si THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESENTED BY PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID ' VIZETELLY'S HALF-CROWN SERIES. UNDEE THE SUN BY GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA. at - " The Thing that hath been is that which shall be ; and that which is done is that which shall be done. And there is no New Thing under the Sun." Ecd, i. 9. VIZETELLY'S HALF-CROWN SERIES. PARIS HERSELF AGAIN. BY GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA. Ninth Edition. 558 pages and 350 Engravings. On subjects like those in his present work, Mr. Sala is at his best." The Times. "This book is one of the most readable that has appeared for many a day. Few Englishmen know BO much of old and modern Paris as Mr. Sala." Truth. UNDER THE SUN. ESSAYS MAINLY WRITTEN IN HOT COUNTRIES. By GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA. A New Edition. Illustrated with 12 page En- gravings and an etched Portrait of the Author. "There are nearly four hundred pages between the covers of this volume, which means that they contain plenty of excellent reading." St. James's Gazette. DUTCH PICTURES and PICTURES DONE WITH A QUILL. By GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA. A New Edition. Illustrated with 8 page Engravings. " Mr. Sala's best work has in it something of Montaigne, a great deal of Charles Lamh made deeper and broader and not a little of Lamb's m IN DETAIL FOR THE FIRST TIME. A New Edition. By HENRY VIZETELLY. Illustrated with an authentic representation of the Diamond Necklace, and a Portrait of the Countess De la Motte engraved on steel. "Had the most daring of our sensational novelists put forth the present plain unvarnished statement of facts as a work of fiction, it would have been denounced as so violating all probabilities as to be a positive insult to the common sense of the reader. Yet strange, startling, incomprehensible as is the narrative which the author has here evolved, every word of it is true. " A ote and Queries. GUZMAN OF ALFARAQUE. A Spanish Novel, translated by E. LOWDELI.. Illustrated with highly finished steel Engravings from Designs by STAHL. " The wit, vivacity and variety of this masterpiece cannot be over-estimated." Morning Post riZETELLY'S HALF-CROWN SERIES. UNDEB THE SUN: (Essays mamljj Written in got Countries. BY GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA, AUTHOR OF "PARIS HERSELF AGAIN," " AMERICA REVISITED," "DUTCH PICTURES," &c. A NEW EDITION, WITH SEVERAL ADDITIONAL ESSAYS. ILLUSTRATED WITH TWELVE PAGE ENGRAVINGS, AND AN ETCHED PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR. LONDON: V1ZETELLY& CO., 42, CATHERINE STREET, STRAND. 1887. LIEUTENANT-COLONEL JAMES E. FORD r IN PLEASANT MEMORY OF DAYS PASSED LONG AGO UNDER THE SUN, IS CORDIALLY DEDICATED. CONTENTS. I'AGK AN ESSAY ON WAEM WEATHEE h I. UNDER THE GUNS OF THE MOEEO 17 II. THE HUMOUES OF HAVANA 30 in. A COUET-YAED IN HAVANA 47 IV. THE VOLANTI 59 V. HAVANA CIGAEITOS 72 VI. HAVANA CIGAES 83 VII. A HAED EOAD TO TEAVEL 96 Vni. THE DIVEESIONS OF LA SOLEDAD Ill IX. THE CITY OF THE ANGELS . 122 X. MOOEISH HOUSES AT ALOISES .134 XI. COCKPIT EOYAL 144 xn. 3IAUEESQUES 159 Xni. SAMBO AND FATHMA 168 XIV. OLD SPAIN IN AFEICA ...*.... 175 XV. KING PIPPIN'S PALACE 186 XVI. FOEM-SICKNESS 198 XVII. CUAGNAWAGHA 209 xvm. STALLS 226 XIX. WEETCHEDVILLE . 235 XX. NOBODY ABEOAD 248 XXI. SHOCKING ! 261 XXII. THE HOTEL CHAOS 272 XXIII. POSTE EESTANTE 286 XXIV. THE IDLE LAKK 296 &317367 Vlli CONTENTS. PAGE XXV. EMPTY BOXES . . . 307 XXVI. THE SUEEENDEE OF VENICE 31$ XXVII. EVE OF ST. MAEK . . 32J> XXVIII. HOMELESS IN PADUA . . 337 XXIX. FLORENCE, CAPITAL OF ITALY . . . . . . 342 XXX. EOMA UEBS 348- XXXI. THE STEEETS OF EOME 35ft XXXII. A DAY WITH THE EOMAN HOUNDS . . 37^ AN ESSAY ON WARM WEATHER. (PREFIXED TO THE FIRST EDITION OF THIS WORK.) HAVE the greater need to pen an Essay with such- a title as that which appears above, as introductory to UNDER THE SUN, since I sit down to write it on the Twenty-fifth of May the merry month of May T with a blazing fire in my study, and the cat dozing on the- hearth-rug, instead of enjoying her natural otium at this time of the year, in blinking on the coping of the garden wall. The housekeeper has just knocked at the door to say that the coals are nearly "out," and that in view of such "bitter weather,'* it would be as well to communicate with Messrs. Cockerel! without delay. If the men with the sacks do not come, I shall be fain to bite my thumbs to warm them ; and I may well strive to kindle a little mental caloric by writing about "Warm Weather, lest with the thermometer looking at me with the stony stare of a refrigerator I should forget that there was such a season as Summer at all, or that anything but frost and fcg could be felt and seen " Under the Sun." I have given to this collection of Sketches of Travels and Manners the title they bear, for the reason that the majority of their number have a direct reference to the Hot Climates of the lands in which I have wandered. It may strike the reader (and in a stronger degree the critic) that some of the chapters in this volume are, neither subjectively nor objectively, of a very sunny nature, and have nothing to do with hot countries. I may point in explanation, first, to the reservation " mainly " which appears- JC PREFACE. on the face of the book ; and next, to the facts that I wrote *' Wretchedville " in Rome, and "Stalls" in Spain, under cir- cumstances of an abnormally inflammatory nature. Those essays were both composed " in a state of siege," and in the midst of revolutionary crises ; and they should properly smell of brimstone .and boiling lava, With regard to the " Hotel Chaos," in which I have endeavoured to depict the aspect of the city of Metz during the month of July, 1870, 1 can scarcely think that even the severest censor would feel inclined to question that it was hot enough in Lorraine in the city, and at the time I have mentioned. So much for my book : but this is not by any means all I have to say on the subject of Heat. It has long been my ambition to say something in print on the subject of Warm Weather and Warm Blood in connection with their influence on the Literary Style and Character ; and I should wish it, in the outset, to be distinctly understood that I am not addressing myself to the jelly-fish section of mankind, to whom Weather, torrid or frigid, is a matter of indifference ; nor to those Hyperboreans who revel physically, in cold; who "tub" in cold water on the First of January, and even when they are forced to break the ice with a hammer to reach their bath ; who delight in skating, sliding, : snow-balling, sleighing, "curling," and other arctic diversions, which to me only represent so many varieties of self-inflicted agony. Those whom I desire to reach should be warm-blooded animals, swarthy and sanguineous souls, worn black by the Sun's -am'rous pinches. I am not writing for Philosophers of the Glacial Period, or the shareholders of the Wenham Lake Ice Company, or the dragmen of the Royal Humane Society. Many more years ago than I care to name, when I was a little boy, the house in which I lived used to be thrown into periodical commotion by sudden and alarming fits of indisposition with which a near and dear relative of mine used, from time to time, to be attacked. Such a running up and down stairs as took place on these occasions is difficult of description. Warm flannels and hot- water bottles were sent for from the lower regions. There were no railway rugs and few railways, indeed, in those days AN ESSAY ON WARM WEATHER. XI "but the thickest of shawls and wraps were in request. "When the spasmodic sufferings of the invalid in the drawing-room became unusually violent, the doctor would be sent for. I can remember that when the medical practitioner came he was accustomed to smile, and to say that the sufferer would be " all right presently," and that his invariable prescription in alleviation of the symptoms was sherry-and-water hot. And, indeed, when the flannels and bran-bags and water-bottles had been applied ; .when the patient had had a dozen extra coverings wrapped round her ; when she had been laid on the sofa with a pillow under her head ; and especially when the fire had been well stirred and the hot sherry- and-water administered she would rarely fail to fall into a tranquil slumber, and to wake up afterwards quite composed and cheerful, to be, as heretofore, our hope, and comfort, and joy. I should observe that these visitations always took place in the winter months, and their severity was in a precisely propor- tionate ratio to the asperity of the weather, and that their most marked symptoms were a deficiency of circulation in the extremities, accompanied by violent shivering. "We children, under these terrifying circumstances, used to cower in corners, quaking with appalling misgivings ; for we were but five left from thirteen brothers and sisters, and we had very early indeed begun to understand what Death meant. As it happened, my relative survived the severest of her shivering fits (one which took place when I was a very small boy) full five-and-twenty years ; and I am glad to conjecture, nay, to believe, now, that ague or palsy had nothing whatever to do with my dear Mother's ailment. She trembled only because it was January, and a hard winter, and she was so very cold. She was a West Indian, and Cold to her was Pain. I had the fortune, or misfortune, in after years to be sent to a school in which the boys were never beaten nay, not to the extent of a rapped knuckle or a boxed ear ; and to that circum- stance, perhaps, may be ascribed the generally imperfect nature of my education, and my inability at this day to master the niceties of Latin prosody. Had I been duly scourged, I might by this Xll PREFACE. time have become another Codrus, and in slightly bronchitic accents have recited another Theseid. I can nevertheless con- scientiously aver, comparing my own experiences with those of friends educated under the beneficent rule of Doctor Busby, Professor Thwackum, and Mr. Plagosus Orbilius, M.R.C.P., that the physical anguish I endured during my school-life was quite as severe, although not so ignominious, as though I had been beaten every day into bruises and blains. I was never Warm "enough. From July to September (if the skies were favourable, and there was nothing the matter with the Gulf Stream) I enjoyed a tem- porary respite from chilliness. During the remainder of the year I shivered. The Getting-up bell (which was rung at half-past five) pealed on my ear as awfully, in degree, as the dreadful ding-dong of St. Sepulchre's may peal on the tympanum of the wretch in Xewgate doomed to die : yet, happier he, the knell is audible to- him but once. / heard the Getting-up bell every morning, clamouring and screeching, "Come out. Come and be cold. Come and have a blue tip to your nose, and gooseflesh at the ends of your fingers, and chilblains on all your toes. Come, and shudder, and clash your teeth together." That was the kind of invite I heard in the bell. I know that for a length of time I spent half my pocket-money in bribing a boy, whose seat was nearer the stove than mine in the class-room, to allow me to occupy his warm corner, and that I would smuggle additional clothes into the dormitories, or borrow my schoolfellows' blankets, to cover myself at night. I know that I have had impositions of horrible length set me for the offence of going to bed with the major part of my garments on. I had a schoolmaster, once, who was a clever and excellent man, but a little mad, and who had a craze about making boys " hardy." He was pleased to fix upon me as a " chilly mortal," and expressed a determination to " make a man of me." The process of manufacture demanded that when I was snuggling over the fire and a book in play-time, I should be driven forth into the bleak and bitter open " to play." Now I never could play. At AN ESSAY ON WARM WEATHER. xiii this date, when I am grizzling, I scarcely know a cricket-bat from a stump, or prisoner's base from rounders. I never could throw a ball, or catch one, properly ; and in childhood I was utterly unable even to " tuck in my twopenny " at leap-frog, or to drive a hoop. So, while a hundred merry lads round me raced and gambolled, I used to lurk in a corner of the playground and Shiver. We had a large bathroom, and (always with the benevolent idea of " making a man of me ") I was put through a bastard course of hydropathy. I declare that in the midst of the most biting winter weather I have undergone the cold douche, the cold shower-bath, and the cold sitz ; that I have been packed in wet sheets ; that I have been made to put a dry pair of socks over a wet pair, and thus accoutred have been ordered to walk from Hammersmith to Kew Bridge, before breakfast, in the dark, to make me "hardy." Unless another boy of the same "hardy" breed was sent with me to see that I went through my training properly, I used to perform the journey from Hammersmith to Kew Bridge by sneaking to the widow Crump's shop at Turnham Green she sold fruit, toys, periodicals, and sweetstuff and sitting by the fire in her little parlour, drinking warm ginger-beer, and reading the Lives of the Pirates and Highwaymen. The puling, sneaking, lily-livered milksop ! I hear the Hyperboreans cry. I acknowledge the hardest of the impeach- ments ; and I confess, indeed, that indirectly I defrauded my parents by my persistent chillinc ss ; for we had a racquet court, a quintain, and a gymnastic apparatus at school. We were entitled to lessons in swimming, fencing, riding, and calisthenics ; and had I availed myself of all the Olympian facilities at my command, I might by this time have become a distinguished athlete, well known in the higher muscular circles in Elis. As it chanced, my good crazy master did not make a man of me. I grew up to be only a sickly, long-legged, weak-kneed youth, with premature pains in the bones, which developed in later years into chronic rheumatism and interinittant neuralgia. I had some glimpses of Warm Weather when I was a child, xlv PREFACE. being much abroad, but only in temperate climes. But from the age of thirteen to nearly thirty I lived mainly in London, and you know what Cold Weather, and Warm Weather, in the British metropolis mean. With Creole, Italian, Portuguese, Eed Indian blood in my veins (I am afraid that my great grandmother on the maternal side was a squaw, and was tattooed), I was always panting to be Under the Sun the real Sun, not the tepid simulacrum we see in this country but it seemed as though my wish was never to be gratified. I was always repeating : Yet bear me from the harbour's mouth, Wild winds ; I seek a warmer sky ; And I shall see before I die The Palms and Temples of the South. I saw them, and the Sun himself, at last ; but I was con- strained to seek my goal by a round-about route. The first real, glorious, blazing, sweltering Summer I basked in was in Russia. The cholera was rife in St. Petersburg when I went there. The fashionable season was over, and all the grand folks were out of town. The streets were dusty, the canals were malodorous. What did all these things matter to me ? It was Summer, it was Hot. My rheumatism took unto itself wings, and flew away. I could once more feel my blood in its circuits. A long-congealed mind began to thaw, and during that summer in Russia I studied and worked more vigorously than ever I had worked or studied before in my life. Now and then, among the few favourable things people have been good enough to say about me, I have been complimented on the score of my " industry." Hearing such a compliment, I have chuckled, not bitterly, but with much inward merriment, as knowing myself to be constitutionally one of the most indolent of men. " Ah, monsieur," pleaded the French beggar to the stern economist who reproached him with his vagabondage, " si vous saviez combien je suis paresseux ! " If you only knew how idle I was ; how I have wasted three-fourths of the time at my disposal after the necessary deductions for sleep, meals, and recreation AN ESSAY ON WARM WEATHER. XV had been made in purposeless "mooning," in hatching vain: schemes, in covering the margins of books with trivial notes, in filling commonplace books with useless entries, in making sketches for pictures I shall never be able to paint ! In the face of a shelf full of books, and thousands of newspaper columns I have scrawled, I know that, so far as Time is concerned, I have wantonly squandered my substance and wasted my oil. I know, and can honestly declare, that so strongly is tine far niente temper ingrained within me, that I have never sat down to serious labour without reluctance, nor risen from it without exultation. I wonder how many " prolific writers," "interminable scribblers," "assiduous hacks," would make the same confession, were they only candid enough to do so ? One cannot, indeed, repudiate one's own handiwork ; and during a literary course of three-and-twenty years, a man whose- only source of livelihood has been his pen, must needs have accumulated a mass of work performed in some manner or another. The craziest dunce's punishment- tasks will fill many copybooks. Thus, when I look at the volumes and the news- paper-files before me, and ask how ever I could have nerved myself to knead all these stacks of bricks often with the scantiest allowance of straw I remember that I have always worked better in summer than in winter, and that I have always worked best Under the Sun, thousands of miles away. The Summer of 1864 was intensely hot ; yet I managed to do more work in the United States, in Mexico, and in the West Indies, . in three months than I had done in all the preceding three years. I felt my blood in every vein, and it oozed out of my fingers, and so into my pen's point, into red ink. The glorious warm weather melted away the mists and fogs by which I had been surrounded. I had been Hot and Happy. In a kindred but modified degree I have recognised the same influence of Sunshine as encouraging activity in my own individual case and what do I know about other people's ? in Italy, in Spain, , and in Africa. I have been at home now, with brief intervals of con- :XV1 PREFACE. tinental travelling, for four years, and I have written nothing- worth reading. No original book of mine has seen the light for a very long time ; and my publisher had to make my life & torment to me ere he could incite me to collect these papers .and correct the proofs. If any persons wish me to be indus- trious, let them combine in demanding that I should be banished very far beyond the seas, and to the hottest climate procurable. A double purpose would thus be served. Those who disliked me personally would be able to get rid of me ; whereas those who did not hate me might profit by my absence foy communing with me from afar off. GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA. BEOMPTON, May, 1872. UNDER THE SUN. I. UNDER THE GUNS OF THE MORRO. HERE used some years ago to be a little tobacconist's 'shop, somewhere between Pall Mall and Duncannon Street, with the sign of the Morro Castle. It was such a little shop, and it smelt so strongly of cedar and of the Indian weed, that itself was not unlike a cigar box. Here I used to think a threepenny cigar about the greatest luxury in which a young man of pleasure could indulge ; but a luxury only to be ventured upon at the occurrence of solemn festivals, and when the treasures of the mines of Potosi, to the extent of a few shillings, lay loose in one's waistcoat-pocket. There were three- penny cigars in those days, and they were delicious. I am afraid that the manufacture has ceased, or that the threepences have lost their flavour, for Ensign and Lieutenant Dickeystrap, of the Guards, declares that you cannot get anything fit to smoke under ninepence, and that a really tolerable " weed " will " stand you in " eighteenpence. Prince Fortunatus, they say, gives half a crown apiece for his Regalias. The Morro Castle, however, did a very modest, but, I believe, remunerative, business in cigars at from threepence to sixpence each. Well do I remember courtly old Mr. Alcachofado, the pro- prietor of the Morro always in the same well -buttoned frock-coat, 18 UNDER THE SUN. always with the same tall shiny hat with the broad turned-up brim always puffing at, apparently, the same stump of a choice Lon- dres. It was well worth while laying out threepence at the Morro Castle ; for, in consideration of that modest investment, you were treated, for at least five minutes, like a peer of the realm. Mr. Alcachofado himself selected your cigar, and, if you approved of it, snipped off the end in a little patent machine, and presented it to you with a grave bow. You proposed to light it ; but this Mr. Alcachofado would by no means permit. He drew a splint from a stack in a japanned stand, kindled it at the gas jet, and with another bow handed it to you. If you wished to fill the heart of Mr. Alcachofado with anguish, and to pass in his eyes for a person of the very worst breeding, you would, when the splint had served your turn, cast it on the floor and trample it under foot. I have seen the proprietor of the Morro glare at people who did this, as though he would have dearly liked to take off his curly- brimmed hat and fling it at their heads. Regular customers knew well the etiquette of the Morro, which was gently to blow out the tiny flame of the splint and place it horizontally on the top of the fasces in the japanned tin box. Then you bowed to Mr. Alcacho- fado, and he bowed in return ; and, taking a seat, if you liked, on a huge cigar chest, you proceeded to smoke the calumet of peace. Did I say that for five minutes you would be treated like a nobleman ? You might softly kick your heels, and meditate on the transitory nature of earthly things, in that snug little shop for nearly half an hour. Threepenny cigars lasted five-and- twenty minutes in those days. Austere personages of aristocratic mien patronised Mr. Alcachofado. They looked like County Members, Masters in Chancery, Charity Commissioners. They looked as though they belonged to clubs. They called the proprietor Alcatchanything, without the Mr. He was gravely courteous to them, but not more so than to humbler patrons. I remember that he always took in the second edition of The Globe. I have, in my time, bespoken it, I think, not without fear and trembling, from a baronet. They were affable creatures, those exalted ones, and talked sedate commonplaces about the House, and the crops, and UNDER THE GUNS OF THE MORKO. 19 the revenue, until I used to fancy I had land and beeves and a stake in the country. There was only one absolutely haughty customer. He wore a spencer and gaiters, and sometimes swore. He smoked a costlier cigar than the ordinary race of puffers ; and one had to rise from the big cigar chest while Mr . Alcachofado, a shining bunch of keys in hand, like a discreet sacristan, unlocked this treasure-coffer and produced Regalias of price. Yet even this haughty man in the spencer gave me a bow once when I brushed by him in the lobby of the House, where I had been waiting two hours and a quarter on a night when Sir Robert Peel was " up," in the vain hope of getting into the Strangers' Gallery with an Irish member's order. The haughty man thought he knew me. I felt so proud that I had my hair cut the very next day, and determined, like Mr. Pepys, to " go more like myself." A grave company we were at Mr. Alcachofado's. Now and then on Opera nights, dandies in evening dress would stroll in to smoke a cigarette. There was great scandal one evening it was Grisi's benefit when a tall young man, with a white cravat and a tawny moustache, ordered Mr. Alcachofado to " open him a bottle of soda, and look sharp." Those were his very words. There was a commotion among the customers. Soda-water ! Was this a tobacconist's and fancy stationer's in the Clapham Road ? As well might you have asked the beadle of St. George's, Hanover Square, for hot whisky-toddy between psalm and sermon. Mr. Alcacho- fado, under the circumstances, was calm. He gave the tall young desperado one look, to wither him, and in slow and measured accents, not devoid of a touch of sarcasm, replied, " I sell neither soda-water nor ginger-beer, nor walking-sticks, nor penny valen- tines, sir." The customers grimly chuckled at this overwhelming rebuke. There was nothing left for the tall young man but to withdraw ; but, as I was nearest the door, I am constrained to state that as he lounged out he remarked that the "old guy," meaning Mr. Alcachofado, " seemed doosid crusty." He is gone, this Grandison of the counter and till gone, seem- ingly, with most other professors of the grande maniere. The 20 UNDER THE SUN. modern tobacconist is loud-voiced and obtrusive ; proposes to send you home a box of the " Cabana Kings "of which you have scarcely tasted one ; and, ere you have been in his shop five minutes, gives you a tip for the Two Thousand Guineas. This was not Mr. Alcachofado's way of doing business. By-the-by, why wasn't he a Senor ? But he betrayed no symptoms of Iberian ex- traction ; and when, seeing an engraving of the Morro Castle itself on one of his cedar boxes, I strove to draw him out, and asked him if the picture resembled the place itself, he replied, ambiguously, that he had not visited foreign parts adding, after a moment's pause, that he did not approve of their ways. Whence his Spanish name, then ? Whence anybody's name ? I dealt with a green- grocer once who had the self-same appellation as the last prime minister of Constantine Palseologus. How Mr. Alcachofado had come to enter the tobacco business unless he was a retired custom-house officer was to me a mystery. There was a dim something about him that always led you to fancy that before he had dealt in cigars he had been in the Church. The Morro Castle had to me always a fascinating sound. There were three boys at the school at Turnham Green, where I com- pleted my education that is to say, where on the last day of my last " half" I began to discover that I didn't know anything three Spanish Creole boys, all hailing from Havana. They kept very close together and aloof from the rest of the school, and wrapped themselves up in Castilian pride as in cloaks ; indeed, one of them subsequently admitted to me that, on leaving Cuba, his papa had given him two special cautions: to beware of the " Estrangeros," and not to show them " ensenar " the Spanish tongue. We too were rather shy of them at first ; for there was a received tradition among us that all foreign boys, when moved to anger, stabbed. Very unjustly we christened the youngest Creole, Dagger ; his little brother, Bodkin ; and the third, who was a tall lean lad with glittering eyes, Carving-knife. I think a good deal of nonsense as could be proved by the police reports and the Old Bailey sessions papers has "been talked about the "un- English " nature of the crime of stabbing. It is not the custom to UNDER THE GUNS OF THE HORRO. 21 carry deadly weapons on the person in England, for the reason that the laws for the protection of life and property are very stringent, and, in the main, efficiently administered ; but I never heard of a drunken savage Englishman, who could get hold of a Jmife in a rmv, ivho wouldn't use it ; nor, as regards the softer sex, are the biting off the nose of an adversary, and the searing of her face with a red-hot poker, quite "un-English" or un-Irish practices. Our schoolmaster, who was an eccentric instructor, half Pestalozzi and half Philosopher Square, had an idea that all Spanish children were weaned upon tobacco, and absolutely permitted these three Creole lads to smoke ; on condition, however, that they should not light up their papelitos until night time, when the other boys went to bed. How we used to envy them, as, marching in Indian file to our dormitories, we could see those favoured young dons unrolling their squares of tissue-paper, pre- paratory to a descent into the playground and a quiet smoke ! The demoralisation among the juvenile community caused by this concession to Spanish customs was but slight. One or two of us tried surreptitious weeds on half-holiday afternoons ; but the Widow Jones in Chiswick Lane did not keep quite such choice brands in stock as did Mr. Alcachofado of the Morro Castle ; and Nemesis, in the shape of intolerable nausea, very soon overtook us. It is astounding, at fourteen years of age, how much agony of heart, brain, and stomach can be got out of one penny Pickwick. Pestalozzi Square, Ph. Dr., very wisely refrained from excessive severity on this head. He made it publicly known that a boy detected in smoking would not necessarily be caned, but that on three alternate days for a week following the discovery of his offence he would be supplied at 1 p.m. with a clean tobacco-pipe and half an ounce of prime shag in lieu of dinner. We had very few unlicensed smokers after this announcement. Ifc was my singular good fortune, ere I left the tutelage of the sage of Turnham Green, to be admitted to the acquaintance, and almost to the intimacy, of the Creoles. I had somewhat of a Spanish-sounding name and lineage, and they deemed me not 22 UNDER THE SUN. wholly to belong to the " Estrangeros ;" at all events, they talked to me, "showed" me some Castilian which was subsequently very useful to me, and told me as much as I hungered and thirsted to know about the Morro Castle. For, long before I began to deal with Mr. Alcachofado, I had pondered over a picture of this fortress, and mused as to what its real aspect might be. So, softly and gratefully as dried mint falls upon pea-soup, did the tales of these Spanish boys about the rich strange island of Cuba fall upon my willing ear. I saw it in its golden prime, all sugar and spice, and redolent of coffee-berries and the most fragrant of cigars. I basked in the rich full light of the tropical sun. I saw the caballero gravely pacing on his Andalusian jennet ; the lazy negro pausing as he cut the sugar-cane to suck the luscious tubes ; the senora in her mantilla ; the senorita with her fan. I revelled in a voluptuous dream of the torrid clime, where you ate fifteen oranges before breakfast, and a plateful of preserved cocoa-nut at breakfast ; where you never failed to take a siesta in your hammock during the noontide heats ; where full evening costume consisted of a suit of white linen, a Panama hat, and a guitar ; and where, with any little circumspection, you might win the hundred thousand dollar prize in the lottery. I longed to go to Havana, or " the Havannah," as it was termed in our time. Who has not so longed to visit strange countries when he was young and imaginative, and had no money ? Byron's words used to drive us crazy to see Sestos, and Abydos, and Athens. " Anastasius, or the Memoirs of a Greek " why does not some one republish that pearl of picaroon romance ? made us tremble with eagerness to see the Fanal of Constantinople and the Bagnio of Smyrna ; and, later in the day, Eothen sent us wild to catch a gazelle, and bathe in the Dead Sea, and read the Quarterly Revieiv in the Valley of Jehoshaphat. I cannot say the same of " Gil Bias." Unsurpassed as Le Sage's great work is as a feat of story-telling, it is to me singularly deficient in local colour. The Robbers' Cave might be in Italy, or in England in the days of Robin Hood. The Archbishop of Granada might be resident at Barchester Towers. I know Doctor Sangrado. He lives in UNDER THE GUNS OF THE HORRO. 23 Bloomsbury. Now " Don Quixote," on the contrary, is odorous of the real Spanish garlic from the first to the last page. But " Don Quixote " is not a boys' book, whatever you may say. It is a book for men. Well, the great whirling teetotum of life spun round, and one day it fell, spent, athwart a spot on the map marked "United States of America." I packed up my bundle and crossed the Atlantic, but with no more idea of visiting Havana than I have, at this present writing, of going to Afghanistan. I am not ashamed to confess that I had but a very dim notion indeed respecting the topographical relation in which New York stood towards the Island of Cuba. I think there must have been some- thing wrong in the manner they taught boys geography in our time : it was too sectional ; you were made to swallow Mercator's Projection in isolated scraps of puzzles ; and if your eye wandered towards the Gulf of Mexico when it should have been intent on the Bay of Fundy, they boxed your ears. We used to learn all about the West Indies, and Wilberforce, and Clarkson, and Granville Sharpe but no stress was laid on the fact that Cuba, and St. Domingo, and St. Thomas were likewise West India Islands ; and they were never mentioned in connection with North America. I think Admiral Christopher Columbus, or the Spanish Concilio de las Indias, must take some of the blame in this matter. What on earth made them call those American, or rather Columbian, islands Indian ones ? I have never surmounted the early perplexity which beset me on the subject, and to this day it is to me incomprehen- sible why the passage from Halifax to Bermuda should be such a short and easy one ; you ought to go round the Cape, surely, to the Indies. Eound again went the teetotum, and the tip of its tiny staff pointed to the Southern Atlantic. " Havana " was inscribed on the uppermost facet. Again I packed my bundles, and taking passage in a United States mail steamer, sped past Charleston, the which luckless city General Gillmore was then actively engaged in warming with Greek fire, and which Northern preachers were cheerfully and charitably comparing every Sunday 24 UNDER THE SUN. to Sodom and Gomorrah, On the third day we were close on the Gulf Stream, and the usual feat of parlour, or rather gangway magic, was performed by a boatswain's mate, who lowered a bucket of water over the side and bade us plunge our hands into it. It was cold as ice. Twenty minutes afterwards he lowered the bucket again, drew up more water, and bade us dip. "We did, and the water was tepid, almost warm. There was an increase of thirty degrees in temperature, and we were in that stream which an irate American politician once threatened to dam up and divert from the shores of England, thus leaving us " out in the cold," and freezing perfidious Albion to the glacial mean of Spitzbergen. Three times I do not understand the mysteries of navigation we crossed the Gulf Stream. We skirted the coast of Florida so closely that we could see the pines that made a grim horizon to that swampy shore so closely, that you might almost fancy you could see Secession in arms shaking its fists at the Stars and Stripes we carried. All this country was, at the time to which I refer, a land tabooed and accursed in Northern eyes. It was the coast of a rebellious state. Below St. Augustine's, half-way between that and Key West, we saw the coral reefs and the Everglades. Coial reefs, I may observe, do not make so pretty a show on the coast of Florida as the material does, in the form of bracelets and earrings, in Mr. Phillips's windows in Cockspur Street. In fact, a prudent shipmaster keeps as far away from the coral reefs as he possibly can. We should also have sighted Cape Florida Light and Carysfort Light ; but the Confederates having carefully put the lights out, to favour blockade running and perplex their enemies as far as they could, it was rather ticklish navigation after sunset. ^ How- ever, it is but a few days' voyage from New York to Cuba, and we had a tight ship and great confidence in our captain. Occa- sionally, when the look-out man signalled a sail, there was a slight exhibition of nervousness among the passengers. The loyal immediately assumed the stranger to be the Alabama, and indulged in dire forebodings that within two hours the steamer's UNDER THE GUNS OF THE MORRO. 25 chronometers would be ticking in the cabin of Captain Raphael Semmes, C.S.A., the ship burnt or bonded, and themselves carried off to some port in the White Sea or the Indian Archi- pelago, thence to find their way to their destination as best they could. The disloyal, of whom I am afraid we had a considerable proportion among our passengers, generally jumped at the con- clusion that the speck on the horizon, momentarily growing larger, was a Yankee gunboat, specially detached from the blockading squadron to overhaul us. What sudden declarations there were of " whole hog " Union sentiments ! what divings into state-rooms, there presumably to make such little matters as revolvers, Confederate commissions, and rebel mail-bags, snug ! The captain was a discreet man, Union to the backbone, but not inveterate against the opposite party. We had one pas- senger on board who, for all the privacy in which he kept, and the very large cloak in which he wrapped himself, was unmis- takably, inside and out, Southern Grey back and " Secesh." To this gentleman in political difficulties I heard our worthy cap- tain remark one morning, " My Christian friend, I'll tell you what it is : as soon as we get inside the Morro I should advise you to clear out of one of the starboard ports, and never stop running till we've got steam up again. The smell of Uncle Sam's mail-bags ain't good for you. It ain't, indeed." The which, I take it, was very sensible and at the same time very kind-hearted counsel. All this time, while we were eating and drinking, and lounging and smoking, and dawdling over books and newspapers, and card-playing, and listening to the grand pianoforte in the saloon, which was exemplarily punished at least a dozen times a day by Mrs. Colonel Spankie and Miss Alexandra McStinger, lady passengers and pretending that the time hung heavily on our hands, when, to tell the truth, sluggards as we were, we revelled in our laziness there was going on all around us, and to a cer- tain extent in our very selves, a curiously phenomenal process called Transformation. You have read poor Hawthorne's deli- cious book ; you have read " Faust " (with an English " crib ") ; 26 UNDER THE SUN. you have seen Lucas Cranach's picture of the Fontaine de Jouvence in the Berlin gallery ? Well, we and our surround- ings had become Transformed. I had left New York in the middle of January, and in the rigidest throes of a Northern winter. The snow lay thick in the streets. They were skating on the lake in the Central Park. There were midnight sleighing parties on the Bloomingdale Road. The steamers on the North River had frozen fringes on the water-lines of their hulls, like the callous raggedness thrown out from the ends of a fractured bone ; and you could see the very shapes of the ferry-boats' keels cut out in the quickly part- ing ice that gathered about the landing-place. I had left Pier No. Seventy-seven, bottom of I forget which street, swathed in furs and woollens, and shivering through all my wrappers. I heaped mountains of extraneous coverlets in my berth that night. It was not quite so cold next day. On the third it was positively mild. On the fourth morning, taking my ante-breakfast walk on deck, I remarked with astonishment that I was clad in a full suit of the very thinnest nankeen, and that I wore a very broad- brimmed straw hat. Nankeen, white linen, or thin blue flannel, was the only wear among my fellow-passengers, and the ladies had become positive Zephyrs. The smallest children on board testified very conclusively indeed as to the weather having become warmer, by removing their apparel altogether, unless restrained by parents or nurses ; and then I remembered that I had kicked off all the bed-clothes during the night, and had had troubled dreams bearing on iced cider-cup. We had all become Transformed. Where yesterday was a fire-shovel, to-day was a fan. We looked no more on a gray angry wintry ocean, but on a summer sea. It seemed ten years ago since there had been any winter, and yet that was only the day before yesterday. For four-and-twenty hours did we sigh and swelter and com- plain of the intolerable heat, and yet think it the most delightful thing in the world. We dined at four o'clock, as usual ; but the purser, if he contracted for our meals, must have made rather a good thing of our repast that day. The first course was scarcely UNDER THE GUNS OF THE MORRO. 27 over before seven-eighths of the diners rushed on deck to see the highlands of Cuha. Yonder, rather blue and indistinct as yet, was the Pan of Matanzas. That day we dined no more ; but, there being a " bar " on deck, forward, with a New England bar-keeper of many virtues and accomplishments in his profession, sundry cheerful spirits adjourned to his little caboose, and, with steadfast and smiling conviviality of countenance, did "liquor up " on Bourbon and old Rye, till the Pan of Matanzas, to which we had come so close that it was clearly visible to the naked eye, must have been to the convivialists more indistinct than ever. "We were yet many miles from Havana ; but by the help of strong opera-glasses and lively conversation and a glorious tropical sunset, they were the shortest miles I ever knew, by land or sea. Coasting along the northern shore of Cuba from Matanzas westward, by high hills and white houses which, with- out any intervening beach or sand, came right down to the water's edge, like the castle-crowned vine-hills of the Rhine, we sighted, just before sundown, the Morro Castle itself : a great mass of dun-coloured rock, and tower, and battlement, and steep, of which the various parts seem to have grown into one another, like the rocky convent of the Sagrado San Miguel, so that you could scarcely tell which was castle and which crag. From its summit floats the flag of the Most Catholic Queen, blood-red and gold ; and in front, and in the sea, like a tall grenadier on guard, stands the Morro Lighthouse. No Confeds have put that out. We pass between the Morro and a promontory called the Punta, and can see a harbour, forested with masts, and a city all glanc- ing and twinkling with light. We revel in thoughts of landing ; of abandoning our keys to a commissionnaire, and leaving the examination of our luggage until the morrow morning ; of rush- ing to an hotel ; of bathing and supping and going to the Tacon Theatre, or eating ices at La Dominica, after the band had done playing on the Plaza de Armas. Bless you, we know all about Havana by this time. I seem to have been familiar with the place for years. Did not Dagger and Bodkin and eke Carving- 28 UNDER THE SUN. knife tell me all about it ? But the Captain of the Port of San Cristobal de la Habana is a great man a very great man, under correction of the Captain-General Dulce be it spoken and his laws are stringent. The sunset gun has been fired ; the last notes of the warning trumpets have died away from the ramparts. We are just permitted to snuggle into the outer harbour ; but there is no landing for us until six a.m., and under the guns of the Morro we are bound to remain all night. A very few years ago even this privilege would not have been granted us, and we should have been forced to turn our heads seaward, and anchor in the roads. It was tantalising, certainly ; but still it was exceedingly plea- sant, and no one felt inclined to grumble. It was something, at least, to know that the huge engines were at rest, and that we should hear their churning and grinding, their panting and trembling, no more, until, like Poor Jack in Dibdin's song, we " went to sea again." So all the call was for coffee and cigars ; and we idled about the deck and speculated on what might be going on in the innumerable tenements in which the lights, now dim, now bright, were shining. Then out came the moon, like a great phantom of greenish white, and spread her arms right over the city of Havana. We could make out the hoary towers of the cathedral, and the church where is the tomb of Christopher Columbus ; we could see the long slanting shadows cast by the beetling guns of the Morro on the rubbled walls. Boats came and went on the glassy waters of the harbour. There were lights in the port-holes of the ships too. What was going on there, I wonder ? Skipper drinking cold rum-and-water. First officer playing a quiet rubber with the surgeon, the supercargo, and dummy. Purser making up his accounts ; foremast men drinking " Sweethearts and Wives," in the round-house. Every- body glad that the voyage is over, save perhaps that poor Northern lady in the captain's state-room, propped up with pillows, affectionately tended by that little band of Sisters of Charity who are going to New Orleans, and who is dying of con- sumption. Even she, perchance, is grateful that the restless UNDER THE GUNS OF THE MORRO. 29 engines no longer moan and labour, and that to-morrow she may land and die in peace. As "good nights" and "buenas noches" cross each other in the harbour, you begin to wish you could find a friend to take a second in " All's well." For the waning moon now deserts you, and only the twinkling lights shine out from the black masses of buildings. The lights, too, are growing fewer, and ever since you came into port which was at about eight o'clock you have heard from time to time gusts of wild martial music from the shore. These gusts, the captain tells you, are the strains of the military bands playing in the Plaza de Armas. Hark ! a most tremendous crash ! then what a quaint yet plaintive flow of melody. Is that a Seguidilla, or a Cubana, or one of the hun- dred variations of the Jota Aragonese ? Now comes another crash ; the cymbals have it clearly ; the bassoons have given out ; 'tis the big drum that is making all the running ; the cymbals are nowhere ; bah, it is a dead-heat, and the grosse caisse and the plated dishes come in together. Now the sounds have changed their direction. The soldiers are marching home to their bar- racks. Now the wild sounds grow fainter ; now they die away altogether, and Havana is left to silence and to me. I walked the deck until long after the ship was wrapped in darkness all save the illumined binnacles and my fellow deck- walkers' cigar-tips. It was not at all the kind of night for going to bed. It was, the rather, a night on which to stroll and stroll, and indulge in the deleterious habit of smoking, and wonder how many broadsides from the guns of the Morro it would take to blow you out of the water, and try to remember one of the move- ments of the Jota Aragonese, and at last, softly stealing into the saloon and quite disdaining state-room berth, to fling yourself on a couch and dream till morning of Mr. Alcachofado and the three young Creoles of Turnham Green. 30 II. THE HUMOURS OF HAVANA. HE morning, you may be sure, did not find me a sluggard on my couch in the saloon. Never rose a lark, or a landscape-painter on his first sketching- tour in Wales, with more alacrity than did I from the steam-packet's scrubby velvet sofa. Early bird as I was, there had been even lighter sleepers ; and the ship, above and below, was full of joyous life. During the few hours of darkness, too, that process of Transformation I lately spoke of had been making rapid progress. I had fallen asleep, it is true, in Span- ish waters but in Anglo-Saxon company, but I woke up on board a caravel belonging to the Spanish Armada. The grave, sonorous, and dignified Castilian noblest and most Romanesque of tongues resounded on every side ; and although the day wanted several hours of breakfast-time, the blue filmy fumes of the cigaritos were floating about the cabin like aromatic gossamer. The consumption of chocolate was immense. Only yesterday we had been content with an early morning cup of coffee ; but chocolate is the sole recognised Spanish desayuno, or break- fast; nor, with a glass of cold water and a cigarito afterwards, does it make you so very bilious. Or is it that your liver becomes, on your entrance into these torrid climes, so utterly disorganised that nothing can make you more bilious, save the yellow fever which kills you ? " If in doubt, take a drink," says the American proverb. You had better give chocolate the benefit of the doubt, and drink that; for although made so thick that a spoon will well-nigh stand upright in the cup, it is a most delicious and refreshing beverage. I noticed, too, that several of THE HUMOURS OF HAVANA. 31 our Transatlantic fellow-passengers, in compliment to the climate and the Spanish flag, had substituted chocolate for their habitual "morning glory," or cocktail ; in fact, one gentleman, used to these latitudes, informed me that he had "swore off" alcohol altogether, until when returning from New Orleans, whither he was bound, he should be north of Cape Florida again ; " and then," he concluded, " I guess I will change my breath, and nominate my p'ison " a prudent resolve, and one that English- men as well as Americans would do well to imitate in the tropics. Yellow Jack is a bitter foe, and swamp fever a fearful scourge ; but I will back Old Rye and brandy-pawnee to sweep off more Anglo-Saxons in a week than the " vomito " or the fever will do in a month. Tables and chairs covered with oranges come from none could tell precisely where ; but it seems to rain oranges in Havana and the presence of sundry officials in suits of white linen or faint blue stripe, with huge Panama hats, helped to complete the idea of Transformation. Are you aware of the beauties of a Panama hat ? It is of fine straw straw so fine and so exquisitely plaited that it appears to be of one united glossy nature. It is as soft as silk, and as strong as chain-mail, and as elastic as caoutchouc. If you are caught in a shower of rain, and your Panama gets wet through, you have only to wring it out as though it were a towel, and hang it on your walking-stick to dry, and in a quarter of an hour it will have regained its pristine shape. The Spaniards declare that a Panama is shot-proof and an infallible protection against sunstroke ; but of these assertions I have my doubts. The life of a Panama hat may be measured by that of a raven. It is supposed never to wear out. At all events, there is a cunning hatter in New York, who, for ten dollars, will undertake to return to you, as good as new, a Panama which is twenty years old, and has been in the Avars, and shipwrecked, and thrown into a lime-kiln, a tan-pit, and a bucket of tar. This peerless hat is not to be purchased at a mean price. It is the dearest head-gear manufactured. Red-skinned maidens have intoned whole cantos of Indian epics while they 32 UNDER THE SUN. plaited and sewed together those minute circles of straw. A good Panama will stand you in from fifty to seventy-five pesos de oro '-from ten to fifteen pounds sterling. And now, on this first of tropical mornings, did the steamer's state-rooms give up their semi-dead. Whole families of senoras and senoritas made their appearance in shiny black and pink silks, and low mantillas, and pink stockings, and white satin shoes, and colossal fans, ready for any amount of flirtation, serenade-hearing, and bull-fight witnessing. Where had those senoras and senoritas been for the last five days ? On their backs, I trow, in their berths, screeching piteously when the steamer pitched ; moaning dismally when she rolled ; imbibing chlorodyne, cognac, tea, and other nostrums against sea-sickness, and calling upon many saints. Our Lady de los Remedies might be the best to invoke under such circumstances, perchance. There is an immensely stout old lady in violet-coloured satin, with a back-comb as high as the horn of Queen Philippa in old illuminations, a burnt-sienna countenance, a cavalry recruit's moustache, a bright green umbrella, and an oaken casket clasped with brass under one arm. This is the old lady, I apprehend, to whom the stewardess used to take in such tremendous rations of stewed beefsteak, fried bananas, and bottled ale every day at dinner-time. She suffered awfully. Her cries for " Cerveza Inglesa" were incessant. She was troubled in her mind one afternoon when we had a chopping sea on, and sent for one of the Sisters of Charity ; but I am sorry to say that nurse and patient did not agree, and that the good sister was speedily dis- missed with unhandsome epithets. Sister Egyptiaca being of Irish extraction, fresh from an orphanage in New York whence she was going, good little creature, in perfect peace and content- ment, to risk her life in the fever-haunted wards of a New Orleans hospital and speaking nothing but English, and the old lady only talking Spanish, may have had something to do with their misunderstanding. However, the old lady is all right now. She is very voluble ; she has given the steward a golden ducat ; and he has kindled a match for her, and she has begun to smoke THE HUMOURS OF HAVANA. 33 a cigarette. It is reported that the oaken casket with the brass clasps is full of diamonds. The stewardess says she always kept it "under her pillow during the voyage. She looks a rich old lady ; comfortably quilted with ounces, moidores, and pieces of eight. I connect her in my mind with a huge sugar estate and teeming gangs of negroes. I would rather be her overseer than her slave, I think. It is worthy of remark, as another element in the Transforma- tion we have undergone, that our talk is now all of a metallic coinage. Five days ago nobody had anything but greenbacks. The stewards won't look at greenbacks now. Five days ago, the passenger who had hoarded a silver dollar was quite a lion ; he who had an English sovereign hanging to his watch-chain was made much of ; and one thin dry New Englander, who was abso- lutely the owner of an American gold double eagle the hand- somest coin in the world kept it in a wash-leather case, like a watch, would only exhibit it on pressing solicitation, and I am led to infer made rather a good thing of it by taking the precious piece forward and allowing the " hands " to smell it at five cents a sniff. But what cared we for paper money now ? Piles of gold suddenly made their appearance. Little bills for stimulants were paid in five-dollar pieces bearing the effigy of Isabel Segunda. For the first time in my life I saw those numismatic parallels to Brobdingnag and Lilliput to dignity and impudence the gold dollar, which is about the size of an English silver penny, and the gold doubloon or ounce, which, to the dazed and delighted eye of the possessor, looks as large as one of King Croesus' chariot wheels, but is in reality about the diameter of a crown-piece and is worth three pounds ten shillings sterling. They say Havana is the dearest city in the world ; and I can- not help thinking that the costliness of living there is mostly due to the fact of the ounce being held to many intents and purposes the financial unit. It is the Creole sovereign. If you stay at a friend's country-house and his body-servant has valeted you, you give the man an ounce ; if you bet on a cock-fight, you bet an ounce ; if a bull-fighter has won your approbation, you send him o 34 UNDER THE SUN. an ounce ; if the prima donna at the Tacon takes a benefit, you purchase a stall and pay an ounce or as many ounces as your admiration for the prima donna prompts you to disburse. A whole lottery-ticket an "entiero," as it is called costs an ounce. If you hire a volante and two horses for the day, the driver very coolly demands an ounce for his fare : in short, I should imagine that the only wild animal in Cuba must be the Ounce. " I call that man a gentleman," I once heard a German settler in Havana remark, "who can afford to lose at 'rnonte' or 'tressilio,' every day of his life, four or five ounces." Four or five ounces ! Ingots and goldbeaters' hammers ! to what a Tom Tiddler's ground had I come ! I went on deck, where everything was noise, bustle, and Trans- formation, and where they seemed already to be taking in oranges, bananas, and cocoa-nuts as a return cargo. The skipper only remained untransformed. He wore the same fluffy white hat, the same long-skirted bottle-green coat with the same blue-black velvet collar, and the same shepherd's-plaid trousers in which he had stood imposingly on the paddle-bridge of his ship, foot of pier Number Something, New York city, five days since. He had a heart of oak, this skipper of ours, and I believe was an excellent seaman and navigator ; but I could never divest myself of the impression that he had been concerned in dry goods, or even a wooden nutmeg factory, before he had taken to going down to the sea in ships. He had made, I daresay, fifty trips to Cuba, but he couldn't speak Spanish yet. He pressed the doctor ' into his service to act as interpreter in a slight dispute with the health officer. "Ain't posted up in his lingo," he unaffectedly remarked. I looked over the side and drank in a spectacle the most gloriously picturesque I had ever beheld. I have travelled a good deal ; but there are many spots, even on the map of Europe, which to me are still terra incognita. I have never been to India. I have never been in Australia. Looking out upon the crowded port of Havana, I was reminded irresistibly of the market-scene in " Masaniello " the Morro Castle doing duty for Vesuvius. THE HUMOURS OF HAVANA. 35 We were close upon a quay swarming with sunburnt varlets in red nightcaps, in striped nightcaps, in broad flapping straw hats, and some with silken kerchiefs of gay colours twisted round their heads. Nearly all wore gaudy sashes round their loins. They were bare-armed and bare-legged ; their shirts were open at the breast ; and if they had jackets, those garments hung loose upon their shoulders, or with the sleeves tied in a knot before them. Dark elf locks, black glittering eyes, earrings, and little dangling crosses round the neck ; baskets of fish and baskets of fruit, crates of crockery, coops of poultry ; cries of gratulation, welcome, derision, defiance, quarrels never ending in blows, general hubbub and confusion ; and over all the hot, hot Sun and the cloudless vault of blue. But the market-scene in "Masaniello" soon faded away to nothingness. Havana began to assert its own individuality. I saw a town whose houses were painted in all the colours of the rainbow. I saw long lines of gray and crumbling bastions, and curtains and ravelins built in old times by jealous Spanish viceroys, and which I learned, not without pleasure, General Dulce, the then Captain-General, was beginning to demolish, to give the pent-up city of Havana elbow-room. From all these bastions and ravelins the morning drums and trumpets of the garrison were braying and rub-a-dubbing at the most alarming rate. The port seemed as full of shipping as the Pool of London ; and what scant show of blue water there was to spare was packed close as Cowes harbour at a regatta with the shore-boats. Pretty little skiffs they are, with a lateen sail, often decorated with a full-length portrait of San Cristobal, the patron saint of Havana, and with a gaily striped awning aft. From where we lay was a good twenty minutes' row or sail to the custom-house. Were the Americans to gain possession of Cuba a consummation which, for many reasons, is most devoutly to be wished, for they would be bound to commence their occupa- tion by the abolition of slavery they would have twenty piers built in the inner port in less than six months, and the passenger steamers would come quietly up to the pier-foot and discharge 36 UNDER THE SUN. their passengers on the wharves without any boats at all ; but this is not the Spanish way of doing business. " Manana," they would answer, were this necessary reform pressed on their atten- tion. The authorities are of opinion that the harbour boatmen have a right to live as well as other folks ; so you are not allowed to proceed from your ship to the shore without the intermediary of a boatman, to whom you pay a dollar and as much more as he can argue you out of. He never threatens, never is rude : his endeavours to obtain an additional four-and-twopence cannot even be called begging. He puts the case to you as one between man and man ; he appeals to your sense of justice, your self- respect, your honour. You are a caballero ; he is a caballero. This here he rests on his oars a moment, or objurgates Pepe, his assistant, who is putting on too much sail will at once lead you to accede to his demand. The name of the boat which con- veyed me to the shore on this said morning was tl La Rectitud." The boatman was a most unconscionable rogue ; but there was something in the calm assumption of dignity in the name on the stern which drew the dollars from us as though we had been two- years children. I am reminded that when I use the first person singular I might with greater propriety use the plural ? for in this trip to Havana I made one in a party of three. I had two genial travelling companions, both fellow-countrymen, in whose mirthful fellowship I enjoyed to the full all the humours of Havana, and with one of whom I was destined to travel to a stranger and more distant land, of which in process of time I purpose to discourse. But as these travelling companions happen to be alive and merry as they will probably read these papers, and as one in the Old and the other in the New World are as well known as Charing Cross I feel that it would be impertinent to drag them into a rambling and fantastic narration, full of perverse conceits and most egregious fancies ; and I hesitate, too, to veil them under thin pseudonyms or provoking dashes.* * I may partially lift the veil as regards them now. One of my travel- ling companions (alas), Don Eustaquio Barren, whom to know was to love, THE HUMOURS OF HAVANA. 37 Let ine, then, the old Babbler, be solely responsible for all I put my egotism to ; and as for any other travellers, not my immediate companions, whom I may touch upon, do you set them down as mere brain-worms, abstractions, and creatures of the imagination. Do you know that I was once most savagely handled by the Affectionate Review for having made an " unmanly attack " on the character of a lady, in depicting the airiest shadow in the world of a harmless spinster, by name Miss Wapps, with whom, years ago, I journeyed due north as far as Cronstadt ? To please critics of the affectionate school, all travellers should be blind and deaf and dumb, and should write their words in invisible ink and publish them in coal- cellars. I, then, Babbler, having, after many shouts and with much loss of inward animal moisture, selected a boat from among upwards of fifty applicants, saw my luggage thereinto, and free pratique having been granted by the officer of health, was rowed to shore. I should not have minded that health officer's boat as a conveyance but for the thought that people whose business is mainly with the quarantine and the lazaretto usually carry about with them the seeds of the cholera or the yellow fever, and die thereof. It was a most luxurious shallop, with an awning striped crimson and white, a rich carpet, and cushioned benches. The crimson and gold banner of Spain, with the crown on, floated at the stern ; and under the awning the health officer lolled at his ease, clad in bright nankeen, a red cockade in his Panama, and smoking a very big Puro. My passport, a document with a very big red seal, granted me by Mr. Archibald, her Majesty's Consul at New York, had been left with the purser on board the steamer, and would duly be transferred to the Havana police authorities. and whose princely hospitality I enjoyed during my stay in Mexico, is dead. Of mingled British and Spanish lineage he used laughingly to say that he scarcely knew whether it was in English or in Spanish that he thought his friends declared that he had Two Hearts, and that both were of gold. He was continually travelling about, doing kind and generous and noble things ; and gentle and simple, rich and poor, alike bewailed his untimely death. 38 UNDER THE SUN. The journey to the shore is very picturesque, though somewhat tedious. One man rows ; another attends to the sail ; both are smoking and occasionally squabble ; and you, the passenger, are expected to steer. If you happen to be totally unacquainted with that art and mystery, the possibility of your running foul of other craft in the port is not a very remote one ; and sometimes, while the boatmen are quarrelling or singing a little duet about " Juani-i-i-ta, la chi-i-i-quita ! " the boat lets you know that she has something to say for herself, by heeling over and capsizing. But I believe no passenger in a shore-boat was ever known to be drowned before he had paid his fare ; and if you steer badly, the helmsman in the next boat may be steering worse ; and the two negatives make an affirmative, saying "yes" to the question whether you are to get safe to the custom-house. I suppose there are persons who can steer by intuition. I know there are people who can drive mail phaetons, mix salad, and compose charades, without ever having been taught. It is a gift. One is born to it, as to roasting meat and playing the overture to " Semiramide" on the chin. The custom-house was an apartment as big as a barn all the rooms in Havana are huge. The floor was intolerably dirty ; but the roof was a magnificent open timber one : the timber being in solid beams of delightfully fragrant cedar. So you had the Augean Stables underneath and Solomon's Palace in all its glory above not an uncommon contrast in Cuba. The custom-house officers gave us very little trouble. I addressed the first gentleman with a cockade I met as " Senor " I should perhaps have called him "Caballero" begged a cigar light from him, and slipped a dollar into his hand. He opened one of my trunks, let a little tobacco-smoke into the orifice to fumigate it, and then dismissed me with a very low bow. Then I was handed to a little grated wicket, where another official who was smoking so desperately that he sat, as it were, in the midst of a fleecy cloud, like one of Sir James Thornhill's allegories in the Painted Hall at Greenwich asked me my name and country, and delivered to me a printed license to reside in THE HUMOURS OF HAVANA. 39 Cuba for the space of three calendar months ; which was very kind on his part, seeing that I only intended to remain in the island until the West India mail-packet came in from St. Thomas. This license cost a good deal of money four or five dollars, I think ; and I noticed that, when the official had filled up the form, he was a very long time in sanding it from a small pepper- caster, and looked very hard at me. I know from long expe- rience what being intently regarded by an official of the Latin race means, and so " executed " myself without delay. We parted the best of friends, and I was a dollar the poorer. I was now free to proceed to an hotel ; but this was much more easily said than done. In the first place, there were no public conveyances about save the volantes, which are vehicles far too ethereal to carry heavy luggage ; in the next, to find any tolerably comfortable hotel in Havana is a labour which, had it been imposed on Hercules, might have caused that strong man to be a little less conceited about his triumph over the Eryman- thian boar and the eleven other difficulties. The wealthy and splendid city of Havana is worse off for hotels than any other in the civilised world. The Antilles, perhaps, cannot be held as belonging entirely to civilisation; but, as the "Queen" of the Antilles, I think Havana might maintain at least one decent inn. There is an hotel in the Plaza Isabel Fegunda, close to the Tacon Theatre, kept by M. Legrand, a Frenchman ; but I had heard dismal reports as to its cleanliness, and it was situated, besides, beyond the walls, whereas I wanted to be near the Plaza de Armas and the sea. There is a very excellent boarding-house, clean, comfortable, and well appointed, kept by Mrs. Alme, an American lady ; but her accommodation is limited, and her establishment is nearly always as " complete " as a Parisian omni- bus on a wet day. I have been told, also, that there is a slight drawback to the comfort you enjoy at Mrs. Alme's in the fact of the house being the chosen resort of consumptive invalids from the United States, who have fled from the asperity of the northern winter to the warmer sky of Cuba. But they are often in the penultimate stage of the disease when they land ; they 40 . UNDER THE SUN. don't get better ; and it is apt to spoil your dinner so I was told when, inquiring for your next neighbour of the day before who talked so charmingly of the last opera and so hopefully of the coming bull-fight, you are informed that he has been dead for some hours, and will be buried this sundown in the Potters' Field. You grow accustomed to this at last, for it may be said, without exaggeration, life in these regions of " vomito " and fever resembles life on board a man-o'-war in war time. You are very merry with Jack and Tom overnight ; and on the morrow Jack is " knocked over " and Tom " loses the number of his mess," and you say " Poor Jack ! " " Poor Tom ! " Their clothes are sold by auction before the mast, and you forget all about the sad occurrence. With the exception of Legrand's and Mrs. Alme's, the inns of Havana are all very like what I should imagine the fondas and posadas of Old Spain, away from Madrid, to be. I had heard such dreadful stories about them, that, blinking the pulmonary drawback, I determined to try Mrs. Alme's. By this time, with the assistance of several willing and grinning negroes, who danced with delight at the gift of a very small silver coin I never saw any copper money in Havana my luggage had been piled on a machine closely resembling one of those miniature drays in England on which a very small barrel of beer is drawn by a very big horse, conducted by a very big man. The beast of draught was in this case a bullock, with a tremendous yoke, not over his shoulders but right across his forehead. The poor animal certainly earned his bread by the sweat of his brow ; and to judge from his lean flanks and protruding bones, I should infer that the jerked beef he might furnish, subsequent to his demise, would be dear at threepence a pound. The conductor, who sat the animal side-saddle fashion, was a wrinkled old negro whose wool had turned white, and whose wicked old head he was such a nasty-looking old man was surmounted by a ragged straw hat. He was singing, of course, occasionally varying that recreation by skinning and gobbling the pulp of some oranges, of which he had a pocketful, and on the THE HUMOURS OF HAVANA. 41 whole took things very easily. I presume he was a slave. I was bound to walk behind this sable drayman ; for although I might have taken a volante, was it not my duty to follow my luggage ? And but for an uncomfortable fancy that if I stepped on the dray and sat aside my trunk I should look like a traitor being drawn to execution at Tyburn on a sledge, I would have patron- ised that mode of locomotion. There was no obtaining admission at Mrs. Alme's. Intending visitors had written for their rooms a month or six weeks in advance ; and the mansion was as full of phthisis as a Ventnor lodging-house. Next I tried the " Fonda de America," a few streets off. There was some room in that hotel, which was under the arcades of a crumpling old portal, not unlike the Covent Garden piazzas, with the aroma of all the Spanish onions, leeks, and shallots of the adjoining market hanging about the stair- case : a despotism of garlic tempered by tobacco-smoke. The landlady was a German fair, fat, and twenty-five, and was bask- ing in a rocking-chair, enjoying the smoke and the smell of onions with apparently intense gusto. The perfume was almost like Fatherland. She had one huge apartment to let. It was not vacated yet ; but the occupant, a French commercial traveller, who had seemingly just risen, and who was carefully oiling and curling himself before a glass, most courteously permitted me to inspect the room. He was quite affable, indeed, and was good enough to inform me that a packet I saw lying on a side-table contained some of the genuine Amaranthine soap of her Majesty Queen Victoria, patented and gold medalled at the Universal Exhibition of 1855, and that he was just then clearing through the custom-house eighteen cases of Bully's Toilet Yinegar. Ere I quitted his quarters he likewise enounced the opinion that the island of Cuba was un fichu pays, and that the landlady of the Fonda de America was a meg ere. Heaven bless the Frenchman, wherever in the world's weary journey you find him ! He is always easy, sprightly, confidential, and conversational. Bless him for his grimaces, his airy philo- sophy, his harmless, naive vanity. He is, with the exception of 42 UNDER THE SUN. the Englishman, the best travelling comrade in the world ; only, for an Englishman to speak to a stranger to whom he has not been introduced, the stranger must be in the cramp-stage of the cholera morbus, or on the point of having his brains blown out by robbers. Then, but then only, the Briton becomes own brother to the man he doesn't know. But the Frenchman waits for no such crisis. There was room at the "America," but not for all of me. You will bear in mind that I was in triplicate ; and so raw was I then to Hispano- American usages, that I imagined that a traveller with money in his pocket had a right to a bedroom to himself. I had yet to learn that our English word comrade is derived from three Spanish words "camar a dos," double-bedded lodgings. I took a bath at the "America," for the good of the house and my own (the oftener you bathe before eating, and the more seldom after- wards, in the tropics, the better it will be for you) ; and then the dray and I and the negro, who was a spiteful old man and had lost his temper fearfully by this time, resumed our peregrinations. We tried, I think, at " Los Dos Amigos," " La Reyna de Ingla- terra," " La Corona de Espana," and other hostelries ; but the answer in all of them was "no room," or "not room enough." I was, for the nonce, El Senor " Ferguson," and not fated to lodge anywhere ; and the negro sitting side-saddle on the bullock began to spit and swear in Spanish like an infuriated old cat. But to me the time was not all lost. Far from it. I hnd begun to study the humours of Havana. The time had worn away, it was ten o'clock, and the city had burst into the full blaze of tropical life . The Anglo-Americans rail at Havana because the streets are so narrow and so tortuous ; but ah ! from ten to four p.m. how grateful you are for narrow devious lanes, in lieu of broad staring thoroughfares ! You have the inestimable blessing of Shade. Now and then you must take, perforce, a hot bath and frizzle for a moment in the sunshine, as you cross a plaza ; or, turning a corner, the sun, suddenly espying yon, cleverly shoots a ray at your head which pierces your brain well- nigh as an arrow would, but you are soon in the shade again. THE HUMOURS OF HAVANA. 43 The streets of Havana are perhaps as clean as those of most southern European towns. The principal sanitary inspectors are named Garlic and Tobacco-smoke. They are at least determined to keep the other stenches down. The roadway is littered and untidy, but who should complain of litter composed mainly of orange-peel, the rinds of pine-apples, cocoa-nut shells, fragments of melons, and exhausted Indian corn-cobs ? I must go to Covent Garden again for a comparison. Don't you know that delightful litter between the grand avenue and the old Hummums I mean that spot where the orange-boxes are bursting, and the almonds are tumbling out of their sacks, and the Irish market- women sit in the June afternoon shelling peas. The scene is untidy, but grand. I always think of the Garden of Eden run to seed, in consequence of the gardener, Adam, having been turned away for stealing apples. There is but a ridiculous apology for a foot-pavement in these streets. The average width of the trottoir certainly does not exceed twelve inches. It is a kerbstone with nothing to curb. I have fancied this exiguity of path to be a deliberate device on the part of the municipality to keep up the practice of politeness in Havana, for of course, if you meet any one on the Irottoir pro- ceeding in a contrary direction to your own, you naturally step into the kennel to allow him to pass. You don't give him the wall, you give him the totality of the pavement. This hypothesis, I fear, however, is as fantastical as the one suggested, that the narrowness of the streets in Havana is also due to premeditation, and is designed to allow opposite neighbours to light their cigars from each other's weeds. Small as is the space between the houses, they preserve, never- theless, a tolerably perpendicular elevation ; whereas in the town of Algiers, which in the narrowness of its thoroughfares closely resembles Havana, the houses are built on the lean-to principle. Each story seems on the brink of toppling over, and at the roofs opposite houses nearly kiss each other. I have heard that the Moorish architects adopted this style of construction from notions of economy. You see that all but the very narrowest strip of sky 44 UNDER THE SUN. must be shut out. Why ? The heavens above are for ten hours out of the twenty-four one blazing basin of burnished copper. The Cubans, however, being wealthy, can afford to leave a wider space between their houses ; but while the sun shines they shut him out with vast awnings of parti-coloured stuffs. This aspect of Havana would delight the heart of an Edgington. The populous part of the city is one huge marquee. Ah, and how shady the shops are ! There are some as dark as the purser's store-room in a cockpit. You enter them, not only to shop, but to bestow yourself in a rocking-chair, to nod, and to take, if you please, forty winks. The shopkeeper never dreams of disturbing you. He puts your nap in the bill ; that is to say, he adds fifty per cent, to the price of the articles you wish to purchase. Of course you beat him down. You bargain for everything in Havana " mayor o men or," wholesale or retail. The apothecary who sells you a blue pill expects an amicable little tussle over the price. What matter ? It fills up the time ; and unless you are concerned in sugar or coffee, you are sure to have plenty of time hanging on your hands. " Are there no beggars at your gate ? are there no poor about your lands ? " the Poet Laureate might indignantly ask. Well, the poor are slaves, and are very fat and shiny and seemingly well cared for (which does not in the least militate against slavery being a stupid, blunder- ing, and accursed anachronism, of which the Spaniards them- selves are heartily sick) ; and as for the beggars, I never saw any in Havana ; and had I met one, I should certainly not have presumed to offer him less than a golden dollar. The tradespeople seldom, if ever, put their names over their shop-fronts. They adopt signs instead not painted or plastic ones as the Americans and the Germans do, but simply written inscriptions usually implying some ethical allusion. "La Rectitud," our old friend of the boat, is much patronised by the mercers ; but that tradesman in the Calle CTReilly must have had queer ideas of rectitude when he charged me seventy-five dollars for a dress professedly made of pina or pine-apple fibre, but which subsequently turned out to be a silk grenadine from Lyons, THE HUMOURS OF HAVANA. 45 not worth three guineas. Then you have " La Probidad," " La Integridad," " La Buena Fe," " La Consciencia " all special favourites with the gentlemen of the narrow width and ell wand. Their signs are very pretty, but methinks they do profess too much. Some are simply arrogant, " Todos me elogian " I am praised by everybody; " Mi fama por el orbe vuela " my fame is universal : these are over the cigar-shops. The photographer has a flourish about "El Sol de Madrid" and "El Eayo de Luz ; " one studio went by the name of "El Relampago " the flash of lightning ; and I never could refrain from laughing at the motto adopted by the proprietor of a shop for the sale of lucifer matches " La Explosion." And now, if you please, picture- these thread-my-needle thoroughfares, not one of them a third so wide as Hanway Yard, shady to intensity, but yet rich in the tender tints of reflected light, and semitones stealing through the diaphanous awnings overhead, with here and there a burst, a splash, an " explosion," of positive light and colour where the sun has found a joint in the armour of awning, and made play with his diamond dart ; picture these lanes thronged from morning till night with sallow Spanish Creoles, in white linen and Panamas, and negroes and negresses gaudy, gaping, and grinning, according to the wont of our African brothers and sisters. Now and then a slouch-hatted, black-cassocked priest, now and then a demure Jesuit father; many soldiers in suits of "seersucker" a material resembling thin bed-ticking straw hats, and red cockades ; many itinerant vendors of oranges, lemonade, sugar-plums, and cigars; for though every third shop is a tobacconist's, there is a lively trade in cigars done in the streets. The narrowness of the foot-pavement affects you little. You may walk in the roadway without inconvenience. There is no- thing to run over you save the bullock-drays, whose rate of speed rarely exceeds a mile an hour, and the pack-mules, which are so laden with fresh-cut Indian corn-stalks for fodder that only their noses and the tips of their tails are visible beneath their burdens, and they look like animated hayricks and the volantes, which 46 UNDER THE SUN. are so light and springy that they would scarcely crush the legs of a fly if their wheels passed over him. I confess that these several and sundry humours of Havana were, when first I viewed them, subordinated to my intense desire to find an inn in which I could take mine ease ; and I was on the point of desiring the old negro (who was frantic with rage by this time) to turn his bullock's head to the city gates and journey towards Legrand's, when the odour of a decidedly first-rate cuisine attracted me, and ultimately induced me to put up at a Fonda called "El Globo," in the Calle del Obispo. To tell the truth, I wanted my breakfast desperately. 47 III. A COURTYARD IN HAVANA. LEFT my unworthy self and worthier friends and my trunks, so far as I can recollect, just discharged from a bullock-dray at the Fonda called " El Globo," in the Calle del Obispo let us say Bishopsgate Street Havana. Something like four months have elapsed since I found that anchorage, and, glad enough to be in any soundings, ordered breakfast. El Globo not that Cuban inn, but the real rotund habitable globe has gone round in the maddest of gyrations since I began to talk of the humours of Havana. I have been much tossed about and am brought very low. It was at Berlin, in a house overlooking the bridge which has the statues of Peace and Plenty, and over against the great gilded dome of that Schloss which the Kings of Prussia find so gloomy that they are afraid to live in it, and have fled to a pleasant modern palace under the Linden it was there, beneath the darkling shadow of the Prussian Eagle's wings, that I penned the last paragraph of my last paper about the Queen of the Antilles. Then the world began to roll and the teetotum to spin again. Just as I was stepping into a train bound for St. Petersburg, a civil person in uniform put into my hand a telegram containing these simple words, " Please go to Madrid. There is a Revolution in Spain." The next night I was in Cologne ; the morning after I was in Paris ; at night I supped at Dijon ; next morning I breakfasted at Bordeaux, and lunched at Irun ; late in the evening a voice cried " Yalladolid," and I had some chocolate ; and the next day, the fourth, being Sunday, I got to Madrid, and (it being a great saint's day) was just in time to take a ticket in a raffle for 48 UNDER THE SUN. Saint Anthony's pig "el santo cochinillo," as they call him. I must tell you about that pig some day. I put it to you, most forbearing of readers, how could I, being for the first time in my life in Old Spain, take up at once the thread of my reminiscences of Spain the New ? Had I striven to do so, the result would have been but a sadly tangled skein. My conscience pricked me sometimes, I admit. Once I had a most dolorous twinge ; it was in an old library at Seville, and, turning over a vellum-bound volume " Marco Polo's Travels," I think I came upon some marginal notes, written in Latin, and in a bold- honest hand. The old canon who was my guide reverently doffed his shovel-hat when the page, full of marginal notes, lay bare. " They are worth ten thousand reals a letter," quoth Don Basilio. " Ten thousand ! they are priceless. They are by the Great Admiral." Yes ; these were annotations to Marco Polo by Christopher Columbus. Of the authenticity of the autograph there was no doubt. The old library I speak of belonged to the Admiral's son, a learned, valorous, virtuous man, like his sire, and to the chapter of Seville cathedral he bequeathed all his books. I say my conscience smote me. How had I lingered over the humours of that Havana which Columbus discovered ! There is a picture of the Admiral hung up in the library : a picture painted by a Frenchman, and presented to the chapter by Louis Philippe in exchange for a choice Murillo. Out of the canvas the mild eyes seemed to look on me reproachfully. I fancied the grave, resolute lips moving, and that their speech ran: "What are you doing here ? Why don't you go back to Havana ? " But it was no fault of mine. I was a teetotum, and to wheel about and turn about was my doom. Coming out of that strange and fascinating land the most comfortless and the most charming in the world I sat down one day in the Frezzaria at Venice and said, " I really must go back to Havana." So taking hold of Old Spain, I cut its throat and tied a Chubb's patent fireproof safe to its neck and a couple of fifty-six pound shot to its legs, and towing the corse out to the A COURTYARD IN HAVANA. 49 Lido, sank it just under the lee of the Armenian convent of St. Lazaro. It fell with a plash and sank at once. "Back to St. Mark's," I cried to the gondolier; "and lie there, Old Spain," I continued, apostrophising two or three ripples which played above the deed that I had done, as though murder were a thing to laugh at" lie there ; and the fishes may feed on you till I need your bones and dredge you up again." Old bones have their uses. Professor Liebig once stated that all Europe was ransacked to supply England with bones. I have marked the spot where my skeleton lies, full fathom five. But I could not, somehow, go back to Havana. Cuba was coy, She floated in the air; she danced; she smiled at me, but she would not be embraced. Like unto those strange apparitions which mock the shepherd's sight on the Westmoreland fells, now seeming as the form of one that spurs his steed midway along a hill, desperate now merging into a gorgeous train of cavaliers with glittering armour and. waving standards and now fading into vaporous nothingness, I could see, remote, intangible, the Phantom of the Antilles ; the burnished sun, the coral glowing beneath the dark blue water ; the smooth, black sharks waiting about the bathing-places and raging at the walls of planks ; the waving palms, the sanguinolent bananas, the orange and pine-apple groves of the rich island. But she would not approach me then. You cannot always make of your mind an indexed ledger which you can open at will, and, under the proper letter, at the proper page, and in the proper column, find the matter you want, set down with clerk-like accuracy, underruled with red, and ticked off with blue ink. There are seasons when you mislay the key of the ledger, or find the leaves blotted, the index blurred, the entries effaced. Sometimes the firm your transactions with which you are desirous of recalling has gone bankrupt, and the accounts are being unravelled by Messrs. Coleman, Turquand, and Young. Cuba, in short, would not come at call, and it was not until I embarked on the Adriatic and went over to Trieste, whence, as you know, there are steamers starting continually for all parts of the world, that I began to feel a little tropical again, and find my Memory. D 50 UNDER THE SUN. At El Globo they gave us a double-bedded room. Double- bedded ! The apartment itself would have afforded ample quar- ters to five-and-twenty dragoons, horses, forage, and all. It was very like a barn, and had an open timber roof, very massive, but very primitive in its framework. The beams, it is true, were of cedar, and smelt deliciously. I had no means of ascertaining the peculiar hue of the walls or of the floor, for beyond a narrow parallelogram of sunshine thrown on the latter when the doors were open, the apartment was quite dark. It was one of a series surrounding the patio, or courtyard ; and the Cuban architects hold that windows in rooms which do not look upon the street are mere superfluities. Their constant care, indeed, is, not to let the daylight in, but to keep the sun out. The consequence is, that a room in a Cuban house is very like a photographic camera on a large scale. Magnify by twenty the pretty fresco-painted little dens which open out of the courtyard in the Pompeian house at the Crystal Palace, and you will have some idea of our double-bedded room at El Globo. By-the-by, you must forget to sweep it, and you must be rather liberal in your allowance of fleas. What matter ? I daresay there were fleas in the house of the Tragic Poet, notwithstanding all. the fine frescoes, and that the Pompeian housemaids were none too tidy. I was told afterwards that I might consider myself very lucky not to find in this double-bedded room such additional trifles as a cow in one corner and a wheeled carriage in another. Spaniards, old or new, are but faintly averse from making a sleeping apartment of a stable or a coach-house. I was slow to believe this ; and it was only lately, after some wayside expe- riences in Andalusia, and having shared a room with a pedlar's donkey, and being awakened in the morning by the hard, dry, sardonic see-saw of his horrible bray, that I realised to the fullest extent the strangeness of the bedfellows with which misery and the teetotum existence make us acquainted. Of the altitude of the folding-doors leading into this cave there was no complaint possible. I came to the conclusion that El Globo had formerly been a menagerie, and our room A COURTYARD IN HAVANA. 51 the private apartment of the giraffe, who, it is well known, is a very proud animal, and will never submit to the humiliation of stooping. The tallness of the doors, however, was balanced by the shortness of the beds. My companion was a long way over six feet in height, and the ghost of the celebrated Procrustes might have eyed him as his very long limbs lay on that very short pallet, and longed to reform his tailor's bills by slipping off some superfluous inches of his anatomy. As to my bed, it was as the couch of Dryden's Codrus short, and hard, and miserable : the poet's bed, in fact, and a fit preparation for the flagstone, and the kennel, and the grave. But the Procrustean eye couldn't have seen that long-limbed captain overhanging the short bed. Why ? Because, when the folding-doors were shut, all, save a bright streak of sun or moonlight at their base, was utter darkness ; and as soon as we kindled our wax-tapers at night the gnats or the moths, the bats or the scorpions, came and flapped the lights out. I don't know how the Cuban belles contrive to get through their toilettes. I think they must hang up screens of shawls in the patios, and come out into the open to beautify themselves. A Cuban bedroom is not -a place whither you can retire to read or write letters. You may just stumble into it, feel your way to the bed, and, throwing yourself down, sleep as well as you can for the mosquitos. Besides, the best part of your sleeping is done in Cuba out of your bedroom in a hammock slung between the posts of a piazza, or on a mattress flung down any- where in the shade, or in anybody's arm-chair, or in the dark corner of any cafe, or anywhere else where the sun is not, and you feel drowsy. In Algiers, the top of the house, with a sheet spread between two poles by way of awning, is still the favourite spot for an afternoon nap, as it was in the time of the Hebrew man of old ; but in Havana the house-tops slant and are tiled, and so are left to their legitimate occupants, the cats. Our folding-doors proved but a feeble barrier against the on- slaughts of a horse belonging to the proprietor of El Globo, and 52 UNDER THE SUN. whose proper stabling was in a cool grot with a vaulted roof a kind of compromise between an ice-house, a coal-hole, and a wine-cellar. This noble animal, seemingly under the impression that he lived at number five our number made such terrific play with his hoofs against our portals on the first night of our stny, that, remonstrating, we were promoted to a room upstairs, windowless, of course, but the door of which opened on the covered gallery surrounding the patio. This dwelling, likewise, had the great advantage of not being plunged in Cimmerian dark- ness directly the door was closed, for it boasted a kind of hutch, or Judas-trap, in one of the panels, after the fashion of the apertures in the doors of police- cells, through which cautious inspectors periodically peep, to make sure that female disorderlies have not strangled themselves in their garters. You might look from this hutch, too, if you chose, and present to the outside spectator the counterpart of the infuriated old gentleman, pre- sumably of usurious tendencies, in Rembrandt's picture, who thrusts his head through the casement and grins at and exchanges savage glances with the young cavalier who has called to mention that he is unable to take up that little bill. Never, in the course of my travels, did I light upon such a droll hotel as El Globo. You paid about thirty shillings a day for accommodation which would have been dear at half a crown, but the balance was amply made up to you in fun. I had been living for months at the Brevoort House in New York, the most luxurious hotel, perhaps, in the world,* and the change to almost complete barbarism was as amusing as it was wholesome. Amus- ing, for long-continued luxury is apt to become a very great bore wholesome, because the discomfort of the Cuban hotels forms, after all, only an intermediate stage between the splendour of the States and the unmitigated savagery of Mexico and Spain. I was fated to go farther and fare worse than at El Globo. Our quarters there were slightly inferior to those to be found for fourpence in a lodging-house in St. Giles's; but I was destined to make subsequent acquaintance at Cordova, at Orizaba, at Puebla in America, and * This was in the year 1864. A COURTYARD IN HAVANA. 53 in Castile and in Andalusia in Europe, with other pigsties to which that at Havana was palatial. I am so glad that there was no room at Madame Aline 's, and that we did not try Legrand's. I should have missed the sight of that patio at El Globo. It was open to the sky, of course ; that is to say, the four white walls were canopied all day long by one patch of vivid ultramarine. A cloud was so rare, that when one came sailing over the expanse of blue a sportsman might have taken it for a bird and risked a shot at it. I used often to think, leaning over the balusters of the gallery, how intolerable that bright blue patch would become at last to a man cooped up between the four white walls of a southern prison ; for suffering may be of all degrees, and anguish may wear all aspects. There is a cold hell as well as a hot one. I have seen the horrible coop under the leads of the Doge's palace at Venice, in which Silvio Pellico spent so many weary months. But he, at least, could see the roofs of the houses through his dungeon bars, and hear the gondoliers wrangling and jesting between the pillars, or uttering their weird cries of warning as they turned the corners of the canals. He could hear the splashing of the water as the buckets were let down into the wells in the courtyard by the Giant's Staircase, and sometimes, perhaps, a few of the historical pigeons would come wheeling up from the cornices of the Procuratie Vecchie and look at him in his cell pityingly. But only to gaze on four white burning walls and a great patch of ultramarine, and the chains eating into your limbs all the while ! Think of that. How the captive must long for the sky to be overcast or for rain to fall and it falls but once a year ; and what a shriek of joy would come out of him were he to see, high aloft in the ultramarine, a real live balloon ! Such burning white walls, such an intolerable patch of intense blue, must a prisoner by name Poerio have seen in Naples in the old Bourbon time. There was nothing prison-like about our patio, however. It was as full of life as our bedrooms were full of fleas. The oddest courtyard ! the most antique the most grotesque. I used to liken it to that pound into which Captain Bold wig's keepers 54- UNDER THE SUN. wheeled Mr. Pickwick while he got into that sweet slumber pro- duced by too much milk-punch. It was strewn with all manner of vegetable and pomicultural refuse, great leaves of plantains, cocoa- nut shells, decayed pine-apples, exhausted melons, and husks of Indian corn. Havana is a great place for oysters, and the four corners of the " pound " were heaped high with votive offerings of shells. Nor to the pound was there wanting the traditional donkey. He would come strolling in three or four times a day, either bear- ing a pile of Indian corn about the size of an average hay-stack on his back, or with panniers full of oranges slung on either side of him. Occasionally a Pepe or a Jose, or some other criado, would come to unload him. Oftener he would unload himself, by rolling over on the ground and tumbling his oranges about in all direc- tions ; then a fat n egress would emerge from the kitchen and belabour him about the head with a ladle ; then he would slink away to the cool grot where the horse lived, to confer with that animal as to any provender there might be about, and compare notes with him as to the growing depravity of mankind in general and Cuban costermongers in particular. By this time his master would arrive with a sharp stick, or else the big bloodhound that lived in an empty sugar-cask, and so zealously licked all the plates and dishes either immediately before or immediately after they came from the table I am not certain which would become alive to the fact of there being a donkey in the camp, and " run him out " incontinent. How they managed to get rid of all those oranges I really do not know. I had a dozen or so brought me whenever I felt thirsty, and I daresay the other guests at El Globo were as often thirsty and as fond of oranges as I ; and there were a good many, too, cut up in the course of the day for the purpose of making sangaree and orange-toddy ; but even after these draughts the residue must have been enormous. You were never charged for oranges in the bill. They were as plentiful as acorns in a forest, and you might browse on them at will. In the streets, at every corner and under every archway, sits a negress who sells oranges, A COURTYARD IN HAVANA. 55 so they must have some monetary value, however infinitesimal ; but if you bestow on her the smallest coin recognised by the Cuban currency you may fill your hands, your pockets, and your hat too, if you choose, with the golden fruit. When the Cuban goes to the bull-fight he takes with him a mighty store of oranges tied up in a pocket-handkerchief, just as we, when boys, used to buy a pound of gingerbread-nuts, more as a precautionary measure than because we were sweet-toothed, on entering the confines of Greenwich Fair. Some of these oranges the amateur of the bull-fight eats ; but the major part he uses as missiles, and pitches into the ring at a cowardly bull or clumsy toreadores. There is positively a verb in the Spanish dictionary signifying to pelt with oranges. I mentioned the existence of a kitchen just now. It was a hot and grimy den, not much bigger than the stoke-hole of a locomo- tive ; and there was a charcoal stove there, I presume ; but 'the real culinary business was done in the patio. As to venture forth during the noonday or afternoon heats is considered next door to raving madness, and as you necessarily spend much time within doors, and as you feel too lazy to read, or write, or paint, or sew what a blessing sewing-machines must be in Cuba ! before their introduction most of the needlework was done by coolies and as you cannot be always smoking, or dozing, or sipping sangaree, and as billiards are out of the question, and as gambling the real recreation in all tropical climes is immoral, there are certain hours in the day when time is apt to hang heavy on your hands, and you don't know what the deuce to do with yourself. An infallible pastime to me was to lean over the gallery and watch the dinner being cooked in the patio. It has been said that a wise man should never enter his wife's dressing-room, and it has been likewise remarked that if we entered the kitchen of the Trois Freres half an hour before dinner, we should see such sickening sights as would cause us to lose all our appetite for the banquet served in the caUnet particulier upstairs. We must look at results, says the sage, and not at the means employed to bring them about. 56 UNDER THE SUN. But these sententious warnings should not apply, I think, to the cooking that is done in a patio in the open and under the glorious sunshine. There was a rollicking, zingaro-like freedom in thus seeing your meals prepared in broad daylight. Why did they cook in the courtyard ? Because the kitchen itself was too small, or because the gory sun came to the assistance of the charcoal embers and did half the cooking himself. I was told lately, and gravely too, at Seville though the tale may be very likely one of the nature generally told to travellers that on the fourteenth day of July in every year there takes place in La Ciudad de las Maravillas an ancient and solemn ceremony in honour of Apollo a kind of sun-worship, as it were : a culinary person, white-aproned and white-nightcapped, sets up a stall in La Plaza de la Magdalena, and produces a frying-pan, a cruse of oil, and a basket of eggs. Two of the eggs he breaks, sluices their golden yolks with oil, and then, with an invocation to the sun-god, holds the pan towards the meridian blaze. In forty-five seconds the eggs are fried. You must take these eggs, and the story too, with a grain of salt ; but I can only repeat that Seville is a city of wonders witness the two angelic sisters who, no later than the year 1848, sat on the weathercock of the Giralda, and spinning round and round while Espartero was bombarding the city, warded off the iron storm from the sacred fane. Now the sun of Andalusia, though a scorcher when considered from a European point of view, is a mere refrigerator when compared with the great fiery furnace set up within the domains of the Southern Cross. I am not prepared to deny that the pre- paration of some of the stews we had for dinner might have been accelerated by the monstrous kitchen-range overhead ; but I shrink from asserting as a positive fact that the old negress who used to belabour the donkey with a ladle, fried her eggs in the sun. No, I will grant at once that her pots and pans were set upon little braziers full of hot ashes ; but still, without the sun, I don't think her viands would have been cooked to her or our liking. She evidently gloried in the sun, and frizzled in it, bare- headed, while her eggs and sausages frizzled in their own persons. A COURTYARD IN HAVANA. 57 Not till her work was done would she bind her temples with the yellow bandanna, or the gorgeous turban of flamingo hue, and, sitting down in a rocking-chair, fan herself with a dignified air, as though she were the Queen of Spain and had no legs. The oscillations of the chair, however, proved the contrary. She had legs which Mr. Daniel Lambert might have beheld, not unenvious. Good old black cook ! She was like Sterne's foolish fat scullion dipped in a vat of Brunswick black. She was gross and oily, and could exhibit a terrible temper, especially towards troublesome piccaninnies and refractory fowls who showed an ungrateful un- readiness in being caught and strangled and plucked, and trussed and broiled, and served hot with mushrooms, all under half an hour's time ; but her little irritation once over, she was until a roving donkey called for the ministrations of the ladle all grins and chuckles and broad guffaws and humorous sayings. She would sing a fragment of a song, too, from time to time a wild song of Congo sound, and which needed the accompaniment of a banjo. The refrain had some resemblance to the word ipecacuanha pronounced very rapidly and with a strong guttural accent, and yet I daresay it was all about love and the home of her youth on the burning banks of the Niger. Where did all those piccaninnies come from ? Who owned them ? The landlord of El Globo was a bachelor ; the waiters did not look like married men ; and yet, from the youthful brood strewn about the patio, you might have fancied Brigham Young to be the proprietor of the place. " Strewn about " is the only term to use with reference to the piccaninnies. Their age averaged between twenty and thirty months. Nobody nursed them ; they were too small to stand ; and so they sprawled, and crawled, and wriggled, and lay, and squalled, and kicked, and basked in the sun like little guinea-pigs. I have seen a piccaninny in a dish ; I have seen a piccaninny in a wooden tray, like a leg of pork just delivered by the butcher. They were of all colours blue-black, brown-black, chocolate, bistre, burnt sienna, raw sienna, cadmium yellow, and pale Creole white. I am afraid all these piccaninnies, save those of the last-named 58 UNDER THE SUN. hue, were Slaves, and the children of Slaves. Not one of the least suggestive to some it may be one of the most painful features of bondage is that free white and black slave children grow up together in perfect amity and familiarity, are playmates, and foster-brothers and sisters. The great social gulf which is to yawn between them so fair and jewelled with flowers on one side, so dark and hideous on the other is in infancy quite bridged over. The black piccaninnies sprawl about the verandahs and the courtyards, and the thresholds of the rooms of their owners, and the white piccaninnies sprawl in precisely the same manner. That fat old cook, for instance, made no more distinction between a white and a black urchin than between a black and a white fowl. Before ever she could address herself to the concoc- tion of a dish, two ceremonies were gone through. A piccaninny had to be fed and another piccaninny had to be " spanked." For the purpose of feeding, that invaluable ladle, dipped in a bowl of saffron-coloured porridge, came into play ; the " spanking " was done with her broad black hand. She was quite impartial, and distributed the slaps and the spoonfuls in strict accordance with the maxims of equity. Thus, if a piccaninny yelped, it was fed ; but if it yelped after it was fed, it was spanked. And subsequent to both spooning and spanking, the fat old cook would catch the child up in her arms and sing to it a snatch of the famous song that ended with ipecacuanha. So have I seen many dinners cooked. So I have seen my made- dish running about the patio with flapping wings and dismal "grooping" noise, to be at last caught and sacrificed to the culinary deities, and to appear at the evening meal, grilled, with rich brown sauce. And so at last the drama of the day would be played out ; as on going home late, and leaning once more over the rails of the gallery, I would gaze then on the patio all flooded in moonlight of emerald green : pots and pans and plates and crates and baskets and braziers and vegetable rubbish, all glinting and glancing as though some fairy " property-man " had tipped their edges with the green foil -paper of the playhouse. 59 IY. THE VOLANTE. RE there any of us so high and mighty and wise and proud and philosophical as not to long for something ? Until I read a novel called " Barchester Towers," I never ventured to imagine that a being so ineffable as an English bishop could long for anything. Under the shovel- hat and silken apron, I thought, must dwell supreme indifference to the toys and gewgaws for which a grosser laity struggle and intrigue. Yet, what a delicate touch of the lancet between the under muscles of the human mind is that with which Mr. Trollope shows us poor little henpecked Dr. Proudie, in his grand palace at Barchester, longing, not for the see of Canterbury, not to be a second Wolsey or a new Ximenes, but merely to be able to write his sermons and sip his negus in a warm cosy large room above-stairs, from which he has been banished by his imperious bishopess. Yes ; a bishop may long. A bishop ! Who shall say that his Holiness the Pope has not coveted, within these latter years, the lot of one of his own flunkeys ? It was in the disguise of a pos- tillion that the poor old gentleman fled out of Rome in 1849. Quite feasible is it to surmise that his memory has oft reverted to the day when he cracked his whip and rose up and down in his saddle, mechanical, on the dusty road to Graeta, and that, looking wearily on all his tiaras, and copes, and stoles, and peacocks' feathers, he has sighed and thought that happiness might be found in an obscure post, good wages, a jacket with sugar-loaf buttons, and tight buckskin small-clothes. We generally long for the thing which we are least likely ever 60 UNDER THE SUN. to possess. The ugly woman longs for beauty. The drunkard, in his waking moments, longs for the firm tread, clear eye, and assured speech of the temperate; and I have often conjectured that thieves are beset at times with a dreadful longing to become honest men. I was born to go afoot. When Fate condemned me to the footpath, she also presented me with a pair of bad legs ; for Fate seldom does things by halves. The consequence is that I have always been longing to ride in a carriage of my own. Of my own, mind. Let that you have be yours and nobody else's. I have longed for my own carriage this many a year, and have gazed so enviously intent on some of my acquaintance riding high horses or careering along in the chariots of the proud, that my toes have been menaced by their chargers' hoofs, and my last carriage has promised to be a stretcher to convey me to the hospital after being run over. My longings vehiculary have been catholic, and perhaps a little capricious. In childhood I longed for the lord mayor's coach, so grand, so golden, so roomy. What happiness was his who, with a fur porringer on his head and a sword held baton-wise, looked from that coach- window like Punch from a glorified show ! There was a story related to my detriment during nonage, that I once expressed a longing for a mourning coach. I will own that the cumbrous sable wagon, so repulsive to most persons, exercises over me to this day a strange fascination, and that I have some difficulty in refraining from stealing down the stable- yards of funeral postmasters and peeping into the stuffy cloth caverns, and seeking for strange sights in the shining black panels, as the superstitious seek for apparitions in the drop of ink of the Egyptian magician, and wondering at the uncouth leather springs and braces, and watching the harnessing of the long-tailed round-barrelled Flemish steeds, with their obsolete surcingles and chestbands. The which leads me, with a blush, to admit that there may be some truth in the report that in youth " my sister Emmeline and I " her name was not Emmeline were in the habit of performing funerals in the nursery, and playing at Mr. Shillibeer. THE VOLANTE. 61 But these, and the glorious mail-coach, with the four thorough- breds, and a guard and coachman in blazing scarlet and gold, and the brand-new harness and reins, which used to burst on our sight on the evening of the king's birthday long bygone these were but childish longings, airy desires akin to that which children show for the Eoyal Arms on a shop-front, or the moon in a pail of water. Not until manhood did I feel that full fierce longing, the longing which is mingled with discontent, and is own brother to envy, malice, and all uncharitableness. I have given the Drive in Hyde Park a wide berth, and have gone out of my way to avoid Long Acre. The sight of other people's carriages made me sick. I never owned so much as a one-horse chaise. I have not even a perambulator. My longing has varied with the countries in which it has been my lot to long. I have longed for a droschky with a bearded Istvostchik in a braided caftan and a long-maned alezan from the Ukraine in the shafts. There is a droschky, I think, among the specimens of wheeled carriages in the Crystal Palace, but I never longed for an Istvostchik at Sydenham. I coveted the Russian vehicle only while I was on Russian soil. When I went away, I began to long for something else. Nor, I fear, shall I ever possess a droschky of even the humblest kind, which is nothing but a cloth-covered saddle, on which you sit astride, with splash- boards to protect you from the wheels ; for in the latest edition of " Murray " I learn that droschkies are going out of fashion, and that the Petersburg railway stations are now beset by omnibuses and hack cabs. I never longed for an Irish outside car, although I have seen some pretty private ones ; and crinoline may be displayed in its widest sense and to its greatest advantage on a " kyar," say between two and five in the afternoon, in Grafton Street, Dublin. My soul has often thirsted for a private hansom. What luxury in the knowledge that those high wheels, that stiff and shiny apron, all belong to you ! I think I would have a looking-glass in the splash-board, and I am sure I should be always pushing open that trap in the roof and bidding the man drive faster. And I have 62 UNDER THE SUN. longed for a mail phaeton not so much for the sake of the two proud steppers and the trim lamps with their silvered reflectors, as for the sake of the two grooms who, in black tunics, cockaded hats, white neckcloths, and pickle- jar boots, sit in the dickey with their arms folded, like statues of Discipline and Obedience. I knew a gentleman in the city of Mexico, and he owned such a mail phaeton with two such statuesque grooms as I have de- scribed. Little did he reck, good hospitable man, that the guest he was wont to drive out in the Paseo de la Yega envied him, with a green and spotted jealousy, his mail phaeton and his trim grooms. He had encountered the most appalling difficulties before he could find two human beings who, even after long drilling and for liberal wages, could be induced to sit in the dickey or is it the rumble ? and fold their arms without moving. The Mexicans are a very lazy people ; but neither the Spaniards, nor the half-castes, nor the Indians understand sitting behind a horse. They prefer sitting across him. My friend sent to the United States for grooms. They returned him word that there were no grooms in the Union who would fold their arms. A lawsuit took him to New York, and he had another mail phaeton built for the Central Park ; but the grooms were still lacking. He tried Irishmen and he tried negroes. Tempted by abundant dollars, they would consent to wear the cockaded hats and the pickle- jar boots, but they could not be brought to fold their arms. 'To attempt to subject a native American citizen to this indignity was, of course, out of the question. When I remark that I have seen a citizen clad in a red shirt and a white hat driving a hearse at a public funeral, you will recognise the impossibility of any statuesque arrangements in connection with mail phaetons in the States. For any native Yankee carriage I never longed. I held the Noah's-ark cars on the street railways in horror, and considered the Broadway stages as abominations. As for a trotting "wagon " by which is meant a hard shelf on an iron framework between two immense wheels, to which a railway locomotive at high pressure, but disguised as a horse, has been harnessed I never THE VOLANTS. 63 could appreciate the pleasure of being whirled along at the rate of about eighteen miles an hour, with the gravel thrown up by the wheels flying about you, now bombarding your eyes, and now peppering your cheeks. Thoroughly do I agree with the general criticism passed on trotting wagons by an old steamboat captain who had endured for a couple of hours the agony of the iron shelf. " The darned thing," he remarked, " has got no bulwarks." There is rather a pretty American carriage called a Rockaway not from any peculiar oscillatory motion it possesses, but from a watering-place hight Rockaway, where it was first brought into use. The Rockaway is in appearance something between the French panier a salade, in which the gar$ons de bureau of the Bank of France speed on their bill-collecting mission?, and the spring cart of a fashionable London baker. Add to this a grinning negro coachman, with a very large silver or black- velvet band to a very tall hat, and the turn-out, you may imagine, is spruce and sparkling. But I never longed for a Rockaway. The American carriage - horses are the prettiest creatures imaginable out of a circus, and are as prettily harnessed. They are almost covered in summer with a gracefully fantastic netting, which keeps the flies from them. Much less have I yearned for one of the Hungarian equipages, about which such a fuss is made in the Prater at Vienna. An open double or triple bodied rattle-trap, generally of a gaudy yellow, with two or four ragged, spiteful, profligate-looking little ponies, and the driver in a hybrid hussar costume a feather in his cap, sky-blue tunic and pantaloons, much braiding, and Hessian boots with long tassels. This is the crack Hungarian equipage, the Magyar name of which I do not know, nor knowing could pronounce. The Viennese hold this turn-out to be, in the language of the mews, very " down the road ; " but it fails to excite my longing. Hungarian ponies look wild and picturesque enough in Mr. Zeitter's pictures ; but a gipsy's cart without the tilt is not precisely the thing for Hyde Park ; and the " proud Hungarian " on the box-seat reminds me too forcibly of the " Every thin garian," who in cosmopolitan saw-dust continues the 64 UNDER THE SUN. traditions of equitation handed down by the late Andrew Ducrow. When, in the days of Donna Isabella, I was looking from a balcony overhanging the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, and used to hear, at about three in the afternoon, the clangour of trumpets from the guard-house, at the Oasa de la Gobernacion opposite, as the carriages of the royal family, with their glittering escort, drove by to the Prado or the Retiro, I would question myself as to whether I felt any longing for the absolute possession of one of those stately equipages. I don't think I did. They were too showy and garish for my humble ambition. If a slight feeling of longing came over me, it was for the coach which conveyed the junior branches of the royal family. Imagine, if you please, a spacious conveyance all ablaze with heraldic achievements, and crammed to the roof with little infantes and infantas ; Mr. Bumble on the coach-box ; and the beadles of St. Clement's Danes, the ward of Portsoken, and the Fishmongers' Company, hung on behind, abreast for long laced coats and huge laced cocked-hats are the only wear of flunkey dom in Spain. Harnessed to this astounding caravan were six very sleek, very fat, and very supercilious-looking mules. To the beadles before and the beadles behind must be added the beadle of the Burlington Arcade, on the off-leader, as postillion. Yea, more. The beadle of the Royal Exchange trotted on an Andalusian barb as outrider. A squadron of lancers followed, to take care that the infantes and infantas were not naughty, or that the naughtier Progresistas didn't run away with them. On the whole, I don't think I longed much for this sumptuous equipage. There is another coach, in the royal stables at Madrid, much more in my line a queer, cumbrous, gloomy litter, with a boot as big as a midshipman's chest. It is a very old coach the oldest, perhaps, extant, and nearly the first coach ever built, being the one in which Crazy Jane, Queen of Castile and Aragon, used to cany about the coffined body of her husband, Charles of Anjou. There is yet another coach in my line the Shillibeer line, I mean which may be hired for a franc an hour at a certain city THE VOLANTE. 65 on the Adriatic Sea, opposite Trieste. There are about four thousand of those coaches in the city a very peculiar city, for the sea is in its broad and its narrow streets, and the seaweed clings to the door-steps of its palaces. How I have longed to have one of those coaches for my own private riding ; say in the SuiTey Canal or on the Serpentine ! The Americans have got one on the lake in their Central Park ; but the toy once placed there has been forgotten, and it is dropping to pieces. It is the only coach of which use is practicable in Venice. It is black and shiny and hearse-like, and its roof bristles with funeral tufts, and the carving about its doors and panels is strictly of the under- taker's order of decoration. It is called a gondola. But where would be the use of a gondola in London ? The Surrey Canal is nofc in a fashionable district, and the Serpentine has no outlet. The chief purpose of your own carriage, I presume, is to drive about to the residences of your friends and acquaintances, and strike despair into their souls by flash- ing your liveries and appointments in their eyes. You could scarcely put your gondoliers into buckskins and pickle- jar boots, although, upon my word, I remarked once, at Venice, that the Count of Chambord, otherwise the Ihike of Bordeaux, otherwise Henry the Fifth, King of France and Navarre who lived, when he was not at Frohsdorf, at one of the most beautiful palaces on the Grand Canal, and kept half a dozen gondolas for his private recreation had been absurd enough to dress up his boatmen in tail coats, gold-laced hats, plush breeches, and gaiters. Truly, the Bourbons have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. Incongruity of incongruities ! Imagine Jeames de la Pluche on the Grand Canal. As one could not drive down to Ascot in a gondola, or take it to the Crystal Palace on a half-crown day, or keep it waiting for an hour and a half at the door of a Pall Mall club and as the linkman at the Royal Italian Opera would be slightly astonished at having to proclaim that Mr. Anonymous's gondola stopped the way, I must abandon all hopes of possessing a marine Shillibeer until I can afford to take a palace at Venice. 66 UNDER THE SUN. But if my longings are not to be satisfied in Europe, there is in the Spanish West Indies a carriage to be longed for : ay, and the longing may be gratified at a very moderate expen- diture. In the city of Havana, and in Havana alone, is to be found this turn-out. It is but a " one-hoss shay ; " but it is a chaise fit for princes and potentates to ride in. It is the queerest trap into which mortal ever mounted. It is unique and all but inimitable. Those who have visited Cuba will understand that I allude to the famous conveyance called the Yolante. The rooms looking on the street in Havana are necessarily provided with windows, but these casements are garnished with heavy ranges of iron bars, behind which you sit and smoke, or eat, or drink, or yawn, or flirt your fan, or transfix the male passers-by with dreamy yet deadly glances, precisely as your habits, or your sex, or the time of the day may prompt you. Skinny hands are often thrust between these bars ; and voices cry to you in Creole Spanish to bestow alms for the sake of the Virgin and the Saints. Sometimes rude boys make faces at you through the gratings, or rattle a bamboo cane in discordant gamut over the bars, till you grow irritable, and begin to fancy that Havana is a zoological garden, in which the insiders and outsiders have changed places ; that you have been shut up in the monkey-house ; and that the baboons are grimacing at you from the open. I was sitting at the grated window of El Globo's restaurant after breakfast, dallying with some preserved cocoa-nut a most succulent " goody," and which is not unlike one of the spun- glass wigs they used to exhibit at the Soho Bazaar dipped in glutinous syrup when, across the field of vision bounded by the window-pane, there passed a negro, mounted on horseback. The animal was caparisoned in blinkers, and a collar, and many straps and bands, thickly bedight with silver ornaments : which I thought odd in the clothing of a saddle-horse. But it might be " un costumbre del pais," I reflected ; just such another custom as that of plaiting up the horse's tail very tightly, THE VOLANTE. 67 adorning it with ribbons, and tying the end to the saddle-bow. An absurd custom and a cruel custom ; for in the tropics the horse's tail was obviously given him for the purpose of whisk- ing away the flies, which sorely torment him. The black man bestriding this tail tied horse grinned at me as he rode by, touched his hat, and made a gesture as though of inquiry. That, also, I conjectured to be a Cuban custom. Those big placable unreasoning babies called negroes are always grinning and bowing, and endeavouring to conciliate the white man, whom they respect and fear, and love too, after a fashion. This was a stately black man a fellow of many inches, muscular, black as jet, and shiny. He wore a straw hat with a bright ribbon, a jacket of many colours, a scarlet vest, white breeches, very high jack-boots so at least they seemed to me with long silver spurs, and large gold rings in his ears. He carried a short stocked whip, with a very long lash of many knots, and he rode in a high demi- peaked saddle, with Moorish stirrups, profusely decorated, like the harness, with silver. I could not quite make him ont. The Postillion of Longjumeau, a picador from the bull-ring, Gambia in "the Slave" on horseback, struggled for mastery in his guise. He moved slowly across the window, and I saw him no more. I forgot all about this splendid spectre on horseback, and returned to my dalliance with the preserved cocoa-nut. Time passed. It might have been an hour, it might have been a minute, it might have been a couple of seconds for the march of time is only appreciable in degree, and is dependent on circumstances when, looking up from the cocoa-nut, I saw the plane of vision again darkened. Slowly, like the stag in a shooting-gallery, there came bobbing along a very small gig body, hung on very large C-springs, and surmounted by an enormous hood. Stretched between the apron and the top of this hood, at an angle of forty-five degrees, was a kind of awning or tent of some sable material. Glancing between the hood and the awning, I saw a double pair of white-trousered 68 UNDER THE SUN. legs, while at a considerable altitude above, two spirals of smoke were projected into the air. " Surely," I exclaimed, "they can never be so cruel as to make their negro slaves draw carriages." I rose from the table, and standing close to the bars, gained a view of the street pavement. But no toil-worn negro was visible, and, stranger to relate, no horse, only the gig body and a pair of wheels big enough to turn a paper mill, and a pair of long timber shafts, and a great gulf between. Mystery ! Was it an automaton, or Hancock's steam-coach come to life again ? Had my field of view been less confined, I might have discovered that there was, indeed, a horse between the shafts, but that he was a very long way off. He was the identical horse, in fact, ridden by the black postillion who had grinned at me. I had seen a Yolante. I became intimately acquainted with the volante ere I left Havana, and I learned to long for it. I have yet faint hopes of acclimatising it in Hyde Park. Some slight difficulty may be experienced in climbing into it, for the C-springs are hung very high, and are apt to wag about somewhat wildly when the weight of one or two human bodies is pressed upon them. I would recom- mend a few weeks' practice in climbing into a hammock ere the volante is attempted ; but the ascent is, after all, much more facile than that to the knife-board of a London omnibus. Once in the curricle you are at your ease, and happy. You are rocked as in a cradle, and may slumber as peacefully as a baby ; or, if you choose to keep awake, you may catch glimpses, between the canopy of the hood which screens the nape of your neck and the crown of your head, and the black linen awning which shelters your face and eyes from the blinding rays of the sun, of strips of life and movement foot-passengers, or riders in other volantes. To keep a gig was declared on a certain well-known occasion to be an undeniable proof of respectability. But to ride in a gig drawn by a horse with a plaited tail and silver harness, and conducted by a postillion in a many-coloured jerkin and jack-boots, I consider to be the pinnacle of glory. It behoves me to offer two brief explanations with regard to the THE VOLANTE. 69 black postillion's attire. When you come narrowly to inspect him, you discover that he is not entirely a man of truth. There is a spice of imposture about him. Those breeches and those boots are not wholly genuine. The first, you discover, are mere linen drawers, instead of leathers ; indeed, to wear buckskins in the tropics would be a torture, the hint of whose possibility would have filled the hearts of the managing directors of the late Spanish Inquisition (unlimited) with gratitude. I could readily forgive the negro for his trifling fraud as regards the leathers, the exigencies of climate covering a multitude of sins ; but what shall we say of a postillion who pretends to wear jack-boots which turn out to be nothing but stiff leather gaiters or spatterdashes ? These hypocritical boots are truncated close to the ankle, even as was that boot converted by Corporal Trim into a mortar for the siege of Dendermond. At the ankle these boots do not even diverge into decent bluchers or homely shoes. The bare feet of the black man are visible ; and on his bare heels and insteps are strapped the silver spurs with their monstrous rowels. Now jack-boot, I take it, is not a thing to be trifled with. It is either a boot or no boot. This volante appendage is a hybrid, and consequently abominable. The black postillion may urge, it is true, several pleas in abate- ment. First, nature has provided him with feet quite as black, as shiny, and as tough as the extremities of any jack-boots that could be turned out by Mr. Hoby, Mr. Runciman, or any other purveyor to her Majesty's Household Cavalry brigade. Next, the Moorish stirrups into which he thrusts his feet are not mere open arches of steel, but capacious foot-cases overshoes hung by straps to the saddle. Finally, negroes are said to suffer more than white people from the insidious attacks of a very noxious insect common in Havana a vile little wretch who marries early, and digs a hole in the ball of your toe, in which he and his wife reside, Mrs, Insect lays I know not how many thousand eggs in the hole under your skin, and inflammation, ulceration, and all the other ations even sometimes to mortification, the last " ation " of all ensue. Pending the advent of a nice fleshy great toe in which they can 70 UNDER THE SUN. construct a habitation, the young couple dwell, after the manner of the little foxes, in any holes and corners that offer ; and the toe of a jack-boot would present a very comfortable lodging until they moved. So the negro postillion sensibly cuts off the foot of his boot, and his enemy cannot lie perdu, awaiting him in a leathern cavern. For this queer vehicle, the volante, I conceived a violent long- ing ; and one of these days I mean to have a specimen curricle neatly packed in haybands and brought to Southampton per West India mail steamer. A black postillion I might obtain through the friendly offices of the Freedman's Aid Society; and for money you can have silver-adorned harness made to any pattern in Long Acre. I am not quite certain whether the metropolitan police would thoroughly appreciate the inordinate length of the volante shafts, although in the case of a block in Cheapside the space intervening between the horse and the gig body would give impa- tient foot-passengers an opportunity to duck under and cross the street comfortably ; and I don't know whether I should get into trouble with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals if I plaited my horse's tail up tight, and tied it to the saddle-bow, when summer heats were rife and flies were plentiful. The volante ! It is such a pretty name too ; and, Shakespeare's doubt notwithstanding, there is much in a name. Southey and Coleridge and Wordsworth were bent on establishing their Panti- socracy on the banks of the Susquehanna not because they knew anything of the locality, but because Susquehanna was such a pretty name. It is a very ugly river, and, curiously enough, it is the home of a bird possessing at once the most delicious flavour and the most grotesque name imaginable the canvas-back duck. The Cubans have a genuine passion for the volante. Yolantes are the common hack cabs of Havana ; but then the horse is often but a sorry jade, and the negro postillion a ragged profligate "cuss," the state of whose apparel would have shocked Miss Tabitha Bramble, had she travelled so far as the Antilles. But the private volantes as far exceed the public ones in number as they do in splendour. Everybody who can afford it keeps a THE VOL ANTE. 71 volante, and many who cannot afford it keep a volante. It is the one luxury, the one expense, which, next to a cigar and a bull- fight, is dearest to the Spanish Creole heart, and which, by fair means or foul, must be procured. I believe that the middle-class Cubans would sooner live on beans and cold water, dress in rags, and lie on straw like Margery Daw, than go without a volante. Fortunately, Providence has been very good to them. Their beautiful island runs over with fertility. All the world are eager to buy what they have to sell, and what almost exclusively they produce sugar and tobacco. So they make huge piles of dollars and gold ounces, and are enabled not only to keep volantes in profusion, but to give capital dinners and treat strangers with a generous hospitality very rarely shown in starched and stuck-up Europe. We have all heard of the fondness which the Bedouin Arabs show for their horses. We know that the Prophet Mahomet has written whole chapters of the Koran on the breeding and rearing of colts. We know that the young Arab foal is brought up in the tent with the little girls and boys, and that when he grows up to be a horse he is petted and caressed. The children hang about his neck and call him endearing names ; the Arab mother strokes his nose and pats his cheek, fetches him sweet herbs, makes his bed, feeds him with bread and dates, and strips of meat cured in the sun. Well, the affection which the Arabs manifest for their horses the Cubans manifest for their volantes. They can scarcely endure that the beloved object should be out of their sight. Make an evening call all fashionable calls in Cuba are made in the evening and in a dim corner of the reception-parlour you will probably see a great pyramid covered up with brown holland. It is not a harp, it is not a grand pianoforte ; it is a volante. I must hint that Cuban reception rooms are immensely large and lofty, and are always on the ground floor ; otherwise I might be supposed to be availing myself too extensively of the traveller's privilege, in relating that the drawing-room of a Cuban lady is not unfrequently a coach-house as well. 72 V. HAVANA CIGARITOS. HEREABOUTS, I wonder, did those wonderful literary gentlemen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who were in the habit of writing epic poems, and more amazing still, who persuaded people into reading them, keep the Muse whom they so frequently invoked ? Did she stand at livery with Pegasus, and the bird of Jove, and Juno's peacocks, and Phcebus's fiery steeds, and other curiosities of natural history, always ready to be trotted out when it occurred to the literary gentlemen that a Somethingiad in Twelve Cantos would be precisely the kind of thing to take the town, make the fortune of Mr. Osborn or Mr. Tonson, or extract a score of gold pieces from the Peer of the Realm and Patron of the Muses to whom the Somethingiad was to be dedicated ? I want to know what that Muse did when she wasn't under process of invocation. It is my opinion that she was a lazy Muse ; for we frequently find the literary gentlemen bidding her, with some sharpness, Arise, or Awake, or Tell, or Say something which, according to their divination, she had to communicate. She seems also to have been a Muse who had something to give, and was worth flattering, since the literary gentlemen often addressed her by such endearing epithets as Gentle, Heavenly, Benign, and Discreet. But they never told anybody where the Muse lived, or how she was to be " got at." I fear she was to be heard of most frequently in the neighbourhood of Grub Street, at the sign of the Satchel, where the Greek translators lay three in a bed, and the gentleman who did Pindaric odes could only go out on Sundays through terror of the bailiffs, and the watchful HAVANA CIGARITOS. 73 landlady kept the ladder of the cockloft occupied by the Scholar and Divine who did High Church polemics for Mr. Lintot for half a crown a sheet. We have been told a vast deal within these latter days about the Curiosities, the Pursuits, the Amenities, the Miseries, of Literature ; but the polite world has yet much to learn concerning that Muse. Was her inspiration to be had for the paying for, and did she give credit ? By-the-by, she was sometimes called Coy, and I have heard her designated as Intrepid; but that was in a birthday ode about the battle of Dettingen. Her personal history, manners, and customs are, however, shrouded in mystery. The sum of what the literary gentlemen have told us in her regard is this : that she played upon a Lyre and resided on a Mount. It is a very painful and humiliating thing to be fain to confess that, on the threshold of an article which will not contain one line of poetry, but will be of the very plainest prose on the very plainest of subjects, I would give my ears to find a Muse who, for a reasonable consideration, would permit me to invoke her, and would Inspire my Lay and enable me to get to the end of it without committing five hundred blunders. Is there a Muse of Memory ? I am afraid there is not : but it is a Muse of that kind I wish to apostrophise. And if I addressed her as Snuffy, or as Smoky, or even as Cloudy, I should be deemed either stupid or irreverent. Still I desire no less than a Muse who is given to taking tobacco, a Muse who smokes a pipe, a Muse who can twist a cigarito ; but chiefly a Muse who will make me remember things. It is my ardent wish to return once more to the Island of Cuba, and to relate as much as I can call to mind about the famous cigars of Havana. I mentioned recently that I was a teetotum. I have spun round most violently since I last took that liberty. Dear me ! where is Havana and ah 1 my lore about cigars ? My note-book is at the bottom of the Lake of Garda ; and I know that I began an article on cigars one morning at Trieste, wrote the next paragraph at Milan, and cancelled both, as too digressional, at Samaden, in the canton of the Grisons. Just now, as I sit down despondingly and wish I had attended 74 UNDER THE SUN. the lectures of the professor who discourses on memory at the Royal Polytechnic Institution, the bells of Santa Maria della Salute at Venice strike twelve at midnight, and my Muse, hitherto coy to churlishness, appears and grants me all I wish. She is a nut-brown Muse nay, darker than the nut : as dark as chocolate. She is round, and smooth, and graceful, and is deliciously fragrant. I take her up very tenderly between my finger and thumb, and pressing her to my lips, bite off her nose. Then do I apply the flame of a waxen taper to her feet, and I begin to smoke my Muse. Straightway, in the spiral whirls of blue incense curling from my last cigar, the inspiration which I needed glides softly down upon me. Cuba comes back. The ghosts of a hundred memories start up and drum cheerfully on the lids of rose-coloured coffins. Wars and rumours of wars, camps, cities, seas, storms, and sick-beds, all fade away, and here I am in the Calle del Teniente Eey at Havana, bargaining with a volante- driver to take me and a companion to the great tobacco-factory of La Honradez. I remember it all. I went over the establishment, say only yesterday. First, we found out a dark counting-house in a darker street down town both made artificially sombre by screens and curtains, for the sun was salamandering about with his usual ferocity outside and sought Don Domingo. Most courteous of clerks in a Cuban banking-house was he. A tawny man with a close-cropped head of silver-gray, like an over-ripe orange slightly mildewed at top, his thews and sinews all dried in the sun like South American dried beef, but given, like that under the action of warm water, to become quite soft and tender when you were admitted to his intimacy. Don Domingo was intimately ac- quainted with the proprietors of La Honradez. To judge from the very high-dried odour which continually hung about him, he must have spent at La Honradez, himself, a handsome annual income in snuff and cigars. He gave us a Regalia apiece, to keep us in good spirits until we reached the factory, and then we picked our way through a maze of packing-cases and strong boxes, and reaching La Calle del Teniente Key, bargained, as I HAVANA CIGARITOS. 75 have said, with a volante-driver, and were soon set down before the portal of which we were in quest. I think the place had been, prior to the suppression of the monastic orders, a convent. It was large enough to have been that, or a barrack, or a penitentiary. The walls were amazingly thick ; but the windows, few as they were in number, were neither so rare nor so thickly grated but that the odour of fresh-chopped tobacco came gushing through them, like telegraphic messages from the State of Virginia and the Vuelta de Abajo. Have you ever driven along the Paris Boulevards at very early morning ? Have you ever noticed the fragrance issuing from the cafes on your line of route the smell of the coffee roasting and grinding for the day's consumption ? The gargons bring their mills on to the pavement, and from six to seven a.m. the Boulevards smell like Mincing Lane. Substitute tobacco for coffee, and you have the street savour of La Honradez. Penetrating into the great courtyard, the aroma became per- haps a trifle too forcible. It was as that, say, of the most delicate devil's dusfc thrown up by the sweetest shoddy mills. It was as though you were off some guano islands, the haunt only of birds of paradise. It is nevertheless certain that the air was laden with impalpable powder; that a sirocco of small-cut speedily filled your mouth, ears, and nostrils, and the pores of your skin ; and that your first salutation to La Honradez was a violent fit of sneezing. The courtyard was full of broken boxes and the banana-leaf or maize-straw wrappers of tobacco bales tobacco long since minced, and twisted, and smoked. There was an immense deal of litter and rubbish about; for, it must be owned, tidiness is not a thing you must expect to find in the tropics. There were also a number of the Sable Sons of Toil, and the Hapless Children of Bondage, lying about in attitudes suggestive to the artistic student of every conceivable variety of foreshorten- ing. They were asleep, and dreaming, probably, of pumpkin. Slavery I hold to be the dreariest and most detestable of tread- mills ; but in Cuba the thralls doomed to the degrading discipline 76 UNDER THE SUN. of the "stepper" seem to be oftener off than on the wheel, and either exercise or the want of it has a tendency towards making them comfortably fat. As a rule, if at broad noonday you see a negro awake, he is Free. If asleep, he is a Slave. At La Honradez only cigarettes, cigaritos, papelitos, or what- ever else you choose to call the little rolls of tissue-paper con- taining finely chopped smoking tobacco, are made. The process is very simple ; and we took the place only as a whet or relish before the more serious tobacco banquet which we were subse- quently to enjoy at the great cigar manufactory of Cabana. We passed through numbers of barn-like rooms, vast and dim, where, squatting on the floor in groups, negro men, women, and children were sorting the tobacco, stripping the leaves from the stalks, and arranging them in baskets for the chopping-mills. There exists a notion that any kind of tobacco is good enough to make cigaritos with, and that, on the principle said to be adopted in some sausage-making establishments, anything that comes near enough to the machine, be it beef, or pork, or a dog, or a cat, or a man, is forthwith sucked into the vortex and converted into polonies or saveloys. This notion, so far as it regards cigaritos, is, I am happy to believe, groundless. Very great care seemed to be taken in the assortment of the leaves and the selection of the prime parts ; and I was assured that the paper cigars of La Honradez were made from the choicest Havana tobacco obtainable. They are certainly very delicious to smoke. La Honradez is itself modestly conscious of its own merits, and on the little chromo-lithographed wrappers which surround each bundle of twenty-five cigaritos you read this motto: "Mis hechos me justificaran" "My works shall justify me." Other factories are more self-laudatory and less modest. " Todos me elogian " " All praise me," says one, on its wrappers. This may be true, only the establishment ought not to say so. " Mi f ama por el orbe vuela " "My fame is world-wide," exclaims a third. This again is a little too self-asserting ; for I would bet a reasonable number of gold ounces that my present respected reader never heard of that particular establishment for making cigaritos. HAVANA CIGARITOS. 77 The paper cigars of Havana are not perfect cylinders, closed at one end with a dexterous twist, and provided at the other with a mouthpiece of twisbed cardboard and a morsel of cotton- wool to absorb the essential oil. Those are the famous Russian cigarettes, * made at St. Petersburg or Moscow, of Turkish, Syrian, and Bessarabian tobacco. The Havana cigaritos consist mostly of so much finely-chopped tobacco placed in the middle of a little square of very thin paper, neatly rolled up into batons about an inch and a half long and an eighth of an inch thick, and closed at each end. The art of making them lies in there being just enough loose paper at the ends, but no more, to make the required twist, and in there being a perfectly homogeneous consistency of tobacco throughout the entire length. If the roll be too tight, or if, on the other hand, the tobacco be not evenly distributed, and it bulges in one part and is loose in another, the cigarito is useless. Indeed it must be made with almost perfect nicety to satisfy consumers : for almost every Spaniard has in his own fingers an innate gift for twisting and rolling his own cigaritos. We have grown quite familiar, owing to the French " sans nom " paper which for a season or two obtained immense vogue in Paris, with the tiny blank books from which leaves of tissue-paper could be torn to serve as envelopes for the tobacco. Neither the French nor the Germans, however, ever attained great proficiency in this most difficult and delicate art. The Italians abominate cigaritos, preferring to smoke the more abominable cigars of native manufacture ; and I think that the majority of Englishmen could more easily learn to curl hair or play on the mandolin two arts in which they are never very likely to excel than to roll cigarettes. To the Spaniard the trick conies naturally. He would roll up a papelito and twist it faultlessly, in a third-class carriage in the middle of the Box Tunnel. The old Spaniards however, it must be owned, are the best hands, or rather the best digits, at papelito making. The tropics " take it out " of a man, and the Creole Cuban is fain to allow his slaves to manufacture his cigars for him. Moreover, in Cuba, cigarettes are but a pastime. His real repast is in the Puros, or Havanas of the weed itself ; 78 UNDER THE SUN. whereas in Old Spain, genuine Havanas are, through the idiotic financial policy of the government, so difficult to obtain, and cigars of native manufacture are so execrable, that the Castilians smoke cigaritos in self-defence. Picking, sorting, and chopping tobacco, and packing it up in the little squares of tissue-paper, constitute only one section of the art cultivated at La Honradez. Some hundreds of young women and children, blacks, mulattoes, and quadroons, are employed in cutting and folding the paper and in packing the cigarettes into bundles and gumming the wrappers. These wrappers themselves necessitate the maintenance of a very large chromo- lithographic establishment ; and in an airy studio the sun's rays, however, tempered by screens of white gauze we found a number of Creole Spaniards at work, busily designing on stone the fantastic devices and pretty little vignettes, enveloped in which the far- famed cigaritos of La Honradez go forth to the world. The workmen who print these designs in colours, and manage a very elaborate steam lithographic pre?s (made, as I deciphered from a cast-iron inscription, at Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, United States), are a very odd kind of people indeed. They are not negroes, they are not mulattoes, they are not quadroons, still less are they Criollos or Creole Cubans, or Peninsulares, that is to say, European Spaniards. They are not precisely slaves ; yet they can- not exactly be termed free. There is one of these odd workmen perched on a high stool by the side of the machine, and intent on adjusting the pins to the due and proper register of one of the coloured wrappers. He is a limber-limbed young fellow, very thin, with very long, slender fingers, the which, with patient deftness, he knows well how to use. His complexion is of uniform pale saffron, of the texture of parchment, and he is perfectly beardless. He has very long, lustrous black hair falling over his shoulders. Tn the centre of his countenance, which in its yellow smoothness does not ill resemble a boiled batter-pudding, show, like currants in the said pudding, a pair of little sharp black eyes. His forehead is very low, his cheek-bones are very high, and about his lips there lingers continually a scarcely definable yet HAVANA CIGARITOS. 79 ineffable simper of complacent beatitude, due perhaps to an inward consciousness of merit, or to opium, or to sheer innate imbecility. Where have you seen that parchment face, those eyes, that upturned calmly conceited smirk before ? On a tea-tray ? On a tea-chest ? On a fan ? On a rice-paper view of the Porcelain Pagoda at Nankin ? To whom, in fine, should those features and that complexion belong, but to a brother of the Sun and Moon, a native of the Flowery Land, a native of the Celestial empire ? They appertain, indeed, here to a Chinese coolie. Where, you may ask, are his shaven poll and his pigtail ? That question is easily answered. The coolies in Havana let their hair grow, and are soon persuaded to discard their umbrella hats, nankeen knickerbockers, and bamboo shoes for the ordinary white linen habiliments of the West Indies. More than this, and strange enough to say, they do frequently submit to be baptised, to change their Celestial designations for names taken from the Christian hagiology, and so become, to all outward appearance, very decent Roman Catholics. Among Protestants, in California and Australia, the Chinaman clings most tenaciously to his native idolatry and his native customs, which are very nasty. He sticks to his pigtail, he sets up his joss-house, he burns perfumed paper to " the gods of genteel morals," he eats with chopsticks, and even imports dried ducks and other culinary offal from Canton or Chusan, to feed upon. But in Cuba, no sooner does he submit his queue to the barber's shear, and allow the priest to change his name from Kwang-Lew- Fung to Jose Maria, than he becomes at least as good a Christian as the negro : which is not saying much. To the end of the chapter, however, he remains essentially an odd fish. He is a capital workman, patient, cheerful, cunning, and indus- trious enough when he chooses ; but he does not always choose, and is subject to capricious intervals of monkey-like laziness and of a disposition to mutiny ; always in a restless, spiteful, monkey-like manner. It is quite useless to reason with him, for he has his own notions of logic and his own code of ethics. By 80 UNDER THE SUN. the law he cannot be flogged ; but his masters sometimes take the law into their own hands. If he be thrashed, he goes out and commits suicide. He whose forefathers may have been over- civilised some thousands of years ago, and the negro, who seems never to have been civilised at all since the world began, are about the most hopelessly impracticable beings ever created to be the curse and despair of philanthropists and missionaries. The more honour, perhaps, to the courage and devotion of the mis- F sionaries and philanthropists who persist in trying to reclaim the t irreclaimable, and to wash the blackamoor white, and to take \ away the spots from the leopard. Brave hearts ! May they go on trying, and never say die ! There are two hundred thousand of these coolies, it is said, in Cuba. The vast majority of them are " up the country," in the tobacco and sugar plantations. They are the substitute for slavery, as electro ware is the substitute for silver. They are as difficult to keep in good order and as generally unsatisfactory as substitutes for anything are generally found on trial to be. In the towns they are employed to a considerable extent as mechanics and as cooks ; in more than one private house I have found Chinese footmen and body-servants. They are said to be not unlike cats in their characters : necessary, harmless till they are crossed sharp, quiet, noiseless, contemplative, and very deceitful. There is a kind of jail or market for coolies at a place called El Corro, near Havana, and there they are sold I mean, there " contracts " can be made with their " trustees " for their labour for a stated term. At El Corro you may see them in their native dress and with their crowns shaven, all but a tuft on the top the stumps of their departed tails. A coolie may be purchased or " contracted " for, at a price varying between three and four hundred dollars. You are bound to pay the Chinaman you have bought four dollars per month, and to give him his victuals and two suits of clothes per year. For this he is bound to you for eight years. The contract is put in writing before a " juez de paz," and two copies are made, one in Chinese and the other in Spanish, to be kept respectively by the seller and the sold. The strongest CHINESE GOOLIES IN CUBA. Page 80 HAVANA CIGARITOS. 81 guarantee for the Chinaman receiving decent treatment at the hands of his master is the almost certainty of the former's com- mitting suicide if he be beaten. "Why the Celestial, who in his own country has been weaned on a course of bamboo, and has " eaten stick," as the Arabs say, every day of his life, should so bitterly resent corporal punishment at the hands of the stranger, I am unable to explain. This, however, is the fact. For my part, I thought the Chinaman had done very well to change his name from Kwang-Lew-Fung to Jose" Maria, and let his hair grow, and sit on a high stool printing coloured labels. Chromo-lithography is one of the prettiest pursuits imaginable ; and surely it was better to follow it here in peace, and with some- thing like a hire for one's labour, than to be fishing for ducks from a barge on the Canton river, or painting miniatures on the coffin of your grandmother, against that respected person's decease, or addressing hieroglyphic compliments in Indian ink to " the gods of genteel morals." After all, the alcalde is preferable to the local mandarin, with his incessant bamboo. We went to see the place where the coolie workmen of the Honradez were lodged. The dormitories were, for Cuba, wonder- fully clean and airy ; and under proper discipline, I was told, the Chinaman could be made to observe extraordinary neatness and propriety. The beds, or bunks, were in tiers one above the other, as in a passenger steamer, but were much more spacious. Every coolie had his locker for his clothes, and a shelf for his platter, pannikin, and drinking-mug. Above every bunk was printed the name of its occupant. I read a most orthodox catalogue of Jose Marias, Andres, Augustins, Basilios, Benitos, Beltrans, Cristobals, Manuels, Eustaquios, Gils, Enriques, Jacobos, Pepes, Jayrnes, Juans, Domingos, Lazaros, Mauricios, Pablos, Filipes, Rafaels, Estebans, Tadeos, Tomases, Vicentes, and Guillermos. There was one Eusquilo, or ^Eschylus, and one Napoleone, who the last was described as the biggest rascal in the whole gang : the which reminded me that names very seldom suit their possessors, and that the only man I ever knew who had been christened Virgil was a most egregious donkey. F #2 UNDER THE SUN. We were not allowed to leave La Honradez without an " obse- quio" or complimentary offering, and, according to the etiquette of Spanish politeness, this backsh-ish was administered in the most delicate and artful manner. We were asked to sign our names and addresses in the visitors' book, and then, on some pretext or another, we were taken to a remote apartment. Just as we were quitting the establishment, and were thanking the superintendent for the great kindness and courtesy he had shown us, a coolie stepped forward, and, with a low bow and an inimitable simper, presented each of our party with a packet of cigaritos, on whose labels, flourishing in chromo-lithography, were our Christian and surnames, printed at full length. The operation had been effected in about six minutes. It is certain that they have a very nice way of doing things in Havana. 83 VI. HAVANA CIGARS. HE wakes. She is all alive. I have got my Muse fast at Florian's, on St. Mark's Place, Venice, and on a sumptuous summer night. The great full moon hangs over our heads, imminent, like the sign of the World Turned Upside Down. I have regaled my Muse with iced coffee and macaroons. She has even partaken of a "bicchierino" of maraschino. A bicchierino isn't it a dainty name for a dram ? Then, rubbing my hands in uncharitable glee, to think that yonder white-jerkined Tedesco officers have nothing choicer to smoke than three-halfpenny " Virginias " the actual Virginia of their birth being probably the Terra di Lavoro, or the Island of Sardinia I produce from that private case, which has hitherto eluded the lynx eyes of the German Zollverein, the Spanish Duana, and the Italian Dogana, a real cigar a Regalia Britannica, "Flor Una, Maduro : Havana, 1864." My Muse lights up at once, and pours forth memory in clouds. You need not be in the least shocked at the idea of this young lady from Parnassus, otherwise a most decorous person, graduate of the Hyde Park College, and who has been nursery-governess in a nobleman's family, indulging in a cigar as big as a BB pencil, at ten o'clock at night, in front of a public coffee-house. Between ourselves be it mentioned, there are many ladies in Venice who are to the full as inveterate smokers as the ladies of Seville. My Muse, perhaps, is the only high-born dame who puffs in the open Piazza ; but then she is invisible to the vulgar, and an Immortal. You shall scarcely, however, take an evening airing in your gondola without observing numerous fair and graceful 84 UNDER THE SUN. forms at their open windows, or in their balconies, enjoying, not the pretty puerility of the papelito, but the downright and athletic exercitation of the full-grown cigar. About sundown, on most evenings, our gondoliers row us from the Ponte de' Fuseri to the Giardini Pubblici. We strike the Grand Canal a little below the garden of the Palazzo Reale. At the left-hand corner of the canal from which we emerge there is a pretty little mansion, Venetian Gothic in style, and, for Venice, in excellent repair. It is precisely the little mansion which, if its bodily eradication, shipment to Liverpool, and removal to London, on the American system of rollers, was judged impossible, I should like to cause Mr. Barry, E.A., to build for me in Curzon Street, Mayfair ; and then, with the title-deeds of the freehold in my strong-box, and the bins of my bijou house well ballasted with curious hocks and peculiar clarets, I would lead a chirping life, entertaining my friends, drinking even mine enemy's health, and wishing him better luck the next time he went out stabbing. At a charming oriel window of this tiny palazzetto there is sure to be, about this sunset hour, a plump, jovial-looking little lady very ike the portraits of the Countess Guiccioli and who is pulling at a cigar at least half an inch longer and stouter than my Regalia Britannica. I think the plump little lady smokes Ambasciadores a kind of cigar which you hesitate about consuming habitually unless your income exceeds fifteen thousand a year. In about an hour after sunset we glide back from the Giardini towards the Rialto, and there, at the same oriel window, we are sure to find the same plump little lady pulling away as vigorously as ever at her weed. It is not, I am afraid, the same cigar. Even in an Ambasciador there are not more than forty-five minutes' steady and continuous smoking. It has grown dark by this time, and through the open casement I can see a delicious little salon with a frescoed ceiling, containing that "copiosa quantita d' amoretti" which Cardinal Maurice, of Savoy, was so anxious that Albano, the painter, should supply him with. I see a chandelier, glittering with crystal pendants and wax-lights the good old candles of yellow wax, not the meagre, bleached, half- HAVANA CIGARS. 85 hearted gentilities the chandlers sell us too often nowadays. I see walls with silken draperies, and choice pictures, and rare Venice mirrors, with frames like a whole horticultural show carved in gold. The furniture of the salon is of precisely the pattern I should wish Messrs. Jackson and Graham to send me into Curzon Street : sparing no expense, and asking no questions about settlement. I hope that the eyes which have thus dived into the penetralia of a Venetian dwelling-house are not impertinent. Where is the use of having pretty things if you don't allow the world outside to admire them ? and are not all the really nice people who possess pretty things always ready to exhibit their treasures ? Finally, at the window of this enchanting chamber, amidst flowers in boxes and flowers in vases, and with a sprightly little Maltese dog snoozing in her sleeve, is the prettiest picture of all the plump little lady, blowing her placid cloud : " Se non son piu Sovrana, Son sempre Veneziana," she seems to be warbling between her whiffs, in that endearing dialect of the Adriatic which is as soft as creme a la vanille, and a great deal healthier. I salute you, noble lady of Venice ! Did I dare to launch into familiarity did I presume to indulge in slang, I might say what I think that you are a " brick." In any case, I prefer you to Medora in her bower, to Mariana in the South, and to the Lady of Shalott. I would bow to you, Lady mine, were not bowing under the coved roof of a gondola almost as difficult a feat as bowing in bed. More than once the little lady has waved a smoke-spiral amicably towards me. There is a certain freemasonry among smokers. I am thinking that to-morrow evening I shall wave my handkerchief to her, when I am violently pulled back on to the cushions of the gondola, and the boatmen are instructed in a passionate feminine voice to row faster homewards. There is no harm, surely, in wishing to wave one's handkerchief to such a remarkably plump and jovial-looking little lady. Yes, red-sashed boatman, even with my ears boxed, take me 86 UNDER THE SUN. home ; and then, when I have filled my inkhorn and nibbed my pen, take me, if you please, back to Havana. Never mind the heat. We shall be hotter before we are through this day's work. Never mind the dust. The sea-breeze will blow some time after gun-fire, and if you can exist unsmothered until then, you will be refreshed. Let us hail the first volante, whose dark and merry- faced postillion invites us to enter, and drive to the cigar manu- factory, world famous and unequalled in the world, perhaps, of " La Hija de Cabana y Carvajal." For shortness it is called " Cabana's." There is no longer a palpable Cabana in the flesh. Firms remain, but partners pass away. Is there a Child ? Is there a Fortnum, or haply a Mason? Is there a Chevet, or a Widow Clicquot ? Did you ever see Swan and Edgar walking together ? There has not been a Cramer for twenty years ; and what con- temporary man ever knew Boodle ? The actual representative of the great Cuban house of Cabana is the Senor Anselmo del Yalle. I had had the advantage of a special introduction to this gentle- man at his retail establishment ere I visited his factory. The monarch of Nicotine sat enthroned among odoriferous cedar boxes and cigars yet more fragrant, serene and sweet- smelling, like an old Turk merchant in the Bezesteen among his shawls, and chibouks, and spices, and rose-attar. A lissom, dusky, oily- looking man, if I remember aright, with a lustrous, bush-like moustache, and who, reclining in a low chair, and in a full suit of white linen, was gently perspiring. The chief monarch of the great mosque of Araby the blest, this Senor Anselmo del Yalle. What a halcyon existence ! A mattress of lotus-hair a con- tinuous and diaphanous drapery of grateful incense hanging round. Nothing to do all day long save to loll in a rocking- chair, and take gold ounces in exchange for boxes of superfine Cabanas. For the cigar business is essentially a ready-money one. So many cigars as you make you can sell ; and so many cigars as you sell do you get paid for, in Havana, on the nail. I have often thought that to be a brewer of pale ale at Burton- on-Trent must be the acme of human felicity. You have only to HAVANA CIGARS. 87 go on brewing barrels of beer, and an ever-thirsty public will go on buying and paying. Dr. Johnson had an inkling of this when, taking stock, as executor under Thrale's will, of the great brewhouse which was afterwards to become Barclay and Perkins's, he told Topham Beauclerk that he had at last discovered the " source of boundless prosperity and inexhaustible riches." When I. went to Havana, however, I was fain to place the vat in the second rank. The superlative degree I reserve for the cigar trade. "Boundless prosperity and inexhaustible riches" are, in the case of a Cabana or an Anselmo del Yalle, associated with something even more productive of happiness. The cigar merchant can pass at least eighteen hours out of the twenty-four in the delicious occupation of smoking his own cigars. Now the Burton brewer, however fond he may be of the famous decoction of hops, malt, and the water of the Mendip Hills, fermented on the placid banks of Trent, can scarcely go on drinking his own pale ale all day long. Nature wouldn't stand it. The brain and stomach would alike revolt from this perpetual state of beer. As a rule, traders are averse from consuming their own wares. Some, sagacity warns off; others, satiety sickens. Your pro- vincial innkeeper does not share with a very good grace, and with a chance guest, the bottle of red ink, logwood, and spirits of turpentine which he sells as claret, and charges ten-and-sixpence for. The grocer's apprentice soon grows tired of filching figs and munching raisins ah ! how nice they were when, as children, we were allowed to stone the plums for the Christmas pudding, and stole more than we stoned ! on the sly. The pastrycook's girl runs to the counter, indulges in a revel of patties and jam tarts ; but in a fortnight she becomes palled, and a wilderness of sweets rarely invites her to browse. It is different with the merchant who sells good cigars. He knows when he is well off, and makes the most of his oppor- tunity. " Carpe diem" is his motto, as it was that of the Regent Orleans. Heart-complaint, paralysis, liver-complaint, dyspepsia, cerebral disease in its thousand-and-one forms, may menace those who smoke too much ; but the merchant knows when he has a 88 UNDER THE SUN. good article on hand, and continues to smoke the choicest weeds in his stock. A cigar merchant who did not smoke seems to me quite as much of a monster as that French bibliomaniac of the eighteenth century, whom La Bruyere knew, who had a library of eighty thousand volumes, splendidly bound, and who confessed that he never read a book. " I think," says La Bruyere, in his mention of this person, " that he only amassed volumes because he liked the smell of new leather. But why, then, didn't he turn tanner instead of bookworm ?" I have a distinct impression that after Seiior Anselmo del Valle had squeezed my hand he squeezed everybody's hand on my being presented to him, he left in my palm a Cabana Regalia. They give away cigars in Cuba as they give away pinches of snuff elsewhere. I went into the back warehouse to choose a case of Prensados for ordinary smoking, and the warehouseman gave me a handful just to try what their flavour might be like. These are among the "obsequies." When I got home to mine inn that evening, I found even a more splendid olsequio from the Cabana factory, in the shape of a beautiful crystal casket framed in gilt bronze, inscribed with my name "Caballero Ingles" being added as a dignity and containing one hundred of the superla- tive cigars known as Excepcionales. These are said to be worth in England half a crown apiece, and are, indeed, only manufac- * tured in order to be dispensed to crowned heads or presented as olisequios to tourists. I am ashamed to say that sentiments of gratitude apart I would grudge sixpence for the best Excepcionale that ever was made. Their mere fabrication is beyond compare. They are perfect convoluted cylinders of tobacco-leaf mathematically symmetrical, showing not a join, a vein, or a pimple with the broad end as round and smooth as that of a Cumberland pencil ; with the narrow end as sharply blunt a paradox, but a truth, for all that as the agate burnisher used for embossing diapers in illumination. I think that were you to throw an Excepcionale into the midst of Westminster Hall, it would not break, nor lie, but the rather rebound, elastic, and come back to you at last, HAVANA CIGARS. 89 intact, but bent, boomerang fashion. Its defect is that it is a world too light that is to say, too mild in flavour and that like all mild cigars, it is hot in the mouth. To the thorough smoker there is no more feverish tobacco than the lightest Latakia, and no cooler than the strongest Cavendish. Mild- tobacco smoking leads to drinking : witness the Turk, with his continually replenished coffee-cup, and the German, who washes down the chopped-up hay-stacks which he crams into his pipkin of a pipe with innumerable mugs of beer. From the hospitable retail establishment of the seiior to his factory, or rather that of the Hija de Cabana y Carvajal, is a drive .of about twenty minutes. The Fabrica is a grandiose building of white stone, and of the architectural style which may be described as West Indian Doric : that is to say, with plenty of porticos and columns and vestibules, erected much more for the purpose of producing coolness than pictorial effect. There are at least a thousand operatives employed here ; but the mere number of hands is no test of the importance of a cigar manufactory. At the huge Reale Fabrica de Tabacos, in Seville, over four thousand men and women, nearly half of them gipsies, find employment. The Regie at Algiers gives daily work to over fifteen hundred hands. The cigar factories of Bordeaux, Barcelona, Anceno, and ^enice are on a corresponding scale of magnitude ; but please to bear in mind that the staple of the things made in the usines I have named is mere muck, rubbish, refuse ; whereas the Hija de Cabana y Carvajal turns out only choice and fragrant rolls of superfine tobacco. If anything could improve on the dreamy balminess which falls on the contemplative mind in these vast halls, all devoted to the treatment and preparation of tobacco, it would be the fact that the ceiling of every room is of cedar. 'Tis in the groves of Mount Lebanon, or if you choose to be more prosaic, in an atmosphere of lead-pencils, that your weeds are made. I confess that ere I had been half an hour in the Cabana factory I became immersed in a kind of happy fog or state of coma, such as ordinarily incited Messrs. Coleridge and De Qnincey in the good 90 UNDER THE SUN. old days when it was thought no harm to crack a decanter full of laudanum before dinner to literary composition. This must serve as my excuse for the very vague manner in which I am enabled to describe the process of making cigars. I know that I saw great bales and bundles of tobacco, just brought in from the plantations, being weighed in one long hall by negro women. The stuff was piled into monstrous scales, like those used in their dealings with the Indians who had furs to sell by the crafty traders in old Manhattan who laid down the axiom that a Dutchman's foot weighed ten pounds, and popped their foot into the scale accordingly. I know that I subsequently saw tobacco in all stages of being cleaned and picked and sorted, the finer leaves being reserved for the coverings or sheaths of the cigars, the less choice being used to form what magazine editors call "padding," and the Cubans themselves, when speak- ing of cigars, " las tripas" a term not quite translatable to genteel ears, but which I may render in a guarded manner as " insides." If you offer a Spaniard a cigar not with a view that he should smoke, but that he should criticise it he will, after expressing the preliminary wish that you may live a thousand years, produce a sharp penknife and slice the weed through diagonally. Then with a strong magnifying-glass he will scrutinise " las tripas," and tell you as confidently as any Loudon or Linnaeus could, the precise order of vegetation to which the cigar belongs whether it is of the superfine " vuelta de aba jo," the Clos Vougeot of Nicotia, or of some inferior growth, either from the Island of Cuba itself, or from Hayti, or Porto Rico, or Virginia, or Maryland, or the Carolinas, or haply from the south and east of Europe ; for vast quantities of Hungarian, Austrian, Sardinian, and Bessarabian tobacco do find their way to Cuba, and come back to us in the guise of prime Havanas that is certain. A minute investigation of " las tripas" may also lead to the painful disclosure that the cigar is not composed of tobacco at all. The periodical reports of her Majesty's Commissioners of Inland Revenue point out, pretty plainly, HAVANA CIGARS. 91 what vile stuff is sometimes foisted on the public as genuine tobacco. You run no risk, of course, of having a sophisticated cigar from the factory of the Hija de Cabana y Carvajal. Their wares are of different qualities just as claret is, and the quality perhaps takes as wide a range as Bordeaux takes between ordinary Medoc and Chateau Lafitte. But a Cabana cigar bought at Cabana's, Uen entendu, or at any reputable dealer's in London (no foreign cigar merchant I ever met with could be trusted even so far as I could see him) is sure to be made of genuine tobacco. You are quite safe, also, with a cigar from the Partagas factory and there are many amateurs who prefer Partagas to Cabanas ; you are equally safe with an Alvarez ; with a Cavargas ; with a Lopez ; with a Cealdos (of the Guipuzcoana manufactory), and especially with a Figaro. Some persons imagine the name of " Figaro " to be that of a brand or form of cigar, such as a " Henry Clay " or a " Londres ;" but it is really that of a factory. I may mention our "Lion" and "Komford" breweries by way of analogy. I need not say that there are scores more respectable traders in Havana who make good and unadulterated cigars ; but the names I have set down are those best known and most popular with smokers. On the broadest principle of classification, the cigars which are really brought from the Island of Cuba to Europe may be divided into three great groups. First, genuine Havanas, of various degrees of fineness, but, from stem to stern, sheath and " tripas," made of tobacco grown, cured, and rolled in the Island of Cuba. Second, cigars composed inside of United States or of European tobacco, imported into the island, but with an outside wrapper of Havana leaf. Third and last, cigars brought ready made into Havana from Europe mostly from Bremen and Switzerland passed through some export house unfair enough to be an accom- plice in such dealings, and re-exported to Europe. You rarely meet with these doubly sham cigars in England ; but they form the staple of the article retailed at extravagant prices to travellers at continental hotels. They smoke so abominably that the con- 92 UNDER THE SUN. sumer usually jumps at the conclusion that they are simply " duffers," with forged brands and labels on the boxes ; but if he imparts this assumption to the waiter, that functionary may in his turn often assume an air of injured innocence and virtuous indig- nation. He can tell the complainant the name of the wholesale dealer from whom he has purchased the cigars ; nay, he is often enabled to point out on the box the actual government stamp, and the amount of duty paid on the contents as foreign cigars. I have gone down with a waiter to a custom-house and seen him clear from the ship and pay duty upon the cigars he has sold me, and yet have found them afterwards to be the merest rubbish. It is unjust to make Cuba responsible for the prevalence of such trash. The rubbishing cigars have been to Havana, but were not made there. What is it the Bulbul in the Persian poem remarks relative to the rose ? I think he observes that he is not that flower, but that he has lived near her. So Bremen, which has paid a flying visit to Havana, may be regarded as a kind of rascally Bulbul. This species of fraud is too clumsy and too slow for the great English people. We, who are so very hard on the Americans for their " smartness," habitually resort in trade to perhaps the most ingenious swindles, the most impudent deceptions, and the meanest and most detestable "dodges " of any nation in the world. We adulterate everything. We forge everything. "We would adulterate the mother earth which is thrown on our coffins when we are buried, if that fraud would pay. There is not a petty tobacconist's shop in a London back street without a stock of cigar boxes, whose brands, whose printed labels down to the bluntness of the Spanish type and the poverty of the Spanish wood-engravings are cool and literal forgeries of the Spanish originals. These brands and labels are forged quite as neatly as bank-notes are forged ; but this is a " trick of trade" which has not yet become felony. I have seen with my own eyes, in a great English town, and in a cigar factory employing three hundred men, the brands ready for heating and stamping a kind of chamber of horrors where there were no less than ninety different HAVANA CIGARS. 93 trade-marks purporting to be those of leading houses in Havana, and all of which were false. The excuse of the people who resort to these wretched artifices is, that they vend the wares thus spuriously branded and labelled as " British," and not as "foreign" cigars. What's in a name ? they ask ; and so they call a cabbage a Cabana, just for the fun of the thing. But would it be fair, I may ask, to stamp the little figure of the " perro," or dog, which is the trade-mark of the real Toledo blade, on the haft of a carving-knife made at Lie"ge, or to brand " Moe't et Chandon " on the cork of a bottle of cider ? There are, doubtless, numbers of highly trustworthy cigar manu- facturers in England who make their cigars of the very best foreign tobacco that can be imported ; but I must refer again to the reports of the Commissioners of Inland Eevenue for some very ugly revelations made from time to time as to fines inflicted on manufacturers who adulterate their tobacco ; and in any case the practice of marking the boxes which contain home-made cigars, even if they be of good tobacco, with the names and brands of celebrated Havana houses, is unfair, untradesmanlike, and im- moral. I daresay, however, that I am but fighting with wild beasts at Ephesus in alluding to such matters, and that I shall get but scratches for my pains. Only, to unwary people who happen to be young and wealthy I will say this : whenever you have any- thing to do with cigars, or with sherry, or with pictures, or with horses, look out. Some advisers would include women and dia- monds in their caveat ; but I halt at horses. They may have a flaw in them, but a woman is a woman and a diamond a diamond, and you can tell paste at once. A visit to Cabana's manufactory, although it failed in enabling me to describe with terseness combined with accuracy the process of cigar-making, had at least one beneficial result in disabusing my mind of a variety of absurd stories which I, and I daresay a good many of those who read this paper, had heard regarding the process as pursued in the Island of Cuba, To believe these legends, cigar-making is one of the nastiest, nay, the most revolt- ing of handicrafts, and the manner in which the tobacco is rolled 94 UNDER THE SUN. and shaped by imperfectly clad young ladies of the African race and in a state of servitude is, to say the least, shocking. There may be small manufacturers at Havana who own but two or three slaves, or employ but two or three workwomen, and they may do their work in a brutish and uncleanly manner ; but so far as my own experience at the Hija de Cabana y Carvajal's renders me a trustworthy witness, I may vouch for the scrupulous cleanliness and delicacy with which every single stage in the process of cigar- making is conducted. I have seen barley-sugar made and I have seen bread made, and I certainly consider the manufacture of cigars to be a nicer transaction than either bread or sweetstuff making. Nothing can be more orderly, more symmetrical, than the appearance of the cutting and shaping room. The operators sit to their work and make the cigars with their ringers, but do not roll them into shape by attrition on their sartorial muscles, as is popularly supposed. Every operator has his counter or desk, his sharp cutting tools and his pot of gum for fastening the tips, with his stock of assorted tobacco-leaf in baskets by his side. It is a competitive vocation. The best workmen are best off. Payment is by results. Many of the hands employed are negro slaves, or were so when I was in Havana ; but the finer cigars, the prime Cabanas, the Napoleones, the Excepcionales and Regalias, are made exclusively by white Creole Spaniards, who are paid according to the number they can turn out a day, and many of whom realise very handsome wages. Good cigars "are very dear in Havana. You may get a weed for a penny or three-halfpence ; or sometimes, by industriously rooting among the small manufacturers, you may pick up cigars very cheap indeed, which if you throw them into a drawer and allow them to season for six months, may turn out to be tolerable ; but an approved and warranted cigar from a first-rate house will always fetch its price, and our heavy import duties notwithstand- ing, is not much cheaper in Havana than it is in England. I may add that it is generally understood in the cigar trade that the very finest and choicest qualities of Havana cigars go to HAVANA- CIGARS. 95 England simply because the largest prices can be commanded there ; yet I believe I am rather under than above the mark in stating that there are not thirty cigar dealers in London from whom fine and choice Havanas can be procured. It has been computed although I have no official authority for the state- ment that of the cigars manufactured by the Hija de Cabana y Carvajal at least forty per cent, go to England, thirty per cent, to the United States California taking the largest quantity ten per cent, to Brazil, five to Russia, five to France, five to Spain, two to Germany, two to Australia, leaving one per cent, for Italy and other fractional consumers of real cigars ; and yet the Italians are the most inveterate smokers in Europe. They prefer, however, their own home-made Cavours, which are a half- penny apiece and slowly poisonous, to the more wholesome but more expensive Cabana. I forgot to state .that, before I left the Cabana premises, I smoked and enjoyed very much a full-flavoured Regalia, for whose structure I had myself selected the leaves, and which I saw rolled, shaped, gummed, and pointed, with my own eyes. It was like being at Joe's in Finch Lane. 96 VII. A HABD KOAD TO TRAVEL. T was part of the ineffable system of sweetness and light known as the wisdom of our ancestors, to whip all the children on the morning of Innocents' Day, "in order that the memorial of Herod's murder might stick the closer." The wisdom of our contemporaries, while it has discarded the brutal practice of annually reacting the Massacre of the Innocents on a secondary scale, still retains a trace of the disagreeable mediseval custom, in respect of the strict connection maintained in many households between Biblical study and afflictive punishment, and the intimate alliance between chapters from Jeremiah to be gotten by heart, and bread and water and dark cupboards. Who the philanthropic discoverer of child torture as a prelude to a church festival may have been, is uncertain ; perhaps he was a near relative of the bright spirit who hit on the ingenious devices to which the puddling of iron and the glazing of pottery are but trifling puerilities of confining black beetles in walnut shells and binding them over the eyes of infants ; or of that ardent lover of his species connected with the educational profession whose researches into the phenomena of physical pain led him to the inestimable discovery that by boring a hole or any number of holes in a piece of wood with which a child's hand is struck, a corresponding number of blisters may be raised on the smitten palm. Our good ancestors can we ever be sufficiently grateful for the rack, or for the whirligig chair framed by medical wisdom for the treatment of acute mania ! blended the Innocents' Day custom with many of the observances of social life. If they were wicked, A HARD ROAD TO TRAVEL. 97 these ancestors of ours, they were at least waggish in their wickedness. If the boundaries of a parish or the limits of an estate needed accurate record, they laid down a boy on the ascertained frontiers, and flogged him so soundly that he never forgot where the parish of St. Verges ended or where that of St. Brooms began. Fifty years afterwards, if he were summoned as a witness at Nisi Prius, he would relate, quickened by the memory of his stripes, every topographical condition of the limits under discussion. The phantom of this sportive mode of combining cruelty with land-surveying yet survives in the annual outings of charity children to "beat the bounds." Formerly the charity boys and not the bounds were beaten ; but now even the long willow wands with which bricks and mortar are castigated are falling into desuetude, and although the ceremony is still kept up in some parishes the rector in his black gown and a chimney- pot hat, and bearing a large nosegay in his hand, being a sight to see it is feared that beating the bounds will, in a few years, be wholly abolished, owing to the gradual but sure extinction of Beadles, as a race. Another vestige of what may be called Innocenticism lingered until recently in certain pleasant municipal excursions termed ' " swan hoppings," when some corpulent gentlemen, with a con- siderable quantity of lobster salad and champagne beneath their waistcoats, were sportively seized upon by the watermen of the Lord Mayor's barge, and " bumped " on posts or rounded blocks of stone. The solemn usage had some reference, it is to be presumed, to the liberties of the City, as guaranteed by the charter given by William the king to William the bishop, and Godfrey the portreeve. Or it might obscurely have related to the Conservancy of the Thames. Substantially it meant half a crown to the Lord Mayor's watermen. In the south of France there may be found growing, all the year round, as fine a crop of ignorance and fanaticism as the sturdiest Conservative might wish to look upon. The populace of Toulouse would hang the whole Galas family again to-morrow if they had a chance. The present writer was all but stoned once G 98 UNDER THE SUN. at Toulon for not going down on his knees in the street in honour of the passage of an absurd little joss, preceded by a brass band, a drum-major, a battalion of the line, and a whole legion of priests. The country people still thrash their children mercilessly whenever a gang of convicts go by on their way to the lagne, and especially on the morning of the execution of a criminal. And it is a consolation to arrive at the conclusion, from patent and visible facts, that wherever wisdom in its Ancestral form triumphantly flourishes, there dirt, sloth, ignorance, superstition, fever, pestilence, and recurring famihes do most strongly flourish too. It may seem strange to the reader that, after venturing upon these uncomplimentary comments on our forefathers' sagacity, the writer should candidly proceed to own his belief that the human memory may be materially strengthened as to facts and dates by the impressions of bodily anguish suffered concurrently with a particular day or a particular event. Such, however, is the fact, although of course it cannot be accepted as a plea in extenuation of the most barbarous cruelty. For example, if the next time a tramp sought hospitality at the Guildford union the guardians forthwith seized upon such tramp and caused him to be branded with a hot iron from head to foot, and in Roman capitals, with the words, " The guardians of the Guildford union refuse to relieve the Casual Poor," the stigmatised vagrant would, to the day of his death, remember that Guildford union workhouse was not a place whereat bed and breakfast should be asked for. Still there is no combating the fact that the remembrances of agony are lasting. I have a very indistinct recollection of things which took place twenty or even ten years ago ; and I often ask myself with amazement whether it is possible that I could ever have written such and such a letter or known such a man or woman. Yet with microscopic minuteness I can recall a yellow hackney-coach the driver had a carbuncle on the left side of his nose which, once upon a time, conveyed my nurse and myself to the residence of a fashionable dentist in Old Cavendish Street, London. I can remember the black footman who opened the A HARD ROAD TO TRAVEL. 99 -door, and the fiendish manner in which he grinned, as though to show that his molars needed no dentistry. I can remember the dog's-eared copy of the " Belle- Assemblee " on the waiting-room table ; the widow lady with her face tied up, moaning by the window ; the choleric old gentleman in nankeen trousers who swore terrifically because he was kept waiting ; the frayed and threadbare edges of the green baize door leading to the dentist's torture chamber; the strong smell of cloves and spirits of wine and warm wax about ; the dentist himself his white neckcloth and shining bald head ; his horrible apparatus ; his more horrible morocco-covered chair ; the drip, drip of water at the washstand ; the sympathising looks of my nurse ; the deadly dew of terror that started from my pores as the monster seized me ; and finally, that one appalling circular wrench, as though some huge bear with red-hot jaws he has favoured us all in dreams were biting my head off, and found my cervical vertebras troublesome : all these come back to me palpably. Yet I had that tooth out eight-and- thirty years ago. A hard road to travel ! I should have forgotten all about that road by this time but for the intolerable pain I endured when I was travelling upon it. I have crossed Mont Cenis a dozen times, yet I should be puzzled to point out the principal portions of the landscape to a stranger. I could not repeat without book the names of the Khine castles between Cologne and Mayence. I am sure I don't know how many stations there are between London and Brighton. And I am not by any means " letter " or " figure perfect" in the multiplication-table, although the road up to nine times eight was in my time about as hard travelling as could be gone through by a boy with a skin not quite so thick as that of a rhinoceros. But every inch of the hard road I happened to travel in the spring of 1864 a road which stretches for some three hundred miles from the city of Vera Cruz to the city of Mexico is indelibly impressed on my memory. Since then I have journeyed many thousands of miles over roads of more or less duresse ; and in the Tyrol, in Venetia, in Spain, in Algeria, I have often tested by sudden inward query the tenacity 100 UNDER THE SUN. remaining in the reminiscence of that road in Mexico. Yon turn to the right from the great quay of Yera Cruz, passing the castle of San Juan de Ulloa. You drive to a wretched railway station and take the train (I am speaking of 1864) to a place called La Soledad, some five-and-twenty miles inland. There you sleep. Next morning at daybreak you start in a carriage along the great Spanish highway, and by nightfall make Cordova. At four on the following morning you, drive to Orizaba you are taking things quietly, mind, in consequence of the road and pass the day there. Again on the morrow you start at four a.m. from Cordova for Sant' Augustin del Palmar, where you dine and sleep. The next day's journey brings you by sunset to Puebla. The next day you make Rio Frio, in time for breakfast, and at about five in the afternoon you pass the Garita, or customs- barrier, and are in the city of Montezuma, the capital of Mexico. That is the road. I spent, going up, six days on the journey ; but I was an inmate of a private carriage. I came down again in a public diligence in three days; but for reasons I shall explain afterwards, the agony of the private travelling carriage far surpassed that of the stage-coach. Ostensibly I had no reason for grumbling. I was the guest of a kind friend whose carriage had been built in New York with a special view to Mexican highways, and who, being a great friend and patron of the contractor for the Imperial diligences Mexico was an empire in '64 was certain of relays of mules all the way from the sea-coast to the capital. We had a good store of wine with us, and plenty of Havana cigars ; and in the way of edibles, the commissariat of Mexico is as abundant as that of Old Spain is meagre.* The route was singularly clear from highway robbers at * It is curious that in countries where wine is plentiful there should be nothing procurable to eat, and that in non- wine-growing, but beer or cider- producing countries the traveller should always be sure of a good dinner. Out of the beaten track in Italy, a tourist runs the risk of being half starved. In Spain, he is starved habitually and altogether ; but he is sure of victuals in England, in America, and in Kussia. Even in the East, fowls, eggs, kids, and rice are generally obtainable in the most out-of-the- way places ; but many a time have I been dismissed hungry from a village A HARD ROAD TO TRAVEL. 101 that time ; the French being in force at Cordova, Orizaba, and Puebla, and patrolling every league of the way, not only with their own dragoons, but with local levies known as contra- guerrilleros. Finally, we had taken the precaution of leaving behind us in safe care at Vera Cruz, our watches, gold onzas, and other valuables, keeping only a few loose dollars for the expenses of the journey. I even left my clothes and servant on the coast, and during the six weeks I remained in Mexico city was not only boarded and lodged, but washed and clothed by my generous host : even to the articles of purple and fine linen, lapis-lazuli wrist- buttons, a Mexican hat as broad as a brougham wheel, and a pair of spurs with rowels as big as cheese-plates. So, if we had been robbed on the way, the guerillas would have found very little of which to plunder us. The pain, the misery, the wretchedness I endured, almost without intermission for six days at night you generally dreamed of your bumps, and suffered all your distresses over again were entirely due to the abominable road upon which we entered, for our sins, at La Soledad, and which we did not leave until we came to the very custom-house barrier of Mexico. Ten years * have passed since I travelled on the Czar's highway and found it bad. I have waded through the Virginian mud since then ; have made acquaintance with muleback on the banks of the Guadalquivir ; have tried a camel (for a very short time) at Oran. But I can conscientiously declare that I never found so hard a road to travel as that road between Yera Cruz and Mexico, and I am confident that, were I to live to sixty years of age (the Mexican railway by that time being completed and paying fifteen per cent, on its stock, and a beautifully Macadamised carriage road running beside it for three hundred miles), and I were questioned as to what the Mexican highway was like in 1864, I should, on the "beating the bounds" principle, preserve as lively a remembrance of its hostelry in France with the cutting remark : " Monsieur, nous n'avons plus rien." There is an exception to the rule in Grermany I except Prussia which bounteous land runs over with wine, beer, beef, veal, black and white bread, potatoes, salad, and sauerkraut. * This was written in 1866. 102 UNDER THE SUN. horrors as I preserve of it now, a peaceable and contented daily traveller on the Queen's highway and the Metropolitan railway. Had I not been somewhat obtuse, I might have noticed on board the steamer which brought us from Havana that my friend was nervous, even to uneasiness, as to the form my earliest im- pressions of Mexican travelling might assume. I must expect to " rough it " a little, he remarked. I answered that I had tried an American ambulance wagon and a M'Clellan saddle, and that I could not imagine anything rougher than those aids to locomotion. " Our roads are not quite up to the mark of Piccadilly," he would hint sometimes. "You see, since the French came to attack Juarez everything has been knocked into a cocked-hat." How- ever, he always wound up his warnings by declaring that we shouldn't find a single robber on the road, and that we should go up to Mexico " like a fiddle." If the state in which I eventually reached Mexico bore any resemblance to the musical instrument in question, it must have been akin to that of the fiddle of the proprietor of the bear in " Hudibras," warped and untuned, with my bow broken, a fracture in my stomach, another in my back, and my strings flying all abroad. I sincerely hope that I shall never see Vera Cruz again : the ill-omened, sweltering, sandy, black, turkey-buzzard-haunted home of yellow fever! I shall not forget, however, that I was hos- pitably entertained there, and especially I shall never lose consciousness of a long telescope in the saloon overlooking the roadstead, to which I am indebted for one of the drollest scenes I ever saw in my life. There were three or four French men-of-war stationed at Yera Cruz at the time, but they could not lie in the harbour, which is not by any means landlocked, and has but an insufficient breakwater in the castle of San Juan de Ulloa. The Spithead of Yera Cruz is off Sacrificios, a place which owes its name to the horrible human sacrifices perpetrated there up to the time of Cortes' invasion. Sunday being the Frenchman's day of joyous recreation all over the world, leave had been granted, with some liberality, to the crews of the war-ships in port ; and from our window we had seen, during the morning and afternoon, A HARD ROAD TO TRAVEL. 103 numerous parties of gallant French Jack-tars they are so picturesquely dandified in appearance that they more closely resemble patent blacking than common tar swaggering along the strand, peeping under the mantillas of the women, kissing their hands to tawny old Indian dames smoking their papelitos in shadowy doorways, and occasionally singing and skipping, through mere joyousness of heart and exuberance of spirits. Many of the men-o'-war's men were negroes from the Mauritius, and it was very pleasant to remark that their colour did not in the least interfere with their being hail-fellow-well-met with the white seamen. But you would very rarely see an American and a black foremast-man arm-in-arm. These fine fellows of the Impe- rial French navy had, I hope, attended service at the cathedral in the morning ; but as day wore on, they had certainly patronised the " aguardiente " shops with great assiduity ; and spirituous intoxication, following perhaps on a surfeit of melons, shaddocks, and pineapples in a tropical climate, is not very good for the health. Touching at St. Thomas's once, I said inquiringly to the captain of the mail steamer, " And this is the white man's grave, is it?" "No," he answered, "that is ;" and he pointed to a brandy-bottle on the cabin-table. I don't think I ever saw so many tipsy tars as I did that Sun- day at Vera Cruz. Portsmouth, with a squadron just in from a long cruise, was a temperance hotel compared with this tropical town. It is difficult to repress a smile when one is told that Frenchmen never get tipsy. All that I have seen of French soldiers and sailors on active service leads me to the persuasion that they will drink as much as they can get ; and in their cups they are inexpressibly mischievous, and not unfrequently very savage. Yet although rowdy, insolent, and quarrelsome, they rarely fall to fisticuffs, as our men do.* On this particular Sunday * You will find in Algeria, at the military penitentiaries, "disciplinary battalions," formed almost entirely of incorrigible drunkards. The excesses committed by the French in Mexico, and which were generally induced by libations of aguardiente or commissariat brandy, were atrocious ; in fact, they bore out the reputation given them by the Duke of "Wellington in his evidence before the Royal Commission on Military Punishments. Five out 104 UNDER THE SUN. they so frightened Vera Cruz from its propriety the inhabi- tants being mainly an abstemious race, suffering from chronic lowness of spirits in consequence of civil war and the yellow fever that pickets of infantry were sent out from the main guard to pick. up inebriated mariners and pack them off on board ship again. The French are very quick at adapting themselves to the usages of the country they visit, and short as was the time they had been in Mexico, they had learnt the use of that wonderfully serviceable instrument, the lasso. The pickets, wearing only their side-arms, went about lassoing tipsy sailors right and left, most scientifically ; and after they had caught their men in running nooses, they " coralled them " that is to say, they would encircle a whole group of nautical bacchanalians with a thin cord, which being tightened, the whole body of revellers would be drawn close together. Then the pickets would, with mild applications of their sheathed bayonets astern, run the captives down to the waterside and tumble them into the boats which were to convey them on board their respective ships. This afternoon's entertainment had continued for some time, and the last boat-load of topers having been dispatched, Vera Cruz was once more left to the blazing sunshine and to the black scavenger buzzards. My hosts were all in their hammocks (slung in the corridor) enjoying their siesta. I could not sleep, and bethought me of the long brass telescope on a tripod in the balcony. I got the lens adjusted to my sight at last, and made out the castle of San Juan ; the tricoloured flag idly drooping from the staff on the tower ; the shining black muzzles of the cannon looking out of the embrasures of the bastions, like savage yet sleepy mastiffs blinking from their kennels ; the sentinel, with a white turban round his shako, pacing up and down ; the bright bayonet on his rifle throwing off sparkling rays. of ten soldiers who massacred the citizens of Paris on the boulevards in the December of 1851 were drunk. (P.S.) I wrote these remarks in 1866. Since then we have seen the war of 1870 and the insurrection of 1871, and a great deal more of what the "temperate" "French can do in the way of tippling. A HARD ROAD TO TRAVEL. 105 But beyond the castle, some two miles distant, there was nothing to see. Sacrifices and the squadron were "round the corner," so to speak, and out of my field of view. The native craft were all moored in-shore ; and Vera Cruz is not a place where you go out pleasure-boating. There was nothing visible beyond the arid, dusty foreshore, but the excruciatingly bright blue sky and the intolerably bright blue sea : Jove raining down one canopy of molten gold over the whole, as though he thought that Danae was bathing somewhere in those waters. I fell a musing over poor Alexander Smith's " All dark and barren as a rainy sea." The barrenness here was as intense ; but it was from brightness. You looked upon a liquid desert of Sahara. Ah ! what is that ? A dark speck midway between the shore and the horizon. The tiniest imaginable speck. I shift the tele- scope, try again, and again focus my speck. It grows, it intensifies, it is with figures large as life, so it seems, finished with Dutch minuteness, full of colour, light and shade, and animation a picture that gross Jan Steen, that Hogarth, that Callot, might have painted. A boat crammed full of tipsy sailors. There is one man who feels very unwell, and who, grasping his ribs with either hand, grimaces over the gunwale in a most pitiable manner. Another is argumentatively drunk, and is holding forth to a staid quartermaster, who is steering. Another is harmoniously intoxi- cated. Then there is a man who is in a lachrymose state of liquor, and is probably bewailing La Belle France and his mother. Suddenly a negro, who is mad drunk, tries to jump overboard. Such a bustle, such a commotion ! They get the obstreperous black man down and lay him in the sheets, and he too begins to sing. It is as though you were a deaf man looking at the "propos des buveurs," in Rabelais. And in the midst of all this the boat with its stolid sober rowers goes pitching and bounding about the field of the telescope, sometimes swerving quite out of it and leaving but a blank brightness, then coming into full focus again, in all its wondrous detail of reality. 106 UNDER THE SUN. After a night not entirely unembittered by the society of mosquitoes, we rose ; took the conventional cup of chocolate, crust of dry bread, and glass of cold water ; and bidding farewell to our entertainers, drove to the railway terminus. I didn't expect much from a railway point of view, and consequently was not disappointed. We have all heard of things being rough and ready. There was plenty of roughness here, without the readiness. It was nearly noon, and the industrial staff of the station, represented by two Indians in striped blankets (serving them for coat, vest, and pantaloons) and monstrous straw hats, were sleeping in two handbarrows. The station-master, a Creole Spaniard, had slung his grass hammock in a shady nook behind the pay-place, and was sleeping the sleep of the just. There was a telegraph office, recently established by the French ; and the operator, with his face resting on his arms, and those limbs resting on the brand-new mahogany instrument from Paris, snored peacefully. It was the most primitive station imaginable. There was one passenger waiting for the train, a half-caste Mexican "greaser," fast asleep at full length on the floor, and with his face prone to it. He had a bag of Indian corn with him, on which, for safety, he lay ; and he had brought a great demi- pique saddle too, which rested on his body, the stirrup leathers knotted together over the pummel, and which looked like a bridge over the river Lethe. Where was his horse ? I wondered. Did he own one, or had his gallant steed been shot under him in battle, and was he on his way to steal another ? Altogether, this rickety ruinous railway station, with the cacti growing close to the platform, and with creepers twining about every post and rafter, and bits of brick, and stray scaffold-poles, and fragments of matting, and useless potsherds, and coils of grass rope littered about in the noontide glare, reminded me with equal force of an Aztec building speculation overtaken by bankruptcy, and of a tropical farmyard in which all the live stock had died of yellow fever. The time for the train to start had long expired ; but there A HARD ROAD TO TRAVEL. 107 was no hurry ; so my travelling companion lay down with his head on the half-caste's saddle and took a little nap. I wandered on to the platform, and there, to my pleasurable surprise, found one man who was awake. "Who but a French gendarme ? One of a picked detachment of that admirable force sent out to Mexico to keep both invaders and invaded in order combed, brushed, polished, waxed, pomatumed, booted, spurred, sabred, belted, cocked-hatted, gauntleted, medalled a complete and perfect gendarme. He was affable, sententious, and dogmatic. " Mexico," he observed, " was a country without hope." I have since inclined to the belief that the gendarme did not dogmatise quite unreasonably on this particular head. He further remarked that discipline must be maintained, and that in view of that necessity he usually administered une fameuse volee in the shape of blows with the flat of his sword to the station-master. He accepted a cigar, to be reserved for the time of his relief from duty ; and not to be behindhand in politeness, he favoured me with a pinch of snuff from a box bearing on the lid the enamelled representation of a young lady, in her shirt-sleeves and a pair of black-velvet trousers, dancing a jig of a carnaval- esque kind. " I adore the theatre," said the gendarme. " Mon- sieur has, no doubt, seen ' La Belle Helene ' in Paris ? " I replied that I had witnessed the performance of that famous extravaganza. " Ah ! " continued the gendarme, with something like a sigh. " They essayed it at Mauritius ; but it obtained only a success of esteem. Monsieur may figure to himself the effect of a Belle Helene who was a mulatto. As for Agamem- non, he did not advance at all. J'aurais lien flanqu'e trois jours de salle de police a ce gredin-la ! I intend, Monsieur," he concluded, "to visit the Bouffes, and to assist at a repre- sentation of the work of M. Jacques Offenbach, when I reim- patriate myself and enter the civil." Honest gendarme ! I hope the " vomito " spared him, and that he has reimpatriated himself by this time, and seen not only " La Belle Helene," but " Orphee aux Enfers" and " La Grande Duchesse de Ge"rolstein." The station-master woke up about one o'clock, and it ap- 108 UNDER THE SUN. peared that he had sent a messenger down into the town to ask my friend at what time he would like to have the train ready. There was no other passenger save the half-caste, who would very cheerfully have waited until the day after next, or the week after next, or the Greek Kalends. My friend said he thought we might as well start at once ; so half a dozen Indians were summoned from outhouses where they had been dozing, and we proceeded to a shed and picked out the most comfortable carriage in the rolling stock, which was but limited. We found a "car" at last, of the American pattern, open at either end, but with cane-bottomed instead of stuffed seats, and Venetian blinds to the windows. The engine also presently came up puffing and sweating to remind us of a fact which had, at least, slipped my memory that we were living in the nineteenth and not in the ninth century ; a locomotive of the approved American model ; blunderbuss funnel ; " cow-catcher " in front ; pent- house in rear for the driver ; warning bell over the boiler, and " Asa Hodge and Co., Pittsburg, Pa.," embossed on a plate on the "bogey" frame. Everything in this country which in mechanical appliances can remind you of civilisation, comes from the United States. New York is to Mexico as Paris is to Madrid. The machine had an Indian stoker, and uncommonly like a gnome, or a kobold, or some other variety of the demon kind did that Indian look, with his coppery skin powdered black with charcoal dust, and his grimy blanket girt around him with a fragment of grass-rope. But the engine-driver was a genuine Yankee in a striped jacket and a well-worn black satin vest a self-contained man, gaunt, spare, mahogany-visaged, calm, col- lected, and expectoratory, with that wonderful roving down-east eye, which always seems to be looking out for something to patent and make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars by. But for the Mexican sombrero which he had donned, and the revolver which he wore conspicuously in his belt, you might have taken him for a law-abiding manufacturer of patent clothes-wringers or mowing-machines from Hartford or Salem. He "passed the A HARD ROAD TO TRAVEL. 109 time of day" to us very civilly, and confirmed the good news that there were no guerrilleros on the road. " The French have fixed up a whole crowd of 'em about Puebla," he said, " and they don't care about being hung up by the score, like hams round a stove-pipe. I ain't been shot at for a month, and I've loaned my Sharp's rifle to a man that's gone gunning down to the Cameroons." The long car we had selected was attached to the locomotive, and a luggage van coupled to that, in which a fatigue party of French soldiers who had just marched into the station placed a quantity of commissariat stores for the detachment on duty at La Soledad. We got under way, but, the line being single, were temporarily shunted on to a siding : the telegraph having an- nounced the coming in of a train from the interior. A few minutes afterwards there rumbled into the station a long string of cars, which disgorging their contents, the platform became thronged with, at least, five hundred men ; stranger arrivals by an excursion train I never saw. The strangers were mostly tall athletic fellows, clean limbed, and with torsos like to that of the Farnese Hercules. Noble specimens of humanity ; and every man of them as black as the ace of spades. They were, in slave-dealers' parlance now happily a dead language " full- grown buck-niggers." They were uniformly clad, in loose jerkins, vests, and knickerbockers of spotless white linen; and their ebony heads many of them very noble and commanding in expression, straight noses and well-chiselled lips being far from uncommon were bound with snowy muslin turbans. These five hundred men, shod with sandals of untanned hide, armed with musket and bayonet, and the short heavy Roman " tuck " or stabbing sword, and carrying their cartouch-boxes in front of them, formed a battalion of that noted Nubian contingent, of whom there were three regiments altogether, hired from the Viceroy of Egypt by the French government for service in Mexico. They had come down from La Soledad to reinforce the wasting garrison of Vera Cruz, of which the European portion were dying of " vomito " like sheep of the rot. The sergeants and corporals 110 UNDER THE SUN. were black ; but the commissioned officers were Egyptian Arabs, sallow, weazened, undersized creatures in braided surtouts of blue camlet and red fez caps. They compared very disadvantageously .with the athletic and symmetrically-built negroes. These Nubians, my Mend the gendarme told me, were good soldiers, so far as fighting went, but irreclaimable scoundrels. They were horribly savage, and jabbered some corrupted dialect with Arabic for its base, but Mumbo- Jumbo for its branches, and which their own officers could scarcely understand. The system by which discipline was preserved among them had been beauti- fully simplified. If a Nubian soldier didn't do what he was told, his officer, for the first offence, fell to kicking him violently. If he persisted in his disobedience, the officer drew his sabre and cut him down. Think of a Mahometan Khedive letting out his two thousand Pagan negroes to a Eoman Catholic emperor, in order that he might coerce the Spanish and Red Indian population of an American republic into recognising the supremacy of an Austrian archduke ! As the Enemy of Mankind is said to have remarked on a memorable occasion, "It's a queer lot, and the cards want sorting." Ill VIII. THE DIVEKSIONS OF LA SOLEDAD. HE Imperial Mexican Kailway, in the year 1864, was in its infancy. The entire line of route had been carefully surveyed and beautifully mapped out ; all engineering difficulties had been disposed of, on paper, and vast numbers of labourers were employed on cuttings and embankments ; but nine-tenths of the line yet remained to be made. A considerable impetus had been given to all kinds of industry in the normally distracted country just then. The unfortunate Maximilian had accepted the crown from the com- mission of Mexican " notables " who waited on him at Miramar ; and General Almonte had been appointed president of a Council of Regency until " El Principe," as the emperor elect was called, should arrive. As for Don Benito Juarez, he was nobody, and, in sporting parlance, might be said to be " nowhere." He was supposed to be hiding his diminished head in the neighbourhood of Brownsville, on the frontier of Texas, and I have heard him spoken of innumerable times by Mexican politicians (who are, I daresay, very ardent Juarists 'by this time) in the most contemptuous terms. The mildest epithet with which he was qualified was " El Indio," the Indian ; President Juarez having scarcely any European blood in his veins. More frequently he was called " the bandit," or the " banished despot." So everything looked very bright and hopeful in Mexico ; a strong French force occupying the country; and the railway (which was already open for traffic as far as La Soledad) was being pushed forward towards Paso del Macho. We jogged along 112 UNDER THE SUN. pretty steadily in our omnibus car ; but, until we reached a place called Manga de Clavo, I thought that Mexico must be the counterpart of the Egyptian desert. For miles the line was skirted by sandhills. There were more sandhills in the middle distance, and the extreme horizon was bounded by sandhills ; the whole of which, illumined by a persistently ferocious sunshine, offered the reverse of an encouraging prospect. Luckily there was no sirocco, or the sand would have invaded the carriage and choked us. But with magical rapidity the scene changed, and the desert bloomed into fruitfulness amazing. The train plunged into a densely wooded country. We saw thick clumps of trees spangled with blossoms or bending under the load of bright-hued tropical fruits ; the foreground was literally one parterre of variegated flowers, and the " cow-catcher " of the engine scattered roses as we marched. I began to warm into enthusiasm. We hurried by palm trees, cocoa-nut trees, lemon and orange groves, and forests of the banana. That tree with its broad blood-stained leaves, and its body reft and bent by the last hurricane and the last rainstorm, swaying and bulging, but abating not one jot of its ruby ruddiness, should furnish a potent liquor ; but the fruit of the banana is in reality very mild and suave conveying to the mind, in its dulcet mawkishness, the idea of sweet shaving paste. It is most tolerable when fried, and served as a savoury dish. And here I may remark that the majority of tropical fruits are productive of most grievous disappointment when eaten. From the shaddock downward, I don't think I met any which caused me to think disparagingly of the central avenue at Covent Garden in London, or of the Marche St. Honore" in Paris. Abnormal size is the principal characteristic of tropical fruits. They are intensely sweet ; but the saccharine matter has an ugly propensity to turn acid on the stomach and kill you. The flavour is generally flaccid and insipid. From this general censure must be always excepted the sweet lemon not the lime a most exquisitely tooth- some fruit. THE DIVERSIONS OF LA SOLED AD. 113 Ever and anon, in the density of this new and delicious land- scape, there would occur an opening revealing a little valley vividly green, studded with flowers, and perchance with a few scattered wigwams built of palm branches and thatched with palm leaves. The Indian women in their simple costume almost invariably consisting of two articles, a chemise of coarse white cotton cloth called "manta" and a narrow petticoat-skirt of red and black, or black and yellow striped stuff looked, at a distance, picturesque enough. Round about all the palm-branch wigwams there were seen to be sprawling groups of Indian papooses or babies of the precise hue of roast fowls well done. Their costume was even more simple than that of their mammas. Mexican scenery, save where the massive mountain passes intervene, is one continuous alternation. Now comes a belt so many miles broad of wonderful fertility. Indian corn the stalks as tall as beadles' staves, the cobs as large as cricket bats oranges, lemons, bananas, sugar, coffee, cotton, rice, cinnamon, nutmegs, and all manner of spices. Then, for many more miles, you have a belt of absolute barrenness, a mere sandy desert. What I saw of Mexico reminded me of a tiger's skin dull yellow desert barred with rich dark brown stripes of fertility. The land is like a Sahara diversified by slices from the valley of Kashmir. The sun was throwing very long blue shadows indeed from the objects which skirted our track, when we brought up at the straggling structure of deal boards, palm branches, and galvanised tinned iron, or zinc sheds, which did duty as the railway terminus of La Soledad. We found a number of very hospitable gentle- men waiting to receive us ; the sleepy telegraphic operator at Vera Cruz having apparently made himself sufficiently wide awake to notify our coming. He had done us good service. A cordia welcome and a good dinner awaited us. Our hosts were the engineers and surveyors engaged on the works of the railway ; and the engineer is always well off for commissariat supplies. He is the only foreigner, the only invader, on whom the rudest and most superstitious races look without disfavour ; for from the lord of the neighbouring manor to the parish priest nay, to the (I 114 UNDER THE SUN. meanest day labourer everybody has a dim impression that the bridge, or the aqueduct, or the railway will do the country good, and that every inhabitant of the district will, sooner or later, "get something out of it." Our friends of La Soledad were accomplished gentlemen, full of traditions of Great George Street, Westminster ; pioneers from the Far West ; rough Lancashire gangers and hard-handed Cornishinen. They were banded together by the responsibilities of a common undertaking and by the consciousness of a common danger ; for until within the last few weeks every man had worked with his life in his hand. The station of La Soledad had been attacked by banditti over and over again ; and it had been a common practice with the guerrilleros to lie in wait in the jungle and "pot" the passengers in passing trains. Even now the little group were lamenting the loss of their managing engineer, who had been shot while riding along an unfinished portion of the line. " The colonel lasted six days after they'd hit him," an American overseer of workmen told me ; "and it was a desperate cruel thing, seeing that he left a wife and three small children ; but he'd had a good time, I guess, the colonel had. 'Brown,' he ses, turning to me, and clasping my hand as he lay on the mattress in that hut over yonder, * they've done for ine at last ; but I reckon I've shot eight of 'em since last fall.' And so he had." There were two other points in which our railway friends were cheerfully unanimous. They all concurred in despising the Mexicans and disliking the French. "As for the half-castes and Spaniards," the American overseer remarked, " they're right down scallywaggs. Hanging's too good for 'em ; and the only thing that makes me bear the French is, that when they catch a Mexican guerrillero they cowhide him first and shoot him after- wards, and hang him up as a climax. As for the Injuns, they're poor weak-kneed creatures ; but there's no harm in 'em. About a hundred will do the work of ten stout Irishmen. I used to try licking of 'em at first to make 'em spry ; but, bless you ! they don't mind licking. They just lie down on the turf like mules. THE DIVERSIONS OF LA SOLEDAD. 115 "Well, I recollected how the mayoral of a diligencia makes his team to go when they're stubborn ; he just gets down and walks behind, and he fills his pocket with sharp little stones, and every now and then he shies a stone which hits a mule behind the ear,- and he cries ' Ha-i-a-youp ! ' and the mule he shakes his head and gallops along full split. When I see my Indian peons shirk- ing their work I just sit on a stone about fifty yards off, and every minute or so I let one of 'em have a pebble under- neath the left ear. The crittur wriggles like an eel in a pump- log, and falls a working as though he was going to build Babel' before sundown." Why the French should have been so intensely disliked I could hot rightly determine. That the Mexicans should have hated them was feasible enough ; but I rarely found an Englishman or a German in Mexico who would give the army of occupation a good word. I have frequently expressed my opinion that a Frenchman in a black coat, in light pantaloons, in straw-coloured kid gloves, in a blouse and sabots, even, is a most agreeable, friendly, light-hearted creature ; but make his acquaintance when he is on active service, in a ke"pi and scarlet pantaloons, and I fear you will find that a more arrogant and more rapacious swash- laickler does not exist. That is the character, at least, which the French warrior has gotten in Mexico, in Algeria, in Germany, in Italy his transient spell of popularity in '59 excepted and in Spain. I remember that the ragged assemblage of maize, and palm-straw, and mud-and-wattle huts, which forms the town of La Soledad, lay in the midst of a broad valley, the sides shelving to a rocky base, through which ran a shallow river. I came to this place on the last day of February. There had been heavy rains a few days previously, and there was some water, but not much, in the bed of the river. In the summer the rivers of Mexico are as dry as the Paglione at Nice ; and the bridges seem as useless as spurs to the military gentleman in garrison at Venice. There was a detachment of French infantry at La Soledad, whose cheerful bugles were summoning the wearers of 116 UNDER THE SUN. about two hundred pairs of red trousers to the evening repast, of which ratatouille, a kind of gipsy stew, forms the staple ingredient. This evening meal is called the "ordinaire," and is made up of the leavings of the day's rations, and of such odds and ends of victual as the soldiers have managed to purchase or forage. There is no such evening entertainment in the British army. Our men eat their clumsily cooked rations in a hurry, and often pass long hours of hunger between their ill-arranged meals. The bugle- calls of the French brought from the shingly shores of the river numbers of moustached warriors who had been washing their shirts and gaiters socks were not worn by the army of occu- pation in the stream. It was very pretty to watch the red- legged figures winding along the paths running upward through the valley, with boards laden with white linen on their heads. There was a grand background to the picture in a mountain range, rising tier above tier : not in blue delicate peaks and crags, as in the Alps, but in solid, sullen, dun-coloured masses. I can recall one now, with ribbed flanks and a great shelving head, that looked like an old brown lion couchant. The railway gentlemen resided at a little cantonment of timber and corrugated zinc huts, the last of which, although weather- tight and agreeably repellent of various insects (which swarm in wooden structures), were, when the sun shone, intolerably hot. As the sun so shone habitually, without mercy, from eight in the morning until six in the evening, the corrugated zinc huts became by sunset so many compact ovens, suited either to baking, broiling, or stewing the inmates. However, life in Mexico amounts, in the long run, only to a highly varied choice of evils ; and devouring insects being somewhat more aggravating than a warm room, the engineers had chosen that evil which they deemed the lesser. I suffered so terribly, however, during my sojourn in this highly rarified country from determination of blood to the head, that I entreated my hosts to be allowed to sleep under a palm thatch in lieu of corrugated zinc. My wish was acceded to to my partial destruction. THE DIVERSIONS OP LA SOLED AD. 117 We dined sumptuously on hot stews, made much hotter with chiles and peperos, the effect of which last condiment on the palate I can only compare to that of a small shrapnel shell going off in your mouth. We had plenty of sound claret, and, if I remember right, a flask or so of that white-seal champagne which at Trans- atlantic tables is considered preferable to Veuve Clicquot. A bottle of " Sunnyside " Madeira, warranted from a Charleston " garret," was also produced. We were too recently from Havana to be unprovided with Seiior Anselmo del Yalle's fragrant mer- chandise ; and let me whisper to the wanderer, that he who spares no efforts to be provided with good cigars in his baggage will be at least enabled to make some slight return for the hos- pitality he will receive. For in these far-distant cantonments the stock of cigars is liable to run out, and can with difficulty be renewed. After dinner we talked Mexican politics a conversation which generally resolved itself into three conclusions. First, that when things come to the worst they may mend. Second, that things had come to the worst in Mexico. Third, that Maximilian and his empire might last as long as the French occu- pation continued, and as long as his own stock of gold ounces and hard dollars held out. I can aver that on this last head I never heard any more sanguine opinion expressed dur- ing the whole time I was in Mexico. Then we played a hand at poker, and tried a rubber at whist, then songs were sung, and then we went out for a walk. The French tattoo had sounded, and most of the moustached warriors had retired to their huts ; but there were strong pickets patrolling the streets, and double guards posted at every gate. When I speak of the " gates " of this place, I allude simply to certain booms or logs of timber placed athwart blocks of stone at intervals, and by the side of each of which was a French guard hut. When I allude to La Soledad's " streets," I mean simply that the palm-branch and mud-and-wattle huts of the Indian and half-caste population had been erected in two parallel lines, with a few alleys of smaller hovels, with succursals of dunghills branching 118 UNDER THE SUN. from them. Once upon a time, I believe La Soled ad had possessed a plaza, several stone houses, and two churches ; but all that kind of thing had been, to use the invariable American locution when speaking of the ravages of civil war, " knocked into a cocked- hat " by contending partisans. In La Soledad we lived in an easy fashion. We dined without any table-cloth, and with a great many more knives than forks. "We occasionally carved a fowl with a bowie-knife. Our claret had been drawn direct from the wood into calabashes of potters' ware, kneaded and fired on the spot, and the white-seal champagne had been opened by the simple process of knocking the neck off the bottles. It was very unconventional when we sallied forth on a Btroll to see the mats which served as doors to the Indian huts all drawn on one side, and the inmates making their simple prepara- tions for retiring for the night, such preparations consisting chiefly in everybody taking off what little he had on, and curling himself up in a ball on the straw-littered ground. The family mule was tethered to a post outside, and the background was filled up by the family pigs and poultry. It was the county of Tipperary with a dash of Bedouin douar, and a poetic tinge of the days of the Shepherd Kings of Palestine. Everybody had, however, not gone to bed. There was life at La Soledad ; life half of a devotional, half of a dissolute kind. The stone churches, as I have said, had been " knocked into a cocked-hat," but Ave Maria was sounding on a little cracked bell suspended between three scaffold poles, and a dusky congregation all Indians were kneeling on the threshold of a wigwam somewhat larger but fully as rudely fashioned as its neighbours, where an Indian priest was singing vespers. There could not have been a more unconventional church. The poor celebrant was desperately ragged and dirty, and his vestments were stuck over with little spangles and .tarnished scraps of foil paper ; but he had a full, sonorous voice, which seemed to thrill his hearers strangely. Two great twisted torches of yellow wax were placed on the altar, which looked like a huge sea-chest. Another torch, of some resinous wood, flamed at the entrance of the hut, and THE DIVERSIONS OF LA SOLEDAD. . 119 threw the kneeling worshippers into Kembrandt-like masses of light and shade. On the altar were the usual paltry little dolls not much paltrier than you may see in the most superb fanes in Italy or Spain but there was one singularly unconventional ornament. The poor cura of the church, I was told, had waited on the railway officials and begged for something to adorn his fabric withal: something "European," the honest man wanted. They had given him a few dollars and a couple of those enormous coloured lamps which at night are fixed in front of locomotives. One of these, a red one, another a green one, he had fixed on either side of his altar ; and there they were, glaring out of the wigwam like two unearthly eyes. Close to the church was a public gaming-house, to justify Defoe's 1 ' Wherever God erects a house of prayer, The Devil always builds a chapel there." It was contemptuously tolerated by the French, on condition that no soldier of their nation should be suffered to play in it, and that if any knives were used on the disputed question of a turn-up card, the proprietor should be liable to be hanged. But the Mexicans are admirable gamesters, and very rarely stab over their play. They prefer lying in wait for you in the dark, and admonishing you by a puncture under the fifth rib, or a ball in the occiput, that you had best not be so lucky at cards next time. The gambling-house had nothing of the conventional Frascati or German Kursaal aspect about ic. It was just a long wigwam, open in front, and with some rough planks on tressels running along its whole length. It reminded me of a hastily improvised refreshment booth at a cricket match. There was no " lapis vert" unless the sward on which the tressels rested could pass muster as a " green carpet." There were no pure Indians present. Gambling, cheating, and robbing are the business of the Spanish half-castes. These exemplary gentry lined the long table, erect, statuesque in their striped blankets and great coach-wheel hats, motionless save when they extended their long skinny hands to plant their stakes 120 UNDER THE SUN. or to grasp their winnings. With the exception of an occasional hoarse cry of " Tecoloti " referring to a chance in the game " Gaiio todo," " I win all," or " Pierde el Soto," " The knave loses," there was silence. The game was monte, of which it is sufficient to say that it bears a vague affinity to lansquenet and to blind-hookey, and is about one hundred times more specula tively ruinous than vingt-un or unlimited loo. At La Soledad the stakes were dollars, halves, and quarters, and even copper coins. I saw one man win about five pounds on a turn-up. He lost all and more within the next five minutes, and stalked away apparently unconcerned : whether to bed or to hang himself or to wait for a friend and murder him, I had no means of ascertaining. Not many days afterwards I had the honour of being present at several entertainments, of which monte was the object, in the city of Mexico. There we were quite conventional. "We gathered in full evening dress. We had wax lights, powdered footmen, and cool beverages handed round on silver salvers. In lieu of the poor little silver and copper stakes of La Soledad, the piles of gold ounces and half doubloons rose to a monumental height ; but there was no difference in the good breeding of the players. The blanketed rapscallions of La Soledad were just as phlegmatic over their monte as the wealthiest dons in Mexico. We watched this small inferno for some time ; and I was much amused to observe that one of the most sedulous of the punters was a gaunt half-caste boy who, in a ragged shirt and raggeder drawers, had waited on us at dinner. The young reprobate must have risked a year's wages on every turn-up, but his employers did not seem to think '.that there was anything objectionable in his having adjourned from the dining-room to the gambling-table. About ten o'clock the establishment was closed in a very sum- mary manner by a French patrol, who marched along the length of the booth, sweeping out the noble sportsmen before them as though with a broom that had a bayonet in it. And life at La Soledad being terminated we went to bed. For my part I sincerely THE DIVERSIONS OF LA SOLEDAD. 121 wish I had walked about all night, or had laid down in front of the great fire by the French guard-house. I must needs sleep in a wooden hut with a palm thatch, and I was very nearly bitten to death. There were mosquitoes, there were fleas, there were cockroaches unless they were scorpions and finally, O unutterable horror ! there were black ants. I sometimes fancy that a few of those abominable little insects are burrowing beneath my skin to this day. 122 IX. THE CITY OF THE ANGELS. HEY call it," quoth the Canonigo, " Puebla de los Angelos ; but for my part," he continued confi- dently, "I don't think it would do this City of the Angels much harm [if the verdugo were to come hither and hang every man, woman, and child at Puebla to a gallows forty feet high. Hombre ! " went on the Canonigo, " I think Puebla would be all the better for it ; for, look you," and here he sank his voice to a whisper, " everything that walks on two legs in this city and who is not a guemllero a brigand is either a gambler or a receiver of stolen goods." These were hard words indeed to hear from a patriotic Mexican gentleman, and a dignified ecclesiastic to boot, con- cerning a city so ancient and illustrious as Puebla. But the Canonigo knew what he was about. It was at the little village of Amosoque, a few miles from our destination, that our clerical friend uttered the strictures recorded above on the character of the Pueblanas. Now I knew nothing as yet of Puebla ; but I should have been quite prepared to agree with anybody who had told me that a little hanging with perhaps a trifle of drawing and quartering would have done a world of good to the people who congregated round our carriage window of Amosoque. " Mala gente ! mala gente ! " murmured the Canonigo, look- ing at the Amosoquians who trooped up to the coach window, and stared in at us with sad fierce eyes mutely eloquent with this kind of discourse : " I should like a wheel ; I a horse ; I that stout man's coat ; I his hat ; I his dollars ; and I his blood." " Mala gente ! " cried the Canonigo, drawing his head in somewhat THE CITY OF THE ANGELS. 123 abruptly as an Amosoquian of very hungry aspect uttered the word " Caridad ! " in a tone which far more resembled a curse than a request. " For Dios, amigo," quoth the Canonigo, " I have nothing for you. Mala gente ! " he concluded, sinking back on the cushions and taking a very vigorous puff at his cigar, " Mala gente" which being translated, may be accepted as signifying " blackguards all : a bad lot." Whenever you halt in a town or village of Old Spain your equipage will be surely surrounded by silent, moody men, wrapped in striped blankets or tattered cloaks, and with shabby hats slouched over their brows, who will regard you with glances that are sad, but not fierce. But faded as is their aspect, they have a quiet and resigned mien, not wholly destitute of dignity. Yonder tatterdemalion of the Castiles seems to say : " I am desti- tute ; but still I am a Don. Poverty is not a crime. I involve myself in my virtue, and have puffed prosperity away. ; I am bankrupt, but it was through being security for a friend. I am Don Dogberry, and have had losses. I held shares in the Filibuster's Company (limited). The company is being wound up, and another call on the contributories will be made the day after to-morrow. If you like to give me half a peseta you can." But New Spain ! But Amosoque ! That small, wiry, leathery, sooty-looking fellow is a half-caste. Watch him scowling at you in his striped serape further south called a poncho his huge coach-wheel hat like a cardinal's whitewashed, and minus the tassels ; his loose linen drawers bulging through the slashes in his leathern overalls. Salvator might have painted him, but Salvator should have made some preliminary sketches in a Seven Dials slum and a Bowery whisky cellar to get his hand in. The man of Ainosoque utters nothing articulate save an occasional grunt of " Caridad ! " but his eyes are full of speech. They say, "Your throat is precisely the kind of throat I should like to cut. I have cut many throats in my time. I am a bankrupt, but a fraudulent one. My father suffered the punishment of the * garotte vil ; ' and my brother-in-law is a garotter in Orizaba. Give me a dollar, 124 UNDER THE SUN. or by all the saints in Puebla, I and Juan, and Pepe and Fernan here will follow the coach and rob it." Amosoque is a great mart for spurs. The " Espuelas de Amo- soque " are renowned throughout Mexico, and the spur makers, I conjecture, allow the beggars to take the goods "on sale or return." They thrust them in, four or five pairs in each hand, arranged starwise, at the windows, reminding you, in their startling spikiness, of the hundred- bladed penknives with which the Jew boys used to make such terrific lunges at the omnibus passengers in the old days at the "White Horse Cellar. These spurs of Amosoque are remarkable for nothing but their length and breadth the rowels are not much smaller than cheese plates ; but you can no more get clear of the place without purchasing a pair of espuelas than you can leave Monte"limar in Provence without buying a packet of nougat. I have forgotten the name of that village in Old Spain where fifty women always fly at you and force you to buy embroidered garters. A similar assault, though a silent one, is made on you at Amosoque. But our mules are buckled to again, and the mayoral has filled his jacket pocket with a fresh supply of pebbles to fling at- their ears if they are lazy. Bump, bump, thud, thud, up the middle and down again. We are again travelling on the hard road. This kind of thing has been going on for many days ; and this kind of village we have halted at over and over again. Ojo de Agua was very like Nopaluca ; Nopaluca was very like Acagete ; and all these were very like Amosoque. "We are out of the dark defiles of the Cumbres horrifying mountain passes, gray, jagged, arid, cataractless ; no t( tierra caliente " has greeted our eyesight since we left Orizaba. The open has been mainly desert, in- tolerable dust and caked baked clod producing nothing but the nopal and the maguey, the prickly pear and the cactus. The former is picturesque enough, and besides it yields the juice, which fermented, the Indians and half-castes call "pulque," and on which they get swinishly intoxicated. An adult maguey is very stately to look upon, but goodness keep all nervous ladies, and people given to dreaming dreams, and young children from the THE CITY OF THE ANGELS. 125 sight of the Mexican prickly pear. The plant assumes the most hideously grotesque forms. It is twisted and bent and gnarled like metal scroll work which some mad giant has crumpled up in his fingers in a rage. It is a tangle of knotty zigzags interspersed with the prickly fruit, which can be compared to nothing but the flattened faces of so many demon dwarfs, green with bile and thickly sown with bristles. The prickly pear to me is bogey.* Let me see ; where was it, between Orizaba and this evil place of Amosoque, bristling with spurs and scoundrels, that we picked up the Canonigo ? Ah ! I remember, it was at Sant' Augustin del Palmar. We reached Sant' Augustin at about two o'clock in the afternoon, just as the diligencia from Mexico had drawn up at the door of the principal fonda, and precisely in time for the dili- gence dinner. Now I would have you to understand that the chief dish at the coach dinner in all regions Iberian, both on the hither and thither side of the Atlantic, and even beyond the Isthmus and under the southern cross, is the PuCHEKOf print it in capitals, for it is a grand dish and that the puchero is the only thing in Old or New Spain concerning which tolerable punctuality is observed. You have heard no doubt of the olla-podrida as the "national" dish of Spain, but so far as my experience goes it is a culinary preparation which, like the rich uncle in the comedy, is more talked about than seen. While I was in Mexico city my eye lighted one day on a placard in the window of a bodegon or eating- house in the Calle del Espiritu Santo, setting forth that on the ensuing Thursday at noon " una arrogante olla " would be ready for the consumption of cavaliers. I saw this announcement on Monday morning, and for three days I remained on tenter-hooks * It may be mentioned that the heraldic cognisance of the Mexican nation bears intimate reference to the prickly pear. The legend runs that Cortes the Conquistador, during his march to Mexico, descried an eagle perched upon a nopal ; and when the country achieved her independence four cen- turies afterwards "the bird and bush" became the " Mexican arms. " t The names of both the national dishes of Spain are derived from the utensils in which they are served. A puchero is a pipkin, and an olla an earthenware pot. Podrida means simply "rotten" observe the singular corruption of sense in the French "pot pourri," a vase full of dried roses and fragrant spices. 126 UNDER THE SUN. expecting to partake of this arrogant olla-podrida. I concealed my intention from my hospitable host. I was determined to do something independent. I had travelled long in search of beef; there might be, in the arrogant olla, a bovine element ; and the efforts of long years might be crowned at last with success. I went on Thursday, but the vinegar of disappointment came to dash my oil. " Hoy, no," said the keeper of the bodegon, " maiiana se abra." There was to be no arrogant olla that day ; there would be the next. Manana means to-morrow ; and to-morrow to a Spaniard means the Millennium. I have never tasted an olla, arrogant or submissive. But of the puchero I preserve the pleasantest remembrances. There is beef in it boiled beef the French bouilli, in fact. There is bacon. There are garbanzos (broad beans) and charm- ing little black puddings, and cabbage, and delicate morsels of fried banana. It is very wholesome and very filling ; and there is no use in your complaining that an odour of garlic pervades it, because the room and the table-cloth and your next neighbour are all equally redolent of the omnipresent ajo. The puchero (poured from its pipkin) is in a very big platter ; and what you have to do is to watch carefully for the dish as it is passed from hand to hand ; to take care that it is not diverted from you by a dexterous flank movement of a cunning caballero manoeuvring behind your back, or by the savage cavalry charge of the German bagman opposite. Seize the dish when you can, and hold on to it like grim Death with one hand till you have filled your plate. Never mind if the lady next you looks pleadingly, piteously, upon you. She is the weaker vessel. Let her wait. Fill yourself with puchero ; for you will get nothing else in the way of refreshment, save chocolate and cigars, for the next twelve hours. There is a proverb which justifies the most brutal selfishness in this regard, and which I may translate thus : " He who lets puchero pass Is either in love, or asleep, or an Ass." Clutch it then, for when it has once glided away you will never see it again. THE CITY OF THE ANGELS. 127 For a wonder the puchero at the diligence dinner at Sant' Augustin del Palmar was not punctual. We had had soup ; we had had frijoles (black beans fried in oil), we had had a seethed kid ; but no puchero made its appearance. The traveller next to me, a stout black- whiskered man, in a full suit of black velveteen, enormous gold rings in his ears, and with a parti-coloured silk sash round his waist, grew impatient. " Caballeros," he cried, after another five minutes' delay, " I am a plain man. I am a Catalan. Juan Estrellada is well known in Barcelona. But human patience has its limits. I propose that if the puchero is not at once brought in that we rob this house and throw the landlord out of window." The proposal was a startling one ; but the Catalan looked as if he meant it, and I was much moved to remark that a murmur, seemingly not of disapprobation, ran round the table. A gentleman in a cloak two guests off, remarked gutturally, "Es precise," which may be taken as equivalent to " Ditto to Mr. Burke," and to an opinion that robbing the establishment was the right kind of thing to do. You are so continually falling among thieves in Mexico that your moral sense of honesty grows blunted ; and you feel inclined, when people come to you for wool, to send them away shorn. Fortunately for the landlord, the majority of the guests were philosophers, and had betaken themselves to smoking ; and for- tunately for ourselves, just as the Catalan 'seemed to be preparing to put his resolution to the vote, two gingerbread-skinned Indian boys came staggering in with the charger of puchero between them, and we fought for the meal like so many wolves, and I didn't come off the worst, I can assure you. It was when I had secured, with great internal joy and content- ment, the last remaining black pudding in the dish, that I noticed that my right-hand neighbour the Catalan was on the left had suffered the puchero to pass. He told me that he ate but once a day, that he preferred to dine at six or seven, and that this was a fast day, too, and that he must keep his ayuno. I had noticed him, when we alighted, clad in a black cassock and a tremendous " shovel" which brought the Barber of Seville and Basilio to my 128 UNDER THE SUN. mind afc once trotting up and down, saying his breviary, and puffing at a very big cigar. This was our Canonigo. The good old man ! I can see his happy beaming face now, his smile calm as a mountain pool environed by tall cliffs, his clear, bright, trust- ing eyes. I can hear his frank, simple discourse ; not very erudite, certainly, often revealing a curious inexperience of the world and its ways, but infinitely full t)f candour, and modesty, and charity. He held a prebendal stall in the cathedral of San Luis Potosi, to which he was now returning, via Puebla and Mexico city, having journeyed down to Jalapa to see a brother in high military command, who lay sick in that unwholesome city. I call him "our" Canonigo, for my friend and travelling companion, who had been separated from me by stress of company at the inn dinner- table, rejoining me when we went into the colonnade to smoke, recognised the prebendary of San Luis Potosi as an old friend, and embraced him affectionately. The old gentleman was travelling in a rusty old berline of his own, but gave heartrending accounts of the hardships of the road he had endured since he left Jalapa. The post-houses were indeed very short of mules to begin with ; some thousands of those useful animals having been impressed by the French commissariat and transport corps. We had been tolerably successful in the way of mules, simply because my friend, among his other attributes, was an army contractor, and had most of the post-masters under his thumb ; but the poor Canonigo had been frequently left for hours, destitute of cattle, at some wayside venta. It is not at all pleasant, I assure you, so to cool your heels and your coach wheels, while the Indian hostess sits on the ground tearing her long black hair, and wringing her sinewy brown hands, and crying out that the " mala gente " the brigands are in the neighbourhood, and will be down in half an hour to smite everybody hip and thigh. Nothing would suit my host but that the Canonigo should take a seat in our carriage and be of our party up to Mexico. The good priest was nothing loth, for he owned that he was dreadfully frightened of the brigands, who had been committing frightful THE CITY OF THE ANGELS. 129 atrocities lately on the Jalapa road. I might have mentioned to you ere this that we had brought with us from La Soledad a sufficiently imposing escort, in the shape of an entire company of French infantry, who journeyed with us on the " ride and tie " principle : half of them crowded inside and outside a kind of omnibus we had picked up in the post-office at Orizaba, and half of them hanging on to the wheels the omnibus often required pushing up hill or dragging out of a rut or riding on the mules, or trudging through the sand or over the pebbles with their shakoes on the points of their bayonets, and their blue cotton handkerchiefs tied under their chins, with perhaps a damp plantain leaf superadded. These were the merriest set of fellows I ever met with ; and they laughed and smoked and sang songs and capered all the way up to Mexico. They never asked us for drink-money, and were uniformly respectful, polite, and cheerful. They had a little boy -soldier with them an enfant de troupe in training to be a drummer who was their pet and plaything and darling, and for whom, when he was tired of riding in or outside the omnibus, they would rig a kind of litter, made of knapsacks and ammunition blankets laid on crossed muskets, and with a canopy above of pocket-handkerchiefs tied together and held up by twigs. And they would carry the little man along, the soldiers singing and he joining in, with a "Tra, la, la! Tra, la, la ! " and the rest of the company beating their hands in applause from the top of the 'bus. There were but two officers with the company -the captain, who rode with us, and a sub-lieutenant, who preferred occupying the box seat of the longer vehicle. The captain was a pudgy little man, who, his stoutness notwithstanding, wore stays. He had been in Algeria, and, according to his showing, whenever he and Abd-el-Kader met, there had been weeping in the Smala and wailing in the Douar. He had been through the Crimean campaign, and, not very obscurely, insinuated that he, and not Marshal Pelissier, should, if the right man had got his deserts, have been made Duke of Malakoff. In fact, the fat little captain would have bragged Major Longbow's head oil'. He overflowed I 130 UNDER THE SUN. with good-humour, however, and had a capital baritone voice. The sub, on the other hand, was a moody, gaunt man, whose solitary epaulette seemed to have made him at once low-spirited and lopsided. It was as well, perhaps, that he did not form one of our party ; for he evidently hated his captain with great fervour, and when they met off duty, there was generally a squabble. " I know my duty, but I also know my rights," the sub used to mutter, looking fixed bayonets at his superior officer. He was scrupulously attentive to his duties, however, and never missed saluting his pudgy chief. I think the captain would have been infinitely rejoiced had the omnibus toppled over one of the yawning precipices in the Cumbrera, and had the dismal chasm comfortably engulfed that cantankerous sub-lieutenant. But the Canonigo had a berline. Well, that was very soon got rid of. The post-master, who was also landlord of the fonda where we dined I remember that he expressed a hyperbolical wish to kiss my hands and feet at departing, and that he obliged us with two bad five-franc pieces in change for the napoleon we tendered him would have none of the canonical equipage. " Yale nada," it is worth nothing, he said, contemptuously. He hoped that the Canonigo would leave it "until called for," and that he would never call for it. But he was not destined to profit by the relinquishment of the vehicle. At first I suggested that it should be devoted to the use of the cantankerous sub- lieutenant, and that fatigue parties of light infantry should be harnessed to the pole, and drag it ; but this proposal did not meet with much favour especially among the light infantry and the sub himself vehemently protested against making his entrance into Mexico, " before his chiefs," in a carriage which he declared to be fit only for a quack doctor. " There may be some," he remarked, with a sardonic glance at the baritone captain, " who would like to play Dulcamara, or imitate Mangin in a Roman helmet, selling pencils in the Place de la Concorde ; for my part, I know my duties and I know my rights." In this dilemma Pedro Hilo was sent for. Pedro, a rather handsome half-caste, was the administrador or steward to the THE CITY OF THE ANGELS. 131 lordly proprietor of a " hacienda " a maguey plantation in the neighbourhood. He was accustomed to buy everything, even, as my friend hinted, to the portmanteaus, wearing apparel, and other spoils of travellers who had been waited upon in the stage* coach by a select body of the " mala gente." Pedro came, saw, and purchased. He was a man of few words. " Twenty dollars" " pesos fuertes " he said, and he drew a gold ounce from his sash and spun it into the air. " Arriba ! " cried Pedro Hilo, " Heads." Heads it was, and the administrador stuck to his text of twenty dolJars. A doubloon scarcely four pounds is not much for a berline, albeit the thing was woefully the worse for wear ; but what was to be done with it ? The bargain was concluded, and the Canonigo pocketed the gold ounce. As we were leaving Sant' Augustin del Palmar, our omnibus escort making a brilliant show with their scarlet pantaloons and bright guns and bayonets, we passed the determined Catalan, who was girding himself up to ascend the roof of the downward- bound diligence. " I wish we had a few soldiers with us," he remarked, as he took in another reef of his parti-coloured sash. "A prod from a bayonet now and then might remind the postillion that it is his duty to drive his mules, and not to go to sleep under his monstrous millstone of a hat. Who ever saw such a sombrero save on a picador in the bull-ring ? In Barce- lona such hats would be put down by the police. I have paid for my place in the interior," he continued, " but the malpractices of the postillion and the mayoral who, I am assured, is in league with all the gangs of brigands between here and Cordova can no longer be tolerated. I intend to mount the roof; and the first time that pig-headed driver goes to sleep again, I propose to myself to blow out his brains." So he went away, significantly slapping a pouch of untanned leather at his hip, and which I surmised contained his Colt's revolver. A determined fellow, this Juan Estrellada from Catalonia, and the very man to be useful in a street pronunciamieiito. I fancy that he was some- what nettled that no practical upshot should have followed his proposal to rob the fonda and throw the landlord out of window, 132 UNDER THE SUN. and that he was anxious, before he reached Vera Cruz, to do something the memory of which posterity would not willingly let die. The Canonigo was excellent company, but his excessive temper- ance somewhat alarmed me. His " desayuno " literally breakfast would be taken at about four o'clock in the morning ; for we always recommenced our journey at daybreak. Then he would take a cup of chocolate a brown aromatic gruel mixed thick and slab with one tiny loaf of Indian corn bread. And nor bite nor sup would he take again till sunset. The worst of it was that we were not always sure of finding supper when we reached the town or village where we had elected to stay the night. The Canonigo, however, seemed totally indifferent to our lighting upon an Egypt without any corn in it. His supper was always ready, and it seemed to serve him in lieu of dinner, and lunch, and all besides. He produced his grass-woven cigar-case and began to smoke. Not papelitos, mind. Everybody in Mexico man, woman, or child, Spaniard, half-caste, or Indian inhales the fumes of tobacco wrapped in paper, all day long. But the Canonigo was a smoker of " Paros," the biggest of Cabanas. They didn't make him sallow, they didn't make him nervous ; and he never com- plained of headache at least through smoking. On one occasion the worthy gentleman made the confession, " Tengo mala cabeza " " My head is bad." It was on the night before we arrived at Amosoque. We chanced to put up at a venta kept by a Frenchman, whose wife was a capital cook, and whose cellar was, moreover, stocked with capital wine. He gave us an excellent supper, and we subsequently " cracked " I believe that is the correctly convivial expression sundry bottles of that very sound Burgundy wine called Moulin-a-vent. "Well, we were four to drink it, and the temperate Canon could scarcely count as one. He had a thimbleful, however two thimblefuls, perhaps nay, a bumper and a half and the cockles of his good old heart were wanned. In his merriment he sang a wonderful song, setting forth how a donkey, wandering in a field, once fell upon a flute in .Avhich a shepherd had "left "a tune. The donkey tootled, and THE CITY OF THE ANGELS. 133 the tune " came out ; " whereupon " Aha ! " brays the conceited animal, " who shall say that donkeys cannot play the flute ? " Then the Canonigo, merging into another mood, like Alexander at his feast, began to tell us about the saints of the wonders worked by St. Lampsacus and St. Hyacinth, St. Petronilla and St. Jago of Cornpostella. And then he fell asleep, and I can't help thinking that he woke up the next morning slightly flustered about the " cabeza," and that the Moulin-a-vent might have had something to do with the severity with which he spoke about the inhabitants of the City of the Angels. " However," I said, as we drove into Puebla, "we shall see we shall see." "We duly entered La Ciudad de los Angelos ; but the Teetotum Laws forbid that I should proceed to tell you what we saw there. The fingers of Fate gave another twist to the Roulette-wheel of life. Round whirled the ball ; round spun the teetotum, and down it came at last, with Africa uppermost. 134 X. MOORISH HOUSES AT ALGIERS. ". . . . Nee ab Icosio taciti recedamus; Hercule enim illee transeunte, viginti qui a comitatu ejus dixiverant, locum deligunt, faciunt moenia, ac ne quis imposito a se nomine privatim gloriaretur, de condentium numero urbi nomen datum. Porro urbs Icosium sic vocata fuit a viginti Herculis oomitibus qui illam condiderunt, nam ei'Kocri, graece, latini viginti significat." (c. rvxn SOLINI, &c. BASILED, 1538, in-4.) " Old Hercules (the Libyan), They say (or any other man), While marching up the Afric coast "Was clean deserted by his host That is to say, by twenty villians Who thought they'd like to turn civilians. They chose a site, and built a city, Which is the subject of my ditty ; But lest one of their scurvy band Should give his name to all the land (And claimants to it there were plenty), They called the city Number Twenty, Thus snubbing individual pride, While one and all were glorified. You'll find the Latin if you'll seek for 't, Viginti ; eucocri's the Greek for 't, From which Icosium we indite The modern Algiers : Am I right?" Hudibrastic translation of Solin, by a gentleman's hitler. LGIERS, or El Djezzair, as the Arabs still fondly term it, or the Icosium of the Lybian Hercules' twenty deserters mentioned in the foregoing doggrel, and afterwards to become a Roman city of import- ance you may call it which you like ; or if you desire an additional qualification, the Signor Torquato Tasso will help MOORISH HOUSES AT ALGIERS. 135 you to one. "Algieri, infame nido di Corsari, nutrice di leoni e d' elefanti " " Algiers, infamous nest of pirates, nurs- ing mother of lions and elephants." The Signer T. T. is ungallant, but he wrote in the sixteenth century, which must be his excuse. There is a Yankee locution descriptive of a process which implies ruthless and wholesale demolition and devastation, known as "knocking things into a cocked-hat." The Goths and the Vandals and the Anythingarians, the Moors, the Arabs, and the Turks did, during many succeeding ages, knock Icosium into a cocked-hat. Then it retained stability for some centuries as the Mahometan city of El Djezzair." Then the French seized it, and from an architectural point of view they too have knocked it into a cocked-hat as battered and shapeless as that of a parish beadle who has been maltreated by a mob of mutinous paupers. But the French have made some amends. Although they have demolished the most romantic portion of Algiers, they have built it up again in the approved Paris boulevard fashion. For the ancient Moresco turban Louis Philippe substituted the kepi of a chasseur d'Afrique ; and to this Napoleon III. super- added the petit chapeau of Imperialism. Its partial devastation, and more deplorable restoration, not- withstanding, Algiers is yet delightful. Enthusiasts declare it to be adorable. It has been likened to a stately pyramid of white marble, of which the base is flanked by venerable, dusky hills, like old brown lions couchant. Another critic has dis- covered that it resembles a huge Pentelican quarry scooped out of the bosom of a mountain. The resources of comparison have indeed been well-nigh exhausted in the search for similes to describe El Djezzair as it appears from the sea. To one a mathematical tourist this it is as a quadrant sharply cut out of plaster, of Paris. Another genius of a nautical turn likens it to the mainsail of some huge argosy, or "tall ammiral" stretched on the beach. To a gentleman whose mind was more prosaic, but still akin to his immediate predecessor, it occurred that the thickly-piled and snowy-hued buildings of Algiers looked 136 UNDER THE SUN. like nothing so much as a fortnight's washing laid out on the shore to dry, with heavy stones at the corners to keep the sheets and table-cloths from "flopping." The city is in truth from a distance of most sepulchral whiteness whiter than Genoa, whiter than Naples, whiter even than Stamboul from the Golden Horn. And thus a bard in "milky white numbers" sings: " . . . . Un soir La blanche Alger dormait comme un grand encensoir D' argent qui fume encore apres le saint office." The idea is certainly pretty, "the scented smoke curling from a silver censer when mass is over." Only it is nullified by the fact that no vapour curls from the silver censer of El Djezzair. The Algerines smoke incessantly, but their houses never, save when they catch fire and are burnt down. The enfumed poet was obliged to explain, indeed, in a foot-note that the smoke he meant came from the adjacent lime-kilns of Bab-al-Oued. I know their stench to be awful ; and they are suggestive of anything but silver censers. The houses of El Djezzair are as white as brand-new dice, and the little peepholes of windows in them stand for the pips. I question if there ever lived such a nation of inveterate white- washers as the modern Moors, who have been incited perhaps to profusion in the use of the double-tie brush by their French masters. Inside as well as outside the Moorish dwellings are thickly covered with glaring white distemper paint. At least six times a year every wall and every ceiling are whitewashed : to the horror and despair, one would think, of the fleas. There may at the same time be fleas that like walking upon walls and others that prefer to roost in warm garments. The Moors whitewash their inner courts and living rooms persistently, often to the concealment beneath heavy layers of body colour of the most exquisitely beautiful sculpture and tracery, the work of less enlightened but non-whitewashing ages. I wonder how many acres of fresco and encaustic painting on the walls of old English churches lie equally perdu x daubed over by the Protestant MOORISH HOUSES AT ALGIEES. 137 brush ? Surely there must be " un infierno bianco," a Tophet kept alway at a white heat, for those horrible Ostrogoths and Visigoths, the whitewashing churchwardens of the last century, and " lubber fiends " to restore and beautify them with white lead boiling hot. I have often fancied that when a Moorish lady has nothing to do she never has much, still smoking, eating lollipops, making coffee and love, and twanging the mandolin, do take up a reasonable part of her time she calls in the whitewashers "pour passer le temps." You shall hardly toil up one of the steep lanes of the Moorish quarter without seeing the white- washer swinging high in air, as one who gathers samphire, sitting on a little bit of wood, pendant by ropes from the wall a human hanging bookshelf. You shall hardly stand a moment to gaze sorrowfully on some delicate morsel of stone undercutting he is filling up with chalky pigment without being bespattered by the droppings of his brush ; and then a mysterious door opens and there issues forth, not an Arab cavalier or Moorish damsel dreamily veiled, but a big negro, brush in hand, his teeth gleaming as snowily as the whitewash in the bucket he carries. All this interminable whitewashing is avowedly for the purpose of keeping the houses sweet and clean, and keeping off at once the fleas and the cholera morbus. Let us slowly ascend those precipitous flights of steps bordered by whitewashed houses, gaunt, silent, and suggestive, which in the upper town, or old Moorish quarter, are called " streets." Do you know La Rue des Machicoulis at Boulogne ? Put the bare-legged fishergirls into trousers and haiks, and the fishermen into burnouses, and the Machicoulis would very much resemble a street in the Moorish quarter of Algiers. In the technics of the building trade, when the superstructure of a wall leans away from you, it is said to be " on the batter." The storeys of these Moorish houses lean, on the contrary, towards you. They are irreclaiinably top-heavy, forming a kind of serrated vault over you. There is no need to shore them up as we do tottering fabrics, in the. old streets out of Cheapside. The 138 UNDER THE SUN. opposite sides are so near touching each other, that little danger would accrue from their tumbling further forward. You would only lose that narrow ribbon of bright blue over head, placed there as you think to let you know that there is such a thing as a heaven above this " citta senza sole," just as in the most intricate of the back alleys behind the Merceria at Venice you will always find a thread of white marble meandering along the centre of the pavement, and which, if you follow it sedulously, will lead you to St. Mark's Place. Many of these streets ladder-lanes rather are not more than six feet in breadth. They would, were they on a level surface, be as fever-haunted as the abominable wynds and closes in the Canongate at Edinburgh and the Trongate of Glasgow ; but being built on the steepest of inclines, they are compulsorily drained. For the rest, the sanitary precautions insisted upon by the French authorities are excellent. The police would have few scruples in walking into a Moorish house, were it reported to be in a filthy state, only they can't force the male population to wear clean burnouses, or to undress when they sleep. The Moors certainly do their best to keep their houses free from Giaour intrusion. With very great difficulty they have been brought even to submit their " etat civil," or births, deaths, and marriages, to registration at the Mairie. Before 1830 there was simply a Beit-et-Mal, or "chamber of goods," which took cognizance, with a view to the administration of property, of the deaths of the population. If you ask an elderly Moor when he was born, or married, or when his first child was born, he will answer, either that Allah knows, not he, or that these events took place about; the time of such and such an earthquake, or invasion of grasshoppers, or when this dey came into power, or that pasha was strangled. Narrow, and dark, and steep, and tortuous as are the streets in the Jewish quarter, the houses are in their way in the artistic way gems. In the eyes of Gallic authority they are simply so many abominations, which need to be swept away to make room for the alignement. The French would pull down MOORISH HOUSES AT ALGIERS. 139 the Alhambra or the Taj-Mehal. It is well that the Russians burnt Moscow about the ears of their invaders. Otherwise, and had Napoleon kept his footing there, composite columns and allegories of victory would soon have replaced the Byzantine cupolas of the Kremlin. The Moors, in the opinion of non-French critics, have always excelled in architecture ; yefe, curious to say, the " maallum," or professional architect, is regarded in Arab society less as the professor of a liberal art than as a mechanic. My masonic brethren will remember that the master mason who built the Second Temple was its designer as well ; but he was no magnifico ; only a working man. Many of the principal edifices in old Algiers were built under the direction of Christian slaves, who, "pour encourager les autres," were occasionally bastinadoed or strangled if the edifices were not finished in time, or if the outlay exceeded their estimates, or if his Highness the Pasha-Dey did not like the house when it was finished. There is one legend of an Italian architect the constructor, indeed, of the Great Mosque who was impudent enough to cross its threshold after it had been consecrated to the Mahometan worship ! He was dipped into a vat of boiling oil, and then hung up to dry, I presume. The Moorish house the dwelling house as it is still to be seen in what remains of old Algiers, and to a greater extent in Oran and Constantinople, is simply the house common to Old and New Spain ay, and to the old East, and oldest Scripture perchance. There is the " patio," or open courtyard, the arched corridor around it, the arched galleries above, and the " azotea," or flat roof. You see in the Moorish house a pretty close illustration of the divergence between Oriental civilisation and ours. For a Moor, his house can scarcely be too shabby and melancholy- ooking without, or too splendid or luxurious within. The house is, in short, a symbol of Mussulman life, with its dreamy and impenetrable mysteries. The front door looks like the most rearward of back doors ; it is like the stage door to a shut-up theatre, or the portal to a gambling-house in the day time ; half the paint scraped or kicked 140 UNDER THE SUN. off, splashed with mud or whitewash, which it is nobody's business to clean off ; bolted, barred, chained, and, it would seem, nailed up. In one panel, head high, is a little Judas trap, with an iron grating before it. There is never a bell ; and when there is a knocker, it is usually bolted down to the woodwork. If you wish to make your presence known to those within, you must thunder at the door with a cudgel, or bang at it with your foot. After some ten minutes of this exercitation, the trap may be slowly opened, and the great grinning face of a negress appear at the aperture. In some Moorish houses, in addition to the Judas trap in the doors, there are spy-holes in the wall sometimes, and designedly, of considerable size and you may become aware of a moon-face with kohl-stained eyelids, surrounded by tresses inter- woven with coins, and crowned by a dainty " chachia," or skull- cap, beaming down upon you. It is only a " Rikat." It is but Jezebel, with her painted face. In the old days, when to be a Jew in Algiers was to be a despised and persecuted wretch, the Moorish ladies used occasionally to vary the monotony of their existence by having a little bit of fun with an Israelite after this wise. There were then, as now, numbers of Jew pedlars vendors of jewellery, gold lace, cosmetics, and other feminine fal-lals wandering up and down the precipitous thoroughfares of El Djezzair. Then the cruel law decreed that no Jew, on pain of forfeiture and the bastinado, was to be suffered to enter the house of a True Believer. But as the Jews sold precisely the commodities most dearly desiderated by the She-believers, they were fain to come to their front doors, and, holding them ajar, transact their business there. The little bit of fun consisted in getting possession of the Jew's merchandise, promising to pay him for it, then slamming the door in his face, and, sliding open the Judas trap, laugh at the poor pedlar's beard, tell him that he was a son of Sheytan, and bid him go to Eblis. This was very funny, was it not ? The unhappy Sheeny, thus " left out in the cold," was powerless to regain possession of his property ; for another cruel law forbade him to knock at a Mussulman's door. All he could MOORISH HOUSES AT ALGIERS. 141 do was to stand in the street, whimper, yell, stamp, dance, tear his hair and beard, and invoke Moses and the prophets. If it were evening, the watch, perhaps, would come round. Then probably the Jew would be beaten for making a noise ; but he was in luck's way indeed if the commandant of the patrol took it into his head to do him justice, by thundering at the True Believer's door, forcing the dishonest inmates to disgorge their booty, and returning it to the pedlar with a deduction of seventy- five per cent, for costs and trouble taken. The good old times of El Djezzair. They remind me of an exordium to an article I once read in a Review. " It was formerly the wholesome custom in England, at the seasons of Christmas and Easter, to stone and beat the Jews." And there are a good many people, I daresay, who unfeignedly regret the abrogation of that and many other equally wholesome customs. The traveller Shaw was of opinion that the houses of Palestine, in scriptural times, were precisely similar to those in the modern Algiers. It is indeed startling to find in a Moorish house the vestibule or " gate " in which Mordecai sat ; the " housetop " on which the apostle dreamed his dream, and the " third loft " from which Eutychus fell. But to discuss these matters is not my province. I leave them to the Palestine Exploration Society. All Moorish houses are built on the same model. The wealthiest make no pretence of exterior facades or porticoes. Everybody the richest and the poorest lives in a cube of stone or plastered brick ; the only difference between the dwellings of a sheikh and a cobbler is that of size. Here and there a little wooden balcony, 4iot unlike a chicken coop, may project from a window ; but, as a rule, the surface of the walls is entirely flat. The door I spoke of just now is a most massive construction, and garnished with huge convex-headed nails. Here and there the panels may contain some carving in an antique geometrical design, and over the lintel a full-blown rose is sometimes cut in marble. One curious ornament you are sure to find, either painted or carved, in the neighbourhood of the front door. That is the 142 UNDER THE SUN. representation of a human hand, cut off short at the wrist. I was told that this manual symbol was always affixed by the masons or painters to a Moorish house, at the moment of its completion, to preserve its inmates thenceforth and evermore from the influence of the evil eye : the " gettatura " of the Neapolitans. The prows of the pirate ships which used to sally forth from Algiers were, in a like intent, decorated with the representation of a human eye. It is desirable to correct the mistake into which some tourists have fallen respecting the rude representations, in gold and silver gilt, of human arms, legs, hands, ears, eyes, and noses which are exposed for sale in the shops of Algiers. These effigies, reminding the Englishman of Miss Kilmansegge and her precious leg, have nothing to do with the superstition of the evil eye. They are votive offerings, to be purchased by people who have been cured of hurts or affections of the members to which they have reference, and to be hung up in the Catholic churches. There are numbers of Maltese and Spaniards and Southern Frenchmen in Algiers, all as superstitious as pagans ; and these simple-minded fools for is not superstition one of the principal features of simplicity of mind ? are the great offerers of offerings at the shrine of Notre Dame d'Afrique and other popular idols. I remember a droll story related, on this head, by worthy M. Douz, the jeweller of the Rue Soggemah. The captain of an Italian brigantine, whose leg had been broken by his falling into the hold, determined, so soon as he was well enough to get about on crutches, to offer up a silver leg as large as life at the shrine of his favourite saint. He called on M. Douz and ordered the leg to be made. It was to cost a thousand francs. In a week after- wards he called again. Was the leg finished ? he asked. No ; the model in wax was only just completed. Well, he had changed his mind, and he felt a great deal better, and he thought a leg half the size of life would do. In another week he was again at Douz, much better, and with a mind again changed. Suppose M. Douz made him a foot ? After all, it was only the ankle- joint which had been fractured. Whereat M. Douz grew wroth, MOORISH HOUSES AT ALGIERS. 143 and told him that as in another week he would probably be able to walk without crutches, and would then further diminish his order, he had better let him make him a silver toenail, and be off the leg bargain. In this compromise the captain of the brigantine joyfully acquiesced ; but he must have got very well indeed afterwards, for he never came to the Rue Soggemah again, and the saint who ought to have had a whole leg did not get so much as a toenail. 144 XI. COCKPIT ROYAL. IX days of the week they do nothing, and on Sunday they go to the bull-fight." Such is the awful charge I have heard brought against the inhabitants of Madrid. But something after all may be urged in favour of a bull-fight. It is a national, a royal amusement. Ferdinand the Seventh established a school of Tauromachia at Seville. Bull-baiting, too, is one of the oldest of English sports. Something approaching it used to take place in the streets of London every Monday morning within very recent times, and until, indeed, the cattle market was removed from Smithfield to Islington, nay, even since the aforesaid removal, I have occasion- ally seen much sport got out of a lively young bullock between Farringdon Street and the Old Bailey, to the imminent peril of Mr. Benson's shop windows. Perhaps there may be also a trifle to be said in favour of the bull-ring. You will not hear it said by me, for I have gone through my course of tauromachia, and hold a corrida de toros to be the most brutal, cruel, and demo- ralising spectacle to be seen on this lower earth, after the King of Dahomey's " great custom." Still there are people who like it. So much for Bos ; but who dares to defend cock-fighting ? No*- one, I should hope. It is undeniably cruel, and as undeniably demoralising ; since it leads, in England at least, to gambling and to the undue consumption of alcoholic liquors. Again, a cock- fight not unfrequently ends in a man-fight. That the heinous turpitude of the thing is deeply impressed on the English mind is obvious from the proverbial expression employed to denote any- thing unusually and superlatively profligate and audacious that COCKPIT ROYAL. 145 " it beats cock-fighting." Very properly, this barbarous sport has been put under the special ban of the English law. It is reached by the provisions of the Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, commonly known as " Dick Martin's." Lawyers, cun- ning of fence, have sometimes striven to show in appeal cases that the cock is not a domestic animal ; but the judges all ranged in Westminster Hall a terrible show have decided that chanti- cleer is as much an animal as a donkey; and more than one amateur of the cockpit royal has expiated his fondness for the gallinaceous tournament in county jail. There was that poor young marquis, for instance, who indulged in the luxury of a private cock-fight in his own grounds on a Sunday morning. Soon did Nemesis, in the shape of a Society's constable, overtake that sporting peer. There was a terrible scandal. It is true that the marquis was not sent to the tread- mill ; but the case against him was proved, and his lordship, if I remember aright, was fined. That, at least, was something. I dwell the more particularly on this case, as, the moment I found cock-fighting and Sunday morning associated in the phrase I had penned, my ears began to tingle and my cheek to blush with remorseful shame. Ah ! I should be the last wretch in the world to moralise on the wickedness of cock-fighting, for, not many years since, I deliberately attended a cock-fight. It was on a Sunday morning, too. I may as well make a clean breast of it, and allow the whole sad truth to be known. I was born to be a "frightful example" to the more virtuously disposed of my species; and I have little doubt that all the misfortunes I have since under- gone, or which I may be doomed to undergo, spring directly from, tor will spring from, that cock-fight. The only thing I can plead in extenuation is, that the combat I attended did not take place within the London bills of mortality, or within the sound of English church bells. The deed was done on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and on the coast of Africa. It was at Algiers. I had just been reading in the English papers how a whole bevy of noblemen and gentlemen, disguised under the most plebeian aliases, had been arrested at a sporting K 146 UNDER THE SUN. public-house Jemmy Somebody's in London, and marched ignominiously through the public street to the police-court, where they were each fined five pounds : all for cock-fighting. The case against them was clear. The plumed bipeds, the metal spurs, the weights and scales, the pit itself, had all been found, and duly produced in court by inexorable inspectors. It was shown that a great deal of money had been laid on the combat. " Serve them right," quoth a stern gentleman, to whom I read the report of the case. " I'd have sent every man Jack of them to prison for six months, with hard labour." This downright opinion was neces- sarily provocative of argument. Another gentleman present, a mild and genial person, remarked that he really did not see much harm in cock-fighting. The birds, he added, evidently liked fighting ; and so long as the natural spurs only were used But the stern gentleman wouldn't hear anything in palliation of that which he termed an abominable and degrading exhibition of cruelty and ruffianism. It had now grown to be about twelve at noon ; and it so fell out that Abdallah, the guide attached to the hotel, sent to ask, with his duty, what amusement the gentlemen would like to have provided for them that present Sunday : adding that a capital cock-fight was to come off at two o'clock precisely at the Cafe de 1'Ancienne Kiosque, on the road to Moustafa Supdrieur. "We had been arguing so long on the pros and cons of cock-fighting with- out arriving at any satisfactory conclusion, that Abdallah's pro- position came upon us like the refreshing spray from a hydropult on a dusty day. The Gordian knot was severed. The stern gentleman and the mild gentleman, and your humble servant, were unanimous that the best thing to be done was to proceed to the scene of action and compare notes on what we saw. So we hired a carriage and went off to the Cafe" de 1'Ancienne Kiosque. I beg to repeat that all this took place in Africa. In England we should not have dreamed of doing such a thing ; nor, dreaming, should we have dared. But it ivas Sunday. Long years have passed since, in pages precursors to those in which I now write, I was permitted to COCKPIT ROYAL. 147 discourse on the aspect of Sunday in London, and on the different Sabbaths which men in their pride, or their strict conscientious- ness, or their sheer indifference, had made to themselves. I have spent five hundred Sundays in twenty different lands since I first took pen in hand and told how I had heard " Sunday bands " playing in the Parks ; how I had heard English mechanics enjoy- ing their " Sunday out " in suburban tea-gardens. And am I, or are you, or is our patron Society any nearer now the solution of the vexed question of how Sunday should best be spent, and which of our human Sabbaths is most acceptable to the Divine Ordainer of all things ? That the seventh day, or the first day for we are scarcely agreed as to whether it is properly number one or number seven should not be spent in cock-fighting seems clear enough ; but remember, again, that what I am telling of took place in Africa, in a country governed by a Eoman Catholic power, numbering among its subjects Turks, Jews, heretics, fire-worship- pers, and pagan negroes. Man was made for the Sabbath, they tell you, grimly scowling, north of the Tweed. The Sabbath was made for man, they hold in latitudinarian France, and even in Lutheran Germany. But how is a government to impose a Sabbath upon so many races of men, and of so many ways of thinking ? Eeligious politics run as high in Algeria as elsewhere. The Mahometan Arabs call the Christians, dogs. The orthodox Turks are continually expressing a desire to defile the graves of the fathers and mothers of the heterodox Moors, and both concur in hating the schismatical Kabyles. The negroes are mere idolaters and Obeahmen. Turks, Moors, and negroes concur in loathing and despising the Jews. The Gallicans in Algiers hint that the Catholicism of the Spaniards who colonise Oran is tinged with strange heresies and excessive mariolatry ; and the Maltese sailors resolutely refuse to pray to the saints in the French calendar. The resident British community import tracts ; try a little proselytism without any apparent results ; squabble among themselves, and make no secret of their convictions that their neighbours are going to Jehanum. As for the Jews, they look upon Moslem and Nazarene alike, with the 148 UNDER THE SUN. feelings harboured from time immemorial, but harboured in an occult manner. And yet, amidst this confusion of mosques, cathedrals, chapels, synagogues, and Mumbo- Jumbo houses, Trap- pist convents, and marabout koubbas, nobody in Algiers, extraor- dinary to relate, thinks of quarrelling or fighting about Sunday. Everybody enjoys his Sabbath as seemeth him best. To what causes must the absence of dispute as to the ob- servance of the Algerine Sabbath be ascribed ? To the warmth of the climate ? To the indolence or placability of the people ? To the tolerance of the clergy? Scarcely, I conjecture. Hot as is the climate and lazy the people, there are enough activity and energy about to make Sunday the noisiest day in the week. The clergy are just as intolerant as the authorities permit them to be ; and the priests of one sect, not being allowed to burn or plunder those of another, console themselves by preaching against and cursing their neighbours. The real reason is that a casting vote in all matters, secular or ecclesiastical, is given by the dominant power by the eminently tolerant, unpreju- diced, and unbelieving French government. I hope I am not libelling that government by hinting that, theologically, it is a little more than sceptical. Sunday is a day when everybody is allowed, and indeed expected, to make merry ; and the Gaul being at bottom a light-hearted and mercurial soul, he sees nothing very wrong in the social organisation of a colony in which there are three Sabbaths instead of one. I will not say that I pursued precisely this train of thought as the carriage bore us along the very dusty road leading to the Cafe de 1'Ancienne Kiosque, and ultimately to Mouscafa Supe"rieur; but the roadside was fertile in materials on which future reflections might bo founded. It was Sunday out on the most extensive scale, and with the oddest combination of Oriental and European characteristics. Group after group of French soldiers, military coveys of red-legged partridges, were scattered along the broad highway; and in the keen zest in which they were evidently enjoying their Sunday, offered a very marked contrast to the English warriors whom you meet COCKPIT ROYAL* 149 listlessly wandering about the streets of provincial towns, and whose mental condition never seems to me to extend beyond these stages : first, that of despair at not having money enough to get drunk; second, that of having it, and being drunk; third, that of having got sober, and wanting to get drunk again. The third stage is analogous to, but not identical with, the first. The British private, who has tasted the sweets of the beer-shop, is in a position more fully to appreciate the poetical reminder that the sorrow's crown of sorrow is in the remembrance of happiness. Ah! if under some blessed fiscal dispensation the English soldier could only be supplied with cigars three for a penny ! He would still visit the canteen, I suppose ; but I would lay any odds that he would not get tipsy half so often ; that he would not be half so brutal, so stupid, or so disorderly; and that he would not find time hang with such awful ponderosity on his hands. Cigars three a penny ! My panacea is a cheap one. I have but one addition to suggest : a theatre for two- pence, in lieu of the filthy public-house and the blackguard music-hall. With cheap cigars and cheap theatrical amusements you would soon find a sensible diminution in your number of courts-martial, in the inmates of your barrack cells and the number of your punishment drills, your extra guards, your stoppages, and your bloody stripes laid on the backs of poor brave fellows who get into trouble because they do not know what to do with themselves.* Cigars three a penny, I say, and " Box and Cox " for twopence, in preference to the " Memoirs of Lieutenant Melchisedec Bethel," that sainted subaltern of foot, or the "Beatified Baggage-wagon "Woman," price thirteen shillings per thousand for distribution. Cigars three a penny were very common in the mouths of the French warriors on the road to Moustafa Superieur. Scarcely a private but had his cheap roll of tobacco ; nor did his officers seem to be too proud to smoke cigars at the same price. Tobacconists in Algiers will sell you so-called Londres * Flogging-, thanks to Mr. Otway, exists 110 longer in our army. 150 UNDER THE SUN, and Eegalias at as high a price as you are foolishly willing to give ; but the prices are essentially " fancy " ones, and the cigars themselves but the sweepings of the French Regie. Given a fine Sunday afternoon, and several hundreds of military men swaggering or strolling along in the direction of a cafe where a cock-fight is about to take place, the odds in England, I opine, would be laid on all those military men being intent on witnessing the cock-fight in question. Did your betting lay that way in Algeria, however, you would lose. Every nationality here has its special and exclusive Sun- day amusement; but cock-fighting is not one to which the French are addicted. " Comment ! " they would cry. " Spend two hours in seeing two miserable birds peck one another to pieces : mais c'est une horreur ! " The Frenchman's Sunday means a long day of dawdling, of staring at shows and sights, of ogling pretty girls, of sipping moderate and thin potations, and of winding up at billiards or the play. The French officers have an occasional bout at partridge-shooting or pig-sticking, and, at outlying stations, can cultivate perilous laurels, if they choose, in hunting the lion; but ideas of "Le Sport," as it is understood in France, have not yet penetrated to Ceesarean Mauritania. Horse-racing languishes. Many of the Mahometan gentlemen have magnificent studs of thoroughbreds, but they decline to enter their full-blooded Arabs for plates unless the French owners of racehorses can exhibit a faultless pedigree with each of the horses they enter. And a racer must have a very long lineage to match with one in the stud-book of an Arab sheikh. The native gentry, too, are great falconers^ the French scarcely know a hawk from a hernshaw, and regard a falcon as a kind of semi-fabulous bird, not often out of heraldic scutcheons, and which ladies used to wear on their wrists like bracelets some time in the dark ages. 1iV>' The Arabs understand cock-fighting, and among themselves can enjoy it keenly ; but, on the whole, they prefer the contests of quails, and even of pheasants which are here " game " to the backbone, and desperately pugnacious to those of cocks. COCKPIT ROYAL. 151 Moreover, they never bet ; and to Europeans a cock-fight without money won and lost is as insipid as card-playing for "love." The real amateurs, "aficionados," as they call themselves, of cock-fighting are the Spaniards, of whom there are some thou- sands domiciled in Algiers, either as agriculturists, as mecha- nics, or as shopkeepers. They wear their national costume ; speak very little French ; scowl at the Arabs as though they were the self -same Moriscoes whom they were wont to perse- cute in Spain ; and have their own church and their own priests. The jewellers' shops in Algiers are full of rudely-fashioned representations in silver of human eyes, noses, arms, legs, and ears, and these I used to take at first as being in some way connected with the Mahometan superstition of the evil eye ; but in reality they are votive offerings, and their chief purchasers are Spaniards, who devoutly hang them up on the altars of favourite saints, in gratitude for their recovery from deafness, toothache, chilblains, ophthalmia, or otherwise, as the case may be. For the rest, these Algerine Spaniards, usually emigrants from Carthagena and Valencia, are peaceable citizens enough, and give the government but little trouble. They are honest, industrious, and eminently temperate bread, garlic, tobacco, and cold water being their principal articles of diet. They occasionally indulge in stabbing affrays, when arrears of ill- feeling, arising from bygone cock-fighting and card-playing disputes, are cleared up ; but as a rule the use of the knife is strictly confined to the family circle. Pepe has it out with and then the thing is hushed up, and the swarthy gentle- .who is taken to the hospital with a punctured wound the fifth rib is reported to have accidentally slipped dew a upon an open knife as he was cutting the rind of a piece of cheese. They don't run mucks, and they seldom stab the * gendarmes. They are inveterate gamblers and finished cock-fighters. The Maltese sailors, of whom there are usually a numerous tribe in Algiers belonging to the speronares in port, are likewise 152 UNDER THE SUN. enthusiastic admirers of the " gallirnachia ; " but the Spaniards, to cull a locution from the pit, " fight shy M of the brown islanders. Your Maltese, not to mince matters, is a drunken, quarrelsome dog, fearfully vindictive, as lazy as a duke's hall-porter, and a great rogue. Rows are rare at Algerian cock-fights ; but if ever a difficulty occurs, and the ^police are called in, the Maltese are sure to be at the bottom of it. Cafes, breweries with gardens attached, and dancing-saloons, are plentiful in the neighbourhood of Algiers. As the road grows crowded and more crowded with soldiers and sailors, with French workmen in blouses and French farm-labourers in striped night- caps and sabots ; with German artisans with their blonde beards, belted tunics, and meerschaums ; with little grisettes and Norman bonnes with their high white caps ; with grave, dusky Spaniards in their round jackets, bright sashes, pork-pie hats, clubbed hair, and earrings ; with Greek and Italian sailors, and fishermen from the Balearic Isles, all mingled pell-mell ; with the Jews in their gorgeous habiliments, clean white stockings, snowy turbans, and shiny shoes ; with the Jewish women with high conical head- dresses of golden filigree, and long falling veils of lace, and jewelled breastplates, and robes of velvet and rich brocade ; with Arabs in white burnouses and flapping slippers, who stalk grimly onward, looking neither to the right nor to the left ; with Berbers and Kabyles swathed in the most astonishing wrap-rascals of camel's hair, and goat's hair, and cowskin ; with fez- capped, bare- footed, and more than half bare-backed Arab boys, shrieking out scraps of broken French ; with Zouaves so bronzed and so barbaric in appearance as to make one doubt whether they have not turned Mussulmans for good and all ; with sellers of fruit, and sherbet, and dates, and sweetstuff, and cigars, and lucifer-matches, you begin at last to wonder whether the days of the Crusades have not returned, and whether this motley crowd, belonging to ail nations and jabbering all dialects, is not part of the enormous host whilom encamped at Jaffa or Ascalon. Surely the Duke of Bethlehem or the Marquis of Jericho must be somewhere here- abouts. Surely Richard of England must have patched up a COCKPIT ROYAL. 153 truce with the Sultan Saladin, and the camp-followers of the Christian and the Saracen army must be making merry together, No ; this is only an ordinary Algerine Sunday. It is the Christian Sunday, remember ; but it is worthy of remark that the Hebrews who had their Sabbath yesterday, and the Mahometans who had theirs the day before, do not evince the slightest disinclination to take an extra holiday on the real or Nazarene one. The Cafe de PAncienne Kiosque was rather a tumble-down place of entertainment, and might have been easily mistaken for one of the inferior " guinguettes " outside the barriers, whither, in olden times, ere Paris, both outside and inside its barriers, had grown to be the dearest city in the world, one used to repair to drink "petit bleu" at eight sous the litre. The different nationalities were enjoying themselves, each after its peculiar fashion, at the Ancienne Kiosque. The burnoused Arabs were aravely squatting on the benches outside, paying a trifle, I suppose, DO the proprietor of the cafe for that privilege ; for they brought their own tobacco, and partook of no other refreshment. A noisy group of Frenchmen were wrangling over a "pyramid " game of billiards the once green cloth of the table tinted dun-gray from long use and many absinthe stains, and grown as full of rents as poor Robin's jerkin. At the side-tables some sailors were drinking drams. Sailors are cosmopolitans in that respect. The Germans had a back yard to themselves, where they were playing ninepins and wallowing in drouthy draughts of "biere de Mars." The cockpit was at the extremity of a long garden, originally laid out in the French or sham classical style, but where the indigenous and spiky cactus had long since had it all its own way, carrying ?hings before it literally with a high hand, and driving out the modest plants of Europe with sticks and staves and sharp-pointed knives. Next to the horse-armoury at the Tower, a grove of cactus is about the most formidable array of lethal-like weapons I know. We paid a franc apiece and were admitted into a square barn- like apartment, the walls whitewashed and the roof supported by heavy beams. Within this quadrangle had been constructed a 154 UNDER THE SUN. theatre, properly so called, consisting of twenty rows of seats disposed one over the other in circles, and gradually widening in diameter as they ascended. You entered this theatre by means of ladders and trap- doors, of which there might have been half a dozen in the different grades of seats ; and I may best explain my meaning by saying that the outside of the structure looked, from the floor of the barn, like a gigantic wooden funnel. The neck of the funnel was the cockpit itself. We climbed up to the highest range of seats, and getting as close as we could to the two gendarmes who represented authority, looked curiously around and beneath. There was little fear of disturbance, however. The "roughs" were not present that Sunday morning ; indeed, we heard subsequently that it was Saint Somebody's day a Maltese saint and that the brown islanders were protracting their devotions at their own church. The Spaniards, who had all doubtless attended mass before eleven a.m., were the chief occupants of the theatre ; and into it were crammed, tight as herrings in a barrel, at least two hundred and fifty amateurs. Turn where you would, were visible the swarthy faces, bright black eyes, closely-cropped whiskers, upper lips and chins blue from constant shaving, ear-lobes decorated with rings of gold, hair in clubs, in queues, in nets, and in bags, pork-pie or soft felt hats with rosettes, round shaggy jackets, loose necker- chiefs, and curiously-worked gaiters or embroidered slippers, so distinctive of the children of sunny Spain. They were all smoking. On such solemn occasions as bull- fights and cock-fights the papelito or paper roll is accounted puerile and jejune, and the genuine weed or Puro enjoyed. Such Puros as were in a state of combustion here were probably not of the Algerine or three-a-penny species. They were big, black, odorous, and probably smuggled from the Peninsula. The company had obviously taken a good deal of garlic with their morning meal ; and if you will again be pleased to recollect that the month was May and the country Africa, I need not enter into any details concerning the somewhat powerful aroma which issued from the two hundred and fifty amateurs. But a better behaved, a quieter COCKPIT ROYAL, 155 audience, I never saw. It is a pity they had not something worthier than a cock-fight at which to display their good behaviour. I am so ignorant of the technology of cock-fighting as to be unaware of the precise meaning of a " main ; " but we saw five different battles between five brace of birds. They were, for the most part, as game as game could be. One only it was the third fight a red long-legged fellow, " El rubio," as he was called in the betting, showed, figuratively speaking, the white feather. He essayed to run away from his adversary, and even to scale the walls of the pit ; whereat there were dull murmurs among the auditory, and cries of " Fuera ! fuera el rubio " " Out with him ! " His owner very speedily put an end to the growing discontent by jumping into the pit, seizing the recreant gladiator, wringing his neck, and stamping upon him. He then handed over a handful of dollars, his loss on the event, to the owner of the opposition bird, and philosophically lighting a fresh Puro, regained his seat, and betted throughout the next fight on a white bird with a gray gorget. Cockpit Royal ! As I gazed on the fierce struggle I could not but recall the mild "Wordsworth's mellifluous description of Chanticleer under pacific circumstance : " Sweetly ferocious round his native walks, Pride of his sister-wives, the monarch stalks ; Spur-clad his nervous feet, and firm his tread, A crest of purple tips the warrior's head ; Bright sparks his black and rolling eyeball hurls, Afar his tail he closes and unfurls. On tiptoe rear'd, he strains his clarion throat, %Threaten'd by faintly answering forms remote. Again with his shrill voice the mountain rings, While, flapp'd with conscious pride, resound his wings." Are not the numbers melodious ? Is not the description charm- ing ? Was there ever a prettier amplification of cock-a-doodle- do-o-o-o ? But here he was the "monarch " " sweetly ferocious" with a vengeance. I have heard ere now the term "pitted against each other," and I know not what may have been formerly the practice in cock-fighting England ; but in this Algerine pit 156 UNDER THE SUN. there did not seem to be any need to excite the combatants for the fray. The two owners stepped into the arena, each with his bird in his hand. Solemn declarations were made and written down as to the ages and prior performances of the champions. Weights and scales were then produced, and the birds were duly weighed. The appointed judges subjected them to a minute examination. Their spurs and beaks were then rubbed with the half of a lemon ; they were put down, at opposite corners of the pit ; and the owners, bowing to each other, went to their places. Not a cry, not a gesture, was used to excite the birds to the attack. There was a quiet walk round the pit ; then a few sidelong looks, a careful mutual examination of the opposite party's general build and make-up ; then a rush, a rise on the wings, another, another ; then it seemed as though a small feather-bed had been suddenly ripped up and the plumes scattered in all directions. Such a furious clapper -clawing, such a tooth-and-nail exhibition of gameness ! But not a crow was heard. Not a cry, not a gap even, of pain. The loudest sound audible was the rustling of feathers. Then the rivals would emerge from the downy cloud, stalk round the pit again, and eye and take stock of each other as before. Then would come rush number two, and another rise and another furious clapper-clawing. And so on, round after round, for perhaps an hour. This volume not being BelVs Life in London, I am absolved from chronicling the minutiae of the various rounds. In the first fight I may remark that one of the birds, a black one, was defeated early. Time was called ; he could not come up to it ; he consequently lost the fight, and was put out of his misery, bp' not contumeliously, by his owner. The victor expired just as he was being handed over the barrier to his triumphant proprietor. The next duel was between a little gray fiend of a bird and a gaunt white creature of most doleful mien. How handicapping is managed in the Algerian Cockpit Royal I do not know ; but there was evidently a great disparity in bottom and bone between these two. The pluck, however, of the gaunt white creature was COCKPIT ROYAL. 157 indomitable. He grew rather wild after about eighteen minutes' clapper-clawing, and staggered rather than walked round the pit : the little gray fiend strutting by his side, and ever and anon whispering in his ear, so it seemed, like an importunate bore ; but in reality finding out fresh tender parts about the un- happy creature's head wherein to progue him with his sharp beak. It was very horrible to see this gaunt white creature gradually turn first a streaky and then a complete crimson with the blood he lost. It was more horrible when both his eyes were gone, and blind and " groggy," but undismayed, he still went reeling about, occasionally closing with his enemy and clawing him. At last, in the twentieth round, I think, the little gray fiend coolly went up to the luckless white knight, looked in his face as though he were laughing in it, and with one trenchant blow of his beak cut the poor wretch's throat. I am sure by the blood that spurted out that the great artery had been severed. The white cock balanced himself for a moment on one leg, then threw back his head, gave one smothered "cluck," and as sharply as a human hand can be turned round from the position of supination to that of pronation, fell over dead, and turned his toes up. So may you have seen in the shambles a bullock stricken by the slaughterer's poleaxe. One stupid moment motionless he stands, as though all unconscious that his skull is cleft in twain and that his brains lie bare. But anon the quicksilver current 01 dissolution searches every vein and plumbs every nerve. The giant frame trembles, the legs give way, and the great beast topples over into so much beef. Can any extenuation for the manifest cruelty of this sport be found in the fact that the birds in Spanish pits wear only their natural horny pedal protuberances or spurs ? This, like every- thing else, is a moot point. The uninitiated generally jump at the conclusion that a fight with steel or silver spurs is much more larbarous than one without. These sharpened glaives, they argue, inflict the most hideous gashes. On the other side, it may be shown that when spurs are used the fight is over much 158 UNDER THE SUN. sooner ; and that spurs, besides, give an equality in weapons to the combatants. A bird may be of the same weight and age as his opponent, but much overmatched by him in adroitness and endurance ; yet it will often happen that when apparently at the last gasp, the bird who is getting the worst of it may turn the tables by driving his spur into his enemy's brain. To others I leave the task of drawing a moral from the tale I have told. As I went to the cock-fight, and it was Sunday, I am, so far as moralising is concerned, out of court. 159 XII. MAURESQUES. HAT was the name of the Frenchman who trans- lated the "Arabian Nights" in the middle of the last century? It began with a G, I think. "Well, Algiers is that gentleman's translation, in stone, and plaster, and whitewash, and glaring pigments. The Place da Gouvernement might be the principal square of a French pro- vincial town of the first class. There are big hotels, cafes, counting-houses, and shops; the names are French, the green blinds are French, the merchandise is French. You may buy Paris chocolate, and pectoral paste, and pills, and sham jewellery, and crinolines. You may dine "a la carte'* or "au prix fixe;" you may buy the latest "scrofulous French novel" at the bookstalls, and read the same etiolated little newspapers, with their timid murmurings of news a fortnight old, and their leading article devoted to a puff on a corn-cutter or a juggler fresh come to town. In a word, you are in a little Paris. The "pst!" of the consumer sounds shrilly through the air, and the "iffaM'sr/ 9 * of the gar$on is audibly responsive. The itinerant musicians of Gaul, the wheezy flute, the rachitic fiddle, and the harp dying of atrophy, strum and tootle feeble music at the street corner ; the commissionnaire slumbers on his truck in the sun ; the shoeblack plies his trade ; the bonne parades the same elabo- rately-laced babies ; the little girls in Hessian boots and frilled trousers go through competitive exhibitions with skipping ropes ; a real French poodle, shaven and shorn, crosses your path ; groups of red- trousered soldiers lounge by, their mouths agape 160 UNDER THE SUX. and their hands thrust in their pockets ; the roguish little milliner flits past with her bandbox; the tremendous officier superieur, aiguilletted and epauletted, strolls out of the cafe where he has been breakfasting, picking his teeth ; the orderly trots by with his leathern satchel on his hip ; the gamin makes faces at you, flees behind a corner if you threaten him with your cane, and, when you are at a convenient distance, flings a stone at you; the snowy-vested, white-capped cook emerges into the morning and leans against the door-jamb to inhale the fresh air, all hot and hot though it be, until it is time for him to dive into his burning tomb of pots and pans again. Adolphe, in curly-brimmed hat and turn-down collar pre- posterously vandyked, and cravat in a gigantic true-lover's-knot, leers under the bonnet of Madame, the spouse of the employe of the administration, taking her walks abroad attired in the height of Parisian fashion to cheapen leathery artichokes and skinny chickens in the market ; whilst Jules is humming " Rien n'est sacre pour un Sapeur," and puffing his halfpenny cigar as superbly as though it were a half-crown Embajador. Wan children press you to buy cigar-lights and three-sous bunches of flowers ; bright in the sun glitter the gilded signs of the pho- tographers and the dentists two branches of industry which appear at present to absorb the most energetic of French faculties ; there is a distant sound of trumpeting and drumming ; the caleche-drivers are asleep on their boxes, as usual; and cropping up like poppies in a cornfield are the red ribbons of the Legion. So plentiful, indeed, are these glorified button- holes, that you begin to wonder how many people there are in the French empire who are not decorated. Surely this is Paris, or Lyons, or Bordeaux, or at least Boulogne or Dieppe! No ; you are in Africa ; this indeed is Algiers ; and the " Arabian Nights" are all round you. There goes the Sultana Scheherazade. Tho Sultana in walking costume resembles a clothes-bag bifurcated, or say a pair of well-inflated pillows, surmounted by a bolster and covered with a mosquito curtain. MAURESQUES. 161 The Sultana may be one of the wives of a wealthy Moresco, or she may be a washerwoman. She is a Mauresque, and her outdoor costume is invariable. It consists of a pair of very baggy galligaskins, precisely that kind of Turkish trousers which Mandane wears in the opera of " Artaxerxes." These the shintiyan of the Turkish women are of plain white muslin ; above is a quantity of semi-diaphanous drapery, which I cannot attempt to describe ; and over all is thrown a long robe, or feminine toga, of very fine white linen or gauze> called a " haik," Sometimes another haik of a somewhat stouter material is worn over the first. This drapery does not fall in graceful folds, but is drawn close to the form, and the general composition of the pillow-case legs and bolster body is, in the entire effect, droll. The feet and ankles are bare, and from the hue of those extremities the Algerine expert is, I suppose, enabled to judge whether the veiled lady is dark or fair. Of course, I only presumed to look at the Sultana Scheherazade's supporters for the purpose of verifying the fact that her feet are thrust into wide shoes called "sebabath," which, again, are encased in looser slippers of yellow morocco, the papouches or babouches. Looking at these slippers, I could not, however, avoid regarding that which the slippers covered; and I must admit that the greatest part of the flesh I peeped at was very dusky indeed. The upper class of Mauresques, however, are said to be as fair as Europeans. You can see nothing of the Sultana Scheherazade's face but her eyes. The upper haik comes well down over her temples ; then you have a pair of big, black, sloe-like orbs, the lids so prolonged that they almost meet, or are darkened at least with kohl till they seem to join. The rest of the face is hidden by a handkerchief tied tightly behind. Some Arab ladies are said coquettishly to make use, as a veil, of a handkerchief so very transparent that their features can be perfectly well discerned beneath ; but with the vast majority of the sultanas I have seen the gauze mask has been a reality and the concealment effectual. L 162 tJXDER THE SUtf, I don't Wonder at this veil, answering to the Turkish yashmak, having been through so many centuries so obstinately retained. It may be regarded as a beautiful dispensation of Providence for promoting outdoor equality among the ladies. A pretty woman may let the passers-by know, even through her veil, that she is comely ; but an ugly woman is, by the merciful interposition of the knotted handkerchief, enabled altogether to hide her ill-favouredness. Once veiled and packed and pinned together, the Mauresques enjoy entire liberty out of doors. No jealously- curtained " arabas " -convey them ; no hideous eunuchs ushers of a perpetual seminary for grown-up young ladies hurry them along, forbidding them to look to the right or the left. Let me hasten to admit that in point of tidiness and cleanliness the Mauresques offer a very favourable contrast to the dignified and dirty male child of the desert. Haik, veil, and unmentionables are alike spotless and snowy. Sometimes the clothes-bag is portly, and suggests a stout mamma beneath a suggestion strengthened by a pursuivant tribe of children, all, down to little-girl toddlekins of four or five (so at least to judge from their stature), as closely veiled as their elders. Altogether the "get-up" of a Mauresque en promenade is livelier and smarter than that of a Turkish woman, whose veil is horribly ugly, who wears instead of the haik a pillow-case of black silk, and whose trousers hang in ugly folds over her loose and slovenly boots of untanned leather. There is a spick-and-span, just-home- from-the-wash look about these Moorish ladies very refreshing to view; but their ensemlle is, nevertheless, as I have hinted, funny. If you are in the penseroso mood, you may picture to yourself that all the feminine tombs in the great cemetery of Mustapha have disgorged their tenants, and that they, or their pallid ghosts rather, are wandering about in the sunshine, vainly seeking for the Janissaries of the good old times, and wondering how the Dey could think of allowing so many Christians to be at large without shackles on their shins and burdens on their backs. Or, still in ghostly frame of mind, you may liken them to the MAURESQUES. 1C8 phantom nuns who serenade Robert le Diable. Very much like these sainted apparitions did the white Mauresques look, gliding through the dim arcades of the Rue Bab-Azzoun. Or, if the allegro suit you better, you may fancy yourself gazing on the corps de ballet in " G-iselle," and that the airy creatures are but "Wills," with their ballet-skirts tucked lightly round them. Or, to one of ruder vision, they may appear like those five-and-thirty boarders at the ladies' school where Mr. Pickwick went to prevent the elopement, in their bed-gowns. Take them, however, as you will, and granting the grotesqueness of their trim, and you shall not divest them of an indefinable but omnipresent perfume of the East of the dreamy, vaporous, sensuous land of mystery and sorcery and jealousy and intrigue. I abandon for good the bifurcated clothes-bag, the double pillow-case similes. At night, albeit the gas contends with the moon's rays, each pair of baggy pantaloons becomes a novel in two volumes. The shops are full of cartes de visite of Arab and Jewish ladies, not only veiled, but with uncovered countenances not only smothered in the haik, but arrayed in all the picturesque splendour of Oriental costume. Whence have these photographers obtained their models ? Have they been permitted to enter the penetralia of the Moresco houses ? Has the camera become one of the lights of the harem ? I trow not. The models, I apprehend, have been selected from the Rikat, or naughty, tribe numerous enough here, as everywhere else. In these photographs you may see, at least, the lay figure dressed in the gorgeous attire of the Mauresque at home. The baggy trousers, drawn tight about the ankles, are replaced by the serroual, or, wide drawers of silk, or china crape, and reaching only mid-leg. The inmost garment is of finest gauze ; the feet are in slippers of velvet embroidered with gold ; the hair, plaited in long tresses, is knotted behind the head, and descends almost to the ground ;- the head-dress is a dainty little skull-cap or chachia of velvet, thick with gold and seed pearls, and attached by golden cords beneath the chin. The upper garment is the rlila, or jacket of brocaded silk, beneath which are one or more vests of 164 UNDER THE SUN. gay colours, ornamented with innumerable sugar-loaf buttons/ Round the waist is swathed the fouta, or many-folded sash of striped silk. Add rings and earrings, often of diamonds and emeralds very clumsily cut ; necklaces with side rows of fine pearls strung on common string ; bracelets for the arms, called " m'sais," and bangles for the ankles termed "m'kai's," and the Mauresque in her carte de visite or indoor costume is complete. Stay ; she sometimes wears a kind of upper jerkin called a " djabadoli," curiously filigreed with gold. A knowing Frenchman of long Algerine experience tells me that you may see the Mauresques in all this bravery of dress, and in actual reality of visage, if you will only remain at your window for an hour every evening before sunset, armed with a powerful opera-glass. Then, sweeping the horizon of houses, you may espy the beauteous she-Moors, gorgeous as the Queen of Sheba, come forth on the flat roofs of those old tenements in the upper town which have escaped the ruthless progress of French improvements. Simple she-Moors ! Like the ostrich which is said to hide its head in the sand but doesn't do anything of the sort and fancies itself invisible to the hunter, the confiding Mauresques imagine that nobody can see them when, glowing in silk, and velvet, and gold, and fine linen, they take their evening walk upon 1 he house-top. Another informant tells me that scarcely an even- ing passes without his seeing the unveiled Moorish women crawling over the tiles, very much after the fashion of cats, from roof to roof, from house to house, and often from street to street; for in the old quarters of the town the thoroughfares are, as a rule, consider- ably narrower than Middle Temple Lane or old Cranbourne Alley, or one of those queer back streets at Venice, and each storey pro- jects so much above the other that at the summit they touch. Shinning over the tiles is the orthodox way of paying evening visits. The tiles are the stairs, the flat roofs the drawing-rooms. It is precisely the same at Mexico, where the u azoteas " are the great sunset rendezvous. Sky Parlour is where the Mauresque woman most enjoys herself. Thither she comes to gossip with her neighbours., to sing, to eat sweetmeats, to hang out her linen, MAURESQUES. 165 to beat her carpets and her children. Life in a Moorish town would be dreary indeed without the house-top. The house-top ! For how many thousands of years have these unchangeable races been walking on the house-top ! And the sheet that was let down before the eyes of the visionary : what was that but the old canvas curtain they rig here every night on their roof to temper the sea breeze and afford shade from the latest fierceness of the sun's rays. This Moorish woman's dress which I have figured bit by bit from a bundle of photographs might have been copied almost verbatim from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's description of the dress of a Turkish lady in the seraglio a hundred and fifty years ago; and for centuries, perhaps, ere that, no fashions in the harem had changed. Staunch old Conservatism walks Algiers as proudly as of yore, and, for all the improvements of the innovating Franks, they cannot improve it out of the land which they occupy, but have not conquered. The position of the Mahometan woman in Algeria is theoreti- cally much preferable to that of her sex in Tunis or Morocco. The strictly equitable nature of the French rule forbids her being treated with harshness or sold into slavery ; but practically she is not much better off than in other Oriental countries. She is the victim of a stupid and brutalising social code, founded on and bound up in a religion whose theory is pure, but whose practice is barbarous. She is either contemned or maltreated : a toy to the rich, a beast of burden to the poor. When a child is born to a Moorish woman, she cries, if it be a boy, "it is a blessing ;" if ic be a girl, " it is a curse." Directly she comes into the world she is baptised in the name of Fatma, which is that of the mother of the Prophet. A week afterwards another name is given to her. The choice of appellatives lies between Aicha, Bedra, Djohar, Halima, Hasuria, Khredoudga, Khreira, Meriem, Mimi, Mouni, Rosa, Safia, Yamina, Zina, and Zohra. Some of these names seem to have a characteristic sound. Wouldn't you like to fall in love with a young lady named Mouni ; and can't you fancy being blessed with a mother-in-law by the name of Khredoudga ? 166 UNDER THE SUN. If the Moorish girl's parents are poor they will regard her only as an incubus. Her mother was probably married at ten or twelve years of age ; she ages early ; and each accession of maternal cares is to her only a renewed warning that she is no longer fair to look upon. As for the father, it is as much as he knows that he has a daughter till some one buys her of him in marriage. The poor girl grows up to be beaten, overworked, and despised : a Cinderella without a fairy godmother, but with sisters as miserable as herself. The rich girl is neglected by her mother, and is rele- gated to a corner of the harem and the care of an old negress. When she is old enough to be sold, she is married. She is pro- foundly ignorant, of course, very fond of sweetstuff, very fond of the bath, very fond of flowers, very fond of smoking cigarettes. In the street she ogles you with her big eyes, and if there be any- thing peculiar in your appearance, points a henna-stained finger and giggles shrilly. Beyond these characteristics, which may be gotten by heart in the course of half an hour's stay in Algiers, I question whether a European, not being a hakim or physician, would know much more of the Mauresques if he dwelt in the country for forty years. This state of life is no doubt very pitiable. The government can do little to ameliorate it. They have guaranteed to the natives the possession of the civil law which is the Koran and the social code and the civil law are one. They might as well decree that the Mahometan women should go unveiled, or that the Arabs should leave off their burnouses, as interfere with the domestic arrangements of the Moorish gynecseum. A benevolent French lady residing in Algiers has of late years endeavoured to do that which the admirable Miss Whateley attempted in Cairo, though on a purely secular basis. She has established a school where nearly a hundred little Mussulman girls, from four to ten years of age, receive a very good education ; and I am told that the progress made by some of these young Paynims in geography, arithmetic, and history besides the more feminine accomplish- ments of needlework and flower-painting would have done no discredit to a ladies' college in Europe. But the civilisation given MAUBESQUES, 167 to these poor little creatures is perforce superficial. The lower classes are glad enough to send their children to this school, for the teaching is gratuitous, and the parents are even encouraged by bribes to send them ; but the half-educated girl goes back to all the dreariness and all the drudgery of Oriental life. She is married and becomes a mother when she should still be learning her lessons ; and she very soon forgets the few she has learnt. The wives of the very rich Morescoes are said never to leave the house save to visit the holy koubbas to pray that they may have men-children, and to propitiate the Mara- bouts with gifts. It is an animal kind of existence altogether ; but can be no more altered or mended than the Koran. In the cities, it is true, there is a class of Mauresques who go out to the brasseries and caf6s chantant at night in garments and bonnets fresh from Paris. Elles valent ce q_ue valent lews scaurs at Paris, and everywhere else. 168 XIIL SAMBO AND FATHMA. OU have doubtless been told that the reason why the free negro gets on so badly in America is because he is despised and looked down upon on account of his colour because no road of social advancement is open to him because, through the cruelty and injustice of ois white brethren, he is plunged in an abyss of degradation as bad as, if not worse than, involuntary servitude with its accom- paniment of cotton-picking and the cowhide. You have been told that with education and equal political and social rights the free negro will in process of time rise to the level of the white man. Some amiable fanatics, moreover, go so far as to maintain that Sambo is in all respects about thirty-five per cent, better than his fair-skinned brother. Well, the free-nigger experiment has been tried by the French in Algiers, not dogmatically, but almost unconsciously> for nearly forty years. Sambo in Algeria is held by authority to be as good as any other man. The Europeans, the Arabs, the Jews, and the negroes all enjoy equal rights. The Moors often marry their negresses. The French have not the slightest prejudice against the negro on account of his ebony skin. They never have had. Among the ladies Sambo is even popular. He is "un beau noir." The Zouave walks arm-in-arm with the Turco ; negroes and negresses ride in the same omnibuses and carriages as white men; and there seem to be as many negroes in Algiers full- blooded black niggers in comparison with the population as in any considerable city of the Northern, States of America. I am. SAMBO AND FATHMA. 169 quite certain that if a deserving colonist were recommended for the cross of the Legion of Honour, the decoration would not be withheld from him on the ground that he had a black face. I don't think the community would offer the slightest objection to a negro sub-prefect or a negro commissary of police. Why should they ? The negro is a French subject, and all Frenchmen are equal before the law. Thus, without civil disabilities, without the stigma of belonging to an abhorred and contemned race, one might imagine that enfranchised Sambo would have done something for himself by this time. The State provides gratuitous education for all races, classes, and creeds ; and there is plenty of work, and money to be made, for those who are sober and industrious. The end of all which is that Sambo goes to sleep in the sun, waking up to refect himself with "abundant pumpkin," or plenteous plantains you may buy a bunch of them for twopence and devouring preferably another man's pumpkin to his own. He does a little fishing that avocation affording him plenty of time to swing his legs over a bank, crooning forth songs of the " tam-tam " kind, and taking short dozes between the bites ; he does a little gardening ; he peddles a few baskets, calabashes, and bead rosaries, and higgles also fowls and eggs. This is all. He works, perhaps, two days a week. He is very Catholic in his creed, keeping with much scrupulosity, and as the closest of holidays, the Mahometan Sabbath, which is Friday, the Jewish, which is Saturday, and the Christian, which is Sunday, with very likely a little Saint Monday of his own. And whenever there is the slightest excuse for an extra festival, he begs or steals an old cocked-hat and a pair of worsted epaulettes to surmount his turban or his shoulders withal ; he sticks spangles and tinsel over his caftan, and with Pornpey, and Quashie, and Quimbo, his brethren, he perambulates the streets, thumping the tam-tam, clanging the castanets, howling the chants of his country, and demanding sous. In the whole of Algiers there is not a single reputable negro shopkeeper or artisan. You never see the negroes, now that they are free, carrying heavy burdens or doing any kind 170 UNDER THE SUN. of arduous manual labour ; that they leave to the Arabs. Sambo prefers to loaf and " slosh around." The negro women officiate as shampooers in the Moorish baths, as peripatetic bakers of galettes or pancakes, as nurses, prostitutes and sorceresses. On the first Monday after the feast of the Nissam they have a grand Obeah festival at the Ain-el-Abiad (the White Fountain), distant about three miles from Algiers on the sea-shore. Then they have their Derdebas, .or private festivals, in their own particular quarter near the Kasbah or citadel of Algiers, in the streets of Darfour and Kattaroudjil. There, in their beastly dens, the women throw off the striped blue mantles in which they muffle themselves abroad, and appear in every variety of barbarous finery. The tam-tam and karakob, or casta- nets, then come into play, and the women go through those dances of which it is enough to say that they resemble the orgies of the Ghawahzee and Alme" of Egypt or the Nautoh girls of India dipped in a vat of lampblack. There are always low-class Arab touters hanging about the hotels to entice tourists into putting down so many francs a head to get up a Derdeba in the Kattaroudjil. If you decline to witness the disgusting gambols of a "dignity ball," they will offer to organise a Mauresque fandango for you, " chez Fathma." Fathma is the Ninon de 1'Enclos of Algiers. She does not belie her name, and is enormously fat. She is supposed to be very rich, and to carry most of her wealth in gold and jewels about her person. She goes about as closely veiled as though she were a respectable woman ; but you may know her, the adepts say, by her wearing scarlet stockings. Of course she has rivals and imitators who also wear red stockings, and would fain make believe that they are each and all of them the real Fathma. Anonyma, Synonyma, it does not matter much. A pair of red stockings in one country, and a paletot made by Poole, with a phaeton and a pair of piebald ponies, in the other, and see to what a common tune the world wags. Fathma at Algiers is a personage. She has been sent for, it is rumoured, by great people, to palaces, to be paraded as the most BAMBO AND FATHMA. 171 perfect that is to say, the fattest specimen of a Mauresque extant, although her non-admirers declare that she is not a Mauresque at all, but the offspring of a negress and a Biskri. She boasts of gold chains and diamond rings, given to her by the illustrious ones of the earth. She is the only veiled woman who has been known to enter a European cafe, and every morning, about eleven, you may see her sipping her "demi-tasse " at a par- ticular marble table, her bracelets, chains, and ouches glinting through the thin folds of her haik, and exhibiting her red stockings with conscious superiority to a throng of whispering admirers. She is a shrewd jade, and Jules and Adolphe think she is an Odalisque a sultana. She is only a Mauritanian Doll Common. Fathma never condescends to give a ball unless a minimum sum of one hundred and twenty-five francs is brought to her as a peace-offering by one of the low-class Arab touters. These balls, or ballets, or nautches, which are as stupid as they are revolting, serve, however, one useful purpose. Without the facilities offered by these balls you would not see on the walls of the Royal Academy or the Water-colour Societies those brilliant representa- tions of " The Light of the Hhareem," or " Moorish Maidens Dancing," or " An Eastern Lady playing on the Mandolin," or " Life in the Seraglio," which seem to argue so amazingly intimate an acquaintance with the inmost penetralia of Oriental life. Fathma and her colleagues in Algiers, as in Tunis, as in Stamboul, as in Cairo, are lay figures-in-ordinary to the worshipful guild of painters in oil and water colours. The meanest Moorish women, not being of the " Rikat " sisterhood, would disdain to sit to an artist as a model. A few photographs for backgrounds, a few visits to' the Bazaars, and a good stock of odds and ends of wear- ing apparel and frippery from the curiosity-shops, and the painter may go to work. Of putting a real Moorish lady from nature on canvas he has about as much chance as of drawing the portrait of the late Queen of Sheba from the life. In connection with these balls gotten up by greedy adven- turers for the hoodwinking of ingenuous Europeans young Harry Foker, travelling in the East after having been jilted by Blanche 172 UNDER THE SUN. Amory, is passionately fond of seeing " a real Moorish fandango, sir, by Jove " and returning to my old friend Sambo, I must not omit to mention the Issaoua, or fire-eaters, who are supposed to be a religious sect, but are in reality only so many swindlers and impostors. They are negroes, and profess to swallow live coals, to lick bars of red-hot iron, to devour scorpions, the rind of the prickly pear which is certainly very tough eating, let alone the prickles ashes, chalk, and clay, always with a pious intent, and for the greater glory of Allah. The red-hot poker and live-coal swallowing are clever tricks, which the late lamented Ramo Samee might have explained, and which I have seen before now performed at country fairs in England ; but as for the natural capacity of the negro for gobbling up earth, there is no reason to doubt it. The parliamentary blue-books will tell you that the frightful disease common in the West India Islands, and called "Le mal d'estomac," was brought on by the invincible propensity of the blacks for gorging clay ; and " dirt-eating " was one of the recognised offences punishable by the slave laws of Jamaica. An Issaoua is, as I have hinted, a swindle. The sole object of the fervid religionists is to extract the greatest possible number of twenty-franc pieces from the visitor. They will begin their per- formances and then suddenly stop, declaring that the police are at the door, but that if ten francs more be advanced, they will eat a peck more dirt and a bushel more prickly pear. Then the poker cannot be heated under an additional fifteen francs, or swallowed without an extra twenty. In short, it is a continual round of " Twopence more, and up goes the donkey." There is another ceremony among the Algerine negroes, more closely connected with the rites of Obeah, but which is also made to serve the purposes of cheating and extortion. On Wednesday morning in every week, on the road from the faubourg of Bab-el- Oued to St. Eugene which last is distant about four miles from Algiers you may meet groups of Moorish women and children, on foot or on muleback, followed by servants carrying live fowls under their arms. They halt on the sea-shore, at a spot called SebarAioun, the Seven Fountains. Here the good and the evil SAMBO AJTD FATHMA. 173 genii of the Mussulmans are to be invoked and exorcised. The good genii are white, green, blue,, and yellow ; the bad ones are red, black, and brown. The exercisers are all negresses, who, when they conjure, tell fortunes, or sell love-philters, are called " guezzanates." The audience being grouped on their haunches round one of the fountains, the performances commence. An old black woman lights a fire under a brazen incense burner, on which are some grains of benzoin. The person who wishes to propitiate the genii inhales the vapour of the gum. Then the old black woman takes the fowls prepared for sacrifice, cuts their throats half through, and throws them on to the sand. If these unhappy birds, partly slaughtered, half flying and half staggering, can contrive to drag themselves as far as the sea, the sacrifice has been propitious the sick person will be cured or the dearly-cherished wish fulfilled. On the contrary, if the fowl dies at once under the knife, the genius invoked is displeased, and the whole thing has to be done over again. It need scarcely be said that the sable sorceress contrives to make a good many failures ere a half-killed fowl reaches the briny ocean, and that the abortive sacrifices are her perquisites. Sometimes a sheep is sacrificed instead of a fowl, and on very grand occasions that is to say, when the touters can beat up a sufficient number of sight-seers from the hotels in Algiers a bul- lock is slaughtered. In this case, however, a buck negro officiates as sacrificing priest, and the bullock is allowed to expire on the sand without being expected to put out to sea, like Jupiter run- ning away with Europa. There is a great deal of manoeuvring of the " twopence more, and up goes the donkey " order before the act is accomplished. The bull is either too sacred, or not sacred enough ; he has been smitten by the evil zjQyour eye, it may be ; the priest has been warned in a dream not to slay him ; will you give twenty, fifteen, ten, five francs more to see him slain ? and so on in a diminuendo. Finally it is urged that " the police are coming," which is the most impudent lie of all ; the sacrificial bullock being actu?lly provided at the cost and charges of a 174 UNDER THE SUN, paternal government, which, under the erroneous but good-natured impression that the bestial and fraudulent mummeries of the" Seba-Aioun are really religious observances, generously makes the nigger sorcerers a periodical present of a bullock from the commissariat stores. Now, won't this tempt you, lady and gentleman tourists, to come to Algeria ! Think of " The priest who slew the slayer And shall himself be slain," Think of the Bull-Sacrifice at the Seven Fountains Flainetts and angurs, and all within eighty hours' journey from Charing Cross. '* The priest who slew the slayer " may be seen all alive and grin- ning, with an old gendarme's cocked-hat on his woolly cocoa-nut pate and a pair of cast-off dress boots with red morocco tops on his spindle-shanks. It would be unjust too severely to blame the French authorities for thus subsidising Obeah to the extent of a rather skinny bullock. For many years the British Government in India greased the wheels of the Car of Juggernaut at an enormous expense. 175 XIV, OLD SPAIN IN AFRICA. CCORDING to the historian El Bekri, the actual city of Oran dates from the year 297, when a certain Mohammed-ben- Abi-Aoun came over from Spain with a band of Andalusian fishermen, and patched up a sufficiently amicable alliance with the Beni-Mosguen, the original holders of the soil. The neighbouring tribes burnt and sacked the place, or were repulsed from it for four or five centuries or so the only light thrown on the "dark ages" being that of internecine conflagrations then, in 1086, the Almoravides conquered all this part of Africa. The Almoravides were suc- ceeded by the Almohades, and these again by the Merinides ; until, in the middle of the fifteenth century, there came to Oran a refugee from his revolted subjects, the famous Muley Moham- med, surnamed the Lop-sided, King of Granada. At this period the historians declare Oran to have been, as the Yankees say, " quite a place." Elephants' teeth and ostrich feathers, tanned hides, gold-dust, negro slaves, and corn were the staple of exports, and made the Oranese very rich. They excelled also in the manufacture of rich stuff's and weapons of war. The Venetians, the Genoese, the Marseillais, and the Catalans came in great numbers to trade with them, bringing looking-glasses, silks and velvets, and hardware in exchange. Alvarez Gomez says that in 1437 there were six thousand houses in Oran, many splendid mosques, colleges as learned as those at Cordova and Seville, quays cumbered with merchandise, and the most sump- tuous "stews" or baths in the world. Unfortunately, wealth seems to have brought luxury, luxury excess, and excess the most 176 tKDER THE SUK. alarming depravity ; since we find a holy man named Sidi- Mahomed-el-Haouari lifting up his voice in this epoch against the city, and crying out, " Oran, city of innumerable adulteries, the stranger shall enter into thy gates and abide there until the day of meeting and of dispersion ;" by which is meant the day of judgment. El-Haouari died in 1439, and, seventy years afterwards, his ominous prediction was fulfilled by the capture of Oran by the Spaniards. The expedition which subdued it was a sort of frag- mentary tail-piece to the Crusades. In 1506$ Ferdinand of Spain, Emmanuel of Portugal, and Harry of England entered into a compact to Christianise all heathendom by force of arms ; but they soon fell out among themselves, and then Emmanuel and Ferdinand had to go to the assistance of his Holiness the Pope, who, not for the first time in history, had fallen out with the Eldest Son of the Church in France. An edifying spectacle : the mediaeval Pontiff. He was either cursing Christendom all round, or blessing some prince with a view to persuade him to batter another prince's brains out. But Cardinal Ximenes, the King-Cardinal of Spain, had set his heart upon a crusade of some kind, and persuaded Ferdinand to fit out an expedition to the African Main. The Spaniards knew little of the geography of the country, and contemplated a landing at the little town of Honein, on the frontiers of Morocco. Then they were told that Mers-el-Kebir was the richest point on the coast ; for plunder, as well as proselytism, was part of Ximenes' plan. Then the Spanish treasury likewise not for the first time in history was found to be empty. But the Cardinal, in his religious and filibustering zeal, agreed with his sovereign to pay for the crusade out of his own pocket. Finally, Mers-el-Kebir was attacked and captured, and General Don Gonzales de Ayora wrote home, quite in the Spanish fashion, " We have conquered half Africa." And the Desert of Sahara, and the country of the Touaregs, and that great white patch upon the map, the Region of the Utterly Unknown ! Oh, thou most wall-eyed Don ! Then occurred once more an abhorrent vacuum in the exchequer OLD SPAitf IN AFRICA. 177 of the most Catholic King, but the indomitable Ximenes came to the rescue again. An army of fifteen thousand men sailed from Carthagena for Mers-el-Kebir. His Eminence himself accom- panied the crusaders, performed high mass on the store, and headed the troops, crucifix in hand. So many millions of the children of humanity have in all ages been smitten to death by those who arrogate to themselves a peculiar property in the symbol of our salvation, that I wonder it has never occurred to ingenious small-arms manufacturers to contrive crucifixes with spring-bayonets in the arms, or to cast cross-shaped rifle-bullets. They might hurt as sorely as conical ones. The Spaniards marched upon Oran, and took it with but the loss of thirty men. The new era was at once inaugurated by the pitiless massacre of eight thousand Muslim prisoners. Public buildings and private houses were alike sacked, and the treasures accumulated in Oran by three centuries of industrious trade and half a century of piracy on the high seas were divided among the Christian officers and soldiers. The great filibuster X. was him- self too highly placed and too proud to enrich himself by vulgar booty. He took nothing but a few Arabic manuscripts and rare objects, which he presented on his return to Spain, to the Cathedral of Toledo and the Convent of San Ildefonso at Madrid. Before Ximenes went away, however, he ordered all the fortifications to be rebuilt, and the Tribunal of the Holy Inquisition to be established. The Spaniards kept possession of the place for two centuries ; but in 1708 the Regency of Algiers, profiting by the distracted state of the Peninsula, in which the War of the Succession was then raging, sent Moustafa-bou-Chelar'em, Bey of Maskara, to besiege Oran. He besieged it accordingly ; the city fell, and the Turkish janissaries ruled in the place of the captains-general of Philip Y. But Oran was still to be a challenge cup. The Peace of Utrecht having been signed, the King of Spain began to make preparations for the recovery of Oran, and a few years afterwards wrested it from the Turks. The new lease of Spanish rule lasted from 1732 to 1790, when came the great earthquake and the M 178 . UNDER THE SUN. final evacuation by the Spaniards. The Turks, once more masters of the city, strove to rebuild it a la Turqiie that is to say, in a pleasing intermixture of strong castles and blind alleys full of mud hovels ; but this style of architecture was equally disgusting to the tasteful Moors and to the Spaniards who remained behind. The Turks governed by means of a Bey, a Khralifa or Finance Minister, and two Aghas. The scheme of administration was of the simplest. The Bey ordered a certain sum to be raised by way of revenue. The Khralifa, with the assistance of the Aghas, proceeded to squeeze it out of the natives. He got it out of their backs, their stomachs, or the soles of their feet, to all which parts of the body the great persuader, the bastinado, was indifferently applied. He got it out of their fingers by means of thumbscrews and lighted matches, and out of their heads by the skilful super- position on their skulls of nightcaps of heated copper. When the money was raised the Bey took as much of it as he chose, and the Khralifa and the Aghas stole as much of it as they dared. The remainder was carried by the Khralifa to Algiers as tribute to the Dey. If the sum was not sufficient, his Highness caused the financier to be soundly beaten. Sometimes he had him bowstrung as, according to Voltaire, Admiral Byng was shot, "pour encourager les autres." So that everything was very nice and comfortable. The natives of the province of Oran are not at all grateful to the French for having put an end to this state of things. When have you found Orientals grateful to Europeans for having given them an " administration " in lieu of an out-and-out despotism ? Perhaps the natives thought that an occasional dose of the bas- tinado assisted the circulation of the blood and helped to kill the fleas. It is certain that when a Bey or a Khralifa vexed them too sorely, some one managed to strangle him for the public good, and the new broom, or Bey, swept clean for awhile. In 1830, the French, not having any quarrel with the Government of Oran, were constrained for a period to let them alone. Then Marshal Clausel assigned the city to Sidi-Ahmed, Bey of Tunis, OLD SPAIN IN AFRICA* 179 who was to pay to France an annual tribute of a million of francs. Sidi-Ahmed sent his Khralifa, Kheir Eddin, to Oran, but the natives would not obey him j the French Government refused to ratify the convention between the Marshal and the Bey of Tunis, and in the end, almost in their own despite, the French had to annex the province. Among the French governors who have ruled here you may find the famous names of Delmichels, Letang, Lamoriciere, Cavaignac, Pelissier, Montauban, Martimprey, and Walsin-Esterhazy. There are no Turks in Oran now, and but very few Koulouilis or sons of Turks. The noise and bustle of the French system has been too much for these sleepy Orientals. They have gone to Tunis or to Morocco, where they can still enjoy the privilege of having their heads chopped off comfortably, or of dozing cross- legged, with their chibouks between their lips, on their carpets, and, as they count their beads, thanking Allah that they have escaped decapitation yet another day. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick ; but, in certain phases of the human mind, postponed disaster maketh the heart glad. " Petit bonhomme vit encore ! " Mayor Bailly used to say, rubbing his hands, every morning that his name did not appear in the executioner's list. It appeared there at length, and they guillotined him ; but to the last moment he who is holding on to life even by the skin of his teeth may comfort himself with the hope that the Deluge, or the Millennium, or an earthquake may come to avert his doom. The Moors of Oran are very much fairer than their brethren at Algiers. You may even see red and auburn beards among them. This is explained on the ground that they are not Moors of Mauritania, or Morocco proper, but descendants of the Moriscoes of Spain, who fled there before the conquering arms of Ferdinand and Isabella. They rarely wear the domino-like burnouse of the Bedouin, the flowing white garment which conceals the whole costume, however rich it be, but go clad in a comfortable though somewhat sombre splendour. The well-to-do Moors at Oran all ' wear shoes and stockings, and, save that they are more given to corpulence and are less demonstrative in their manner, are nowa- 180 UNDER TSE SUN 1 . days, and to an unpractised eye, scarcely to be distinguished from the Jews. These Israelites are certainly, next to the Arabs, the most interesting and the most picturesque of the inhabitants of Algeria, and to keep them in the background would be to suppress the most glowing tints of the picture which spreads itself before the tourist. At Oran, so far as costume goes, there are Jews and Jews. There are the Old Jews, who cannot forget days when the Turks forced them to wear a peculiar and degrading dress), and who from habit still adhere to the dark Levite robe, the black turban, and the loose trousers with stocking-feet attached thrust into yellow slippers, which is still the distinguishing garb of the Jews of Morocco. To these must be added the Jews of the interior, who come to Oran on business and Avho wear the haik or over-burnouse, but with a bandage of camel's hair dyed black round the head. To these again must be added the affluent Hebrew merchants, bankers, and shopkeepers, who adopt the Moorish dress in all its details, save that they are rather partial on the Sabbath to shoes with heels and of patent leather. Their turbans are of the whitest and amplest, and curiously crimped in diagonal lines to the folds. Finally, there are the young Jews, who of late years have shown a predilection for the European style of dress. I had the advantage of the society of one of these young gentle- men for three days and a half in a diligence, and it was very amusing to mark the supreme contempt with which he was regarded by two other Jews in the diligence, respectable old parties with full beards, enormous turbans, voluminous sashes, and baggy knickerbockers. This young dandy was evidently very ill at ease in his new clothes. He had a tall shiny hat, which was always tumbling off; he had shaved his chin, and preserved only a tiny moustache, and he was continually putting his hand to his lips to make sure that he had not swallowed it ; he evidently did not know what to do with his legs, which were imprisoned in the newest Parisian pantaloons of the most violent stripe. Watching the two elders, with their handsome caftans of OLD SPAIN IN AFRICA. 181 purple cloth with sugar-loaf buttons of gold, their rich sashes and roomy nether garments, I could not help thinking of the story of the old Turk at Cairo, who, passing a European exquisite loung- ing from Shepherd's Hotel, plucked his little boy by the wrist, and said, " My son, if you do not obey the commands of Allah and the Prophet, you will come some day to look like that" I am not treading, I hope, on anybody's toes by hinting that in an Eastern country my young Hebrew friend would have acted wisely in sticking to the Eastern garb. The French have had the common sense to acknowledge its utility in this climate by adopt- ing the old Janissary dress into the uniform of their Zouaves and Spahis. Even the European civilian wears the caban, or short white Algerian jerkin, the veil for the head and neck or nuquiere, and the roomiest of shoes in lieu of tight boots. The Jews, more- over, are foolish to pine over the tailor's goose fripperies of Paris, for the Eastern costume becomes them admirably. They, every tourist must have remarked, are the handsomest people, both in face and figure, in all Algeria ; tall and muscular, and shapely in form, with regular Roman features ; with beards, black, glossy, and flowing, and with complexions not sallow as the town Arabs, or dusky red like the Bedouins, but clear and fair. As a rule they are pale probably from incessant smoking ; for the women, who are comely, but not nearly so handsome as the men, are ruddy to sanguineousness. I can conscientiously say that, out of that regiment of our Horse Guards who are said to be recruited exclu- sively from a Dacio-Roman colony settled since the year One in the county of Durham, I have never seen finer men than the Algerine Jews. Their children are exquisitely beautiful, but, in the majority of cases, of Saxon fairness. Their hair darkens as they age. Indeed, the striking comeliness of the Hebrew community in Algeria presents more than one curious ethnological problem. One of the surest effects of slavery so, at least, it has been usually assumed is the degradation of the physical as well as the moral status of its victims. In Poland and Lithuania they will tell you that the abject appearance of the dreadful Israelites who hang about the posting-houses and entreat you to buy tea, 182 UNDER THE SUN, tobacco, almanacs, and even brandy is due to the miserable social obloquy which for centuries has been their lot. Whence arises another problem : Why do they swarm most densely in the countries where they are most scandalously treated ? In Con- stantinople, where they have always been reviled and spit upon, they have always abounded ; whereas in the United States, where they have never laboured under any civil disabilities, they are rarely to be found. But the Jews of Algeria, it is certain, show no signs of having been either morally or physically degraded by the long ordeal of contumely and maltreatment they have undergone at the hands of the Turks the rudest, the most bigoted, and the most intolerant of all the Mahometan races. Indeed, the Jews make no very grievous complaints of hardships inflicted on them by the Moors. There is much even now in the sedentary Moors of Africa to remind the student of what he has read of the mild, polished, learned, and ingenious Moriscoes of Spain; and there are many old Spaniards who maintain that the Moors and Jews are substantially of the same stock that they are brothers in blood, though not in creed, thus bearing out Mr. Disraeli's idea of the Mosaic Arab. When Granada fell, and the Arab dominion in Spain was destroyed by Ferdinand and Isabella, Moors and Jews were involved in a common ruin, and shared in many instances a common exile. They lived without any serious moles- tation from their Mahometan neighbours on the African littoral for many years ; but it was when the Turks subjugated the country that their sufferings began. It was the children of Osman, and the ruffianly soldadoes of the Porte, the cruel and fanatical Jenitcheri or Janissaries, who were their real persecutors. They became the Djifa-ben-Djifa carrion and the sons of carrion. They were confined to a particular quarter, like the Ghetto at Rome, which is now represented at Oran by the suburb called La Blanca. At six o'clock at night they were bound to be indoors. If they wished to remain abroad after sunset, they were compelled to ask permission of the police, who gave them a strip of bulTs-hide, by which they might be known if met by the patrol OLD SPAIN IN AFRICA. 183 going the rounds. If the night was dark, instead of carrying a lantern like the Moors, the unhappy Israelites were expected to carry a lighted candle, which the merest puff of wind might extinguish. Every time they passed the Kasba, or citadel, they were required to fall on their knees, and then withdraw rapidly, the head brnfc and averted. They were mercilessly beaten for the slightest offence, and as there was until the other day in Morocco a female officer of justice was appointed, whose special duty it was to flog Jewesses. They were bound to wait with their pitchers at the fountain for the last turn that is, until every blackguard little Arab boy or smutty negress had filled his or her jar. If a Jew insulted a Mussulman, he was put to death. If a Mussulman killed a Jew, he only paid a certain fine ; if a Janissary slew one, he was only mulct in a pound and a half of tobacco. For offences which in a Turk would have been visited only with the bastinado the Jew was burnt alive. These oppressed people could not leave the Regency without givrng enormous bail for their return. In addition to the innumerable extortions practised on them on the slightest pretext, they were bound to pay a heavy weekly tribute, which every Thursday evening, before sunset, the chief or king of the Jews for these bondmen were allowed a king bore himself to the Kasba. And, finally, if driven to desperation by these tortures, the Jew wished to apostatise, he was obliged as a preliminary measure, and with a fiendish refinement of insult, to turn Christian before he could become a Mussulman. I have dwelt on these facts with thus much particularity for the reason that the Jews of Morocco in whose cause Sir Moses Montefiore so nobly exerted himself were, in the year 1865, very little better off than their brethren in Algeria in the days of the Janissaries. And yet, amid all this intolerable misery, degradation, and oppression, the Algerian Jews throve. That they gathered wealth is no matter for wonder ; they have enriched themselves in all countries. It is, however, their having kept their good looks and gallant bearing that excites astonishment. Their vitality under so many cruel wrongs must have been prodigious. "We have been 184 UNDER THE SUN. too much accustomed in Europe to study only the Shylock type of the Jew the sallow, cowering, browbeaten Hebrew, in his dingy gabardine and badge of sufferance. Go to Algeria and I think every traveller will bear me out and you will see the robust and bellicose-looking Jew, as you read of him in the Book of Maccabees, the Jew of martial mien and haughty port ; aye, and the Jewess, tall and stern, and well-knit as she who slew Holofernes in the night. Alignation and Caesareanism and earthquakes and conquest and reconquests notwithstanding, Oran is still much more a Spanish than a French town. Two hundred and fifty years of Castilian rule are not so easily shaken off. The Chateau Neuf and the new or French town rise in an amphitheatre to the east of the bay, and are encroaching more and more every day on the Moorish and Jewish sections ; but the lower town is half Spanish and half Maltese. The most indelible traces of the Spanish occu- pation are, however, in the long lines of bristling forts with which the town is girt about, and which make of Oran a kind of Mediterranean Cronstadt. One French writer, struck with the solidity of all these bastions, ravelins, curtains, redoubts, and demilunes a solidity which has defied earthquakes and can- nonadings without number qualifies them as "an orgie of masonry, a debouch of stone and lime." They were all built, the histories say, by convicts. The Spaniards were capital task- masters : witness the colossal paved roads they made in Mexico, and which forty years of civil war have been powerless to destroy. Nor do their public works, at Oran at least, seem to have been very expensive, for at the eastern end of the Kasba may still be read this remarkable inscription : EN EL ANO 1589 SIN COSTAR A SO MAGESTAD MAS QUE EL VALOR DE LAS MADERAS HIZO ESTA OBRA DON PEDRO DE PADILLA SO CAPITAN GENERAL Y JUSTICIA MAYOR DE ESTAS PLAZAS POR SO DILIGENCIA Y BUENOS MEDIOS. " In the year of our Lord 1589, Don Pedro de Padilla, Captain- OLD SPAIU IN AFRICA, 185 General and Grand Justiciary of these parts, caused this edifice to be constructed, without any other expense to his Majesty than the cost of the wood employed for scaffolding." The convicts got the stone from the quarries, and then they built the Kasba. This inscription is, to say the least, edifying. Only fancy an analogous one on the breakwater at Cherbourg, or on a draw- bridge at Portsmouth ! Oran was for years the great bagnio or penitentiary of Spain. Thither the corregidors sent Guzman de Alfarache and Lazarillo de Tormes, rogues both, to mind their morals and build forts. And yet, according to some accounts, the rascals had not such a bad time of it in Africa. The Ivasba must have taken a good many years to build, or the convicts must have persuaded the Arabs to do their work for them. There was a garrison of seven thousand men, and about an equal number of puridarios, or felons. Of Spanish inhabitants there were about three thousand. Between the soldiers, the convicts, and the townspeople there reigned the most charming entente cordiale. The soldiers let the thieves do pretty well as they liked, and when there was a captain-general who turned rusty and talked of the cat-o' -nine- tails, the rogues took themselves off gaily to Morocco, where to this day there are whole towns peopled by their descendants. The Spanish Government were in the habit of banishing to Oran such hidalgos and caballeros as were in disgrace for political and other reasons. Many of these exiles had plenty of money, and Oran became one of the most jovial, most rollicking, and wickedest places it is possible to imagine. It gained the sou- briquet of " La Corte Chica" the Little Court. Night and day there was nothing but balls, collations, and festivities, wine- quaffing, cigarette-smoking, guitar-strumming, bull-baiting, love- making, and cock-fighting. It was a " presidario " of pleasure ; but every now and then the Arabs or the Turks would come thundering at the gates, and there would be a bloody fight by way of diversion, 186 XV. KING PIPPIN'S PALACE. DEEPLY regret that it should be my duty to sound the alarm, but I am constrained to state my fears that there is something the matter with our old and, generally, esteemed friend the Dwarf. I don't meet him in society, that is to say, at the fairs, as I was wont to do ; and although I do not overlook the fact that I have ceased to attend fairs, and that indeed there are very few fairs of the old kind left to frequent, it is difficult to avoid the unpleasant conviction that dwarfs as a race are dying out. Very recently, in his strange, eloquent romance, " L'Homme qui rit," M. Victor Hugo has told us that the pigmy, preferably monstrous and deformed, whose pictured semblance is to be found in so many works of the old Italian and German masters, was to most intents and purposes a manufactured article. That mysterious association of the " Comprachicos," of whom M. Hugo has told us so many strange things, pursued among their varied branches of industry the art of fabricating hunch- backed, abdominous, hydrocephalous, and spindle-shanked dwarfs for the European market : the purchasers being the princes, potentates, and wealthy nobles of the Continent. The Com- prachicos would seem to have borrowed the mystery of dwarf- making from the Chinese, who had an agreeable way of putting a young child into a pot of arbitrary form from which the top and bottom had been knocked out, and in the sides of which were two holes through which the juvenile patient's arms protruded. The merry consequence was that young master's body, if he did not die during the process, grew to be of the KIN& PIPPIN'S PALACE, 187 shape of the pot; and so far as the torso went, the order of amateurs for a spherical dwarf, or an oval dwarf, or a hexagonal dwarf, or a dwarf with knobs on his chest or an " egg-and- tongue" pattern on his shoulders, could be executed witli promptitude and dispatch.* But we have another informant, of perhaps greater weight and "authority, who has told us in what manner dwarfs, and bandy and rickety and crooked-spined children, can be manufactured without the aid either of the Comprachicos or of the Chinese potters. " The learned and amiable Cheselden has dwelt minutely in his "Anatomy" on the wickedly cruel and barbarous folly which marked the system of nursing babies in his time, and has shown how the practice of tightly swaddling and unskilfully carrying infants was calculated to cripple and deform their limbs and to stunt their growth. "We have grown wonderfully wiser since Cheselden's time, although I have heard some cynics mutter that the custom of growing children in pipkins could not have been more detrimental to health or to the symmetry of the human form than is the modern fashion of tight-lacing. Be all this as it may, I still hold that the dwarf well, the kind of dwarf who can be seen for a penny at a fair continues, as the French say, " to make himself desired." Surely his falling * Setting M. Hugo's wild myth of the Comprachicos entirely on one side, most students of the social history of England are aware that the custom of kidnapping children (generally to be sold as slaves in the West Indies or the American plantations) was frightfully prevalent in this country in the seventeenth and during the early part of the eighteenth century, and that Bristol was dishonourably distinguished as the port whence the greater number of the hapless victims were dispatched beyond sea. And it is a very curious circumstance, which appears to have been overlooked by Lord Macaulay in his notice of Jeffries, that the infamous judge, shortly before the Bloody Assize, went down to Bristol and delivered to the grand jury at the assizes a most eloquent and indignant charge, overflowing with senti- ments of humanity, bearing on the practice of kidnapping children for the plantations a practice which his lordship roundly accused the Corporation of Bristol of actively aiding and abetting for their own advantage and gain. Jeffries' charge is preserved in the library of the British Museum, and is as edifying to read as the sentimental ballad, "What is Love?" by Mr. Thomas Paine, or as would be an Essay upon Cruelty to Animals, with proposals for the suppression thereof, by the late Emperor Nero. 188 UNDER THE SUN. off must bo due to the surcease of the manufacture. Old manu- factured dwarfs are as difficult to light upon as Mortlake tapestry or Chelsea china, simply, I suppose, because tapestry is no longer woven at Mortlake, and Chelsea produces no more porcelain ware. To an amateur of dwarfs it is positively distressing to read the numerous detailed accounts which the historians have left us of bygone troglodytes. Passing by such world-famous manikins as Sir Jeffery Hudson and Count Borulawski, where can one hope in this degenerate age to light on a Madame Teresia, better known by the designation of the Corsican Fairy, who came to London in 1778, being then thirty years of age, thirty-four inches high, and weighing twenty - six pounds ? " She possessed much vivacity and spirit, could speak Italian and French with fluency, and gave the most inquisitive mind an agreeable entertainment." England has produced a rival to Madame Teresia in Miss Anne Shepherd, who was three feet ten inches in height, and was married, in Charles the First's time, to Richard Gibson, Esq., page of the backstairs to his majesty, and a distinguished miniature painter. Mr. Gibson was just forty-six inches high, and he and his bride were painted "in whole length" by Sir Peter Lely. The little couple are said to have had nine children, who all attained the usual standard of mankind ; and three of the boys, according to the chronicles of the backstairs, enlisted in the Life Guards. But what are even your Hudsons and your Gibsons, your Corsican Fairies and your Anne Shepherds, to the dwarfs of antiquity ? Where am I to look for a parallel to the homunculus who flourished in Egypt in the time of the Emperor Theodosius, and who was so small of body that he resembled a partridge, yet had all the functions of a man and would sing tunably ? Mark Antony is said to have owned a dwarf called Sisyphus who was not of the full height of two feet, and was yet of a lively wit. Had this Sisyphus been doomed to roll a stone it must surely have been no bigger than a schoolboy's marble. Ravisius who was Bavisius ? narrates that Augustus Caesar exhibited in his plays KING PIPPIN'S PALACE. 189 one Lucius, a young man born of honest parents, who was twenty- three inches high, and weighed seventeen pounds, yet had he a strong yoice. In the time of Jamblichus, also, lived Alypius of Alexandria, a most excellent logician and a famous philosopher, but so small in body that he hardly exceeded a cubit, or one foot five inches and a half in height. Finally, Garden tells us^-but who believes Garden ? that he saw a man of full age in Italy not above a cubit high, and who was carried about in a parrot's cage. " This," remarks Wanley, in his " Wonders of the Little World," " would have passed my belief had I not been told by a gentleman of a clear reputation that he saw a man at Sienna about two years since not exceeding the same stature. A Frenchman he was, of the county of Limo- sin, with a formal beard, who was likewise shown in a cage for money, at the end whereof was a little hatch into which he retired, and when the assembly was full came forth and played on an instrument." The very thing we have all seen at the fairs, sub- stituting the simulacrum of a three-storied house for a cage, and not forgetting the modern improvements of the diminutive inmate ringing a bell and firing a pistol out of the first-floor window ! And after banqueting on these bygone dwarfs, who were scholars and gentlemen as well as monstrosities for was not Alypius, cited above, a famous logician and philosopher ? and did not Richard Gibson, Esq., teach Queen Anne the art of drawing, and proceed on a special mission to Holland to impart artistic instruction to the Princess of Orange ? after dwelling on the dwarfs who formed part of the retinue of William of Normandy when he invaded England, and who held the bridle of the Emperor Otho's horse ; after remembering the dwarfs whom Dominichino and Rafaelle, Velasquez and Paul Veronese have introduced in their pictures ; after this rich enjoyment of dwarfish record I am thrown back on General Tom Thumb. I grant the General and the Commodore and their ladykind a decent meed of acknowledgment. I confess them calm, self- possessed, well-bred, and innocuous ; but I have no heart to attend their "levees." Nutt, in the caricature of a naval 190 UNDER THE gtfrf. uniform, does not speak to my heart ; I have no ambition to see Thumb travestied as the late Emperor Napoleon that conqueror could on occasion cause himself to appear even smaller than Thumb nor am I desirous of purchasing photographic cartes de visite of Minnie Warren. My dwarf is the gorgeously attired little pagod of the middle ages ; the dwarf who pops out of a pie at a court banquet ; the dwarf who runs between the court- jester's legs and trips him up ; the dwarf of the king of Brob- dingnag, who is jealous of Gulliver, and souses his rival in a bowl of cream, and gets soundly whipped for his pains. Or, in default of this pigmy, give me back the dwarf of my youth in his sham three-storied house with his tinkling bell and sounding pistol. It is not to be, I presume. These many years past I have moodily disbursed in divers parts of the world sundry francs, lire, guilders, florins, thalers, reals, dollars, piastres, and marks-banco for the sight of dwarfs ; but they (Thumb and his company included) have failed to come up to my standard of dwarfish excellence. Did you ever meet with anything or anybody that could come up to that same standard ? Man never is, but always to be blest ; still, although my dreams of dwarfs have not as yet been fully realised, I have been able to enjoy the next best thing to fulfilment. I call to mind perhaps the wonderfullest dwarf's house existing on the surface of this crazy globe. It is a house in the construction and the furniture of which many thousands of pounds were expended, and it was built by a king for his son. It is for this reason that I have called the diminutive mansion "The Palace of King Pippin." King Pippin's Palace is in Spain, and has been shamefully neglected by English tourists in that interesting country. For my part, I think that it would be a great advantage to picturesque literature if the Alhambra and the Alcazar, the Bay of Cadiz and the Eock of Gibraltar, the Sierra Morena and the Mezquita of Cordova, the Cathedral of Burgos and the Bridge of Toledo, could be eliminated altogether from Spanish topography. By these means travellers in Spain would have a little more leisure to attend to a number of cosas de EspaTia which are at present KING PIPPIN'S PALACE. 191 passed by almost without notice. Among them is this incom- parable dwarf's house of mine. You will observe that I have excluded the Escorial from the catalogue of places which English sight-seers in the Peninsula might do well for a time to forget. The Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo must needs be visited, for King Pippin's Palace is a dependency of that extraordinary pile. Few tourists have the courage to admit, in print at least, that this palace-monastery or monastery-palace of the Escorial is a gigantic bore. "When it was my lot to visit it my weariness began even before I had entered its halls ; for in the railway carriage which conveyed our party from Madrid to the " Gridiron station " there was a fidgety little Andalusian, a maker of guitar-strings, I think he was, at Utrera, who was continually rebounding on the cushions like a parched pea in a fire-shovel, and crying out to us, "El edificio, caballeros, donde esta el edificio ?" It was his first visit to the northern provinces of his native country, and he was burning to see the edificio. To him evidently there was but one edifice in the world, and that was the Escorial. When at last he caught sight of its sullen fagades, its stunted dome and blue-slate roofs, the little Andalusian fell into a kind of ecstasy, and pro- truded so much of his body out of the carriage-window that I expected him every moment to disappear altogether. To my surprise, however, when the train drew up at the station he did not alight, but murmuring the conventional " Pues, seiiores, echemos nn cigarito," "Well, gentlemen, let us make a little cigar," calmly rolled up a tube of paper with tobacco, lit it, and adding, " Varnos al Norte," subsided into sleep, and, the train aiding, pursued his journey to the Pyrenees, or Paris, or the North Pole, or whereso- ever else he was bound. He was clearly a philosopher. He had seen el edificio from afar off. Was not that enough ? I daresay when he went back to Utrera he talked guide-book by the page to his friends, and minutely described all the marvels of the interior of the palace. I rarely think of the little Andalusian without recalling Sheridan's remark to his son Tom about the coal-pits : " Can't you say you've been down ? " The " edifice " itself is really and without exaggeration a bore. 192 UNDER THE SUN. The good pictures have all been taken away to Swell the attract tions of the Real Museo at Madrid ; the jolly monks have been driven out and replaced by a few meagre, atrabilious-looking, shovel-hatted seminarists (even these, since the last political earth- quake in Spain, may have disappeared) ; and it is with extreme difficulty that you can persuade the custodes to show you the embroidered vestments in the sacristy or the illuminated manu- scripts in the library. The guardians of every public building in Spain have a settled conviction that all foreign travellers are Frenchmen, who, following the notable example of Marshals Soulfc and Victor in the Peninsular War, are bent on stealing something. Moreover, the inspection of embroidered copes, dalmatics, and chasubles soon palls on sight-seers who are not crazy on the subject of Ritualism ; and as for being trotted through a vast library when you have no time to read the books, all I can say is that in this respect I prefer a bookstall in Gray's Inn Lane, with free access to the " twopenny box," to the library of the Escorial, to the BibliothSque (ex-)Imperiale, the Bodleian, Sion College, and the library of St. Mark to boot. The exterior of the Escorial, again, is absolutely hideous ; its grim granite walls, pierced with innumerable eyelet-holes, with green shutters, remind the spectator of the Wellington Barracks, Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, and the Great Northern Hotel at King's Cross. The internal decorations principally consist of huge, sprawling, wall-and-ceiling frescoes by Luca Giordano, surnamed " Luca fa Presto," or Luke in a Hurry. This Luke the Labourer has stuck innumerable saints, seraphs, and other celestial personages upon the plaster. He executed his apotheoses by the yard, for which he was paid according to a fixed tariff, a reduction, I suppose, being made for clouds ; and the result of his work is about as interesting as that of Sir James Thornhill in the Painted Hall of Greenwich Hospital. Almost an entire day must be spent if you wish to see the Escorial thoroughly, and you grow at last fretful and peevish well-nigh to distraction at the jargon of the guides, with their monotonous statistics of the eleven thousand windows of the place, the two thousand and two feet of KING PIPPIN'S PALACE. 193 its area, the sixty-three fountains, the twelve cloisters, the sixteen patios or courtyards, the eighty staircases, and so forth. As for the relics preserved of that nasty old man Philip the Second, his greasy hat, his walking-stick, his shabby elbow-chair, the board he used to rest his gouty leg on, they never moved me. There is something beautifully and pathetically interesting in the minutest trifle which remains to remind us of Mary Queen of Scots. Did you ever see her watch, in the shape of a death's- head, the works in the brain-pan, and the dial enamelled on the base of the jaw ? But who would care about a personal memento of Bloody Queen Mary ? She was our countrywoman, but most of us wish to forget her bad individuality utterly. Should we care anything more about her Spanish husband? To complete the lugubrious impressions which gather round you in this museum of cruelty, superstition, and madness, you are taken to an appalling sepulchre underground : a circular vault, called, absurdly enough, the "Pantheon," where on ranges of marble shelves are sarcophagi containing the ashes of all the kings and queens who have afflicted Spain since the time of Charles the Fifth. The bonehouse is rendered all the more hideous by the fact of its being ornamented in the most garishly theatrical manner with porphyry and verde antique, with green and yellow jasper, with bronze gilt bas-reliefs and carvings in variegated marble, and other gimcracks. There is an old English locution which laughs at the man who would put a brass knocker on a pigsty-door. Is such an architect worthier of ridicule than he who paints and gilds and tricks-up a charnel-house to the similitude of a play-house ? As, with a guttering wax-taper in your hand, you a?cend the staircase leading from the Pantheon into daylight and the world again, your guide whispers to you that to the right is another and ghastlier Golgotha, where the junior scions of Spanish royalty are buried, or rather where their coffins lie huddled together pell-mell. The polite name for this place, which might excite the indignation of " graveyard " Walker (he put a stop to intramural interments in England, and got no thanks for his pains; is the " Pantheon of the Infantes/' The N 194 UNDEB THE SUN. common people call it, with much more brevity and infinitely more eloquence, El Pudridwo, the " rotting-place." The best guide-book you can take with you to this portion of the Escorial is Jeremy Taylor's sermon on death. Once out of the Escorial, "Luke's iron crown" I mean the crown of Luca fa Presto's ponderous heroes is at once removed from your brow, on which it has been pressing with the deadest of weights. Once rid of the Pantheon and the stone staircases and the slimy cloisters, and you feel inclined to chirrup, almost. The gardens are handsome, although shockingly out of repair ; but bleak as is the site, swept by the almost ceaseless mountain blasts of the Guadarrama range, it is something to be rid of Luca fa Presto, and Philip the Second, and St. Lawrence and his gridiron, and all their gloomy com- pany. You breathe again ; and down in the village yonder there is a not bad inn called the Biscaina, where they cook very decent omelettes and where the wine is drinkable. But before you think of dining you must see King Pippin's Palace. This is the " Casita del Principe de abajo," the " little house of the prince on the heights," and was built by Juan de Villa- nueva for .Charles the Fourth, when heir-apparent. The only circumstances, perhaps, under which a king of Spain can be contemplated with complacency are those of childhood. In Madrid I used always to have a sneaking kindness for the infantes and infantas "los ninos de Espaiia" who with their nurses and governesses, and their escort of dragoons and lancers, used to be driven every afternoon, in their gilt coaches drawn by fat mules, through the Puerta del Sol to the Retire. The guard at the Palace of the Gobernacion would turn out, the trumpets would be flourished bravely as " los nirios " went by. Poor little urchins ! In the pictures of Don Diego Velas- quez, the "ninos," in their little ruffs and kirtles and farthin- gales, or their little starched doublets and trunk-hose, with their chubby peachy cheeks, their ruddy lips and great melting black eyes, look irresistibly fascinating. Ah ! my infantes and infantas of Don Diego, why did you not remain for aye at the KING PIPPIN'S PALACE. 195 toddlekins' stage ? why did you grow up to be tyrants and madmen and bigots and imbeciles, and no better than you should have been ? This Carlos the Fourth, for instance, for whom King Pippin's Palace was built, made an exceedingly bad end of it. He was the king who was led by the nose by a worthless wife, and a more worthless favourite, Godoy, who was called " Prince of the Peace," and who lived to be quite forgotten and to die in a garret in Paris. Carlos the Fourth was the idiot who allowed Napoleon to kidnap him. He was the father of the execrable Ferdinand the Seventh, the betrayer of his country, the restorer of the Inquisition, and the em- broiderer of petticoats for the Virgin. King, or rather Prince Pippin, Charles the Third's son, is represented in a very curious style of portraiture in one of the apartments of the Escorial itself, a suite fitted up by his father in anti-monastic style, that is to say, in the worst kind of Louis Quinze rococo. The king employed the famous Goya to make a series of designs to be afterwards woven on a large scale in tapestry ; and Goya consequently produced some car- toons which, with their reproductions in loom- work, may be regarded as the burlesque antipodes to the immortal patterns which Eafaelle set the weavers of Arras. In one of the Goya hangings you see the juvenile members of the royal family at their sports, attended by a select number of young scions of the sangre azul. .At what do you think they are playing ? at ~bull-fi (jhting : a game very popular among the blackguard little street-boys of Madrid to this day. One boy plays Bos. He has merely to pop a cloth over his head, holding two sticks passing through holes in the cloth at obtuse angles to his head, to represent the horns of the animal. The "picadores" are children pickaback, who with canes for lances tilt at the bull. The "chulos" trail their jackets, the "bandarilleros" fling wreathed hoopsticks for darts, in admirable caricature of the real blood- thirsty game you see in the bull-ring. Prince Pippin of course is the " matador," the slayer. He stands alone, superb and mag- nanimous, intrepidity in his mien, fire in his eye, and a real 106 UNDEB THE SUN. little Toledo rapier in his hand. Will the bull dare to run at the heir-apparent of the throne of Spain and the Indies ? Quien sabe ? Train up a child in the way he should go ; and a youth of bull-fighting is a fit preparative for a manhood of cruelty and an old age of bigoted superstition. It is somewhat difficult to give an idea of the precise size of Pippin's Palace. Mr. Ford, who speaks of the entire structure with ineffable contempt, says that it is u just too small to live in, and too large to wear on a watch-chain ; " but I maintain that the Casita del Principe is quite big enough to be the country residence of Thumb, or Nutt, or Miss "Warren, or Gibson, or Hudson, or Anne Shepherd, or Madame Teresia, or Wy brand Lolkes the Dutch dwarf ; a wonderful little fellow with a head like a dolphin's, no perceptible trunk, and two little spindle-shanks like the legs of a skeleton clock. There should properly be a statue cast from the Manneken at Brussels in the vestibule of the Casita ; but, if I recollect aright, the only object of sculpture in the hall is a life-size cast of the Apollo Belvedere, whose head of course touches the palatial ceiling. Could that inanimate effigy stand on tiptoe, he would assuredly send the first floor flying ; and could he perform but one vertical leap, he would have the roof off the palace in the twinkling of a bedpost. There is a tiny grand staircase, which (from dolorous experience) I know to be somewhat of a tight fit for a stout tourist ; and to increase the exquisite grotesqueness of the whole affair, the walls are panelled in green and yellow jasper and porphyry, and there are verde-antique columns and scagliola pilasters, and bas-reliefs in gilt bronze on every side, just as there are in the horrible tomb-house hard by. There are dozens of rooms in King Pippin's Palace : dining-rooms, audience-chambers, council-chambers, bedrooms, libraries, ante -chambers, boudoirs, guard-rooms, and ball-rooms, the dimensions of which vary between those of so many store-cupboards and so many mid- shipmen's sea-chests. But the pearl, the cream, the consummation of the crack- brained joke is that the furniture does not in any way harmonise KING PIPPIN'S PALACE. 197 with the proportions of the building. The house is a baby one, but the furniture is grown up. The chairs and tables are suited for the accommodation of adults of full growth. The walls are hung with life-size portraits of the Spanish Bourbons. The busts, statuettes, French clocks, chandeliers, ciifha gimcracks, and ivory baubles are precisely such as you might see in a palace inhabited by grown-up kings and princes. The whole place is a pippin into which a crazy king has endeavoured to cram the contents of a pumpkin ; and but for the high sense I entertain of the obligations of decorum, and the indelicacy of wounding the susceptibilities of foreigners, I might, had the proper appliances been at hand, have wound up my inspection of the Palace of King Pippin by ringing a shrill peal on a hand-bell, or firing a pistol out of the first- floor window. 198 XYJ. FORM-SlCKNESS. HERE is a mysterious disease which the doctors find difficult of diagnosis, and from which foreign conscripts are said to suffer. They call it nostalgia, or le mal du pays in plainer English, home-sickness. "We have all read how the band-masters of the Swiss regiments in the French service were forbidden to play the "Ranz des Yaches," lest the pensive children of the mountains, inspired by the national melody, should run home too quickly to their cows that is to say, desert. That dogs will pine and fret to death for love of the masters they have lost is an ascertained fact ; and I have been told that the intelligent and graceful animal, the South American llama, if you beat, or overload, or even insult him, will, after one glance of tearful reproach from his fine eyes and one meek wail of expostulation, literally lay himself down and die. Hence the legend that the bat-men, ere they load a llama, cover his head with a poncho, or a grego, or other drapery, in order that his susceptibilities may not be wounded by a sight of the burden he is to endure: a pretty conceit vilely transposed into English in a story about a cab-horse whose eyes were bandaged by his driver lest he should be ashamed of the shabbiness of the fare who paid but sixpence for less than a mile's drive. I was never south of the Isthmus, and never saw a llama save in connection with an overcoat on a cheap tailor's show-card ; but I am given to understand that what I have related is strictly true. If the lower animals, then, be subject to nostalgia, and if they be as easily killed by moral as by physical ailments, why should humanity be made of sterner stuff ? After all there may be such FORM-SICKNESS. 199 things as broken hearts. With regard to home-sickness, however, I hold that generally that malady is caused less by absence from home than by the deprivations of the comforts and enjoyments which home affords. Scotchmen and Irishmen are to be found all over the world, and get on pretty well wherever they are ; but a Scot without porridge to sup, or an Irishman without butter- milk to drink at breakfast, is always more or less miserable. The Englishman, accustomed to command, to compel, and to trample difficulties under his feet, carries his home-divinities with him, and has no sooner set up his tent in Kedar than he establishes one sup- plementary booth for making up prescriptions in accordance with the ritual of the London Pharmacopoeia, another for the sale of pickles, pale ale, and green tea, and a third for the circulation of tracts intended to convert the foreigners among whom he is to abide. He suffers less perhaps from home-sickness than any other wanderer on the face of the earth, since he sternly refuses to look upon his retirement from his own country as anything but a temporary exile ; he demands incessant postal communication with home, or he will fill the English newspapers with the most vehement complaints ; he will often through the same news- papers carry on controversies, political or religious, with adver- saries ten thousand miles away ; and after an absence from England of twenty years, he will suddenly turn up at a railway meeting, or in the chair at a public dinner ; bully the board ; move the previous question ; or, in proposing the toast of the evening, quote the statistics of the Cow-cross Infirmary for Calves, as though he had never been out of Middlesex. In short, he no more actually expatriates himself than does an attache to an English embassy abroad, who packs up Pall Mall in his portmanteau, parts his hair down the middle, and carries a slender umbrella never under any circumstances unfurled in the streets of Teheran. But are you aware that there is another form of nostalgia which afflicts only Europeans, and, so far as I know, is felt only in one part of the world ? Its symptoms have not hitherto been described, and I may christen it Form-sickness. I should wish to have Mr. Kuskin, Mr. Tom Taylor, and Mr. Beresford Hope 200 UNDER THE SUN. on the medical board to which I submitted my views on this disease, for it is one architecturally and aesthetically occult. Form-sickness begins to attack you after you have resided some time say a couple of months in the United States of America. Its attacks are more acutely felt in the North than in the South ; for in the last-named parts of the Union there are fig and orange trees, and wild jungles and cane brake some of the elements of FORM, in fact. It is the monotony of Form, and its deficiencies in certain conditions that is to say, curvature, irregularity, and light and shade that make you sick in the North. I believe that half the discomfort and the uneasiness which many educated Englishmen experience from a protracted residence in the States springs from the outrage offered to their eye in the shape of perpetual flat surfaces, straight vistas, and violent contrasts of colour. There are no middle tints in an American landscape. In winter, it is white and blue ; in spring, blue and green ; in summer, blue and brown ; in autumn, all the colours of the rainbow, but without a single neutral tint. The magnificent October hues of the foliage on the Hudson and in Vermont simply dazzle and confound you. You would give the world for an instant of repose for a gray tower, a broken wall, a morsel of dun thatch. The immensity of the area of vision is too much for a single spectator. Don't you remember how Banvard's gigantic panorama of the Mississippi used to make us first wonder and then yawn ? Banvard is everywhere in the States ; and so enormous is the scale of the scenery in this colossal theatre, that the sparse dramatis personce are all but invisible. An English landscape painter would scarcely dream of pro- ducing a picture, even of cabinet size, without a group of peasants, or children, or a cow or two, or a horse, or at least a flock of geese, in some part of the work. You shah 1 hardly look half a dozen times out of the window of a carriage of an express train in England, without seeing something that is Alive. In America, the desolation of Emptiness pervades even FORM-SICKNESS. 201 the longest settled and the most thickly populated States. How should it be otherwise ? How should you wonder at it when, as in a score of instances, not more people than inhabit Hertfordshire are scattered over a territory as large as France ? One of the first things that struck me when I saw the admir- able works of the American landscape painters of such men as Church and Kensett, Bierstadt and Hart was the absence of animal life from their scenes. They seemed to have been making sketches of the earth before the birth of Adam. This vacuous vastness is one of the provocatives of Form- sickness. To the European, and especially to the Englishman, a country without plenty of people, pigs, poultry, haystacks, barns, and cottages, is as intolerable as the stage of the Grand Opera would be if it remained a whole evening with a sump- tuously set scene displayed, but without a single actor. New England is the region in which perhaps the accessories of life are most closely concentrated; but even in New England you traverse wastes into which it appears to you that the whole of Old England might be dropped with no more chance of being found again than has a needle in a pottle of hay. But it is when you come to dwell in towns that Form-sickness gets its firmest grip of you. In a city of three or four hundred thou- sand inhabitants, you see nothing but mere flat surfaces, straight lines, right angles, parallel rows of boards, and perpendicular palings. The very trees lining the streets are as straight as walking-sticks. Straight rows of rails cut up the roadway of the straight streets. The hotels are marble packing-cases, uniformly square, and pierced with many quadrangular windows ; the railway cars and street omnibuses are exact oblongs ; and to crown all, the national flag is ruled in parallel crimson stripes, with a blue quadrangle in one corner, sown with stars in parallel rows. Philadelphia, from its rectangularity, has been called the "chess-board city;" "Washington has been laid out on a plan quite as distressingly geometrical ; and nine-tenths of the other towns and villages are built on gridiron lines. There are some 202 UNDER THE SUN. crooked streets in Boston, and that is why Europeans usually show a preference for Boston over other Northern American cities; while in the lower part of New York a few of the thorough- fares are narrow, and deviate a little from the inexorable straight line. In most cases there is no relaxation of the cord of tension. There are no corners, nooks, archways, alleys ; no refuges, in fact, for light and shade. In the State of Virginia there is one of the largest natural arches in the world ; but in American architecture a curved vault is one of the rarest of structures. The very bridges are on piers without arches. Signboards and trade effigies, it is true, project from the houses, but always at right angles. This rigidity of outline makes its mark on the nomencla- ture and on the manners of the people. The names of the streets are taken from the letters of the alphabet and the numerals in the " Ready Reckoner." I have lived in G Street. I have lived in West-Fourteenth, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Mathematical calculation is the basis of daily life. You are fed at the hotels at stated hours ; and the doors of the dining-room are kept locked until within a moment of the gong's sounding. At some tables d 'hote fifty negro waiters stand mute and immobile behind the chairs of two hundred and fifty guests ; and at a given signal uncover, with the precision of clock-work, one hundred dishes. These are not matters of fancy ; they are matters of fact. Routine pursues you every- where : from the theatre to the church ; from the fancy fair to the public meeting. In the meanest village inn, as in the most palatial hotel, there is a traveller's book, in which you are bound to enter your name. You may assume an alias ; but you must be Mr. Somebody. You cannot be, as in England, the " stout party in Number Six," or the " tall gent in the Sun." You must shake hands with every one to whom you are introduced ; you must drink when you are asked, and then ask the asker to drink though I am bound to say that this strictly mathematical custom has, owing to the piteous protests of Europeans, somewhat declined of late. FOKM-SICOTESS. 203 If you enter a barber's shop to be shaved, a negro hands you a check bearing a number, and you must await your turn. When your turn arrives, you must sit in a certain position in a velvet-covered fauteuil with high legs, and must put your feet up on a stool on a level therewith. The barber shaves you, not as you like, but as he likes ; powders you, strains a napkin over your countenance ; sponges you ; shampoos you ; pours bay ruin and eau-de-Cologne on your head ; greases, combs you out ; and " fixes " you generally. The first time I was ever under the hands of an American tonsor, I rose as soon as he had laid down his razor, and made a move in the direction of the washhand basin. He stared at me as though I had gone mad. " Hold on ! " he cried, in an authoritative accent. " Hold on ! Guess I'll have to wash you up." That I should be "washed up" or " fixed," was in accordance with the mathematical code. This all but utter absence of variety of form, of divergence of detail, of play of light and shade, is productive in the end of that petulant and discontented frame of mind, of that sore- ness of spirit, with which so many tourists who have visited the Great Republic have come at last to regard its civilisation. As a rule, the coarser the traveller's organisation the less he cares about art or literature the better he will get on in America. I met a fellow-countryman once, the son of an English earl, at one of the biggest, most mathematical, and most comfortless of the New York hotels, who told me that he should be very well content to live there for ten years. "Why," he said, ''you can have five meals a day if you like." This is the kind of traveller the robust, hardy, strong-stomached youth, fresh from a public school, who goes to America, and does not grumble. But do you take, not a travelled Englishman, but a travelled American one who has been long in Europe, and has appre- ciated the artistic glories of the Continent, and you will discover that he finds it almost impossible to live in his own country, or " board " at an American hotel. Every continental city has its colony of refined Americans, good patriots and staunch republicans, but who are absolutely afraid to go back to their 204 UNDER THE StN. native latid. They dread the mathematical system. Those who, for their families' or their interests' sake, are compelled to abide in the States, live at hotels conducted, not on the American, but on the European system that is to say, where they can dine, breakfast, or sup, not as the landlord likes, but as they themselves like. Those who are wealthy shut themselves up in country houses, or splendid town mansions, surrounded by books, and pictures, and statues, and tapestry, and coins from Europe, until their existence is almost ignored by their countrymen. In no country in the world are so many men of shining talents, of noble mind, of refined taste, buried alive as in the United States. That which I call the " Mathematical System " is only another name for a very stringent and offensive social tyranny ; and did we not remember that humanity is one mass of inconsistencies and contradictions, it would be difficult to understand how this social despotism could be made compatible with the existence of an amount of political liberty never before equalled in this world. Until 1861, the American citizen was wholly and entirely free ; and now that the only pretext for the curtailment of his liberties has disappeared, he will enter upon, it is to be hoped, a fresh lease of freedom, as whole and unrestricted as of yore. How far the social despotism spoken of has extended would be almost in- credible to those who have not resided in America. " Whatever you do," said an American to me on the first day of my landing in the States, " don't live in a boarding-house where you are to be treated as one of the family. They'll worry you to death by wanting to take care of your morals." To have one's morals taken care of is a very excellent thing ; but as a rule you prefer to place the curatorship thereof in the hands of your parents and guardians, or of your ghostly director, or, being of mature age, of yourself. " Taking care of morals ' ' is apt to degenerate into petty impertinence and espionage. One of the most eminent of living sculptors in New York told me that for many years he experienced the greatest difficulty in pursuing the studies incidental to, and indeed essential to, his attaining excellence in his profession, owing to the persistent FORM-SICKNESS. 205 care taken of his morals by the lady who officiated as house- keeper in the chambers where he lived. It must be premised that these chambers formed part of a building specially erected for the accommodation of artists, and with a view to their professional requirements. Our sculptor had frequent need of the assistance of female models, and the "Janitress," as the lady housekeeper was called, had a virtuously indignant objec- tion to young persons who posed as Venuses or Hebes, in the costume of the mythological period, for a dollar an hour. She could only be induced by the threat of dismissal from the proprietor of the studio building to grant admission to the models at all ; even then she would await their exit at her lodge gate, and abuse them as they came downstairs. Much more acclimatised to models was the good sister of William Etty, who used to seek out his Venuses for him ; but a tran- sition state of feeling was that of the wife of Nollekens, the sculptor, who, whenever her husband had a professional sitter, and the day was very cold, used to burst into the studio with a basin in her hand, crying : " You nasty, good-for-nothing hussey ! here's some hot mutton broth for you." To recapitulate a little. Form-sickness is the unsatisfied yearning for those broken lines, irregular forms, and infinite gradations of colour reacting as those conditions of form in- variably do on the manners and characteristics of the people which are only to be met with in very old countries. How- ever expensively and elegantly dressed a man may be, he is apt to feel uncomfortable in a brand-new hat, a brand-new coat and trowsers, and brand-new boots and gloves ; and I believe that if he were compelled to put on a brand-new suit every morning, he would hang himself before a month was over, and send his abhorred garments to Madame Tussaud's, to swell the wardrobe in the Chamber of Horrors. The sensation of entire novelty is one inseparable from the outward aspect of America. You can smell the paint and varnish ; the glue is hardly dry. The reasons for this are very obvious. American civilisation 206 UNDER THE SUN. is an independent and self-reliant entity. It has no connections, or ties, or foregatherings with any predecessors on its own soil. It is not the heir of long-entailed patrimony. It is, like Rudolph of Hapsburg, the first of its race. It has slain and taken possession. In Great Britain we have yet Stonehenge and some cairns and cromlechs to remind us of the ancient Britons' acts ; but in the settled parts of the United States, apart from the Indian names of some towns and rivers, there remains not the remotest vestige to recall the existence of the former possessors of the soil. There are yet outlying districts, millions of acres square, where Red Indians hunt, and fight, and steal, and scalp ; but American civilisation marches up, kills or deports them at all events, entirely " improves them " off the face of the land. They leave no trace behind ; and the brand-new civili- sation starts up in a night, like a mushroom. Where yesterday was a wigwam, to-day is a Doric meeting-house, also a bank and a grand pianoforte ; where yesterday the medicine-mar, muttered his incantations, to-morrow an advertising corn -cutter opens his shop ; and in place of a squaw, embroidering moccasins, and cudgelled by the drunken brave, her spouse, we have a tight-laced young lady with a chignon and a hooped skirt, taking academical degrees, and talking shrilly about Woman's Righfcs.* A few years since, the trapper and pioneer race formed a transition stage between the cessation of barbarism and the advent of civilisation. The pioneer was a simple-minded man ; and so soon as a clearing grew too civilised for him, he would shoulder his hatchet and rifle, and move farther out into the wilds. I have heard of one whose signal for departure was the setting up of a printing press in his settlement. " Those darned newspapers," he remarked, "made one's cattle stray so." But railway extension, and the organisation in the Atlantic cities of enormous caravans of emigrants, are gradually thinning the ranks' of the pioneers. In a few years, Natty Bumppo, Leather- * And I wish that she would talk more shrilly still, all over the world until those Eights are granted. FORM-SICKNESS. 207 stocking, the Deerslayer, the Pathfinder, will be legendary. Civilisation moves now en masse. There is scarcely any advanced guard. Few skirmishers are thrown out. The main body swoops down on the place to be occupied, and civilises it in one decided charge. It may be advantageous to compare such a sudden substitution of a settled community for a howling wilderness with the slow and tentative growth of our home surroundings. European civilisation resembles the church of St. Eustache at Paris, in whose exterior Gothic niches and pinnacles, Byzantine arches, Corinthian columns, Composite cornices, and Renaissance doorways, are all jumbled together. Every canon of archi- tectural taste is violated, but the parts still cohere ; a very solid fagade still rears its head ; and at a certain distance its appearance is not inharmonious. At Cologne, in Germany, they will point out to you an ancient building, here a bit of Lombard, here a morsel of florid Gothic, here some unmis- takable Italian, and here ten feet of genuine old Roman wall. There are many Christian churches in Italy whose walls are supported by columns taken from Pagan temples. The entire system, physical as well as moral, has been the result of growth upon growth, of gradual intercalation and emendation, of perpetual cobbling and piercing and patching ; and although at last, like Sir John Cutler's silk stockings, which his maid darned so often with worsted that no part of the original fabric remained, the ancient foundations may have become all but invisible, they are still latent, and give solidity to the superstruc- ture. We look upon the edifice, indeed, as we would on some- thing that has taken root that has something to rest upon. We regard it as we would that hoary old dome of St. Peter's at Rome. We know how long it took to build, and we trust that it will endure for ever. The brand-new civilisation we are apt to look at more in the light of a balloon. It is very astonishing. We wonder how ever it contrived to rise so high, and how long it will be before it comes down again ; and we earnestly hope that it will not burst. 208 UNDER THE SUN. It is not necessary to avow any kind of partisan predilection for one phase of civilisation as against another. It is sufficient to note the fact, that Europeans the least prejudiced, and the most ardent admirers of the political institutions of the United States, very soon grow fretful and uneasy there, and are unable to deny when they come back that the country is not an elegant or a comfortable one to look upon. I attribute this solely to aesthetic causes. I do not believe that Englishmen grumble at America because the people are given to expectoration, or " guessing," or " calculating," or trivialities of that kind. Continental Europeans expectorate quite as freely as the Americans ; and for rude cross- questioning of strangers, I will back a German against the most inquisitive of New Englanders. It is in the eye that the mischief lies. It is the brand-new mathematical outline of Columbia that drives the Englishman into Form-sickness, and ultimately to the disparagement and misrepresentation of a very noble country. In many little matters of detail American manners differ from ours ; but in the aggregate we are still one family. Americans speak our language frequently with far greater purity and felicity of expression than we ourselves do they read our books, and we are very often glad and proud to read theirs. They have a common inheritance with us in the historic memories we most prize. If they would only round off their corners a little ! If they would only give us a few crescents and ovals in lieu of " blocks ! " If they would only remember that the circle as well as the rectangle is a figure in mathematics, and that the curvilinear is, after all, the Line of Beauty ! 209 XVII. CUAGNAWAGHA. UAGNAWAGHA ! Cuagnawagha ! it is but a word. I may plead at least that it is fertile in vowels, and has not the spiky chevaux de frise appearance, when written down, which Polish and Hungarian and others of the Sclavonic family (those quadrilaterals of orthography) present. To me, even Cuagnawagha looks pretty in black and white. I have adopted the spelling accepted by those who rule over Cuagnawagha, and are neighbours to it ; but the Cuagnawaghians themselves are not much given to reading or writing. Cuagnawagha ! Cuagnawagha ! will you agree in the premiss that there are certain words the names of things and places, and sometimes, but very rarely, of men the bare sound of which will haunt you ? That they should do so is not always the result of the associations they recall. Windermere is close to Patterdale ; yet the first is a name that haunts you, and is full of a soft and mysterious beauty. Patterdale is one of the loveliest spots in Europe, but its sound is harsh, severe, and ugly. In all human probability I shall never more behold Cuagna- wagha on this side the grave, at least. On the other we may all see sights that shall astonish us. I was never in Cuagnawagha but once in my life ; I only passed fifty minutes within its confines ; I was thoroughly disappointed in all that I had come to see ; yet Cuagnawagha, its name and itself, have haunted me from the day on which I first beheld it until this, and in my dreariest moments its dear name sweeps o 210 UNDER THE SUN. like soft music over the chords of my heart and lights up the dim old Yauxhall of my twilight with thrice fifty thou- sand additional lamps. I do not know why. I have seen the lions of the world, their manes and their tails, and have heard them roar. I can gaze upon the ocean without addressing it as Yast, and Interminable, and Blue, and without bidding it Roll on a request which, on my part or any one else's, I hold to be one of surplusage, if not grossly impertinent. I have lost most of my enthusiasm about great rivers. I wait for the Ganges and the Indus, the Euphrates and the Amazon ; but I have seen the Guadalquivir, the Ebro, the Tagus, the Rhone, the Rhine, the Mincio, and the Danube ; but I am of opinion that the Thames at Ditton, in that priceless half-hour between your ordering the stewed eels and the cutlets to follow and the arrival of the banquet itself, is brighter and more shining than any other river which I might have asked, again imper- tinently, to " flow on." The lions and the rivers, the cataract and the Alpine passes, are apt, indeed, to pall upon you when they are seen, not from choice but from necessity ; and goodness gracious ! how many miles would I willingly travel, and with peas in my shoes, to get out of the way of an Old Master or a con- noisseur given to talking about one ! I almost blush to recall the irreverent terms in which I heard one of her Majesty's Messengers allude, the other day, to that sublime chain of mountains the exploration of which has been undertaken by an association of Climbing-boys, and whose peaks, passes, and glaciers are so fascinating to our landscape painters that they seem to be quite unaware of the existence of any more sub- lime mountain scenery in the world. The Queen's Messenger called the sublime chain those " something " Alps. So might you, if you had to carry a bag across them twenty times a year, in hail, rain, or sunshine. But Cuagnawagha has not lost one iota of its primeval charms to me. My love for it is as fresh as what shall I say ? as CUAGNAWAGHA. 211 your love for the face you always love : for the face which, like that of Queen Victoria on the postage-stamps, never grows older. As it was in 1840 so it is in 1872, only younger and fresher and prettier (to you) ; so was it when your life began, so is it now you are a man, so may it be when you grow old. And I am sure, had Wordsworth ever seen Cuagnawagha ; he would have written as melodiously about it as he ha8 written of Grasmere or Dungeonghyll. Cuagnawagha is only an unpretending little Indian village on the bank of the Kiver St. Lawrence, over against the French village of La Chine, one of the earliest settlements of the Jesuit missionaries in Canada (and so called by them in affectionate reference to the labours of which the " Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses" are a record). It is some six miles' drive from the thriving and populous city of Montreal. This is not, perhaps, the first time you have been told that there are no more genial and hospitable folks in British North America (where capital punishment will never be abolished, so far as killing with kindness is concerned) than the inhabitants of Montreal. The Canadians generally labour under a notion not an entirely mistaken one, perhaps that their brethren of the Old Country do not hold them in sufficient estimation ; that the glare and bustle and sensational whirligig life of the United States offer greater attractions to English tourists who cross the Atlantic than the solid, steady, sober-sided existence of the British provinces. They have an idea that an Englishman travelling in the States gets rid of Canada at an early stage in his journey, or just looks in upon it at the fag-end thereof, and that the real centres of his curiosity are in the cities of the Atlantic seaboard. The " Kenucks " and the " Blue noses " and the other pro- vincials murmur at this, but always in a placable and good- humoured manner. " At least," says Canada, " the better half of Niagara belongs to us. At least, the Falls of Montmorency are equal to those of Gennessee ; at least, the St. Lawrence is not inferior to the Ohio, and the Thousand Islands beat Boston 212 UNDER THE SUN. Harbour. There is not on the whole North American continent a city so picturesque as Quebec ; and if you are curious about redskins, we can show you plenty of Indians fat, copper- coloured, prosperous, and happy, instead of the gaunt, dwarfed, half-starved wretches who are being 'improved' off the face of the earth by the restless Yankees." These grievances, however, do not prevent the Montrealese from pressing the heartiest of welcomes on every stranger who comes within their gates. It is enough for them that he is a stranger, and they immediately take him in. He is asked out, systematically and stubbornly, to dinner. If he pleads previous engagements, he is asked whether Monday week or Tuesday fortnight will suit him ; and the dinner comes due, and mu^t be met, like a bill. The Amphitryons who cannot bag him for a dinner are fain to secure him for breakfasts or suppers or lunches. Then they drive him out in trotting-waggons in summer and sleighs in winter ; they take him to the club and to the "rink ;" they wrap him up, as in buffalo-robes, with kind offices and generous deeds. When I say that my experiences of Montreal hospitality, on the last occasion of my visit to the Eoyal Town, included the gift of a roll of Canada homespun sufficient to make a couple of travelling suits, and the loan of a railway-car, combining sitting-room, bedrooms, smoking-rooms, and kitchen, in which I travelled at my ease many hundreds of miles, you will be enabled to infer that the people of Montreal are not in the habit of doing things by halves, and that when they say they are glad to see you, they mean it. Hospitality has generally its price ; and I have known more than one country where the price exacted was slightly beyond the value of the article itself ; but the terms on which kindness is obtainable in Montreal are not very onerous. You are not expected to praise everything you see, to make flowing speeches, or to write a book declaring Lower Canada in general, and Montreal in particular, to be the grandest and most glorious country and city in the universe. Nor are you absolutely CtTAGNAWAGHA. 213 required to furnish the album of every young lady fresh from boarding-school, or at boarding-school, with autographs and cartes-de-visite, or to write scraps of poetry of your own composition (not to exceed thirty lines) on little bits of parti -coloured silk, to be returned post-paid to localities a thousand miles away, there to be sewn into patchwork coun- terpanes. Nor are you asked for opinions on the abstract questions of Woman's Rights, Moral Suasion, or International Law. You are only expected to eat a great deal, to pass the bottle, to go round the Mountain, to go through the Tube, and to visit Cuagnawagha. There are always plenty of kind friends, with knives, forks, bottles, carriages, and horses, to enable you to accomplish the first three feats. For the performance of the fourth every assistance will be rendered you by the courteous officials of the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada ; and the Victoria Bridge at Montreal is, in its way, quite as great a wonder of the world as the Falls of Niagara. When you have dispatched that tremendous piece of engineering when you have not only ridden through the tube on a locomotive, but walked through it and inspected the identical rivet driven into the iron by the Prince of Wales, the last of I know not how many millions you have done all that is required of you in Montreal, with the exception of visiting Cuagnawagha. The name strikes you at once. What is it ? where is it ? you eagerly inquire. It is an Indian village, you are told, easily accessible. The best way is by road to La Chine, where you can obtain a canoe and be ferried across to the village itself. The very word " canoe " sets you all agog to go. Sunday, your counsellors continue, is the best day for a visit to Cuagnawagha. The squaws are then in their best dresses, and the papooses or children are neat and clean, for the inspection of visitors. It was on a Saturday afternoon that I made an appointment with a hospitable friend to start for Cuagnawagha at noon on the morrow. All night I dreamt about it. A radiant chaos filled my sleep of moccasins and wampum-belts, of wigwams 214 UNDER THE SUN. and medicine-men, of war-painfc and calumets, of tomahawks and scalps, of fire-water and unturned hatchets, of gallant braves and beauteous squaws, of the Council Fire and the Happy Hunting-grounds. Sunday morning dawned. It was a Canadian summer Sunday, which is perhaps saying enough ; but our open carriage had a hood, and the day, though warm, was so beautiful that we felt it would have been a sin to remain at home. Perforce, however, so fierce was the glare of the sun, we lingered in the cool shades of the St. Lawrence Hall Hotel until two in the afternoon. To broil in Canada was with me a new sensation, for on the occasion of my last visit to Montreal the thermometer had been at a whole flight of stairs below zero, and my tour round the Mountain accomplished in a sleigh, with such a jingling accompaniment of bells as might have been envied by the celebrated female traveller to Banbury Cross. But why did she not attach the bells to the cock-horse instead of to her toes ? There are but two changes of the seasons at Montreal, but they are pantomimic in their suddenness. I could scarcely believe that the Mr. Hogan who suggested iced sangaree or a trifle in the way of a cobbler, ere we started for Cuagnawagha, was the same obliging host who, the last time I started from St. Lawrence Hall, had lent me the skin (seemingly) of a mega- therium to wrap myself in, with a mighty fur cap, and a pair of sealskin gloves like unto leviathan his paws, and had whispered that half-way round the mountain there were some excellent hot " whiskey skins " to be obtained. The drive to La Chine was not very interesting. Few drives in North America, save where the scenery is mountainous, can be said to possess much interest, picturesquely speaking. The farming is all doubtless in strict accordance with the precepts of Jethro Tull, great-grandfather of Anglo-Saxon husbandry ; but to the European eye it looks shiftless and slovenly. The fields are too large (which w r ould scarcely be a fault in the eye of a farmer) ; there are ugly posts and rails in lieu of hedges, and the trees are few. Gentlemen's houses, parks, and pleasaunces you CtJAGNAWAGHA. 215 never expect to see. Add to this an all-pervading dust powdering the vegetation with the monotonous livery of Midge the miller, and those chronic Canadian nuisances, abundant turnpike-gates. There were plenty of cattle about, however, well bred and full of flesh, and the cottages along the road, although mainly of wood, had a substantial and satisfied appearance, as though they belonged to country folks who ate meat every day. I am inclined to think that meat twice, if not three times a day, would be nearer the mark, as the habitual dietary of the Canadian peasant or farmer, for they are both one here. Given a country where the babes and sucklings clamour for beefsteak at breakfast : should not that country be a happy one ? There was the usual confusion of French and English nomenclature, and of Protestant and Romanist places of wor- ship, and of people of Saxon and Celtic race along the road ; but, as seems happily the case in Canada, the Gaul and the Saxon, the follower of Peter and>the disciple of Martin, seemed to get on pretty well together. Fenianism was in an ugly embryo state when I was in Canada. It had scarcely got beyond its first foetal squalling in its cradle in Chicago ; and the Canadian Paddy, so far as I had any experience of him, was a jovial, easy-going mortal, civil to the Saxon, obedient to his rule, and passably contented with plenty of work and high wages. I am inclined to hope, and even to believe, that the outburst of Fenianism now grown from a fretful wail to a frantic howl notwithstanding, the kind of Paddy (the con- tented one) I have mentioned is still in a majority in Lower Canada. What he may be in the West I am rather chary of opining. On this present Sunday he was evidently, so far as his patronage of French and English public-houses went, wholly free from prejudice. "The Queen's Arms" and "Les Armes d'Angleterre " were all one to him. I could not help think- ing, as we saw these hybrid taverns, that half-and-half should properly be the only beverage sold there ; and when I passed a knot of scarlet-coated British guardsmen issuing from a 216 UNDER THE SUN. wayside hostel, I fancied an international version of the old nursery rhyme : " Qui est la ? A grenadier. Ou est votre argent? I forgot. AUez-vous-en, ivrogne ! " Conversations closely resembling the above were certainly audible from time to time when the Guards were in Canada. Happy was it when they were content to demand a "pot of beer " in lieu of the atrocious " white eye " and the abomi- nable "fixed bayonets" the cheap whiskey or cheap hell- fire of Canada. Not that the guardsman was given in any marked degree to misbehave himself. He did not get tipsier, or with greater frequency, than his cousin of the Line does in Gibraltar. He was much more sober in Canada than he is generally in London. The Guards were deservedly popular with the people of Montreal, and went home "as fit as fiddles." Many obtained their discharge while in America, and married and settled in the province. They must have been quick about their sweethearting ; but next to a sailor's, is there anything shorter than a soldier's courtship ? Three Sundays might be given as a fair average. Let us take a virtuously inclined corporal. A regiment, we will say, disembarks on a Saturday night ; on the first Sunday afternoon you will meet your virtuously inclined corporal walk- ing down Notre-Dame Street with a young lady in a three- dollar shawl and a two-dollar bonnet. The next Sunday, if you happened to be passing down Bonaventure Street, you might catch a glimpse of the virtuously inclined corporal taking tea with the entire family of his innamorata; cutting the bread-and-butter, carving the ham, nursing the married sister's baby, or handing the old grandsire a light for his pipe. And on Sunday number three you heard that Corporal Smith had got leave to be married to a " Kenuck." How do they manage it, these wonderful military men ? "What inflammatory quality is there in their scarlet coats to CUAGNAWAGHA. 217 set maidens' hearts ablaze so ? How many weary months, years perhaps, did it take you to win the present Mrs. Bene- dick ? Mind, I can't help thinking that if civilians would adopt the short sharp mode of military courtship, the girls would meet them half-way. I heard of a train breaking down once on the Camden and Amboy Eailroad, and before a fresh locomotive could be brought to its assistance no less than three offers 'of marriage were made and accepted among the passen- gers. And did you ever hear of a courtship more expeditious than that of the mystic William Blake, pktor ignotus? He had had some great trouble. "I pity you, "William," remarked a young lady. "Then I am sure I love you with all my heart," quoth William Blake ; and they went off and got married at once. But if she had not added the endearing "William" to the expres- sion of pity, that young lady might never have become Mrs. Blake. There was not much to remind one of the Celestial Empire at the clean little village of La Chine. It was nearly all French. The hotel or tavern was, as usual, half and half. The little sanded parlour was decorated with portraits of Queen Victoria and the late Duke of Wellington, side by side with a Madonna and Child, and his Graee the Archbishop of Quebec in full canonicals ; and the Montreal Herald lay on the table cheek-by- jowl with L'Echo du Canada. A French servant-maid brought us some English beer ; and on our expressing a desire to hire a canoe, the Scotch landlord hailed two boatmen, one of whom was an Indian and the other an Irishman, to "pole" us across to Cuagnawagha. It only wanted a raven and a cage and the celebrated professor of Trafalgar Square, to make the exhibition of the Happy Family complete.* We crossed the magnificent river, at this point far enough from the La Chine Rapids to be lying calm in the sun like one sheet of burnished gold. There was no awning to the canoe, and a Venetian gondola would perhaps have been preferable as a * The Happy Family was composed of cats, rats, mice, an owl, a raven, canaries and other singing birds, all of which were exhibited together in a large cage in front of the National Q-allery. 218 UNDER THE SUN. conveyance ; but there was something after all in riding lightly on the bosom of the famous St. Lawrence in a real canoe of birch bark, with a real Red Indian at the stern. I will say nothing of the Irishman at the prow, for he rather detracted from the romance of the thing. A Canadian voyageur now, softly mur- muring "La Complainte de Cadieux," or chanting in lugubrious tones the fearful history of Marie Joseph Corriveau and the iron cage of Quebec : such an oarsman would have left nothing to be desired. You must get on to the Ottawa river ere you can catch your voyageur. The Irishman and the Indian did not attempt the " Row, Brothers, Row," or any other variety of the Canadian boat-song. It was worth coming a good many miles, however, to hear the Irishman endeavour to make himself understood in the French tongue by the redskin, and that noble savage, not to be behindhand in courtesy, endeavouring to talk English to the Irishman. I must not omit to mention that the noble savage wore a pea-jacket and a billy-cock hat, and informed us that in addition to the skill and dexterity with which he feathered his oar, or rather his pole, he was " one dam good pilot." As the opposite shore was approached the navigation became somewhat difficult, and the channel rather a matter to be faintly hoped for than confidently fixed upon. Several times we were, as I thought, within an inch of being " snagged," the " snags " in this case not being trunks of trees, as on the Mississippi, but sharp-pointed fragments of rock. However, the Indian success- fully guided us through the watery labyrinth, and in some degree justified his claim to the title of " one dam good pilot." There were more rocky fragments on the bank ; indeed, the littoral of the St. Lawrence opposite La Chine might remind the Eastern traveller of the shores of Arabia Petraea ; and the quarter-of-a- mile walk of so lying between the river and the village was, to one of the visitors to Cuagnawagha, of a gouty constitution, and to another with tight boots, and to third with bunions and an irritable temper, agonising. We brought up at last in a long straggling street, or rather lane, of hovels built of loose stones and planks nailed together in CUAGNAWAGHA. 219 apparently as loose a fashion. Here and there perhaps a little mud had been used to finish off the corners, or stick on the chimney-pots ; but looseness was the prevailing characteristic of the street architecture. When I call these dwellings hovels, I use the word in no offensive sense. They were hovels in construction, but exceedingly clean and abundantly furnished. The doors and windows were all wide open, and the domestic arrangements of the inhabitants of Cuagnawagha were almost as fully exposed to public gaze as those of a doll's-house in Mr. Crerner's London shop- windows. As the majority of the houses comprised only one room, the publicity given to the domesticity of the place may be more easily understood. They were, as I have hinted, supplied with abundant chattels. I saw more than one four-post bedstead, several easy-chairs, and any number of profusely ornamented tea-trays. Next to these the most fertile product of Cuagnawagha appeared to be babies. I could not at first make out what had become of the children of medium growth, nor of the seven-year olds up to the ten-year olds ; but I learnt subsequently that the elder ones were at church and the younger at play in the cemetery. In Cuagnawagha itself the babies ruled the roast. They were very fat of a rich oily fatness indeed, and in the ridiculous swaddling-bands in which they were enveloped, looked not unlike very little sucking-pigs seen through reddish-brown spectacles. But all the babies I saw were, I am pleased to say, immaculately clean. Those who had any hair had it of a lustrous raven hue, such as Horace Vernet has put on the head of the baby Napoleon in that exquisite vignette where the hero is depicted naked, and one hour old, sprawling on a fragment of tapestry. Their black eyes, too, had a merry twinkle ; and altogether their coppery hue was not unpleasing, and they were the nicest babies I had seen for many a long month. In Cuagnawagha a baby is called a " papoose ; " and a solemn rite, the performance of which is exacted from all strangers, is that the papooses should be kissed. I had been warned in Montreal that the maternal squaws of Cuagnawagha were some- 220 TJtfbER THE times actuated by mercenary motives in offering their babies to the caresses of tourists; and that the request, "Anglis, kiss papoose," was not unfrequently followed by another, " Give little quarter" meaning twenty-five cents. I took a provision of small money with me the newest and brightest I could procure ; but the mothers of Cuagnawagha were that day in no mercenary mood. At least they did not actually beg for money. They clapped their hands for joy, and the papoose crowed in unison whenever we did present them with a backshish ; so that on the whole in this lane full of copper-coloured babies we had our money's worth and more. We would no sooner halt at an open threshold than cheery voices in an amazing jargon of French and English invited us to walk in. If we hesitated about intruding, the inevitable papoose, tightly swaddled and strapped on to a board, like a diminutive Egyptian mummy, was handed to us through the window. A gipsy woman of felonious tendencies might have made a fortune in ten minutes' perambulation of Cuagnawagha by running off with the papooses thus offered on trust ; only, as the gipsies are said to steal only Nazarene children, and the Eed Indians themselves are by some ethnologists supposed to be of kin with the gipsies, those Zingarini persons might not have cared perhaps about stealing their own flesh and blood. I was given to understand afterwards that these Indians of Cuagnawagha were a very industrious and well-to-do com- munity. The men hunted and fished, and were boatmen and river pilots ; the women stayed at home, took care of the papooses, and filled up their time by making baskets and creels, and embroidering those exquisite moccasins, slippers, pouches, fans, warnpam-belts, and other articles of bead and feather-work which are so much in request in the fancy bazaars of Montreal and Quebec, and for which the retail dealers charge such exorbitant prices. The squaws of Cuagna- wagha have certain market days for the disposal of their manufactures. On these occasions they are conveyed by their lords in canoes of birch-bark across the river, and may be CUAGNAWAGHA. 221 seen, with their black hair abundantly oiled and their per- sons spruced up in infinite Indian finery, gliding from shop to shop in the most frequented streets of Montreal, in strange contrast to the European costumes around them. I did not hear that the Indians of Cuagnawagha, male or female, were much given to the consumption of fire-water, or to quarrelling or pilfering, or to the other generic weaknesses of the noble savage when in a state of free nobility and nastiness. I did not see any liquor-shop in the place. The domestic affairs of the village are administered by a chief John or Peter, or Big Bellows or Bear's Paw, was, I think, his name ; but it does not matter now who was re- ported to have done uncommonly well in the fur trade, and to be worth many dollars. I had the honour of an interview with this Sachem, who was sitting, after the manner of his subjects, at his open door, in a "Windsor chair, and smoking the. calumet of peace an ordinary tobacco-pipe, containing, as I was led to infer from the odour, bird's-eye. He was old, and immensely fat, but very affable. He showed me a pair of the most beautifully embroidered moccasins I had ever beheld. Not to mince the matter, they served as coverings to his own stout legs and feet ; but nothing could exceed the courteous manner in which he cocked up his bead-worked limbs on the window-sill, and allowed me narrowly to inspect, and even to smooth and pat them. The Sachem's house was so full of chattels that it looked like a broker's shop ; and the name of his tea-trays was legion. He wore on his breast, and was evidently exceedingly proud of, a silver medal bearing the effigy of King George the Fourth, and had, so far as I could make out, served at some remote period in the local militia. He had the usual twin engravings over his mantle-piece the Madonna and the Queen of England, and was a staunch Conservative and a devout Roman Catholic. So I left him, never to behold him more, in this semi- ignored corner of the world, so close to civilisation and yet so far from it. Ho was sitting under his own vine and his 222 UNDER THE SUN. own fig-tree ; and who was there to make him. afraid ? Not the British Government, surely, whose rule over these honest folks is mild and equitable and protective ; not the Pope of Rome, assuredly. In Lower Canada the Roman Catholic religion seems to have lost the terriiying character which it is apt to assume elsewhere. The priest neither bullies nor teases nor grinds the faces of his parishioners. He is their master ; for he is lawyer, arbitrator, journalist, schoolmaster, letter-writer, match-maker, guide, philosopher, and friend, all in one ; but his spiriting seems to be done with infinite gentleness, and he is certainly beloved by a population who, but for his quietly paternal despotism, would very likely be drunken and savage and profligate, and not peaceable and affectionate and docile. At one extremity of the village street there was a church, a bare structure of considerable antiquity, highly whitewashed. The irregular area before this edifice seemed to be the general trysting- place of the young squaws and the young braves of Cuagnawagha, who were sweethearting after the manner of young squaws and young braves the whole world over. The braves, I am sorry to say, had repudiated the slightest approach to Indian costume, and in the round blue jackets and glazed hats which they mostly affected, had somewhat of a sailor-like appearance. They were pure redskins, however, and half-castes were rare. Now a Red Indian in a blue jacket and a round glazed hat sounds rather anomalous and incongruous. Where were the feathers and the war-paint and the tattooing? Not at Cuagnawagha, certainly. You must go much farther west if you wish to see the noble savage in his full native splendour and squalor ; and even in the wildest districts the Indian rarely fails to supply himself with a European outfit whenever he has an opportunity to do so. I remember a hard-hearted but withal very amusing speculator from down East telling me of a gambling transaction he had had with an Indian somewhere in the territory of Colorado. " The cuss," he observed, " had been tradin' bosses, and bought a lot of store clothes. There he was, in a stove-pipe hat, a satin vest and CUAGNAWAGHA. 223 a coat and pants most handsome. "We took drinks, and I kinder froze to him till I had him comfortable over draw-poker in the verandah of the Cummin's House. Sir, in the course of three hours and three quarters I won of that Ingin all the money he'd got from tradin' bosses, and all his clothes, from the crown of his hat to the soles of his boots. Sir, it was very hot ; and, lawful sakes ! it was a sight to see that Ingin, a child of Adam and as bare as a robin, a walking away solemn, perspirin' with rage in the rays of the setting sun, and looking like a hot roast turkey" The hot roast turkeys of Cuagnawagha had not yet been plucked of their feathers by speculators from down East, direct lineal descendants of the cunning man of Pyquag, who questioned Anthony Van Corlcar the trumpeter out of his horse. But ! the squaws of Cuagnawagha. The elder squaws were unutterably hideous ; so they prudently stayed at home and minded the papooses. The younger squaws were here, philander- ing. Such mellow brunettes did I see with nature's pure carmine mantling upon their dusky cheeks. Such lustrous blue-black tresses. Such liquid, lingering, longing eyes. If their foreheads had not been quite so low, and the chiselling of their mouths not quite so square, many of these girls would have been positively beautiful. Their figures in early youth are very shapely and graceful, and their gait a strictly " gliding " motion, as already noted. A lady of our party admitted that they walked prettily, but that they turned their toes in. Another critic discovered that they walked on tiptoe in consequence of the wretched condition of the pavement. I could only notice that they glided, that their ankles were faultless, and that they were exquisitely shod. Moccasins they may have worn on week-days ; this Sabbath their pretty feet were arrayed in brodequins and bottines of varnished and bronzed leather, of soft kid, and even of bright-coloured silk and satin. Otherwise there was little European in their costume. Crinoline had not yet invaded Cuagnawagha. There was an upper garment, which was the inner garment the innermost garment, in fact snowy white, leaving the arms bare, but very maidenly and modest. This was all they had for bib, or tucker, 224 UNDER THE SUN. or bodice. Then came a petticoat falling in straight heavy folds, and decorated round the bottom with three or four rows of ribbons, the whole offering a close resemblance to the garment known in operatic wardrobes as the "Amina skirt." Over all, and covering the head, was a long mantle, in shape somewhat like a priest's cope a square of fine broadcloth, of yellow, of red, or of black, and adorned with curious patchwork embroi- dery. The lady critic above mentioned complained that they went about with drawing-room table-covers over their heads ; but what will not lady critics say ? Such were the squaws of Cuagnawagha. Their necklaces and armlets of beads, " their ribbons, chains, and ouches," I need not dwell upon. As for their manner of receiving the addresses of the young braves, it was remarkably like that which on previous occasions I have observed in Kensington Gardens, in many private parlours and on some staircases. "We were turning our faces towards the shore again, when there issued from one of the hovels a procession which we could not choose but follow. It was the funeral train of a little child. As at a Turkish funeral, the assistants came along at the double quick, but not jostling and hallooing as the Turks, or at least the Arabs, do. The men were first, absolutely running, but with that grave, concentrated expression in their faces of which only Indians and Breton peasants seem masters. Then came a squad of squaws ; and then, alone, the mother of the dead child, bearing in her own arms whose could be better ? the tiny corpse, which was in a species of wicker pie-dish, adorned with innumerable streamers of rainbow-hued ribbon and strips of cloth. A bevy of dusky children, capering but silent, brought up the rear. We followed this curious train into the church, and I went up into a rickety gallery and looked down on the coffin of the poor little papoose stranded in the midst of a big bier in the chancel, like a pincushion in a brewer's vat. The priest came, with his cross-bearer and his acolytes and tapers and holy water, and the service for the dead was chanted ; but in the midst of a timid CUAGNAWAGHA. 225 quavering of the "Dies Iras" there burst from the hitherto silent assemblage a prolonged and harrowing wail. It rings in my ears even now ; and I can see the Indian women on their knees on the church pavement, rocking themselves to and fro and howling dismally. It was savagery asserting itself. It was as the voice of the wild animal in the depths of the forest, mourning for her cubs. We followed the train again, away from the church and to the cemetery, and saw the papoose comfortably stowed away, gay- ribboned pall and all, in a quiet corner where the grass grew tall. Sleep soundly, papoose ; thou art well out of a troublous world. Then we came back to the shore and took boat and sped across the great river, and saw the last of Cuagnawagha. And many and many a time in far-distant lands have I recalled the rocky shore, the fat old chief, the gliding squaws, and the dead papoose -with its rainbow pall. 226 XVIII. STALLS. T may not have occurred to you, amsene reader, to trouble yourself much concerning the Philosophy of Stalls, if haply you have ever thought it worth your while to inquire whether there was anything philosophical connected with a stall at all. To my mind there is, and much. To me a stall typifies in an intense degree the quality of selfishness. I draw a direct alliance between a stall and celibacy. I hold the possession of a stall to be linked with the ideas of independence, of isolation from and superiority to the rest of mankind. In a stall, properly so termed, you cannot put two people. The stalled ox is alone, and may look with infinite contempt on the poor sheep huddled together in a fold ; the cobbler who lived in his stall, which served him for kitchen and parlour and all, was, I will go bail, a bachelor. Robinson Crusoe for a very long time occupied a stall, and was monarch of all he surveyed. When Man Friday came, the recluse began to yearn to mingle with the world again. Diogenes in his tub perfectly fulfils the idea of an egotist. From his tub- stall he could witness at leisure the entire grand opera of Corinth. I have heard of a royal duke one of the past generation of royal dukes : burly, bluff princes in blue coats and brass buttons, who said everything twice over, drank hard, swore a good deal, and were immensely popular at the Crown and Anchor and the Thatched House Taverns who, being in Windsor one Sunday afternoon, thought he would like to attend divine service in St. George's Chapel. Of course he was a Knight of the Garter, and had his stall in the old Gothic fane, with his casque and STALLS. 227 banner above, and a brass plate let in to the oaken carving, recording what a high, mighty, and puissant prince he was. The chapel happened to be very crowded, and as H.R.H. essayed to pass through the throng towards his niche in the choir, a verger whispered him deferentially that a distinguished foreign visitor, his Decrepitude the Grand Duke of Pfenningwurst-Schinken- braten, had been popped into the place of the English duke. " Don't care a rush a rush," quoth H.R.H., poking his walking- cane into the spine of a plebeian in front of him. " Want to get to my stall my stall." And from it, I suppose, he eventually succeeded in ousting the intruder from Germany. Was not H.R.H. in the right ? His stall was his vine and his fig-tree, and who was there to make him afraid ? So much for stalls in the abstract. Practically, a stall may be defined as a place of occupation, in relative degrees, of a canon, a chorister, a cow, a cobbler, or a connoisseur. To study stalls most profitably in their ecclesiastical or monastic aspect, you should go to Flanders or to Spain. In the grand old cathedrals in those countries the traveUer has always free access to the choir, and can take his surfeit of contemplation of the stalls. They will be found to the observant mind replete with human interest. They may be peopled with priests. Pursy pre- bendaries, dozing the doze of the just, and dreaming placidly, perchance, of good fat capon and clotted cream, while the brawny choirmen at the lecterns are thundering from huge oak-bound and brass-clamped folios, on the parchment pages of which corpulent minims and breves flounder over crimson lines ; pale, preoccupied priests, fretfully crimping the folds of their surplices and enviously eyeing my Lord Archbishop yonder, awfully enthroned, with his great mitre on his head and his emerald ring glancing on the plump white hand which he complacently spreads over the carved arm of his chair of state. Will they ever come to sit in that chair ? those pale, preoccupied men may be think- ing. Will they ever wear a mitre and hold out their hands for an obedient flock to kiss ? Or will dignity and power and wealth fall to the lot of those drowsy prebendaries ? 228 UNDER THE SUN. More absorbing even in interest than the stalls in the choir of a cathedral are those in a convent chapel. The reason is, I suppose, that a monk has always been to me a mystery. A nun I can more easily understand, for the monastic state in its best and purest acceptation is a dream or an ecstasy ; and there are vast numbers of women who pass their whole lives in a dreamy and ecstatic frame of mind, and in a species of unob- trusive hysterics. But the monk, with his manhood and his great strong frame and the fire of ambition lambent in his eye, and his lips firm-set in volition, always puzzles me. Continental physicians will tell you that in every monastery there will be found a certain proportion of mad monks friars who have strange lunes, and hear voices while they are sweeping out the chapel or extinguishing the altar-candles, and to whom the saints and angels in the pictures on the walls are living and breathing personages. I remember a dwarfish Cappuccino at Rome once executing a kind of holy hornpipe before Guide's famous painting of the Archangel vanquishing the Demon, and, as he jigged, taunting the fiend on the canvas on the low estate to which he had fallen, and derisively bidding him to use his claws and fangs. Nor do I think that I was ever more terrified in my life than by the behaviour of a gaunt young friar in the Catacombs of San Sebastiano, who, opposite the empty tomb of a renowned martyr, suddenly took to waving his taper above his head and to abusing the Twelve Caesars. He was our guide, and I feared the candle would go out, and trembled to think what would become of us, lost in Necropolis. But mad monks, or dreamy or ecstatic monks, are sufficiently rare, it is to be surmised. Most of the wearers of the cowl and sandals with whom T have made acquaintance seemed to be perfectly well aware of what they were about ; and a spirit of shrewd and pungent humour and drollery is not by any means an uncommon characteristic of male inmates of the cloister. As for a Knight of the Garter in his stall, I regard him simply as an awful being. Understand that, to strike one with STALLS. 229 sufficient awe, he should be, not in plain dress, but iii the " full fig " of his most noble order : a costume more imposing than the full uniform of the captain of a man-o'-war ; and that, backed by the man-o'-war herself in the offing, can be war- ranted to send any black king on the west coast of Africa into fits. But a K.G. with his garter on, with his sweeping velvet robe, with his collar and his George, with his tassels and badges and bows of ribbons, next to Solomon in all his glory is the most sumptuous sight I can conceive. The very stall he sits in is historical ; a knight of his own name occupied it three hundred years ago. It bears brazen chronicle of the doughtiest barons that ever lived. What should one do to get made a K.Gr. and to earn the privilege of sitting in such a stall ? Would the genius of Shake- speare or Dante, would the learning of Boyle or Milton, would the imagination of a Tennyson, the graphic powers of a Millais, the researches of a Faraday would even the giant intellect of a Brougham, help a man in the climbing upward to that stall ? Not much, I fancy. Its occupancy is to be obtained only by one process, ridiculously simple, yet to be mastered only by very few children of humanity. "Vous vous etes donne* la peine de naitre," says Figaro to Count Almaviva, in the play. To be K.G.'d you must take the trouble to be . born of the E.G. caste. But envy, avaunt ! Social fate is not without its compensa- tions, and there are stalls and stalls. Lend me a guinea, and for a whole evening, from eight to nearly midnight, I can sit supreme in a stall, solitary, grand, absolute ; for who shall dare to turn me out ? The stall is mine, to have and to hold corporeally until the curtain has fallen on the last tableau of the ballet, and (in imagination at least) I can hang my banner and my casque over my stall and deem myself a high, mighty, and puissant prince. As the process put into practice might interfere with the comfort of the patrons of the Royal Italian Opera, I content myself with hanging my overcoat over the back of my stall and placing my collapsible Gibus beneath it. 230 UNDER THE SUN. I notice a large party of beautiful dames and damsels in a box on the pit tier, who, I am vain enough to think, are intently inspecting me through their opera-glasses. I plume myself. I pull down niy wristbands, I smooth my shirt-front and caress the bows of my cravat. I turn the favourite facet of my diamond ring well on to the box on the pit tier. If you are the sun, shall you not shine ? I am taken, I fondly hope, for one of the Upper Ten. I am aware, from eyesight acquaintance with the aristocracy, that my neighbour on the right, with the purple wig, the varnished pumps, and the ear- trump, is Field-Marshal Lord Viscount Dumdum, that great Indian hero ; and that the yellow- faced little man on my left, with the yellow ribbon at his button- hole, is the Troglodyte ambassador. Behind me is Sir Hercules Hoof, of the Second Life- Guards. In front of me is the broad back I wish in respect to the back that it wasn't quite so broad of Mr. Bargebeam, Q.O. How are that family in the pit tier to know that I am not a nobleman, a diplomatist, a guardsman, ' or a queen's counsel ? I am clean. I had my hair dyed the day before yesterday. My boots are polished ; my neckcloth is starched stiff; my stall is as big as anybody else's. How is beauty in the boxes to tell that I came in (failing to borrow one-pound-one) with an order ? The playhouse stall is a thoroughly modern innovation ; and even the pit of the Italian theatres of the Renaissance was destitute of seats. When Sterne first visited the opera in Paris the groundlings stood to witness the performance, and sentinels with fixed bayonets were posted to appease tumults, as in the well-known case quoted in the " Sentimental Journey," when the irate dwarf threatened to cut off the pigtail of the tall German. I am old enough to remember when the pittites in the Scala at Milan stood. You paid, I think, an Austrian florin one-and-eightpence for bare admission to the house, and then you took your chance of lighting upon some lady who would invite you to a seat in her box ; or some Bachelor acquaintance who, having had enough of the performance, would 6TALLS. 231 surrender to you his reserved seat near the orchestra for the rest of the evening. ' Seated pits have always been common in our English theatres, owing to the strong determination of the people to make them- selves comfortable whenever it was possible to do so ; and these reserved seats of the Scala were the beginning of the exclu- sive seats we call stalls. They are not older than the era of the dominion of the Austrians in Lombardy, after the down- fall of Napoleon the First. There were many Milanese nobles not wealthy enough to take boxes for the season, and too proud to sponge on their friends every evening for a back seat in a " palco," and too patriotic to mingle in the standing-up area with the Austrian officers, who, according to garrison regulations, were admitted to the Scala at the reduced price of ninepence half- penny. So the manager of the Scala hit upon the crafty device of dividing the rows of benches near the orchestra into compart- ments, each wide enough to accommodate a single person, and the seats of which could be turned up as in the choir of a cathedral. Moreover, these seats were neatly fitted with hasps and padlocks, so that the subscriber could lock up his seat when, between the acts, he strolled into the cafe for refreshment. Perhaps he was absent from Milan during the whole operatic season ; and if he did not choose to lend the key of his stall to a friend of the right political way of thinking, the seat remained inexorably closed. The system had a triple charm : First, the subscriber could revel to the fullest extent in the indulgence of that dog-in-the manger-like selfishness which I have held to be inseparably connected with stall-holding ; next, he could baflle the knavish boxkeepers, with whom in an Italian theatre you can always drive an immoral bargain, and by a trifling bribe secure a better seat than that for which you have originally paid ; finally, he could obviate the possibility of his stall being contaminated by the sedentary presence of any Austrian general of high rank who happened to be an amateur of legs. High-handed as were the proceedings of the Tedeschi in Italy, they were wisely reluctant to interfere with the social habits of the people. 232 UNDER THE SUN. Just before the great FrencH Revolution it became the fashion to place arm-chairs close to the orchestra of the Academy of Music, for the use of noble visitors who came down from their boxes to take a closer survey of the coryphees ; but these were fauteuils at large ; they were few in number, and could be shifted from place to place at will. Veritable stalls are those which, albeit they are fitted with arm-rests, are still immovably screwed to the floor ; and such stalls, old playgoers will bear me out, are things of very recent introduction in. our theatres. The pit of Her Majesty's Theatre was once the resort of the grandest dandies in London. Going over the new structure the other day, I observed that the pit proper had been almost entirely suppressed, and that stalls monopolised seven-tenths of the sitting- room of the ground area. In English theatres a similar monopoly has been from year to year gradually gaining strength. The most rubbishing little houses have now numerous rows of stalls, from which bonnets are of course banished ; and the pit is being quietly elbowed out of existence. "The third row of the pit" was once a kind of bench of judgment I don't say of justice on which those tremendous dispensers of dramatic fame and fortune, the critics, sat. Our papas and mammas did not despise the pit of Old Drury ; and I have heard tell of a lady of title who paid to the pit to see Master Betty, and who took with her a bag of sandwiches and some sherry in a bottle. I think I heard tell that she lost her shoe in the crowd before the doors were opened. Should this remarkable extension of the stall system be con- sidered as a blessing or an evil ? Has it not tended to the vast increase of selfishness, superciliousness, and the pride of place ? Dear sir, if I were a Professor of Paradoxes, I might tell you that the more selfish, the more supercilious, and the prouder of our places we are, the likelier will be the attainment of universal happiness. I might whisper to you that virtue is only selfishness in a sublime degree. But I am a professor of nothing, and I dread paradoxes having had a relative once who was afflicted with them, and died. So I go back to stalls. STALLS. 233 The stalled ox, and the stalled cows in the byres of Brock, in Holland, with their tails tied up to rings in the rafters, I leave to their devices, for my talk is of men and not of beasts. But lovingly do I glance at the cobbler in his stall a merry man with twinkling eyes, a blue-black mazard, and somewhat of a copper nose, for ever cuddling his laps tone, smoothing his leather with sounding thwacks, drawing out his waxed string, working and singing, and bandying repartee with the butchers' boys and the fishwives passing his hutch. I would Mr. Longfellow had sung of that cobbler ; for as many tuneful things could be said about Crispin as about the Village Blacksmith. That he has been left unsung, I mourn sincerely ; for times change and types of humanity vanish, and I am beginning to miss that cobbler. Metropolitan improvements are unfavourable to him ; our pride and vanity militate against him ; for somehow we don't care about seeing our boots mended in public nowadays. In old times the cobbler's stall was permitted to nestle in the basement of mansions almost aristocratic in their respectability ; but at present no architect would dream of building a new cobbler's stall in a new house, and the old ones are fast disappearing. Crispin has risen in the world. He has taken a shop, and " repairs ladies' and gentlemen's boots and shoes with punctuality and dispatch." The term "stall," as applied to the board on trestles, or supported perchance by a decayed washing-tub, laid out with apples, sweetstuff, or oysters, and presided over by an old Irish- woman with a stringless black bonnet flattened down on a mob- cap, I consider a misnomer. It lacks the idea of exclusive possession which should attach to a stall. The apple, or sweet- stuff, or oyster woman is but a tenant-at-will. She has no fee simple. She may be harried by the police, and petitioned against by churlish shopkeeping neighbours jealous of her poor outdoor traffic. Drunken roysterers may overturn her frail structure ; a reckless hansom cabdriver may bring her to irretrievable crash and ruin ; rival apple-women may compete with her at the opposite street corners ; and passing costermongers with strong- 234 UNDER THE SUN. wheeled barrows may gird afc her and disparage her wares. 'Tis not a stall at which she sits, but a stand, a mere thing of tolerance and sufferance : here to-day and gone to-morrow, if the proud man chooses despitefully to use poor Biddy. But once give me sitting-room in a cathedral stall, and, by cock and pye, I will not budge ! You may threaten to dis- establish and disendow me, but I will carry my stall about with me, as old gentlemen at the seaside carry their camp-stools. And if at last, by means of a measure forced on an unwilling nation by ministers more abandoned in their principles, sir, than Se janus, Empson, Dudley, Polignac, Peyronnet, or the late Sir Robert Walpole, you declare that my stall must be abolished, you shall compensate me for its loss at a rate as rich as though I had always had it clamped with gold and stuffed with bank notes. 235 XIX. WRETCHED VILLE. UNKS took to drinking ; and as for his matrimonial affairs, the late Sir Cresswell Cresswell* was fain to take them in hand; and a pretty case was Dunks versus Dunks, I promise you. Having sold or mortgaged every "carcass" he possessed, and under- mined his own with strong liquors, Dunks went into the Bankruptcy Court, and soon afterwards died of a severe attack of rum-and-water, and trade-assignee on the brain a wholly-ruined and still-uncertificated trader. It was a sad end for a man who had once served the office of church- warden and driven his own chaise-cart who had banked with the London and County and whose brother-in-law's uncle was reputed to be the proprietor of a New Eiver share; but the mills of the gods grind small, and Dunks, to my thinking, only met in his decadence with his deserts. When I spoke of "carcasses" just now, I did not intend to imply that Dunks was a wholesale butcher. His carcasses were of bricks and mortar, and of his own making. Dunks was a builder. He took the contract once for the Doleful Hill Lunatic Asylum, by which he did so well notwithstand- ing the complaints of the architect in respect to the bricks that he was enabled to build a large number of semi-detached villas, and a still larger quantity of "carcasses," as a specula- tion of his own. Had he been prudent had common sense or even common decency been his guide he might have made * A former well-known judge of the Divorce Court. 236 UNDER THE SUN; a fortune and been living at this day in his own house at South Kensington, six stories high, and with a belvedere at one end, like the Eddystone lighthouse. His wife might have had a box at the Opera in lieu of that sad witness-box at the Divorce Court ; and bis sons might be enjoying a college education instead of being (as I know is the case with Tom) a waiter at a chop-house in Pope's Head Alley, or suffering every kind of hardship and privation (which I am afraid is Phil's mournful lot) as cabin-boy to that well-known disciplinarian, Captain Koper, of the ship Anne and Sarah Cofrbum of Great Grimsby. This misguided Dunks might have become rich, respected, and a member of the Metropolitan Board of Works. Instead of this flying in the face of his reason and experience, of which he should have had a fair share, seeing that he weighed nearly seventeen stone he went and built Wretchedville. And then, forsooth, the man won- dered that he was ruined. The ground, to begin with, was the very worst in the whole county. It was an ugly, polygonal plot, shelving down from the higher road that leads from Sobbington to Doleful Hill : a clay soil, of course, but in very bad repute for the making of bricks. Indeed, the clay did not seem to be fit for anything save to stick to the boot-soles of people who were incautious enough to walk over it. When any rain fell, it remained here for about seven days after the adjoining ground had dried up. Then the clay resolved itself into a solution of a dark-red colour, and the spot assumed the aspect of a field of gore. When it was not clayey it was marshy ; and the neighbours had long since christened the place "Ague Hole." Dunks in his frenzy, and with the Vale of Health at Hampstead in his eye, wanted to call it "Pleasant Hollow;" but the ground landlord, or -rather land- lady, Miss Goole (she went melancholy mad, left half her fortune to the Doleful Hill Asylum, and the will is still the subject of a nice little litigation in Chancery) Miss Goole, I say, who granted Dunks his building lease, insisted that the group of tenements lie intended to erect should be called WRETCHED VILLEi 237 Wretchedville. Her aunt had been a Miss Wretched, of Ashby- de-la-Zouch. And "Wretchedville the place remains to this day. Dunks did his best, or rather his worst, with it. He proposed to drain the ground ; the result of which was that water made its appear- ance in places where it had not appeared before. He laid out a declivitous road branching downwards from the highway and leading nowhere save to the reservoir of the "West Howlington Gasworks ; and a nice terminus to the vista did this monstrous iron tub make. He spent all his own money, and as much of other people's as he could possibly borrow, on Wretchedville, and then, as I have hinted, Bacchus and he became insepar- able companions, and he continued to "wreathe the rosy bowl" and "quaff the maddening wine-cup," the two ordinarily assuming the guise of rum-and-water, cold, till he woke up one morning in the Messenger's Office in Basinghall Street, waiting for his protection. Swamper, the great buyer-up of carcasses, was a secured creditor, and came into possession of Wretchedville ; but Swamper is the world-known contractor, whose dealings with the Bucharest Improvements, and the Herzegovina Baths and Washhouses Company have been made lately the subject of such lively public comment. He is generally oscillating between his offices in Great George Street, Westminster, and the Danubian provinces, and has had little time to attend to Wretchedville. He has been heard to express an opinion that the place the con- founded hole, he calls it will "turn up trumps" some day; and, indeed, plans for a new county prison on a remarkably eligible site between Doleful Hill and Sobbington have been hanging up for some time, neatly framed and glazed, in his office. Meanwhile the Wretchedville rents are receivable by Messrs. Flimsy and Quinsy, auctioneers, valuers, and estate agents, of Chancery Lane; and Swamper's affairs being, as I am given to understand, in somewhat evil trim, it is not unlikely that Wretchedville ere long will fall into fresh hands. And I don't envy the man into whose hands it fall?. 238 UNDER THE SUN, How I caine to be acquainted with Wretchedville was in this wise. I was in quest last autumn of a nice quiet place within a convenient distance of town where I could finish an epic poem or stay, was it a five-act drama ? on which I had been long engaged, and where I could be secure from the annoyance of organ-grinders and of reverend gentlemen leaving little subscription-books one day and calling for them the next I should like to know what difference there is between them and the people who leave the packets of steel pens, and the patent lamp-globe protector, and Bullinger's " History of the Inqui- sition," under the special patronage of the Archbishop of Tobago, to be continued in monthly parts together with the people who want your autograph, and others who want money, and things of that kind. I pined for a place where one could be very snug, and where one's friends didn't drop in "just to look you up, old fellow;"- and where the post didn't come in too often. So I packed up a bag of needments, and availing myself of a mid-day train on the Great Domdaniel Eailway, alighted haphazard at a station. It turned out to be Sobbington. I saw at a glance that Sobbington was too fashionable, not to say stuck-up, for me. The Waltz from " Faust " was pianofortetically audible from at least half a dozen semi-detached windows ; and this, combined with some painful variations on " Take, then, the Sabre," and a cursory glance into a stationer's shop and fancy warehouse where two stern mammas of low-church aspect were purchasing the back numbers of " The New Pugwell Square Pulpit," and three young ladies were telegraphically inquiring, behind their parent's backs, of the young person at the counter whether any letters had been left for them, sufficed to accelerate my departure from Sobbington. The next station on the road, I was told, was Doleful Hill, and then came Deadwood Junction. I thought I would take a little walk and see what the open and what the covert yielded. I left my bag with a moody porter at the Sobbington station and trudged along the road which had been indicated to nie as WRETCHEDVILLE. 239 leading to Doleful Hill. It happened to be a very splendid afternoon. There were patches of golden gorse and purple heather skirting those parts of 'the road in which the semi-detached villa eruption had not yet broken out ; the distant hills were delicately blue, and the mellow sun was distilling his rays into diamonds and rubies on the roof of a wondrous Palace of Glass, which does duty in these parts, as Vesuvius does duty in Naples, as a pervading presence. At Portici and at Torre del Greco, at Sobbington or at Doleful Hill, turn whithersoever you will, the mountain seems close upon you always. It is true that I was a little dashed when I encountered an organ-grinder lugubriously winding " Slap, bang, here we are again ! " off his brazen reel, and looking anything but a jolly dog. Organ-grinding was contrary to the code I had laid down to govern my retirement. But the autumnal sun shone very genially on this child of the sunny South who had possibly come from the bleakest part of Piedmont ; his smile was of the sunniest likewise, and there was a roguish twinkle in his black eyes ; and though his cheeks were brown, his teeth were of the whitest. So, as I gave him pence, I determined inwardly that I would tolerate at least one organ-grinder if he came near where I lived. It is true that I had not the remotest idea of where I was going to live. I walked onwards and onwards, admiring the pied cows in the far-off pastures cows the white specks on whose hides occurred so artistically that one might have thought that the scenic arrangement of the landscape had been intrusted to Mr. Birket Foster. Anon I saw coming . towards me a butcher-boy in his cart, drawn by a fast-trotting pony. It was a light high spring-cart, very natty and shiny, with the names and addresses of the proprietors, Messrs. Hock, Butchers to the Royal Family, West Deadwood which of the princes or princesses resided at West Dead wood, I wonder ? emblazoned on the panels. The butcher- boy shone, too, with a suety sheen. The joints which formed his cargo were of the hue of which an English girl's cheeks 240 UNDER THE sus. should be pure red and white. And the good sun shone tipoil all. The equipage came rattling along at a high trot, the butcher squaring his arms and whistling I could see him whistle from afar off. I asked him, when he neared me, how far it might be to Doleful Hill. " Good two mile," quoth the butcher-boy, pulling up. "Steady> you warmint ! " This was to the trotting pony. " But," he continued, " you'll have to pass Wretchedville first. Lays in a 'ole a little to the left, 'arf a mile on." " Wretchedville," thought I ; what an odd name ! " What sort of a place is it ? " I inquired. " Well," replied the butcher-boy ; " it's a lively place, a werry lively place. I should say it was lively enough to make a cricket burst himself for spite : it's so uncommon lively." And with this enigmatical deliverance the butcher-boy relapsed into a whistle of the utmost shrillness, and rattled away towards Sobbington. I wish that it had not been quite so golden an afternoon. A little dulness, a few clouds in the sky, might have acted as a caveat against Wretchedville. But I plodded on and on, finding all things looking beautiful in that autumn glow. I came positively on a gipsy encampment ; blanket tent ; donkey tethered to a cart-wheel; brown man in a wide-awake hammering at a tin pot ; brown woman with a yellow kerchief, sitting cross- legged, mending brown man's pantaloons ; brown little brats of Egypt swarming across the road and holding out their burnt- sienna hands for largesse, and the regular gipsy's kettle swinging from the crossed sticks over a fire of stolen furze. Farmer Somebody's poultry simmering in the pot, no doubt. Family linen somebody else's linen yesterday drying on an adjacent bush. Who says that the picturesque is dead ? The days of Sir Roger de Coverley had come again. So I went on and on admiring, and down the declivitous road into Wretchedville and to destruction. Were there any apartments " to let " ? Of course there were. The very first house I came to was as regards the parlour- window nearly blocked up by a placard treating of " Apartments WRETCHED VILLE. 241 Furnished." Am I right in describing it as the parlour- window ? I scarcely know ; for the front door, with which it was on a level, was approached by such a very steep flight of steps that when you stood on the topmost grade it seemed as though, with a very slight effort, you could have peeped in at the bedroom window, or touched one of the chimney-pots ; while as concerns the basement, the front kitchen I beg pardon, the breakfast parlour appeared to be a good way above the level of the street. The space in the first-floor window not occupied by the placard was filled by a monstrous group of wax fruit, the lemons as big as pumpkins and the leaves of an unnaturally vivid green. The window below it was a single- windowed front served merely as a frame for the half-length portrait of a lady in a cap, ringlets, and a colossal cameo brooch. The eyes of this portrait were fixed upon me ; and before almost I had lifted a very small light knocker, decorated, so far as I could make out, with the cast-iron effigy of a desponding ape, and had struck this against a door which, to judge from the amount of percussion produced, was composed of bristol-board highly varnished, the portal itself flew open and the portrait of the basement appeared in the flesh. Indeed, it was the same portrait. Downstairs it had been Mrs. Primpris looking out into the "Wretchedville Road for lodgers. Upstairs it was Mrs. Primpris letting her lodgings and glorying in the act. She didn't ask for any references. She didn't hasten to inform me that there were no children or any other lodgers. She didn't look doubtful when I told her that the whole of my luggage con- sisted of a black bag which I had left at the Sobbington station. She seemed rather pleased than otherwise at the idea of the bag, and said that her Alfred should step round for it. She didn't object to smoking ; and she at once invested me with the Order of the Latch-key a latch-key at Wretchedville, ha ! ha ! She further held me with her glittering eye, and I listened like a two years' child while she let me the lodgings for a fortnight certain. Perhaps it was less her eye that dazed me than her cameo, on which there was, in high relief and on a ground the hue of a pig's Q 242 UNDER THE SUN. liver, the effigy of a young woman with a straight nose and a round chin and a quantity of snakes in her hair. I don't think that cameo came from Rome. I think it came from Tottenham Court Road. She had converted me into a single gentleman lodger of quiet and retired habits or was I a widower of independent means seeking a home in a cheerful family ? so suddenly that I beheld all things as in a dream. Thinking, perchance, that the first stone of that monumental edifice, the bill, could not be laid too quickly, she immediately provided me with tea. There was a little cottage- loaf, so hard, round, shiny, and compact, that I experienced a well- nigh uncontrollable desire to fling it up to the ceiling to ascertain whether it would chip off any portion of a preposterous rosette in stucco in the centre, representing a sunflower, surrounded by cab- bage-leaves. This terrible ornament was, by the way, one of the chief sources of my misery at Wretchedville. I was continually apprehensive that it would tumble down bodily on the table. In addition to the cottage-loaf there was a pretentious teapot, which, had it been of sterling silver, would have been worth fifty guineas, but which, in its ghastly gleaming, said plainly " Sheffield " and "imposture." There was a piece of butter in a "shape" like a diminutive haystack, and with a cow sprawling on the top in unctuous plasticity. It was a pallid kind of butter, from which with difficulty you shaved off adipocerous scales, which would not be persuaded to adhere to the bread, but flew off at tangents and went rolling about an intolerably large tea-tray, on whose papier- mache surface was depicted the death of Captain Hedley Vicars. The Crimean sky was inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and the gallant captain's face was highly enriched with blue-and-crimson foil- paper. As for the tea, I don't think I ever tasted such a peculiar mixture. Did you ever sip warm catsup sweetened with borax ? TJiat might have been something like it. And what was that sediment, strongly resembling the sand at Great Yarmouth, at the bottom of the cup ? I sat down to my meal, however, and made as much play with the cottage-loaf as I could. Had the loaf WRETCHEDViLLE. 243 been varnished ? It smelt and looked as though it had undergone that process. Everything in the house smelt of varnish. I was uncomfortably conscious, too, during my repast one side of the room being all window that I was performing the part of a " Portrait of the Gentleman in the first floor," and that as such I was " sitting " to Mrs. Lucknow at Number Twelve opposite I know her name was Lucknow, for a brass plate on the door said so whose own half-length effigy was visible in her breakfast- parlour window, glowering at me reproachfully because I had not taken her first floor, in the window of which was, not a group of wax fruit, but a sham alabaster vase full of artificial flowers. Every window in Wretchedville exhibited one or other of these ornaments, and it was from their contemplation that I began to understand how it was that the " fancy-goods " trade in the Minories and Houndsditch throve so well. They made things there to be purchased by the housekeepers of "Wretchedville. The presence of Mrs. Lucknow at the glass case over the way was becoming unbearable, when the unpleasant vision was shut out by the appearance of Mrs. Primpris's Alfred, who with his sister Selina had been sent to Sobbington for my bag. Alfred was a boy with a taste for art. In the daytime he was continually copying the head of a Greek person (sex uncertain) in a helmet, who reminded you equally of a hairdresser's dummy in plaster and of a fireman of the Fire Brigade. He used to bring studies of this person, in white, red, and black chalk, to me, and expect that I would reward him for his proficiency with threepenny- pieces " to buy india-rubber ;" and then Mrs. Primpris would be sure to be lurking outside the door and audibly expressing her wish that some good, kind gentleman would get Alfred into the Blue Coat School, which she appeared to look upon as a kind of eleemosynary institution in connection with the Royal Academy of Arts. I can't help suspecting, from sundry private conversa- tions I had with Alfred, that he entertained a profound detestation for the plaster person in the helmet and for the Fine Arts gene- rally ; but, as he logically observed, he was "kep at it," and " it was no use hollerin'." 244 UNDER THE SUtf. As for Alfred's sister Selina, all I can remember of her is thai one leg of her tucked calico trousers was always two inches and a half longer than the other, and that for a girl of thirteen she had the most alarmingly sharp shoulder-blades I ever saw. I always used to think when I saw these osseous angularities, oscillating like the beams of a marine engine, that the next time her piston- rod-like arms moved, the scapulas must come through her frock. Mrs. Primpris was a disciplinarian, and whenever I heard Selina plaintively yelping in the kitchen, I felt tolerably certain that Mrs. Primpris was correcting her on her shoulder-blades with a shoe. The shades of evening fell, and Mrs. Primpris brought me in a monstrous paraffin lamp, the flame of which wouldn't do anything but lick the glass chimney till it had smoked it to the hue proper to observe eclipses by, and then splutter into extinction, emitting a charnel-house-like odour. After that we tried a couple of com- .posites (six to the pound) in green glass candlesticks. I asked Mrs. Primpris if she could send me up a book to read, and she favoured me, per Alfred and Selina, with her whole library, con- sisting of the Asylum Press Almanac for 1860 ; two odd volumes of the Calcutta Directory ; the Brewer and Distiller's Assistant ; Julia de Crespigny, or a Winter in London ; Dunoyer's French Idioms ; and the Reverend Mr. Huntington's Bank of Faith. I took out my cigar-case after this and began to smoke ; and then I heard Mrs. Primpris coughing and a number of doors being thrown wide open. Upon this I concluded that I would go to bed. My sleeping apartment the first-floor back was a perfect cube. One side was window overlooking a strip of clay soil hemmed in between brick walls. There were no tombstones yet, but if it wasn't a cemetery, why, when I opened the window to get rid of the odour of the varnish, did it smell like one ? The opposite side of the cube was composed of a chest of drawers. I am not impertinently curious by nature, w but, as I was the first- floor lodger, I thought myself entitled to open the top long drawer with a view to the bestowal therein of the contents of my black bag. The drawer was not empty ; but that which it held made WRETCHED VILLE. 245 me very nervous. I suppose the weird figure I saw stretched oufc there with pink arms and legs sprouting from a shroud of silver paper, a quantity of ghastly auburn curls, and two blue glass eyes unnaturally gleaming in the midst of a mask of salmon-coloured wax, was Selina's best doll ; the present, perhaps, of her uncle, who was, haply, a Calcutta director, or an Asylum Press Almanac maker, or a brewer and distiller, or a cashier in the Bank of Faith. I shut the drawer again hurriedly, and that doll in its silver paper cerecloth haunted me all night. The third side of my bedroom consisted of chimney the coldest, hardest, brightest-looking fireplace I ever saw out of Hampton Court Palace guardroom. The fourth side was door. I forget into which corner was hitched a washhand stand. The ceiling was mainly stucco rosette, of the pattern of the one in my sitting-room. Among the crazes which came over me at this time was one to the effect that this bedroom was a cabin on board ship, and that if the ship should happen to lurch or roll in the trough of the sea, I must infallibly tumble out of the door or -the window, or into the drawer where the doll was unless the drawer and the doll came out to me or up the chimney. I think that I murmured " Steady " as I clomb into bed. My couch an " Arabian " one, Mrs. Primpris said proudly seemingly consisted of the Logan, or celebrated rocking-stone of Cornwall, loosely covered with bleached canvas, under which was certain loose foreign matter, but whether composed of flocculi of wool or of the halves of kidney potatoes I am not in a position to state. At all events I awoke in the morning veined all over like a scagliola column. I never knew, too, before, that any blankets were ever manufactured in Yorkshire, or elsewhere, so remarkably small and thin as the two seeming flannel pocket-hand- kerchiefs with blue-and-crimson edging, which formed part of Mrs. Primpris' s Arabian bed-furniture. Nor had I hitherto been aware, as I was when I lay with that window at my feet, that the moon was so very large. The orb of night seemed to tumble on me, flat, until I felt as though I were lying in a cold frying-pan. Jt wag a " watery moon," I have reason to think ; for when I 246 UNDER THE SUN. awoke the next morning, much battered with visionary conflicts with the doll, I found that it was raining cats and dogs. "The rain," the poet tells us, "it raineth every day." It rained most prosaically all that day at Wretchedville, and the next, and from Monday morning till Saturday night, and then until the middle of the next week. Dear me ! dear me ! how wretched I was ! I hasten to declare that I have no kind of complaint to make against Mrs. Primpris. Not a flea was felt in her house. The cleanliness of the villa was so scrupulous as to be distressing. It smelt of soap and scrubbing-brush like a Refuge. Mrs. Prim- pris was strictly honest, even to the extent of inquiring what I would like to have done with the fat of cold mutton-chops, and sending me up antediluvian crusts, the remnants of last week's cottage-loaves, with which I would play moodily at knock-'em- downs, using the pepper-caster as a pin. I have nothing to say against Alfred's fondness for art. India-rubber, to be sure, is apter to smear than to obliterate drawings in chalk ; but a three- penny piece is not much, and you cannot too early encourage the imitative faculties. And again, if Selina did require correction, I am not prepared to deny that a shoe may be the best implement and the bladebones the most fitting portion of the human anatomy for such an exercitation. I merely say that I was wretched at Wretched ville, and that Mrs. Primpris's apartments very much aggravated my misery. The usual objections taken to a lodging-house are to the effect that the furniture is dingy, the cooking execrable, the servant a slattern, and the landlady either a crocodile or a tigress. Now my indictment against my Wretchedville apartments simply amounts to this: that everything was too new. Never were there such staring paper-hangings, such gaudily printed druggets for carpets, siich blazing hearthrugs one representing the Dog of Montargis seizing the murderer of the Forest of Bondy such gleaming fire-irons, and such remarkably shiny looking-glasses, with gilt halters for frames. The crockery was new, and the glne in the chairs and tables was scarcely dry. The new veneer peeled off the new chiffonier. The roller-blinds to the windows WRETCHED VILLE. 247 were so new that they wouldn't work. The new stair-carpeting used to dazzle my eyes so, that I was always tripping myself up ; the new oil-cloth in the hall smelt like the Trinity House repository for new buoys ; and Mrs. Primpris was always full- dressed, cameo brooch and all, by nine o'clock in the morning. She confessed once or twice during my stay that her house was not quite "seasoned." It was not even seasoned to sound. Every time the kitchen-fire was poked you heard the sound in the sitting-room. As to perfumes, whenever the lid of the copper in the washhouse was raised, the first-floor lodger was aware of the fact. I knew by the simple evidence of my olfactory organs what Mrs. Primpris had for dinner every day. Pork, accompanied by some green esculent, boiled, pre- dominated. "When my fortnight's tenancy had expired I never went outside the house until I left it for good and my epic poem, or whatever it was, had more or less been completed, I returned to London, and had a rare bilious attack. The doctor said it was painter's colic; I said at the time it was disappointed ambi- tion, for the booksellers had looked very coldly on my poetical proposals, and the managers to a man had refused to read my play ; but at this present writing I believe the sole cause of my malady to have been "Wretchedville. I hope they will pull down the villas and build the jail there soon, and that the rascal convicts will be as wretched as I was. 248 XX. NOBODY ABROAD. ARLY in the present century, that is to say, in the month of October, 1801, it occurred to Mr. Nobody to visit the famous city of Paris. Accord- ing to the Republican calendar, which then obtained among our neighbours, the month was not October and the year was not 1801. The month was Brumaire and the year was Ten of the Republic one and indivisible. But Mr. Nobody being an Englishman, the non-republican computation of time and season may be adopted. I call my traveller Mr. Nobody because I have not the slightest idea who he was, whence he came, or whither when he returned from his Parisian tour- he went. He was certainly not Tom Paine, but I am not prepared to assert that he might not have been the author of Junius, taking a shady and secretive holiday, according to his inscrutable wont. Mr. Nobody wrote a book about his travels, entitled "A Rough Sketch of Modern Paris," and he caused it to be published anonymously in a thin octavo by a bookseller in St. Paul's Churchyard. He did not even favour the public with his initials, or with three asterisks, or with a Greek or Roman pseudonym. At the end of four pages of preface he signs himself "The Author," which, in default of any other explanation, is, to say the least, baffling. To increase the bewilderment of posterity, the work of this occult traveller takes the form of a series of letters addressed to a friend, who is qualified as " My Dear Sir ; " but who " My Dear Sir" was is unknown to Everybody except Nobody. At the conclusion of each of his letters Mr. Nobody observes, "As soon as I have anything to communicate, I shall write NOBODY ABROAD, 249 again. In the meantime I take my leave, and am, &c." What are you to do with an author who persists in saying that he is et cetera ? Mr. Nobody, however, is not to be neglected, for two reasons ; the first, that he has drawn a veiy curious and interesting picture of Paris as it appeared to an Englishman during the brief peace, or rather truce, of Amiens ; the second that, his obstinate anony- mity notwithstanding, Mr. Nobody's pages are fruitful of internal evidence that he must have been Somebody, and somebody of note, too. He had a wife who shared his pleasures and his hard- ships. He was on visiting terms with his Britannic Majesty's ambassador in Paris, and was presented at the Tuileries. Mrs. Nobody even dined there. Finally, he took his own carriage abroad with him, and his letters of credit on his bankers were illimitable. On the twenty-sixth of October he left the York House at Dover and embarked on board a neutral vessel, which he was compelled to hire, no English packet-boat being yet permitted to enter a French port. After a smooth and pleasant passage of four hours, Mr. Nobody found himself at Calais. As soon as the vessel entered the port, two Custom-house officers in military uni- form came on board, and took down the names of the passengers. One of them retired to make his report to the municipality of Calais, while the other remained on board to prevent any of the passengers from landing. While the French douanier was on shore, Calais pier was crowded by spectators, the greater part of whom were military men. They seemed to derive great gratifica- tion from staring at the English ladies, and from examining the body of Mr. Nobody's carriage, which was hung on the deck of the ship ; while Mr. N. himself was equally entertained with the great moustaches the italics are his own of the grenadiers, the wooden shoes of the peasants, and the close caps of the grisettes. The douanier returning on board, Mr. Nobody and suite were permitted to touch the territory of the Republic, and, escorted by a guard of bourgeois, desperately ragged as to uniform, were marched from the quay to the Custom-house, from the Custom- 250 UNDER THE SUN. house to the mayor, and from the mayor to the Commissary of Police. At each of these offices, examinations oral, impedi- mental, and personal were made. Mr. Nobody was fain not only to surrender his passport but also his pocket-book and letters. The last-named were returned on the following day. These little police amenities coming to an end about seven p.m., Mr. Nobody was then free to sit down to an excellent dinner at the celebrated hotel formerly kept by Dessein, now succeeded by his nephew Quillacq a very respectable man, who met Mr. N. at landing, and with the utmost civility and attention took care of his carriage and baggage. The Unknown wished to set out on the following morning for Paris, but, according to respectable M. Quillacq, that was a simple impossibility ; for although the Unmentioned had brought with him a passport in due form from M. de Talleyrand, countersigned by M. Otto, the French minister in London, and backed by his Britannic Majesty's own gracious licence to travel in foreign parts, it was necessary to have all these documents exchanged for a laissez-passet from the mayor of Calais. Mr. N. accordingly passed the whole of the next day in Calais, and on Wednesday morning, accompanied by " Mrs. ," he left Calais with post-horses. Why won't he call her his Araminta or his Sophonisba ? Betsy Jane, even, would be preferable to this colourless " Mrs. ." The roads were very bad, particularly near Boulogne ; the posting charges were moderate six livres, or five shillings, a stage of five miles ; say a shilling a mile. How much is first-class fare by the Great Northern of France ? About twopence-halfpenny. Montreuil, where the travellers were to sleep, was not reached until sunset. Here was found excellent accommodation " at the inn celebrated by Sterne." The Reverend Mr. Yorick seems to have been the Murray of the eighteenth century and the begin- ning of the present one, and it is astonishing that his publishers did not put forth an advertising edition of the " Sentimental Journey." At Montreuil, Mr. N. (the rogue !), in true Yorick- like spirit, noticed " the smiling attentions of two very pretty girls who acted as waiters." He omits to state whether Mrs. NOBODY ABROAD. 251 noticed their smiling attention. The next day, through a fine country and bad roads, Amiens was reached. The cultivation by the wayside was good ; the peasants were well clad ; the beggars were numerous. The waiters, postboys, and landlords were every- where remarkably civil, and expressed their joy at seeing " Milords Anglais " once more among them. Can Mr. Nobody have been a nobleman, and Mrs. only a shallow delusion veiling an actual ladyship ? His Lordship I mean his Nonentity remarked that the lower classes were more respectful than before the Revolution. The reason appeared to him obvious. The old nobility treated their inferiors with jocular familiarity the familiarity which, it may be, bordered on contempt and the inferiors, mere thralls and bondsmen as they were, took trifling verbal liberties with their lords. Did not something akin to this prevail in Scotland during the last century, and is it not very well illustrated in Dean Ramsay's story of the Scotch lord who picks up a farthing in the sight of a beggar ? " Earl ! " cries out the gabeiiunzie man, "gie us the siller." " Na, na," replies his lordship, pocketing the coin, " fin' a baubee for yoursel', puir bodie." "When the social gulf between classes is unfathomable, do we not sometimes affect to shake hands across it ? But when we stand foot to foot " mensch zu mensch" as Schiller as it on the same earth, do we not often feel inclined to shake our fists in each other's faces ? " The loss of their rank," observes Mr. Nobody, " has compelled the higher classes to command respect by a distance of manner, which has of course produced a similar course of conduct in the persons beneath them." But for that merciless date 1801 one would think that Mr. Nobody had travelled in the State of Virginia since the abolition of slavery. The planters are no longer hail fellow well met with their serfs, and enfranchised Sambo no longer addresses the white man as "Mas'r," but as " Sa." Liberty is a wonderful teacher of etiquette. At Amiens the Unknown drove to the Hotel d'Angleterre, where he was magnificently and miserably lodged. The windows and doors declined to keep out the wind and rain ; the fires were 252 UNDER THE SUN. bad and the supper was worse ; nor was the final touch of extravagant charges wanting. The journey was resumed on Friday morning ; the beauty of the country and the badness of the roads increasing at every step. At length the weary travellers clattered into Chantilly, found a comfortable bed, and on Saturday morning visited *the " magnificent ruins " of the Palace of Chan- tilly. The superb edifice of the stables only remained intact. The Government of the First Consul had forbidden the sale of these buildings, and the mistress of the inn told Mr. Nobody, with tears in her eyes, that had Napoleon been at the head of affairs only six months sooner, the palace also would have been rescued from destruction. A little way out of Chantilly a fine paved road commenced, extending to Paris, which city Mr. Nobody reached at two p.m. on Saturday. He had been three and a half days and three nights on the road. At the Paris barrier passports were asked for, but were at once and civilly returned. " Carriages," Mr. N. adds, " are no longer stopped, as formerly, in every town, to be searched for contraband goods ; but turnpikes are numerous and expensive." On entering Paris the travellers drove to several hotels before they could procure accommodation, and such as they at last found was wretched. Many of the hotels had been stripped during the Revolution, and had not been refurnished ; and the few remaining in proper gear were crowded by foreigners, who since the peace had flocked hither in vast numbers from every country in the world. Mr. Nobody very strongly advises persons intending to visit Paris to write some days beforehand to their correspondents if they desire to be comfortably lodged on their arrival. The Mysterious Man was not, however, disheartened by the badness of the inn. So soon as he had changed his attire he hastened to call on M. Perregaux, his banker, who, notwithstand- ing his recent promotion to the rank of senator, was as civil and obliging as ever. Mr. Nobody must have been Somebody. See how civil everybody was to him ! I have been an unconscionable time bringing this shadowy friend of mine from Calais to Paris ; but I holcl this record of his KOBODY ABROAD* 253 experiences to be somewhat of the nature of a text on which a lay sermon might be preached, to the great edification of modern, fretful, and grumbling travellers. " Young sir," I would say, were it my business to preach the which, happily, it is not " modern young British tourist, take account of the four days' sufferings of Mr. Nobody and Mrs. Dash, and learn patience arid contentment. Some eighty hours did they pass in hideous dis- comfort on dolorous roads or in unseemly hostelries. Much were they baited anent passports ; much were they exercised in con- sequence of the stiff-neckedness of that proud man the mayor of Calais. How many times, for aught we know, may not their linch-pins have disappeared, their traces snapped, their axles parted ? Who shall say but that their postilions, although civil, smelt fearfully of garlic, and (especially during the stages between Beauvais and St. Denis) became partially overcome by brandy ? St. Denis has always been notorious for the worst brandy in Europe. And the dust ! And the beggars ! But for the ' smiling attentions ' of those two pretty waiter girls at Mont- reuil, I tremble to think what might have been the temper of Mr. Nobody when he found himself at last in Paris. Thus ho of 1801. "This is how your grandpapa, your uncle William, went to Paris ; but how fares it with you, my young friend ? You designed, say on Friday afternoon last, to take three days' holiday, You would have a ' run over to Paris,' you said. You dined at six p.m. on Friday at the Junior Juvenal Club, Pall Mall. You smoked your habitual cigar ; you played your usual game of billiards after dinner. It was many minutes after eight when you found yourself, with a single dressing bag for luggage, at Charing Cross terminus. You took a 'first-class return' for Paris, for which you paid, probably, much less than Mr. Nobody disbursed for the passage of himself and his high-hung carriage (to say nothing of Mrs. Dash) from Dover to Calais. A couple of hours of the express train's fury brought you that Friday night to Dover brought you to the Admiralty pier, to the very verge and brink of the much-sounding sea, and bundling you, so to speak, 254 tJNDER THE Stftf. down some slippery steps, sent you staggering on board a taufc little steamer, which, having gorged certain mail bags, proceeded to fight her way through the biggest waves. In two hours after- wards you were at Calais. No passports, no botheration with municipalities, commissaires, or stiff-necked mayors awaited you. Another express train waited for you, giving you time to dispatch a comfortable supper ; and by seven o'clock on Saturday morning you were in Paris. " You went to the Porte St. Martin on Saturday night and to Mabille afterwards. On Sunday I hope you went to church, and perhaps you went to Versailles. On Monday you had a good deal of Boulevard shopping to get through for your sisters or for the Mrs. Dash of the future ; and after a comfortable five o'clock dinner at the Cafe Riche in the afternoon, you found yourself shortly after seven p.m. at the Chemin de Fer du Nord, and by six o'clock on Tuesday morning you were back again at Charing Cross or at Victoria. Arrived there, you had yet a florin and a fifty centime piece left of the change for a ten-pound note. And yet you murmur and grumble. You have spoken heresy against the harbour-master of Dover. You have hurled bitter words at the directors of the South Eastern Railway Company, and have made mock of the London, Chatham, and Dover. Thrice have you threatened to write to The Times. Once did you propose to * punch ' the head of an obnoxious waiter at the Calais buffet." To this purport I could say a great deal if I preached sermons. My esteemed friend Mr. Nobody abode in Paris for full six months ; but the amount of sight-seeing he went through was so vast, and his account thereof is so minute, that for reasons of space I do not dare to follow him from each Parisian pillar to its corresponding post. I can only briefly note that he attended a sitting of the legislative body in the ci-devant Palais Bourbon, and that he paid five francs for admission to the gallery. Drums and fifes announced the approach of the legislators, and a guard of honour, consisting of an entire regiment, escorted them. The president having taken the chair, more drums and fifes proclaimed the arrival of three counsellors of state bearing a message from ftOBODY ABROAD. 255 the government. These high republican functionaries were pre- ceded by ushers wearing Spanish hats with tricoloured plumes ; the counsellors themselves were dressed in scarlet cloth, richly embroidered. They ascended the tribune, read their message, and made three separate speeches on the subject of honour, glory, and France ; whereafter the legislative body, with loud cries of "Vive le Premier Consul!" "Vive Madame Bonaparte!" separated. It was the last day of the session. Abating the scarlet coats and the Spanish hats of the huissiers, the break-up of a parliamentary session in 1801 must have very closely resembled that which we see in the French Corps Legis- latif in 1869. Mr. Nobody went away much pleased, especially with the admiration bestowed by his neighbours in the gallery on Lord Cornwallis, who was present among the Corps Diplomatique, and for whom Mr. Nobody seems himself to have entertained an affection bordering on adoration. " Yes, yes," cried an enthusiastic republican near him, " that tall man is Milord Cornwallis. He has a fine figure. He looks like a military man. He has served in the army. Is it not true, sir ? Look at that little man near him. What a difference I What a mean appearance ! " Mr. Nobody was in one aspect an exceptional Englishman. He appears to have been imbued with a sincere admiration for the talents of Napoleon Bonaparte, and even to have had some liking for the personal character of that individual. " My dear sir," he writes to that nameless friend of his on the sixth of December, "my curiosity is at length gratified. I have seen Bonaparte. You will readily conceive how much pleasure I felt to-day in beholding for the first time this extraordinary man, on whose exertions the fate of France, and in many respects that of Europe, may be said to depend." Mr. N. was fortunate enough to obtain places in the apartments of Duroc, governor of the Tuileries, from which he witnessed a review in the Carrousel. The Consular, soon to become the Imperial, Guard were inspected by the Master of France, than in the thirty-third year of his age. He was mounted on a white charger. As he passed several times before Mr. Nobody's window, that Impalpability had ample 256 tfNDER THE leisure to observe him ; and it appears to me that the portrait he has drawn of the First Consul, then in the full flush of his fame, undarkened by D'Enghien's murder, Pichegru's imputed end, and Josephine's divorce, is sufficient to rescue Mr. Nobody's notes from oblivion. ''His complexion," writes the Unknown, "is remarkably sallow ; his countenance expressive, but stern ; his figure lithe, but well made ; and his whole person, like the mind which it contains, singular and remarkable. If I were compelled to compare him to any one, I should name Kemble the actor. Though Bonaparte is less in size, and less handsome than that respectable performer, yet, in the construction of the features and the general expression, there is a strong resemblance. The picture of Bonaparte at the review, exhibited some time back in Piccadilly,* and the bust in Sevres china, which is very common in Paris, and has probably become equally so in London " (it was soon to be superseded by Gillray's monstrous caricatures of the Corsican Ogre), " are the best likenesses I have seen. As to his dress, he wore the grand costume of his office, that is to say, a scarlet velvet coat, profusely embroidered with gold. To this he had added leather breeches, jockey boots, and a little plain cocked-hat, the only ornament to which was a national cockade. His hair, unpowdered, was cut close to his neck." Now this (excuse the anachronism) is a perfect photograph, and might serve as a guide to any English artist desirous of emulating as a Napoleographer the achievements of Meissonier or Gerome. We have had from English painters Napoleon in blue, in green, in a gray greatcoat, in his purple coronation robes, even in the striped nankeen suit of his exile on the Kock. But the great enemy of England in scarlet ! the vanquished of "Waterloo in a red coat ! But for Mr. Nobody's testimony I should just as soon have imagined George the Third with a * This picture was by Carle Vernet, the father of Horace,, and was exhibited at Fores' s ancestor of the present well-known printseller. At Fores' s, just eight years previously, had been on view an engraving of the execution of Louis the Sixteenth, by Isaac Cruikshank (father of our George), and a " working model" of the guillotine. NOBODY ABROAD. 257 Phrygian cap over his wig, or the Right Honourable William Pitt weathering the storm as a sans-culotte. Again did Mr. Nobody see the Corsican, and at his own house in the audience hall of the Tuileries. Mr. Jackson was minister plenipotentiary from England prior to Lord Whit- worth's coming ; and to Mr. Jackson did Mr. Nobody apply to obtain presentation at the court of the First Consul. His name tvhat was his name ? being ficcordingly sent in to Citizen Talleyrand, three years afterwards to be Prince of Beneventum, minister of foreign affairs, Mr. N. drove to the Tuileries at three o'clock in the afternoon, and was ushered into a small apartment on the ground floor, called the Saloon of the Am- bassadors, where the foreign ministers and their respective countrymen waited until Napoleon was ready to receive them. Chocolate, sherbet, and liqueurs in abundance having been handed around a hint for St. James's Palace the doors, after an hour's interval, were thrown open, and the guests ascended the grand staircase, which was lined by grenadiers with their arms grounded. Passing through four or five rooms, in each of which was an officer's guard who saluted the strangers, the cortege came into the presence chamber. Here stood Bonaparte, between Cam- baceres, the second, and Lebrun, the third consul. The triumvirs were all in fall fig of scarlet velvet and gold. The generals, senators, and counsellors of state who surrounded Napoleon made way for the foreigners, and a circle was immediately formed, the nationalities ranging themselves behind their, proper ministers. The Austrian ambassador stood on the right of the First Consul ; next to him Mr. Jackson ; then Count Lucchesini, the Prussian minister ; and next to him the Hereditary Prince of Orange, who was to be presented that day, and who was not to meet Napoleon again until Waterloo. In 'compliment to the Dutch prince, Napoleon, contrary to his practice, began the audience on his side the circle. He spoke some time to the son of the deposed Stadtholder, and seemed anxious to make his awkward and extra- ordinary situation as little painful to him as possible. According 258 UNDER THE SUN. to Mr. Nobody, the Napoleonic blandishments were lost on his Batavian highness, who was sulky and silent. In passing each foreign minister, the First Consul received the individuals of each respective nation with the greatest ease and dignity. Where had he learnt all this ease and dignity, this young soldier of thirty-two ? From the goatherds of Corsica ? From the snuffy old priests who were his tutors at Brienne ? From the bombardiers at Toulon ? In the camps of Italy ? From the Sphinx in Egypt ? From Talrna the actor, who, when the conqueror was poor, had often given him the dinner he lacked ? When it came to Mr. Jackson's turn, sixteen English were pre- sented. After he had spoken to five or six of their number, Napoleon remarked, "with a smile which is peculiarly his own, and which changes a countenance usually stern into one of great mildness : ' I am delighted to see here so many English. I hope our union may be of long continuance. We are the two most powerful and most civilised nations in Europe. We should unite to cultivate the arts and sciences and letters ; in short, to improve the happiness of human nature.' " In about two years after this interview Englishmen and Frenchmen were cultivating the arts and sciences and doing their best to improve the happiness of human nature by cutting each other's throats in very con- siderable numbers. Did Napoleon really mean what he said ? Was he really anxious to be our friend, if we would only leb him ? Or was he then, and all times, a prodigious Humbug ? Mrs. Dash was to have her share in the hospitalities of the Tuileries. Keturning home from viewing the sights one after- noon at half-past four o'clock, Mr. N. found a messenger who was the bearer of an invitation to Mrs. Dash, asking her to dinner that very day at five. The lady dressed in haste and drove to the palace. She returned enraptured. The entertainment was elegant ; the sight superb. More than two hundred persons sat down to dinner in a splendid apartment. The company consisted, besides Napoleon's family, of the ministers, the ambassadors, several generals, senators, and other constituted authorities. There were only fifteen ladies present. All the English ladies who had been NOBODY ABROAD. 259 presented to Madame Bonaparte were asked ; but only two of their number remained in Paris. The dinner was served entirely on gold and silver plate and Sevres china, the latter bearing the letter B on every dish ; the central plateau was covered with moss, out of which arose innumerable natural flowers, the odour of which perfumed the whole room. The First Consul and Madame Bona- parte conversed very affably with those around them. The ser- vants were numerous, splendidly dressed, and highly attentive, and the dinner lasted more than two hours. Seven years ago the lord of this sumptuous feast had been glad to pick up the crumbs from an actor's table, and vegetated in a garret in Paris, had haunted the antechambers of the war minister in vain, had revolved plans of offering his sword to the Grand Turk if he could only procure a new pair of boots wherein to make his voyage to Constantinople. the ups and downs of fortune ! The First Consul was fated to invite few more Englishmen to dinner. But he was doomed to dine with us, not as a host, but as an unwilling guest. I can picture him in the cabin of the North- umberland, rising wearily from heavy joints to avoid heavier drink- ing, and the admiral and his officers scowling at him because he wouldn't stop and take t'other bottle. " The General," pointedly remarked Sir George Cockburn once when his captive rose from the table and fled from port and sherry, "has evidently not studied politeness in the school of Lord Chesterfield." The poor temperate Italian, to whose pale cheek a single glass of champagne would 'bring a flush ! Yet Mr. Nobody thought him dignity and politeness itself; and my private opinion is that Mr. Nobody knew what was what. 260 XXI. SHOCKING ! HE other day, being at Seville, at the inn dinner of the Fonda de Paris, I saw an English lady thrown into great perturbation by the conduct of a French- man, her neighbour, who having finished his plate of soup, and the " puchero " being somewhat tardy in making its appearance, drew forth a leathern case and a box of wax matches, and having bitten the end off a very big and bad cigar, proceeded to light and smoke it. I do not think a Spaniard of any class, to the lowest, would have done this thing. Although smoking is common enough at Spanish dinner-tables, when only men or natives are present, the innate good breeding of a caballero would at once cause him to respect the presence of a lady and a stranger ; and he would as soon think of kindling, unbidden, a weed before her, as of omitting to cast himself (metaphorically) at her feet when he took his leave. Moreover, the Frenchman was wrong even in his manner of smoking. To consume a cigar at meal-times is not even un costumlre del pais a custom of the country. It is the rather a stupid solecism. Between soup and " puchero," or fish and roast, you may just venture on a cigarito a dainty roll of tobacco and tissue paper. Any other form of fumigation ere the repast be over is ill-mannered. The Gaul, however, thought no doubt that to puff at one of the hideous lettuce-leaf sausages of the Regie Imperiale at dinner-time was precisely the thing to do in Spain. He smoked at Seville, just as on a hot day in an English coffee-room he would have ordered turtle-soup, a beefsteak, " well-bleeding," and a pot of porter-beer. I only wonder that he did hot come down SHOCKING ! 261 to dinner afc the Fonda de Paris in full bull-fighter's costume green satin breeches, pink silk stockings and his hair in a net, or strumming a guitar, or clacking a pair of castanets. Indeed, he grinned complacently as he pulled at the abominable brand, and looked round the table as though for approval. The Spaniards preserved a very grave aspect, and Don Sandero M'Grillicuddy, late of Buenos Ay res, my neighbour, whispered to me that he thought the Frenchman "vera rude." As for the English lady, she was furious. She gathered up her skirts, grated away her chair, turned her left scapula full on the offending Frenchman, and I have no doubt wrote by the next post to Mr. John Murray, of Albemarle Street, indignantly to ask why English readers of the " Handbook " were not warned against the prevalence of this atrocious practice at Spanish dinner-tables. In fact, she did everything but quit the hospitable board. In remaining she showed wisdom, for Spain is not a country where you can afford to trifle with your meals. You had best gather your rosebuds while you may, and help yourself to the puchero whenever you have a chance. Ages may pass ere you get anything to eat again. The Frenchman was not abashed by this palpable expression of distaste on the part of his fair neighbour. I had an over-the- way acquaintance with him, and glancing in my direction, he simply gave a deprecatory shrug, and murmured, " Ah ! c*est comme cct. Shocking ! " It never entered the honest fellow's head that he had been wanting in courtesy to the entire company, but he jumped at the conclusion that the demoiselle Anglaise was a faultless monster of prudery, and that the inhalation of tobacco- smoke at dinner-time, the employment of a fork as a toothpick, the exhibition of ten thousand photographed " legs of the ballet " in the shop windows, and frequent reference to the anonymous or Bois de Boulogne world in conversation, were, to her and her sex and nation generally, things abhorrent, criminal, and " shocking." The French, who never get hold of an apt notion or a true expression without wearing it threadbare and worrying it to 262 UNDER THE SUN. death, and have even traditional jests against this country which are transmitted from caricaturist to caricaturist and from father to son, have built up the " faultless monster " to which I alluded above, and persist in believing that it is the ordinary type of the travelling Englishwoman. Oddly enough, while their ladies and all other continental ladies have borrowed from ours the quaint and becoming hat, the coloured petticoats and stockings, and the high-heeled boots which of late years have made feminine juvenility so coquettish and so fascinating, no French draughts- man, no French word-painter, ever depicts the English young lady save as a tall, rigid, and angular female comely of face if you will, but standing bolt upright as a lifeguardsman, with her arms pendant and her eyes demurely cast down. She always wears a straw bonnet of the coal-scuttle form, or an enormous flap hat with a green veil. Her hands, encased in beaver gloves, and her feet, which are in sandalled shoes, are very large. She usually carries a capacious reticule, in variegated straw, of a bold chessboard pattern. She seldom wears any crinoline, and her hair is arranged in long ringlets most deliciously drooping. She seldom opens her mouth but to ejaculate " Shocking ! " It is absolutely astounding to find so accurate an observer and so graphic a narrator as Monsieur Theophile Gautier falling into this dull and false conventionalism in his charming book on Spain. He is describing Gibraltar, and is very particular in the pourtrayal of such a " Mees Anglaise " as I have sketched above. The fidelity of the portrait will of course be fully appreciated by all British officers who have mounted guard over the Pillars of Hercules. The ladies of the garrison at Gibraltar are not, it is true, so numerous as they might be. Calpe is not a popular . station with military females. There is no native society beyond the families of the " Rock scorpions," who are usually dealers in mixed pickles and Allsopp's pale ale, and a few Spaniards who earn a remunerative but immoral livelihood by coining bad dollars and smuggling Manchester cottons and Bremen cigars through San Roque ; and unfortunately, to ladies of a theological turn, one of the chief charms of a sojourn in a foreign garrison is SHOCKING ! 263 here lacking. There is nobody to convert in Gibraltar but the Jews, and as it takes about a thousand pounds sterling to turn a Hebrew into a Christian and a very indifferent Christian at that, for you have to set him up in business and provide for his relations to the third and fourth generation missionary enter- prise, to say the least, languishes. With all these drawbacks, I am told that English female society at the Rock is charming ; that their costume, their features, and their manners are alike sprightly and vivacious, and that the " girls of Gib," as regards that rapidity and entrain which are so pleasingly characteristic of modern life, are only second to the far-famed merry maidens of Montreal, whose scarlet knickerbockers and twinkling feet, disporting on the glassy surface of the Victoria " Rink,-' have led captive so many old British grenadiers. "When a maiden of Montreal is unusually rapid what is termed "fast" in this country they say she is " two forty on a plank road," two minutes and forty seconds being the time in which a Canadian trotter will be backed to get over a mile of deal-boarded track. Now, whatever could Monsieur Gautier have been thinking of so to libel the ladies of Gibraltar ? They slow ! They angular ! They " avec la demarche d'un grenadier I " They addicted to the national ejaculation of " Shocking !" That old oak, however, of prejudice is so very firmly rooted that generations perhaps will pass away ere foreigners begin to perceive that the stiff, reserved, puritanical Englishman or Englishwoman, if they still indeed exist and travel on the Continent, have for sons and daughters ingenuous youths who in volatile vivacity are not disposed to yield the palm to young France, and gaily attired maidens, frolic- some, not to say frisky, in their demeanour. It is curious that the French, ordinarily so keen of perception and so shrewd in social dissection, should not by this time have discovered some other and really existent types of English tourists, male and female, to supply the place of the obsolete and well-nigh mythical " Mees " with her long ringlets, her green veil, her large hands and feet, and her figure full of awkward and ungainly angles. And may not the British Baronet, with his top-boots and his bull-dog and 264 UNDER THE SUN. his hoarse cries for his servant " Jhon," and his perpetual thirst for " grogs," be reckoned among the extinct animals ? I was reading only yesterday, in the cJironique of one of the minor Parisian journals, a couple of anecdotes most eloquent of the false medium through which we are still viewed by the lively Gaul. In the first the scene is laid at the Grand Hotel. An Englishman is reading The Times and smoking a cigar. It is a step in advance, perhaps, that the Briton should have come to a cabana instead of pulling at a prodigiously long pipe. The Eng- lishman happens to drop some hot ashes on the skirt of his coat. " Monsieur, monsieur!" cries a Frenchman sitting by, "take care, you are on fire ! " " "Well, sir," replies the Briton, indignant at being addressed by a person to whom he has not been formally introduced, " what is that to you ? You have been on fire twenty minutes, and I never mentioned the fact." I refrain from giving the wonderful Anglo-French jargon in which the Englishman's reply is framed. The second anecdote is equally choice. An English nobleman is " enjoying his villeggiatura at Naples " by which, I suppose, is meant that he is betting on the chances of a proximate eruption of Mount Vesuvius when his faithful steward, Williams Johnson, arrives in hot haste from England. " Well, Williams," asks the nobleman, "what is the matter?" "If you please, milor, your carriage-horses have dropped down dead." " Of what did they die ?" " Of fatigue. They had to carry so much water to help put out the fire." "What fire?" "That of your lordship's country house, which was burnt down on the day of the funeral." " What funeral ?" " That of your lordship's mother, who died of grief on hearing that the lawsuit on which your lordship's fortune depended had been decided against you." Charming anecdotes are these, are they not ? The gentleman who popped them into his column of chit-chat gave them as being of perfect authenticity and quite recent occurrence, and signed his name at the bottom ; and yet I think I have read two stories very closely resembling them in the admired collection of Monsieur Joseph Miller. The Englishman who is the hero of cock-and-bull stories, and SHOCKING ! 265 the English lady who is always veiling her face with her fan and exclaiming " Shocking !" are so dear to the French and the general continental heart that we must look for at least another half century of railways, telegraphs, illustrated. newspapers, and international colleges before the mythical period passes away and the reign of substantial realism begins. I remember at the sump- tuous Opera House at Genoa seeing a ballet called the " Grateful Baboon," in which there was an English general who wore a swallow-tail coat with lapels, Hessian boots with tassels, a pigtail, colossal bell-pull epaulettes, and a shirt-frill like unto that of Mr. Boatswain Chucks. The audience accepted him quite as a matter of course as the ordinary and recognised type of an English military officer of high rank ; and then I remembered that during our great war with France, Genoa had been once occupied by an English force under Lord William Bentinck, and that his lordship had probably passed bodily into the album of costumes of the Teatro Carlo Felice, and remained there unchangeable for fifty years. In like manner the Americans, irritated, many years since, by the strictures of Mrs. Trollope, and stung to the quick by her sneers at the national peculiarities of "calculating" and spitting, thought they could throw the taunt back in our teeth by assuming that we were a nation of cockneys, hopelessly given to misplacing our H's. I had no sooner put down the lively chronigue contain- ing the Joe Millerisms than I took up a copy of the New York Times, a paper of very high character and respectability, and whose editor, Mr. Henry Raymond, one of the most distinguished of living American politicians, is doing good service to the Republic by striving almost alone, unhappily to stem the tide of the intolerance and tyranny of the dominant faction. In a leading article of the New York Times I read that when the British Lion was reproached with his blockade-running sins and other violations of neutrality during the war, the hypocritical beast turned up his "cotton-coloured eyes" and whimpered, "Thou cannot say Hi did it." The gentleman who wrote the leader doubtless thought he had 266 UNDER THE SUN. hit us hard with that " Hi." He would have shot nearer the bull's- eye had he asked why Lord Russell is always " obleged " instead of obliged, and why the noble proprietor of Knowsley is Lord "Derby" to one .set of politicians and Lord "Darby" to another. But these little niceties of criticism seem to escape our neighbours. The imputation of cockneyism is a bit of mud that will stick. The Americans have made up their minds that we are "halways waunting the walour of hour harms," and " hexulting hover hour 'appiness hunder the 'ouse of 'Anover." No disclaimers on our part will cause them to abandon their position. Nor in this case, nor in that of " Shocking," do we lie open, I venture to think, to accusations of a tu yuoque nature. We caricature our neighbours more closely and observantly than they do us. "We have found out long since that the Yankee is not invariably a sallow man in a broad-brimmed straw bat and a suit of striped nankeen, who sits all day in a rocking-chair with his feet on the mantelpiece, sucking mint julep through a straw. We know the circumstances under which he will put his feet up, and the seasons most favourable to the consumption of juleps. We have even ceased to draw him as he really was frequently visible, some twenty years since, as a cadaverous straight-haired individual, clean-shaved, in a black tail-coat and pantaloons, a black satin waistcoat, and a fluffy hat stuck on the back of his head and the integument of his left cheek much distended by a plug of tobacco. The English painter of manners takes the modern American as he finds him : a tremendous dandy, rather " loud " in make-up, fiercely moustached and bearded, ringed and chained to the eyes, and, on the continent of Europe at least, quoting Rafaelles and Titians, Canovas and Thorwaldsens, as confidently as he would discourse of quartz or petroleum in Wall Street. We know that he has long ceased to " calculate " or " reckon," and that it is much, now, if he " guesses " or " expects." Not long ago, at Venice, an old English traveller was telling me of an American family with whom he had travelled from Florence to Bologna. One of the young ladies of the party, it seems, did not approve of SHOCKING ! 267 the railway accommodation, and addressed the Italian guard in this wise : " My Christian friend, is this a first-class kyar or a cattle-waggon ? " At a subsequent stage of the journey the eldest gentleman of the group had remarked : " Say, if any of you gals bought frames at Florence, I can supply you with a lot o' picturs I got at Kome, cheap." " They were model Yankees," the old English traveller chuckled, as he told me the story. " Not at all," I made bold to answer ;