and strike a blow for humanity and justice; get this foul
dishonour from the name of England, try to be at least as
good Christians as the Lucknow Highlanders who risked
their lives for the babies' sakes. For every wee bare foot
shall leave a blister on the National soul, and every pinched
and stunted child-form shall cast a shadow on the National
glory. Save the babies first, and then build tapering spires
and swelling organs, and hang your church walls with
pictures, and your vestries with precious tapestries, if you
will. But, in heaven's name, either be honest men or
honest rogues.
"He prayeth best who loveth best all
things both great and small," and to help even one of these
poor children seems a nobler prayer than any that a bishop
G
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ever recited to a decorous and apathetic congregation. "Do
you hear the children crying, O my brothers."
"How long," they say; "how long, O cruel nation,
Will you stand to move the world on a child's heart;
Stifle down with mailed heel its palpitation,
And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?
Our blood splashes upwards, O gold-heaper,
And your purple shows the path!
"
But the child's sob in the darkness curses deeper
Than the strong man in his wrath.
.:
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99
SOMETHING NEW UNDER
A
THE SUN.
S it appears to be generally acknowledged that English
society is sick, and as it appears to be perfectly
evident the Parliament, Press, and Pulpit, the
only physicians English society will recognise, have
so far failed to cure, or even to diagnose the malady, I hope
it may not be thought presumptuous in a humble layman to
suggest a remedy.
My panacea is a drastic one; but desperate diseases
require desperate remedies, and it is because I fear the
condition of England to be serious that I propose a course
of-Honesty.
I am aware that such a heretical suggestion will bring
down upon me the ridicule of the cultured few, even if it
does not expose me to the hostility of the ignorant many.
The schools are always severe in their opposition to any
strange, fantastic, or dangerous experiments; and in
advocating honesty as a fit medicine for this fevered and
sick State, I am prepared for the fierce disdain and scathing
criticism of the legion priests, philanthropists, philosophers,
politicians, pamphleteers, and pressmen, who are working on
principles entirely antagonistic to that which I venture to
recommend.
I am aware also how difficult it is to reconcile Englishmen
to a new idea, and that anything so entirely novel to the
public mind, and so utterly at variance with the general
custom as this scheme of mine, must necessarily encounter
strong and enduring prejudices. Such difficulties I have
foreseen. Indeed, they are germane to the issue, for it is
because my remedy is new that I venture to put it forward.
I do not presume to question the methods of the accredited
doctors. I have a becoming sense of my own littleness.
But, seeing that no medicine hitherto given to the patient
has resulted in lasting benefit, I am not without hope that
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honesty, which is the one remedy left untried, may effect a
radical change in the debilitated social system. At any rate,
I hope not to be condemned unheard. A friend of mine,
who once gave this remedy a short trial, declares it to be
innocuous, and not unpleasant after the first shock of
natural repugnance has been overcome. And although I
myself have not seen the thing tried, save in infinitesimal
doses, I have long felt growing within me a conviction that
honesty would not make nearly so severe a demand upon
human ingenuity and energy as any of the systems now in
general use; nor would its expense be greater. Why, then,
should not honesty be tried?
Why, for instance, should not honesty be, at least
partially, adopted by the Church? It would certainly be a
bold innovation, and we know that the Church is exceed-
ingly Conservative, and therefore loth to break away from
time-honoured traditions; but I cannot help thinking that,
should the Church depart from its ancient policy of
toadyism and subserviency to the rich, and begin to preach
the Gospel, it might win the suffrages of the poor, and so
would recoup from them what it lost by offending its
present patrons.
But I go beyond the Church, and dare to say that even
in politics honesty might prove successful. The assertion
will, of course, appear absurd to practical politicians of both
parties. All successful statesmen have concurred in believing
honesty the policy of fools, and on that account, as being
themselves wise, have rejected it. But now I would press
upon them the advisability of going to the country with
this very policy of honesty, when, if they are right in
considering it the policy for fools, they should be returned
to power by an overwhelming majority.
I think also that a little honesty might be tried in busi-
ness without serious risk. I know that the traditions of
trade and the practice of the most prosperous houses are
against the plan, and I would not advise the hasty adoption
of such a radical change throughout the whole range of our
glorious commerce-at least, not until an increased taste
for fair dealing and genuine workmanship has been created
amongst consumers. Yet, I believe there are still left
lingering in the bypaths of civilisation some few honest men
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101
and women, and amongst these may hap could be found
enough of those with a taste for calico that will wash, and
steel that will cut, and bacon that will keep, to enable at
least one house to give my plan a trial. But there is
another argument. Is it not possible that if genuine food,
fabrics, and furniture were put upon the market, the public
might learn in time to prefer them to the kind of articles
now universally offered? At all events, it is certain that
any house adopting principles of honesty would secure a
monopoly.
About the Press I say nothing, feeling sure that the
Press will espouse the cause of honesty as soon as it becomes
popular. The Press, it is well known, exists mainly for the
purpose of telling people that which they a'ready know,
and convincing them of that which they already believe.
And as the newspapers have never yet failed to yelp at the
heels of any folly or sensation of the time, like a pack of
curs barking after a cat with a cracker tied to its tail, so we
have no reason to suppose that it would fail to lend its
powerful aid to the cause of honesty directly that cause has
grown strong enough to do without it.
And now I hope I have said enough to convince my
readers that howsoever strange and visionary a policy of
honesty may appear when first flashed upon the mind, yet
there is enough of reason in it to justify a closer
investigation of the subject than has yet been made. And
I would impress most earnestly upon bishops, priests,
Cabinet Ministers, employers of labour, economists, and
magisters, the suggestion that, although honesty may be
distasteful and foreign to their minds and practice, yet it
would seem well for them to adopt, or at least to feign some
respect therefor, if only as an example to the common
people.
For indeed the prevalence of jerry work, in which the
chief masses of the people are engaged, cannot fail to pro-
duce a bad effect upon the stability of the nation. The
dyer's hand assimilates itself to that it works in, and those
who habitually make lies for a living are apt to lose some of
their reverence for truth. Moreover, it seems to me that
under the present conditions of society, with a jerry
Government ruling on behalf of a jerry commerce, and a
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jerry Church preaching a jerry Gospel to a populace of
jerry workmen, there is some risk of the said populace
becoming cynical. And in a cynical proletariat there is
danger.
So that, to sum up my arguments, I may assure the men
of light and leading who illuminate and guide this realm
that the proper way to keep the people orderly and con-
tented is to keep them honest. Yes, keep the common
people honest, and thereby preserve the class distinctions
which are at once the honour and the safeguard of the
nation. Keep the common people honest that they may
feel their inferiority to the classes placed by Providence.
above them. Keep the common people honest that they
may still be reduced to labour assiduously, and so may have
no time to indulge in comparisons between themselves and
their superiors; but may rest contented and humble in that
lowly walk of life which their honesty so well qualifies
them to adorn.
In fact, to put my case into the only form likely to find
favour with the intellect and piety of the age, I should say
that honesty, if not attempted too suddenly, or practised too
recklessly, would most certainly be found to pay.

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103
DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN.
D
ANGLE and I went for a long walk the other day.
See anything? Nothing of any consequence. A
few miles of flat muddy roads running through flat
grey fields, with here and there a clump of melan-
choly trees, or a weedy and turgid brook. But, yes, we saw
a homestead. A real old-fashioned farmhouse, of grey
stone, draped with ivy, with red corn ricks in the quiet
farmyard, real fat ducks in the pond, and, best of all, a real
peacock, with splendid tail extended, perched on a crumb-
ling wall, and blinking lazily at the watery sun.
There was no date on the house, but the style of
architecture denoted it as belonging to the early half of
the seventeenth century. An old house, but in excellent
repair. I wonder what its original inhabitants would think
of the new railway now making close at hand, or of the
two frosty-looking British workmen putting up telegraph
wires near the front gate!
Dangle and I were much amused by an old turkey
gobbler, who was strutting about the yard with as much
pride as an acting-manager.
A tranquil place. You might fancy, if you turned your
back to the telegraph poles and shut your ears to the puffing
of the engines, that you were back in the troublous times of
stern old Noll. On a still morning it were easy to imagine
the long-haired Cavaliers standing round the porch, taking
a stirrup-cup; or the short-haired Puritans, in their good
buff jerkins, mounting guard on the cross-roads, or singing
psalms round the ancient chimney corner.
There would be lively doings in this old farmyard in 1643,
when the Royalists were driven from this place by Sir
Thomas Fairfax; and we may be sure that yonder drowsy
windows have stared out many a time upon the trampling
troops of Ironsides or Cavaliers, upon trains of clumsy
cannon and stretchers laden with the wounded. There has
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been considerable clashing of steel and burning of powder
hereabouts, we may be certain.
Poor old soldiers, long since marched into limbo; poor
pretty maids, long ceased to tattle; poor old passions all
burned out, and hopes all melted, like the music of the harp
of Tara.
Dangle and I raise our hats to the turkey gobbler and
pass on.
And anon we come to a church, and behind it a
graveyard-long disused. Pipe in mouth and hands in
pockets, we proceed to meditate amongst the tombs.
At the low end of the quiet graveyard there are stoneless
mounds, or sinking stones, the latter inscribed with pitiful
legends to the memory of men no more remembered. Poor
men and women of no account, as dead as Pharaoh, and as
utterly passed away as are the soldiers who fought Pharaoh's
battles, or the slaves who built his pyramids. If these poor
folk, some forty years in the ground, had been buried before
the Flood, they could not be more nameless, more forgotten.
They are as far off from us as the ancient Aryans. The
poor old dead.
Some more pretentious tombstones give us pause. The
names are cut on the slabs with a flourish, and well larded
with scripture texts and compliments; but there is an air of
chilliness and insincerity about them suggesting the much-
respected Mr. Stubbins, who was cut down in the midst of
his invaluable work on the Muddlecome Poor Law Board,
and "went to heaven in an oak coffin with iron handles."
Right in the midst of these monuments to the under-
taker's enterprise there stands a tiny cross of stone, stained
with the rainy tears of winter, and on it but the one word
"Aggie."
Dotted about amongst the rank grass and thin neglected
shrubs we find many sad and uneventful histories cut in
brief words. Wives have lost husbands-and married again
mayhap. Mothers have lost children; children have been
left orphans.
John Fagg, born A.D. 1749; died A.D. 1820.
No more. Poor old Fagg. Whose Fagg was he? Was
he much fagged before he was fagged out some seventy odd
years syne? Of what trade, Fagg? Soldier, sailor, tinker,
tailor, butcher-boy-the stone is reticent.
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105
I fancy poor old Fagg, a lonely bachelor at three-score
years and eleven, hanging up his hat for ever, and falling
asleep, disgusted with a wifeless, childless, cheerless life.
He would be a tall man, Fagg, thin, like Whiffly Puncto,
and with a stoop in his shoulders. He would smoke a long
clay pipe, and keep a hosier's shop, and read the local
papers, and vote Blue. He would probably have a few
pounds in his old stocking, for which a cousin or two,
several times removed, would be waiting with considerable
impatience. And I hope Fagg didn't leave it to them;
and I don't think he did. Fagg doesn't sound like a man of
that sort.
Next door but one to Faggs there is a stone nigh filled
with lettering. I stop to read it.
"Sacred to the memory of Rachel, dearly-beloved wife of
Rufus Jones, who departed this life," &c., &c.
Then, "Also of John William Jones, son of the above,"
&c., &c. Then, "Also of Sarah Helen Jones, daughter of
the above," &c., &c. Then, "Also of Martha Anna Jones,
daughter of the above," &c., &c. Then, "Also of Henry
Ernest Jones, son of the above," &c., &c. And finally,
"Also of the said Rufus Jones, who departed this life,"
&c., &c.
So poor old Rufus lived to bury his wife, his sons, and his
daughters, and then, having nothing left to live for, he died
himself, and some one buried him, and in a truly business-like
spirit drew a line under the particulars relating to Rufus,
and closed his account.
I turn Dangle round-he is looking at a pretty girl who
is hanging clothes out in a neighbouring garden-and direct
his notice to the sepulchre of brother Rufus, and Dangle
immediately rises to the situation, and keeping an eye on
the damosel, observes:-
"It is a sad reflection that all our efforts and aspirations
are doomed to this lame and impotent conclusion. For this
we weep; for this we laugh; for this we work and worry,
and peak and pine; to lie at last under a slice of sandstone,
with not even a redbreast to lay a leaf above us.
"Oh, Vanity!” cried the great critic, kissing his hand to
the pretty laundress, "Oh, Vanity! that a man, having by
a long life of industry and virtue, attained to the proud
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1
(C
eminence of a seat on the Slushly-cum-Slopperton Parish
Council, or the Bethnal Gas Committee, should peter out
at last like a farthing squib, and lay his greatness here."
My dear Dangle," I replied, "of such is life. Yet, be
not you cast down. I pray you remember the beautiful
lines in 'Love in Idleness,' where the dead man soliloquiseth
in his tomb, as thus:-
The worms are what I've been ;
I shall change, but what of that?
The grass will grow more green,
The parson's sheep more fat.
I shall change, but what of that?
All flesh is grass one says;
The parson's sheep grow fat,
The parson grows in grace.
All flesh is grass one says,
Grass becomes flesh one knows;
The parson grows in grace,
I am the grace he grows.
At this Dangle's brow cleared, and, the laundry-maid
having retired, he stepped out proudly on his way, his heart
exalted by the faith that his component gases might some
day make a bishop.
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107
ரா
HADDON HALL.
>>
HAT building over there," said the driver, as our
carriage moved slowly through the green woods
of Cromford-" that building over there is Wil-
lersley Castle, built by the great Sir Richard
Arkwright." I looked across at the grim, prison-like
towers, and asked : "Who was he? The driver seemed
hurt. He was the father of our manufacturers, he was,"
said the driver; "a man what began life as a barber, as you
might say, and rose to be a-a millionaire-all by his own
industry. Why, sir, you must have heerd of Arkwright,
the inventor of the spinning jenny! One of the greatest
men as ever lived, sir; one of the cleverest men ever trod
England's ground. They do say as he died worth eight
million pounds, and did it all out of his own 'ead." And
the driver flicked up his horse, and expectorated in a
scornful manner.
He was evidently hurt in his feelings
that a respectable Englishman in a new light suit, with a
gold watch-chain, should be ignorant of the fame of the
"great" Arkwright.
And perhaps the reader will sympathise with the driver,
and wonder how I could be so ignorant. But, by-the-way,
what do you know about Arkwright?
When I was a boy, Arkwright was one of my heroes.
He was a man who had "got on," and I had been taught
to revere the art of getting on. He was a clever man, and
I admired cleverness; and an industrious man, and I
honoured industry. But of late years my views have
changed. I have become the prey of the philosopher. I
I have acquired a dreadful habit of searching for motives.
I have begun to doubt whether men of Arkwright's stamp
are "great" men, and I don't feel at all sure that even the
result of Arkwright's labour is a boon and a blessing to
So I say to you what I would not trouble to say to
the driver on a hot May morning, and when I wanted to look
men.
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!
at the trees and flowers-I say to you what do you know
about Arkwright? Come, do you admire him? Do you
feel grateful to him? Do you think him “great.
""
A most
Of course, you have read Smiles' "Self-Help."
bewitching book. Just open it now, and see what kind of
man this Arkwright was. In his youth he was a barber, and
set up in business at Bolton in a cellar, over which he put
up the sign, "Come to the Subterranean Barber. He
shaves for a penny." The other barbers, whose charge was
twopence, soon found themselves obliged to come down to
the subterranean terms, whereupon, says Smiles, "Arkwright,
determined to push his trade, announced his determination
to give 'A clean shave for a halfpenny.'
>"}
An enterprising tradesman, this Arkwright. What now
we should call a blackleg.
From shaving under price Arkwright rose, by his own in-
dustry, to be a dealer in hair. He used to go to the hiring
fairs in Lancashire and buy their tresses from the young
women, and is said to have been very successful at the
business. A cute and pushing man evidently. But-but I
have misgivings, from my own experience of cute and push-
ing men, as to whether the poor girls always got à fair
price for the commodity that has been described as "woman's
glory," and as to whether the "successful" prosecution of
such a trade would be possible without violation of some of
our socialistic ideas of honour. As for the sale of hair-dye,
that may have been a fair commercial transaction-though
I cannot fancy a really "great" man selling hair-dye.
Well, this great man invented the spinning-jenny-or
some such thing-and originated our great factory system,
and made a lot of money, and was created a baronet, and
built a castle-and died. A man of unflinching resolution,
of untiring industry; keen, ingenious, selfish, and greedy,
but great-
? Ah, well, don't let us drift back into
philosophy.
I saw many things that day which Arkwright did not
invent: the graceful, down-reaching lime trees, the massive
rocks, the grassy downs, the sweet violets and pretty prim-
roses, the rolling clouds and laughing waters, and the little
people playing in the woods and meadows; and I felt
thankful that Nature never put her talents out to usury,
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and had nothing to do with castles beyond covering them
with ivy and crumbling them into ruin and oblivion. The
great Arkwright! The great man! The barber's castle!
Faugh!
There be castles and castles. The day after my drive
through Cromford I visited Haddon Hall. That is a castle.
That is worth seeing. That is not alluded to by Smiles,
and was not made by a barber-all out of his own head.
I have seen many castles-Conway, Skipton, Carisbrooke,
to wit--but I never saw one that interested me so much as
did Haddon Hall. Some of the other places are better
endowed with legends-or with lies-but Haddon has
a subtle charm of its own: a silent but irresistible sug-
gestiveness that steals upon the imagination and masters
it completely. Every branch of its woods, every rood of
its glades, every block and beam of its roofs and walls is
saturated with the mysterious spirit of humanism. Nowhere
can it be said with greater truth that there are tongues in
trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and
good in everything.
I am not going to describe the place. Mr. Puncto could
do that much better than I. I am not going to quote the
guide-book. The guide-book tells you very little that is
worth the knowing, and, with a very few words of history
to aid it, Haddon Hall can tell its own story. And what
an intensely interesting story it is!
Some of the castle is of the Norman period; some of the
14th century; some of the Tudor time. Haddon Hall has
been Haddon Hall for near eight hundred years. Through
what changes of fortune and fashion, through what shocks
of tempest and battle, have its sturdy towers stood? They
were there, these old walls and gates, when William the
Conqueror was fighting us; when we were fighting the
French; when we were fighting the Spaniards; when we
were fighting the Dutch; when we were fighting each other
when Catholics were roasting Protestants, and when Protes-
tants were torturing Catholics; when Cromwell was
thrashing the armies of the King; and when Charles the
Second's puppets were persecuting the fallen captains of
Cromwell; when Manchester was a place of small account;
when the great Arkwright was unborn; when wolves gobbled
;
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!
up Little Red Riding Hoods in the forest of Chatsworth;
when Shakespeare was stealing deer; when Spenser was
writing sonnets; when Elizabeth was scorning the Armada;
when Bluff King Hal was plundering priests; when
Marlborough was taking cities-and bribes; when Nelson
was dying on the deck of the " Victory"; when Sir Walter
Raleigh, and Surrey, and Essex, and King Charles were
laying their heads upon the block, those towers stood there
stolid and stately-as they stand there now.
For nearly four hundred years the Vernons lived high at
Haddon Hall. There has been some wassail kept in that
great hall. Those dints in the lord's oak table were not
made by babies' hands. Cannot you fancy the great logs
blazing on the kitchen hearth; the waddling knaves bearing
the boar's head down that dark passage; the great cask, of
which they show you the six-foot diameter hoop, full of old
fat ale? Look at that old copper wine-cooler. It has held
some canary in its time. Do you notice the hasp in the
wall of the great dining-hall? When a guest would pass
his wine it was the good lord's custom to fix up his recreant
wrist in that hasp and pour the rejected liquor down his
sleeve. Think of that battered table, that great cask-hoop,
that iron hasp, and tell me if the Bounder has not come
after his time. How he would have scored at Haddon Hall
in the days of the lusty and trusty Vernons!
now.
In one room they show you a pair of jack-boots-a
wonderful pair of boots-hundreds of years old, and yet
the leather is uncracked and sound, and not a stitch given
way. I wonder who wore those boots, and where he is
He had a long, narrow foot, and walked upon his
toes. There is a rakish, dandified look about the boots. I
can fancy them spurring a horse to battle, or tripping up
the back stairs to a lady's bower; but I cannot fancy them
wearing many holes in their toes on a chapel floor. Those
holsters, now, belong to quite a different man. They
suggest Marston Moor and the Ironsides-never a ruffled
wrist was pushed into them after a pistol. They look more
like Dick Turpin than Prince Rupert. I fancy the man.
who used those holsters was a short, square man, clean
shaven, with a protruding nether lip, a cold grey eye, anp
a mole on his nose. He would ride with his legs very wide
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apart, and would always frown when he came to a toll-bar
and had to pay. He would be a useful man in a scuffle, but
not a nice sort of person to have on a jury if you were being
tried for treason. And people were always being tried for
treason in his day. Perhaps he was tried for treason
himself. I don't believe he ever died in his bed.
One of the finest rooms at Haddon Hall is the ballroom,
a long room panelled in oak. It is quite empty, and at the
end farthest from the door there is a plaster cast of the
head of Lady Grace Manners, who died at the age of 90 or
So. I should think the sight of that white and ghostly
bust, in that great, empty, sombre room, on a moonlight
night, must be distinctly calculated to promote in the
beholder a state of aggravated creeps. The ballroom itself
is eerie enough. It must be four hundred years old at
least; a fact we can better realise by reflecting that the
room was venerable before Shakespeare was born. But
when one thinks of all the lusty knights and lovely dames
who have danced in that room, gallants and beauties long
since danced away into limbo, and then turns one's eyes to
the white face of old Lady Manners-why, one feels inclined
to ask for a small brandy.
-
Poor old Lady Grace! I wonder what the cheap trippers
say about her when they come here? I wonder what she
would say about the cheap trippers ?
You might think that the great empty kitchen, the silent
chapel, the shadowy ballroom, or the grand old "Banquet
Hall deserted," were the most ghostly sights at Haddon.
But they are not. To my mind, the grimmest article about
the whole place is an ancient mirror in Queen Elizabeth's
bedroom. It is a large mirror, and the quicksilver still good,
though it gives reflections rather dimly. It stands near the
State bed of the Maiden Queen, with its back to the
window, and I defy any man or maid with more imagination
than a cow to look into that mirror for sixty seconds without
feeling as if he or she had raspberry jam trickling down his
or her back. If only that glass could give back all the
shadows that it has reflected! If it could microphone back
the speeches it has heard! Fancy that ghostly army
marching past: Queen Bess in her towering collar-and,
like enough, in a towering rage; shaven-pated monks;
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whiskered warriors, clad in complete steel; stern old Noll,
in jack-boots and jerkin; Raleigh, in lace and velvet; poor
Amy Robsart and unhappy Leicester; Spanish envoys, all
smiles and congés; honest Drake, fresh from victory and
skittles; bonny servant wenches; wicked ladies-in-waiting,
down to the simpering misses and vacant bucks of this
present era of cheap trips and comic papers! I'd like to
have that mirror. I'd rather have it than any picture ever
painted-although I should, as a matter of fact, never look
into it after candle-light without imagining I saw some stern,
dark knight, or pale-faced lady peering over my shoulder.
Eugh! That mirror is the most ghostly thing I can
remember.
We leave the Hall by Dorothy Vernon's steps, and we
stand upon the terrace under the yew trees. Oh! Whiffly
Puncto, where art thou? What words can describe this
glorious terrace; these glorious trees?
these glorious trees? The terrace at
Haddon Hall is the grandest I have ever seen. There is
nothing like it at Kew, at Hampton, at Chatsworth, or at
Windsor. It is sublime. It is a national treasure, and
ought to be made national property. All the wealth of the
richest millionaire could not buy such a place. It takes
ages of time to form and colour, and generations of courage
and beauty to give grace and tenderness to these old halls and
gardens. As I said just now, the place is saturated with
romance. Its soil and stones have been sunned with the
smiles and watered with the tears of generations passed
away. Time and weather have tinted the steps and balus-
trades, thickened the ivy, and given vigour and richness t
the ruddy yew trunks, and density and luxuriance to their
foliage; but brave hearts and bright eyes have sanctified the
ground, and the flowers of tenderness and human kindness
that give the air of Haddon Hall its sweetness have their
roots in the dust of dead men and women.
The crowning legend of Haddon Hall is that of Dorothy
Vernon's runaway match with Lord Manners, whereby the
hall and grounds of Haddon came into the hands of the
Manners family, and descended to the present Duke of
Rutland. Well, it is an old story, and little is left but the
outlines. Lady Dorothy was an heiress, and she fell in
love with John, afterwards Lord Manners, and the Vernons
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not being friendly to the match, Dorothy tripped down
those steps now called by her name, and John met her
probably at that old bridge by the stream under the great
oak trees, and they went away and were married, and lived
happy ever after-or we hope so. And now we may sit in
the deep shadow of the gloomy old yew trees on the
terrace, and fancy once more the pretty lady stealing away
by the side door and the eager lover waiting outside the
wall-and that is a long time ago, and life is short, though
love lasts long, and poor Dolly was buried in Bakewell
churchyard-in the 16th century!
And now remember that you are practical men, and go and
sit under the yews at Haddon and meditate upon the irony of
fate. Hundreds of eminent and successful men and women
have passed up and down those steps-and they have left
no footprints on them. The steps are Dorothy Vernon's
steps and no one else's. Kings and queens have lived
here in this hall; men and women have been born and
bred; have feasted and fought and died here; belted earls
and captains of might have shed their blood in defence or
attack; sentries have died at their posts; wealth and
courage and art and rank have shown themselves upon this
stage, and the centuries have rolled on, and the best-
known fact of Haddon Hall and all its glories is the fact
that a bright-eyed wench eloped from thence with her
lover. What a satire on the practical men-what a satire
upon the foolish thirst for fame!
Haddon Hall is a fine old place, and would make a
splendid residence. But I'd not care to live there—or, at
anyrate, I'd not care to sleep there. I don't believe in
ghosts at all, and could spend a quiet night in a churchyard
if need be; but these ghostly old rooms at Haddon that
dim old mirror, that staring cast of Lady Grace, those
ghostly boots, and murderous holsters-why, the place
must be full of ghosts; and of all the crowd, the only one
I would care to meet would be the ghost of Dorothy
Vernon.
And so much for Haddon Hall. As we came away, there
was a skylark singing over the meadow-singing the same
song that the skylark sang above the bloody field of
Hastings; the same song that the cave man harkened to as
H
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he sat scraping a deer's backbone with a flint; the same
song that other men will hear ten thousand years after we
are dust and ashes, and when even Haddon towers are
fallen, and the name of Dorothy Vernon is forgotten. Poor
old Dorothy, brave old Haddon, good old Time!
Time's glory is to calm contending kings,
To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light,
To stamp the seal of years in aged things,
To wake the morn and sentinel the night,
To wrong the wronger till he render right;
To ruinate proud buildings with his hours,
And smear with dust their glittering golden towers:
To fill with worm-holes stately monuments,
To feed oblivion with decay of things,
To blot old books and alter their contents,
To pluck the quills from ancient ravens' wings,
To dry the old oak's sap, and cherish springs;
To spoil antiquities of hammered steel,
And turn the giddy round of Fortune's wheel.
Good old Shakespeare! Good morning!
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D
THE GOOD OLD TIMES.
ANGLE and I took a walk the other day through
some of the fairest valleys in Derbyshire.
We
scaled mountains, we jumped ditches, we picked our
way through thickets; and we drank old ale at old
alehouses, and it was good. And the great critic was much
pleased until we came across a notice-board nailed to a tree
in a wild and solitary glen, and requesting passengers not
to touch the roots and ferns or trespass from the walks
upon the estate of His Grace the Duke of Devonshire.
Then said Dangle: "This beats all. This place belongs
to the Duke of Devonshire.
66
Sedge and bracken, rock and river, the birds of the air
and the lilies of the field, the pathless woods, the unresting
streams and the everlasting hills of God belong' to a
perambulating forked radish named Cavendish!
"And the people must not trespass on the everlasting
hills, nor consider the lilies of the field-except from a
distance. And the people acquiesce in this arrangement
and call it 'law' and 'right'-ach Gott!" And therewith
the light of the Drama sat him down upon a fallen pine,
and put ashes on his beard, and cursed the day that bore
him; for his soul was full of bitterness.
Then said I, as I languidly removed a spider from my
left ear: " My dear Dangle, it is even as you say. The
Duke of Devonshire appears to have got a good thing on,
and the people of these islands are a hass!
"God made little apples, but his children must not eat
them without permission from the Duke. And while the
poor ignorant fools of this realm are known as honest and
law-abiding subjects, and while the few reasonable creatures
not already confined in the prisons and lunatic asylums are
despised as dangerous fanatics, the Dukes will continue to
appropriate the birthright of the nation by the simple
expedient of nailing a tin label on a tree, and the people

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will continue to yearn with a vain yearning for cheap beef
and open spaces. If Jesus Christ came and fed the multi-
tude on these hill-sides, he would be sent to prison by the
Duke of Devonshire for trespass." Then Dangle snorted
with anger and derision; and we resumed our way.
The
Do you not agree with Dangle's observations?
place was wild and solitary. No gardener had ever turned
a spade to help the violet and hyacinth to flourish in those
dells. The sturdy oak, the writhen thorn, and the feathery
lime owed not a leaf or a blossom to the woodman's craft.
Such paths as there are through this lovely wilderness have
been worn by the feet of travellers-there are no roads.
The birds are wild, the flowers are wild, the wild streams
gush at their own will down the channels they have worn
between the unhewn boulders or across the mossy plains.
For miles you can see neither roof nor chimney, nor any
sign of man or of man's handiwork, and this "belongs" to
the Duke of Devonshire.
You must not snare the Duke of Devonshire's rabbits,
nor hook the Duke of Devonshire's trout, nor pluck the
Duke of Devonshire's blackberries, nor shoot the Duke of
Devonshire's rooks. 'Tis a wonder you may breathe the
Duke of Devonshire's air, or smell the Duke of Devonshire's
honeysuckle, or look at the Duke of Devonshire's sky.
The "Duke of Devonshire!"
country, what a fool you are.
Oh, England; oh, my
It is, however, a source of great comfort to many of us
that we are allowed-by kind permission of his Grace the
Duke of Devonshire-to walk across our valleys and climb
our hills-by the regulation paths-and at such times and
within such limits as his Grace may deem convenient. That
is to say, when his Grace and his friends are not engaged in
shooting our rabbits and pheasants, nor his Grace's servants
in felling our timber. Well, this is a great country, and
I'm hanged if I can understand ourselves. Why do we not
wake up and do something? At any rate, we might laugh
at our own folly, if we did no better.
When I reached home after our walk I found a small
midge in my eye. I hope I'm not liable to punishment for
poaching. Is it penal to catch the Duke of Devonshire's
flies?
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I wonder whether a man could claim compensation if,
during a thunderstorm in that valley, he should be struck
by the Duke of Devonshire's lightning. 'Tis a moot point.
They are terrible fellows, these dukes. When you have
been long in the lands which the lords our gods have given
them, you become so unhinged with the constant dread of
trespass that you begin to doubt whether your soul's your
own.
But let us turn from the lords to the ladies. A fair
reader addresses me as follows:-
Dear Mr. Nunquam,--I was very deeply interested this week
with your notes on Queen Elizabeth and Dorothy Vernon, and the
old Hall at Haddon. I have been to Haddon, and I saw those
wonderful boots. But I had never read that speech of Queen
Elizabeth's before. It is a beautiful speech, but rather masculine,
don't you think? Of course I don't know much about such
matters, but would not good Queen Bess have been a better Queen
Bess if she had been a little bit more womanly. She seems so cold,
and stern, and proud. But do not be cross at my presumption, and
do tell us some more about those dear old times. And tell us, do
you really think the old times were better than our times. I
should not like to go back and live my life in the good old times.
Would you? Of course they may have been very clever people
then, but education must have done something, and if it has, how
can it have failed to make our condition better? Don't answer
these silly questions, please, but do, do tell us a lot more about
Queen Elizabeth, for, though one reads history at school, one
forgets it so soon. At least I do. Give my compliments to Mr.
Dangle, and tell him I like his articles ever so much.—Yours,
DOROTHY.
Heigho! Miss Dorothy, Miss Dorothy. Who shall
fathom the depths of a woman's heart? Who knows what
is passing in the mind of his dearest friend? But in the
case of Queen Elizabeth-who died so many moons ago,
what have we to trust to but guess work?
a
I think—I say I think Queen Bess had more of softness
in her than you seem to suppose. She was a woman
true woman-but she was a Queen; and it seems to me
that, because she was proud and clever, and because of the
times she lived in, she was a Queen first and a woman
afterwards. One writer says of her that-
She was excessively fond of flattery, jealous even of a fine gown,
and so fond of dress herself that she would change it daily for
months together; but great in the main, able to understand the
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true interests of her country, and sovereign mistress even of the
favourites who touched her heart, and who could bring tears into
her proud eyes.
Jealous! Fond of dress! Are not those womanly qualities?
What more can Miss Dorothy require ?
Have you ever read any of Queen Bess's love verses?
Oh, she could write such-and did. Here are a few lines
in which she speaks with some feeling :-
My care is like my shadow in the sun,
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it;
Stands and lies by me; does what I have done;
This too familiar care does make me rue it;
No means I find to rid him from my breast,
Till by the end of things it be suppressed.
Some gentler passions slide into my mind,
For I am soft, and made of melting snow;
Or be more cruel, love, or be more kind;
Let me or float, or sink, be high or low;
Or let me live with some more sweet content,
Or die, and so forget what love e'er meant.
There is much tenderness also, and a faint odour of
melancholy, in a speech delivered by Queen Bess to her
last Parliament, on the 30th November, 1601. From which
speech I quote these lines:-
And in my governing this land, I have ever set the last
judgment day before mine eyes, and so to rule as I shall be judged,
and answer before a Higher Judge, to whose judgment seat I do
appeal: in that thought was never cherished in my heart that
tended not to my people's good.
And if my princely bounty have been abused, and my grants
turned to the hurt of my people contrary to my will and meaning;
or if any in authority under me have neglected, or converted, what
I have committed to them, I hope God will not lay their culps to
my charge.
To be a king and wear a crown is a thing more glorious to them
that see it than it is pleasant to them that bear it. For myself, I
was never so much enticed with the glorious name of a King, or
the royal authority of a Queen, as delighted that God had made me
His instrument to maintain His truth and glory, and to defend
this kingdom from dishonour, damage, tyranny, and oppression.
And for my own part, were it not for conscience' sake to
discharge the duty that God hath laid upon me, and to maintain
His glory, and keep you in safety, in mine own disposition I
should be willing to resign the place I hold to any other, and glad
to be freed of the glory with the labours, for it is not my desire
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to live nor to reign longer than my life and reign shall be for your
good. And though you have had and may have many mightier
and wiser princes sitting in this seat, yet you never had nor shall
have any that will love you better.
Now, do you not think that poor Queen Bess had a soft
place in her heart? I think she was a true woman, a
splendid woman, a good woman; but-she must rule or
perish.
I remember a verse from an old burlesque of Kenilworth
that I heard when I was a child. It is a solo sung by
Queen Bess, and is to the following substance and effect:-
I am the Queen, ha, ha!
I am the Queen, ha, ha!
I am the Queen, ha, ha!
Ha, ha, ha, ha!
There is not much metrical skill, nor shining wit, in that
gem of the librettist's art; but there is a lot of unintentional
character. Elizabeth was "the Queen, ha, ha!" and she
never allowed her courtiers to forget it.
And no, I'd not like to be dropped back into the middle
of Elizabeth's reign. I should be put in the pillory, and
put in the stocks, and put in the Tower, and put on the
rack, and beheaded, and burnt at the stake before I had
really begun to enjoy myself. And yes, perhaps these
times are better to live in-except we happen to be very
brave and clever, or very rich and powerful-and even then
it was risky in the sixteenth century. One's head had to
be screwed on the right way in those days, or there was
great danger of its coming off.
But while we guard ourselves against the sentimental
error of over-estimating the glories of the past, we should
be careful not to fall into the vulgar error of disdaining all
ages and all nations but our own.
The people may be in some wise better off now than in
Queen Bess's day; and education is more general; and we
have the telegraph, and the Gatling gun, and the Darwinian
theory, and other advantages of civilisation; but we have
not got any Shakespeares, nor are we exactly weltering in
Drakes and Raleighs and Cecils and Spensers. Dorothy
Vernon is dead also, and good Queen Bess herself, and
many thousands more lovable and worthy people who
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forgot, or did not care, to inscribe their names upon the
pinnacles of fame.
It would be very foolish to underrate the men of our
own times, but I sometimes wish our people would give less
time to modern and more to ancient English literature. The
time spent with Emerson, Ruskin, and George Eliot is spent
well; but a good deal of the time spent over the daily paper
and the sensational novel might bring a richer harvest if
devoted to the writers of the old lost years. We often
talk of Spenser and Sir Philip Sydney, of Jeremy Taylor
and of Sir Thomas More; but how many of us ever read
the Faery Queen or Utopia? The men of Elizabeth's time
are familiar by name, and their works are quoted, if not
read; but there are scores of good fellows whose books are
hardly ever opened, whose songs are hardly ever sung.
The reign of Henry the Eighth was rich in the best that
has made English song and English literature what they
are. Rich in sweet, quaint madrigals, in jovial songs, in
tender sonnets, and in sinewy prose. In the reign of Bluff
King Hal came Tyndall's bible, which secured the founda-
tions of English prose; and the poems of Surrey, which
fixed the canons of English verse. But there were many
men worth hearing whose very names are lost. For instance,
what think you of this for a hunting song:
The hunt is up, the hunt is up,
And it is well-nigh day
And Harry our King is gone hunting
To bring his deer to bay.
The east is bright with morning light,
And darkness it is fled,
And the merry horn wakes up the morn
To leave his idle bed.
Behold the skies with golden dyes
Are glowing all around;
The grass is green, and so are the treen,
All laughing at the sound.
The horses snort to be at the sport,
The dogs are running free;
The woods rejoice at the merry noise,
Of hey tantara tee ree!
Awake all men, I say agen,
Be merry as you may,
For Harry our King is gone hunting
To bring his deer to bay,
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We have not a poct living who could write a song like that.
No writer of our age could combine the breezy freedom, the
simple grace, the easy elegance, and the lusty love of nature
and delight of life which these few lines contain. Our
poets have excellences of their own, but the excellences of
the writers of Bluff Harry's reign are unattainable; and I
mean to say that a song like that is as good as a day at the
seaside, and it's a pity we should let such lie unsung while
our pianos are throbbing to the strains of "In the gloamin'."
Compare that simple, joyous hunting song with the work
of our modern poets, and you will see a big stride in literary
evolution. We don't seem to see nature at "first hand," as
our forefathers did. Now, here are four very melodious
and beautiful lines of Swinburne's :-
When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain,
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain.
And here is a bit of Tennyson's most simple and effective
scene painting-
The honeysuckle round the porch has wov'n its wavy bowers,
And by the meadow-trenches blow the faint sweet cuckoo flowers;
And the wild marsh marigold shines like fire in swamps and
hollows grey,
And I'm to be queen of the May, mother, I'm to be queen of the
May.
But there's nothing in either of these so fresh and so
hearty as-
The grass is green, and so are the treen,
All laughing at the sound.
The same distinction will be found between the old and
new prose. Ruskin is our champion descriptive writer,
and very magnificent and brilliant he is-but not so vivid
nor so truthful as Jeremy Taylor and Gilbert White.
Ruskin, speaking of the clouds, says :—
And yonder filmy crescent, bent like an archer's bow above the
snowy summit, the highest of all the hill-that white arch which
never forms but over the supreme crest - how is it stayed there,
repelled apparently from the snow-nowhere touching it, the clear
sky seen between it and the mountain edge, yet never leaving it—
poised as a white bird hovers over its nest?
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Which is very nice, but not much like a cloud; whereas
the following rapid notes on the flight of birds, from the
famous "Selborne," are as graphic as any picture :—
Some birds have movements peculiar to the season of love.
Thus ring doves, though strong and rapid at other times, yet, in
the spring, hang about on the wing in a toying and playful
manner; thus the cock-snipe, while breeding, forgetting his former
flight, fans the air like a windhover; and the greenfinch, in
particular, exhibits such languishing and faltering gestures as to
appear like a wounded or dying bird. The kingfisher darts along
like an arrow; fern owls glance in the dusk over the tops of trees,
like a meteor. Starlings, as it were, swim along; while missel
thrushes use a wild and desultory flight. Swallows sweep over the
surface of the ground and water, with many rapid turns and swift
evolutions, and the bank marten moves with frequent vacillations,
like a butterfly.
The difference between Gilbert White and Ruskin is the
difference between a Japanese and a European painter. The
latter paints you a bird correctly and perfectly to every
detail; but the former, with a few true and rapid touches,
suggests the bird and its action also-the European is most
exact in detail, but the Jap gives you more life. However,
don't think I'm finding fault with our own men.
I say,
read Ruskin by all means; but don't neglect Gilbert White.
But to return to the reigns of Good Queen Bess and
Bluff King Hal, I repeat what I just now said, that I'd
rather live in the 19th century. Literary men in those old
times often got into trouble. The Earl of Surrey and Sir
Thomas More lost their heads; so did Raleigh. Sir Philip
Sydney was killed in battle. Sir Thomas Wyatt was tried
for treason, but managed to escape with his life—a most
unusual thing at that time.
I always felt sorry for the Earl of Surrey. He does not
seem to have been a perfect character-if he had been I'd
not have pitied him so much, perhaps—but he was brave,
clever, and manly, and it's rather early to be laying your
head on the block at thirty-which, if I remember rightly,
was the age of the Earl when he joined the majority.
He joined the majority with his head in his hand. I
should think there must have been some sport on the other
side of the Styx in those days. Cannot you fancy the
ghosts crowding together on the banks of the river
when a fresh arrival was expected, and waiting for old
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Charon to push over? there was ground for speculation
then-money would change hands. Let us imagine such a
Scene:-
FAR BANK OF THE STYX.
Ghosts collected to await the arrival of the ferry.
The Earl of SURREY; Is't true, Wyatt, that Raleigh joins to-day?
Sir T. WYATT: A Captain Frogmore, who came in late last night-
the same who was thrust through the lungs in a brawl at
Coventry-said he heard Sir Walter would be due here in a
few hours.
Sir T. MORE: Raleigh is a man of too lively spirit to die tamely in
his bed. 'Tis odds he doth not land in one piece.
ROBERT THE BRUCE: I'll gie ye the odds of sax to four the mon
Ralley does nae bring his head on his shoulders.
WALLACE: What will ye stand me he is nae quartered, as I was?
KING HAL: I'll take your six to four about his head, Bobby
Bruce. The times are not what they were, and the headsman
gets poor pickings.
QUEEN BESS (leaning back in her chair and tapping Essex with her
fan): What price will the gallant Essex lay about the double
event?
(Enter Charon and Raleigh in ferry-boat. Loud cries from
assembled ghosts, and great hustling to get at the landing stage.)
THE BRUCE: I tak yere money, Bluff Harry. The chiel has nae
head aboot him.
(Raleigh rises in stern sheets and throws his head ashore, afterwards
leaping lightly out. Queen Bess, Essex, Leicester, and others
crowd round to welcome him. King Hal and The Bruce retire
into a corner to settle up.)
But, gracious powers, where are we now? Let us hurry
up into our own world, and leave the gloomy shades and
their shadowy peoples-though I should say, for the matter
of that, the company in the best circles of Hades must be
very select I'd like to see Samson and Hercules putting
the hammer, Robin Hood and William Tell shooting at the
mark, Atalanta breaking the egg-snatching record, and
Socrates arguing with the late John Stuart Mill; but where
are we? Where were we? Oh, I was talking about Lord
Surrey.
Have you read Surrey's poetry? Read his life. He was
a soldier. For that matter, Sydney and Raleigh and Wyatt
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were soldiers. Many of the writers of old times were, and
from Eschylus to Nunquam the men of the sword have
often had a liking for the pen.
But what I was going to tell you about Surrey's soldiering
was that, during the time when he held the command of
Boulogne, he took his forces out to prevent the French
from revictualling Montreuil, and there was a fight. Surrey
led the right wing and defeated the enemy, but the left
wing of the English suddenly took a panic and bolted. The
result of the action was honours divided, and Surrey, in his
dispatch to the King (Bluff Harry), thus excuses the
untoward incident:
And if any disorder there were, we assure your Majesty there
was no default in the rulers, nor lack of courage to be given them,
but a humour that sometime reigneth in Englishmen.
Most
humbly thanking your Majesty that it hath pleased the same to
consider their payment, which shall revive their hearts to most
willingly adventure their lives, according to their bounden duty,
in your Majesty's service.
The italics are mine. The "humour that sometime
reigneth in Englishmen " is good. The allusion to the pay
is also very quaint and delicate. But what think you of
this snatch from a letter of the Earl of Surrey's father,
just before the army were afflicted with that curious stroke
of British humour :-
This shall be to advertise your Lordships that this evening
Monsieur de Bewers with his band, and my son of Surrey, my
Lord of Sussex, my Lord Mountjoy, my brother William, my Lord
Latimer, Mr. Treasurer, and all the rest of the noblemen whom I
sent further up on Saturday at ten at night, returned hither to
this camp this night at seven o'clock, without loss of any man
slain, and have made a very honest journey, and have burnt the towns
of St. Riquier and Riew, both walled towns, and also the Faubourg
of Abbeville, where the English horsemen had a right hot skirmish,
and after the coming of the whole army, retired without loss, and
burned all the country!
A very honest journey; burnt two towns and a suburb,
and all the country round. Honest old Britons! Grand
old times! Funny old bandits! But methinks I talk too
long. How like you, my good friends, the Earl of Surrey
and his honest father; and our sovereign lady, Queen
Elizabeth; and the times wherein they flourished? We
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125
are different now. More gentle, less merciless. We never
burn towns, nor cut off traitors' heads, nor go a buccaneering
-heigho! Poor old human nature. It mends but slowly,
but slowly, good friends-but slowly.
And yet 'tis a pity they are dead-these grand old men
and women. I often think wistfully how useful they
would be now—such folk as Joan of Arc, and Rabelais, and
Cervantes, and Heloise, and the rest. If we could have
Shakespeare to write us some plays, and Mozart to write
us some music, and Fair Rosamond to play Juliet, and Sir
Walter Raleigh to go out rescuing Emin Pasha-it would
be well with us.
What a pity that all the brutal, mean, and surly people
cannot be allowed to die in their due season, and all the
good, gentle, handsome people keep on living and making
life the better worth living for the rest of us.
Why did Shakespeare ever dic, or Lady Godiva grow
old? What an envious old thief this Time is, to be sure.
And yet we owe Time something, too, for removing the
man who invented the dismal science.
Ah me! Did you ever lie amongst the grass and
daisies, at the head of a high cliff, and peep at the sleepy
summer sky while the bces hummed drowsily around you?
Believe me, 'tis enjoyable, and has a high moral influence,
lazy as it may seem. During this idle holiday-of which
I now write-I was prowling through a Derbyshire valley,
brooding over the moral enigmas and social complications
amongst which I have worked so long, when I came to a
bank of moss all shot with bluebells. The air was warm
and lazy, the couch was soft, the rustling leaves seemed to
whisper me an invitation to rest, and I sank amongst the
flowers and looked up at the glistening blue, across which
a rook was slowly paddling his way, until the air and the
trees, the gliding river, the shining sky, and the labouring
black, big bird, seemed all to speak to me and say, "Peace,
peace, the Earth is very fair, and time is inscrutable and
death inexorable; and you are weak, and ignorant, and
little-most despicably little-but one drop in an ocean
that rolls you know not whither; and you have not the
stoicism of the leaf that falls and withers and fattens the
earth in silence, nor the wisdom of the lark that trills his
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+
few bars of sweetness and is content-and the mills of the
Gods grind slowly, slowly; but they grind exceeding
small."
And then I thought what a fussy, excitable, impotent
little creature I am; and that it seemed hopeless and insane
almost to the border of blasphemy for me to be, as grave
old Goethe said, "still shaping here at the world".
battering my feverish old head against stone walls, roaring
against the tempest, preaching to the impassive trees,
railing at the moon-the cold white moon that waxes and
wanes and runs its course- -though little terrier dogs may
bark-as little terriers will.
It has a very soothing, humbling effect, that face-to-face
communion with nature; and yet and yet little terriers
will bark, and so will little Nunquam. And when I came
away out of the fields and woods, I came away only the
sadder and the less hopeful for the journey.
Bah! Man cometh up as a flower, and is cut down, and
the earth shall know him no more. Fate is unchangeable,
implacable, resistless, and we that fight against it get sore
hearts and weary heads for our labour, and the humble,
cheerful soul is the happiest and the best-that, like the
lark, sings its few bars of sweetness-and is content.
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R
A DREAM CITY.
OUEN is a dream city. A quaint, quiet, ancient
beautiful bright town. Not a town with here
and there an old-style street, and anon
a
fine building or picturesque bridge or gateway,
but a town composed almost wholly of houses grey
and venerable with years, and delightful with wealth
of cunning carvings, and graceful line and mellow colour;
an old, old handsome city, dowered rich with history and
legend. A city whose every tree is a picture; whose every
courtyard is a romance; whose churches and palaces are all
old histories; whose quaint gables and fantastic gates and
windows graced with lavish sculptures are all poems; a
place where the very pavements show the footmarks of the
dead, and where the tall trees, and the low, soft breeze
seem to whisper song and story.
There are no crows so ancient and witchlike as the Rouen
crows. There are no trees so gracefully tall, so vividly
green, so curiously theatrical; there are no martens so blue,
so bright, so fitful on the wing; no horses so sleepy; no
gardens so sunny; no court so shady; no aisles so dim and
silent in any other place that I have seen. It is a very
dreamy place this Rouen-a city of the past-of the past
in which we old fogies find all our wisdom, our glory, and
our happiness, as the youngsters find theirs in the future.
Dear old Rouen !
The interest and beauty of Rouen need no seeking. You
find a huckster selling fruit and vegetables in a wing of
what has been a bishop's palace; you find a second-hand
furniture shop established in a beautiful old church; you
see a cobbler at work in an oak-panelled room, at a window
magnificent with ancient sculpture. In the poorest streets,
where the roustabouts drink cheap wine in dingy cafés, and
where the workmen buy their frugal dinners of bread and
radishes, you may see doors and windows embellished with
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wonderful old wood carvings of heads and flowers, and
gates of wrought iron of rich and curious workmanship.
In the Rue Saint Romain are shops many centuries old,
with the ground-floor windows leaning back like the ports
of a line of battleship, with the upper storeys overhanging
the pavement in a beetle-browed manner, with the rain
spouts outlets cut into grotesque faces, and the black beams
all bored with worm holes. As you pass them you may
fancy the craftsmen and customers of a bygone age; the
armourer, the arrow-maker, the silversmith, and the mercer
gossiping at the doors; the Normandy maids of the period
watering the bow pots at the upper casement; but now-
Ichabod is the word. One noble old row is shuttered up and
deserted, another is held by a cheap Jew clothier, whom I
beheld on Sunday afternoon stopping the passers-by and
endeavouring to foist on them his slop-made nineteenth-
century corduroys and calicos.
In the little square garden in one of the chief streets I
see a couple of old French rustics resting on a seat. Old
woman in blue dress and white frilled nightcap, eating
oranges; old man in blouse and clogs and a cap like a
damaged concertina, smoking cigarette; on the left of them
a modern building of yellow stone, with a row of fairy pop-
lars against it; behind them an old and handsome mansion.
I ask what is that old and handsome mansion, and find it
was the home of Dianne of Poictiers. My old couple must
be both on the lee side of seventy, but their birthdays are
as yesterday in comparison with that of the house by which
they rest. Madame Dianne of Poictiers was a gay lady of
the sixteenth century. She was born in 1499 and died in
1566. At the age of thirteen she was married to one Louis
de Brézé. Nine years later she was left a widow, and six
years later still she became mistress of King Francis the
First. But all flesh is grass-even the flesh of kings—and
Francis went to the mowing, whereupon lively Madame
Dianne made a conquest of his son King Henry the
Second, by whom she was raised to the rank of Duchess,
and so came to live here in the handsome house by
the old garden. She must have been a remarkable
woman, for King Henry was but twenty-nine, and
she was forty-eight when he fell in love with her.
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I wonder what she was like. To me she seems to have
been a fat, fair, well-favoured woman; merry, witty, and
well-trained in the difficult art of flirtation. At anyrate,
Harry the Second was evidently in love with her, for he
perpetrated poetry—which is a sure symptom :-
More constant faith none ever swore
Than mine to thee whom I adore.
And be like his Majesty :
Well meant the early vow;
Meant it much as men and women mean the same thing
spoken now.
But the royal faith was never tried by the test of years, for
soon after committing the poem King Henry was killed in
a tournament, and the Duchess was left to sit at yonder
window and revel in visions of the past or of the future as
her humour pleased her. And I wonder what she thought
of life! And I wonder what that other old lady thinks of
it. She sits there by her poor old husband calm and silent,
eating oranges in the garden of the dead mistress of two
dead kings.
But in addition to its own wealth of history and romance,
Rouen possesses a strong interest for the British visitor.
To begin with, it was the favourite seat of the Dukes of
Normandy. It was here that William the Conqueror held
his Court before he set out to play that desperate game of
brag with Harold. He mustered his pirates and filibusters
in this district, and his fleet set out from Harfleur, at the
mouth of the Seine. I saw his palace the other day. It is
a vast, gloomy pile, and still stands sound and solid. There
is a courtyard within where the tournaments were held, and
where, for aught I know (my history being weak), our
friend, the Second Henry, may have run his face against
the fatal lance of Montgomery. The court is spacious, and
the ladies' gallery is still standing.
Go where you will in Rouen the burly form of William
the Conqueror seems to loom upon you out of the mists of
time. You see his palace. You see his picture. His name
crops up at every turn. And yet he does not appear to
J
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have been a nice sort of man. He had a fearful temper.
He was a glutton and a brawler-"proud, revengeful,
ambitious," as Hamlet says-and prone to lay the country
waste with fire and sword upon the least encouragement.
Indeed, it was in one of his mad rages that he met his
death. He was ailing-had the gout, maybe, or dyspepsia,
or some illness bred of overfeeding-and the King of
France made merry over the thought of the Conqueror
lying abed. Which fetched the Conqueror into his clothes
and into his saddle sharply, with the determination to make
things ugly for the French. Out he went. He burned the
crops, he tore down the vines, he slew the peasants, and he
set fire to the town of Mantes, at which his horse took
fright and threw him,—and
O eloquent, just and mighty death! Whom none could advise
thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared thou hast done; and
whom all the world hath flattered thou has cast out of the world
and despised. Thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched great-
ness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all
over with these two narrow words, Hic jacet.
It was
And so much for William the Conqueror. A handful
of fire, a plunging horse, and-hic jacet Gulielmus.
from Rouen the great bully went out to his fate, and it was
hard by Rouen that he died. He was left on his death-bed
by his children, was deserted by his toadies after death, and
finally received the burial of a dog.
Another famous Rouen man was Richard the Lion-
hearted, who also died hereabouts; and was, I should fancy,
as little loss as the conquering one. Richard is said to have
loved Rouen; and when he died he left his heart to the
town. They show you the ashes of it now in a little glass
box at the museum. The box looks like a snuff-box, and
contains about a tablespoonful of something like tobacco.
dust. I saw the ashes, but don't suppose they ever formed
part of the brave, blustering, brutal King—though it's likely
enough they may have belonged to a much better heart
than his.
I never liked Dick the First; that's a fact. He was a
bully, and I have a natural aversion to bullies. I know it
is said that when young Bertrand, whose arrow caused the
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131
lion-hearted one's death, was brought a prisoner before him,
the dying King magnanimously ordered him to be set at
large, but I don't believe it. You see, King Dick had for a
very small offence attacked the castle wherein Bertrand
served; had hanged the garrison on the walls, Bertram's
father and brothers amongst them; and it is a fact that after
the lion heart had ceased to beat, the officers of his army
flayed poor brave Berty alive, and then had him dragged at
the heels of horses-but let us not be cynical. King Dick
didn't do so many good acts; let him have the benefit of
this one.
He was a bloodthirsty scoundrel anyhow, and I'm
glad the Frenchman shot straight, and so rid the world of a
dangerous criminal.
There were some awful brutes in those days, and the
people of Rouen got a good many proofs of it, and must in
particular have harboured very mixed feelings towards
the English kings. Look now at this brief extract from the
chronicles of good old Froissart. The Countess of Salisbury
was besieged in her Castle of Hennebon, and to her relief
had gone the bold Sir Walter Manny. Sir Walter had
been out on a sortie, and was falling back on the castle
when he was charged by the French cavalry:
Sir Walter, seeing them, exclaimed, "May I never be embraced
by my mistress if I enter castle or fortress before I have unhorsed
one of these gallopers," and so saying he turned, as did his
companions-they spitted several coursers and unhorsed many;
after which they made good their escape to the castle, where the
Countess received them with a most cheerful countenance, and kissed
Sir Walter and his party, one after another, like a noble and
valiant dame.
The italics are mine. Ladies and gentlemen, all in those
days kept cheerful countenances under trying conditions.
But here now from Froissart is a sample of the kind of
thing that went on commonly near Rouen in the good old
times. You know, of course, that previous to the battle of
Crecy, Edward the Third of England had taken Harfleur
and Rouen. He also made great havoc at Caen. Well, now
for old Froissart :-
The English did not march direct towards Rouen, but went to
Gisors, which has a strong castle, and burnt the town. After this
they destroyed Vernon, and all the country between Rouen and
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Pont-de-l'Arche; they then came to Mantes and Menlan, which
they treated in the same manner, and ravaged all the country
round about. They passed by the strong castle of Roulleboise, and
everywhere found the bridges of the Seine broken down. They
pushed forward until they came to Poissy, where the bridge was
also destroyed, but the beams and other parts of it were lying in
the river.
The King of England remained at the nunnery of Poissy
to the middle of August, and celebrated there the feast of the
Virgin Mary.
You see they were pious in those days, if they were
"just a leetle teeny weeny bit bloodthirsty," and though
they might cut throats and burn crops with freedom, they
never forgot to say their prayers and tip the Church like
Christian gentlemen.
There was the same mixture of savagery and treachery
and bestial besotted cowardice with loud religion in the
conduct of the French and English towards Joan of Arc. I
fell in love with Joan of Arc when I was a child at school.
I always liked brave women better than timid ones; and
Joan was brave to a fault. I knew she must be handsome,
and have known it always, and now in Rouen town I have
seen a picture of her, said to have been painted from the
life; and she is handsome, with a fine proud face and frank
eyes looking bravely out at all men across the gulf of many
centuries, and through the mists of infamy and mis-
representation. And I believe in that picture, though I am
doubtful about the ashes of the lion's heart, for Joan of Arc
was good and valiant, and steadfast unto death, and she
must have looked as that picture looks; she must have been
lovely who had so much love and courage.
It is not a very pleasant chapter to read, that history of
the poor, brave Orleans maiden. It is not creditable to the
gallant French that they ran away and left a woman, and
that woman their deliverer, to the tender mercies of the
wolfish soldiery of England. It is sickening to read of the
craven cur of a French King skulking in his camp, while
the priests, and lords, and captains, and other scoundrels
ill-used and tortured the splendid woman who had chased
their banners from so many fields. It makes a man's blood
creep and his fingers itch for a weapon to see the painting
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133
in Rouen gallery of the pale-faced girl on the heap of
faggots, with the fire at her foot, and a crowd of pitiless
dastards all around her. It always galls one to read the
despicable, brutal libels uttered in the name of our noble
Shakespeare on this poor heroine. It was a base, a vile, a
cowardly, and fiendish act of our countrymen to burn her
at the stake in the name of God-a sad, humiliating thing
to think upon. I'm not a jingo. I'm not very proud of
England's glory; I don't think too highly of our honour.
But-but I wish they hadn't done it. I do wish the English
had not burned Joan of Arc.
In Rouen Museum-the same in which lie the ashes of
the Lion-hearted Richard's lion heart-there are some old
Roman tear bottles. They were dug up at a place near by,
and are said to have been used by the Romans to preserve
their tears in. It's a comic idea, and I wondered as I
looked at the curious little phials what kind of tears they
had held, and whether the large bottles were for young
maids crossed in love and the small ones for the weeping
nephews of a deceased Croesus. But afterwards a notion
came to me that it would be a good thing if the people of
Rouen filled these bottles up with tears of shame, and
buried them under the shrine of the new saint-Joan of
Orleans.
I think I have talked enough history now for the present,
and so, having just remarked that Henry V., Falstaff's
"Hal," held his court in Rouen, and also performed the
usual acts of pillage and slaughter in the adjacent country,
I will return to modern times. I didn't mean to be so
historical, but the fact is one cannot help it in Rouen.
History leaks out of every wall; springs up in every
garden; beckons to you from every doorway; peeps at you
out of every window. You cannot walk through these
shady old streets and for a moment forget the poor old
dead who built and lived in them. You could as soon
forget that Rouen is French as forget that it is old. Old!
There is a poem in every one of its moss-grown courts; a
romance in every one of its grand grey towers; a three-
volume novel in every one of its quaint and beautiful
old houses! Why, I saw an old oak fireplace from a
dismantled fifteenth-century chateau in the Museum that I
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could write a hundred articles about. The history of that
old fireplace would fill a library.
The rusty swords, the worm-eaten cross-bows, the bat-
tered armour hanging near it also-what of them? They
are from Crecy field, a great many. Where be the
smiths who forged and the soldiers who bore them? As
you look at the rotting blades and think of the burnt-out
rages and extinguished pride of the men who slew with their
edge and point, the lines of Shakespeare come naturally into
the head, of how Time's glory is to calm contending Kings,
to ruinate proud buildings, to fill great monuments with
worm-holes, to blot old books, and
To spoil antiquities of hammered steel,
And turn the giddy round of Fortune's wheel.
The steel lies there a-spoiling; the giddy wheel turns on.
The Normans honour the memory of the tyrant butcher
William; and a shrine is to be erected to Joan of Arc.
As we came away from the Museum, we called at the
Cathedral. I was weary with sight-seeing, and it was
evening, and I had a melancholy humour on me. So I
stood and mooned, and as I mooning be there entered
the church a nun. She walked slowly down the main isle,
her eyes bent on the ground, and, kneeling on one of the
queer little low-seated, high-backed praying chairs, with
hands clasped before her and eyes still downcast, began to
pray.
She was a little woman, hard-favoured, and of middle
age. I stood aside and watched her. How reverent, how
rapt, how humble! Of what was she thinking? For
what did she beseech? A woman devoted to duty, leading
a hard and austere life, renouncing the world and all its
joys, ready at the lifting of a hand to brave plague, or
pestilence, or famine, battle and murder, and sudden death!
For what did she pray? What manner of beatitude did
her bruised soul desire? Did she yearn for a hereafter
wherein she should be young and fair and happy, wearing
a crown of glory and a white robe of honour, pure and
sinless and at peace? If she longed for a brighter day, for
the reward of sacrifice and duty, for an eternity of cloud-
less summer and untroubled ease, for a respite from sin
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135
and sorrow, and the anguish of seeing innocence suffer and
merit trodden down, I suppose she felt as most of us have
felt at times. But to whom did she pray? For what?
When her life of courage and self-denial is ended-
what? I looked at her there upon her knees, the sad,
brave, fading woman. I pitied her. I wonder had she
known my thought would she have pitied me.
Have you
ever heard Swinburne's sweet and plaintive "Child's Song"?
I thought of it then in the Rouen church as the poor nun
knelt a-praying:—
Gold is worth but gold;
Love's worth love.
I wonder if that poor nun's golden love will ever be
rewarded by its worth in love. I wonder. Ah! I wonder!
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A TALE OF A DRAGON.
It's
HERE are some very sober-minded, or painfully
matter-of-fact people, who think novels too frivolous
for earnest men and women to read. For my part,
I am one of the unregenerate majority, and always
read novels-when I can get them. I have just been
reading, and for the first time, "Lorna Doone."
a love of a book. There is humour in it, and action in it;
robbers, and battles, and adventures, and deeds of derring
do; and, above all, a most refreshing wrestler of immense
stature and strength, who throws people about and breaks.
their bones in a manner that it does one's heart good to read
of. It has done me a power of good, that book. I should
advise Trevor to try it. An excellent good book, i' faith.
There is a fight near the end between a mighty robber and
the mightier wrestler, which is worth all the half-crown.
I have been wanting to read that book for a long time.
So I bought it for a birthday present for my wife. The
heart of man, it has been said, is deceitful above all things,
and desperately wicked. But our wives believe in us!
What blessed marvels are the dispensations of Nature.
Another book I have been reading recently is "The Story
of My Heart," by Richard Jefferies. A beautiful book, a
grand book; but a strange book, too.
The first thing that struck me about it was some remarks
about the outre-human forms of animals which are so entirely
opposite to the ideas of animal and human kinship, so well
expressed in Edward Carpenter's "Towards Democracy,"
that I feel obliged to quote from them at some length.
Be it said that Jefferies prefaces these remarks by an im-
passioned, almost bitter assertion of the indifference of
nature to man.
"There is nothing human in nature. The earth, though
loved so dearly, would let me perish_on the ground, and
neither bring forth food nor water. Burning in the sky,
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137
Those
the great sun, of whose company I have been so fond, would
merely burn on and make no motion to assist me.
who have been in an open boat at sea without water have
proved the mercies of the sun, and of the deity who did not
give them one drop of rain, dying in misery under the same.
rays that smile so beautifully on the flowers."
Thus, and much more to the same effect, and then we
are told :-
"Everything is anti human. How extraordinary, strange,
and incomprehensible are the creatures captured out of the
depths of the sea! The distorted fishes, the ghastly cuttles,
the hideous eel-like shapes, the crawling shell-encrusted
things, the centipede-like beings; monstrous forms, to see
which gives a shock to the brain. They shock the mind
because they exhibit an absence of design. There is no idea
in them."
"There is no idea in them." How different the effect of
all this on the mind of Tennyson, who, after watching the
strange insects in a pond, turned round with the remark,
"What a wonderful imagination God has."
Jefferies goes on in the same original and vivid way,
speaking of the snake, the toad, and the shark; then he
says:
"Horses and dogs we love; we not only do not recog-
nise anything opposite in them, we come to love them.
They are useful to us, they show more or less sympathy
with us, they possess, especially the horse, a certain grace of
movement. A gloss, as it were is thrown over them by
these attributes, and by familiarity. The shape of the horse
to the eye has become conventional: it is accepted. Yet
the horse is not in any sense human. Could we look at it
suddenly, without previous acquaintance, as at strange fishes
in a tank, the ultra-human character of the horse would be
apparent. It is the curves of the neck and body that carry
the horse past without adverse comment. Examine the
hind legs in detail, and the curious backward motion, the
shape, and anti-human curves become apparent. Dogs take
us by their intelligence, but they have no hand; pass the
hand over the dog's head, and the shape of the skull to the
sense of feeling is almost as repellent as the form of the toad
to the sense of sight."
.
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How does that strike you? For my part I prefer the
view of Edward Carpenter.' To me all animals are un-
finished human beings: creatures moving through ages of
slow change towards the human standard of perception and
of form. You cannot see a child playing with a kitten, or a
crow looking askance from an elm branch, or a poor, broken,
out-worn boat-horse tugging at its rope in pitiful endurance,
without being struck with the presence of a human analogy
in the animals. And who can fail to see in the eyes of the
seal, the cow, even the carp, a certain dim gleam, or rather
shadow, of a baffled, struggling, half-torpid human soul
trying to see-though as in a glass darkly-some of the
things which we have not yet seen except in a wavering
twilight, or uncertain flashing, as of lightning on a dark
night.
But what I begun to quote from Jefferies for was not
only to show the difference between his view and Carpenter's,
but also to express some ideas of my own in regard to life
and its meanings.
Jefferies, who was a man of genius and of a noble heart,
seems to have troubled himself as so many fine fellows
have—about things which we are impotent to alter. He
dilates almost bitterly upon the inhumanity of nature to
man, upon the non-interference of the Deity in human
affairs, and upon the awful volume of human suffering.
He seems to think that all the labours and energies of
man-past and present-have led to nothing. He says he
cannot bear to think of, or look upon, the agonies his fellow
creatures commonly endure. He implies that the world is
a kind of mad chaos, in which genius and worth are carried
away or trampled down by the helpless onrushing of the
mob; and then he utters the following significant
thoughts:
"Full well aware that all has failed, yet, side by side
with the sadness of that knowledge, there lives on in me an
unquenchable belief, though burning like the sun, that there
is yet something to be found, something real, something to
give each separate personality sunshine and flowers in its
* Quoted in the article, "A Spring Ramble," see page 159
of this book,
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139
own existence now. Something to shape this million-
handed labour to an end and outcome, leaving accumu-
lated sunshine and flowers to those who shall succeed.
must be dragged forth by might of thought from the
immense forces of the universe."
It
And what course did Jefferies take? He sat and pondered,
he took pen in hand and wrote, he went upon the mountains
and to the marge of the sea and prayed. And he pondered
on his own soul, and he wrote about his ponderings, and he
prayed for more soul, for a vaster, greater personality.
I don't find fault with him for this. He was a good
man, and a man of genius. I don't say that his idea was
not as good as my idea-I don't say it was not better. I
admit that in his words I see the glimmer-which to him
may have been a light of a higher and farther ideal than
any I can conceive. But I want to contrast with his ideas
of life my own ideas of life, as I have contrasted his ideas
of animals with the ideas of Edward Carpenter.
All those thoughts about the relationship of God and
man, about a future life, about a human soul, about fate and
chance, and the futility of human effort have occurred to
me, as they did to him, and as they do to most thinking
men.
At some time of your life these doubts and fears, these
desires and despairings are almost sure to rise around you
like mists upon a moorland. Yonder is a light. Is it a
beacon, or a will-o'-the-wisp? Leads it to the highway or
to the bog? Yonder is a form; of what? Of hill or
cloud? You stand baffled, puzzled, hopeless.
So in your life. Which is the eternal verity, and which
the mist wraith? Whither, behind these impenetrable
clouds, stands the eternal city, and whither the bottomless
slough?
These questions you must answer, or leave unanswered,
promptly. If you stand only trying to answer them, you
will perish there in the dark, and leave no work
accomplished.
Now, all the wise men of all ages have tried to answer
these questions, and none have succeeded. When my turn
came I tried hard and got no nearer a solution than my
betters.
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Therefore, I came to the conclusion that since the way
through the fog was hidden, I would just settle down in the
wilderness and make the best of it.
What have I to do with the immortal gods, and the
boundless eternities? Am I to sit down and howl because
the Creator has not thought fit to unfold his schemes to
me? Am I to giggle with imbecile glee because Professor
Huxley never found God in a bottle; or beat my breast and
blubber because some long-haired poet doesn't approve of
God when he sees him or imagines he sees him--in an
earthquake or a cyclone? Will these things make me or
any man happier, or better, or wiser?
As a practical man I have to answer these questions in
the negative. As a practical man the next question is, what
can be done?
I look about me. I descry, as Jefferies did, the awful
volume of human suffering. I see that there is a thing
which men call pain. I see that this pain is dreaded of
them, and feared of them. I see that pain both mental and
physical seems a thing which the world would be well rid of.
What follows? I am a practical man, and hold fast by
facts. I am, as most men are, compounded of the feminine
idea of pity, and the masculine idea of war. I look about
me, and I laugh a soft little laugh to myself, and I say:
"Ha ha! I see some one to succour, and something to
fight. Thou accursed monster, Pain, thou art a cruel
dragon, and I am in case to play St. George and joust at
thee." And then I rise up and get to business; and there
is much hacking and hewing, and sweating and panting, and
breathing of fire and venom. But it is a great fight.
It is now about five years since I turned my lance against
the dragon. And, on the whole, I have enjoyed myself
right royally. Of course the monster is still alive and at
large, and his fang and claw are still fetching human blood,
and will be when I am dead. Perhaps a thousand or a
million years after I am dead. But there will be other, and
better (thank God), men alive to carry on the struggle.
Ah! it is a great fight. It is a holy fight. By the beard
of the prophet, I wouldn't have missed it for a thousand
years in a world of perfect peace.
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141
I
IN WONDERLAND.
GIVE thanks! I have just read a book. It happened like
this. I was strolling along the greasy, murky streets
of Modern Athens, in company with the Candid Friend,
when we passed a book shop.
A Book Shop! What a jeweller's is to the maids, and a
furniture dealer's to the matrons of Merrie England, a book
shop is to me. When I was a sweet, artless, interesting
child, I used to French polish my nose on the plate-glass
windows of the toffee-shops. There were the huge sierras
of almond rock, the tempting roleaus of golden jujubes, the
jungles of liquorice twigs so stringy and sweet, and alas!
no ha'pennies! Ah! what dreams I have dreamed on the
wrong side of the glass! What vows of future epicurean
revels have I registered!
A couple of years ago I was trudging along the Strand,
when I saw two gutter snipes, their eyes starting, their lips
parted, their noses glued to the window of a tart shop. I
remembered the old days, and the old shop, and the old
resolutions of indulgence, "when I am a man,” and I went
up to the boys and said, "Can you eat some of those
tarts ?"
They did eat some. Gracious powers, how those boys
did eat!
Well, I am not very fond of toffee now. I never squander
my earnings in pine-apple wine, or Turkish delight.
Indeed, I don't squander my earnings at all.
But when I pass a book shop! Then I am young again.
Then I know the bitter joy and sweet pain which fill the
human soul when "over-supply" stands confronted with
"ineffective demand."
It isn't just the love of reading. There is also the desire
for possession. A book lover loves his books, and covets
the books of his neighbour. He likes to caress them. He
likes to arrange them and rearrange them. He likes to
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F
stand in his treasure house and bathe in the pride of owner-
ship. He likes to place his pets in lines upon the shelves,
and read the titles.
Nay, I have known a fellow to sit down and write the
titles neatly on sheets of paper, just for the pleasure of
repeating the magic names. How the mind lingers over
the titles of those noble masterpieces, those dear friends,
those revered teachers, those delightful boon-companions.
"Sartor Resartus"! "Silas Marner"! "Leaves of Grass"!
"The Conscript"! "The Pilgrim's Progress"! "Notre
Dame"! "The Doll's House"! "Andersen's Fairy Tales"!
"Robinson Crusoe"! "Hiawatha"!" Roundabout Papers"!
"Pickwick"! "Field and Hedgerow"! "Gargantua"!
"Religio Medici"! "Eschylus"! "The Faery Queen"!
"Hamlet"! "As You Like It"! "Tristram Shandy"!
Ah! I could keep on writing the names of my treasures
over and over for hours.
Do you know what part of a new book I always read
first? I always begin with the publisher's announcements
at the end. I have spent hundreds of happy hours over
catalogues. I have written down the names of hundreds
of books to buy-and never bought them. I have bought
dozens of books and never read them.
(6
I had Edward Carpenter's "England's Ideal" for two
years on the shelf uncut. I was saving it up." It was
in the bank. And a few weeks since I dipped into a chapter-
and finished the book. I was delighted; but I had drawn
on my capital.
One of the greatest favours you can do a man is to tell
him of a good book which you have read, and he hasn't.
Thus Dangle lent me Ibsen's "Brand," and kept me under
a spell all one night. And then John Trevor lent me
"The Doll's House"; and I was tired of writing one
evening, and I thought I'd smoke a pipe and take a peep
at "that play of Ibsen's," and I sat down in an uneasy
position on the end of the sofa with my back against a cold
wall, the light on the wrong side, and my ear in a draught,
and never moved and scarcely breathed for above two
hours. Oh! what a treat that was. Most noble Ibsen.
I salute thee.
So with "Tess"; that was the Candid Friend. I had
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143
Then one
the book some days. I was too busy to read it.
evening I was bored and irritable. I tried a chapter after
tea and put the book down. I couldn't read. I was bothering
myself about economics.
But an hour later I took up "Tess" again, and read on.
I read on until ten o'clock. I was getting interested. My
wife was very tired. So tired that she actually said if I
wouldn't sit up long she would go to bed. It was a terrible
temptation. The flesh is weak. I fell. I lied. I said I
should only finish that chapter. I yawned. My wife was
deceived. She retired!!!!
Then I made up the fire, stood a screen before the door,
filled all the pipes I had, and settled down to my task. I
had to finish that book before I went to bed. It was fate!
I did finish it. I finished it about-well, say three in the
morning; and was punished for my sins by the most
wretched fit of blues I have ever got from any book.
But it was fine.
Let me see; I was saying that we came to a book shop.
We stood at the window, We saw the new season's goods.
Temptation crept into my veins. I formed a desperate
resolution. I would buy a book !
Now, there is a fearful joy in scanning the treasures of a
book shop when you have no hopes of buying anything;
but it is not comparable to the bewildering delight experi-
enced by the man who can only afford to buy one book, and
has to choose that one from a score, or a hundred. That
is more than pleasure it is bliss. At a time like that, if
the bookman came out and said, "My dear sir, don't stint
yourself, call a cab and carry off as many as you choose, and
there's nothing to pay," the book chooser would be disgusted.
The spell would be broken, the charm would be gone.
:
So we stood and considered. There were some books of
Jefferies', which I have not read; there was a tempting book
about stars, by Sir Robert Ball; there was "Goblin Market,”
in a pretty binding; but it was 3s. 6d., and 3s. 6d. is not
so easily come by. I was in doubt. I sighed. I moved
on to the next window.
Ah! "Ships that Pass in the Night," 2s. 8d.! I glanced
at the Candid Friend. "I think," I said, "I will buy that
book." The Candid Friend made no answer.
He was
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biting his lips, and gazing at a gorgeous book on Japanese
Art. I watched him struggling. The beady sweat was on
his brow. His colour came and went. At last he sighed.
He had conquered. He said, "I think I'll take that six-
penny edition of Tho Cloister and the Hearth.'
I bought "Ships that Pass in the Night" because my
friend McPinto told me it was "awfu' rot." McPinto is a
useful guide. When he damns a book I know it is good,
and I don't rest until I have read it.
I have read "Ships that Pass," and I give thanks! It is
good. Selah!
* *
Yes, my sober friend, "Ships that Pass" is a novel; nay,
it is a love story! But yet it is good, and he must be a very
good man who is not better for reading it.
McPinto tells me that the author, Beatrice Harraden, is
"a novice, and quite unknown." She might have been un-
known, but she is no novice. She is an artist, and a wise
as well as a witty woman.
Of course, after that you'll he prepared to hear that the
book is idealistic. It is so. The moral of it is that love is
worth more than power, that the true hero does the work
next his hand, that silent, humble, and obscure service may
be more noble, more valuable, and even sweeter in the doing
than the showier work which wins the popular applause.
Indeed, I think Miss Harraden might have taken for her
text the noble line, "They also serve who only stand and
wait."
The author's literary perception is very keen. In the
sixth chapter there is an allegory of a traveller who, at cost
of great pain and toil, scales a high mountain in a chain
called "The Ideals," and seeks the "Temple of Knowledge,"
only to learn that he has wasted his life on an error. That
the real "Ideals" are not inaccessible mountains, but open
and accessible plains, and that the true Temple of
Knowledge is situated right in the midst of the city, and
has not even a door to keep out visitors.
This allegory may be studied with advantage by many
ambitious young people. Men look up to the heavens on a
starry night, and long to live in the stars, never thinking
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145
that we do live in the stars, and that our world is as
wonderful a star as any in the vast sidereal system.
So young writers rake the skies of imagination for new
plots, new motives, new ideals, new characters. And while
they are seeking the unfindable, the master calmly takes up
the old theme of "love me, love me not," and tunes it to
new chords, and threads it on new melody as surely as the
composer finds unheard airs on the same seven notes of the
old scale.
The country girl, with a taste for story-making, longs to
go to the city to study life; the city man longs to go to the
country to study nature. The artist knows that the Ideals
are an open plain, that the Temple of Knowledge is free to
all, and proceeds to find his "Vanity Fair," or "Silas
Marner," or "John Valjean," or "Goblin Market," or
"Jane Eyre" in the London clubs, or in the Lancashire
slums, or in the French police courts, or in the Yorkshire
moors, taking always the scenery he has lived in and the
life he knows.
Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons
in stones, and good in everything. Do you suppose there
is not a tongue in the grimy lilac tree of the Lambeth
backyard, as well as in the green and silver-clad beech of
the Dorking Valley? Or that the stones of the Strand
pavement, or the Ancoats slum, or the Newgate cell are not
as prolific in sermons as the sunny cliffs of Shanklin, or the
marble pillars of Venice? Does not our wisest Englishman
tell us there is good in everything?
There is no life so tame, no character so colourless, no
town so flat, no landscape so barren that the true artist
will not find therein material for his art. There is always
tragedy and there is always comedy where there is human
nature. In the grocer's shop, in the tram, in the counting-
house, you shall find material as surely as in the battle-
field or the shipwreck. What is the "Doll's House" but
the story of a common domestic episode, told in common
language? Did not Tom Hood sing his "Bridge of Sighs
on the same theme which finds the reporter his bald
paragraph of "Found Drowned"? But this is a hobby
of mine.
}}
Ships that Pass" has no plot. A man and a woman,
K
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both invalids, both peculiar, both disappointed, are casually
brought together at an invalid resort in the Alps. They
talk and walk and ride together; they joke, and, of course,
they fall in love, and then the woman returns to England
and-
And, I must say, Miss Harraden, that I cannot forgive
you for that homicide.
Is it fair to introduce a reader to a character, to make
that character unfold itself and charm the poor reader into
tender friendship, and then suddenly to cut off the dream
figure in the flower of youth, and leave the deluded reader
with an ache in his heart, to console himself if he can with
the reflection that his dream friend never existed? I say,
is it fair? And I say I don't think it is fair.
What right had Thomas Hardy to kill Tess? She
wasn't his Tess. She was our Tess. We knew her. We
had laughed with her, sighed with her, suffered with her,
become her friends and champions. And then I call
it an outrage. I resent it. I cannot endure to have my
friends snatched from my arms and hurled to the gnashing
red-toothed Furies. Confound it, Mr. Hardy, I say, who
authorised you to kill our Tess, our beautiful, true-hearted,
deliciously faulty, lovable girl friend?
I knew a fellow who wrote a story, and got so fond of
his own heroine that he wouldn't let anyone marry her,
and had to break off the tale in the middle.
Upon my word, I was going to say a lot of very nice
things about Miss Harraden's book, but that cruel deed
rankles in my breast, and I will not praise "Ships that
Pass in the Night" at all.
* *
*
And yet. What about Justice? Don't we owe some-
thing to our writers? Ten hours in the Better Land for
two-and-eightpence: is no gratitude due for that? Yes, I
will be just. "Ships that Pass in the Night" is a beautiful
little book; delightfully fresh and pure and sweet, and its
author is a clever woman, and deserves well of her country.
But-
But if I had wit enough for the task, I would write a
book with a most irresistibly, distractingly fascinating hero
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147
in it, and then, just as all was going well, just at the
moment when the reader was revelling in a tender, manly,
beautiful love-letter-like that masterpiece in "Ships that
Pass"—I would touch off a powder mine in the cellarage,
and blow that hero higher than Mahomet.
And I would send the first copy of that story to Miss
Beatrice Harraden. There is a point at which forbearance
ceases to be a virtue. I have had two of my best-loved
heroines cruelly slain within the last ten weeks.
However, "Ships that Pass" is a good book, and-I
think this article is long enough.
By-the-way, talking about value, what is the value of a
book like "Tess”?
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C
(
ON HEROES.
ARLYLE, commenting on the cynical saying that
no man is a hero to his valet," remarks that in
that case the fault is the valet's, and is due to the
fact that he has a valet soul.
This, I think, is over-harsh towards Jeames. Jeames may
not have a valet soul, yet may fail to recognise a hero in
an irritable, unshaven, bald-headed Briton in singlet and
pyjamas.
Or if Jeames has the soul of a valet, then are valet souls
more numerous in England than one's patriotism would
like to believe.
For it is very certain that the gift of discerning heroism
out of uniform is not a common gift. The eye for heroism
is as rare indeed as the eye for humour, or for pathos, or
for the dramatic.
To the average man the vast crowds of human beings
around him are a mere rabble of contemptible, and by no
means virtuous, mediocrities. Amid the rabble he recognises
some few figures as those of heroes, and usually atones for
the indifference or disdain with which he regards the mob,
by unmeasured adulation of the few whom he has learned
to look up to as the mob's superiors. This is a natural
disability of the average man. In no case can he distinguish
a hero until the hero has distinguished himself. He has
not the gift.
What is this gift which he lacks? It is by no means
just to assume that he has a valet soul. On the contrary,
he may be himself a hero, and I believe very often is a hero,
or has in his nature some leaven of the heroic. His failing
is due to misconception in the first place, and perhaps, in
the second place, to slowness or dulness of mental vision.
His misconception lies in his belief that the bulk of the
human family are unstable as water and shall not excel;
that the wise, or the valiant, or the good are the exceptions
and not the rule.
Acting on this belief, he never seeks for heroism amongst
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS,
149
the crowd, but only recognises it when its possessor has
been singled out for applause or preferment, or bas been
thrown up above the heads of the crowd, as one apple is
thrown up above the others by the shaking of the bushel.
But even supposing him capable of seeking for heroes
amongst the common crowd, is it probable that our average
man would find them? It is not probable at all.
It is not probable, because the marks by which he expects
to know his hero are as fallible as the marks by which
Rosalind had been taught to know a lover.
The artist, the poet, or the seer goes down into the
struggling press of indistinguishable human beings, turns on
them the light of genius, and instantly the figures start out
vivid, distinct, awful in their tragedy or beauty.
And the average man gazes on them with astonishment
and admiration, as marvels, and despises more than ever
the unillumined crowd of dim forms moving round them.
Thus it is that as the light of genius-or of love-goes
flashing fitfully hither and thither through the murky
masses of Vanity Fair, we are startled by the sudden
apparition of a Hamlet, a Don Quixote, a Juliet, a Falstaff,
or a Becky Sharpe.
And it is but natural that your average man, having no
lamp of his own, should suppose that no other striking
figures exist besides those whom the poet or the seer has
shown him.
But the average man is wrong. All around him in the
moving throng are forms of grace, of power, of terror, had
he the light!
What light? The light of human sympathy. The light
of a fearless, truthful, loving eye.
How he stares, our average man, at the hero whom he
knows. How he wonders over him. How he worships
him-or envies him. And how he spurns him, mocks him,
buffets him, tramples upon him, murders him when the
love-light fails to shine.
It is pathetically comic, too, to see the pains the average
man will take to look upon a hero. Yet, when seen, the
hero is seldom more worth seeing than the common type of
the crowds of average men who rush to swell his triumph.
What? Would you struggle, and hasten, to gaze upon
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;
a brave man, or a generous man, or a man of intellect, or
learning? But there are thousands of brave and noble and
wise men running with you to the sight.
Balaclava heroes! Lifeboat heroes!
Doers of deeds! Thinkers of thoughts!
of them.
Savers of life!
The land is full
These men here in the crowd of the sordid streets; these
men at the anvil and the plough; these men in the vessel's
hold, or on the station platform, or the pit head; these
women with the wan faces and bent forms and clouded
eyes, who toil at menial tasks in the gloomy workshops and
factories. These, my dear average man, these also are the
stuff of which heroes are made. These, many, thank God
very many of them would be seen for what they are, for
the brave and faithful, the lovely and the lovable children
of God-had you but the lamp of genius, the loving eye of
the poet to see them by.
You doubt it. You, John Smith, of Oldham, our average
man, you do not believe me. You hold your own manhood
so cheap. You price the womanhood of your wife or sister
so low, that you scorn your fellow-creatures, and scorn me
for honouring them.
Yet the cause, my friend, is in your stupidity rather
than in their unworthiness. You cannot buy much love for
little love. You cannot work miracles with little faith.
Suspicion squints. If you blow upon a man with the chill
breath of scorn, he turns his back, and rolls his cloak the
closer round him. It is not wise, dear John, to sing flat
and vow that the choir is out of tune.
Your grudging spirit recoils on you, in two ways.
Denying the just meed of honour to your fellow-creatures,
you make foes of friends; monsters of the gods. Refusing
the bounty of kindness and honour to other men, you
starve your own soul until you have no honour for yourself.
Thus it comes about that your better nature droops or
dies. Suspicion, ill-will, grow like fungi round your heart.
You cannot trust or honour other men because you will
not trust or honour your own nature; you cannot trust or
honour your own nature because you will not trust or
honour other men. You have looked down upon your
brothers and your sisters until you have forgotten how to
hold up your own head.
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Think of it, my friend. The bitter penalty you pay for
being a churl! For what is your answer, when one calls you
to the higher life? What is it you mutter, when one bids
you be free? What, when one tells you of the slavishness,
the drudgery, the meanness of your life? What, when
one intreats your mercy for the fallen, your succour for the
weak? What, when one challenges you to rise up and
follow the pure and gentle Christ to the realisation of the
prayer, "Thy kingdom come"? What is this you answer?
It is vain! It is a dream! The life you speak of is a
better, nobler, happier life. But it may not be. Human
nature is bad. Our fellow-creatures cannot rise. They will
not serve God. They love Mammon. They are as swine,
and will for ever wallow in the mire. There is no salvation.
Let us be. Let us hate, and sneer, and rob, and rot, and
die. Be not a fool. Accept the evil and forsake the good,
lest worse befall thee."
A devil's creed,
A horrid creed that, my average man.
which the devil and none other has hissed into your ear,
until, like Christian in the Valley of the Shadow of Death,
you have come to believe the blasphemy your own.
It is thus you stand-thus when all the trumpets of
heaven sound the call to advance that you shrink back,
shaking and sullen, like a dastard and a boor; and why?
Because you have lost your faith. You have no faith in
your fellow-man; therefore no faith in yourself.
Lacking that one quality of trust and that one light of
love, you lie down in despair in the Valley of the Shadow
and curse the friend who would lead you out of the horror
and the gloom.
Can you not borrow the love-light for an hour? Can you
not for once look round upon the millions of your fellow-
creatures and see them as they are?
Do you not mark these people? See how faithful they
are to the duty they can see-faithful even unto death.
Man, look at them. The drudges in the factory and the
field. The soldiers, the sailors, the miners, the doctors,
nurses, even the pallid, spiritless slaves of the sweater--how
faithful are these, how honest, how patient!
Were it otherwise. Did not these men and women
labour and endure, acting and speaking truth in their com-
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mon round-bearing and doing so much in almost all cases
for conscience' sake, or for the love of wife, or child, or kin,
or friend, or home: were not the great mass of our country-
men and countrywomen heroes in the truest sense of the
word, society would crumble into ruin, hell would break
loose, mankind would sink lower than the brutes.
So, John Smith, the average man, bethink you. Is your
servant a liar and a fool? or is it true that the people you
distrust and despise are children of God, creatures destined
to climb ever higher towards the light-creatures blinded
and misled, but yet lovely and lovable, with souls wherein
springs up an eternal and unquenchable fountain of human
kindness, where burns an obscured but inextinguishable
flame of truth and goodness?
Think of it, John Smith, and tell me, what else but
righteousness keeps life from putrefaction; what else but
love can make the world go round?
We are in tribulation and in danger. Misery, anxiety,
shame, and sin surround and conquer us, and on the black
and gloomy horizon ruin hangs impending.
And this is because for lack of love and trust we are
impotent to save ourselves. It is because being unable to
trust each other we are constrained to do the devil's bidding
and remain the devil's slaves.
But if we could trust each other! If for one short year
we English men and women could believe in ourselves and
in each other! If we could stand up, as men and women
should stand, faithful and fearless, and say that never again
should idleness flourish and labour starve, that never again
should the children suffer and perish for lack of love or
nourishment, that never again should any woman sell her
soul and body for bread, or for her children's bread! If
we could speak out with united voice, and say now that the
slave shall cease and the master of slaves shall cease! If
we could stand firm and fast together in our millions, and
declare that we would have God's kingdom now, that we
would have human life and human hope for God's children
here and to-day—who then should stay us from our purpose
or deny our right?
And-now, my average man, will you speak? Will you
more, will you dare? Will you be one?
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I
A SPRING RAMBLE.
T was a little after nine when I set out.
A dense grey
mist still hung in the valley, blotting out the hills I
was bound for, and hiding half the hanging woods on
our side.
Very beautiful these woods looked, the foreground lighted
by pale sunshine, the middle-distance steeped in cool
shadows, and the background merged in the pearly mist.
Rank behind rank stood the stunted wiry pollard oaks;
those nearest to me gilded a little on the upper branches by
the morning sun, their ragged crowns of dead red leaves
glowing with strong colour; those a little farther showing
more of a sepia tint, with grey shadows, and streaks of
bluish mist; those still farther growing into greyness and
dimness, until they became mere intricate and half-defined
tree patterns on the ashy mist, resembling strangely the
fretted frost forest on a frozen window pane.
This wood is of considerable extent, and though it con-
tains but few trees of large size, the most part being pollard
oak, with a sprinkling of thorn, holly, and elder, and a few
sycamore and ash, has a certain wild beauty of its own, and
characteristic of the neighbourhood.
Indeed, the country hereabouts, though it has nothing to
boast of like the Derby dales or Surrey lanes, has a certain
charm on its wild and bleak features, not unlike the charm
of homely women.
Are you fond of trees? For me they have always
possessed a powerful fascination. Their beauty of line and
colour, their wealth of tint and shade, their combined grace
and power, the strong, vigorous life and love of life which.
they display from budding coronal to grasping root; above
all, the mysterious feeling of humanity about them, and the
marvellous beauty and variety of "drawing" which the
humblest of them present, suffice to hold the eyes and the
mind in a kind of loving and delighted wonder. They are
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a thing of beauty and a joy for ever. Age cannot wither
nor custom stale their infinite variety.
And yet, how few of us love, or even notice trees? How
many per cent. of our English people would stop to admire
the green and grey, and bronze and silver decoration of a
beech trunk? How many have done justice to the pendu-
lous grace of the down-reaching lime? How many have
ever marked the beauty of the cross shadows cast by one
bough across another; or recognised the powerful effect of
the fore-shortened arms of the lusty oak?
In Alexandra Park, in Manchester, I have some very
dear tree friends. All the trees there are very young, but
many of them are of singular beauty, and most of them are
skilfully and lovingly kept, and artistically planted. I used
to go round and visit my favourites. I used to watch
them bud, and blossom, and bloom, and fade, and shed
their leaves. There were some fine red thorns; there were
some pretty weeping willows; and there were several
almonds.
One of these almond trees was an especial pet of mine.
You know, of course, that the almond tree is one of the
first to flower, and that its pale pink blossoms are superla-
tively beautiful.
Browning, in a favourite lyric of mine, called "A
Lovers' Quarrel," mentions this early flowering habit of the
almond:
Here's the Spring back, or close,
When the almond blossom blows.
I remember well the last time I heard that lyric. Slender,
Clarionette, and I were out on a ramble in Monsall Dale.
It was a glorious summer's day. We lay down on the Duke
of Devonshire's flowers, by the brimming lip of the Duke of
Devonshire's river, with the Duke of Devonshire's swallows
sailing over us, and the Duke of Devonshire's hills and woods
surrounding us, and Clarionette read the poem, and Slender
and I listened, and the clouds sailed on reflected in the
stream, and the water laughed low and sweet amongst the
reeds, and the swallows wove fairy patterns over us, and it
was well.
But I was talking about trees. I was passing through
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Alexandra Park on the 4th of March, when it suddenly
occurred to me that my favourite almond tree would soon
be in blossom. And I looked up, and it was in blossom.
It was morning, and the sun was shining. There were
the dainty pink flowers splashed in lovely constellations
against the blue-grey sky, one side of each cluster outlined
with pale light, the other losing its definition in rich colour.
It startled me. I felt inclined to throw up my hat and
cheer. What a picture it was! How it would have charmed
the soul of a Japanese painter.
Are you fond of Japanese art? What eyes they have,
those funny little ugly men! What a feeling for colour,
for composition, for mass and line! What a gift for putting
life into all they draw; what a feeling for the springing
form of flower, or rush, or spray; and what a genius for
backgrounds.
There was a little Kilmarnock weeping willow near the
end of the avenue in Alexandra Park which was distinctly
Japanese "in conception." I saw this tree also on the day
when my almond blossomed. A low tree, little more than
a yard high. A fountain of graceful sprays in amber and
green, and every spray studded throughout its length,
from insertion to point, with silver palm buds, and behind
it a Japanese background of warm brown earth.
Well, I sat down on a seat near my almond tree, and I
thought I would watch the people pass, and see how many
of them noticed the most delicate and beautiful thing in
Manchester that sunny morning. And I sat there for an
hour. And more than thirty men and women went by, and
of all those not six so much as gave my lovely tree a
glance; and even those who looked at it never changed
expression, never started with surprise, or paused in
admiration. Until at last came an elderly lady, who looked
up
in a lingering, wistful way, and sighed.
* *
*
Do you love trees? How much? In my sight that
almond tree is of greater value than the Manchester Town
Hall, with the Cathedral and Strangeways Gaol thrown in.
But you know I'm such an unpractical person. I would
give our slum children real primroses and violets—even if
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our Lady Mayoress had to do without satin flowers in her
bonnet. I would even turn a railway line a rood out of its
course to save a flowering thorn brake, or white lilac tree
--I am such a "dreamer."
*
*
Why did Richard Jefferies die? Who will write us the
history of a hawthorn? Who will tell us how the tiny
emerald buds appear upon the branches of burnished
bronze; how they grow into little tufts of feathery green;
how the blossoms appear in clusters of satiny white balls
how these expand into bunches, of the most beautiful and
delicate blooming flowers, covering all the tree; how the
April rains and the May suns deck the radiant garden with
sparkling gems of moisture, and how the summer breeze-
the sweetbriar wind of Jefferies-winnows the sweet and
wholesome fragrance "round the smiling land"? Ah! if
I could draw !
If it comes to that, why cannot we all draw? Why were
we, why are we not taught? Is it because drawing is "not
of any practical use"? Is it because national art training
would have little "commercial value"? But it would help
to make us happy. It would teach us to use our eyes.
It
would enable us to appreciate the unfathomable wonder and
illimitable beauty of our lovely England.
I used to think that everyone who looked at a beautiful
thing saw its beauty. The first intimation I got to the
contrary was in a confession of Professor Drummond's. The
professor said he used to "wonder why God had made the
world so ugly." Until Ruskin taught him to see he could
find no beauty in nature. The finest thing, he used to
think, he had ever seen was the inside of a toy trumpet,
painted red. He "wondered why God had not made the
sky red." And there are many millions of Drummonds
who have never read Ruskin.
You remember Wordsworth's Philistine, "A primrose by
the river's brim, a yellow primrose was to him, and it was
nothing more. But what more is it to the great majority
of our people?
After I had gone down through my wood, I climbed the
rocky bed of a hill stream, and I sat looking at a small pool
;
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157
of lucent, still water. The untrained and unseeing eye
would look into that pool and see, what? A small puddle
of clean water!
What did I see in my pool? I saw the glassy surface
still, yet moving. I saw the ripples and dimples on the
surface, and the "netted sunbeams" wavering there. I
saw also on the surface the blue sky, and the white cloud,
and grey branches, and green buds, and ghosts of dead
leaves reflected. I saw, still upon the surface, the shadows.
of the brown boulders; and at the bottom, through all
this, I saw the yellow gravel, the brown and grey and
speckled pebbles, the green water moss, the long water
grasses, tawny, and yellow, and green and gold, and the
submerged rusty leaf of the pollard oak, with the veins
discernible, and on it a gall gleaming scarlet on the light
side, and glowing purple on the side in shadow; and I saw
that these greys and browns and reds and greens and
yellows were not of one tint, but of a dozen tints, just as
the sun made them vivid, or the shadow dim, or the sky
blue, and I saw all this in the circumference of a few feet.
How long would it take you or me to learn to paint it?
And could we catch and distinguish all the sounds and
odours and colours of that little glen? the murmur and
tinkle of the brook and its cascades, the hum of the bees
and flies, the warbling and trilling of the robins, and
chaffinches, and wrens, the rustle of the dead oak leaves,
the sigh of the breeze among the wavy, withered heather,
the quawk of the rook overhead, the cadence of the lark,
the sweet lowing of the distant cattle! Have these things
any “value”?
And I have been seven years in Manchester. And this
spot is an hour's easy walk from my new home. And those
poor people who live (?) in Ancoats and Hulme! Those
little wizened, dirty, joyless children of the slums !
There is a factory down in the valley a mile or so from
here. And on the hillside under the wood there is an ugly
village. And the people who live in the ugly village work
in the ugly factory. They go into that stinking, noisy,
horrible place at six in the morning, and stay there until
half-past five in the evening. And on Sunday they are
cooped up in Sunday schools and chapels. And they have
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།
two or three day's holiday two or three times a year. And
the Archdeacon thinks these people well off, and asked me
if I was "writing for the submerged tenth"!
*
* *
*
As I was passing my first wood I saw a flock of
chaffinches playing round the trees, but they caught sight
of me and retired. I remember well a passage in "Walden,"
where Thoreau tells how tame the birds were in his garden,
and how one day one of the little creatures alighted on his
hand. He adds, "I was prouder than any emperor.
""
I think he might well be proud; don't you? I have
wished many a time for such luck. If only the wild things
would make friends with us. Better still, if we could, like
the little Hiawatha, "learn of every bird its language"!
Fancy the delights of an hour's gossip with a swallow, or
with the wild bees-I saw some this morning on a hill road,
with brown velvet bodies and golden wings-or if we could
persuade the squirrel to come down and play with us! Or
the rook to divulge the substance of one of his parliamentary
debates among the elms! But we cannot win the confidence
of these earthly cherubim. They do not love us as we
(some of us) love them. Not for us their pretty songs. Go
through the woods in spring. You will find yourself push-
ing on in the vain hope of getting nearer to the choir. But
as you advance the choir recedes. It closes before you, and
opens behind you. However much the birds and flowers
may be to us, we are nothing to them.
Down in the ugly village I saw a philosophic dog. He
sat on a cottage threshold with bowed head and winking
eyes. He looked as if he were trying to understand the
queer conduct of the humans. I wonder now what would
be his theory of value !
And crossing a meadow beyond the second wood a
choleric, florid-faced, heavy-wattled gamecock swaggered
up to me and clucked out a kind of challenge, his harem
standing silently in rear, and with heads a-one-side seeming
to think, "Ah! the Governor will soon bring him to his
bearings." He reminded me of a short-tempered, red-
necked, old Indian major asking some stray civilian,
"What the devil you-haw-mean, sir, by crossing the—
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haw-private parade, sir, damme, private-haw-have
the-haw-goodness to retire !"
Strangely human all these creatures are, if we but notice.
I knew a foolish-faced peacock near Chorlton who was the
very counterpart of a dear old gentleman I used to write
for. And who can see the penguins waddle in procession
at Belle Vue and not imagine they are going into the lobby
to vote against Keir Hardie?
This mannishness of manner and humanish light of eye
in the animals is well expressed by Edward Carpenter in
his "Towards Democracy":—
I saw deep in the eyes of the animals the human soul look out
upon me.
I saw where it was born deep down under feathers and fur, or
condemned for awhile to roam four-footed among the brambles. I
caught the clinging mute glance of the prisoner, and swore that I
would be faithful.
Thee, my brother and sister, I see and mistake not. Do not be
afraid. Dwelling thus for a while, fulfilling thy appointed time-
thou, too, shalt come to thyself at last.
Thy half warm horns, and long tongue lapping round my wrist,
do not conceal thy humanity any more than the learned talk of
the pedant conceals his-for all thou art dumb we have words and
plenty between us.
Come nigh, little bird, with your half-stretched quivering wings
—within you I behold choirs of angels, and the Lord himself in
vista.
Surely the influence of Darwin is there; and we cannot
easily over-estimate the change he has wrought in our
sentiment and religions by his revelation of our kinship
with the "weed and the worm."
Talking of weeds, I have made a discovery. I had plucked
a flower of coltsfoot, and was looking at it through a mag-
nifying glass, when I was surprised to find a flower within
the flower.
You know the coltsfoot flower has a yellow disc in the
centre, surrounded by a yellow ring of radiating petals.
These petals are long and narrow, and shaped like blades of
grass. The central disc appears to the eyes to be formed of
specks of pollen or of small, irregular-shaped seeds. But
these seeds are flowers. Each of them a separate yellow,
bell-shaped flower, in form resembling the well-known
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Canterbury bells of our gardens, but with "a long pistil
standing up out of the cup like the head of a tiny bullrush.
Well, that discovery, well enough known to hotanists, of
course, surprised me. But fancy my astonishment when I
tried the glass on the blossom of the burdock and the inner
disc of the daisy, and found the same marvel there.
Get a magnifying glass, and look at the dome of yellow
studs in the heart of the daisy. Each of those studs is a
yellow Canterbury bell, with a yellow pistil. Wait a
moment, and I'll quote some remarks on the daisy by
Rousseau.
The burdock bloom-I think it is the burdock-is a kind
of flower, in shape like a fir-cone, and in contour somewhat
resembling the blossom of the horse-chestnut. It is formed
of a number of flowers, much like heads of groundsel,
clustered on a thick stem. These flowers are like green
cups, with pink bands at the neck, and round the rim a
wide fringe of delicate white lace. Inside them are some
pale pink seeds. Now, each of those seeds is a Canterbury
bell of pale pink, with fine petals and a white pistil. I
should think there must be a hundred and fifty cups on
each bloom, and about five or six bells in each cup. In a
daisy there are over two hundred bells.
Why does nature take such pains to perform all this
exquisite workmanship? It is not done for our eyes, for
they cannot see it. But is it not possible that it is done
for the delight of the willow-wren and the lady-bird; of
the May-fly and the bee?
Why not? I have read of some ants who make gardens;
and we know that many ants keep cows, and milk them,
too. And do you suppose the butterfly has no love for
form and colour? But why? Darwin tells us that gay-
plumaged birds display their attractions to charm their
females. Bechstein tells us that a female chaffinch will
select as her mate the best singer from a hundred males.
The caddis worm decks his house with bits of shell and
stone for ornament. How do we know that some of those
animated rape-seeds with legs of gossamer and eyes like
needle points are not as keenly alive to the beauty of line
and colour as any mop-headed Japanese fan-painter in all
the flowery land?
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And now for Rousseau :-
Take one of those little flowers which cover all the pastures,
and which everybody knows by the name of daisy. Look at it
well; for I am sure you would not have guessed, by its appearance,
that this flower, which is so small and delicate, is really composed
of between two and three hundred flowers, all of them perfect;
that is, each having its corolla, stamens, pistil, and fruit. Every
one of those leaves which are white above and red underneath,
and form a kind of crown round the flower, appearing to be nothing
more than little petals, are in reality so many flowers; and every
one of those tiny yellow things also, which you see in the centre,
and which at first you have, perhaps, taken for nothing but
stamens, are real flowers.
* *
* *
About seven miles farther on, I struck a road mender.
He was seated on a heap of stones eating fat bacon. I
said: "Where does this road lead to?"
He answered: "Dahn inter t' low rooad."
I asked: "And where does the low road lead to ?"
And he answered: "To Owdham."
* *
* *
"I will walk," said I, when I recovered consciousness,
"a few miles along the low road, and I will return home by
train from the first station."
* * *
*
I went into the low road and walked on.
I walked on for five miles, and I came into a desolate and
bleak moorland, and I met two men on tramp. They had
tramped from Southport, and were going on to Leeds. They
had walked all night, with only an hour or two of sleep on
the moors.
They said there was no railway station betwixt the place
where we now stood and Owdham!
I grasped them by the hand, and then I lay down in the
rusty heather and wept. I had gone to all that trouble and
expense to come to Yorkshire; instead of which, the first
time I go for a walk I have to tramp it to Owdham!
* *
* *
A mile farther on I came to a small inn.
Here I ate raw
bread and waxy cheese and drank sour porter. I had not
L
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tasted food since breakfast-and very little then-and it
was now past five.
There was a drunken navvy in the house, and he talked
to me all the time. He was very drunk, and not at all
nice; but his conversation was most singular. It ran some-
what as follows:
"Here yer are for a honest workin' man. Mind yer
don't drop yer white nose-rag. Hear me? You, gentle-
man out o' work. You eatin' cheese (whistle). Hooray
for honest workin' man. S'pose yer think yer everybody
with yer goold guard (whistle). Three cheers for the big
sunflower (hic); three cheers for red, white, and—(hic)—
blue; three cheers for the world goes round (whistle).
What do you know 'bout short'and writin' and Brownin's
poems? (hic). Fall in the recruits. Turn out yer toes
(hic). Three cheers for a world goes round. A devil take
all stuck-up swells (whistle). A way was long a wind was
cold a minstrel—(hic)—infirm an' hold-three pennorth o'
rum. D'ye year? (whistle). Three cheers for Tennyson
an' Ettrick (hic)-Shepherd. Round goes a world."
I arose. I said: "Sir, I have enjoyed your conversation
immensely. Thank you very much. I hope to meet you
again when I come this way. Good evening." And I went
out into the wild moor roads.
It was twilight. I had reason to believe that there were
nails in my hand-sewn shoes. It was five miles to-
Owdham.
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163
B
A MERRY BARD.
ISMILLAH! The barn-cock is a bumptious bird, and
given much to crowing. He scratcheth all day in
the rubbish heap for a few poor grains of barley,
and, having found them, hops upon the handle of
the muck rake and toots his horn.
Praise be to Allah! I am a merry bard.
He will walk a league to fight another rooster, and return
with bloody comb and draggled plumage, and stand on one
leg to crow in the darkness. He joyeth in the gobbling up
of worms, but hath not time to view the sun-rise.
Praise be to Allah! I am a merry bard.
The redbreast is an idle vagrant. He toils not, neither
doth he spin; but he taps at my window when the East is
streaked with grey, and crieth "It is morning."
Praise be to Allah! The morning is good business.
He perches gaily on a holly bough, and sings, because he
is glad.
Praise be to Allah!
The redbreast is a bul-bul, but the rooster is a nuisance.
I am a merry bard.
There is a money-spinner in the City of the Infidels who
labours through a bunch of years that he may get many
shekels and give them to another man to lock up in an iron
chamber.
Praise be to Allah!
The money-spinner is a merchant. He has a ruby nose,
and his belly trembles with fatness.
The poet sits in the hanging gardens of Stamboul, and
tootles upon a pipe of gold. He makes verses and sings
them through his nose, like a Frankish tenor; but he
scorns to soil his hands with trade.
Praise be to Allah!
The young damsels cast upon him the tender glances of
the sheep, and the smooth-chinned youth presenteth him
with backsheesh.
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I am a merry bard.
The poet knows somewhat; but the monney-spinner is
an ass.
Selah? The Pasha rides forth in his carriage when the
sun is hot, and behold he is languid, and lacketh energy to
curse the flies.
Praise be to Allah!
There is cool sherbet sparkling on the sideboard of the
Pasha when he reaches home. It gives me the water-brash
to think of it.
I am a merry bard.
The villein toileth with mattock and eke with spade.
In the weariness of his flesh he casteth up gravel from the
pit that the Pasha's garden may be trim in its paths when
the Pasha walketh out in yellow slippers. Zulikah! The
digger's back is sore with travail, and the sweat dews
drop from the apex of his nose.
I am a merry bard.
When night cometh the villein drinks strong waters
forbidden of the Prophet until his brain spins like a juggler's
dish.
Vanity of vanities! The spademan is a drunken beast.
I am a merry bard.
In the winter the snow lies deep on the earth, and the
clouds of heaven are black as the gates of Tophet; the wind
also hath an edge like a curry-comb.
The Pasha lolls all day upon his divan and throws slippers
at his slave for that the coffee is too sweet.
But the lean tramp and his tattered drab limp through
the sleet along the frozen roads, or shiver in the alcoves of
the windy bridges; for they are empty and cold.
Praise be to Allah! The world is very droll.
Behold, a fine lady sits in the high places of the city
theatre and weepeth tears as big as the pearls of price that
clasp her dove-like neck because of her sorrow that another
lady is feigning hunger.
And, behold, the match girl in the street without crieth
to the darkness. Her tears are as the raindrops that fall
upon her unprotected head. She grieveth because she has

no supper.
By the beard of the Prophet, I am a merry bard.
!
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
165
The actress who feigneth hunger is paid twenty shekels
of gold at the walking of the ghost, which is weekly, but
the gentle lady drieth her eyes as she quits the theatre, and
bestows not a cowry upon the match girl.
Allah is in heaven; but the world is gay.
There is a holy Dervish preaches in the name of the
Prophet. Praise be to Allah! It is a profitable trade.
He preacheth against the maker of strong waters, which are
palatable, but lead to the pit that hath not any bottom.
There is a poor man living in a bylane of the city where
the drains are bad, and he falleth sick of a fever.
The Dervish asketh alms in the name of Allah, and with
them buys a bell to hang in the minaret of the Mosque.
Praise be to Allah! The tolling of the bell is enough to
make a true man curse the land that bore him.
There is no money left for the sick man, who goes unto
the hospital which is builded of the sinful brewer, and is
taken in there.
I am a merry bard.
The sick man dieth and is buried by the Poor-law
Guardians.
Allah is good! But it costs more to bury the man than
it would have cost to save his life.
The world is droll indeed.
Now, behold, there is a meeting in the market-place,
where the faithful complain because of the high cost of the
janissaries of the guard, who eat much beef and do but
little fighting. And the Grand Vizier speaks unto the
people words of brave sounding, and sweet as the honey
jars of Hybla, and the people answer him, saying "Hear,
hear."
Praise be to Allah! The speech of the Grand Vizier is
like the tinkling of little bells that are set upon an ass's
harness to please him and make him bear a heavy load.
I am a merry bard.
The sons of the faithful are hungry, and they do gape
with open mouths what time the Grand Vizier filleth their
bellies with the east wind. He promises them to do great
deeds, and they believe him-yea, they believe him even
when he keeps on doing nothing to the utmost bent of his
power.
166
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
!
Bismillah! I am a merry bard.
In the morning I get me up into my tower, and look
forth upon the world. And I see many sons of men
drudging at the anvil and the plough, and many legions of
lusty knaves strutting forth in rich attire, and with swords
in their hands, and these last have horses to ride on.
Selah! The toilers toil to pay taxes, and the men in
gold and scarlet buy meat and sherbet with the money, and
then go forth and shoot each other with guns; and it is
Zulikah! Houpla! Yoicks! I am as merry a little
war.
devil as ever skipped.
In the pleasant places of the great towns the faithful
spread their prayer carpets and pray to Allah.
I see the husbandmen on the Western hills perishing be-
cause the earth yieldeth not enough of roots to pay tribute
to the Bashi-Bazouks, their masters, and the children of the
workers in brass and iron weeping for bread, and behold,
there is no bread.
And the scribes and law-givers of the land keep uttering
many words, saying, "Allah is good! It is his will. Behold
the laws of supply and demand. The price of orchids also
is high, and the ladies of Stamboul pay many shekels for
the shawls of Cassimere, so that there remains nothing at
all for charity. Yea, these are hard times, and the shilling
cigar stands the rich man in one and six. Nevertheless, we
live in a free country, and the man that hath no boots may
trudge it barefoot. Great is the cause of law and order,
and a winter eviction is a thing of beauty and a joy for
ever. Peace, then, ye miserable poor devils. Why talk
ye vanity and Communistic naughtiness?"
And the fat and pursy Pashas say, Hear, hear!" and
the wind sigheth and the rain raineth, and the little children
cry on, and the lean husbandmen gnaw their thumbs; and
the faithful kneel upon their carpets and pray to Allah for
the health and glory of the Sultan. And so the world
wags on.
((
Praise be to Allah! It is beautiful to live.
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
167
OLD COMIC SONGS.

N
PRAY you like this picture. It is not a burlesque lady
got up as a pantomime Sinbad. It is a serious illus-
tration to a sentimental ballad of sixty years ago, and
represents Young Henry of the Raging Main.
Let me intreat you like Young Henry. His make-up is
a thing of beauty, and his properties are a joy for ever.
The thing he sits upon is not a milk can, but a howitzer,
and the vessel by his left hand is a punch bowl, and not a
shaving dish. What would they think of Henry aboard
the ironclad ram? What would Henry think of the torpedo
boat? Observe his ringlets, marvel at his whiskers. Isn't
he a daisy? and don't you feel tempted to ask :—
How do you get your trousers on,
And do they hurt you much?
I met with Young Henry in a book of street ballads, and I
prize him as the apple of my eye. He grows on you, this
Henry, and you find yourself haunted by his presence and
by the beautiful ballad of his love :-
168
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
On a summer's morn the day was dawning,
Down by the pleasant river side,
I saw a brisk and lovely maiden,
And a youth called "England's Pride!"
He was a tight and smart young sailor,
Tears from his eyes did fall like rain,
Saying "Adieu, my lovely Emma,
I'm going to plough the raging main."
And there we must quit Henry, though for your comfort be
it said that he ploughed the main as per invoice and didn't
suffer from mal de mer.
* *
*
*
They are delightful, those old street songs. The un-
conscious humour of them, the quaint naïve diction, the
amazing shifts to which their authors resorted to adapt
their ideas to the exigencies of the rhyme; the artless
frankness of their recital, the comic earnestness of their
sentiment, and the startling inconsequence of their morals,
making them a source of abiding joy to the modern mind.
We have nothing like them; nothing like them at all.
* * * * *
Some of my readers may remember these songs of the
fifties. Some may remember the singers of that time.
Several years ago; no matter how many-suffice it to say
that I was too young to be critical-I was often about the
halls and theatres, and got to know the characteristics of
songs and singers well.
*
* *
* *
When a man was got up with a red nose, a white hat, a
limp collar, and a patch on his pantaloons, we knew that
his song was "comic," and we laughed. If he appeared in
evening dress we were prepared to find him fiercely patriotic,
and we cheered. If he wore a frock coat and a turn-down
collar we felt that we were in for sentiment, and we sighed.
You see the advantage of these conventional make-ups lay
in their enabling us to guess at once the character of the
song. Without such a guide some awkward mistakes might
have happened.
*
* *
For instance, there was a very popular ballad about a
young carpenter, who killed his sweetheart, to the refrain
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
169
of "Doddle, doddle, doddle jib, jub; ri tooral li lay," which
no critic could have classified, had it not been sung by a
frock-coat; which proved it to be pathetic.
In this ballad, after the assassination, the hero, "Young
William," goes to sea; but a storm arising, the captain
suspects villainy, and acts in this wise:—
Now the captain called out, with a cry and a whoop,
And he ordered Young William to stand on the poop,
Saying, "Something's not right about this 'ere crew,
And, blow me, Young William, if I don't think it's you!"
With his doddle, doddle, doddle jib, jub, &c.
Then "Molly's pale ghostie, she stands by his side," and of
her it is related that:

Her breast it was white, the blood it was red,
She moved not, and she vanish-ed,
And that's all she said.
With her doddle, doddle, &c.
But what was Young William's fate I cannot now remember.
* * * * *
The songs of that period had their formulæ, as had the
make-ups of the singers. They usually opened in the
imperative mood, with a :-
or a
"Come all you young maidens
"
And listen to me,"
"Good people give attention,
And hearken to my song."
But sometimes they plunged headlong into the narrative
in the first line, as :—
or
Down Cheapside there lived a merchant,
In Westminster, not long ago,
There lived a rat-catcher's daughter.
She was not born in Westminster,
But on the other side of the water.
This was a comic song, and demanded a lavish outlay in
rose-pink on the singer's nose, and, in prosperous times, a
bunch of flowers at the button-hole.
The heroine falls in love with an itinerant vendor of
"lily-white sand," who reciprocates her passion. Love is
170
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
no respecter of persons, and the sandman makes a fool
of himself as successfully as if his name had been Romeo,
or Solomon, or McGinnis :-
The rat-catcher's daughter so ran in his head,
He didn't know what he was arter,
Instead of lily-white sand, he cried
"Do you want any rat-catcher's daughter?”
His donkey cocked his ears and brayed,
Folks couldn't tell what he was arter,
To hear a lily-white sandman cry,
"Do you want any rat-catcher's daughter ?”
A salient characteristic of the song-writer of those days
was the admirable lyrical genius evinced in the invention
of his refrains. And an unfailing charm of the songs
themselves were the unstudied effects which those refrains
frequently produced upon the sentiment. As in Giles
Scroggins, where Giles' Ghost comes to claim his bride:-
The Ghost it said, right solemnly,
(Right fol de riddle, fol de ri.)
Oh, Emily, you must go along of I,
Right fol de riddle, fol de ri.)
All to the grave, your love to cool,
Says she, why I'm not dead, you fool;
But the Ghost, says he, he says, that ere
you see's no rule.
(Right fol de riddle, fol de ri.)
Quite as startling as the refrains in these songs were the
delicious morals. Take, for example, the moral of “Wilkins
and his Dinah.”
MORAL.
Now all you young vimmen,
Take warning by her,
And never, by no means,
Disobey the guv'ner;
And all you young fellers
Mind who you claps eyes on:
Think of Vilikins and his Dinah,
And the cup of cold pison,
SPOKEN: Else you'll be dead and buried.
Singing tooral-lal-looral, &c.
Some of Ingoldsby's Morals are as comic as that; but then
he was trying to be funny.
* * * *
The pet themes of these truly great lyrists were love
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS
171
tragedies, and love comedies; their pet heroes sailors and
costermongers, though smugglers were popular.
In Mr. Ashton's book, Modern Street Ballads, are several
delightful songs about smugglers and their devoted brides.
One of these opens as follows:—
Attention give and a tale I'll tell,
Of a damsel fair that in Kent did dwell.
On the Kentish coast, when the tempest rolled,
She fell in love with a smuggler bold.

And this is the smuggler bold, as he appeared. Observe
his curly sword and pistols, his epaulettes, his boots; what
maiden could resist him? Especially when the tempest
rolled.
But, perhaps because their passion was born when the
tempest rolled, the course of their true love did not run
smoothly. They were married, went to sea, fought valiantly
against two Revenue Cutters, were overpowered by numbers,
and slain, in manner as follows :-
A shot that moment made Nancy start,
Another struck William to the heart.
This shock distressed sweet Nancy's charms,
She fell and died in William's arms.
172
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
You will observe that our tars and smugglers are all perfectly
well-bred. William was never by any chance known as
Bill.
* * *
A second smuggler ballad in the same book is quaint
enough to have supplied a theme for a Bab Ballad. In this
case the heroine's name is Jane, and her affection is filial.
Thus, we are told :-
In sailor's clothing young Jane did go,
Dressed like a sailor from top to toe.
Her aged father was the only care
Of the female smuggler who did never despair.
Jane goes to sea and captures a pirate ship. She is a young
person of irreproachable morals, and her character has no
flaw. I give this assurance because the following verse is
open to misconstruction :-
They beat the robbers, and took their store,
And soon returned to Old England's shore.
With a keg of brandy she walked along,
Did the female smuggler, and sweetly sang a song.
Reader, you know the motto, Honi soit, &c., &c.
* * * * *
Jane is challenged by a commodore of the fleet, who
demands the brandy keg, and is promptly shot through the
diaphragm by the lovely Jane.
Jane is arrested, and put upon her trial for murder. But
the commodore gets repaired, and, finding his foe is a lovely
woman, begs her life from the judge, that he may marry
her; and we are made happy by the assurance that :-
He gained consent, so the commodore
And the female smuggler are joined for evermore.
*
* *
But it is when the old-time ballad-monger handles sacred
subjects that he shines forth in all his pristine loveliness.
I remember a very old book of songs, in which was a
picture of Jonah disembarking from the whale. The whale
had laid-to by a rocky coast, upon which the serried ranks
of scalloped waves, looking exactly like racks of dinner
THE NUNQUAM PAPERS.
173
plates, were breaking, and Jonah was in the act of stepping
ashore. He was attired in thirteenth-century English
costume, and had in his hand a shepherd's crook. His
right foot was on a rock, and he was lifting the left very
gingerly out of the whale's mouth. He had on his face a
look of comical surprise, quite justifiable under the circum-
stances, and except that his long curly locks were somewhat
dishevelled, appeared to be in an excellent state of repair-
all things considered. The whale consisted chiefly of mouth
and tail, his build amidships being very meagre. He looked
discouraged, and seemed to think he had been imposed
upon. It was a gorgeous picture, and the poem did it
justice. The following verse is all I can remember :—
But when the whale came to the sea-side,
On the rocks his bulk he lays,
And shot out Jonah from his inside,
Wherefore he the Lord did praise.
Singing tooral looral lay
When he saw the light of day.
And now, as I have no desire to cramp the literary
aspirations of the Clarion advertisement canvasser, I will
hush my artless lays.
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A SON OF THE FORGE,
A NOVEL,
BY
ROBERT BLATCHFORD (NUNQUAM),
Editor of the "CLARION.”
AUTHOR OF
"The Nunquam Papers," "Fantasias," "Tommy Atkins," and
"Merrie England."
CHEAP EDITION.
PRICE 3/6
London:-A. D. INNES & CO.
A Few Press Notices:
The Academy says:-"A Son of the Forge' is a study in realism which
compels respect in virtue of its sincerity. The characters are admirably drawn,
and the Crimean and Whitechapel scenes are thoroughly lifelike. The author
of 'A Son of the Forge' ought to have a future before him."
*
*
* * *
The Literary World says:-"It is well and powerfully told, with an occa-
sional flash of humour in situation or dialogue, and possesses a strong readable
interest which inclines one to read straight on, having once commenced, until
the book is finished."
*
*
* * *
The Morning Leader says:-"The story is one of grim realism crossed with
the happiest flashes of poetry. Scene succeeds scene rapidly and effectively in
this breezy and brave spirited story.'
* *
*
* *
The Irish Independent says:—" If Dickens be the founder of the proletarian
novel that is to be, possibly Mr. Blatchford is the next to him in order of develop-
ment. And not even in 'La Debacle' do we find a more vivid picture of the
sordid, brutal side of glorious war. Certainly, if' A Son of the Forge' marks a
stage in the evolution of the democratic novel, it promises well for the vividness,
power, and human interest of the coming school of fiction, whose advent is
associated with so much curiosity."

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