zc/m^ University of California • Berkeley From the Collection of Joseph Z. Todd Gift of Hatherly B. Todd Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2008 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/amateuremigrantaOOstevrich ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON Vol. XV THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT ACROSS THE PLAINS k THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS t ^ ^ AND ., . >BERT LOUIS STEVENSON JR EMi ACROSS 3EPUBLISHED IN NEW YORK BY CHARLES SCP^^- R'S SONS t * t A37 ACROSS THE PLAINS ungrateful country. And it was still westward that they ran. Hunger, you would have thought, came out of the east like the sun, and the evening was made of edi- ble gold. And, meantime, in the car in front of me, were there not half a hundred emigrants from the oppo- site quarter ? Hungry Europe and hungry China, each pouring from their gates in search of provender, had here come face to face. The two waves had met ; east and west had alike failed ; the whole round world had been prospected and condemned; there was no El Dorado anywhere; and till one could emigrate to the moon, it seemed as well to stay patiently at home. Nor was there wanting another sign, at once more pictu- resque and more disheartening; for, as we continued to steam westward toward the land of gold, we were continually passing other emigrant trains upon the journey east; and these were as crowded as our own. Had all these return voyagers made a fortune in the mines? Were they all bound for Paris, and to be in Rome by Easter.? It would seem not, for, whenever we met them, the passengers ran on the platform and cried to us through the windows, in a kind of wailing chorus, to "Come back." On the plains of Nebraska, in the mountains of Wyoming, it was still the same cry, and dismal to my heart, '*Come back!" That was what we heard by the way "about the good coun- try we were going to." And at that very hour the Sand-lot of San Francisco was crowded with the un- employed, and the echo from the other side of Market Street was repeating the rant of demagogues. If, in truth, it were only for the sake of wages that men emigrate, how many thousands would regret the 158 ACROSS THE PLAINS bargain! But wages, indeed, are only one considera- tion out of many; for we are a race of gipsies, and love change and travel for themselves. DESPISED RACES Of all stupid ill-feelings, the sentiment of my fellow- Caucasians towards our companions in the Chinese car was the most stupid and the worst. They seemed never to have looked at them, listened to them, or thought of them, but hated them a priori. The Mongols were their enemies in that cruel and treacherous battle- field of money. They could work better and cheaper in half a hundred industries, and hence there was no calumny too idle for the Caucasians to repeat, and even to believe. They declared them hideous vermin, and affected a kind of choking in the throat when they be- held them. Now, as a matter of fact, the young Chi- nese man is so like a large class of European women, that on raising my head and suddenly catching sight of one at a considerable distance, I have for an instant been deceived by the resemblance. I do not say it is the most attractive class of our women, but for all that many a man's wife is less pleasantly favoured. Again, my emigrants declared that the Chinese were dirty. I cannot say they were clean, for that was impossible upon the journey; but in their efforts after cleanliness they put the rest of us to shame. We all pigged and stewed in one infamy, wet our hands and faces for half a minute daily on the platform, and were unashamed. But the Chinese never lost an opportunity, and you would see them washing their feet — an act not dreamed »39 ACROSS THE PLAINS of among ourselves — and going as far as decency per- mitted to wash their whole bodies. I may remark by the way that the dirtier people are in their persons the more delicate is their sense of modesty. A clean man strips in a crowded boathouse ; but he who is unwashed slinks in and out of bed without uncovering an inch of skin. Lastly, these very foul and malodorous Cauca- sians entertained the surprising illusion that it was the Chinese waggon, and that alone, which stank. I have said already that it was the exception, and notably the freshest of the three. These judgments are typical of the feeling in all West- ern America. The Chinese are considered stupid, be- cause they are imperfectly acquainted with English. They are held to be base, because their dexterity and frugality enable them to underbid the lazy, luxurious Caucasian. They are said to be thieves; I am sure they have no monopoly of that. They are called cruel; the Anglo-Saxon and the cheerful Irishman may each reflect before he bears the accusation. I am told, again, that they are of the race of river pirates, and belong to the most despised and dangerous class in the Celestial Em- pire. But if this be so, what remarkable pirates have we here! and what must be the virtues, the industry, the education, and the intelligence of their superiors at home! Awhile ago it was the Irish, now it is the Chinese that must go. Such is the cry. It seems, after all, that no country is bound to submit to immigration any more than to invasion : each is war to the knife, and resistance to either but legitimate defence. Yet we may regret the free tradition of the republic, which loved to depict 140 ACROSS THE PLAINS herself with open arms, welcoming all unfortunates. And certainly, as a man who believes that he loves free- dom, I may be excused some bitterness when I find her sacred name misused in the contention. It was but the other day that I heard a vulgar fellow in the Sand-lot, the popular tribune of San Francisco, roaring for arms and butchery. '' At the call of Abreham Lincoln," said the orator, *' ye rose in the name of freedom to set free the negroes; can ye not rise and liberate yourselves from a few dhirty Mongolians ?'' For my own part, I could not look but with wonder and respect on the Chinese. Their forefathers watched the stars before mine had begun to keep pigs. Gun- powder and printing, which the other day we imitated, and a school of manners which we never had the deli- cacy so much as to desire to imitate, were theirs in a long-past antiquity. They walk the earth with us, but it seems they must be of different clay. They hear the clock strike the same hour, yet surely of a different epoch. They travel by steam conveyance, yet with such a baggage of old Asiatic thoughts and superstitions as might check the locomotive in its course. Whatever is thought within the circuit of the Great Wall; what the wry-eyed, spectacled schoolmaster teaches in the hamlets round Pekin ; religions so old that our language looks a halfling boy alongside; philosophy so wise that our best philosophers find things therein to wonder at; all this travelled alongside of me for thousands of miles over plain and mountain. Heaven knows if we had one common thought or fancy all that way, or whether our eyes, which yet were formed upon the same design, beheld the same world out of the railway windows. 141 ACROSS THE PLAINS And when either of us turned his thoughts to home and childhood, what a strange dissimilarity must there not have been in these pictures of the mind — when I be- held that old, gray, castled city, high throned above the firth, with the flag of Britain flying, and the red-coat sentry pacing over all ; and the man in the next car to me would conjure up some junks and a pagoda and a fort of porcelain, and call it, with the same affection, home. Another race shared among my fellow-passengers in the disfavour of the Chinese ; and that, it is hardly ne- cessary to say, was the noble red man of old story — he over whose own hereditary continent we had been steaming all these days. I saw no wild or independent Indian; indeed, I hear that such avoid the neighbour- hood of the train; but now and again at way stations, a husband and wife and a few children, disgracefully dressed out with the sweepings of civilisation, came forth and stared upon the emigrants. The silent stoicism of their conduct, and the pathetic degradation of their ap- pearance, would have touched any thinking creature, but my fellow-passengers danced and jested round them with a truly Cockney baseness. I was ashamed for the thing we call civilisation. We should carry upon our con- sciences so much, at least, of our forefathers' misconduct as we continue to profit by ourselves. If oppression drives a wise man mad, what should be raging in the hearts of these poor tribes, who have been driven back and back, step after step, their promised reservations torn from them one after another as the States extended westward, until at length they are shut up into these hideous mountain deserts of the centre -^ ACROSS THE PLAINS and even there find themselves invaded, insulted, and hunted out by ruffianly diggers ? The eviction of the Cherokees (to name but an instance), the extortion of Indian agents, the outrages of the wicked, the ill-faith of all, nay, down to the ridicule of such poor beings as were here with me upon the train, make up a chapter of injustice and indignity such as a man must be in some ways base if his heart will suffer him to pardon or for- get. These old, well-founded, historical hatreds have a savour of nobility for the independent. That the Jew should not love the Christian, nor the Irishman love the English, nor the Indian brave tolerate the thought of the American, is not disgraceful to the nature of man ; rather, indeed, honourable, since it depends on wrongs ancient like the race, and not personal to him who cherishes the indignation. TO THE GOLDEN GATES A LITTLE corner of Utah is soon traversed, and leaves no particular impressions on the mind. By an early hour on Wednesday morning we stopped to breakfast at Toano, a little station on a bleak, high-lying plateau in Nevada. The man who kept the station eating-house was a Scot, and learning that I was the same, he grew very friendly, and gave me some advice on the country I was now entering. "You see," said he, **I tell you this, because I come from your country." Hail, brither Scots ! His most important hint was on the moneys of this part of the world. There is something in the simplicity of a decimal coinage which is revolting to the human mind; thus the French, in small affairs, reckon strictly >43 ACROSS THE PLAINS by halfpence ; and you have to solve, by a spasm of mental arithmetic, such posers as thirty-two, forty-five, or even a hundred halfpence. In the Pacific States they have made a bolder push for complexity, and settle their affairs by a coin that no longer exists — the bit, or old Mexican real. The supposed value of the bit is twelve and a half cents, eight to the dollar. When it comes to two bits, the quarter-dollar stands for the required amount. But how about an odd bit } The nearest coin to it is a dime, which is short by a fifth. That, then, is called a short bit. If you have one, you lay it trium- phantly down, and save two and a half cents. But if you have not, and lay down a quarter, the bar-keeper or shopman calmly tenders you a dime by way of change; and thus you have paid what is called a long bit, and lost two and a half cents, or even, by comparison with a short bit, five cents. In country places all over the Pacific coast, nothing lower than a bit is ever asked or taken, which vastly increases the cost of life ; as even for a glass of beer you must pay fivepence or sevenpence- halfpenny, as the case may be. You would say that this system of mutual robbery was as broad as it was long; but I have discovered a plan to make it broader, with which I here endow the public. It is brief and simple — radiantly simple. There is one place where five cents are recognised, and that is the post-office. A quarter is only worth two bits, a short and a long. Whenever you have a quarter, go to the post-office and buy five cents' worth of postage-stamps ; you will receive in change two dimes, that is, two short bits. The pur- chasing power of your money is undiminished. You can go and have your two glasses of beer all the same; »44 ACROSS THE PLAINS and you have made yourself a present of five cents' worth of postage-stamps into the bargain. Benjamin Franklin would have patted me on the head for this discovery. From Toano we travelled all day through deserts of alkali and sand, horrible to man, and bare sage-brush country that seemed little kindlier, and came by supper- time to Elko. As we were standing, after our manner, outside the station, I saw two men whip suddenly from underneath the cars, and take to their heels across coun- try. They were tramps, it appeared, who had been riding on the beams since eleven of the night before; and several of my fellow-passengers had already seen and conversed with them while we broke our fast at Toano. These land stowaways play a great part over here in America, and I should have liked dearly to be- come acquainted with them. At Elko an odd circumstance befell me. I was com- ing out from supper, when I was stopped by a small, stout, ruddy man, followed by two others taller and ruddier than himself. "Ex-cuse me, sir," he said, **but do you happen to be going on?" I said I was, whereupon he said he hoped to persuade me to desist from that intention. He had a situation to offer me, and if we could come to terms, why, good and well. *'You see," he continued, "I'm running a theatre here, and we're a little short in the orchestra. You're a musician, I guess ? " I assured him that, beyond a rudimentary acquain- tance with " Auld Lang Syne" and "The Wearing of the Green," I had no pretension whatever to that style. He seemed much put out of countenance; and one of '45 ACROSS THE PLAINS his taller companions asked him, on the nail, for five dollars. ** You see, sir," added the latter to me, ''he bet you were a musician; I bet you weren't. No offence, I hope.^" "None whatever," I said, and the two withdrew to the bar, where I presume the debt was liquidated. This little adventure woke bright hopes in my fellow- travellers, who thought they had now come to a coun- try where situations went a-begging. But I am not so sure that the offer was in good faith. Indeed, I am more than half persuaded it was but a feeler to decide the bet. Of all the next day I will tell you nothing, for the best of all reasons, that I remember no more than that we continued through desolate and desert scenes, fiery hot and deadly weary. But some time after I had fallen asleep that night, I was awakened by one of my companions. It was in vain that I resisted. A fire of enthusiasm and whisky burned in his eyes ; and he de- clared we were in a new country, and I must come forth upon the platform and see with my own eyes. The train was then, in its patient way, standing halted in a by-track. It was a clear, moonlit night; but the valley was too narrow to admit the moonshine direct, and only a diffused glimmer whitened the tall rocks and relieved the blackness of the pines. A hoarse clam- our filled the air; it was the continuous plunge of a cascade somewhere near at hand among the mountains. The air struck chill, but tasted good and vigorous in the nostrils — a fine, dry, old mountain atmosphere. I was dead sleepy, but I returned to roost with a grateful mountain feeling at my heart. 146 ACROSS THE PLAINS When I awoke next morning, I was puzzled for a while to know if it were day or night, for the illumina- tion was unusual. I sat up at last, and found we were grading slowly downward through a long snowshed; and suddenly we shot into an open; and before we were swallowed into the next length of wooden tunnel, I had one glimpse of a huge pine-forested ravine upon my left, a foaming river, and a sky already coloured with the fires of dawn. I am usually very calm over the displays of nature ; but you will scarce believe how my heart leaped at this. It was like meeting one's wife. I had come home again — home from unsightly deserts to the green and habitable corners of the earth. Every spire of pine along the hill-top, every trouty pool along that mountain river, was more dear to me than a blood relation. Few people have praised God more happily than I did. And thenceforward, down by Blue Canon, Alta, Dutch Flat, and all the old mining camps, through a sea of mountain forests, dropping thousands of feet toward the far sea-level as we went, not I only, but all the passengers on board, threw off their sense of dirt and heat and weariness, and bawled like school- boys, and thronged with shining eyes upon the plat- form and became new creatures within and without. The sun no longer oppressed us with heat, it only shone laughingly along the mountain-side, until we were fain to laugh ourselves for glee. At every turn we could see farther into the land and our own happy futures. At every town the cocks were tossing their clear notes into the golden air, and crowing for the new day and the new country. For this was indeed our destination ; this was **the good country" we had been going to so long. J 47 ACROSS THE PLAINS By afternoon we were at Sacramento, the city of gar- dens in a plain of corn; and the next day before the dawn we were lying to upon the Oakland side of San Francisco Bay. The day was breaking as we crossed the ferry; the fog was rising over the citied hills of San Francisco; the bay was perfect — not a ripple, scarce a stain, upon its blue expanse; everything was waiting, breathless, for the sun. A spot of cloudy gold lit first upon the head of Tamalpais, and then widened down- ward on its shapely shoulder; the air seemed to awaken, and began to sparkle ; and suddenly "The tall hills Titan discovered," and the city of San Francisco, and the bay of gold and corn, were lit from end to end with summer daylight. ['879.] 148 II. THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL THE WOODS AND THE PACIFIC The Bay of Monterey has been compared by no less a person than General Sherman to a bent fishing-hook ; and the comparison, if less important than the march through Georgia, still shows the eye of a soldier for topography. Santa Cruz sits exposed at the shank; the mouth of the Salinas river is at the middle of the bend ; and Monterey itself is cosily ensconced beside the barb. Thus the ancient capital of California faces across the bay, while the Pacific Ocean, though hidden by low hills and forests, bombards her left flank and rear with never- dying surf. In front of the town, the long line of sea- beach trends north and north-west, and then westward to enclose the bay. The waves which lap so quietly about the jetties of Monterey grow louder and larger in the distance; you can see the breakers leaping high and white by day ; at night, the outline of the shore is traced in transparent silver by the moonlight and the flying foam; and from all round, even in quiet weather, the low, distant, thrilling roar of the Pacific hangs over the coast and the adjacent country like smoke above a battle. These long beaches are enticing to the idle man. It would be hard to find a walk more solitary and at the 149 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL same time more exciting to the mind. Crowds of ducks and sea-gulls hover over the sea. Sandpipers trot in and out by troops after the retiring waves, trilling to- gether in a chorus of infinitesimal song. Strange sea- tangles, new to the European eye, the bones of whales, or sometimes a whole whale's carcase, white with car- rion-gulls and poisoning the wind, lie scattered here and there along the sands. The waves come in slowly, vast and green, curve their translucent necks, and burst with a surprising uproar, that runs, waxing and waning, up and down the long key-board of the beach. The foam of these great ruins mounts in an instant to the ridge of the sand glacis, swiftly fleets back again, and is met and buried by the next breaker. The interest is perpetually fresh. On no other coast that I know shall you enjoy, in calm, sunny weather, such a spectacle of Ocean's greatness, such beauty of changing colour, or such degrees of thunder in the sound. The very air is more than usually salt by this Homeric deep. Inshore, a tract of sand-hills borders on the beach. Here and there a lagoon, more or less brackish, attracts the birds and hunters. A rough, spotty undergrowth partially conceals the sand. The crouching, hardy, live- oaks flourish singly or in thickets — the kind of wood for murderers to crawl among — and here and there the skirts of the forest extend downward from the hills with a floor of turf and long aisles of pine-trees hung with Spaniard's Beard. Through this quaint desert the railway cars drew near to Monterey from the junction at Salinas City — though that and so many other things are now for ever altered — and it was from here that you had the first view of the old township lying in the sands, 150 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL its white windmills bickering in the chill, perpetual wind, and the first fogs of the evening drawing drearily around it from the sea. The one common note of all this country is the haunt- ing presence of the ocean. A great faint sound of breakers follows you high up into the inland canons; the roar of water dwells in the clean, empty rooms of Monterey as in a shell upon the chimney ; go where you will, you have but to pause and listen to hear the voice of the Pacific. You pass out of the town to the south- west, and mount the hill among pine woods. Glade, thicket, and grove surround you. You follow winding sandy tracks that lead nowhither. You see a deer; a multitude of quail arises. But the sound of the sea still follows you as you advance, like that of wind among the trees, only harsher and stranger to the ear; and when at length you gain the summit, out breaks on every hand and with freshened vigour, that same un- ending, distant, whispering rumble of the ocean ; for now you are on the top of Monterey peninsula, and the noise no longer only mounts to you from behind along the beach towards Santa Cruz, but from your right also, round by Chinatown and Pinos lighthouse, and from down before you to the mouth of the Carmello river. The whole woodland is begirt with thundering surges. The silence that immediately surrounds you where you stand is not so much broken as it is haunted by this dis- tant, circling rumour. It sets your senses upon edge ; you strain your attention ; you are clearly and unusually conscious of small sounds near at hand ; you walk listen- ing like an Indian hunter; and that voice of the Pacific is a sort of disquieting company to you in your walk. 151 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL When once I was in these woods I found it difficult to turn homeward. All woods lure a rambler onward; but in those of Monterey it was the surf that particularly invited me to prolong my walks. I would push straight for the shore where I thought it to be nearest. Indeed, there was scarce a direction that would not, sooner or later, have brought me forth on the Pacific. The empti- ness of the woods gave me a sense of freedom and dis- covery in these excursions. I never in all my visits met but one man. He was a Mexican, very dark of hue, but smiling and fat, and he carried an axe, though his true business at that moment was to seek for straying cattle. I asked him what o'clock it was, but he seemed neither to know nor care ; and when he in his turn asked me for news of his cattle, I showed myself equally in- different. We stood and smiled upon each other for a few seconds, and then turned without a word and took our several ways across the forest. One day — I shall never forget it — I had taken a trail that was new to me. After a while the woods began to open, the sea to sound nearer hand. I came upon a road, and, to my surprise, a stile. A step or two farther, and, without leaving the woods, I found myself among trim houses. I walked through street after street, par- allel and at right angles, paved with sward and dotted with trees, but still undeniable streets, and each with its name posted at the corner, as in a real town. Facing down the main thoroughfare — " Central Avenue," as it was ticketed — 1 saw an open-air temple, with benches and sounding-board, as though for an orchestra. The houses were all tightly shuttered ; there was no smoke. no sound but of the waves, no moving thing. I have never 152 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL been in any place that seemed so dreamlike. Pompeii is all in a bustle with visitors, and its antiquity and strangeness deceive the imagination ; but this town had plainly not been built above a year or two, and perhaps had been deserted overnight. Indeed, it was not so much like a deserted town as like a scene upon the stage by daylight, and with no one on the boards. The bark- ing of a dog led me at last to the only house still occu- pied, where a Scotch pastor and his wife pass the winter alone in this empty theatre. The place was " The Pa- cific Camp Grounds, the Christian Seaside Resort." Thither, in the warm season, crowds come to enjoy a life of teetotalism, religion, and flirtation, which ! am willing to think blameless and agreeable. The neigh- bourhood at least is well selected. The Pacific booms in front. Westward is Point Pinos, with the light- house in a wilderness of sand, where you will find the lightkeeper playing the piano, making models and bows and arrows, studying dawn and sunrise in amateur oil- painting, and with a dozen other elegant pursuits and interests to surprise his brave, old-country rivals. To the east, and still nearer, you will come upon a space of open down, a hamlet, a haven among rocks, a world of surge and screaming sea-gulls. Such scenes are very similar in different climates ; they appear homely to the eyes of all ; to me this was like a dozen spots in Scot- land. And yet the boats that ride in the haven are of strange outlandish design; and, if you walk into the hamlet, you will behold costumes and faces and hear a tongue that are unfamiliar to the memory. The joss- stick burns, the opium pipe is smoked, the floors are strewn with slips of coloured paper — prayers, you 153 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL would say, that had somehow missed their destination — and a man guiding his upright pencil from right to left across the sheet, writes home the news of Monterey to the Celestial Empire. The woods and the Pacific rule between them the climate of this seaboard region. On the streets of Monterey, when the air does not smell salt from the one, it will be blowing perfumed from the resinous tree- tops of the other. For days together a hot, dry air will overhang the town, close as from an oven, yet healthful and aromatic in the nostrils. The cause is not far to seek, for the woods are afire, and the hot wind is blow- ing from the hills. These fires are one of the great dangers of California. I have seen from Monterey as many as three at the same time, by day a cloud of smoke, by night a red coal of conflagration in the distance. A little thing will start them, and, if the wind be favour- able, they gallop over miles of country faster than a horse. The inhabitants must turn out and work like demons, for it is not only the pleasant groves that are de- stroyed ; the climate and the soil are equally at stake, and these fires prevent the rains of the next winter and dry up perennial fountains. California has been a land of promise in its time, like Palestine; but if the woods continue so swiftly to perish, it may become, like Pales- tine, a land of desolation. To visit the woods while they are languidly burning is a strange piece of experience. The fire passes through the underbrush at a run. Every here and there a tree flares up instantaneously from root to summit, scatter- ing tufts of flame, and is quenched, it seems, as quickly. But this last is only in semblance. For after this first »54 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL squib-Iike conflagration of the dry moss and twigs, there remains behind a deep-rooted and consuming fire in the very entrails of the tree. The resin of the pitch-pine is principally condensed at the base of the bole and in the spreading roots. Thus, after the light, showy, skir- mishing flames, which are only as the match to the ex- plosion, have already scampered down the wind into the distance, the true harm is but beginning for this giant of the woods. You may approach the tree from one side, and see it, scorched indeed from top to bottom, but apparently survivor of the peril. Make the circuit, and there, on the other side of the column, is a clear mass of living coal, spreading like an ulcer; while un- derground, to their most extended fibre, the roots are being eaten out by fire, and the smoke is rising through the fissures to the surface. A little while, and, without a nod of warning, the huge pine-tree snaps off short across the ground and falls prostrate with a crash. Meanwhile the fire continues its silent business; the roots are reduced to a fine ash ; and long afterwards, if you pass by, you will find the earth pierced with radiat- ing galleries, and preserving the design of all these sub- terranean spurs, as though it were the mould for a new tree instead of the print of an old one. These pitch- pines of Monterey are, with the single exception of the Monterey cypress, the most fantastic of forest trees. No words can give an idea of the contortion of their growth ; they might figure without change in a circle of the nether hell as Dante pictured it; and at the rate at which trees grow, and at which forest fires spring up and gallop through the hills of California, we may look forward to a time when there will not be one of them ^55 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL left Standing in that land of their nativity. At least they have not so much to fear from the axe, but perish by what may be called a natural although a violent death ; while it is man in his short-sighted greed that robs the country of the nobler red-wood. Yet a little while and perhaps all the hills of sea-board California may be as bald as Tamalpais. I have an interest of my own in these forest fires, for I came so near to lynching on one occasion, that a braver man might have retained a thrill from the ex- perience. I wished to be certain whether it was the moss, that quaint funereal ornament of Californian for- ests, which blazed up so rapidly when the flame first touched the tree. I suppose I must have been under the influence of Satan, for instead of plucking off a piece for my experiment, what should I do but walk up to a great pine-tree in a portion of the wood which had es- caped so much as scorching, strike a match, and apply the flame gingerly to one of the tassels. The tree went off simply like a rocket; in three seconds it was a roaring pillar of fire. Close by I could hear the shouts of those who were at work combating the original conflagration. I could see the waggon that had brought them tied to a live oak in a piece of open ; I could even catch the flash of an axe as it swung up through the underwood into the sunlight. Had any one observed the result of my experiment my neck was literally not worth a pinch of snuff; after a few minutes of passionate expostulation I should have been run up to a convenient bough. To die for faction is a common evil ; But to be hanged for nonsense is the deviL 156 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL I have run repeatedly, but never as I ran that day. At night I went out of town, and there was my own par- ticular fire, quite distinct from the other, and burning as 1 thought with even greater vigour. But it is the Pacific that exercises the most direct and obvious power upon the climate. At sunset, for months together, vast, wet, melancholy fogs arise and come shoreward from the ocean. From the hill-top above Monterey the scene is often noble, although it is always sad. The upper air is still bright with sunlight; a glow still rests upon the Gabelano Peak ; but the fogs are in possession of the lower levels; they crawl in scarves among the sandhills; they float, a little higher, in clouds of a gigantic size and often of a wild configuration; to the south, where they have struck the seaward shoulder of the mountains of Santa Lucia, they double back and spire up skyward like smoke. Where their shadow touches, colour dies out of the world. The air grows chill and deadly as they advance. The trade-wind freshens, the trees begin to sigh, and all the wind- mills in Monterey are whirling and creaking and fill- ing their cisterns with the brackish water of the sands. It takes but a little while till the invasion is complete. The sea, in its lighter order, has submerged the earth. Monterey is curtained in for the night in thick, wet, salt, and frigid clouds, so to remain till day returns; and before the sun's rays they slowly disperse and retreat in broken squadrons to the bosom of the sea. And yet often when the fog is thickest and most chill, a few steps out of the town and up the slope, the night will be dry and warm and full of inland perfume. 157 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL MEXICANS, AMERICANS, AND INDIANS The history of Monterey has yet to be written. Founded by Catholic missionaries, a place of wise beneficence to Indians, a place of arms, a Mexican cap- ital continually wrested by one faction from another, an American capital wnen the first House of Representa- tives held its deliberations, and then falling lower and lower from the capital of the State to the capital of a county, and from that again, by the loss of its charter and town lands, to a mere bankrupt village, its rise and decline is typical of that of all Mexican institutions and even Mexican families in California. Nothing is stranger in that strange State than the ra- pidity with which the soil has changed hands. The Mexicans, you may say, are all poor and landless, like their former capital; and yet both it and they hold themselves apart and preserve their ancient customs and something of their ancient air. The town, when I was there, was a place of two or three streets, economically paved with sea-sand, and two or three lanes, which were watercourses in the rainy season, and were, at all times, rent up by fissures four or five feet deep. There were no street lights. Short sections of wooden sidewalk only added to the dangers of the night, for they were often high above the level of the roadway, and no one could tell where they would be likely to begin or end. The houses were, for the most part, built of unbaked adobe brick, many of them old for so new a country, some of very elegant proportions, with low, spacious, shapely rooms, and walls so thick that the heat of summer never dried 158 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL them to the heart. At the approach of the rainy season a deathly chill and a graveyard smell began to hang about the lower floors; and diseases of the chest are common and fatal among house-keeping people of either sex. There was no activity but in and around the saloons, where people sat almost all day long playing cards. The smallest excursion was made on horseback. You would scarcely ever see the main street without a horse or two tied to posts, and making a fine figure with their Mexican housings. It struck me oddly to come across some of the Cornhill illustrations to Mr. Blackmore's Erema, and see all the characters astride on English sad- dles. As a matter of fact, an English saddle is a rarity even in San Francisco, and, you may say, a thing unknown in all the rest of California. In a place so exclusively Mexican as Monterey, you saw not only Mexican sad- dles but true Vaquero riding — men always at the hand- gallop up hill and down dale, and round the sharpest corner, urging their horses with cries and gesticulations and cruel rotatory spurs, checking them dead with a touch, or wheeling them right-about-face in a square yard. The type of face and character of bearing are surprisingly un-American. The first ranged from some- thing like the pure Spanish, to something, in its sad fixity, not unlike the pure Indian, although I do not suppose there was one pure blood of either race in all the country. As for the second, it was a matter of perpetual surprise to find, in that world of absolutely mannerless Americans, a people full of deportment, solemnly courteous, and doing all things with grace and decorum. In dress they ran to colour and bright 159 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL sashes. Not even the most Americanised could always resist the temptation to stick a red rose into his hat- band. Not even the most Americanised would de- scend to wear the vile dress hat of civilisation. Spanish was the language of the streets. It was difficult to get along without a word or two of that language for an occasion. The only communications in which the pop- ulation joined were with a view to amusement. A weekly public ball took place with great etiquette, in addition to the numerous fandangoes in private houses. There was a really fair amateur brass band. Night after night serenaders would be going about the street, sometimes in a company and with several instruments and voices together, sometimes severally, each guitar before a different window. It was a strange thing to lie awake in nineteenth-century America, and hear the guitar accompany, and one of these old, heart-breaking Spanish love songs mount into the night air, perhaps in a deep baritone, perhaps in that high-pitched, pa- thetic, womanish alto which is so common among Mexican men, and which strikes on the unaccustomed ear as something not entirely human but altogether sad. The town, then, was essentially and wholly Mexican ; and yet almost all the land in the neighbourhood was held by Americans, and it was from the same class, nu- merically so small, that the principal officials were se- lected. This Mexican and that Mexican would describe to you his old family estates, not one rood of which re- mained to him. You would ask him how that came about, and elicit some tangled story back-foremost, from which you gathered that the Americans had been greedy like designing men, and the Mexicans greedy like chil- i6o THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL dren, but no other certain fact. Their merits and their faults contributed alike to the ruin of the former land- holders. It is true they were improvident, and easily dazzled with the sight of ready money ; but they were gentlefolk besides, and that in a way which curiously unfitted them to combat Yankee craft. Suppose they have a paper to sign, they would think it a reflection on the other party to examine the terms with any great minuteness; nay, suppose them to observe some doubt' ful clause, it is ten to one they would refuse from deli- cacy to object to it. I know I am speaking within the mark, for I have seen such a case occur, and the Mexi- can, in spite of the advice of his lawyer, has signed the imperfect paper like a Iamb. To have spoken in the matter, he said, above all to have let the other part}; guess that he had seen a lawyer, would have *'been like doubting his word." The scruple sounds oddly to one of ourselves, who have been brought up to under- stand all business as a competition in fraud, and honesty itself to be a virtue which regards the carrying out but not the creation of agreements. This single unworldly trait will account for much of that revolution of which we are speaking. The Mexicans have the name of being great swindlers, but certainly the accusation cuts both ways. In a contest of this sort, the entire booty would scarcely have passed into the hands of the more scrupu- lous race. Physically the Americans have triumphed ; but it is not entirely seen how far they have themselves been morally conquered. This is, of course, but a part of a part of an extraordinary problem now in the course of being solved in the various States of the American i6i THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL Union. I am reminded of an anecdote. Some years ago, at a great sale of wine, all the odd lots were pur- chased by a grocer in a small way in the old town of Edinburgh. The agent had the curiosity to visit him some time after and inquire what possible use he could have for such material. He was shown, by way of answer, a huge vat where all the liquors, from humble Gladstone to imperial Tokay, were fermenting together. "And what, " he asked, * ' do you propose to call this ? " "I'm no very sure," replied the grocer, "but I think it's go- ing to turn out port." In the older Eastern States, I think we may say that this hotch-potch of races is going to turn out English, or thereabout. But the problem is indefinitely varied in other zones. The elements are differently mingled in the south, in what we may call the Territorial belt, and in the group of States on the Pacific coast. Above all, in these last, we may look to see some monstrous hybrid — whether good or evil, who shall forecast ? but certainly original and all their own. In my little restaurant at Monterey, we have sat down to table day after day, a Frenchman, two Portu- guese, an Italian, a Mexican, and a Scotchman : we had for common visitors an American from Illinois, a nearly pure blood Indian woman, and a naturalised Chinese; and from time to time a Switzer and a German came down from country ranches for the night. No wonder that the Pacific coast is a foreign land to visitors from the Eastern States, for each race contributes something of its own. Even the despised Chinese have taught the youth of California, none indeed of their virtues, but the debasing use of opium. And chief among these influ- ences is that of the Mexicans. 162 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL The Mexicans although in the State are out of it. They still preserve a sort of international independence, and keep their affairs snug to themselves. Only four or' five years ago Vasquez, the bandit, his troops being dis- persed and the hunt too hot for him in other parts of California, returned to his native Monterey, and was seen publicly in her streets and saloons, fearing no man. The year that I was there there occurred two reputed mur- ders. As the Montereyans are exceptionally vile speak- ers of each other and of every one behind his back, it is not possible for me to judge how much truth there may have been in these reports; but in the one case every one believed, and in the other some suspected, that there had been foul play ; and nobody dreamed for an instant of taking the authorities into their counsel. Now this is, of course, characteristic enough of the Mexicans ; but it is a noteworthy feature that all the Americans in Mon- terey acquiesced without a word in this inaction. Even when I spoke to them upon the subject, they seemed not to understand my surprise ; they had forgotten the traditions of their own race and upbringing, and become, in a word, wholly Mexicanised. Again, the Mexicans, having no ready money to speak of, rely almost entirely in their business transactions upon each other's worthless paper. Pedro the penni- less pays you with an I O U from the equally penniless Miguel. It is a sort of local currency by courtesy. Credit in these parts has passed into a superstition. I have seen a strong, violent man struggling for months to re- cover a debt, and getting nothing but an exchange of waste paper. The very storekeepers are averse to ask- ing for cash payments, and are more surprised than 163 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL pleased when they are offered. They fear there must be something under it, and that you mean to withdraw your custom from them. I have seen the enterprising chemist and stationer begging me with fervour to let my account run on, although I had my purse open in my hand; and partly from the commonness of the case, partly from some remains of that generous old Mexican tradition which made all men welcome to their tables, a person may be notoriously both unwilling and unable to pay, and still find credit for the necessaries of life in the stores of Monterey. Now this villainous habit of living upon ' ' tick " has grown into Californian nature. I do not mean that the American and European storekeepers of Monterey are as lax as Mexicans ; I mean that American farmers in many parts of the State expect unlimited credit, and profit by it in the meanwhile, without a thought for consequences. Jew storekeepers have already learned the advantage to be gained from this ; they lead on the farmer into irretrievable indebtedness, and keep him ever after as their bond-slave hopelessly grinding in the mill. So the whirligig of time brings in its re- venges, and except that the Jew knows better than to foreclose, you may see Americans bound in the same chains with which they themselves had formerly bound the Mexican. It seems as if certain sorts of follies, like certain sorts of grain, were natural to the soil rather than to the race that holds and tills it for the moment. In the meantime, however, the Americans rule in Monterey County. The new county seat, Salinas City, in the bald, corn-bearing plain under the Gabelano Peak, is a town of a purely American character. The land is held, for the most part, in those enormous tracts which 164 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL are another legacy of Mexican days, and form the present chief danger and disgrace of California ; and the holders are mostly of American or British birth. We have here in England no idea of the troubles and inconveniences which flow from the existence of these large landholders — land-thieves, land-sharks, or land-grabbers, they are more commonly and plainly called. Thus the town- lands of Monterey are all in the hands of a single man. How they came there is an obscure, vexatious question, and, rightly or wrongly, the man is hated with a great hatred. His life has been repeatedly in danger. Not very long ago, I was told, the stage was stopped and examined three evenings in succession by disguised horsemen thirsting for his blood. A certain house on the Salinas road, they say, he always passes in his buggy at full speed, for the squatter sent him warning long ago. But a year since he was publicly pointed out for death by no less a man than Mr. Dennis Kearney. Kearney is a man too well known in California, but a word of explanation is required for English readers. Originally an Irish drayman, he rose, by his command of bad language, to almost dictatorial authority in the State ; throned it there for six months or so, his mouth full of oaths, gallowses, and conflagrations; was first snuffed out last winter by Mr. Coleman, backed by his San Francisco Vigilantes and three gatling guns ; com- pleted his own ruin by throwing in his lot with the grotesque Greenbacker party ; and had at last to be res- cued by his old enemies, the police, out of the hands of his rebellious followers. It was while he was at the top of his fortune that Kearney visited Monterey with his battle-cry against Chinese labour, the railroad mo- -165 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL nopolists, and the land-thieves; and his one articulate counsel to the Montereyans was to "hang David Jacks." Had the town been American, in my private opinion, this would have been done years ago. Land is a sub- ject on which there is no jesting in the West, and I have seen my friend the lawyer drive out of Monterey to ad- just a competition of titles with the face of a captain going into battle and his Smith-and-Wesson convenient to his hand. On the ranche of another of these landholders you may find our old friend, the truck system, in full opera- tion. Men live there, year in year out, to cut timber for a nominal wage, which is all consumed in supplies. The longer they remain in this desirable service the deeper they will fall in debt — a burlesque injustice in a new country, where labour should be precious, and one of those typical instances which explains the prevailing discontent and the success of the demagogue Kearney. In a comparison between what was and what is in California, the praisers of times past will fix upon the Indians of Carmel. The valley drained by the river so named is a true Californian valley, bare, dotted with cha- parral, overlooked by quaint, unfinished hills. The Carmel runs by many pleasant farms, a clear and shal- low river, loved by wading kine; and at last, as it is falling towards a quicksand and the great Pacific, passes a ruined mission on a hill. From the mission church the eye embraces a great field of ocean, and the ear is filled with a continuous sound of distant breakers on the shore. But the day of the Jesuit has gone by, the day of the Yankee has succeeded, and there is no one left to care for the converted savage. The church is 1 66 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL roofless and ruinous, sea-breezes and sea-fogs, and the alternation of the rain and sunshine, daily widening the breaches and casting the crockets from the wall. As an antiquity in this new land, a quaint specimen of missionary architecture, and a memorial of good deeds, it had a triple claim to preservation from all thinking people; but neglect and abuse have been its portion. There is no sign of American interference, save where a headboard has been torn from a grave to be a mark for pistol bullets. So it is with the Indians for whom it was erected. Their lands, I was told, are being yearly en- croached upon by the neighbouring American proprie- tor, and with that exception no man troubles his head for the Indians of Carmel. Only one day in the year, the day before our Guy Fawkes, the padre drives over the hill from Monterey; the little sacristy, which is the only covered portion of the church, is filled with seats and decorated for the service ; the Indians troop together, their bright dresses contrasting with their dark and mel- ancholy faces; and there, among a crowd of somewhat unsympathetic holiday-makers, you may hear God served with perhaps more touching circumstances than in any other temple under heaven. An Indian, stone- blind and about eighty years of age, conducts the sing- ing; other Indians compose the choir; yet they have the Gregorian music at their finger ends, and pronounce the Latin so correctly that I could follow the meaning as they sang. The pronunciation was odd and nasal, the singing hurried and staccato. 'Mn ssecula saeculo-ho- horum," they went, with a vigorous aspirate to every additional syllable. I have never seen faces more viv- idly lit up with joy than the faces of these Indian sing- 167 THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL ers. It was to them not only the worship of God, nor an act by which they recalled and commemorated bet- ter days, but was besides an exercise of culture, where all they knew of art and letters was united and ex- pressed. And it made a man's heart sorry for the good fathers of yore who had taught them to dig and to reap, to read and to sing, who had given them European mass-books which they still preserve and study in their cottages, and who had now passed away from all au- thority and influence in that land — to be succeeded by greedy land-thieves and sacrilegious pistol-shots. So ugly a thing may our Anglo-Saxon Protestantism appear beside the doings of the Society of Jesus. But revolution in this world succeeds to revolution. All that I say in this paper is in a paulo-past tense. The Monterey of last year exists no longer. A huge hotel has sprung up in the desert by the railway. Three sets of diners sit down successively to table. Invaluable toilettes figure along the beach and between the live oaks; and Monterey is advertised in the newspapers, and posted in the waiting-rooms at railway stations, as a resort for wealth and fashion. Alas for the little town ! it is not strong enough to resist the influence of the flaunting caravanserai, and the poor, quaint, penniless native gentlemen of Monterey must perish, like a lower race, before the millionaire vulgarians of the Big Bo- nanza. [1880.] 168 III. FONTAINEBLEAU VILLAGE COMMUNITIES OF PAINTERS The charm of Fontainebleau is a thing apart. It is a place that people love even more than they admire. The vigorous forest air, the silence, the majestic avenues of highway, the wilderness of tumbled boulders, the great age and dignity of certain groves — these are but ingredients, they are not the secret of the philtre. The place is sanative; the air, the light, the perfumes, and the shapes of things concord in happy harmony. The artist may be idle and not fear the ** blues." He may dally with his life. Mirth, lyric mirth, and a vivacious classical contentment are of the very essence of the bet- ter kind of art ; and these, in that most smiling forest, he has the chance to learn or to remember. Even on the plain of Biere, where the Angelus of Millet still tolls upon the ear of fancy, a larger air, a higher heaven, something ancient and healthy in the face of nature, purify the mind alike from dulness and hysteria. There is no place where the young are more gladly con- scious of their youth, or the old better contented with their age. The fact of its great and special beauty further recom- mends this country to the artist. The field was chosen by men in whose blood there still raced some of the 169 FONTAINEBLEAU gleeful or solemn exultation of great art — Millet who loved dignity like Michelangelo, Rousseau whose mod- ern brush was dipped in the glamour of the ancients. It was chosen before the day of that strange turn in the history of art, of which we now perceive the culmina- tion in impressionistic tales and pictures — that volun- tary aversion of the eye from all speciously strong and beautiful effects — that disinterested love of dulness which has set so many Peter Bells to paint the river-side primrose. It was then chosen for its proximity to Paris. And for the same cause, and by the force of tradition, the painter of to-day continues to inhabit and to paint it. There is in France scenery incomparable for romance and harmony. Provence, and the valley of the Rhone from Vienne to Tarascon, are one succession of master- pieces waiting for the brush. The beauty is not merely beauty; it tells, besides, a tale to the imagination, and surprises while it charms. Here you shall see castel- lated towns that would befit the scenery of dream- land; streets that glow with colour like cathedral windows; hillsof the most exquisite proportions; flow- ers of every precious colour, growing thick like grass. All these, by the grace of railway travel, are brought to the very door of the modern painter; yet he does not seek them ; he remains faithful to Fontainebleau, to the eternal bridge of Gretz, to the watering-pot cascade in Cernay valley. Even Fontainebleau was chosen for him; even in Fontainebleau he shrinks from what is sharply charactered. But one thing, at least, is certain, whatever he may choose to paint and in whatever man- ner, it is good for the artist to dwell among graceful shapes. Fontainebleau, if it be but quiet scenery, is 170 FONTAINEBLEAU classically graceful ; and though the student may look for different qualities, this quality, silently present, will educate his hand and eye. But, before all its other advantages — charm, loveli- ness, or proximity to Paris — comes the great fact that it is already colonised. The institution of a painters' colony is a work of time and tact. The population must be conquered. The inn-keeper has to be taught^ and he soon learns, the lesson of unlimited credit; he must be taught to welcome as a favoured guest a young gentleman in a very greasy coat, and with little baggage beyond a box of colours and a canvas; and he must learn to preserve his faith in customers who will eat heartily and drink of the best, borrow money to buy tobacco, and perhaps not pay a stiver for a year. A colour merchant has next to be attracted. A certain vogue must be given to the place, lest the painter, most gregarious of animals, should find himself alone. And no sooner are these first difficulties overcome, than fresh perils spring up upon the other side; and the bourgeois and the tourist are knocking at the gate. This is the crucial moment for the colony. If these intruders gain a footing, they not only banish freedom and amenity ; pretty soon, by means of their long purses, they will have undone the education of the innkeeper; prices will rise and credit shorten ; and the poor painter must fare farther on and find another hamlet. "Not here, O Apollo!" will become his song. Thus Trouville and, the other day, St. Raphael were lost to the arts. Curi- ous and not always edifying are the shifts that the French student uses to defend his lair; like the cuttlefish, he must sometimes blacken the waters of his chosen pool ; 171 FONTAINEBLEAU but at such a time and for so practical a purpose Mrs. Grundy must allow him licence. Where his own purse and credit are not threatened, he will do the honours of his village generously. Any artist is made welcome, through whatever medium he may seek expression; science is respected ; even the idler, if he prove, as he so rarely does, a gentleman, will soon begin to find himself at home. And when that essentially modern creature, the English or American girl-student, began to walk calmly into his favourite inns as if into a draw- ing-room at home, the French painter owned himself defenceless; he submitted or he fled. His French re- spectability, quite as precise as ours, though covering different provinces of life, recoiled aghast before the in- novation. But the girls were painters ; there was noth- ing to be done; and Barbizon, when I last saw it and for the time at least, was practically ceded to the fair invader. Paterfamilias, on the other hand, the common tourist, the holiday shopman, and the cheap young gen- tleman upon the spree, he hounded from his villages with every circumstance of contumely. This purely artistic society is excellent for the young artist. The lads are mostly fools ; they hold the latest orthodoxy in its crudeness; they are at that stage of education, for the most part, when a man is too much occupied with style to be aware of the necessity for any matter; and this, above all for the Englishman, is ex- cellent. To work grossly at the trade, to forget senti- ment, to think of his material and nothing else, is, for awhile at least, the king's highway of progress. Here, in England, too many painters and writers dwell dis- persed, unshielded, among the intelligent bourgeois. 172 FONTAINEBLEAU These, when they are not merely indifferent, prate to him about the lofty aims and moral influence of art. And this is the lad's ruin. For art is, first of all and last of all, a trade. The love of words and not a desire to publish new discoveries, the love of form and not a novel reading of historical events, mark the vocation of the writer and the painter. The arabesque, properly speaking, and even in literature, is the first fancy of the artist ; he first plays with his material as a child plays with a kaleidoscope; and he is already in a second stage when he begins to use his pretty counters for the end of representation. In that, he must pause long and toil faithfully ; that is his apprenticeship ; and it is only the few who will really grow beyond it, and go forward, fully equipped, to do the business of real art — to give life to abstractions and significance and charm to facts. In the meanwhile, let him dwell much among his fellow- craftsmen. They alone can take a serious interest in the childish tasks and pitiful successes of these years. They alone can behold with equanimity this fingering of the dumb keyboard, this polishing of empty sentences, this dull and literal painting of dull and insignificant subjects. Outsiders will spur him on. They will say, "Why do you not write a great book? paint a great picture ? " If his guardian angel fail him, they may even persuade him to the attempt, and, ten to one, his hand is coarsened and his style falsified for life. And this brings me to a warning. The life of the apprentice to any art is both unstrained and pleasing; it is strewn with small successes in the midst of a career of failure, patiently supported ; the heaviest scholar is conscious of a certain progress ; and if he come not ap- »73 FONTAINEBLEAU preciably nearer to the art of Shakespeare, grows letter- perfect in the domain of A-B, ab. But the time comes when a man should cease prelusory gymnastic, stand up, put a violence upon his will, and for better or worse, begin the business of creation. This evil day there is a tendency continually to postpone: above all with painters. They have made so many studies that it has become a habit; they make more, the walls of exhibi- tions blush with them ; and death finds these aged stu- dents still busy with their horn-book. This class of man finds a congenial home in artist villages; in the slang of the English colony at Barbizon we used to call them ''Snoozers." Continual returns to the city, the society of men farther advanced, the study of great works, a sense of humour or, if such a thing is to be had, a little religion or philosophy, are the means of treatment. It will be time enough to think of curing the malady after it has been caught ; for to catch it is the very thing for which you seek that dream-land of the painters' village. ** Snoozing" is a part of the artistic education; and the rudiments must be learned stupidly, all else being forgotten, as if they were an object in themselves. Lastly, there is something, or there seems to be some- thing, in the very air of France that communicates the love of style. Precision, clarity, the cleanly and crafty employment of material, a grace in the handling, apart from any value in the thought, seem to be acquired by the mere residence; or if not acquired, become at least the more appreciated. The air of Paris is alive with this technical inspiration. And to leave that airy city and awake next day upon the borders of the forest is but to 174 FONTAINEBLEAU change externals. The same spirit of dexterity and finish breathes from the long alleys and the lofty groves, from the wildernesses that are still pretty in their con- fusion, and the great plain that contrives to be decora- tive in its emptiness. In spite of its really considerable extent, the forest of Fontainebleau is hardly anywhere tedious. I know the whole western side of it with what, I suppose, I may call thoroughness; well enough at least to testify that there is no square mile without some special character and charm. Such quarters, for instance, as the Long Rocher, the Bas-Breau, and the Reine Blanche, might be a hundred miles apart; they have scarce a point in common beyond the silence of the birds. The two last are really conterminous ; and in both are tall and ancient trees that have outlived a thousand political vicissitudes. But in the one the great oaks prosper placidly upon an even floor; they beshadow a great field; and the air and the light are very free below their stretching boughs. In the other the trees find difficult footing; castles of white rock lie tumbled one upon another, the foot slips, the crooked viper slumbers, the moss clings in the crevice; and above it all the great beech goes spiring and casting forth her arms, and, with a grace beyond church archi- tecture, canopies this rugged chaos. Meanwhile, divid- ing the two cantons, the broad white causeway of the Paris road runs in an avenue : a road conceived for pa- geantry and for triumphal marches, an avenue for an army ; but, its days of glory over, it now lies grilling in the sun between cool groves, and only at intervals the »75 FONTAINEBLEAU vehicle of the cruising tourist is seen far away and faintly audible along its ample sweep. A little upon one side, and you find a district of sand and birch and boulder; a little upon the other lies the valley of Apremont, all juniper and heather; and close beyond that you may walk into a zone of pine trees. So artfully are the in- gredients mingled. Nor must it be forgotten that, in all this part, you come continually forth upon a hill-top, and behold the plain, northward and westward, like an unrefulgent sea ; nor that all day long the shadows keep changing; and at last, to the red fires of sunset, night succeeds, and with the night a new forest, full of whisper, gloom, and fragrance. There are few things more reno- vating than to leave Paris, the lamplit arches of the Carrou- sel, and the long alignment of the glittering streets, and to bathe the senses in this fragrant darkness of the wood. In this continual variety the mind is kept vividly alive. It is a changeful place to paint, a stirring place to live in. As fast as your foot carries you, you pass from scene to scene, each vigorously painted in the colours of the sun, each endeared by that hereditary spell of forests on the mind of man who still remembers and salutes the ancient refuge of his race. And yet the forest has been civilised throughout. The most savage corners bear a name, and have been cherished like antiquities; in the most remote. Nature has prepared and balanced her effects as if with con- scious art; and man, with his guiding arrows of blue paint, has countersigned the picture. After your far- thest wandering, you are never surprised to come forth upon the vast avenue of highway, to strike the centre point of branching alleys, or to find the aqueduct trail- 176 FONTAINEBLEAU ing, thousand-footed, through the brush. It is not a wilderness ; it is rather a preserve. And, fitly enough, the centre of the maze is not a hermit's cavern. In the midst, a little mirthful town lies sunlit, humming with the business of pleasure ; and th(; palace, breathing dis- tinction and peopled by historic names, stands smoke- less among gardens. Perhaps the last attempt at sa^^age life was that of the harmless humbug who called himself the hermit. In a great tree, close by the high-road, he had built himself a little cabin after the manner of the Swiss Family Rob- inson; thither he mounted at night, by the romantic aid of a rope ladder; and if dirt be any proof of sin- cerity, the man was savage as a Sioux. I had the pleasure of his acquaintance; he appeared grossly stu- pid, not in his perfect wits, and interested in nothing but small change ; for that he had a great avidity. In the course of time he proved to be a chicken-stealer, and vanished from his perch; and perhaps from the first he was no true votary of forest freedom, but an ingenious, theatrically-minded beggar, and his cabin in the tree was only stock-in-trade to beg withal. The choice of his position would seem to indicate so much; for if in the forest there are no places still to be discov- ered, there are many that have been forgotten, and that lie unvisited. There, to be sure, are the blue arrows waiting to reconduct you, now blazed upon a tree, now posted in the corner of a rock. But your security from interruption is complete ; you might camp for weeks, if there were only water, and not a soul sus- pect your presence; and if I may suppose the reader to have committed some great crime and come to me for 177 FONTAINEBLEAU aid, I think I could still find my way to a small cavern, fitted with a hearth and chimney, where he might lie perfectly concealed. A confederate landscape-painter might daily supply him with food ; for water, he would have to make a nightly tramp as far as to the nearest pond; and at last, when the hue and cry began to blow over, he might get gently on the train at some side sta- tion, work round by a series of junctions, and be quietly captured at the frontier. Thus Fontainebleau, although it is truly but a plea- sure-ground, and although, in favourable weather, and in the more celebrated quarters, it literally buzzes with the tourist, yet has some of the immunities and offers some of the repose of natural forests. And the soli- tary, although he must return at night to his frequented inn, may yet pass the day with his own thoughts in the companionable silence of the trees. The demands of the imagination vary; some can be alone in a back garden looked upon by windows; others, like the os- trich, are content with a solitude that meets the eye; and others, again, expand in fancy to the very borders of their desert, and are irritably conscious of a hunter's camp in an adjacent county. To these last, of course, Fontainebleau will seem but an extended tea-garden : a Rosherville on a by-day. But to the plain man it offers solitude : an excellent thing in itself, and a good whet for company. Ill I was for some time a consistent Barbizonian ; et ego in Arcadia vixi, it was a pleasant season ; and that noise- less hamlet lying close among the borders of the wood 178 FONTAINEBLEAU is for me, as for so many others, a green spot in mem- ory. The great Millet was just dead, the green shutters of his modest house were closed; his daughters were in mourning. The date of my first visit was thus an epoch in the history of art : in a lesser way, it was an epoch in the history of the Latin Quarter. The Petit Chiacle was dead and buried ; Murger and his crew of sponging vagabonds were all at rest from their expedients ; the tradition of their real life was nearly lost; and the petri- fied legend of the Vie de Boheme had become a sort of gospel, and still gave the cue to zealous imitators. But if the book be written in rose-water, the imitation was still farther expurgated ; honesty was the rule ; the inn- keepers gave, as I have said, almost unlimited credit; they suffered the seediest painter to depart, to take all his belongings, and to leave his bill unpaid; and if they sometimes lost, it was by English and Americans alone. At the same time, the great influx of Anglo-Saxons had begun to affect the life of the studious. There had been disputes ; and, in one instance at least, the English and the Americans had made common cause to prevent a cruel pleasantry. It would be well if nations and races could communicate their qualities; but in practice when they look upon each other, they have an eye to nothing but defects. The Anglo-Saxon is essentially dishonest; the French is devoid by nature of the principle that we call *'Fair Play." The Frenchman marvelled at the scruples of his guest, and, when that defender of in- nocence retired over-seas and left his bills unpaid, he marvelled once again; the good and evil were, in his eyes, part and parcel of the same eccentricity; a shrug expressed his judgment upon both. 179 FONTAINEBLEAU At Barbizon there was no master, no pontiff in the arts. Palizzi bore rule at Gretz — urbane, superior rule — his memory rich in anecdotes of the great men of yore, his mind fertile in theories; sceptical, composed, and venerable to the eye ; and yet beneath these out- works, all twittering with Italian superstition, his eye scouting for omens, and the whole fabric of his man- ners giving way on the appearance of a hunchback. Cernay had Pelouse, the admirable, placid Pelouse, smil- ingly critical of youth, who, when a full-blown commer- cial traveller, suddenly threw down his samples, bought a colour-box, and became the master whom we have all admired. Marlotte, for a central figure, boasted Olivier de Penne. Only Barbizon, since the death of Millet, was a headless commonwealth. Even its secondary lights, and those who in my day made the stranger welcome, have since deserted it. The good Lachevre has departed, carrying his household gods; and long before that Gaston Lafenestre was taken from our midst by an untimely death. He died before he had deserved success; it may be, he would never have deserved it; but his kind, comely, modest countenance still haunts the memory of all who knew him. Another — whom I will not name — has moved farther on, pursuing the strange Odyssey of his decadence. His days of royal favour had departed even then ; but he still retained, in his narrower life at Barbizon, a certain stamp of conscious importance, hearty, friendly, filling the room, the occu- pant of several chairs ; nor had he yet ceased his losing battle, still labouring upon great canvases that none would buy, still waiting the return of fortune. But these days also were too good to last ; and the former favourite i8o FONTAINEBLEAU of two sovereigns fled, if I heard the truth, by night. There was a time when he was counted a great man, and Millet but a dauber; behold, how the whirligig of time brings in his revenges ! To pity Millet is a piece of arrogance; if life be hard for such resolute and pious spirits, it is harder still for us, had we the wit to under- stand it; but we may pity his unhappier rival, who, for no apparent merit, was raised to opulence and momen- tary fame, and, through no apparent fault, was suffered step by step to sink again to nothing. No misfortune can exceed the bitterness of such back-foremost pro- gress, even bravely supported as it was ; but to those also who were taken early from the easel, a regret is due. From all the young men of this period, one stood out by the vigour of his promise ; he was in the age of fermenta- tion, enamoured of eccentricities. " 11 faut faire de la peinture nouvelle," was his watchword; but if time and experience had continued his education, if he had been granted health to return from these excursions to the steady and the central, I must believe that the name of Hills had become famous. Siron's inn, that excellent artists' barrack, was man- aged upon easy principles. At any hour of the night, when you returned from wandering in the forest, you went to the billiard-room and helped yourself to liquors, or descended to the cellar and returned laden with beer or wine. The Sirons were all locked in slumber; there was none to check your inroads; only at the week's end a computation was made, the gross sum was di- vided, and a varying share set down to every lodger's name under the rubric : estrats. Upon the more long- suffering the larger tax was levied ; and your bill length- iSi FONTAINEBLEAU ened in a direct proportion to the easiness of your dis- position. At any hour of the morning, again, you could get your coffee or cold milk, and set forth into the forest. The doves had perhaps wakened you, fluttering into your chamber; and on the threshold of the inn you were met by the aroma of the forest. Close by were the great aisles, the mossy boulders, the interminable field of forest shadow. There you were free to dream and wander. And at noon, and again at six o'clock, a good meal awaited you on Siron's table. The whole of your accommodation, set aside that varying item of the estrats, cost you five francs a day ; your bill was never offered you until you asked it; and if you were out of luck's way, you might depart for where you pleased and leave it pending. IV Theoretically, the house was open to all comers ; prac- tically, it was a kind of club. The guests protected themselves, and, in so doing, they protected Siron. Formal manners being laid aside, essential courtesy was the more rigidly exacted; the new arrival had to feel the pulse of the society ; and a breach of its undefined observances was promptly punished. A man might be as plain, as dull, as slovenly, as free of speech as he de- sired ; but to a touch of presumption or a word of hec- toring these free Barbizonians were as sensitive as a tea-party of maiden ladies. I have seen people driven forth from Barbizon; it would be difficult to say in words what they had done, but they deserved their fate. They had shown themselves unworthy to enjoy these corporate freedoms ; they had pushed themselves ; they 182 FONTAINEBLEAU had *'made their head;" they wanted tact to appreciate the "fine shades" of Barbizonian etiquette. And once they were condemned, the process of extrusion was ruthless in its cruelty; after one evening with the for- midable Bodmer, the Baily of our commonwealth, the erring stranger was beheld no more ; he rose exceeding early the next day, and the first coach conveyed him from the scene of his discomfiture. These sentences of banishment were never, in my knowledge, delivered against an artist; such would, I believe, have been il- legal; but the odd and pleasant fact is this, that they were never needed. Painters, sculptors, writers, singers, I have seen all of these in Barbizon; and some were sulky, and some blatant and inane; but one and all en- tered at once into the spirit of the association. This singular society is purely French, a creature of French virtues, and possibly of French defects. It cannot be imitated by the English. The roughness, the impatience, the more obvious selfishness, and even the more ardent friendships of the Anglo-Saxon, speedily dismember such a commonwealth. But this random gathering of young French painters, with neither apparatus nor pa- rade of government, yet kept the life of the place upon a certain footing, insensibly imposed their etiquette upon the docile, and by caustic speech enforced their edicts against the unwelcome. To think of it is to wonder the more at the strange failure of their race upon the larger theatre. This inbred civility — to use the word in its completest meaning — this natural and facile ad- justment of contending liberties, seems all thai is re- quired to make a governable nation and a just and prosperous country. 183 FONTAINEBLEAU Our society, thus purged and guarded, was full of high spirits, of laughter, and of the initiative of youth. The few elder men who joined us were still young at heart, and took the key from their companions. We returned from long stations in the fortifying air, our blood renewed by the sunshine, our spirits refreshed by the silence of the forest; the Babel of loud voices sounded good; we fell to eat and play like the natural man ; and in the high inn chamber, panelled with indifferent pictures and lit by candles guttering in the night air, the talk and laugh- ter sounded far into the night. It was a good place and a good life for any naturally-minded youth ; better yet for the student of painting, and perhaps best of all for the student of letters. He, too, was saturated in this atmos- phere of style; he was shut out from the disturbing currents of the world, he might forget that there existed other and more pressing interests than that of art. But, in such a place, it was hardly possible to write ; he could not drug his conscience, like the painter, by the produc- tion of listless studies; he saw himself idle among many who were apparently, and some who were really, em- ployed ; and what with the impulse of increasing health and the continual provocation of romantic scenes, he became tormented with the desire to work. He en- joyed a strenuous idleness full of visions, hearty meals, long, sweltering walks, mirth among companions; and still floating like music through his brain, foresights of great works that Shakespeare might be proud to have conceived, headless epics, glorious torsos of dramas, and words that were alive with import. So in youth, like Moses from the mountain, we have sights of that House Beautiful of art which we shall never enter. They 184 FONTAINEBLEAU are dreams and unsubstantial; visions of style that re- pose upon no base of human meaning; the last heart- throbs of that excited amateur who has to die in all of us before the artist can be born. But they come to us in such a rainbow of glory that all subsequent achieve- ment appears dull and earthly in comparison. We were all artists ; almost all in the age of illusion, cultivating an imaginary genius, and walking to the strains of some deceiving Ariel; small wonder, indeed, if we were happy! But art, of whatever nature, is a kind mistress; and though these dreams of youth fall by their own baselessness, others succeed, graver and more sub- stantial; the symptoms change, the amiable malady endures ; and still, at an equal distance, the House Beautiful shines upon its hill-top. Gretz lies out of the forest, down by the bright river. It boasts a mill, an ancient church, a castle, and a bridge of many sterlings. And the bridge is a piece of public property; anonymously famous; beaming on the incuri- ous dilettante from the walls of a hundred exhibitions. I have seen it in the Salon ; 1 have seen it in the Acad- emy; 1 have seen it in the last French Exposition, ex- cellently done by Bloomer; in a black-and-white, by Mr. A. Henley, it once adorned this essay in the pages of the Magaiine of Art. Long-suffering bridge ! And if you visit Gretz to-morrow, you shall find another gen- eration, camped at the bottom of Chevillon's garden under their white umbrellas, and doggedly painting it again. i8s FONTAINEBLEAU The bridge taken for granted, Gretz is a less inspiring place than Barbizon. I give it the palm over Cernay. There is something ghastly in the great empty village square of Cernay, with the inn tables standing in one corner, as though the stage were set for rustic opera, and in the early morning all the painters breaking their fast upon white wine under the windows of the vil- lagers. It is vastly different to awake in Gretz, to go down the green inn-garden, to find the river streaming through the bridge, and to see the dawn begin across the poplared level. The meals are laid in the cool ar- bour, under fluttering leaves. The splash of oars and bathers, the bathing costumes out to dry, the trim canoes beside the jetty, tell of a society that has an eye to plea- sure. There is "something to do " at Gretz. Perhaps, for that very reason, I can recall no such enduring ar- dours, no such glories of exhilaration, as among the solemn groves and uneventful hours of Barbizon. This ** something to do " is a great enemy to joy ; it is a way out of it; you wreak your high spirits on some cut- an d- dry employment, and behold them gone ! But Gretz is a merry place after its kind : pretty to see, merry to in- habit. The course of its pellucid river, whether up or down, is full of gentle attractions for the navigator: islanded reed-mazes where, in autumn, the red berries cluster; the mirrored and inverted images of trees; lil- ies, and mills, and the foam and thunder of weirs. And of all noble sweeps of roadway, none is nobler, on a windy dusk, than the high road to Nemours between its lines of talking poplar. But even Gretz is changed. The old inn, long shored and trussed and buttressed, fell at length under the mere 186 FONTAINEBLEAU weight of years, and the place as it was is but a fading image in the memory of former guests. They, indeed, recall the ancient wooden stair; they recall the rainy evening, the wide hearth, the blaze of the twig fire, and the company that gathered round the pillar in the kitchen. But the material fabric is now dust; soon, with the last of its inhabitants, its very memory shall follow; and they, in their turn, shall suffer the same law, and, both in name and lineament, vanish from the world of men. **For remembrance of the old house' sake," as Pepys once quaintly put it, let me tell one story. When the tide of invasion swept over France, two foreign painters were left stranded and penniless in Gretz; and there, until the war was over, the Chevil- lons ungrudgingly harboured them. It was difficult to obtain supplies ; but the two waifs were still welcome to the best, sat down daily with the family to table, and at the due intervals were supplied with clean nap- kins, which they scrupled to employ. Madame Che- villon observed the fact and reprimanded them. But they stood firm ; eat they must, but having no money they would soil no napkins. VI Nemours and Moret, for all they are so picturesque, have been little visited by painters. They are, indeed, too populous; they have manners of their own, and might resist the drastic process of colonisation. Mon- tigny has been somewhat strangely neglected ; I never knew it inhabited but once, when Will H. Low installed himself there with a barrel of piquette, and entertained 187 FONTAINEBLEAU his friends in a leafy trellis above the weir, in sight of the green country and to the music of the falling water. It was a most airy, quaint, and pleasant place of resi- dence, just too rustic to be stagey ; and from my mem- ories of the place in general, and that garden trellis in particular — at morning, visited by birds, or at night, when the dew fell and the stars were of the party — I am inclined to think perhaps too favourably of the future of Montigny. Chailly-en-Biere has outlived all things, and lies dustily slumbering in the plain — the cemetery of itself The great road remains to testify of its for- mer bustle of postilions and carriage bells; and, like memorial tablets, there still hang in the inn room the paintings of a former generation, dead or decorated long ago. In my time, one man only, greatly daring, dwelt there. From time to time he would walk over to Bar- bizon, like a shade revisiting the glimpses of the moon, and after some communication with flesh and blood re- turn to his austere hermitage. But even he, when I last revisited the forest, had come to Barbizon for good, and closed the roll of Chaillyites. It may revive — but I much doubt it. Acheres and Recloses still wait a pio- neer; Bourron is out of the question, being merely Gretz over again, without the river, the bridge, or the beauty; and of all the possible places on the western side, Marlotte alone remains to be discussed. I scarcely know Marlotte, and, very likely for that reason, am not much in love with it. It seems a glaring and unsightly hamlet. The inn of Mother Antonie is unattractive; and its more reputable rival, though comfortable enough, is commonplace. Marlotte has a name ; it is famous ; if I were the young painter I would leave it alone in its glory. 188 FONTAINEBLEAU VII These are the words of an old stager; and though time is a good conservative in forest places, much may be untrue to-day. Many of us have passed Arcadian days there and moved on, but yet left a portion of our souls behind us buried in the woods. I would not dig for these reliquiae; they are incommunicable treasures that will not enrich the finder; and yet there may lie, interred below great oaks or scattered along forest paths, stores of youth's dynamite and dear remembrances. And as one generation passes on and renovates the field of tillage for the next, I entertain a fancy that when the young men of to-day go forth into the forest, they shall find the air still vitalised by the spirits of their prede- cessors, and, like those ** unheard melodies" that are the sweetest of all, the memory of our laughter shall still haunt the field of trees. Those merry voices that in woods call the wanderer farther, those thrilling si- lences and whispers of the groves, surely in Fontaine- bleau they must be vocal of me and my companions ? We are not content to pass away entirely from the scenes of our delight; we would leave, if but in gratitude, a pillar and a legend. One generation after another fall like honey-bees upon this memorable forest, rifle its sweets, pack themselves with vital memories, and when the theft is consum- mated depart again into life richer, but poorer also. The forest, indeed, they have possessed, from that day forward it is theirs indissolubly, and they will return to walk in it at night in the fondest of their dreams, and use it for ever in their books and pictures. Yet when 189 FONTAINEBLEAU they made their packets, and put up their notes and sketches, something, it should seem, had been forgot- ten. A projection of themselves shall appear to haunt unfriended these scenes of happiness, a natural child of fancy, begotten and forgotten unawares. Over the whole field of our wanderings such fetches are still travelling like indefatigable bagmen; but the imps of Fontainebleau, as of all beloved spots, are very long of life, and memory is piously unwilling to forget their orphanage. If anywhere about that wood you meet my airy bantling, greet him with tenderness. He was a pleasant lad, though now abandoned. And when it comes to your own turn to quit the forest may you leave behind you such another; no Antony or Werther, let us hope, no tearful whipster, but, as becomes this not uncheerful and most active age in which we figure, the child of happy hours. No art, it may be said, was ever perfect, and not many noble, that has not been mirthfully conceived. And no man, it may be added, was ever anything but a wet blanket and a cross to his companions who boasted not a copious spirit of enjoyment. Whether as man or artist, let the youth make haste to Fontaine- bleau, and once there let him address himself to the spirit of the place ; he will learn more from exercise than from studies, although both are necessary; and if he can get into his heart the gaiety and inspiration of the woods he will have gone far to undo the evil of his sketches. A spirit once well strung up to the con- cert-pitch of the primeval out-of-doors will hardly dare to finish a study and magniloquently ticket it a picture. The incommunicable thrill of things, that is the tuning- 190 FONTAINEBLEAU fork by which we test the flatness of our art. Here it is that Nature teaches and condemns, and still spurs up to further effort and new failure. Thus it is that she sets us blushing at our ignorant and tepid works ; and the more we find of these inspiring shocks the less shall we be apt to love the literal in our productions. In all sciences and senses the letter kills; and to-day, when cackling human geese express their ignorant condemnation of all studio pictures, it is a lesson most useful to be learnt. Let the young painter go to Fon- tainebleau, and while he stupefies himself with studies that teach him the mechanical side of his trade, let him walk in the great air, and be a servant of mirth, and not pick and botanise, but wait upon the moods of nature. So he will learn — or learn not to forget — the poetry of life and earth, which, when he has acquired his track, will save him from joyless reproduction. [1882.] i$\ IV. EPILOGUE TO '' AN INLAND VOYAGE"^ The country where they journeyed, that green, breezy valley of the Loing, is one very attractive to cheerful and solitary people. The weather was superb; all night it thundered and lightened, and the rain fell in sheets; by day, the heavens were cloudless, the sun fervent, the air vigorous and pure. They walked separate: the Cigarette plodding behind with some philosophy, the lean Arethusa posting on ahead. Thus each enjoyed his own reflections by the way ; each had perhaps time to tire of them before he met his comrade at the designated inn ; and the pleasures of society and solitude combined to fill the day. The Arethusa carried in his knapsack the works of Charles of Orleans, and employed some of the hours of travel in the concoction of English ron- dels. In this path, he must thus have preceded Mr. Lang, Mr. Dobson, Mr. Henley, and all contemporary roundeleers ; but for good reasons, he will be the last to publish the result. The Cigarette walked burthened with a volume of Michelet. And both these books, it will be seen, played a part in the subsequent adventure. The Arethusa was unwisely dressed. He is no pre- cisian in attire; but by all accounts, he was never so ill- 1 See An Inland Voyage, by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1878, 193 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE" inspired as on that tramp ; having set forth indeed, upon a moment's notice, from the most unfashionable spot in Europe, Barbizon. On his head, he wore a smoking- cap of Indian work, the gold lace pitifully frayed and tarnished. A flannel shirt of an agreeable dark hue, which the satirical called black ; a light tweed coat made by a good English tailor; ready-made cheap linen trou- sers and leathern gaiters completed his array. In person, he is exceptionally lean ; and his face is not like those of happier mortals, a certificate. For years he could not pass a frontier or visit a bank without suspicion ; the police everywhere, but in his native city, looked as- kance upon him; and (though I am sure it will not be credited) he is actually denied admittance to the casino of Monte Carlo. If you will imagine him, dressed as above, stooping under his knapsack, walking nearly five miles an hour with the folds of the ready-made trousers fluttering about his spindle shanks, and still looking eagerly round him as if in terror of pursuit — the figure, when realised, is far from reassuring. When Villon journeyed (perhaps by the same pleasant valley) to his exile at Roussillon, I wonder if he had not some- thing of the same appearance. Something of the same preoccupation he had beyond a doubt, for he too must have tinkered verses as he walked, with more success than his successor. And if he had anything like the same inspiring weather, the same nights of uproar, men in armour rolling and resounding down the stairs of heaven, the rain hissing on the village streets, the wild bull's-eye of the storm flashing all night long into the bare inn-chamber — the same sweet return of day, the same unfathomable blue of noon, the same high-col- 193 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE" oured, halcyon eves — and above all if he had anything like as good a comrade, anything like as keen a relish for what he saw, and what he ate, and the rivers that he bathed in, and the rubbish that he wrote, I would ex- change estates to-day with the poor exile, and count myself a gainer. But there was another point of similarity between the two journeys, for which the Arethusa was to pay dear: both were gone upon in days of incomplete security. It was not long after the Franco-Prussian war. Swiftly as men forget, that country-side was still alive with tales of uhlans, and outlying sentries, and hairbreadth 'scapes from the ignominious cord, and pleasant momentary friendships between invader and invaded. A year, at the most two years later, you might have tramped all that country over and not heard one anecdote. And a year or two later, you would — if you were a rather ill- looking young man in nondescript array — have gone your rounds in greater safety ; for along with more in- teresting matter, the Prussian spy would have some- what faded from men's imaginations. For all that, our voyager had got beyond Chateau Renard before he was conscious of arousing wonder. On the road between that place and Chatillon-sur-Loing, however, he encountered a rural postman ; they fell to- gether in talk, and spoke of a variety of subjects ; but through one and all, the postman was still visibly pre- occupied, and his eyes were faithful to the Arethusa's knapsack. At last, with mysterious roguishness, he inquired what it contained, and on being answered, shook his head with kindly incredulity. '' Non/' said he, "non, vous ave^ des portraits/ ' And then with a 194 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE" languishing appeal, "l^oyons, show me the portraits!" It was some little while before the Arethusa, with a shout of laughter, recognised his drift. By portraits he meant indecent photographs; and in the Arethusa, an austere and rising author, he thought to have identified a pornographic colporteur. When countryfolk in France have made up their minds as to a person's calling, ar- gument is fruitless. Along all the rest of the way, the postman piped and fluted meltingly to get a sight of the collection ; now he would upbraid, now he would rea- son — "'Foyons, I will tell nobody"; then he tried cor- ruption, and insisted on paying for a glass of wine; and, at last, when their ways separated — "Non/' said he, "ce n'est pas hien de voire part. O non, ce n*est pas Men." And shaking his head with quite a senti- mental sense of injury, he departed unrefreshed. On certain little difficulties encountered by the Are- thusa at Chatillon-sur-Loing, I have not space to dwell; another Chatillon, of grislier memory, looms too near at hand. But the next day, in a certain hamlet called La Jussiere, he stopped to drink a glass of syrup in a very poor, bare drinking shop. The hostess, a comely woman, suckling a child, examined the traveller with kindly and pitying eyes. " You are not of this depart- ment.^" she asked. The Arethusa told her he was English. *'Ah!" she said, surprised. *'We have no English. We have many Italians, however, and they do very well; they do not complain of the people of hereabouts. An Englishman may do very well also; it will be something new. " Here was a dark saying, over which the Arethusa pondered as he drank his grena- dine ; but when he rose and asked what was to pay, 195 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE" the light came upon him in a flash. "'O, pour voms/* replied the landlady, ** a halfpenny ! " Potir vous ? By heaven, she took him for a beggar! He paid his half- penny, feeling that it were ungracious to correct her. But when he was forth again upon the road, he became vexed in spirit. The conscience is no gentleman, he is a rabbinical fellow ; and his conscience told him he had stolen the syrup. That night the travellers slept in Gien; the next day they passed the river and set forth (severally, as their custom was) on a short stage through the green plain upon the Berry side, to Chatillon-sur-Loire. It was the first day of the shooting; and the air rang with the report of firearms and the admiring cries of sports- men. Overhead the birds were in consternation, wheel- ing in clouds, settling and re-arising. And yet with all this bustle on either hand, the road itself lay solitary. The Arethusa smoked a pipe beside a milestone, and I remember he laid down very exactly all he was to do at Chatillon : how he was to enjoy a cold plunge, to change his shirt, and to await the Cigarette's arrival, in sublime inaction, by the margin of the Loire. Fired by these ideas, he pushed the more rapidly forward, and came, early in the afternoon and in a breathing heat, to the entering-in of that ill-fated town. Childe Roland to the dark tower came. A polite gendarme threw his shadow on the path. " Monsieur est voyageur?" he asked. And the Arethusa, strong in his innocence, forgetful of his vile attire, replied — I had almost said with gaiety : '*So it would appear." *' His papers are in order } " said the gendarme. And 196 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE" when the Arethusa, with a slight change of voice, ad- mitted he had none, he was informed (politely enough) that he must appear before the Commissary. The Commissary sat at a table in his bedroom, stripped to the shirt and trousers, but still copiously perspiring; and when he turned upon the prisoner a large meaningless countenance, that was (like Bar- dolph's) " all whelks and bubuckles," the dullest might have been prepared for grief Here was a stupid man, sleepy with the heat and fretful at the interruption, whom neither appeal nor argument could reach. The Commissary. You have no papers ? The Arethusa. Not here. The Commissary. Why ? The Arethusa. I have left them behind in my valise. The Commissary. You know, however, that it is for- bidden to circulate without papers ? The Arethusa. Pardon me: I am convinced of the contrary. I am here on my rights as an English subject by international treaty. The Commissary {with scorn). You call yourself an Englishman ? The Arethusa. I do. The Commissary. Humph. — What is your trade ? The Arethusa. I am a Scotch Advocate. The Commissary (with siiigular annoyance). A Scotch advocate! Do you then pretend to support yourself by that in this department } The Arethusa modestly disclaimed the pretension. The Commissary had scored a point. The Commissary. Why, then, do you travel ? The Arethusa. I travel for pleasure. 197 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE" The Commissary {pointing to the knapsack, and with sublime incredulity). Avec ca ? l^oye^-vous, je suis un homme intelligent ! (With that? Look here, I am a person of intelligence! ) The culprit remaining silent under this home thrust, the Commissary relished his triumph for a while, and then demanded (like the postman, but with what dif- ferent expectations!) to see the contents of the knap- sack. And here the Arethusa, not yet sufficiently awake to his position, fell into a grave mistake. There was little or no furniture in the room except the Commis- sary's chair and table; and to facilitate matters, the Arethusa (with all the innocence on earth) leant the knapsack on a corner of the bed. The Commissary fairly bounded from his seat ; his face and neck flushed past purple, almost into blue; and he screamed to lay the desecrating object on the floor. The knapsack proved to contain a change of shirts, of shoes, of socks, and of linen trousers, a small dress- ing-case, a piece of soap in one of the shoes, two vol- umes of the Collection Jannet lettered Poesies de Charles d' Orleans, a map, and a version book containing divers notes in prose and the remarkable English roundels of the voyager, still to this day unpublished : the Commis- sary of Chatillon is the only living man who has clapped an eye on these artistic trifles. He turned the assort- ment over with a contumelious finger; it was plain from his daintiness that he regarded the Arethusa and all his belongings as the very temple of infection. Still there was nothing suspicious about the map, nothing really criminal except the roundels ; as for Charles of Orleans, to the ignorant mind of the prisoner, he seemed 198 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE" as good as a certificate ; and it was supposed the farce was nearly over. The inquisitor resumed his seat. The Commissary {after apause). Eh bienj'e vats vom dire ce que vom etes. Vous ites aUemand et vom vene^ chanter d la foire. (Well, then, I will tell you what you are. You are a German and have come to sing at the fair.) The Arethusa. Would you like to hear me sing ? I believe I could convince you of the contrary. The Commissary. Pas de plaisanterie, monsieur ! The Arethusa. Well, sir, oblige me at least by look- ing at this book. Here, I open it with my eyes shut. Read one of these songs — read this one — and tell me, you who are a man of intelligence, if it would be pos- sible to sing it at a fair ? The Commissary {critically). Mais out. Tres Men. The Arethusa. Comment, monsieur ! What! But you do not observe it is antique. It is difficult to under- stand, even for you and me; but for the audience at a fair, it would be meaningless. The Commissary {taking a pen). Enfin, il faut en finir. What is your name .^ The Arethusa {speaking with the swallowing vivacity of the English). Robert-Louis-Stev'ns'n. The Commissary {aghast). He! Quoi? The Arethusa {perceiving and improving his advan- tage). Rob'rt-Lou's-Stev'ns'n. The Commissary {after several conflicts with his pen). Eh Men, il faut se passer du nom. (^a ne s'icrit pas. (Well, we must do without the name: it is unspella- ble.) 199 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE" The above is a rough summary of this momentous conversation, in which I have been chiefly careful to preserve the plums of the Commissary ; but the remain- der of the scene, perhaps because of his rising anger, has left but little definite in the memory of the Arethusa. The Commissary was not, I think, a practised literary man ; no sooner, at least, had he taken pen in hand and embarked on the composition of the proces-verbal, than he became distinctly more uncivil and began to show a predilection for that simplest of all forms of repartee: "You lie! " Several times the Arethusa let it pass, and then suddenly flared up, refused to accept more insults or to answer further questions, defied the Commissary to do his worst, and promised him, if he did, that he should bitterly repent it. Perhaps if he had worn this proud front from the first, instead of beginning with a sense of entertainment and then going on to argue, the thing might have turned otherwise; for even at this eleventh hour the Commissary was visibly staggered. But it was too late ; he had been challenged ; the proces- verbal was begun; and he again squared his elbows over his writing, and the Arethusa was led forth a pris- oner. A step or two down the hot road stood the gendar- merie. Thither was our unfortunate conducted, and there he was bidden to empty forth the contents of his pockets. A handkerchief, a pen, a pencil, a pipe and tobacco, matches, and some ten francs of change : that was all. Not a file, not a cipher, not a scrap of writing whether to identify or to condemn. The very gendarme was appalled before such destitution. **I regret," he said, "that I arrested you, for I see 200 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE" that you are no vqyou/' And he promised him every indulgence. The Arethusa, thus encouraged, asked for his pipe. That he was told was impossible, but if he chewed, he might have some tobacco. He did not chew, however, and asked instead to have his handkerchief " Non/' said the gendarme. "" Nom avons eu des histoires de gens qui se sontpendus. ' ' (No, we have had histories of people who hanged themselves.) **What," cried the Arethusa. ''And is it for that you refuse me my handkerchief.? But see how much more easily I could hang myself in my trousers ! " The man was struck by the novelty of the idea ; but he stuck to his colours, and only continued to repeat vague offers of service. " At least," said the Arethusa, ''be sure that you ar- rest my comrade; he will follow me ere long on the same road, and you can tell him by the sack upon his shoulders." This promised, the prisoner was led round into the back court of the building, a cellar door was opened, he was motioned down the stair, and bolts grated and chains clanged behind his descending person. The philosophic and still more the imaginative mind is apt to suppose itself prepared for any mortal accident. Prison, among other ills, was one that had been often faced by the undaunted Arethusa. Even as he went down the stairs, he was telling himself that here was a famous occasion for a roundel, and that like the com- .mitted linnets of the tuneful cavalier, he too would , make his prison musical. I will tell the truth at once : . the roundel was never written, or it should be printed EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE" . in this place, to raise a smile. Two reasons interfered : the first moral, the second physical. It is one of the curiosities of human nature, that al- though all men are liars, they can none of them bear to be told so of themselves. To get and take the lie with equanimity is a stretch beyond the stoic ; and the Are- thusa, who had been surfeited upon that insult, was blazing inwardly with a white heat of smothered wrath. But the physical had also its part. The cellar in which he was confined was some feet underground, and it was only lighted by an unglazed, narrow aperture high up in the wall and smothered in the leaves of a green vine. The walls were of naked masonry, the floor of bare earth ; by way of furniture there was an earthenware basin, a water-jug, and a wooden bedstead with a blue- gray cloak for bedding. To be taken from the hot air of a summer's afternoon, the reverberation of the road and the stir of rapid exercise, and plunged into the gloom and damp of this receptacle for vagabonds, struck an instant chill upon the Arethusa's blood. Now see in how small a matter a hardship may consist: the floor was exceedingly uneven underfoot, with the very spade-marks, I suppose, of the labourers who dug the foundations of the barrack; and what with the poor twilight and the irregular surface, walking was impos- sible. The caged author resisted for a good while; but the chill of the place struck deeper and deeper; and at length, with such reluctance as you may fancy, he was driven to climb upon the bed and wrap himself in the public covering. There, then, he lay upon the verge of shivering, plunged in semi-darkness, wound in a garment whose touch he dreaded like the plague, and 202 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE" (In a Spirit far removed from resignation) telling the roll of the insults he had just received. These are not cir- cumstances favourable to the muse. Meantime (to look at the upper surface where the sun was still shining and the guns of sportsmen were still noisy through the tufted plain) the Cigarette was drawing near at his more philosophic pace. In those days of liberty and health he was the constant partner of the Arethusa, and had ample opportunity to share in that gentleman's disfavour with the police. Many a bitter bowl had he partaken of with that disastrous comrade. He was himself a man born to float easily through life, his face and manner artfully recommending him to all. There was but one suspicious circumstance he could not carry off, and that was his companion. He will not readily forget the Commissary in what is ironically called the free town of Frankfort-on-the-Main ; nor the Franco-Belgian frontier; nor the inn at La Fere; last, but not least, he is pretty certain to remember Chatillon-sur-Loire. At the town entry, the gendarme culled him like a wayside flower; and a moment later, two persons, in a high state of surprise, were confronted in the Commis- sary's office. For if the Cigarette was surprised to be arrested, the Commissary was no less taken aback by the appearance and appointments of his captive. Here was a man about whom there could be no mistake : a man of an unquestionable and unassailable manner, in apple- pie order, dressed not with neatness merely but elegance, ready with his passport, at a word, and well supplied with money : a man the Commissary would have doffed his hat to on chance upon the highway ; and this beau 203 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE" cavalier unblushingly claimed the Arethusa for his com- rade! The conclusion of the interview was foregone; of its humours, I remember only one. *' Baronet?" de- manded the magistrate, glancing up from the passport. '' Alors^ monsieur, voiis etes lefils d'un bar on} " And when the Cigarette (his one mistake throughout the in- terview) denied the soft impeachment, "Alors/' from the Commissary, '' ce n est pas voire passeport! " But these were ineffectual thunders; he never dreamed of laying hands upon the Cigarette ; presently he fell into a mood of unrestrained admiration, gloating over the contents of the knapsack, commending our friend's tailor. Ah, what an honoured guest was the Commis- sary entertaining! what suitable clothes he wore for the warm weather! what beautiful maps, what an attractive work of history he carried in his knapsack ! You are to understand there was now but one point of difference between them : what was to be done with the Arethusa } the Cigarette demanding his release, the Commissary still claiming him as the dungeon's own. Now it chanced that the Cigarette had passed some years of his life in Egypt, where he had made acquaintance with two very bad things, cholera morbus and pashas ; and in the eye of the Commissary, as he fingered the volume of Mi- chelet, it seemed to our traveller there was something Turkish. I pass over this lightly ; it is highly possible there was some misunderstanding, highly possible that the Commissary (charmed with his visitor) supposed the attraction to be mutual and took for an act of grow- ing friendship what the Cigarette himself regarded as a bribe. And at any rate, was there ever a bribe more singular than an odd volume of Michelet's history ? The ^04 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE" work was promised him for the morrow, before our departure; and presently after, either because he had his price, or to show that he was not the man to be be- hind in friendly offices — '"Eh hien/' he said, '' je sup- pose qu'il faut Idcher voire camarade." And he tore up that feast of humour, the unfinished proces-verbal. Ah, if he had only torn up instead the Arethusa's roun- dels! There were many works burnt at Alexandria, there are many treasured in the British Museum, that I could better spare than the proces-verbal of Chatillon. Poor bubuckled Commissary! I begin to be sorry that he never had his Michelet: perceiving in him fine human traits, a broad-based stupidity, a gusto in his magisterial functions, a taste for letters, a ready admiration for the admirable. And if he did not admire the Arethusa, he was not alone in that. To the imprisoned one, shivering under the public covering, there came suddenly a noise of bolts and chains. He sprang to his feet, ready to welcome a com- panion in calamity ; and instead of that, the door was flung wide, the friendly gendarme appeared above in the strong daylight, and with a magnificent gesture (being probably a student of the drama) — "Vous etes litre! " he said. None too soon for the Arethusa. I doubt if he had been half an hour imprisoned; but by the watch in a man's brain (which was the only watch he carried) he should have been eight times longer; and he passed forth with ecstasy up the cellar stairs into the healing warmth of the afternoon sun ; and the breath of the earth came as sweet as a cow's into his nostril; and he heard again (and could have laughed for pleasure) the concord of delicate noises that we call the hum of life. 005 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE" And here it might be thought that my history ended ; but not so, this was an act-drop and not the curtain. Upon what followed in front of the barrack, since there was a lady in the case, I scruple to expatiate. The wife of the Marechal-des-logis was a handsome woman, and yet the Arethusa was not sorry to be gone from her so- ciety. Something of her image, cool as a peach on that hot afternoon, still lingers in his memory : yet more of her conversation. " You have there a very fine par- lour," said the poor gentleman. — *' Ah," said Madame la Marechale (des-logis), "you are very well acquainted with such parlours ! " And you should have seen with what a hard and scornful eye she measured the vaga- bond before her! I do not think he ever hated the Com- missary ; but before that interview was at an end, he hated Madame la Marechale. His passion (as I am led to understand by one who was present) stood confessed in a burning eye, a pale cheek, and a trembling utter- ance; Madame meanwhile tasting the joys of the mata- dor, goading him with barbed words and staring him coldly down. It was certainly good to be away from this lady, and better still to sit down to an excellent dinner in the inn. Here, too, the despised travellers scraped acquaintance with their next neighbour, a gentleman of these parts, returned from the day's sport, who had the good taste to find pleasure in their society. The dinner at an end, the gentleman proposed the acquaintance should be ripened in the cafe. The caf6 was crowded with sportsmen conclamantly explaining to each other and the world the smallness of their bags. About the centre of the room, the Ciga- 206 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE" retteand the Arethusa sat with their new acquaintance; a trio very well pleased, for the travellers (after their late experience) were greedy of consideration, and their sportsman rejoiced in a pair of patient listeners. Sud- denly the glass door flew open with a crash ; the Mare- chal-des-logis appeared in the interval, gorgeously belted and befrogged, entered without salutation, strode up the room with a clang of spurs and weapons, and disap- peared through a door at the far end. Close at his heels followed the Arethusa's gendarme of the afternoon, im- itating, with a nice shade of difference, the imperial bearing of his chief ; only, as he passed, he struck lightly with his open hand on the shoulder of his late captive, and with that ringing, dramatic utterance of which he had the secret — " Suiveil " said he. The arrest of the members, the oath of the Tennis Court, the signing of the declaration of independence, Mark Antony's oration, all the brave scenes of history, I conceive as having been not unlike that evening in the cafe at Chatillon. Terror breathed upon the assembly. A moment later, when the Arethusa had followed his recaptors into the farther part of the house, the Ciga- rette found himself alone with his coffee in a ring of empty chairs and tables, all the lusty sportsmen huddled into corners, all their clamorous voices hushed in whis- pering, all their eyes shooting at him furtively as at a leper. And the Arethusa ? Well, he had a long, sometimes a trying, interview in the back kitchen. The Marechal- des-logis, who was a very handsome man, and I believe both intelligent and honest, had no clear opinion on the case. He thought the Commissary had done wrong, 307 EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE" but he did not wish to get his subordinates into trouble; and he proposed this, that, and the other, to all of which the Arethusa (with a growing sense of his position) demurred. "In short," suggested the Arethusa, "you want to wash your hands of further responsibility ? Well, then, let me go to Paris." The Marechal-des-logis looked at his watch. "You may leave," said he, "by the ten o'clock train for Paris." And at noon the next day the travellers were telling their misadventure in the dining-room at Siron's. 2g6 V. RANDOM MEMORIES I. THE COAST OF FIFE Many writers have vigorously described the pains of the first day or the first night at school; to a boy of any enterprise, I believe, they are more often agreeably exciting. Misery — or at least misery unrelieved — is confined to another period, to the days of suspense and the ** dreadful looking-for" of departure; when the old life is running to an end, and the new life, with its new interests, not yet begun ; and to the pain of an immi- nent parting, there is added the unrest of a state of con- scious pre-existence. The area-railings, the beloved shop-window, the smell of semi-suburban tanpits, the song of the church-bells upon a Sunday, the thin, high voices of compatriot children in a playing-field — what a sudden, what an overpowering pathos breathes to him from each familiar circumstance ! The assaults of sor- row come not from within, as it seems to him, but from without. ] was proud and glad to go to school; had I been let alone, I could have borne up like any hero; but there was around me, in all my native town, a conspir- acy of lamentation : " Poor little boy, he is going away — unkind little boy, he is going to leave us " ; so the un- spoken burthen followed me as 1 went, with yearning and reproach. And at length, one melancholy afternoon 209 RANDOM MEMORIES in the early autumn, and at a place where it seems to me, looking back, it must be always autumn and gen- erally Sunday, there came suddenly upon the face of all I saw — the long empty road, the lines of the tall houses, the church upon the hill, the woody hillside garden — a look of such a piercing sadness that my heart died; and seating myself on a door-step, I shed tears of mis- erable sympathy. A benevolent cat cumbered me the while with consolations — we two were alone in all that was visible of the London Road : two poor waifs who had each tasted sorrow — and she fawned upon the weeper, and gambolled for his entertainment, watching the effect, it seemed, with motherly eyes. For the sake of the cat, God bless her! I confessed at home the story of my weakness ; and so it comes about that I owed a certain journey, and the reader owes the present paper, to a cat in the London Road. It was judged, if I had thus brimmed over on the public high- way, some change of scene was (in the medical sense) indicated ; my father at the time was visiting the harbour lights of Scotland ; and it was decided he should take me along with him around a portion of the shores of Fife ; my first professional tour, my first journey in the complete character of man, without the help of petti- coats. The Kingdom of Fife (that royal province) may be observed by the curious on the map, occupying a tongue of land between the firths of Forth and Tay. It may be continually seen from many parts of Edinburgh (among the rest, from the windows of my father's house) dying away into the distance and the easterly haar with one smoky seaside town beyond another, or in winter print- RANDOM MEMORIES ing on the gray heaven some glittering hill-tops. It has no beauty to recommend it, being a low, sea-salted, wind-vexed promontory; trees very rare, except (as common on the east coast) along the dens of rivers ; the fields well cultivated, I understand, but not lovely to the eye. It is of the coast I speak : the interior may be the garden of Eden. History broods over that part of the world like the easterly haar. Even on the map, its long row of Gaelic place-names bear testimony to an old and settled race. Of these little towns, posted along the shore as close as sedges, each with its bit of harbour, its old weather-beaten church or public build- ing, its flavour of decayed prosperity and decaying fish, not one but has its legend, quaint or tragic : Dunferm- line, in whose royal towers the king may be still ob- served (in the ballad) drinking the blood-red wine; somnolent Inverkeithing, once the quarantine of Leith ; Aberdour, hard by the monastic islet of Inchcolm, hard by Donibristle where the "bonny face was spoiled"; Burntisland where, when Paul Jones was off the coast, the Reverend Mr. Shirra had a table carried between tide-marks, and publicly prayed against the rover at the pitch of his voice and his broad lowland dialect; King- horn, where Alexander "brak's neckbane" and left Scotland to the English wars; Kirkcaldy, where the witches once prevailed extremely and sank tall ships and honest mariners in the North Sea; Dysart, famous — well famous at least to me for the Dutch ships that lay in its harbour, painted like toys and with pots of flowers and cages of song-birds in the cabin windows, and for one particular Dutch skipper who would sit all day in slippers on the break of the poop, smoking a RANDOM MEMORIES long German pipe; Wemyss (pronounce Weems) with its bat-haunted caves, where the Chevalier Johnstone, on his flight from Culloden, passed a night of supersti- tious terrors ; Leven, a bald, quite modern place, sacred to summer visitors, whence there has gone but yester- day the tall figure and the white locks of the last En- glishman in Delhi, my uncle Dr. Balfour, who was still walking his hospital rounds, while the troopers from Meerut clattered and cried ' ' Deen, Deen " along the streets of the imperial city, and Willoughby mustered his hand- ful of heroes at the magazine, and the nameless brave one in the telegraph office was perhaps already finger- ing his last despatch; and just a little beyond Leven, Largo Law and the smoke of Largo town mounting about its feet, the town of Alexander Selkirk, better known under the name of Robinson Crusoe. So on, the list might be pursued (only for private reasons, which the reader will shortly have an opportunity to guess) by St. Monance, and Pittenweem, and the two Anstruthers, and Cellardyke, and Crail, where Primate Sharpe was once a humble and innocent country min- ister: on to the heel of the land, to Fife Ness, overlooked by a sea wood of matted elders and the quaint old man- sion of Balcomie, itself overlooking but the breach or the quiescence of the deep — the Carr Rock beacon ris- ing close in front, and as night draws in, the star of the Inchcape reef springing up on the one hand, and the star of the May Island on the other, and farther off yet a third and a greater on the craggy foreland of St. Abb's. And but a little way round the corner of the land, im- minent itself above the sea, stands the gem of the province and the light of mediaeval Scotland, St. An- RANDOM MEMORIES drews, where the great Cardinal Beaton held garrison against the world, and the second of the name and title perished (as you may read in Knox's jeering narrative) under the knives of true-blue Protestants, and to this day (after so many centuries) the current voice of the professor is not hushed. Here it was that my first tour of inspection began, early on a bleak easterly morning. There was a crash- ing run of sea upon the shore, 1 recollect, and my father and the man of the harbour light must sometimes raise their voices to be audible. Perhaps it is from this circumstance, that I always imagine St. Andrews to be an ineffectual seat of learning, and the sound of the east wind and the bursting surf to linger in its drowsy class- rooms and confound the utterance of the professor, until teacher and taught are alike drowned in oblivion, and only the sea-gull beats on the windows and the draught of the sea-air rustles in the pages of the open lecture. But upon all this, and the romance of St. Andrews in general, the reader must consult the works of Mr. An- drew Lang; who has written of it but the other day in his dainty prose and with his incommunicable humour, and long ago in one of his best poems, with grace, and local truth and a note of unaffected pathos. Mr. Lang knows all about the romance, 1 say, and the educational advantages, but I doubt if he had turned his attention to the harbour lights ; and it may be news even to him, that in the year 1863 their case was pitiable. Hanging about with the east wind humming in my teeth, and my hands (I make no doubt) in my pockets, I looked for the first time upon that tragi-comedy of the visiting engineer which I have seen so often re-enacted on a 213 RANDOM MEMORIES more important stage. Eighty years ago, I find my grandfather writing: *Mt is the most painful thing that can occur to me to have a correspondence of this kind with any of the keepers, and when I come to the Light House, instead of having the satisfaction to meet them with approbation and welcome their Family, it is dis- tressing when one is obliged to put on a most angry countenance and demeanour." This painful obligation has been hereditary in my race. I have myself, on a perfectly amateur and unauthorised inspection of Turn- berry Point, bent my brows upon the keeper on the question of storm-panes ; and felt a keen pang of self- reproach, when we went down stairs again and I found he was making a coffm for his infant child ; and then regained my equanimity with the thought that I had done the man a service, and when the proper inspector came, he would be readier with his panes. The human race is perhaps credited with more duplicity than it de- serves. The visitation of a lighthouse at least is a busi- ness of the most transparent nature. As soon as the boat grates on the shore, and the keepers step forward in their uniformed coats, the very slouch of the fellows' shoulders tells their story, and the engineer may begin at once to assume his ** angry countenance." Certainly the brass of the handrail will be clouded; and if the brass be not immaculate, certainly all will be to match — the reflectors scratched, the spare lamp unready, the storm-panes in the storehouse. If a light is not rather more than middling good, it will be radically bad. Medi- ocrity (except in literature) appears to be unattainable by man. But of course the unfortunate of St. Andrews was only an amateur, he was not in the Service, he had 314 RANDOM MEMORIES no uniform coat, he was (I believe) a plumber by his trade and stood (in the mediaeval phrase) quite out of the danger of my father; but he had a painful inter- view for all that, and perspired extremely. From St. Andrews, we drove over Magus Muir. My father had announced we were '*to post," and the phrase called up in my hopeful mind visions of top- boots and the pictures in Rowlandson's Dance of Death; but it was only a jingling cab that came to the inn door, such as I had driven in a thousand times at the low price of one shilling on the streets of Edinburgh. Be- yond this disappointment, I remember nothing of that drive. It is a road I have often travelled, and of not one of these journeys do I remember any single trait. The fact has not been suffered to encroach on the truth of the imagination. I still see Magus Muir two hundred years ago; a desert place, quite uninclosed; in the midst, the primate's carriage fleeing at the gallop; the assassins loose-reined in pursuit, Burley Balfour, pistol in hand, among the first. No scene of history has ever written itself so deeply on my mind; not because Balfour, that questionable zealot, was an ancestral cousin of my own; not because of the pleadings of the victim and his daughter; not even because ofthe live bum-bee that flew out of Sharpe's 'bacco-box, thus clearly indi- cating his complicity with Satan; nor merely because, as it was after all a crime of a fine religious flavour, it figured in Sunday books and afforded a grateful relief from Ministering Children or the Memoirs of Mrs. Katharine IVinslowe. The figure that always fixed my attention is that of Hackston of Rathillet, sitting in the saddle with his cloak about his mouth, and through all 215 RANDOM MEMORIES that long, bungling, vociferous hurly-burly, revolving privately a case of conscience. He would take no hand in the deed, because he had a private spite against the victim, and ''that action " must be sullied with no sug- gestion of a worldly motive; on the other hand, '* that action," in itself was highly justified, he had cast in his lot with " the actors," and he must stay there, inactive but publicly sharing the responsibility. *'You are a gentleman — you will protect me! " cried the wounded old man, crawling towards him. " I will never lay a hand on you," said Hackston, and put his cloak about his mouth. It is an old temptation with me, to pluck away that cloak and see the face — to open that bosom and to read the heart. With incomplete romances about Hackston, the drawers of my youth were lum- bered. I read him up in every printed book that I could lay my hands on. 1 even dug among the Wodrow manuscripts, sitting shame-faced in the very room where my hero had been tortured two centuries before, and keenly conscious of my youth in the midst of other and (as I fondly thought) more gifted students. All was vain : that he had passed a riotous nonage, that he was a zealot, that he twice displayed (compared with his grotesque companions) some tincture of soldierly reso- lution and even of military common sense, and that he figured memorably in the scene on Magus Muir, so much and no more could I make out. But whenever I cast my eyes backward, it is to see him like a landmark on the plains of history, sitting with his cloak about his mouth, inscrutable. How small a thing creates an im- mortality! I do not think he can have been a man en- tirely commonplace ; but had he not thrown his cloak 216 RANDOM MEMORIES about his mouth, or had the witnesses forgot to chroni- cle the action, he would not thus have haunted the imagination of my boyhood, and to-day he would scarce delay me for a paragraph. An incident, at once romantic and dramatic, which at once awakes the judg- ment and makes a picture for the eye, how little do we realise its perdurable power ! Perhaps no one does so but the author, just as none but he appreciates the influence of jingling words; so that he looks on upon life, with something of a covert smile, seeing people led by what they fancy to be thoughts and what are really the ac- customed artifices of his own trade, or roused by what they take to be principles and are really picturesque ef- fects. In a pleasant book about a school-class club, Colonel Fergusson has recently told a little anecdote. A "Philosophical Society" was formed by some Acad- emy boys — among them, Colonel Fergusson himself, Fleeming Jenkin, and Andrew Wilson, the Christian Buddhist and author of The Abode of Snow. Before these learned pundits, one member laid the following ingenious problem: "What would be the result of putting a pound of potassium in a pot of porter ? " "I should think there would be a number of interesting bi-products," said a smatterer at my elbow; but for me the tale itself has a bi-product, and stands as a type of much that is most human. For this inquirer who con- ceived himself to burn with a zeal entirely chemical, was really immersed in a design of a quite different nature; unconsciously to his own recently breeched intelligence, he was engaged in literature. Putting, pound, potas- sium, pot, porter; initial p, mediant t — that was his idea, poor little boy! So with politics and that which 217 RANDOM MEMORIES excites men in the present, so with history and that which rouses them in the past: there lie at the root of what appears, most serious unsuspected elements. The triple town of Anstruther Wester, Anstruther Easter, and Cellardyke, all three Royal Burghs — or two Royal Burghs and a less distinguished suburb, I forget which — lies continuously along the seaside, and boasts of either two or three separate parish churches, and either two or three separate harbours. These ambigui- ties are painful; but the fact is (although it argue me uncultured), 1 am but poorly posted upon Cellardyke. My business lay in the two Anstruthers. A tricklet of a stream divides them, spanned by a bridge; and over the bridge at the time of my knowledge, the celebrated Shell House stood outpost on the west. This had been the residence of an agreeable eccentric; during his fond tenancy, he had illustrated the outer walls, as high (if I remember rightly) as the roof, with elaborate patterns and pictures, and snatches of verse in the vein of exegi monumentum ; shells and pebbles, artfully contrasted and conjoined, had been his medium; and I like to think of him standing back upon the bridge, when all was finished, drinking in the general effect and (like Gibbon) already lamenting his employment. The same bridge saw another sight in the seven- teenth century. Mr. Thomson, the ''curat" of An- struther Easter, was a man highly obnoxious to the devout: in the first place, because he was a ** curat"; in the second place, because he was a person of irregular and scandalous life; and in the third place, because he was generally suspected of dealings with the Enemy of Man. These three disqualifications, in the popular lit- 218 RANDOM MEMORIES erature of the time, go hand in hand ; but the end of Mr. Thomson was a thing quite by itself, and in the proper phrase, a manifest judgment. Ke had been at a friend's house in Anstruther Wester, where (and else- where, I suspect,) he had partaken of the bottle; in- deed, to put the thing in our cold modern way, the reverend gentleman was on the brink of delirium tre- mens. It was a dark night, it seems; a little lassie came carrying a lantern to fetch the curate home ; and away they went down the street of Anstruther Wester, the lantern swinging a bit in the child's hand, the barred lustre tossing up and down along the front of slumber- ing houses, and Mr. Thomson not altogether steady on his legs nor (to all appearance) easy in his mind. The pair had reached the middle of the bridge when (as I conceive the scene) the poor tippler started in some base- less fear and looked behind him; the child, already shaken by the minister's strange behaviour, started also ; in so doing, she would jerk the lantern; and for the space of a moment the lights and the shadows would be all confounded. Then it was that to the unhinged toper and the twittering child, a huge bulk of blackness seemed to sweep down, to pass them close by as they stood upon the bridge, and to vanish on the farther side in the general darkness of the night. ''Plainly the devil came for Mr. Thomson!" thought the child. What Mr. Thomson thought himself, we have no ground of knowledge ; but he fell upon his knees in the midst of the bridge like a man praying. On the rest of the jour- ney to the manse, history is silent; but when they came to the door, the poor caitiff, taking the lantern from the child, looked upon her with so lost a countenance that 219 RANDOM MEMORIES her little courage died within her, and she fled home screaming to her parents. Not a soul would venture out; all that night, the minister dwelt alone with his terrors in the manse; and when the day dawned, and men made bold to go about the streets, they found the devil had come indeed for Mr. Thomson. This manse of Anstruther Easter has another and a more cheerful association. It was early in the morning, about a century before the days of Mr. Thomson, that his predecessor was called out of bed to welcome a Grandee of Spain, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, just landed in the harbour underneath. But sure there was never seen a more decayed grandee; sure there was never a duke welcomed from a stranger place of exile. Half-way between Orkney and Shetland, there lies a cer- tain isle; on the one hand the Atlantic, on the other the North Sea, bombard its pillared cliffs; sore-eyed, short-living, inbred fishers and their families herd in its few huts ; in the graveyard pieces of wreck-wood stand for monuments; there is nowhere a more inhospitable spot. Belle-Isle-en-Met — Fair-lsle-at-Sea — that is a name that has always rung in my mind's ear like music; but the only ''Fair Isle" on which I ever set my foot, was this unhomely, rugged turret-top of submarine sierras. Here, when his ship was broken, my lord Duke joyfully got ashore ; here for long months he and cer- tain of his men were harboured; and it was from this durance that he landed at last to be welcomed (as well as such a papist deserved, no doubt) by the godly in- cumbent of Anstruther Easter; and after the Fair Isle, what a fine city must that have appeared ! and after the island diet, what a hospitable spot the minister's table! 220 RANDOM MEMORIES And yet he must have lived on friendly terms with his outlandish hosts. For to this day there still survives a relic of the long winter evenings when the sailors of the great Armada crouched about the hearths of the Fair- Islanders, the planks of their own lost galleon perhaps lighting up the scene, and the gale and the surf that beat about the coast contributing their melancholy voices. All the folk of the north isles are great artificers of knit- ting: the Fair-Islanders alone dye their fabrics in the Spanish manner. To this day, gloves and nightcaps, innocently decorated, may be seen for sale in the Shet- land warehouse at Edinburgh, or on the Fair Isle itself in the catechist's house; and to this day, they tell the story of the Duke of Medina Sidonia's adventure. It would seem as if the Fair Isle had some attraction for '* persons of quality." When I landed there myself, an elderly gentleman, unshaved, poorly attired, his shoulders wrapped in a plaid, was seen walking to and fro, with a book in his hand, upon the beach. He paid no heed to our arrival, which we thought a strange thing in itself; but when one of the officers of the Pharos, passing narrowly by him, observed his book to be a Greek Testament, our wonder and interest took a higher flight. The catechist was cross-examined ; he said the gentleman had been put across some time before in Mr. Bruce of Sumburgh's schooner, the only link between the Fair Isle and the rest of the world; and that he held services and was doing "good." So much came glibly enough ; but when pressed a little farther, the catechist displayed embarrassment. A singular diffidence ap- peared upon his face: ''They tell me," said he, in low tones, ''that he's a lord." And a lord he was; a peer 2Stl RANDOM MEMORIES of the realm pacing that inhospitable beach with his Greek Testament, and his plaid about his shoulders, set upon doing good, as he understood it, worthy man! And his grandson, a good-looking little boy, much bet- ter dressed than the lordly evangelist, and speaking with a silken English accent very foreign to the scene, accom- panied me for a while in my exploration of the island. I suppose this little fellow is now my lord, and wonder how much he remembers of the Fair Isle. Perhaps not much ; for he seemed to accept very quietly his savage situation ; and under such guidance, it is like that this was not his first nor yet his last adventure. 223 VI. RANDOM MEMORIES II. THE EDUCATION OF AN ENGINEER Anstruther is a place sacred to the Muse; she in- spired (really to a considerable extent) Tennant's ver- nacular poem Anst'er Fair; and I have there waited upon her myself with much devotion. This was when I came as a young man to glean engineering experience from the building of the breakwater. What I gleaned, I am sure I do not know; but indeed I had already my own private determination to be an author; I loved the art of words and the appearances of life; and travellers, and headers, and rubble, and polished ashlar, and pierres per dues, and even the thrilling question of the string- course, interested me only (if they interested me at all) as properties for some possible romance or as words to add to my vocabulary. To grow a little catholic is the compensation of years; youth is one-eyed ; and in those days, though I haunted the breakwater by day, and even loved the place for the sake of the sunshine, the thrilling seaside air, the wash of waves on the sea-face, the green glimmer of the divers' helmets far below, and the musical chinking of the masons, my one genuine preoccupation lay elsewhere, and my only industry was in the hours when I was not on duty. I lodged with a certain Bailie Brown, a carpenter by trade; and there, 223 RANDOM MEMORIES as soon as dinner was despatched, in a chamber scented with dry rose-leaves, drew in my chair to the table and proceeded to pour forth literature, at such a speed, and with such intimations of early death and immortality, as I now look back upon with wonder. Then it was that I wrote Voces Fidelium, a series of dramatic monologues in verse; then that I indited the bulk of a covenanting novel — like so many others, never finished. Late I sat into the night, toiling (as I thought) under the very dart of death, toiling to leave a memory behind me. I feel moved to thrust aside the curtain of the years, to hail that poor feverish idiot, to bid him go to bed and clap Voces Fidelium on the fire before he goes ; so clear does he appear before me, sitting there between his candles in the rose-scented room and the late night; so ridiculous a picture (to my elderly wisdom) does the fool present! But he was driven to his bed at last without miraculous intervention; and the manner of his driving sets the last touch upon this eminently youthful business. The weather was then so warm that I must keep the win- dows open ; the night without was populous with moths. As the late darkness deepened, my literary tapers bea- coned forth more brightly ; thicker and thicker came the dusty night-fliers, to gyrate for one brilliant instant round the flame and fall in agonies upon my paper. Flesh and blood could not endure the spectacle; to capture immor- tality was doubtless a noble enterprise, but not to cap- ture it at such a cost of suffering; and out would go the candles, and off would I go to bed in the darkness, rag- ing to think that the blow might fall on the morrow, and there was Voces Fidelium still incomplete. Well, the moths are all gone, and Voces Fidelium along with 224 RANDOM MEMORIES them ; only the fool is still on hand and practises new follies. Only one thing in connection with the harbour tempted me, and that was the diving, an experience I burned to taste of. But this was not to be, at least in Anstruther ; and the subject involves a change of scene to the sub- arctic town of Wick. You can never have dwelt in a country more unsightly than that part of Caithness, the land faintly swelling, faintly falling, not a tree, not a hedgerow, the fields divided by single slate stones set upon their edge, the wind always singing in your ears and (down the long road that led nowhere) thrumming in the telegraph wires. Only as you approached the coast was there anything to stir the heart. The plateau broke down to the North Sea in formidable cliffs, the tall out-stacks rose like pillars ringed about with surf, the coves were over-brimmed with clamorous froth, the sea-birds screamed, the wind sang in the thyme on the cliff's edge ; here and there, small ancient castles toppled on the brim ; here and there, it was possible to dip into a dell of shelter, where you might lie and tell yourself you were a little warm, and hear (near at hand) the whin-pods bursting in the afternoon sun, and (farther off) the rumour of the turbulent sea. As for Wick it- self, it is one of the meanest of man's towns, and situate certainly on the baldest of God's bays. It lives for her- ring, and a strange sight it is to see (of an afternoon) the heights of Pulteney blackened by seaward-looking fishers, as when a city crowds to a review — or, as when bees have swarmed, the ground is horrible with lumps and clusters; and a strange sight, and a beautiful, to see the fleet put silently out against a rising moon, 235 RANDOM MEMORIES the sea-line rough as a wood with sails, and ever and again and one after another, a boat flitting swiftly by the silver disk. This mass of fishers, this great fleet of boats, is out of all proportion to the town itself; and the oars are manned and the nets hauled by immigrants from the Long Island (as we call the outer Hebrides), who come for that season only, and depart again, if **the take" be poor, leaving debts behind them. In a bad year, the end of the herring fishery is therefore an exciting time; fights are common, riots often possible ; an apple knocked from a child's hand was once the signal for something like a war; and even when I was there, a gunboat lay in the bay to assist the authorities. To contrary inter- ests, it should be observed, the curse of Babel is here added ; the Lews men are Gaelic speakers. Caithness has adopted English; an odd circumstance, if you reflect that both must be largely Norsemen by descent. I re- member seeing one of the strongest instances of this division: a thing like a Punch-and-Judy box erected on the flat grave-stones of the churchyard; from the hutch or proscenium — I know not what to call it — an eldritch- looking preacher laying down the law in Gaelic about some one of the name of Fowl, whom I at last divined to be the apostle to the Gentiles; a large congregation of the Lews men very devoutly listening; and on the outskirts of the crowd, some of the town's children (to whom the whole affair was Greek and Hebrew) pro- fanely playing tigg. The same descent, the same coun- try, the same narrow sect of the same religion, and all these bonds made very largely nugatory by an acci- dental difference of dialect! Into the bay of Wick stretched the dark length of the 226 RANDOM MEMORIES unfinished breakwater, in its cage of open staging; the travellers (like frames of churches) over-plumbing all; and away at the extreme end, the divers toiling unseen on the foundation. On a platform of loose planks, the assistants turned their air-mills ; a stone might be swing- ing between wind and water; underneath the swell ran gaily ; and from time to time, a mailed dragon with a window-glass snout came dripping up the ladder. Youth is a blessed season after all ; my stay at Wick was in the year of Voces Fidelium and the rose-leaf room at Bailie Brown's ; and already I did not care two straws for literary glory. Posthumous ambition perhaps re- quires an atmosphere of roses ; and the more rugged excitant of Wick east winds had made another boy of me. To go down in the diving-dress, that was my ab- sorbing fancy ; and with the countenance of a certain handsome scamp of a diver. Bob Bain by name, I grat- ified the whim. It was gray, harsh, easterly weather, the swell ran pretty high, and out in the open there were "skipper's daughters," when I found myself at last on the diver's platform, twenty pounds of lead upon each foot and my whole person swollen with ply and ply of woollen un- derclothing. One moment, the salt wind was whistling round my night-capped head; the next, I was crushed almost double under the weight of the helmet. As that intolerable burthen was laid upon me, I could have found it m my heart (only for shame's sake) to cry off from the whole enterprise. But it was too late. The attendants began to turn the hurdy-gurdy, and the air to whistle through the tube ; some one screwed in the barred win- dow of the vizor ; and I was cut off in a moment from my 227 RANDOM MEMORIES fellow-men ; standing there in their midst, but quite di- vorced from intercourse : a creature deaf and dumb, pa- thetically looking forth upon them from a climate of his own. Except that I could move and feel, I was like a man fallen in a catalepsy. But time was scarce given me to realise my isolation ; the weights were hung upon my back and breast, the signal rope was thrust into my unresisting hand ; and setting a twenty-pound foot upon the ladder, I began ponderously to descend. Some twenty rounds below the platform, twilight fell. Looking up, I saw a low green heaven mottled with vanishing bells of white; looking around, except for the weedy spokes and shafts of the ladder, nothing but a green gloaming, somewhat opaque but very rest- ful and delicious. Thirty rounds lower, I stepped off on the pierrcs per dues of the foundation ; a dumb helmeted figure took me by the hand, and made a gesture (as I read it) of encouragement; and looking in at the crea- ture's window, I beheld the face of Bain. There we were, hand to hand and (when it pleased us) eye to eye; and either might have burst himself with shouting, and not a whisper come to his companion's hearing. Each, in his own little world of air, stood incommunicably separate. Bob had told me ere this a little tale, a five minutes' drama at the bottom of the sea, which at that moment possibly shot across my mind. He was down with an- other, settling a stone of the sea-wall. They had it wefl adjusted. Bob gave the signal, the scissors were slipped, the stone set home; and it was time to turn to some- thing else. But still his companion remained bowed over the block like a mourner on a tomb, or only raised 228 RANDOM MEMORIES himself to make absurd contortions and mysterious signs unknown to the vocabulary of the diver. There, then, these two stood for awhile, like the dead and the living; till there flashed a fortunate thought into Bob's mind, and he stooped, peered through the window of that other world, and beheld the face of its inhabitant wet with streaming tears. Ah ! the man was in pain ! And Bob, glancing downward, saw what was the trou- ble : the block had been lowered on the foot of that un- fortunate — he was caught alive at the bottom of the sea under fifteen tons of rock. That two men should handle a stone so heavy, even swinging in the scissors, may appear strange to the in- expert. These must bear in mind the great density of the water of the sea, and the surprising results of trans- plantation to that medium. To understand a little what these are, and how a man's weight, so far from being an encumbrance, is the very ground of his agility, was the chief lesson of my submarine experience. The know- ledge came upon me by degrees. As I began to go forward with the hand of my estranged companion, a world of tumbled stones was visible, pillared with the weedy uprights of the staging : overhead, a flat roof of green : a little in front, the sea-wall, like an unfinished rampart. And presently in our upward progress, Bob motioned me to leap upon a stone; I looked to see if he were possibly in earnest, and he only signed to me the more imperiously. Now the block stood six feet high ; it would have been quite a leap to me unencum- bered ; with the breast and back weights, and the twenty pounds upon each foot, and the staggering load of the helmet, the thing was out of reason. I laughed aloud 229 RANDOM MEMORIES in my tomb ; and to prove to Bob how far he was astray, I gave a little impulse from my toes. Up I soared like a bird, my companion soaring at my side. As high as to the stone, and then higher, I pursued my impotent and empty flight. Even when the strong arm of Bob had checked my shoulders, my heels continued their ascent; so that I blew out sideways like an autumn leaf, and must be hauled in, hand over hand, as sailors haul in the slack of a sail, and propped upon my feet again like an intoxicated sparrow. Yet a little higher on the foundation, and we began to be affected by the bottom of the swell, running there like a strong breeze of wind. Or so I must suppose ; for, safe in my cushion of air, I was conscious of no impact; only swayed idly like a weed, and was now borne helplessly abroad, and now swiftly — and yet with dream-like gentleness — impelled against my guide. So does a child's balloon divagate upon the currents of the air, and touch and slide off again from every obstacle. So must have in- effectually swung, so resented their inefficiency, those light crowds that followed the Star of Hades, and uttered exiguous voices in the land beyond Cocytus. There was something strangely exasperating, as well as strangely wearying, in these uncommanded evolu- tions. It is bitter to return to infancy, to be supported, and directed, and perpetually set upon your feet, by the hand of someone else. The air besides, as it is supplied to you by the busy millers on the platform, closes the eustachian tubes and keeps the neophyte perpetually swallowing, till his throat is grown so dry that he can swallow no longer. And for all these reasons — although I had a fine, dizzy, muddle-headed joy in my surround- 230 RANDOM MEMORIES ings, and longed, and tried, and always failed, to lay hands on the fish that darted here and there about me, swift as humming-birds — yet I fancy I was rather re- lieved than otherwise when Bain brought me back to the ladder and signed to me to mount. And there was one more experience before me even then. Of a sud- den, my ascending head passed into the trough of a swell. Out of the green, 1 shot at once into a glory of rosy, almost of sanguine light — the multitudinous seas incarnadined, the heaven above a vault of crimson. And then the glory faded into the hard, ugly daylight of a Caithness autumn, with a low sky, a gray sea, and a whistling wind. Bob Bain had five shillings for his trouble, and I had done what I desired. It was one of the best things I got from my education as an engineer: of which how- ever, as a way of life, I wish to speak with sympathy. It takes a man into the open air; it keeps him hanging about harbour-sides, which is the richest form of idling ; it carries him to wild islands ; it gives him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea ; it supplies him with dexteri- ties to exercise ; it makes demands upon his ingenuity ; it will go far to cure him of any taste (if ever he had one) for the miserable life of cities. And when it has done so, it carries him back and shuts him in an office! From the roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with a memory full of ships, and seas, and perilous head- lands, and the shining pharos, he must apply his long- sighted eyes to the petty niceties of drawing, or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive figures. He is a wise youth, to be sure, who can bal- 231 RANDOM MEMORIES ance one part of genuine life against two parts of drudg- ery between four walls, and for the sake of the one, manfully accept the other. Wick was scarce an eligible place of stay. But how much better it was to hang in the cold wind upon the pier, to go down with Bob Bain among the roots of the staging, to be all day in a boat coiling a wet rope and shouting orders — not always very wise — than to be warm and dry, and dull, and dead-alive, in the most comfortable office. And Wick itself had in those days a note of originality. It may have still, but I misdoubt it much. The old minister of Keiss would not preach, in these degenerate times, for an hour and a half upon the clock. The gipsies must be gone from their caverns ; where you might see, from the mouth, the women tend- ing their fire, like Meg Merrilies, and the men sleeping" off their coarse potations ; and where in winter gales, the surf would beleaguer them closely, bursting in their very door. A traveller to-day upon the Thurso coach would scarce observe a little cloud of smoke among the moorlands, and be told, quite openly, it marked a pri- vate still. He would not indeed make that journey, for there is now no Thurso coach. And even if he could, one little thing that happened to me could never happen to him, or not with the same trenchancy of contrast. We had been upon the road all evening ; the coach- top was crowded with Lews fishers going home, scarce anything but Gaelic had sounded in my ears; and our way had lain throughout over a moorish country very northern to behold. Latish at night, though it was still broad day in our subarctic latitude, we came down upon the shores of the roaring Pentland Firth, that 232 RANDOM MEMORIES grave of mariners; on one hand, the cliffs of Dunnet Head ran seaward; in front was the little bare, white town of Castleton, its streets full of blowing sand; nothing beyond, but the North Islands, the great deep, and the perennial ice-fields of the Pole. And here, in the last imaginable place, there sprang up young out- landish voices and a chatter of some foreign speech ; and I saw, pursuing the coach with its load of Hebrid- ean fishers — as they had pursued vetturini up the passes of the Apennines or perhaps along the grotto under Virgil's tomb — two little dark-eyed, white-toothed Italian vagabonds, of twelve to fourteen years of age, one with a hurdy-gurdy, the other with a cage of white mice. The coach passed on, and their small Italian chatter died in the distance; and I was left to marvel how they had wandered into that country, and how they fared in it, and what they thought of it, and when (if ever) they should see again the silver wind-breaks run among the olives, and the stone-pine stand guard upon Etruscan sepulchres. Upon any American, the strangeness of this incident is somewhat lost. For as far back as he goes in his own land, he will find some alien camping there; the Cornish miner, the French or Mexican half-blood, the negro in the South, these are deep in the woods and far among the mountains. But in an old, cold, and rugged country such as mine, the days of immigration are long at an end; and away up there, which was at that time far beyond the northernmost extreme of railways, hard upon the shore of that ill-omened strait of whirlpools, in a land of moors where no stranger came, unless it should be a sportsman to shoot grouse or an antiquary 233 RANDOM MEMORIES to decipher runes, the presence of these small pedes- trians struck the mind as though a bird-of-paradise had risen from the heather or an albatross come fishing in the bay of Wick. They were as strange to their sur- roundings as my lordly evangelist or the old Spanish grandee on the Fair Isle. 234 VII. THE LANTERN-BEARERS These boys congregated every autumn about a certain easterly fisher-village, where they tasted in a high de- gree the glory of existence. The place was created seemingly on purpose for the diversion of young gen- tlemen. A street or two of houses, mostly red and many of them tiled ; a number of fine trees clustered about the manse and the kirkyard, and turning the chief street into a shady alley ; many little gardens more than usually bright with flowers ; nets a-drying, and fisher- wives scolding in the backward parts ; a smell of fish, a genial smell of seaweed ; whiffs of blowing sand at the street-corners; shops with golf-balls and bottled lollipops; another shop with penny pickwicks (that re- markable cigar) and the London Journal, dear to me for its startling pictures, and a few novels, dear for their suggestive names : such, as well as memory serves me, were the ingredients of the town. These, you are to conceive posted on a spit between two sandy bays, and sparsely flanked with villas — enough for the boys to lodge in with their subsidiary parents, not enough (not yet enough) to cocknify the scene : a haven in the rocks in front : in front of that, a file of gray islets : to the left, endless links and sand wreaths, a wilderness of hiding- 335 THE LANTERN-BEARERS holes, alive with popping rabbits and soaring gulls : to the right, a range of seaward crags, one rugged brow beyond another; the ruins of a mighty and ancient fortress on the brink of one; coves between — now charmed into sunshine quiet, now whistling with wind and clamorous with bursting surges; the dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thyme and southernwood, the air at the cliff's edge brisk and clean and pungent of the sea — in front of all, the Bass Rock, tilted seaward like a doubtful bather, the surf ringing it with white, the solan-geese hanging round its summit like a great and glittering smoke. This choice piece of seaboard was sacred, besides, to the wrecker; and the Bass, in the eye of fancy, still flew the colours of King James ; and in the ear of fancy the arches of Tantallon still rang with horseshoe iron, and echoed to the commands of Bell-the-Cat. There was nothing to mar your days, if you were a boy summering in that part, but the embarrassment of pleasure. You might golf if you wanted ; but I seem to have been better employed. You might secrete your- self in the Lady's Walk, a certain sunless dingle of el- ders, all mossed over by the damp as green as grass, and dotted here and there by the streamside with roof- less walls, the cold homes of anchorites. To fit them- selves for life, and with a special eye to acquire the art of smoking, it was even common for the boys to har- bour there; and you might have seen a single penny pickwick, honestly shared in lengths with a blunt knife, bestrew the glen with these apprentices. Again, you might join our fishing parties, where we sat perched as thick as solan-geese, a covey of little anglers, boy and 236 THE LANTERN-BEARERS girl, angling over each other's heads, to the much entan- glement of lines and loss of podleys and consequent shrill recrimination — shrill as the geese themselves. Indeed, had that been all, you might have done this often ; but though fishing be a fine pastime, the podley is scarce to be regarded as a dainty for the table ; and it was a point of honour that a boy should eat all that he had taken. Or again, you might climb the Law, where the whale's jawbone stood landmark in the buzzing wind, and behold the face of many counties, and the smoke and spires of many towns, and the sails of distant ships. You might bathe, now in the flaws of fine weather, that we pathetically call our summer, now in a gale of wind, with the sand scourging your bare hide, your clothes thrashing abroad from underneath their guar- dian stone, the froth of the great breakers casting you headlong ere it had drowned your knees. Or you might explore the tidal rocks, above all in the ebb of springs, when the very roots of the hills were for the nonce discovered; following my leader from one group to another, groping in slippery tangle for the wreck of ships, wading in pools after the abominable creatures of the sea, and ever with an eye cast backward on the march of the tide and the menaced line of your retreat. And then you might go Crusoeing, a word that covers all extempore eating in the open air: digging perhaps a house under the margin of the links, kindling a fire of the sea- ware, and cooking apples there — if they were truly apples, for I sometimes suppose the merchant must have played us off with some inferior and quite local fruit, capable of resolving, in the neighbourhood of fire, into mere sand and smoke and iodine; or per- 237 THE LANTERN-BEARERS haps pushing to Tantallon, you might lunch on sand- wiches and visions in the grassy court, while the wind hummed in the crumbling turrets; or clambering along the coast, eat geans^ (the worst, I must suppose, in Christendom) from an adventurous gean tree that had taken root under a cliff, where it was shaken with an ague of east wind, and silvered after gales with salt, and grew so foreign among its bleak surroundings that to eat of its produce was an adventure in itself. There are mingled some dismal memories with so many that were joyous. Of the fisher- wife, for instance, who had cut her throat at Canty Bay ; and of how I ran with the other children to the top of the Quadrant, and beheld a posse of silent people escorting a cart, and on the cart, bound in a chair, her throat bandaged, and the bandage all bloody — horror! — the fisher-wife herself, who continued thenceforth to hag-ride my thoughts, and even to-day (as I recall the scene) darkens daylight. She was lodged in the little old jail in the chief street; but whether or no she died there, with a wise terror of the worst, I never inquired. She had been tippling; it was but a dingy tragedy ; and it seems strange and hard that, after all these years, the poor crazy sinner should be still pilloried on her cart in the scrap-book of my memory. Nor shall I readily forget a certain house in the Quadrant where a visitor died, and a dark old wo- man continued to dwell alone with the dead body; nor how this old woman conceived a hatred to myself and one of my cousins, and in the dread hour of the dusk, as we were clambering on the garden-walls, opened a window in that house of mortality and cursed us in ^ 1 Wild cherries. 338 THE LANTERN-BEARERS shrill voice and with a marrowy choice of language. It was a pair of very colourless urchins that fled down the lane from this remarkable experience ! But I recall with a more doubtful sentiment, compounded out of fear and exultation, the coil of equinoctial tempests; trumpeting squalls, scouring flaws of rain; the boats with their reefed lugsails scudding for the harbour mouth, where danger lay, for it was hard to make when the wind had any east in it; the wives clustered with blowing shawls at the pier-head, where (if fate was against them) they might see boat and husband and sons — their whole wealth and their whole family — engulfed under their eyes ; and (what I saw but once) a troop of neighbours forcing such an unfortunate homeward, and she squall- ing and battling in their midst, a figure scarcely human, a tragic Maenad. These are things that I recall with interest ; but what my memory dwells upon the most, I have been all this while withholding. It was a sport peculiar to the place, and indeed to a week or so of our two months' holiday there. Maybe it still flourishes in its native spot; for boys and their pastimes are swayed by periodic forces inscrutable to man ; so that tops and marbles reappear in their due season, regular like the sun and moon; and the harmless art of knucklebones has seen the fall of the Roman empire and the rise of the United States. It may still flourish in its native spot, but nowhere else, I am persuaded ; for I tried myself to introduce it on Tweed- side, and was defeated lamentably; its charm being quite local, like a country wine that cannot be ex- ported. The idle manner of it was this: — 239 THE LANTERN-BEARERS Toward the end of September, when school-time was drawing near and the nights were already black, we would begin to sally from our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern. The thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of Great Britain ; and the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish their windows with our particular brand of luminary. We wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigour of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled noisomely of blistered tin ; they never burned aright, though they would always burn our fingers ; their use was naught ; the pleasure of them merely fanciful ; and yet a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing more. The fishermen used lanterns about their boats, and it was from them, I suppose, that we had got the hint; but theirs were not bull's-eyes, nor did we ever play at being fishermen. The police carried them at their belts, and we had plainly copied them in that ; yet we did not pretend to be policemen. Burglars, indeed, we may have had some haunting thoughts of ; and we had certainly an eye to past ages when lanterns were more common, and to certain story-books in which we had found them to figure very largely. But take it for all in all, the pleasure of the thing was sub- stantive; and to be a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat was good enough for us. When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious "Have you got your lantern.?" and a gratified *Yes!" That was the shibboleth, and very needful too ; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none could recognise a lantern-bearer, unless (like the 240 THE LANTERN-BEARERS pole-cat) by the smell. Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts above them — for the cabin was usually locked, or choose out some hollow of the links where the wind might whistle overhead. There the coats would be unbuttoned and the bull's-eyes discovered; and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge windy hall of the night, and cheered by a rich steam of toast- ing tinware, these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the cold sand of the links or on the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and delight themselves with inappropriate talk. Woe is me that I may not give some specimens — some of their foresights of life, or deep inquiries into the rudiments of man and nature, these were so fiery and so innocent, they were so richly silly, so romantically young. But the talk, at any rate, was but a condiment; and these gatherings themselves only accidents in the career of the lantern-bearer. The essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night; the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned; not a ray escaping, whether to conduct your footsteps or to make your glory public : a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your fool's heart, to know you had a bull's-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the knowledge. It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid. It may be contended, rather, that this (somewhat minor) bard in almost every case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor. Justice is not 241 THE LANTERN-BEARERS done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man's imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud; there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells delighted ; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will have some kind of a bull's-eye at his belt. It would be hard to pick out a career more cheerless than that of Dancer, the miser, as he figures in the '' Old Bailey Reports," a prey to the most sordid persecutions, the butt of his neighbourhood, betrayed by his hired man, his house beleaguered by the impish school-boy, and he himself grinding and fuming and impotently fleeing to the law against these pin-pricks. You marvel at first that any one should willingly prolong a life so destitute of charm and dignity; and then you call to memory that had he chosen, had he ceased to be a miser, he could have been freed at once from these trials, and might have built himself a castle and gone es- corted by a squadron. For the love of more recondite joys, which we cannot estimate, which, it may be, we should envy, the man had willingly foregone both com- fort and consideration. ** His mind to him a kingdom was " ; and sure enough, digging into that mind, which seems at first a dust-heap, we unearth some priceless jewels. For Dancer must have had the love of power and the disdain of using it, a noble character in itself; disdain of many pleasures, a chief part of what is com- monly called wisdom ; disdain of the inevitable end, that finest trait of mankind ; scorn of men's opinions, another element of virtue ; and at the back of all, a conscience just like yours and mine, whining like a cur, swindling like a thimble-rigger, but still pointing (there or thereabout) 242 THE LANTERN-BEARERS to some conventional standard. Here were a cabinet portrait to which Hawthorne perhaps had done justice; and yet not Hawthorne either, for he was mildly minded, and it lay not in him to create for us that throb of the miser's pulse, his fretful energy of gusto, his vast arms of ambition clutching in he knows not what : insatiable, insane, a god with a muck-rake. Thus, at least, look- ing in the bosom of the miser, consideration detects the poet in the full tide of life, with more, indeed, of the poetic fire than usually goes to epics ; and tracing that mean man about his cold hearth, and to and fro in his discom- fortable house, spies within him a blazing bonfire of delight. And so with others, who do not live by bread alone, but by some cherished and perhaps fantastic plea- sure; who are meat salesmen to the external eye, and possibly to themselves are Shakespeares, Napoleons, or Beethovens ; who have not one virtue to rub against an- other in the field of active life, and yet perhaps, in the life of contemplation, sit with the saints. We see them on the street, and we can count their buttons; but heaven knows in what they pride themselves ! heaven knows where they have set their treasure ! There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life : the fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself on his return a stranger at his con- vent gates ; for he had been absent fifty years, and of all his comrades there survived but one to recognise him. It is not only in the woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. He sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him and chuckles, and the days are moments. With no more apparatus than 245 THE LANTERN-BEARERS an ill-smelling lantern I have evoked him on the naked links. All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands : seeking for that bird and hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. And just a knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortu- nate hours in which the bird has sung to us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn the pages of the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we forget ; but of the note of that time-devouring nightingale we hear no news. The case of these writers of romance is most obscure. They have been boys and youths ; they have lingered outside the window of the beloved,, who was then most probably writing to some one else ; they have sat before a sheet of paper, and felt themselves mere continents of congested poetry, not one line of which would flow; they have walked alone in the woods, they have walked in cities under the countless lamps; they have been to sea, they have hated, they have feared, they have longed to knife a man, and maybe done it; the wild taste of life has stung their palate. Or, if you deny them all the rest, one pleasure at least they have tasted to the full — their books are there to prove it — the keen pleasure of successful literary composition. And yet they fill the globe with volumes, whose cleverness inspires me with despairing admiration, and whose consistent falsity to all I care to call existence, with despairing wrath. If I had no better hope than to continue to revolve among the dreary and petty businesses, and to be moved by the 244 THE LANTERN-BEARERS paltry hopes and fears with which they surround and animate their heroes, I declare I would die now. But there has never an hour of mine gone quite so dully yet; if it were spent waiting at a railway junction, I would have some scattering thoughts, I could count some grains of memory, compared to which the whole of one of these romances seems but dross. These writers would retort (if 1 take them properly) that this was very true ; that it was the same with them- selves and other persons of (what they call) the artistic temperament; that in this we were exceptional, and should apparently be ashamed of ourselves; but that our works must deal exclusively with (what they call) the average man, who was a prodigious dull fellow, and quite dead to all but the paltriest considerations. I ac- cept the issue. We can only know others by ourselves. The artistic temperament (a plague on the expression!) does not make us different from our fellow-men, or it would make us incapable of writing novels; and the average man (a murrain on the word ! ) is just like you and me, or he would not be average. It was Whitman who stamped a kind of Birmingham sacredness upon the latter phrase; but Whitman knew very well, and showed very nobly, that the average man was full of joys and full of a poetry of his own. And this harping on life's dulness and man's meanness is a loud profession of incomj?etence ; it is one of two things : the cry of the blind eye, / cannot see, or the complaint of the dumb tongue, / cannot utter. To draw a life without delights is to prove I have not realised it. To picture a man without some sort of poetry — well, it goes near to prove my case, for it shows an author may have little 245 THE LANTERN-BEARERS enough. To see Dancer only as a dirty, old, small- minded, impotently fuming man, in a dirty house, be- sieged by Harrow boys, and probably beset by small attorneys, is to show myself as keen an observer as . . . the Harrow boys. But these young gentlemen (with a more becoming modesty) were content to pluck Dancer by the coat-tails ; they did not suppose they had surprised his secret or could put him living in a book: and it is there my error would have lain. Or say that in the same romance — I continue to call these books romances, in the hope of giving pain — say that in the same romance, which now begins really to take shape, I should leave to speak of Dancer, and follow instead the Harrow boys; and say that I came on some such business as that of my lantern-bearers on the links; and described the boys as very cold, spat upon by flurries of rain, and drearily surrounded, all of which they were; and their talk as silly and indecent, which it certainly was. I might upon these lines, and had I Zola's genius, turn out, in a page or so, a gem of literary art, render the lantern-light with the touches of a master, and lay on the indecency with the ungrudging hand of love ; and when all was done, what a triumph would my pic- ture be of shallowness and dulness! how it would have missed the point! how it would have belied the boys! To the ear of the stenographer, the talk is merely silly and indecent; but ask the boys themselves, and they are discussing (as it is highly proper they should) the pos- sibilities of existence. To the eye of the observer they are wet and cold and drearily surrounded ; but ask them- selves, and they are in the heaven of a recondite pleasure, the ground of which is an ill-smelling lantern. 246 THE LANTERN-BEARERS III For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern, it may reside, like Dancer's, in the mys- terious inwards of psychology. It may consist with perpetual failure, and find exercise in the continued chase. It has so little bond with externals (such as the observer scribbles in his note-book) that it may even touch them not; and the man's true life, for which he consents to live, lie altogether in the field of fancy. The clergyman, in his spare hours, may be winning battles, the farmer sailing ships, the banker reaping triumph in the arts : all leading another life, plying another trade from that they chose; like the poet's housebuilder, who, after all is cased in stone, " By his fireside, as impotent fancy prompts, Rebuilds it to his liking,'' In such a case the poetry runs underground. The ob- server (poor soul, with his documents !) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb up after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven for which he lives. And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets : to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the 247 THE LANTERN-BEARERS actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lanterns, the scene upon the links is meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of re- alistic books. Hence, when we read the English realists, the incredulous wonder with which we observe the hero's constancy under the submerging tide of dulness, and how he bears up with his jibbing sweetheart, and endures the chatter of idiot girls, and stands by his whole unfeatured wilderness of an existence, instead of seeking relief in drink or foreign travel. Hence in the French, in that meat-market of middle-aged sensuality, the disgusted surprise with which we see the hero drift sidelong, and practically quite untempted, into every description of misconduct and dishonour. In each, we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colours of the sunset; each is true, each incon- ceivable ; for no man lives in the external truth, among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric cham- ber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied walls. Of this falsity we have had a recent example from a man who knows far better — Tolstoi's Powers of Dark- ness. Here is a piece full of force and truth, yet quite untrue. For before Mikita was led into so dire a situa- tion he was tempted, and temptations are beautiful at least in part; and a work which dwells on the ugliness of crime and gives no hint of any loveliness in the temp- tation, sins against the modesty of life, and even when THE LANTERN-BEARERS a Tolstoi writes it, sinks to melodrama. The peasants are not understood ; they saw their life in fairer colours ; even the deaf girl was clothed in poetry for Mikita, or he had never fallen. And so, once again, even an Old Bailey melodrama, without some brightness of poetry and lustre of existence, falls into the inconceivable and ranks with fairy tales. IV In nobler books we are moved with something like the emotions of life; and this emotion is very variously provoked. We are so moved when Levine labours in the field, when Andre sinks beyond emotion, when Richard Feverel and Lucy Desborough meet beside the river, when Antony, ''not cowardly, puts off his helmet," when Kent has infinite pity on the dying Lear, when, in Dostoieffsky's Despised and Rejected, the uncomplaining hero drains his cup of suffering and virtue. These are notes that please the great heart of man. Not only love, and the fields, and the bright face of danger, but sacri- fice and death and unmerited suffering humbly sup- ported, touch in us the vein of the poetic. We love to think of them, we long to try them, we are humbly hopeful that we may prove heroes also. We have heard, perhaps, too much of lesser matters. Here is the door, here is the open air. Itur in antiquam silvam. 249 VIII. A CHAPTER ON DREAMS The past is all of one texture — whether feigned or suffered — whether acted out in three dimensions, or only witnessed in that small theatre of the brain which we keep brightly lighted all night long, after the jets are down, and darkness and sleep reign undisturbed in the remainder of the body. There is no distinction on the face of our experiences ; one is vivid indeed, and one dull, and one pleasant, and another agonising to remem- ber; but which of them is what we call true, and which a dream, there is not one hair to prove. The past stands on a precarious footing; another straw split in the field of metaphysic, and behold us robbed of it. There is scarce a family that can count four generations but lays a claim to some dormant title or some castle and estate: a claim not prosecutable in any court of law, but flatter- ing to the fancy and a great alleviation of idle hours. A man's claim to his own past is yet less valid. A paper might turn up (in proper story-book fashion) in the se- cret drawer of an old ebony secretary, and restore your family to its ancient honours, and reinstate mine in a certain West Indian islet (not far from St. Kitt's, as be- loved tradition hummed in my young ears) which was once ours, and is now unjustly someone else's, and for 250 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS that matter (in the state of the sugar trade) is not worth anything to anybody. I do not say that these revolu- tions are likely ; only no man can deny that they are pos- sible ; and the past, on the other hand, is lost forever : our old days and deeds, our old selves, too, and the very world in which these scenes were acted, all brought down to the same faint residuum as a last night's dream, to some incontinuous images, and an echo in the cham- bers of the brain. Not an hour, not a mood, not a glance of the eye, can we revoke; it is all gone, past conjuring. And yet conceive us robbed of it, conceive that little thread of memory that we trail behind us broken at the pocket's edge; and in what naked nullity should we be left ! for we only guide ourselves, and only know our- selves, by these air-painted pictures of the past. Upon these grounds, there are some among us who claimed to have lived longer and more richly than their neighbours ; when they lay asleep they claim they were still active ; and among the treasures of memory that all men review for their amusement, these count in no sec- ond place the harvests of their dreams. There is one of this kind whom I have in my eye, and whose case is perhaps unusual enough to be described. He ^yas from a child an ardent and uncomfortable dreamer. When he had a touch of fever at night, and the room swelled and shrank, and his clothes, hanging on a nail, now loomed up instant to the bigness of a church, and now drew away into a horror of infinite distance and infinite little- ness, the poor soul was very well aware of what must follow, and struggled hard against the approaches of that slumber which was the beginning of sorrows. But his struggles were in vain ; sooner or later the night-hag 251 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS would have him by the throat, and pluck him, strangling and screaming, from his sleep. His dreams were at times commonplace enough, at times very strange : at times they were almost formless, he would be haunted, for instance, by nothing more definite than a certain hue of brown, which he did not mind in the least while he was awake, but feared and loathed while he was dream- ing; at times, again, they took on every detail of circum- stance, as when once he supposed he must swallow the populous world, and awoke screaming with the horror of the thought. The two chief troubles of his very nar- row existence — the practical and everyday trouble of school tasks and the ultimate and airy one of hell and judgment — were often confounded together into one appalling nightmare. He seemed to himself to stand before the Great White Throne; he was called on, poor little devil, to recite some form of words, on which his destiny depended; his tongue stuck, his memory was blank, hell gaped for him ; and he would awake, cling- ing to the curtain-rod with his knees to his chin. These were extremely poor experiences, on the whole ; and at that time of life my dreamer would have very willingly parted with his power of dreams. But pres- ently, in the course of his growth, the cries and phys- ical contortions passed away, seemingly forever; his visions were still for the most part miserable, but they were more constantly supported ; and he would awake with no more extreme symptom than a flying heart, a freezing scalp, cold sweats, and the speechless midnight fear. His dreams, too, as befitted a mind better stocked with particulars, became more circumstantial, and had more the air and continuity of life. The look of the 252 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS world beginning to take hold on his attention, scenery came to play a part in his sleeping as well as in his wak- ing thoughts, so that he would take long, uneventful journeys and see strange towns and beautiful places as he lay in bed. And, what is more significant, an odd taste that he had for the Georgian costume and for stories laid in that period of English history, began to rule the features of his dreams ; so that he masqueraded there in a three-cornered hat, and was much engaged with Jacobite conspiracy between the hour for bed and that for breakfast. About the same time, he began to read in his dreams — tales, for the most part, and for the most part after the manner of G. P. R. James, but so incredibly more vivid and moving than any printed book, that he has ever since been malcontent with literature. And then, while he was yet a student, there came to him a dream-adventure which he has no anxiety to re- peat; he began, that is to say, to dream in sequence and thus to lead a double life — one of the day, one of the night — one that he had every reason to believe was the true one, another that he had no means of proving to be false. I should have said he studied, or was by way of studying, at Edinburgh College, which (it may be supposed) was how 1 came to know him. Well, in his dream life, he passed a long day in the surgical thea- tre, his heart in his mouth, his teeth on edge, seeing monstrous malformations and the abhorred dexterity of surgeons. In a heavy, rainy, foggy evening he came forth into the South Bridge, turned up the High Street, and entered the door of a tall land, at the top of which he supposed himself to lodge. All night long, in his 253 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS wet clothes, he climbed the stairs, stair after stair in endless series, and at every second flight a flaring lamp with a reflector. All night long, he brushed by single persons passing downward — beggarly women of the street, great, weary, muddy labourers, poor scarecrows of men, pale parodies of women — but all drowsy and weary like himself, and all single, and all brushing against him as they passed. In the end, out of a north- ern window, he would see day beginning to whiten over the Firth, give up the ascent, turn to descend, and in a breath be back again upon the streets, in his wet clothes, in the wet, haggard dawn, trudging to another day of monstrosities and operations. Time went quicker in the life of dreams, some seven hours (as near as he can guess) to one; and it went, besides, more intensely, so that the gloom of these fancied experiences clouded the day, and he had not shaken off their shadow ere it was time to lie down and to renew them. I cannot tell how long it was that he endured this discipline ; but it was long enough to leave a great black blot upon his memory, long enough to send him, trembling for his reason, to the doors of a certain doctor; whereupon with a simple draught he was restored to the common lot of man. The poor gentleman has since been troubled by noth- ing of the sort; indeed, his nights were for some while like other men's, now blank, now chequered with dreams, and these sometimes charming, sometimes appalling, but except for an occasional vividness, of no extraordinary kind. I will just note one of these occa- sions, ere I pass on to what makes my dreamer truly interesting. It seemed to him that he was in the first ?54 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS floor of a rough hill-farm. The room showed some poor efforts at gentility, a carpet on the floor, a piano, I think, against the wall; but, for all these refinements, there was no mistaking he was in a moorland place, among hillside people, and set in miles of heather. He looked down from the window upon a bare farmyard, that seemed to have been long disused. A great, un- easy stillness lay upon the world. There was no sign of the farm-folk or of any live stock, save for an old, brown, curly dog of the retriever breed, who sat close in against the wall of the house and seemed to be dozing. Something about this dog disquieted the dreamer ; it was quite a nameless feeling, for the beast looked right enough — indeed, he was so old and dull and dusty and broken-down, that he should rather have awakened pity; and yet the conviction came and grew upon the dreamer that this was no proper dog at all, but some- thing hellish. A great many dozing summer flies hummed about the yard; and presently the dog thrust forth his paw, caught a fly in his open palm, carried it to his mouth like an ape, and looking suddenly up at the dreamer in the window, winked to him with one eye. The dream went on, it matters not how it went ; it was a good dream as dreams go ; but there was noth- ing in the sequel worthy of that devilish brown dog. And the point of interest for me lies partly in that very fact: that having found so singular an incident, my im- perfect dreamer should prove unable to carry the tale to a fit end and fall back on indescribable noises and in- discriminate horrors. It would be different now; he knows his business better! For, to approach at last the point : This honest fel- 255 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS low had long been in the custom of setting himself to sleep with tales, and so had his father before him ; but these were irresponsible inventions, told for the teller's pleasure, with no eye to the crass public or the thwart reviewer: tales where a thread might be dropped, or one adventure quitted for another, on fancy's least sug- gestion. So that the little people who manage man's internal theatre had not as yet received a very rigorous training; and played upon their stage like children who should have slipped into the house and found it empty, rather than like drilled actors performing a set piece to a huge hall of faces. But presently my dreamer began to turn his former amusement of story-telling to (what is called) account; by which I mean that he began to write and sell his tales. Here was he, and here were the little people who did that part of his business, in quite new conditions. The stories must now be trimmed and pared and set upon all fours, they must run from a be- ginning to an end and fit (after a manner) with the laws of life; the pleasure, in one word, had become a business ; and that not only for the dreamer, but for the little people of his theatre. These understood the change as well as he. When he lay down to prepare himself for sleep, he no longer sought amusement, but printable and profitable tales ; and after he had dozed off in his box- seat, his little people continued their evolutions with the same mercantile designs. All other forms of dream de- serted him but two : he still occasionally reads the most delightful books, he still visits at times the most delight- ful places ; and it is perhaps worthy of note that to these same places, and to one in particular, he returns at inter- vals of months and years, finding new field-paths, vis- 256 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS iting new neighbours, beholding that happy valley under new effects of noon and dawn and sunset. But all the rest of the family of visions is quite lost to him : the com- mon, mangled version of yesterday's affairs, the raw- head-and-bloody-bones nightmare, rumoured to be the child of toasted cheese — these and their like are gone; and, for the most part, whether awake or asleep, he is simply occupied — he or his little people — in consciously making stories for the market. This dreamer (like many other persons) has encountered some trifling vicissitudes of fortune. When the bank begins to send letters and the butcher to linger at the back gate, he sets to be- labouring his brains after a story, for that is his readiest money-winner; and, behold! at once the little people begin to bestir themselves in the same quest, and labour all night long, and all night long set before him trun- cheons of tales upon their lighted theatre. No fear of his being frightened now ; the flying heart and the frozen scalp are things bygone ; applause, growing applause, growing interest, growing exultation in his own clev- erness (for he takes all the credit), and at last a jubilant leap to wakefulness, with the cry, *'I have it, that'll do! " upon his lips: with such and similar emotions he sits at these nocturnal dramas, with such outbreaks, like Claudius in the play, he scatters the performance in the midst. Often enough the waking is a disappointment: he has been too deep asleep, as I explain the thing; drowsiness has gained his little people, they have gone stumbling and maundering through their parts; and the play, to the awakened mind, is seen to be a tissue of ab- surdities. And yet how often have these sleepless Brownies done him honest service, and given him, as he 257 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS sat idly taking his pleasure in the boxes, better tales than he could fashion for himself Here is one, exactly as it came to him. It seemed he was the son of a very rich and wicked man, the owner of broad acres and a most damnable temper. The dreamer (and that was the son) had lived much abroad, on purpose to avoid his parent; and when at length he returned to England, it was to find him married again to a young wife, who was supposed to suffer cruelly and to loathe her yoke. Because of this marriage (as the dreamer indistinctly understood) it was desirable for father and son to have a meeting ; and yet both being proud and both angry, neither would condescend upon a visit. Meet they did accordingly, in a desolate, sandy country by the sea ; and there they quarrelled, and the son, stung by some intolerable insult, struck down the father dead. No suspicion was aroused; the dead man was found and buried, and the dreamer succeeded to the broad estates, and found himself installed under the same roof with his father's widow, for whom no pro- vision had been made. These two lived very much alone, as people may after a bereavement, sat down to table together, shared the long evenings, and grew daily better friends; until it seemed to him of a sudden that she was prying about dangerous matters, that she had conceived a notion of his guilt, that she watched him and tried him with questions. He drew back from her company as men draw back from a precipice suddenly discovered; and yet so strong was the attraction that he would drift again and again into the old intimacy, and again and again be startled back by some sugges- tive question or some inexplicable meaning in her 258 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS eye. So they lived at cross purposes, a life full of broken dialogue, challenging glances, and suppressed passion; until, one day, he saw the woman slipping from the house in a veil, followed her to the station, followed her in the train to the seaside country, and out over the sandhills to the very place where the murder was done. There she began to grope among the bents, he watching her, flat upon his face; and presently she had something in her hand — 1 cannot remember what it was, but it was deadly evidence against the dreamer — and as she held it up to look at it, perhaps from the shock of the discovery, her foot slipped, and she hung at some peril on the brink of the tall sand-wreaths. He had no thought but to spring up and rescue her; and there they stood face to face, she with that deadly matter openly in her hand — his very presence on the spot another link of proof. It was plain she was about to speak, but this was more than he could bear — he could bear to be lost, but not to talk of it with his destroyer; and he cut her short with trivial conversation. Arm in arm, they returned together to the train, talking he knew not what, made the journey back in the same carriage, sat down to dinner, and passed the evening in the drawing-room as in the past. But suspense and fear drummed in the dreamer's bosom. **She has not denounced me yet" — so his thoughts ran — "when will she denounce me? Will it be to- morrow.^" And it was not to-morfow, nor the next day, nor the next; and their life settled back on the old terms, only that she seemed kinder than before, and that, as for him, the burthen of his suspense and won- der grew daily more unbearable, so that he wasted 259 A CHAPTER ON DREaMS away like a man with a disease. Once, indeed, he broke all bounds of decency, seized an occasion when she was abroad, ransacked her room, and at last, hidden away among her jewels, found the damning evidence. There he stood, holding this thing, which was his life, in the hollow of his hand, and marvelling at her incon- sequent behaviour, that she should seek, and keep, and yet not use it; and then the door opened, and behold herself. So, once more, they stood, eye to eye, with the evidence between them ; and once more she raised to him a face brimming with some communication ; and once more he shied away from speech and cut her off. But before he left the room, which he had turned upside down, he laid back his death-warrant where he had found it; and at that, her face lighted up. The next thing he heard, she was explaining to her maid, with some ingenious falsehood, the disorder of her things. Flesh and blood could bear the strain no longer; and I think it was the next morning (though chronology is always hazy in the theatre of the mind) that he burst from his reserve. They had been breakfasting together in one corner of a great, parqueted, sparely-furnished room of many windows ; all the time of the meal she had tortured him with sly allusions; and no sooner were the servants gone, and these two protagonists alone together, than he leaped to his feet. She too sprang up, with a pale face ; with a pale face, she heard him as he raved out his complaint: Why did she torture him so ? she knew all, she knew he was no enemy to her; why did she not denounce him at once.? what sig- nified her whole behaviour ? why did she torture him ? and yet again, why did she torture him ? And when he 260 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS had done, she fell upon her knees, and with outstretched hands: **Do you not understand?" she cried. **I love you!" Hereupon, with a pang of wonder and mercantile de- light, the dreamer awoke. His mercantile delight was not of long endurance; for it soon became plain that in this spirited tale there were unmarketable elements; which is just the reason why you have it here so briefly told. But his wonder has still kept growing; and I think the reader's will also, if he consider it ripely. For now he sees why I speak of the little people as of sub- stantive inventors and performers. To the end they had kept their secret. I will go bail for the dreamer (having excellent grounds for valuing his candour) that he had no guess whatever at the motive of the woman — the hinge of the whole well-invented plot — until the instant of that highly dramatic declaration. It was not his tale; it was the little people's! And observe: not only was the secret kept, the story was told with really guileful craftsmanship. The conduct of both actors is (in the cant phrase) psychologically correct, and the emotion aptly graduated up to the surprising climax. I am awake now, and I know this trade ; and yet I can- not better it. I am awake, and I live by this business ; and yet I could not outdo — could not perhaps equal — that crafty artifice (as of some old, experienced carpen- ter of plays, some Dennery or Sardou) by which the same situation is twice presented and the two actors twice brought face to face over the evidence, only once it is in her hand, once in his — and these in their due order, the least dramatic first. The more I think of it, the more I am moved to press upon the world my ques- 261 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS tion : Who are the Little People ? They are near con- nections of the dreamer's, beyond doubt; they share in his financial worries and have an eye to the bank- book; they share plainly in his training; they have plainly learned like him to build the scheme of a con- siderate story and to arrange emotion in progressive order; only I think they have more talent; and one thing is beyond doubt, they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial, and keep him all the while in ig- norance of where they aim. Who are they, then ? and who is the dreamer ? Well, as regards the dreamer, I can answer that, for he is no less a person than myself; — as I might have told you from the beginning, only that the critics mur- mur over my consistent egotism; — and as I am posi- tively forced to tell you now, or I could advance but little farther with my story. And for the Little People, what shall I say they are but just my Brownies, God bless them ! who do one-half my work for me while I am fast asleep, and in all human likelihood, do the rest for me as well, when I am wide awake and fondly sup- pose I do it for myself That part which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies' part beyond contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even then. Here is a doubt that much concerns my conscience. For myself — what I call I, my conscience ego, the denizen of the pineal gland unless he has changed his residence since Des- cartes, the man with the conscience and the variable bank-account, the man with the hat and the boots, and the privilege of voting and not carrying his candidate at 262 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS the general elections — I am sometimes tempted to sup- pose he is no story-teller at all, but a creature as matter of fact as any cheesemonger or any cheese, and a realist bemired up to the ears in actuality ; so that, by that ac- count, the whole of my published fiction should be the single-handed product of some Brownie, some Familiar, some unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked in a back garret, while I get all the praise and he but a share (which I cannot prevent him getting) of the pudding. I am an excellent adviser, something like Moliere's ser- vant; I pull back and I cut down ; and I dress the whole in the best words and sentences that I can find and make ; I hold the pen, too; and I do the sitting at the table, which is about the worst of it; and when all is done, I make up the manuscript and pay for the registration ; so that, on the whole, I have some claim to share, though not so largely as I do, in the profits of our common en- terprise. I can but give an instance or so of what part is done sleeping and what part awake, and leave the reader to share what laurels there are, at his own nod, between myself and my collaborators; and to do this I will first take a book that a number of persons have been polite enough to read, the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr, Hyde. I had long been trying to write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of man's double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking crea- ture. I had even written one, The Travelling Compan- ion, which was returned by an editor on the plea that it was a work of genius and indecent, and which I burned the other day on the ground that it was not a work of 263 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS genius, and that Jekyll had supplanted it. Then came one of those financial fluctuations to which (with an elegant modesty) I have hitherto referred in the third person. For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night 1 dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterwards split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers. All the rest was made awake, and consciously, although I think I can trace in much of it the manner of my Brownies. The meaning of the tale is therefore mine, and had long pre-existed in my gar- den of Adonis, and tried one body after another in vain ; indeed, 1 do most of the morality, worse luck ! and my Brownies have not a rudiment of what we call a conscience. Mine, too, is the setting, mine the char- acters. All that was given me was the matter of three scenes, and the central idea of a voluntary change be- coming involuntary. Will it be thought ungenerous, after I have been so liberally ladling out praise to my un- seen collaborators, if 1 here toss them over, bound hand and foot, into the arena of the critics } For the business of the powders, which so many have censured, is, I am relieved to say, not mine at all but the Brownies'. Of another tale, in case the reader should have glanced at it, I may say a word : the not very defensible story of Olalla. Here the court, the mother, the mother's niche, Olalla, Olalla's chamber, the meetings on the stair, the broken window, the ugly scene of the bite, were all given me in bulk and detail as I have tried to write them ; to this I added only the external scenery (for in my dream I never was beyond the court), the portrait, the characters 264 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS of Felipe and the priest, the moral, such as it is, and the last pages, such as, alas ! they are. And I may even say that in this case the moral itself was given me ; for it arose immediately on a comparison of the mother and the daughter, and from the hideous trick of atavism in the first. Sometimes a parabolic sense is still more un- deniably present in a dream; sometimes I cannot but suppose my Brownies have been aping Bunyan, and yet in no case with what would possibly be called a moral in a tract; never with the ethical narrowness; conveying hints instead of life's larger limitations and that sort of sense which we seem to perceive in the ara- besque of time and space. For the most part, it will be seen, my Brownies are somewhat fantastic, like their stories hot and hot, full of passion and the picturesque, alive with animating in- cident; and they have no prejudice against the super- natural. But the other day they gave me a surprise, entertaining me with a love-story, a little April comedy, which I ought certainly to hand over to the author of A Chance Acquaintance, for he could write it as it should be written, and I am sure (although I mean to try) that I cannot. — But who would have supposed that a Brownie of mine should invent a tale for Mr. Howells ? :i65 IX. BEGGARS In a pleasant, airy, up-hill country, it was my fortune when I was young to make the acquaintance of a cer- tain beggar. I call him beggar, though he usually al- lowed his coat and his shoes (which were open-mouthed, indeed) to beg for him. He was the wreck of an ath- letic man, tall, gaunt, and bronzed; far gone in con- sumption, with that disquieting smile of the mortally stricken on hij face ; but still active afoot, still with the brisk military carriage, the ready military salute. Three ways led through this piece of country; and as I was inconstant in my choice, I believe he must often have awaited me in vain. But often enough, he caught me; often enough, from some place of ambush by the road- side, he would spring suddenly forth in the regulation attitude, and launching at once into his inconsequential talk, fall into step with me upon my farther course. ''A fine morning, sir, though perhaps a trifle inclining to rain. I hope I see you well, sir. Why, no, sir, I don't feel as hearty myself as I could wish, but I am keeping about my ordinary. I am pleased to meet you on the road, sir. I assure you I quite look forward to one of our little conversations." He loved the sound of his ^66 BEGGARS own voice inordinately, and though (with something too off-hand to call servility) he would always hasten to agree with anything you said, yet he could never suffer you to say it to an end. By what transition he slid to his favourite subject I have no memory; but we had never been long together on the way before he was dealing, in a very military manner, with the English poets. "Shelley was a fine poet, sir, though a trifle atheistical in his opinions. His Queen Mab, sir, is quite an atheistical work. Scott, sir, is not so poetical a writer. With the works of Shakespeare I am not so well acquainted, but he was a fine poet. Keats — John Keats, sir — he was a very fine poet." With such ref- erences, such trivial criticism, such loving parade of his own knowledge, he would beguile the road, striding forward up-hill, his staff now clapped to the ribs of his deep, resonant chest, now swinging in the air with the remembered jauntiness of the private soldier; and all the while his toes looking out of his boots, and his shirt looking out of his elbows, and death looking out of his smile, and his big, crazy frame shaken by accesses of cough. He would often go the whole way home with me : often to borrow a book, and that book always a poet. Off he would march, to continue his mendicant rounds, with the volume slipped into the pocket of his ragged coat; and although he would sometimes keep it quite a while, yet it came always back again at last, not much the worse for its travels into beggardom. And in this way, doubtless, his knowledge grew and his glib, random criticism took a wider range. But my library was not the first he had drawn upon : at our first en- BEGGARS counter, he was already brimful of Shelley and the athe- istical Queen Mab, and ** Keats — John Keats, sir." And I have often wondered how he came by these acquire- ments; just as I often wondered how he fell to be a beggar. He had served through the Mutiny — of which (like so many people) he could tell practically nothing beyond the names of places, and that it was ''difficult work, sir," and very hot, or that so-and-so was "a. very fme commander, sir." He was far too smart a man to have remained a private; in the nature of things, he must have won his stripes. And yet here he was without a pension. When I touched on this problem, he would content himself with diffidently offering me advice. *' A man should be very careful when he is young, sir. If you'll excuse me saying so, a spirited young gentle- man like yourself, sir, should be very careful. I was perhaps a trifle inclined to atheistical opinions myself." For (perhaps with a deeper wisdom than we are in- clined in these days to admit) he plainly bracketed ag- nosticism with beer and skittles. Keats — John Keats, sir, — and Shelley were his fa- vourite bards. I cannot remember if I tried him with Rossetti; but I know his taste to a hair, and if ever I did, he must have doted on that author. What took him was a richness in the speech; he loved the exotic, the unexpected word; the moving cadence of a phrase; a vague sense of emotion (about nothing) in the very let- ters of the alphabet: the romance of language. His honest head was very nearly empty, his intellect like a child's; and when he read his favourite authors, he can almost never have understood what he was reading. Yet the taste was not only genuine, it was exclusive ; I 268 BEGGARS tried in vain to offer him novels ; he would none of them ; he cared for nothing but romantic language that he could not understand. The case may be commoner than we suppose. I am reminded of a lad who was laid in the next cot to a friend of mine in a public hos- pital, and who was no sooner installed than he sent out (perhaps with his last pence) for a cheap Shakespeare. My friend pricked up his ears ; fell at once in talk with his new neighbour, and was ready, when the book ar- rived, to make a singular discovery. For this lover of great literature understood not one sentence out of twelve, and his favourite part was that of which he un- derstood the least — the inimitable, mouth-filling rodo- montade of the ghost in Hamlet. It was a bright day in hospital when my friend expounded the sense of this be- loved jargon : a task for which I am willing to believe my friend was very fit, though I can never regard it as an easy one. I know indeed a point or two, on which I would gladly question Mr. Shakespeare, that lover of big words, could he revisit the glimpses of the moon, or could I myself climb backward to the spacious days of Elizabeth. But in the second case, 1 should most likely pretermit these questionings, and take my place instead in the pit at the Blackfriars, to hear the actor in his favourite part, playing up to Mr. Burbage, and rolling out — as I seem to hear him — with a ponderous gusto — " Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd." What a pleasant chance, if we could go there in a party ! and what a surprise for Mr. Burbage, when the ghost received the honours of the evening! 269 BEGGARS As for my old soldier, like Mr. Burbage and Mr. Shakespeare, he is long since dead ; and now lies buried, I suppose, and nameless and quite forgotten, in some poor city graveyard. — But not for me, you brave heart, have you been buried! For me, you are still afoot, tasting the sun and air, and striding southward. By the groves of Comiston and beside the Hermitage of Braid, by the Hunters' Tryst, and where the curlews and plovers cry around Fairmilehead, I see and hear you, stalwartly carrying your deadly sickness, cheer- fully discoursing of uncomprehended poets. The thought of the old soldier recalls that of another tramp, his counterpart. This was a little, lean, and fiery man, with the eyes of a dog and the face of a gipsy; whom I found one morning encamped with his wife and children and his grinder's wheel, beside the burn of Kinnaird. To this beloved dell 1 went, at that time, daily ; and daily the knife-grinder and I (for as long as his tent continued pleasantly to interrupt my little wilderness) sat on two stones, and smoked, and plucked grass, and talked to the tune of the brown water. His children were mere whelps, they fought and bit among the fern like vermin. His wife was a mere squaw ; I saw her gather brush and tend the kettle, but she never ventured to address her lord while I was present. The tent was a mere gipsy hovel, like a sty for pigs. But the grinder himself had the fine self-sufficiency and grave politeness of the hunter and the savage; he did me the honours of this dell, which had been mine but 230 BEGGARS the day before, took me far into the secrets of his life, and used me (I am proud to remember) as a friend. Like my old soldier, he was far gone in the national complaint. Unlike him, he had a vulgar taste in letters ; scarce flying higher than the story papers; probably finding no difference, certainly seeking none, between Tannahill and Burns; his noblest thoughts, whether of poetry or music, adequately embodied in that some- what obvious ditty, " Will ye gang, lassie, gang To the braes o' Balquidder: " — which is indeed apt to echo in the ears of Scottish children, and to him, in view of his experience, must have found a special directness of address. But if he had no fine sense of poetry in letters, he felt with a deep joy the poetry of life. You should have heard him speak of what he loved; of the tent pitched beside the talking water; of the stars overhead at night; of the blest re- turn of morning, the peep of day over the moors, the awaking birds among the birches; how he abhorred the long winter shut in cities; and with what delight, at the return of the spring, he once more pitched his camp in the living out-of-doors. But we were a pair of tramps; and to you, who are doubtless sedentary and a consistent first-class passenger in life, he would scarce have laid himself so open; — to you, he might have been content to tell his story of a ghost — that of a buccaneer with his pistols as he lived — whom he had once encountered in a seaside cave near Buckie; and that would have been enough, for that would have shown you the mettle of the man. Here was a piece 271 BEGGARS of experience solidly and livingly built up in words, here was a story created, teres atque rotundus. And to think of the old soldier, that lover of the lit- erary bards! He had visited stranger spots than any seaside cave; encountered men more terrible than any spirit; done and dared and suffered in that incredible, unsung epic of the Mutiny War; played his part with the field force of Delhi, beleaguering and beleaguered ; shared in that enduring, savage anger and contempt of death and decency that, for long months together, be- devil'd and inspired the army ; was hurled to and fro in the battle-smoke of the assault; was there, perhaps, where Nicholson fell; was there when the attacking column, with hell upon every side, found the soldier's enemy — strong drink, and the lives of tens of thousands trembled in the scale, and the fate of the flag of Eng- land staggered. And of all this he had no more to say than **hot work, sir," or "the army suffered a great deal, sir," or "1 believe General Wilson, sir, was not very highly thought of in the papers." His life was naught to him, the vivid pages of experience quite blank: in words his pleasure lay — melodious, agitated words — printed words, about that which he had never seen and was connatally incapable of comprehending. We have here two temperaments face to face ; both un- trained, unsophisticated, surprised (we may say) in the egg\ both boldly charactered: — that of the artist, the lover and artificer of words; that of the maker, the seeer, the lover and forger of experience. If the one had a daughter and the other had a son, and these mar- ried, might not some illustrious writer count descent from the beggar-soldier and the needy knife-grinder? 273 BEGGARS III Every one lives by selling something, whatever be his right to it. The burglar sells at the same time his own skill and courage and my silver plate (the whole at the most moderate figure) to a Jew receiver. The bandit sells the traveller an article of prime necessity : that trav- eller's life. And as for the old soldier, who stands for central mark to my capricious figures of eight, he dealt in a specialty ; for he was the only beggar in the world who ever gave me pleasure for my money. He had learned a school of manners in the barracks and had the sense to cling to it, accosting strangers with a regi- mental freedom, thanking patrons with a merely regi- mental difference, sparing you at once the tragedy of his position and the embarrassment of yours. There was not one hint about him of the beggar's emphasis, the outburst of revolting gratitude, the rant and cant, the ** God bless you. Kind, Kind gentleman," which insults the smallness of your alms by disproportionate vehe- mence, which is so notably false, which would be so un- bearable if it were true. I am sometimes tempted to suppose this reading of the beggar's part, a survival of the old days when Shakespeare was intoned upon the stage and mourners keened beside the death-bed; to think that we cannot now accept these strong emotions unless they be uttered in the just note of life ; nor (save in the pulpit) endure these gross conventions. They wound us, I am tempted to say, like mockery ; the high voice of keening (as it yet lingers on) strikes in the face of sorrow like a buffet; and the rant and cant of the staled beggar stirs in us a shudder of disgust. But the 273 BEGGARS fact disproves these amateur opinions. The beggar lives by his knowledge of the average man. He knows what he is about when he bandages his head, and hires and drugs a babe, and poisons life with Poor Mary Ann or Long, long ago ; he knows what he is about when he loads the critical ear and sickens the nice conscience with intolerable thanks ; they know what they are about, he and his crew, when they pervade the slums of cities, ghastly parodies of suffering, hateful parodies of grati- tude. This trade can scarce be called an imposition ; it has been so blown upon with exposures ; it flaunts its fraudulence so nakedly. We pay them as we pay those who show us, in huge exaggeration, the monsters of our drinking-water; or those who daily predict the fall of Britain. We pay them for the pain they inflict, pay them, and wince, and hurry on. And truly there is nothing that can shake the conscience like a beggar's thanks; and that polity in which such protestations can be purchased for a shilling, seems no scene for an hon- est man. Are there, then, we may be asked, no genuine beg- gars } And the answer is. Not one. My old soldier was a humbug like the rest; his ragged boots were, in the stage phrase, properties; whole boots were given him again and again, and always gladly accepted ; and the next day, there he was on the road as usual, with toes exposed. His boots were his method ; they were the man's trade; without his boots he would have starved ; he did not live by charity, but by appealing to a gross taste in the public, which loves the limelight on the actor's face, and the toes out of the beggar's boots. There is a true poverty, which no one sees : a false and 274 BEGGARS merely mimetic poverty, which usurps its place and dress, and lives and above all drinks, on the fruits of the usurpation. The true poverty does not go into the streets ; the banker may rest assured, he has never put a penny in its hand. The self-respecting poor beg from each other; never from the rich. To live in the frock- coated ranks of life, to hear canting scenes of gratitude rehearsed for twopence, a man might supposethat giving was a thing gone out of fashion ; yet it goes forward on a scale so great as to fill me with surprise. In the houses of the working class, all day long there will be a foot upon the stair; all day long there will be a knocking at the doors; beggars come, beggars go, without stint, hardly with intermission, from morning till night; and meanwhile, in the same city and but a few streets off, the castles of the rich stand unsummoned. Get the tale of any honest tramp, you will find it was always the poor who helped him ; get the truth from any work- man who has met misfortunes, it was always next door that he would go for help, or only with such exceptions as are said to prove a rule; look at the course of the mimetic beggar, it is through the poor quarters that he trails his passage, showing his bandages to every win- dow, piercing even to the attics with his nasal song. Here is a remarkable state of things in our Christian commonwealths, that the poor only should be asked to give. IV There is a pleasant tale of some worthless, phrasing Frenchman, who was taxed with ingratitude: '"Ilfaut savoir garder V inMpendance du coeur/' cried he. I 275 BEGGARS own I feel with him. Gratitude without familiarity, gratitude otherwise than as a nameless elem.ent in a friendship, is a thing so near to hatred that I do not care to split the difference. Until 1 find a man who is pleased to receive obligations, I shall continue to question the tact of those who are eager to confer them. What an art it is, to give, even to our nearest friends! and what a test of manners, to receive ! How, upon either side, we smuggle away the obligation, blushing for each other; how bluff and dull we make the giver; how hasty, how falsely cheerful, the receiver! And yet an act of such difficulty and distress between near friends, it is sup- posed we can perform to a total stranger and leave the man transfixed with grateful emotions. The last thing you can do to a man is to burthen him with an obliga- tion, and it is what we propose to begin with ! But let us not be deceived : unless he is totally degraded to his trade, anger jars in his inside, and he grates his teeth at our gratuity. We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented. We are all too proud to take a naked gift: we must seem to pay it, if in nothing else, then with the delights of our society. Here, then, is the pitiful fix of the rich man ; here is that needle's eye in which he stuck already in the days of Christ, and still sticks to-day, firmer, if possible, than ever: that he has the money and lacks the love which should make his money acceptable. Here and now, just as of old in Palestine, he has the rich to dinner, it is with the rich that he takes his pleasure : and when 276 BEGGARS his turn comes to be charitable, he looks in vain for a re- cipient. His friends are not poor, they do not want ; the poor are not his friends, they will not take. To whom is he to give ? Where to find — note this phrase — the Deserving Poor ? Charity is (what they call) central- ised; offices are hired; societies founded, with secre- taries paid or unpaid : the hunt of the Deserving Poor goes merrily forward. I think it will take more than a merely human secretary to disinter that character. What ! a class that is to be in want from no fault of its own, and yet greedily eager to receive from strangers ; and to be quite respectable, and at the same time quite devoid of self-respect ; and play the most delicate part of friendship, and yet never be seen ; and wear the form of man, and yet fly in the face of all the laws of human nature : — and all this, in the hope of getting a belly-god Burgess through a needle's eye! O, let him stick, by all means: and let his polity tumble in the dust; and let his epitaph and all his literature (of which my own works begin to form no inconsiderable part) be abolished even from the history of man ! For a fool of this monstrosity ofdulness, there can be no salvation: and the fool who looked for the elixir of life was an angel of reason to the fool who looks for the Deserving Poor ! And yet there is one course which the unfortunate gentleman may take. He may subscribe to pay the taxes. There were the true charity, impartial and im- personal, cumbering none with obligation, helping all. There were a destination for loveless gifts; there were 277 BEGGARS the way to reach the pocket of the deserving poor, and yet save the time of secretaries ! But, alas ! there is no colour of romance in such a course; and people nowhere demand the picturesque so much as in their virtues. 378 X. LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO PRO- POSES TO EMBRACE THE CAREER OF ART With the agreeable frankness of youth, you address me on a point of some practical importance to yourself and (it is even conceivable) of some gravity to the world : Should you or should you not become an artist ? It is one which you must decide entirely for yourself; all that I can do is to bring under your notice some of the ma- terials of that decision ; and I will begin, as I shall pro- bably conclude also, by assuring you that all depends on the vocation. To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. Youth is wholly experimental. The essence and charm of that unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life. These two unknowns the young man brings together again and again, now in the airiest touch, now with a bitter hug; now with exquisite pleasure, now with cutting pain ; but never with indifference, to which he is a total stranger, and never with that near kinsman of indiffer- ence, contentment. If he be a youth of dainty senses or a brain easily heated, the interest of this series of ex- periments grows upon him out of all proportion to the pleasure he receives. It is not beauty that he loves, nor pleasure that he seeks, though he may think so ; his de- 379 LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN sign and his sufficient reward is to verify his own ex- istence and taste the variety of human fate. To him, before the razor-edge of curiosity is dulled, all that is not actual living and the hot chase of experience wears a face of a disgusting dryness difficult to recall in later days; or if there be any exception — and here destiny steps in — it is in those moments when, wearied or sur- feited of the primary activity of the senses, he calls up before memory the image of transacted pains and plea- sures. Thus it is that such an one shies from all cut- and-dry professions, and inclines insensibly toward that career of art which consists only in the tasting and recording of experience. This, which is not so much a vocation for art as an impatience of all other honest trades, frequently exists alone; and so existing, it will pass gently away in the course of years. Emphatically, it is not to be regarded; it is not a vocation, but a temptation ; and when youi* father the other day so fiercely and (in my view) so properly discouraged your ambition, he was recalling not improbably some similar passage in his own experi- ence. For the temptation is perhaps nearly as common as the vocation is rare. But again we have vocations which are imperfect; we have men whose minds are bound up, not so much in any art, as in the general ars artium and common base of all creative work; who will now dip into painting, and now study counterpoint, and anon will be inditing a sonnet: all these with equal interest, all often with genuine knowledge. And of this temper, when it stands alone, I find it difficult to speak; but I should counsel such an one to take to let- ters, for in literature (which drags with so wide a net) 280 LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN all his information may be found some day useful, and if he should go on as he has begun, and turn at last into the critic, he will have learned to use the necessary tools. Lastly we come to those vocations which are at once decisive and precise ; to the men who are born with the love of pigments, the passion of drawing, the gift of music, or the impulse to create with words, just as other and perhaps the same men are born with the love of hunting, or the sea, or horses, or the turning-lathe. These are predestined ; if a man love the labour of any trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him. He may have the general voca- tion too : he may have a taste for all the arts, and I think he often has ; but the mark of his calling is this laborious partiality for one, this inextinguishable zest in its tech- nical successes, and (perhaps above all) a certain can- dour of mind, to take his very trifling enterprise with a gravity that would befit the cares of empire, and to think the smallest improvement worth accomplishing at any expense of time and industry. The book, the statue, the sonata, must be gone upon with the unreasoning good faith and the unflagging spirit of children at their play. Is it worth doing ? — when it shall have occurred to any artist to ask himself that question, it is implicitly answered in the negative. It does not occur to the child as he plays at being a pirate on the dining-room sofa, nor to the hunter as he pursues his quarry; and the can- dour of the one and the ardour of the other should be united in the bosom of the artist. If you recognise in yourself some such decisive taste, there is no room for hesitation : follow your bent. And observe (lest I should too much discourage you) that the LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN disposition does not usually burn so brightly at the first, or rather not so constantly. Habit and practice sharpen gifts ; the necessity of toil grows less disgusting, grows even welcome, in the course of years ; a small taste (if it be only genuine) waxes with indulgence into an ex- clusive passion. Enough, just now, if you can look back over a fair interval, and see that your chosen art has a little more than held its own among the thronging interests of youth. Time will do the rest, if devotion help it; and soon your every thought will be engrossed in that beloved occupation. But even with devotion, you may remind me, even with unfaltering and delighted industry, many thousand artists spend their lives, if the result be regarded, utterly in vain : a thousand artists, and never one work of art. But the vast mass of mankind are incapable of doing anything reasonably well, art among the rest. The worthless artist would not improbably have been a quite incompetent baker. And the artist, even if he does not amuse the public, amuses himself; so that there will always be one man the happier for his vigils. This is the practical side of art: its inexpugnable fortress for the true practitioner. The direct returns — the wages of the trade — are small, but the indirect — the wages of the life — are incalculably great. No other business offers a man his daily bread upon such joyful terms. The soldier and the explorer have moments of a wor- thier excitement, but they are purchased by cruel hard- ships and periods of tedium that beggar language. In the life of the artist there need be no hour without its pleasure. I take the author, with whose career I am best acquainted ; and it is true he works in a rebellious 282 LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN material, and that the act of writing is cramped and trying both to the eyes and the temper; but remark him in his study, when matter crowds upon him and words are not wanting — in what a continual series of small successes time flows by ; with what a sense of power as of one moving mountains, he marshals his petty characters; with what pleasures, both of the ear and eye, he sees his airy structure growing on the page; and how he labours in a craft to which the whole ma- terial of his life is tributary, and which opens a door to all his tastes, his loves, his hatreds, and his convictions, so that what he writes is only what he longed to utter. He may have enjoyed many things in this big, tragic playground of the world ; but what shall he have en- joyed more fully than a morning of successful work ? Suppose it ill paid : the wonder is it should be paid at all. Other men pay, and pay dearly, for pleasures less desirable. Nor will the practice of art afford you pleasure only ; it affords besides an admirable training. For the artist works entirely upon honour. The public knows little or nothing of those merits in the quest of which you are condemned to spend the bulk of your endeavours. Merits of design, the merit of first-hand energy, the merit of a certain cheap accomplishment which a man of the artistic temper easily acquires — these they can recognise, and these they value. But to those more exquisite refinements of proficiency and finish, which the artist so ardently desires and so keenly feels, for which (in the vigorous words of Balzac) he must toil " like a miner buried in a landslip," for which, day after day, he recasts and revises and rejects — the gross mass 283 LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN of the public must be ever blind. To those lost pains, suppose you attain the highest pitch of merit, posterity may possibly do justice ; suppose, as is so probable, you fail by even a hair's breadth of the highest, rest certain they shall never be observed. Under the shadow of this cold thought, alone in his studio, the artist must preserve from day to day his constancy to the ideal. It is this which makes his life noble; it is by this that the practice of his craft strengthens and matures his char- acter; it is for this that even the serious countenance of the great emperor was turned approvingly (if only for a moment) on the followers of Apollo, and that sternly gentle voice bade the artist cherish his art. And here there fall two warnings to be made. First, if you are to continue to be a law to yourself, you must beware of the first signs of laziness. This idealism in honesty can only be supported by perpetual effort; the standard is easily lowered, the artist who says "' It will do/'\^ on the downward path ; three or four pot-boilers are enough at times (above all at wrong times) to falsify a talent, and by the practice of journalism a man runs the risk of becoming wedded to cheap finish. This is the danger on the one side; there is not less upon the other. The consciousness of how much the artist is (and must be) a law to himself, debauches the small heads. Perceiving recondite merits very hard to at- tain, making or swallowing artistic formulae, or perhaps falling in love with some particular proficiency of his own, many artists forget the end of all art: to please. It is doubtless tempting to exclaim against the ignorant bourgeois ; yet it should not be forgotten, it is he who is to pay us, and that (surely on the face of it) for services 284 LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN that he shall desire to have performed. Here also, if properly considered, there is a question of transcen- dental honesty. To give the public what they do not want, and yet expect to be supported : we have there a strange pretension, and yet not uncommon, above all with painters. The first duty in this world is for a man to pay his way; when that is quite accomplished, he may plunge into what eccentricity he likes; but em- phatically not till then. Till then, he must pay assid- uous court to the bourgeois who carries the purse. And if in the course of these capitulations he shall falsify his talent, it can never have been a strong one, and he will have preserved a better thing than talent — character. Or if he be of a mind so independent that he cannot stoop to this necessity, one course is yet open : he can desist from art, and follow some more manly way of life. I speak of a more manly way of life, it is a point on which I must be frank. To live by a pleasure is not a high calling; it involves patronage, however veiled; it numbers the artist, however ambitious, along with dancing girls and billiard markers. The French have a romantic evasion for one employment, and call its prac- titioners the Daughters of Joy. The artist is of the same family, he is of the Sons of Joy, chose his trade to please himself, gains his livelihood by pleasing others, and has parted with something of the sterner dignity of man. journals but a little while ago declaimed against the Tennyson peerage; and this Son of Joy was blamed for condescension when he followed the example of Lord Lawrence and Lord Cairns and Lord Clyde. The poet was more happily inspired ; with a better modesty he ac- 285 LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN cepted the honour; and anonymous journalists have not yet (if I am to believe them) recovered the vicarious dis- grace to their profession. When it comes to their turn, these gentlemen can do themselves more justice; and I shall be glad to think of it; for to my barbarian eyesight, even Lord Tennyson looks somewhat out of place in that assembly. There should be no honours for the artist; he has already, in the practice of his art, more than his share of the rewards of life; the honours are pre-empted for other trades, less agreeable and perhaps more useful. But the devil in these trades of pleasing is to fail to please. In ordinary occupations, a man offers to do a certain thing or to produce a certain article with a merely conventional accomplishment, a design in which (we may almost say) it is difficult to fail. But the artist steps forth out of the crowd and proposes to delight: an im- pudent design, in which it is impossible to fail without odious circumstances. The poor Daughter of Joy, car- rying her smiles and finery quite unregarded through the crowd, makes a figure which it is impossible to re- call without a wounding pity. She is the type of the unsuccessful artist. The actor, the dancer, and the singer must appear like her in person, and drain publicly the cup of failure. But though the rest of us escape this crowning bitterness of the pillory, we all court in essence the same humiliation. We all profess to be able to de- light. And how few of us are! We all pledge our- selves to be able to continue to delight. And the day will come to each, and even to the most admired, when the ardour shall have declined and the cunning shall be lost, and he shall sit by his deserted booth ashamed. 286 LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN Then shall he see himself condemned to do work for which he blushes to take payment. Then (as if his lot were not already cruel) he must lie exposed to the gibes of the wreckers of the press, who earn a little bitter bread by the condemnation of trash which they have not read, and the praise of excellence which they cannot understand. And observe that this seems almost the necessary end at least of writers. Les Blancs et les Bleus (for instance) is of an order of merit very different from Le Vicomte de Bragelonne ; and if any gentleman can bear to spy upon the nakedness of Castle Dangerous, his name I think is Ham : let it be enough for the rest of us to read of it (not without tears) in the pages of Lockhart. Thus in old age, when occupation and comfort are most needful, the writer must lay aside at once his pastime and his breadwinner. The painter indeed, if he succeed at all fn engaging the attention of the public, gains great sums and can stand to his easel until a great age without dis- honourable failure. The writer has the double misfortune to be ill-paid while he can work, and to be incapable of working when he is old. It is thus a way of life which conducts directly to a false position. For the writer (in spite of notorious examples to the contrary) must look to be ill-paid. Tennyson and Montepin make handsome livelihoods ; but we cannot all hope to be Tennyson, and we do not all perhaps desire to be Montepin. If you adopt an art to be your trade, weed your mind at the outset of all desire of money. What you may decently expect, if you have some talent and much industry, is such an income as a clerk will earn with a tenth or perhaps a twentieth of your nervous 287 LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN output. Nor have you the right to look for more; in the wages of the life, not in the wages of the trade, lies your reward ; the work is here the wages. It will be seen I have little sympathy with the common lamenta- tions of the artist class. Perhaps they do not remember the hire of the field labourer; or do they think no par- allel will lie ? Perhaps they have never observed what is the retiring allowance of a field officer; or do they suppose their contributions to the arts of pleasing more important than the services of a colonel ? Perhaps they forget on how little Millet was content to live; or do they think, because they have less genius, they stand excused from the display of equal virtues ? But upon one point there should be no dubiety : if a man be not frugal, he has no business in the arts. If he be not frugal, he steers directly for that last tragic scene of le vieux saltimbanque ; if he be not frugal, he will find it hard to continue to be honest. Some day, when the butcher is knocking at the door, he may be tempted, he may be obliged, to turn out and sell a slovenly piece of work. If the obligation shall have arisen through no wanton- ness of his own, he is even to be commended; for words cannot describe how far more necessary it is that a man should support his family, than that he should attain to — or preserve — distinction in the arts. But if the pressure comes through his own fault, he has stolen, and stolen under trust, and stolen (which is the worst of all) in such a way that no law can reach him. And now you may perhaps ask me, if the debutant artist is to have no thought of money, and if (as is im- plied) he is to expect no honours from the State, he may not at least look forward to the delights of popularity ? 288 LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN Praise, you will tell me, is a savoury dish. And in so far as you rnay mean the countenance of other artists, you would put your finger on one of the most essential and enduring pleasures of the career of art. But in so far as you should have an eye to the commendations of the public or the notice of the newspapers, be sure you would but be cherishing a dream. It is true that in cer- tain esoteric journals the author (for instance) is duly criticised, and that he is often praised a great deal more than he deserves, sometimes for qualities which he prided himself on eschewing, and sometimes by ladies and gentlemen who have denied themselves the privi- lege of reading his work. But if a man be sensitive to this wild praise, we must suppose him equally alive to that which often accompanies and always follows it — wild ridicule. A man may have done well for years, and then he may fail ; he will hear of his failure. Or he may have done well for years, and still do well, but the critics may have tired of praising him, or there may have sprung up some new idol of the instant, some " dust a little gilt," to whom they now prefer to offer sacrifice. Here is the obverse and the reverse of that empty and ugly thing called popularity. Will any man suppose it worth the gaining ? 289 XI. PULVIS ET UMBRA We look for some reward of our endeavours and are disappointed; not success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our ineffectual efforts to do well. Our frailties are invincible, are virtues barren ; the battle goes sore against us to the going down of the sun. The canting moralist tells us of right and wrong; and we look abroad, even on the face of our small earth, and find them change with every climate, and no coun- try where some action is not honoured for a virtue and none where it is not branded for a vice ; and we look in our experience, and find no vital congruity in the wisest rules, but at the best a municipal fitness. It is not strange if we are tempted to despair of good. We ask too much. Our religions and moralities have been trimmed to flatter us, till they are all emasculate and sentimentalised, and only please and weaken. Truth is of a rougher strain. In the harsh face of life, faith can read a bracing gospel. The human race is a thing more ancient than the ten commandments; and the bones and revolutions of the Kosmos, in whose joints we are but moss and fungus, more ancient still. 290 PULVIS ET UMBRA I Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports many doubtful things and all of them appalling. There seems no substance to this solid globe on which we stamp : nothing but symbols and ratios. Symbols and ratios carry us and bring us forth and beat us down ; gravity that swings the incommensurable suns and worlds through space, is but a figment varying inversely as the squares of distances; and the suns and worlds them- selves, imponderable figures of abstraction, NHg and HgO. Consideration dares not dwell upon this view; that way madness lies ; science carries us into zones of speculation, where there is no habitable city for the mind of man. But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our senses give it us. We behold space sown with rota- tory islands, suns and worlds and the shards and wrecks of systems: some, like the sun, still blazing; some rot- ting, like the earth; others, like the moon, stable in desolation. All of these we take to be made of some- thing we call matter: a thing which no analysis can help us to conceive; to whose incredible properties no familiarity can reconcile our minds. This stuff, when not purified by the lustration of fire, rots uncleanly into something we call life; seized through all its atoms with a pediculous malady ; swelling in tumours that become independent, sometimes even (by an abhorrent prodigy) locomotory ; one splitting into millions, millions cohering into one, as the malady proceeds through varying stages. This vital putrescence of the dust, used as we are to it, yet strikes us with occasional disgust, and the profusion 2pl PULVIS ET UMBRA ef worms in a piece of ancient turf, or the air of a marsh darkened with insects, will sometim.es check cur breath- ing so that we aspire for cleaner places. But none is clean : the moving sand is infected with lice; the pure spring, where it bursts out of the mountain, is a mere issue of worms ; even in the hard rock the crystal is forming. In two main shapes this eruption covers the coun- tenance of the earth: the animal and the vegetable: one in some degree the inversion of the other: the second rooted to the spot ; the first coming detached out of its natal mud, and scurrying abroad with the myriad feet of insects or towering into the heavens on the wings of birds : a thing so inconceivable that, if it be well con- sidered, the heart stops. To what passes with the an- chored vermin, we have little clue : doubtless they have their joys and sorrows, their delights and killing agonies : it appears not how. But of the locomotory, to which we ourselves belong, we can tell more. These share with us a thousand miracles : the miracles of sight, of hearing, of the projection of sound, things that bridge space; the miracles of memory and reason, by which the present is conceived, and when it is gone, its image kept living in the brains of man and brute; the miracle of reproduction, with its imperious desires and stagger- ing consequences. And to put the last touch upon this mountain mass of the revolting and the inconceivable, all these prey upon each other, lives tearing other lives in pieces, cramming them inside themselves, and by that summary process, growing fat : the vegetarian, the whale, perhaps the tree, not less than the lion of the desert; for the vegetarian is only the eater of the dumb. Meanwhile our rotatory island loaded with predatory 2q2 PULVIS ET UMBRA life, and more drenched with blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship, scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and turns alternate cheeks to the reverberation of a blazing world, ninety million miles away. What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bring- ing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face ; a thing to set children screaming ; — and yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how sur- prising are his attributes ! Poor soul; here for so little, cast among so many hardships, filled with desires so in- commensurate and so inconsistent, savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives: who should have blamed him had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous ? And we look and behold him instead filled with imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often admira- bly valiant, often touchingly kind ; sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity ; rising up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch the heart of his mystery, we find in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy : the thought of duty ; the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God : an ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it 293 PULVIS ET UMBRA were possible ; a limit of shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not stoop. The design in most men is one of conformity ; here and there, in picked natures, it transcends itself and soars on the other side, arming martyrs with independence; but in all, in their degrees, it is a bosom thought: — Not in man alone, for we trace it in dogs and cats whom we know fairly well, and doubtless some similar point of honour sways the ele- phant, the oyster, and the louse, of whom we know so little : — But in man, at least, it sways with so complete an empire that merely selfish things come second, even with the selfish: that appetites are starved, fears are conquered, pains supported; that almost the dullest shrinks from the reproof of a glance, although it were a child's ; and all but the most cowardly stand amid the risks of war; and the more noble, having strongly con- ceived an act as due to their ideal, affront and embrace death. Strange enough if, with their singular origin and perverted practice, they think they are to be re- warded in some future life : stranger still, if they are per- suaded of the contrary, and think this blow, which they solicit, will strike them senseless for eternity. I shall be reminded what a tragedy of misconception and miscon- duct man at large presents : of organised injustice, cow- ardly violence and treacherous crime ; and of the damning imperfections of the best. They cannot be too darkly drawn. Man is indeed marked for failure in his efforts to do right. But where the best consistently miscarry, how tenfold more remarkable that all should continue to strive; and surely we should find it both touching and inspiriting, that in a field from which success is banished, our race should not cease to labour. 294 PULVIS ET UMBRA If the first view of this creature, stalking in his rota- tory isle, be a thing to shake the courage of the stoutest, on this nearer sight, he startles us with an admiring wonder. It matters not where we look, under what climate we observe him, in what stage of society, in what depth of ignorance, burthened with what errone- ous morality; by camp-fires in Assiniboia, the snow powdering his shoulders, the wind plucking his blanket, as he sits, passing the ceremonial calumet and uttering his grave opinions like a Roman senator; in ships at sea, a man inured to hardship and vile pleasures, his bright- est hope a fiddle in a tavern and a bedizened trull who sells herself to rob him, and he for all that simple, inno- cent, cheerful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave to drown, for others; in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent millions to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his virtues, hon- est up to his lights, kind to his neighbours, tempted perhaps in vain by the bright gin-palace, perhaps long- suffering with the drunken wife that ruins him ; in India (a woman this time) kneeling with broken cries and streaming tears, as she drowns her child in the sacred river; in the brothel, the discard of society, living mainly on strong drink, fed with affronts, a fool, a thief, the comrade of thieves, and even here keeping the point of honour and the touch of pity, often repaying the world's scorn with service, often standing firm upon a scruple, and at a certain cost, rejecting riches: — everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, everywhere some de- cency of thought and carriage, everywhere the ensign of man's ineffectual goodness: — ah! if I could show 295 PULVIS ET UMBRA you this! if I could show you these men and women, all the world over, in every stage of history, under every abuse of error, under every circumstance of fail- ure, without hope, without help, without thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to some rag of honour, the poor jewel of their souls ! They may seek to es- cape, and yet they cannot; it is not alone their privilege and glory, but their doom ; they are condemned to some nobility ; all their lives long, the desire of good is at their heels, the implacable hunter. Of all earth's meteors, here at least is the most strange and consoling : thatthis ennobled lemur, this hair-crowned bubble of the dust, this inheritor of a few years and sor- rows, should yet deny himself his rare delights, and add to his frequent pains, and live for an ideal, however misconceived. Nor can we stop with man. A new doctrine, received with screams a little while ago by canting moralists, and still not properly worked into the body of our thoughts, lights us a step farther into the heart of this rough but noble universe. For nowadays the pride of man denies in vain his kinship with the original dust. He stands no longer like a thing apart. Close at his heels we see the dog, prince of another genus: and in him too, we see dumbly testified the same cultus of an unattainable ideal, the same constancy in failure. Does it stop with the dog ? We look at our feet where the ground is blackened with the swarming ant: a creature so small, so far from us in the hierarchy of brutes, that we can scarce trace and scarce comprehend his doings; and here also, in his ordered polities and rigor- ous justice, we see confessed the law of duty and the fact 296 PULVIS ET UMBRA of individual sin. Does it stop, then, with the ant ? Rather this desire of well-doing and this doom of frailty run through all the grades of life : rather is this earth,from the frosty top of Everest to the next margin of the internal fire, one stage of ineffectual virtues and one temple of pious tears and perseverance. The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together. It is the common and the god-like law of life. The browsers, the biters, the barkers, the hairy coats of field and forest, the squirrel in the oak, the thousand-footed creeper in the dust, as they share with us the gift of life, share with us the love of an ideal: strive like us — like us are tempted to grow weary of the struggle — to do well ; like us receive at times unmerited refreshment, visitings of support, re- turns of courage ; and are condemned like us to be cruci- fied between that double law of the members and the will. Are they like us, I wonder, in the timid hope of some reward, some sugar with the drug ? do they, too, stand aghast at unrewarded virtues, at the sufferings of those whom, in our partiality, we take to be just, and the prosperity of such as, in our blindness, we call wicked ? It may be, and yet God knows what they should look for. Even while they look, even while they repent, the foot of man treads them by thousands in the dust, the yelping hounds burst upon their trail, the bul- let speeds, the knives are heating in the den of the vivisectionist; or the dew falls, and the generation of a day is blotted out. For these are creatures, compared with whom our weakness is strength, our ignorance wisdom, our brief span eternity. And as we dwell, we living things, in our isle of ter- ror and under the imminent hand of death, God forbid 297 PULVIS ET UMBRA it should be man the erected, the reasoner, the wise in his own eyes — God forbid it should be man that wearies in well-doing, that despairs of unrewarded effort, or utters the language of complaint. Let it be enough for faith, that the whole creation groans in mortal frailty, strives with unconquerable constancy : Surely not all in vain. apS XII. A CHRISTMAS SERMON By the time this paper appears, I shall have been talk- ing for twelve months ; ^ and it is thought I should take my leave in a formal and seasonable manner. Valedic- tory eloquence is rare, and death-bed sayings have not often hit the mark of the occasion. Charles Second, wit and sceptic, a man whose life had been one long lesson in human incredulity, an easy-going comrade, a manoeuvring king — remembered and embodied all his wit and scepticism along with more than his usual good humour in the famous "I am afraid, gentlemen, I am an unconscionable time a-dying." An unconscionable time a-dying — there is the picture C'l am afraid, gentlemen,") of your life and of mine. The sands run out, and the hours are '* numbered and im- puted," and the days go by; and when the last of these finds us, we have been a long time dying, and what else ? The very length is something, if we reach that hour of separation undishonoured ; and to have lived at all is doubtless (in the soldierly expression) to have ^i. e. in the pages of Scrihner's Magazine (1888). 29P A CHRISTMAS SERMON served. There is a tale in Tacitus of how the veterans mutinied in the German wilderness ; of how they mobbed Germanicus, clamouring to go home; and of how, seiz- ing their general's hand, these old, war-worn exiles passed his finger along their toothless gums. Sunt lacrymce rerum: this was the most eloquent of the songs of Simeon. And when a man has lived to a fair age, he bears his marks of service. He may have never been remarked upon the breach at the head of the army ; at least he shall have lost his teeth on the camp bread. The idealism of serious people in this age of ours is of a noble character. It never seems to them that they have served enough ; they have a fine impatience of their virtues. It were perhaps more modest to be singly thankful that we are no worse. It is not only our ene- mies, those desperate characters — it is we ourselves who know not what we do; — thence springs the glimmer- ing hope that perhaps we do better than we think : that to scramble through this random business with hands reasonably clean, to have played the part of a man or woman with some reasonable fulness, to have often re- sisted the diabolic, and at the end to be still resisting it, is for the poor human soldier to have done right well. To ask to see some fruit of our endeavour is but a tran- scendental way of serving for reward ; and what we take to be contempt of self is only greed of hire. And again if we require so much of ourselves, shall we not require much of others ? If we do not genially judge our own deficiencies, is it not to be feared we shall be even stern to the trespasses of others } And he who (looking back upon his own life) can see no more than that he has been unconscionably long a-dying, will 300 A CHRISTMAS SERMON he not be tempted to think his neighbour unconscion- ably long of getting hanged ? It is probable that nearly all who think of conduct at all, think of it too much; it is certain we all think too much of sin. We are not damned for doing wrong, but for not doing right; Christ would never hear of negative morality; thou shalt was ever his word, with which he superseded thou shalt not. To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto. If a thing is wrong for us, we should not dwell upon the thought of it; or we shall soon dwell upon it with inverted pleasure. If we cannot drive it from our minds — one thing of two : either our creed is in the wrong and we must more indulgently remodel it; or else, if our morality be in the right, we are criminal lunatics and should place our persons in restraint. A mark of such unwholesomely divided minds is the passion for interference with others : the Fox without the Tail was of this breed, but had (if his biographer is to be trusted) a certain antique civility now out of date. A man may have a flaw, a weakness, that unfits him for the duties of life, that spoils his temper, that threatens his integ- rity, or that betrays him into cruelty. It has to be con- quered; but it must never be suffered to engross his thoughts. The true duties lie all upon the farther side, and must be attended to with a whole mind so soon as this preliminary clearing of the decks has been effected. In order that he may be kind and honest, it may be needful he should become a total abstainer; let him be- come so then, and the next day let him forget the cir- cumstance. Trying to be kind and honest will require 301 A CHRISTMAS SERMON all his thoughts ; a mortified appetite is never a wise com- panion ; in so far as he has had to mortify an appetite, he will still be the worse man ; and of such an one a great deal of cheerfulness will be required in judging life, and a great deal of humility in judging others. It may be argued again that dissatisfaction with our life's endeavour springs in some degree from dulness. We require higher tasks, because we do not recognise the height of those we have. Trying to be kind and honest seems an affair too simple and too inconsequen- tial for gentlemen of our heroic mould; we had rather set ourselves to something bold, arduous, and conclu- sive ; we had rather found a schism or suppress a heresy, cut off a hand or mortify an appetite. But the task be- fore us, which is to co-endure with our existence, is rather one of microscopic fineness, and the heroism re- quired is that of patience. There is no cutting of the Gor- dian knots of life ; each must be smilingly unravelled. To be honest, to be kind — to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends but these without capitulation — above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself — here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful. There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: what- ever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed ; failure is the fate allotted. It is so in every art and study ; it is so above all in the continent art of liv- A CHRISTMAS SERMON ing well. Here is a pleasant thought for the year's end or for the end of life : Only self-deception will be satis- fied, and there need be no despair for the despairer. But Christmas is not only the mile-mark of another year, moving us to thoughts of self-examination : it is a season, from all its associations, whether domestic or religious, suggesting thoughts of joy. A man dissatis- fied with his endeavours is a man tempted to sadness. And in the midst of the winter, when his life runs low- est and he is reminded of the empty chairs of his beloved, it is well he should be condemned to this fashion of the smiling face. Noble disappointment, noble self-denial are not to be admired, not even to be pardoned, if they bring bitterness. It is one thing to enter the kingdom of heaven maim ; another to maim yourself and stay without. And the kingdom of heaven is of the child- like, of those who are easy to please, who love and who give pleasure. Mighty men of their hands, the smiters and the builders and the judges, have lived long and done sternly and yet preserved this lovely character; and among our carpet interests and twopenny concerns, the shame were indelible if we should lose it. Gentle- ness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect duties. And it is the trouble with moral men that they have neither one nor other. It was the moral man, the Pharisee, whom Christ could not away with. If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say ''give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a 303 A CHRISTMAS SERMON vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people. A strange temptation attends upon man : to keep his eye on pleasures, even when he will not share in them ; to aim all his morals against them. This very year a lady (singular iconoclast!) proclaimed a crusade against dolls; and the racy sermon against lust is a feature of the age. I venture to call such moralists insincere. At any excess or perversion of a natural appetite, their lyre sounds of itself with relishing denunciations; but for all displays of the truly diabolic — envy, malice, the mean lie, the mean silence, the calumnious truth, the back- biter, the petty tyrant, the peevish poisoner of family life — their standard is quite different. These are wrong, they will admit, yet somehow not so wrong; there is no zeal in their assault on them, no secret element of gusto warms up the sermon ; it is for things not wrong in themselves that they reserve the choicest of their indignation. A man may naturally disclaim all moral kinship with the Reverend Mr. Zola or the hobgoblin old lady of the dolls ; for these are gross and naked in- stances. And yet in each of us some similar element resides. The sight of a pleasure in which we cannot or else will not share moves us to a particular impatience. It may be because we are envious, or because we are sad, or because we dislike noise and romping — being so refined, or because — being so philosophic — we have an overweighing sense of life's gravity : at least, as we go on in years, we are all tempted to frown upon our neighbour's pleasures. People are nowadays so fond of resisting temptations ; here is one to be resisted. They are fond of self-denial ; here is a propensity that 304 A CHRISTMAS SERMON cannot be too peremptorily denied. There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbours good. One person I have to make good: myself. But my duty to my neighbour is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him happy — if I may. Ill Happiness and goodness, according to canting moral- ists, stand in the relation of effect and cause. There was never anything less proved or less probable: our happiness is never in our own hands; we inherit our constitution; we stand buffet among friends and ene- mies ; we may be so built as to feel a sneer or an asper- sion with unusual keenness, and so circumstanced as to be unusually exposed to them; we may have nerves very sensitive to pain, and be afflicted with a disease very painful. Virtue will not help us, and it is not meant to help us. It is not even its own reward, ex- cept for the self-centred and — I had almost said — the unamiable. No man can pacify his conscience; if quiet be what he want, he shall do better to let that organ perish from disuse. And to avoid the penalties of the law, and the minor capitis diminutio of social ostracism, is an affair of wisdom — of cunning, if you will — and not of virtue. In his own life, then, a man is not to expect happiness, only to profit by it gladly when it shall arise; he is on duty here; he knows not how or why, and does not need to know ; he knows not for what hire, and must not ask. Somehow or other, though he does not know what goodness is, he must try to be good; somehow 305 A CHRISTMAS SERMON or other, though he cannot tell what will do it, he must try to give happiness to others. And no doubt there comes in here a frequent clash of duties. How far is he to make his neighbour happy ? How far must he re- spect that smiling face, so easy to cloud, so hard to brighten again ? And how far, on the other side, is he bound to be his brother's keeper and the prophet of his own morality ? How far must he resent evil ? The difficulty is that we have little guidance; Christ's sayings on the point being hard to reconcile with each other, and (the most of them) hard to accept. But the truth of his teaching would seem to be this : in our own person and fortune, we should be ready to accept and to pardon all; it is our cheek we are to turn, our coat that we are to give away to the man who has taken our cloak. But when another's face is buffeted, perhaps a little of the lion will become us best. That we are to suffer others to be injured, and stand by, is not conceiv- able and surely not desirable. Revenge, says Bacon, is a kind of wild justice ; its judgments at least are deliv- ered by an insane judge; and in our own quarrel we can see nothing truly and do nothing wisely. But in the quarrel of our neighbour, let us be more bold. One person's happiness is as sacred as another's; when we cannot defend both, let us defend one with a stout heart. It is only in so far as we are doing this, that we have any right to interfere : the defence of B is our only ground of action against A. A has as good a right to go to the devil, as we to go to glory ; and neither knows what he does. The truth is that all these interventions and denunci- ations and militant mongerings of moral half-truths, 306 A CHRISTMAS SERMON though they be sometimes needful, though they are often enjoyable, do yet belong to an inferior grade of duties. Ill-temper and envy and revenge fmd here an arsenal of pious disguises ; this is the playground of in- verted lusts. With a little more patience and a little less temper, a gentler and wiser method might be found in almost every case ; and the knot that we cut by some fine heady quarrel-scene in private life, or, in public affairs, by some denunciatory act against what we are pleased to call our neighbour's vices, might yet have been unwoven by the hand of sympathy. IV To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven and to what small purpose; and how often we have been cowardly and hung back, or teme- rarious and rushed unwisely in ; and how every day and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness; — it may seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries, a certain consolation resides. Life is not designed to minister to a man's vanity. He goes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures as it is — so that to see the day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner-call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys — this world is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, health fails, weariness assails him ; year after year, he must thumb the hardly varying, record of his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly process of de- tachment. When the time comes that he should go, 307 A CHRISTMAS SERMON there need be few illusions left about himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much: — surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed. Nor will he complain at the summons which calls a defeated soldier from the field : defeated, ay, if he were Paul or Marcus Aurelius! — but if there is still one inch of fight in his old spirit, undishonoured. The faith which sustained him in his life-long blindness and life- long disappointment will scarce even be required in this last formality of laying down his arms. Give him a march with his old bones; there, out of the glorious, sun-coloured earth, out of the day and the dust and the ecstasy — there goes another Faithful Failure! From a recent book of verse, where there is more than one such beautiful and manly poem, I take this me- morial piece: it says better than I can, what I love to think ; let it be our parting word. " A late lark twitters from the quiet skies; And from the west, Where the sun, his day's work ended, Lingers as in content, There falls on the old, gray city An influence luminous and serene, A shining peace. ** The smoke ascends In a rosy-and-golden haze. The spires Shine, and are changed. In the valley Shadows rise. The lark sings on. The sun, Closing his benediction, Sinks, and the darkening air Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night- Night, with her train of stars And her great gift of sleep. 308 A CHRISTMAS SERMON *' So be my passing! My task accomplished and the long day done, My wages taken, and in my heart Some late lark singing, Let me be gathered to the quiet west, The sundown splendid and serene, Death." 1 1 From A Book of Verses by William Ernest Henley. D. Nutt, 1888. [1888.] 309 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS " Vixerunt nonnulli in agris, delectaiire stux familiari. His idem propositus, fuit quod regibus, ut ne qua re agerent, ne cut farerent, libertate -uterentur: cuius Proprium est sic vivere ut velis." Cic, De Off., I. XX. TO VIRGIL WILLIAMS AND DORA NORTON WILLIAMS THESE SKETCHES ARE AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED BY THEIR FRIEND THE AUTHOR THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS THE scene of this little book is on a high mountain. There are, indeed, many higher; there are many of a nobler outline. It is no place of pilgrimage for the summary globe-trotter; but to one who lives upon its sides, Mount Saint Helena soon becomes a centre of in- terest. It is the Mont Blanc of one section of the Cali- fornian Coast Range, none of its near neighbours rising to one-half its altitude. It looks down on much green, intricate country. It feeds in the spring-time many splashing brooks. From its summit you must have an excellent lesson of geography: seeing, to the south, San Francisco Bay, with Tamalpais on the one hand and Monte Diablo on the other; to the west and thirty miles away, the open ocean ; eastward, across the cornlands and thick tule swamps of Sacramento Valley, to where the Central Pacific railroad begins to climb the sides of the Sierras ; and northward, for what I know, the white head of Shasta looking down on Oregon. Three coun- ties, Napa County, Lake County, and Sonoma County, march across its cliffy shoulders. Its naked peak stands nearly four thousand five hundred feet above the sea; its sides are fringed with forest ; and the soil, where it is bare, glows warm with cinnabar. Life in its shadow goes rustically forward. Bucks, 315 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS and bears, and rattlesnakes, and former mining opera- tions, are the staple of men's talk. Agriculture has only begun to mount above the valley. And though in a few years from now the whole district may be smiling with farms, passing trains shaking the moun- tain to the heart, many-windowed hotels lighting up the night like factories, and a prosperous city occupy- ing the site of sleepy Calistoga; yet in the meantime, around the foot of that mountain the silence of nature reigns in a great measure unbroken, and the people of hill and valley go sauntering about their business as in the days before the flood. To reach Mount Saint Helena from San Francisco, the traveller has twice to cross the bay: once by the busy Oakland Ferry, and again, after an hour or so of the railway, from Vallejo junction to Vallejo. Thence he takes rail once more to mount the long green strath of Napa Valley. In all the contractions and expansions of that inland sea, the Bay of San Francisco, there can be few drearier scenes than the Vallejo Ferry. Bald shores and a low, bald islet inclose the sea; through the narrows the tide bubbles, muddy like a river. When we made the pas- sage (bound, although yet we knew it not, for Silverado) the steamer jumped, and the black buoys were danc- ing in the jabble ; the ocean breeze blew killing chill ; and, although the upper sky was still unflecked with vapour, the sea fogs were pouring in from seaward, over the hilltops of Marin County, in one great, shape- less, silver cloud. South Vallejo is typical of many Californian towns. It was a blunder; the site has proved untenable; and, 316 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS although it is still such a young place by the scale of Europe, it has already begun to be deserted for its neigh- bour and namesake, North Vallejo. A long pier, a num- ber of drinking saloons, a hotel of a great size, marshy pools where the frogs keep up their croaking, and even at high noon the entire absence of any human face or voice — these are the marks of South Vallejo. Yet there was a tall building beside the pier, labelled the Star Flour Mills ; and sea-going, full-rigged ships lay close along shore, waiting for their cargo. Soon these would be plunging round the Horn, soon the flour from the Star Flour Mills would be landed on the wharves of Liver- pool. For that, too, is one of England's outposts; thither, to this gaunt mill, across the Atlantic and Pa- cific deeps and round about the icy Horn, this crowd of great, three-masted, deep-sea ships come, bringing nothing, and return with bread. The Frisby House, for that was the name of the hotel, was a place of fallen fortunes, like the town. It was now given up to labourers, and partly ruinous. At din- ner there was the ordinary display of what is called in the west a two-bit home : the tablecloth checked red and white, the plague of flies, the wire hencoops over the dishes, the great variety and invariable vileness of the food and the rough coatless men devouring it in silence. In our bedroom, the stove would not burn, though it would smoke ; and while one window would not open, the other would not shut. There was a view on a bit of empty road, a few dark houses, a donkey wandering with its shadow on a slope, and a blink of sea, with a tall ship lying anchored in the moonlight. All about that dreary inn frogs sang their ungainly chorus. 317 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS Early the next morning we mounted the hill along a wooden footway, bridging one marish spot after an- other. Here and there, as we ascended, we passed a house embowered in white roses. More of the bay be- came apparent, and soon the blue peak of Tamalpais rose above the green level of the island opposite. It told us we were still but a little way from the city of the Golden Gates, already, at that hour, beginning to awake among the sand-hills. It called to us over the waters as with the voice of a bird. Its stately head, blue as a sapphire on the paler azure of the sky, spoke to us of wider outlooks and the bright Pacific. For Tamal- pais stands sentry, like a lighthouse, over the Golden Gates, between the bay and the open ocean, and looks down indifferently on both. Even as we saw and hailed it from Vallejo, seamen, far out at sea, were scan- ning it with shaded eyes; and, as if to answer to the thought, one of the great ships below began silently to clothe herself with white sails, homeward bound for England. For some way beyond Vallejo the railway led us through bald green pastures. On the west the rough highlands of Marin shut off the ocean ; in the midst, in long, straggling, gleaming arms, the bay died out among the grass ; there were few trees and few enclosures ; the sun shone wide over open uplands, the displumed hills stood clear against the sky. But by-and-by these hills began to draw nearer on either hand, and first thicket and then wood began to clothe their sides ; and soon we were away from all signs of the sea's neighbour- hood, mounting an inland, irrigated valley. A great variety of oaks stood, now severally, now in a becoming 318 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS grove, among the fields and vineyards. The towns were compact, in about equal proportions, of bright, new wooden houses and great and growing forest trees; and the chapel bell on the engine sounded most festally that sunny Sunday, as we drew up at one green town after another, with the townsfolk trooping in their Sun- day's best to see the strangers, with the sun sparkling on the clean houses, and great domes of foliage hum- ming overhead in the breeze. This pleasant Napa Valley is, at its north end, block- aded by our mountain. There, at Calistoga, the rail- road ceases, and the traveller who intends faring farther, to the Geysers or to the springs in Lake County, must cross the spurs of the mountain by stage. Thus, Mount Saint Helena is not only a summit, but a frontier; and, up to the time of writing, it has stayed the progress of the iron horse. 3*9 IN THE VALLEY CHAPTER I CALISTOGA It is difficult for a European to imagine Calistoga, the whole place is so new, and of such an occidental pat- tern ; the very name, I hear, was invented at a supper- party by the man who found the springs. The railroad and the highway come up the valley about parallel to one another. The street of Calistoga joins them, perpendicular to both — a wide street, with bright, clean, low houses, here and there a verandah over the sidewalk, here and there a horse-post, here and there lounging townsfolk. Other streets are marked out, and most likely named; for these towns in the New World begin with a firm resolve to grow larger, Wash- ington and Broadway, and then First and Second, and so forth, being boldly plotted out as soon as the com- munity indulges in a plan. But, in the meanwhile, all the life and most of the houses of Calistoga are concentrated upon that street between the railway station and the road. I never heard it called by any name, but I will hazard a guess that it is either Washington or Broadway. Here are the blacksmith's, the chemist's, the general merchant's, and Kong Sam Kee, the Chinese laundry- man's; here, probably, is the office of the local paper 320 IN THE VALLEY (for the place has a paper — they all have papers); and here certainly is one of the hotels, Cheeseborough's, whence the daring Foss, a man dear to legend, starts his horses for the Geysers. It must be remembered that we are here in a land of stage-drivers and highwaymen: a land, in that sense, like England a hundred years ago. The highway rob- ber — road-agent, he is quaintly called — is still busy in these parts. The fame of Vasquez is still young. Only a few years ago, the Lakeport stage was robbed a mile or two from Calistoga. In 1879, the dentist of Mendocino City, fifty miles away upon the coast, suddenly threw off the garments of his trade, like Grindoff, in The Miller and his Men, and flamed forth in his second dress as a cap- tain of banditti. A great robbery was followed by a long chase, a chase of days if not of weeks, among the intricate hill-country; and the chase was followed by much desultory fighting, in which several — and the dentist, I believe, amongst the number — bit the dust. The grass was springing for the first time, nourished upon their blood, when I arrived in Calistoga. I am reminded of another highwayman of that same year. "He had been unwell," so ran his humorous defence, **and the doctor told him to take something, so he took the ex- press box." The cultus of the stage-coachman always flourishes highest where there are thieves on the road, and where the guard travels armed, and the stage is not only a link between country and city, and the vehicle of news, but has a faint warfaring aroma, like a man who should be brother to a soldier. California boasts her famous stage- drivers, and among the famous Foss is not forgotten. 321 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS Along the unfenced, abominable mountain roads, he launches his team with small regard to human life or the doctrine of probabilities. Flinching travellers, who be- hold themselves coasting eternity at every corner, look with natural admiration at their driver's huge, impas- sive, fleshy countenance. He has the very face for the driver in Sam Weller's anecdote, who upset the election party at the required point. Wonderful tales are current of his readiness and skill. One in particular, of how one of his horses fell at a ticklish passage of the road, and how Foss let slip the reins, and, driving over the fallen animal, arrived at the next stage with only three. This I relate as I heard it, without guarantee. I only saw Foss once, though, strange as it may sound, I have twice talked with him. He lives out of Calistoga, at a ranche called Fossville. One evening, after he was long gone home, I dropped into Cheese- borough's, and was asked if I should like to speak with Mr. Foss. Supposing that the interview was impossi- ble, and that I was merely called upon to subscribe the general sentiment, 1 boldly answered "Yes." Next moment, 1 had one instrument at my ear, another at my mouth, and found myself, with nothing in the world to say, conversing with a man several miles off among desolate hills. Foss rapidly and somewhat plaintively brought the conversation to an end; and he returned to his night's grog at Fossville, while I strolled forth again on Calistoga high street. But it was an odd thing that here, on what we are accustomed to consider the very skirts of civilisation, I should have used the telephone for the first time in my civilised career. So it goes in these young countries; telephones, and tele- 322 IN THE VALLEY graphs, and newspapers, and advertisements running far ahead among the Indians and the grizzly bears. Alone, on the other side of the railway, stands the Springs Hotel, with its attendant cottages. The floor of the valley is extremely level to the very roots of the hills; only here and there a hillock, crowned with pines, rises like the barrow of some chieftain famed in war; and right against one of these hillocks is the Springs Hotel — is or was; for since I was there the place has been destroyed by fire, and has risen again from its ashes. A lawn runs about the house, and the lawn is in its turn surrounded by a system of little five-roomed cottages, each with a verandah and a weedy palm be- fore the door. Some of the cottages are let to residents, and these are wreathed in flowers. The rest are occu- pied by ordinary visitors to the hotel ; and a very plea- sant way this is, by which you have a little country cottage of your own, without domestic burthens, and by the day or week. The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena is full of sulphur and of boiling springs. The Geysers are famous; they were the great health resort of the Indians before the coming of the whites. Lake County is dotted with spas ; Hot Springs and White Sulphur Springs are the names of two stations on the Napa Valley railroad; and Calistoga itself seems to repose on a mere film above a boiling, subterranean lake. At one end of the hotel enclosure are the springs from which it takes its name, hot enough to scald a child seriously while I was there. At the other end, the tenant of a cottage sank a well, and there also the water came up boiling. It keeps this end of the valley as warm as a toast. I have gone 323 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS across to the hotel a little after five in the morning, when a sea fog from the Pacific was hanging thick and gray, and dark and dirty overhead, and found the thermom- eter had been up before me, and had already climbed among the nineties; and in the stress of the day it was sometimes too hot to move about. But in spite of this heat from above and below, doing one on both sides, Calistoga was a pleasant place to dwell in; beautifully green, for it was then that fa- voured moment in the Californian year, when the rains are over and the dusty summer has not yet set in ; often visited by fresh airs, now from the mountain, now across Sonoma from the sea ; very quiet, very idle, very silent but for the breezes and the cattle bells afield. And there was something satisfactory in the sight of that great mountain that enclosed us to the north: whether it stood, robed in sunshine, quaking to its top- most pinnacle with the heat and brightness of the day; or whether it set itself to weaving vapours, wisp after wisp growing, trembling, fleeting, and fading in the blue. The tangled, woody, and almost trackless foothills that enclose the valley, shutting it off from Sonoma on the west, and from Yolo on the east — rough as they were in outline, dug out by winter streams, crowned by cliffy bluffs and nodding pine trees — were dwarfed into satellites by the bulk and bearing of Mount Saint Helena. She over-towered them by two-thirds of her own stat- ure. She excelled them by the boldness of her profile. Her great bald summit, clear of trees and pasture, a cairn of quartz and cinnabar, rejected kinship with the dark and shaggy wilderness of lesser hilltops. 324 CHAPTER II THE PETRIFIED FOREST We drove off from the Springs Hotel about three in the afternoon. The sun warmed me to the heart. A broad, cool wind streamed pauselessly down the valley, laden with perfume. Up at the top stood Mount Saint Helena, a bulk of mountain, bare atop, with tree-fringed spurs, and radiating warmth. Once we saw it framed in a grove of tall and exquisitely graceful white oaks, in line and colour a finished composition. We passed a cow stretched by the roadside, her bell slowly beating time to the movement of her ruminating jaws, her big red face crawled over by half a dozen flies, a monument of content. A little farther, and we struck to the left up a moun- tain road, and for two hours threaded one valley after another, green, tangled, full of noble timber, giving us every now and again a sight of Mount Saint Helena and the blue hilly distance, and crossed by many streams, through which we splashed to the carriage-step. To the right or the left, there was scarce any trace of man but the road we followed; I think we passed but one ranchero's house in the whole distance, and that was closed and smokeless. But we had the society of these bright streams — dazzlingly clear, as is their wont, 325 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS splashing from the wheels in diamonds, and striking a lively coolness through the sunshine. And what with the innumerable variety of greens, the masses of foliage tossing in the breeze, the glimpses of distance, the de- scents into seemingly impenetrable thickets, the contin- ual dodging of the road, which made haste to plunge again into the covert, we had a fine sense of woods, and spring-time, and the open air. Our driver gave me a lecture by the way on Califor- nian trees — a thing I was much in need of, having fal- len among painters who know the name of nothing, and Mexicans who know the name of nothing in English. He taught me the madrona, the manzanita, the buck- eye, the maple; he showed me the crested mountain quail; he showed me where some young redwoods were already spiring heavenwards from the ruins of the old; for in this district all had already perished: red- woods and redskins, the two noblest indigenous living things, alike condemned. At length, in a lonely dell, we came on a huge wooden gate with a sign upon it like an inn. ''The Petrified Forest. Proprietor: C. Evans," ran the legend. Within, on a knoll of sward, was the house of the proprietor, and another smaller house hard by to serve as a museum, where photographs and petrifactions were retailed. It was a pure little isle of touristry among these solitary hills. The proprietor was a brave old whitefaced Swede. He had wandered this way, Heaven knows how, and taken up his acres — I forget how many years ago — all alone, bent double with sciatica, and with six bits in his pocket and an axe upon his shoulder. Long, useless 326 IN THE VALLEY years of seafaring had thus discharged him at the end, penniless and sick. Without doubt he had tried his luck at the diggings, and got no good from that; with- out doubt he had loved the bottle, and lived the life of Jack ashore. But at the end of these adventures, here he came; and, the place hitting his fancy, down he sat to make a new life of it, far from crimps and the salt sea. And the very sight of his ranche had done him good. It was ** the handsomest spot in the Californy mountains." ** Isn't it handsome, now ? " he said. Every penny he makes goes into that ranche to make it handsomer. Then the climate, with the sea-breeze every afternoon in the hottest summer weather, had gradually cured the sciatica ; and his sister and niece were now domesticated with him for company — or, rather, the niece came only once in the two days, teaching music the meanwhile in the valley. And then, for a last piece of luck, **the handsomest spot in the Californy mountains " had pro- duced a petrified forest, which Mr. Evans now shows at the modest figure of half a dollar a head, or two-thirds of his capital when he first came there with an axe and a sciatica. This tardy favourite of fortune — hobbling a little, I think, as if in memory of the sciatica, but with not a trace that I can remember of the sea — thoroughly rural- ized from head to foot, proceeded to escort us up the hill behind his house. " Who first found the forest.^" asked my wife. *'The first .^ I was that man," said he. *'I was cleaning up the pasture for my beasts, when I found this'' — kicking a great redwood, seven feet in diameter, that lay there on its side, hollow heart, clinging lumps 327 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS of bark, all changed into gray stone, with veins of quartz between what had been the layers of the wood. ** Were you surprised ? " ' * Surprised ? No ! What would I be surprised about ? What did I know about petrifactions — following the sea ? Petrifaction ! There was no such word in my language! I knew about putrefaction, though ! I thought it was a stone; so would you, if you was cleaning up pasture." And now he had a theory of his own, which I did not quite grasp, except that the trees had not *'grewed" there. But he mentioned, with evident pride, that he differed from all the scientific people who had visited the spot; and he flung about such words as *'tufa" and ** silica" with careless freedom. When I mentioned I was from Scotland, ''My old country," he said; " my old country " — with a smiling look and a tone of real affection in his voice. I was mightily surprised, for he was obviously Scandinavian, and begged him to explain. It seemed he had learned his English and done nearly all his sailing in Scotch ships. * * Out of Glasgow, " said he, * * or Greenock ; but that's all the same — they all hail from Glasgow." And he was so pleased with me for being a Scotsman, and his adopted compatriot, that he made me a present of a very beautiful piece of petrifaction — I believe the most beautiful and portable he had. Here was a man, at least, who was a Swede, a Scot, and an American, acknowledging some kind allegiance to three lands. Mr. Wallace's Scoto-Circassian will not fail to come before the reader. I have myself met and spoken with a Fifeshire German, whose combination of abominable accents struck me dumb. But, indeed, I 328 IN THE VALLEY think we all belong to many countries. And perhaps this habit of much travel, and the engendering of scat- tered friendships, may prepare the euthanasia of ancient nations. And the forest itself.? Well, on a tangled, briery hill- side — for the pasture would bear a little further cleaning up, to my eyes — there lie scattered thickly various lengths of petrified trunk, such as the one already mentioned. It is very curious, of course, and ancient enough, if that were all. Doubtless, the heart of the geologist beats quicker at the sight ; but, for my part, I was mightily unmoved. Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment. " There's nothing under heaven so blue, That's fairly worth the travelling to." But, fortunately. Heaven rewards us with many agree- able prospects and adventures by the way; and some- times, when we go out to see a petrified forest, pre- pares a far more delightful curiosity in the form of Mr. Evans, whom may all prosperity attend throughout a long and green old age. 339 CHAPTER III NAPA WINE I WAS interested in Californian wine. Indeed, I am interested in all wines, and have been all my life, from the raisin wine that a schoolfellow kept secreted in his play-box up to my last discovery, those notable Valtel- lines that once shone upon the board of Caesar. Some of us, kind old Pagans, watch with dread the shadows falling on the age: how the unconquerable worm invades the sunny terraces of France, and Bor- deaux is no more, and the Rhone a mere Arabia Petraea. Chateau Neuf is dead, and I have never tasted it; Her- mitage — a hermitage indeed from all life's sorrows — lies expiring by the river. And in the place of these imperial elixirs, beautiful to every sense, gem-hued, flower-scented, dream-compellers: — behold upon the quays at Cette the chemicals -arrayed ; behold the an- alyst at Marseilles, raising hands in obsecration, attest- ing god Lyoeus, and the vats staved in, and the dishonest wines poured forth among the sea. It is not Pan only ; Bacchus, too, is dead. If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the white dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all fervent, hushing their talk, degust- ing tenderly, and storing reminiscences — for a bottle 330 IN THE VALLEY of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retro- spect — if wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old Jack! Now we begin to have compunctions, and look back at the brave bottles squandered upon dinner-parties, where the guests drank grossly, discussing politics the while, and even the schoolboy "took his whack," like liquorice water. And at the same time, we look tim- idly forward, with a spark of hope, to where the new lands, already weary of producing gold, begin to green with vineyards. A nice point in human history falls to be decided by Californian and Australian wines. Wine in California is still in the experimental stage; and when you taste a vintage, grave economical ques- tions are involved. The beginning of vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for the precious metals: the wine-grower also ' ' prospects. " One corner of land after another is tried with one kind of grape after an- other. This is a failure; that is better; a third best. So, bit by bit, they grope about for their Clos Vougeot and Lafite. Those lodes and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious ores, that yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire ; those virtuous Bonanzas, where the soil has sublimated under sun and stars to some- thing finer, and the wine is bottled poetry : these still lie undiscovered ; chaparral conceals, thicket embowers them; the miner chips the rock and wanders farther, and the grizzly muses undisturbed. But there they bide their hour, awaiting their Columbus ; and nature nurses and prepares them. The smack of Californian earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson. Meanwhile the wine is merely a good wine; the best that 1 have tasted better than a Beaujolais, and not un- 331 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS like. But the trade is poor ; it lives from hand to mouth, putting its all into experiments, and forced to sell its vintages. To find one properly matured, and bearing its own name, is to be fortune's favourite. Bearing its own name, I say, and dwell upon the in- nuendo. '* You want to know why California wine is not drunk in the States ? " a. San Francisco wine merchant said to me, after he had shown me through his premises. "Well, here's the reason." And opening a large cupboard, fitted with many little drawers, he proceeded to shower me all over with a great variety of gorgeously tinted labels, blue, red, or yellow, stamped with crown or coronet, and hailing from such^a profusion of clos and chdteaux, that a single department could scarce have furnished forth the names. But it was strange that all looked unfamiliar. " Chateau X ? " said I. ' ' I never heard of that. " '' I dare say not," said he. "I had been reading one of X 's novels." They were all castles in Spain ! But that sure enough is the reason why California wine is not drunk in the States. Napa valley has been long a seat of the wine-grow- ing industry. It did not here begin, as it does too often, in the low valley lands along the river, but took at once to the rough foothills, where alone it can expect to pros- per. A basking inclination, and stones, to be a reservoir of the day's heat, seem necessary to the soil for wine ; the grossness of the earth must be evaporated, its mar- row daily melted and refined for ages ; until at length these clods that break below our footing, and to the eye 332 IN THE VALLEY appear but common earth, are truly and to the perceiv- ing mind, a masterpiece of nature. The dust of Riche- bourg, which the wind carries away, what an apotheosis of the dust! Not man himself can seem a stranger child of that brown, friable powder, than the blood and sun in that old flask behind the faggots. A Californian vineyard, one of man's outposts in the wilderness, has features of its own. There is nothing here to remind you of the Rhine or Rhone, of the low cote d'or, or the infamous and scabby deserts of Cham- pagne; but all is green, solitary, covert. We visited two of them, Mr. Schram's and Mr. M'Eckron's, sharing the same glen. Some way down the valley below Calistoga, we turned sharply to the south and plunged into the thick of the wood. A rude trail rapidly mounting; a little stream tinkling by on the one hand, big enough per- haps after the rains, but already yielding up its life; overhead and on all sides a bower of green and tangled thicket, still fragrant and still flower-bespangled by the early season, where thimble-berry played the part of our English hawthorn, and the buck-eyes were putting forth their twisted horns of blossom : through all this, we struggled toughly upwards, canted to and fro by the roughness of the trail, and continually switched across the face by sprays of leaf or blossom. The last is no great inconvenience at home; but here in Califor- nia it is a matter of some moment. For in all woods and by every wayside there prospers an abominable shrub or weed, called poison-oak, whose very neigh- bourhood is venomous to some, and whose actual touch is avoided by the most impervious. 333 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS The two houses, with their vineyards, stood each in a green niche of its own in this steep and narrow forest dell. Though they were so near, there was already a good difference in level; and Mr. M'Eckron's head must be a long way under the feet of Mr. Schram. No more had been cleared than was necessary for cultivation; close around each oasis ran the tangled wood ; the glen enfolds them; there they lie basking in sun and silence, concealed from all but the clouds and the mountain birds. Mr. M'Eckron's is a bachelor establishment; a little bit of a wooden house, a small cellar hard by in the hill- side, and a patch of vines planted and tended single- handed by himself He had but recently begun; his vines were young, his business young also ; but I thought he had the look of the man who succeeds. He hailed from Greenock : he remembered his father putting him inside Mons Meg, and that touched me home; and we exchanged a word or two of Scotch, which pleased me more than you would fancy. Mr. Schram's, on the other hand, is the oldest vine- yard in the valley, eighteen years old, I think; yet he began a penniless barber, and even after he had broken ground up here with his black malvoisies, continued for long to tramp the valley with his razor. Now, his place is the picture of prosperity : stuffed birds in the verandah, cellars far dug into the hillside, and resting on pillars like a bandit's cave: — all trimness, varnish, flowers, and sunshine, among the tangled wildwood. Stout, smiling Mrs. Schram, who has been to Europe and apparently all about the States for pleasure, enter- tained Fanny in the verandah, while I was tasting wines 334 IN THE VALLEY in the cellar. To Mr. Schram this was a solemn office; his serious gusto warmed my heart; prosperity had not yet wholly banished a certain neophite and girlish trepi- dation, and he followed every sip and read my face with proud anxiety. 1 tasted all. I tasted every variety and shade of Schramberger, red and white Schramberger, Burgundy Schramberger, Schramberger Hock, Schram- berger Golden Chasselas, the latter with a notable bou- quet, and 1 fear to think how many more. Much of it goes to London — most, I think; and Mr. Schram has a great notion of the English taste. In this wild spot, I did not feel the sacredness of an- cient cultivation. It was still raw, it was no Marathon, and no Johannisberg; yet the stirring sunlight, and the growing vines, and the vats and bottles in the cavern, made a pleasant music for the mind. Here, also, earth's cream was being skimmed and garnered ; and the Lon- don customers can taste, such as it is, the tang of the earth in this green valley. So local, so quintessential is a wine, that it seems the very birds in the verandah might communicate a flavour, and that romantic cellar influence the bottle next to be uncorked in Pimlico, and the smile of jolly Mr. Schram might mantle in the glass. But these are but experiments. All things in this new land are moving farther on : the wine-vats and the miner's blasting tools but picket for a night, like Bed- ouin pavillions; and to-morrow, to fresh woods! This stir of change and these perpetual echoes of the moving footfall, haunt the land. Men move eternally, still chas- ing Fortune; and, fortune found, still wander. As we drove back to Calistoga, the road lay empty of mere passengers, but its green side was dotted with the 335 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS camps of travelling families : one cumbered with a great waggonful of household stuff, settlers going to occupy a ranche they had taken up in Mendocino, or perhaps Tehama County; another, a party in dust coats, men and women, whom we found camped in a grove on the roadside, all on pleasure bent, with a Chinaman to cook for them, and who waved their hands to us as we drove by. 336 CHAPTER IV THE SCOT ABROAD A FEW pages back, I wrote that a man belonged, in these days, to a variety of countries; but the old land is still the true love, the others are but pleasant infideli- ties. Scotland is indefinable; it has no unity except upon the map. Two languages, many dialects, innu- merable forms of piety, and countless local patriotisms and prejudices, part us among ourselves more widely than the extreme east and west of that great continent of America. When I am at home, I feel a man from Glasgow to be something like a rival, a man from Barra to be more than half a foreigner. Yet let us meet in some far country, and, whether we hail from the braes of Manor or the braes of Mar, some ready-made affec- tion joins us on the instant. It is not race. Look at us. One is Norse, one Celtic, and another Saxon. It is not community of tongue. We have it not among our- selves ; and we have it almost to perfection, with Eng- lish, or Irish, or American. It is no tie of faith, for we detest each other's errors. And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each one of us, something yearns for the old land, and the old kindly people. Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the 337 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS most inscrutable. There is no special loveliness in that gray country, with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains ; its unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendly looking corn-lands; its quaint, gray, castled city, where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat. I do not even know if I desire to live there ; but let me hear, in some far land, a kindred voice sing out, ''Oh, why left I my hame.^" and it seems at once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise and good, can repay me for my absence from my country. And though I think I would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to be buried among good Scots clods. I will say it fairly, it grows on me with every year: there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh street-lamps. When I forget thee, auld Reekie, may my right hand forget its cunning ! The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotchman. You must pay for it in many ways, as for all other ad- vantages on earth. You have to learn the paraphrases and the shorter catechism; you generally take to drink; your youth, as far as I can find out, is a time of louder war against society, of more outcry and tears and tur- moil, than if you had been born, for instance, in Eng- land. But somehow life is warmer and closer; the hearth burns more redly; the lights of home shine softer on the rainy street; the very names, endeared in verse and music, cling nearer round our hearts. An Englishman may meet an Englishman to-morrow, upon Chimborazo, and neither of them care; but when the Scotch wine-grower told me of Mons Meg, it was like magic. 338 IN THE VALLEY *• From the dim shieling on the misty island Mountains divide us, and a world of seas; Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland, And we, in dreams, behold the Hebrides." And, Highland and Lowland, all our hearts are Scotch. Only a few days after I had seen M'Eckron, a mes- sage reached me in my cottage. It was a Scotchman who had come down a long way from the hills to mar- ket. He had heard there was a countryman in Calis- toga, and came round to the hotel to see him. We said a few words to each other; we had not much to say — should never have seen each other had we stayed at home, separated alike in space and in society; and then we shook hands, and he went his way again to his ranche among the hills, and that was all. Another Scotchman there was, a resident, who for the mere love of the common country, douce, serious, re- ligious man, drove me all about the valley, and took as much interest in me as if I had been his son : more, per- haps ; for the son has faults too keenly felt, while the abstract countryman is perfect — like a whifT of peats. And there was yet another. Upon him I came sud- denly, as he was calmly entering my cottage, his mind quite evidently bent on plunder: a man of about fifty, filthy, ragged, roguish, with a chimney-pot hat and a tail coat, and a pursing of his mouth that might have been envied by an elder of the kirk. He had just such a face as I have seen a dozen times behind the plate. ''Hullo, sir!" I cried. "Where are you going?" He turned round without a quiver. " You are a Scotchman, sir ? " he said gravely. " So am I; I come from Aberdeen. This is my card," pre- ^^9 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS senting me with a piece of pasteboard which he had raked out of some gutter in the period of the rains. "I was just examining this palm," he continued, indi- cating the misbegotten plant before our door, ** which is the largest specimen I have yet observed in Cali- foarnia." There were four or five larger within sight. But where was the use of argument ? He produced a tape- line, made me help him to measure the tree at the level of the ground, and entered the figures in a large and filthy pocket-book, all with the gravity of Solomon. He then thanked me profusely, remarking that such lit- tle services were due between countrymen ; shook hands with me, ''for auld lang syne," as he said; and took himself solemnly away, radiating dirt and humbug as he went. A month or two after this encounter of mine, there came a Scot to Sacramento — perhaps from Aberdeen. Anyway, there never was any one more Scotch in this wide world. He could sing and dance, and drink, I presume; and he played the pipes with vigour and suc- cess. All the Scotch in Sacramento became infatuated with him, and spent their spare time and money, driv- ing him about in an open cab, between drinks, while he blew himself scarlet at the pipes. This is a very sad story. After he had borrowed money from every one, he and his pipes suddenly disappeared from Sacra- mento, and when I last heard, the police were looking for him. I cannot say how this story amused me, when I felt myself so thoroughly ripe on both sides to be duped in the same way. 340 IN THE VALLEY It is at least a curious thing, to conclude, that the races which wander widest, Jews and Scotch, should be the most clannish in the world. But perhaps these two are cause and effect: "For ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." 34' WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL CHAPTER I TO INTRODUCE MR. KELMAR One thing in this new country very particularly strikes a stranger, and that is the number of antiquities. Al- ready there have been many cycles of population suc- ceeding each other, and passing away and leaving behind them relics. These, standing on into changed times, strike the imagination as forcibly as any pyramid or feudal tower. The towns, like the vineyards, are ex- perimentally founded: they grow great and prosper by passing occasions; and when the lode comes to an end, and the miners move elsewhere, the town remains behind them, like Palmyra in the desert. I suppose there are, in no country in the world, so many deserted towns as here in California. The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena, now so quiet and sylvan, was once alive with mining camps and villages. Here there would be two thou- sand souls under canvas ; there one thousand or fifteen hundred ensconced, as if for ever, in a town of comfort- able houses. But the luck had failed, the mines petered out ; and the army of miners had departed, and left this quarter of the world to the rattlesnakes and deer and grizzlies, and to the slower but steadier advance of hus- bandry. 342 WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL It was with an eye on one of these deserted places^ Pine Flat, on the Geysers road, that we had come first to Calistoga. There is something singularly enticing in the idea of going, rent-free, into a ready-made house. And to the British merchant, sitting at home at ease, it may appear that, with such a roof over your head and a spring of clear water hard by, the whole problem of the squatter's existence would be solved. Food, however, has yet to be considered. I will go as far as most peo- ple on tinned meats; some of the brightest moments of my life were passed over tinned mulligatawney in the cabin of a sixteen-ton schooner, storm-stayed in Portree Bay; but after suitable experiments, I pronounce au- thoritatively that man cannot live by tins alone. Fresh meat must be had on an occasion. It is true that the great Foss, driving by along the Geysers road, wooden- faced, but glorified with legend, might have been in- duced to bring us meat, but the great Foss could hardly bring us milk. To take a cow would have involved taking a field of grass and a milkmaid ; after which it would have been hardly worth while to pause, and we might have added to our colony a flock of sheep and an experienced butcher. It is really very disheartening how we depend on other people in this life. *' Mihi est propositum," as you may see by the motto, "id quod regibus;" and behold it cannot be carried out, unless I find a neighbour rolling in cattle. Now, my principal adviser in this matter was one whom I will call Kelmar. That was not what he called himself, but as soon as I set eyes on him, I knew it was or ought to be his name; I am sure it will be his name 343 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS among the angels. Kelmar was the store-keeper, a Russian Jew, good-natured, in a very thriving way of business, and, on equal terms, one of the most service- able of men. He also had something of the expression of a Scotch country elder, who, by some peculiarity, should chance to be a Hebrew. He had a projecting under lip, with which he continually smiled, or rather smirked. Mrs. Kelmar was a singularly kind woman ; and the oldest son had quite a dark and romantic bear- ing, and might be heard on summer evenings playing sentimental airs on the violin. I had no idea, at the time I made his acquaintance, what an important person Kelmar was. But the Jew store-keepers of California, profiting at once by the needs and habits of the people, have made themselves in too many cases the tyrants of the rural population. Credit is offered, is pressed on the new customer, and when once he is beyond his depth, the tune changes, and he is from thenceforth a white slave. I believe, even from the little I saw, that Kelmar, if he choose to put on the screw, could send half the settlers packing in a radius of seven or eight miles round Calistoga. These are continually paying him, but are never suffered to get out of debt. He palms dull goods upon them, for they dare not refuse to buy; he goes and dines with them when he is on an outing, and no man is loudlier welcomed ; he is their family friend, the director of their business, and, to a degree elsewhere unknown in mod- ern days, their king. For some reason, Kelmar always shook his head at the mention of Pine Flat, and for some days I thought he disapproved of the whole scheme and was propor- 344 WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL tionately sad. One fine morning, however, he met me, wreathed in smiles. He had found the very place for me — Silverado, another old mining town, right up the mountain. Rufe Hanson, the hunter, could take care of us — fine people the Hansons; we should be close to the Toll House, where the Lakeport stage called daily; it was the best place for my health, besides. Rufe had been consumptive, and was now quite a strong man, ain't it ? In short, the place and all its accompaniments seemed made for us on purpose. He took me to his back door, whence, as from every point of Calistoga, Mount Saint Helena could be seen towering in the air. There, in the nick, just where the eastern foothills joined the mountain, and she herself be- gan to rise above the zone of forest — there was Silverado. The name had already pleased me ; the high station pleased me still more. I began to inquire with some eagerness. It was but a little while ago that Silverado was a great place. The mine — a silver mine, of course — had promised great things. There was quite a lively popu- lation, with several hotels and boarding-houses; and Kelmar himself had opened a branch store, and done extremely well — "Ain't it.^" he said, appealing to his wife. And she said, *'Yes; extremely well." Now there was no one living in the town but Rufe the hun- ter; and once more I heard Rufe's praises by the yard, and this time sung in chorus. I could not help perceiving at the time that there was something underneath ; that no unmixed desire to have us comfortably settled had inspired the Kelmars with this flow of words. But I was impatient to be gone, to be about my kingly project; and when we were offered J45 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS seats in Kelmar's waggon, I accepted on the spot. Tlie plan of their next Sunday's outing took them, by good fortune, over the border into Lake County. They would carry us so far, drop us at the Toll House, present us to the Hansons, and call for us again on Monday morning early. CHAPTER II FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SILVERADO We were to leave by six precisely ; that was solemnly pledged on both sides; and a messenger came to us the last thing at night, to remind us of the hour. But it was eight before we got clear of Calistoga: Kelmar, Mrs. Kelmar, a friend of theirs whom we named Abramina, her little daughter, my wife, myself, and, stowed away behind us, a cluster of ship's coffee-kettles. These last were highly ornamental in the sheen of their bright tin, but I could invent no reason for their presence. Our carriageful reckoned up, as near as we could get at it, some three hundred years to the six of us. Four of the six, besides, were Hebrews. But I never, in all my life, was conscious of so strong an atmosphere of holiday. No word was spoken but of pleasure; and even when we drove in silence, nods and smiles went round the party like refreshments. The sun shone out of a cloudless sky. Close at the zenith rode the belated moon, still clearly visible, and, along one margin, even bright. The wind blew a gale from the north ; the trees roared ; the corn and the deep grass in the valley fled in whitening surges; the dust towered into the air along the road and dispersed like the smoke of battle. It was clear in our teeth from the 347 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS first, and for all the windings of the road it managed to keep clear in our teeth until the end. For some two miles we rattled through the valley, skirting the eastern foothills ; then we struck off to the right, through haugh-land, and presently, crossing a dry water-course, entered the Toll road, or, to be more local, entered on *'the grade." The road mounts the near shoulder of Mount Saint Helena, bound northward into Lake County. In one place it skirts along the edge of a narrow and deep cafion, filled with trees, and I was glad, indeed, not to be driven at this point by the dashing Foss. Kelmar, with his unvarying smile, jog- ging to the motion of the trap, drove for all the world like a good, plain, country clergyman at home; and I profess I blessed him unawares for his timidity. Vineyards and deep meadows, islanded and framed with thicket, gave place more and more as we ascended to woods of oak and madrona, dotted with enormous pines. It was these pines, as they shot above the lower wood, that produced that pencilling of single trees I had so often remarked from the valley. Thence, looking up and from however far, each fir stands separate against the sky no bigger than an eyelash; and all together lend a quaint, fringed aspect to the hills. The oak is no baby; even the madrona, upon these spurs of Mount Saint Helena, comes to a fine bulk and ranks with forest trees ; but the pines look down upon the rest for underwood. As Mount Saint Helena among her foot- hills, so these dark giants out-top their fellow-vege- tables. Alas ! if they had left the redwoods, the pines, in turn, would have been dwarfed. But the redwoods, fallen from their high estate, are serving as family bed- 348 WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL steads, or yet more humbly as field fences, along all Napa Valley. A rough smack of resin was in the air, and a crystal mountain purity. It came pouring over these green slopes by the oceanful. The wood sang aloud, and gave largely of their healthful breath. Gladness seemed to inhabit these upper zones, and we had left indiffer- ence behind us in the valley. *'I to the hills will lift mine eyes!" There are days in a life when thus to climb out of the lowlands, seems like scaling heaven. As we continued to ascend, the wind fell upon us with increasing strength. It was a wonder how the two stout horses managed to pull us up that steep in- cline and still face the athletic opposition of the wind, or how their great eyes were able to endure the dust. Ten minutes after we went by, a tree fell, blocking the road; and even before us leaves were thickly strewn, and boughs had fallen, large enough to make the pas- sage difficult. But now we were hard by the summit. The road crosses the ridge, just in the nick that Kel- mar showed me from below, and then, without pause, plunges down a deep, thickly wooded glen on the far- ther side. At the highest point a trail strikes up the main hill to the leftward ; and that leads to Silverado. A hundred yards beyond, and in a kind of elbow of the glen, stands the Toll House Hotel. We came up the one side, were caught upon the summit by the whole weight of the wind as it poured over into Napa Valley, and a minute after had drawn up in shelter, but all buffetted and breathless, at the Toll House door. A water-tank, and stables, and a gray house of two stories, with gable ends and a verandah, are jammed 349 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS hard against the hillside, just where a stream has cut for itself a narrow canon, filled with pines. The pines go right up overhead; a little more and the stream might have played, like a fire-hose, on the Toll House roof. In front the ground drops as sharply as it rises behind. There is just room for the road and a sort of promon- tory of croquet ground, and then you can lean over the edge and look deep below you through the wood. I said croquet ground, not green ; for the surface was of brown, beaten earth. The toil-bar itself was the only other note of originality: a long beam, turning on a post, and kept slightly horizontal by a counterweight of stones. Regularly about sundown this rude barrier was swung, like a derrick, across the road and made fast, I think, to a tree upon the farther side. On our arrival there followed a gay scene in the bar. I was presented to Mr. Corwin, the landlord; to Mr. Jennings, the engineer, who lives there for his health; to Mr. Hoddy, a most pleasant little gentleman, once a member of the Ohio legislature, again the editor of a local paper, and now, with undiminished dignity, keep- ing the Toll House bar. I had a number of drinks and cigars bestowed on me, and enjoyed a famous oppor- tunity of seeing Kelmar in his glory, friendly, radiant, smiling, steadily edging one of the ship's kettles on the reluctant Corwin. Corwin, plainly aghast, resisted gal- lantly, and for that bout victory crowned his arms. At last we set forth for Silverado on foot. Kelmar and his jolly Jew girls were full of the sentiment of Sunday outings, breathed geniality and vagueness, and suffered a little vile boy from the hotel to lead them here and there about the woods. For three people all 350 WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL SO old, SO bulky in body, and belonging to a race so venerable, they could not but surprise us by their ex- treme and almost imbecile youthfulness of spirit. They were only going to stay ten minutes at the Toll House ; had they not twenty long miles of road before them on the other side ? Stay to dinner ? Not they ! Put up the horses ? Never. Let us attach them to the veran- dah by a v/isp of straw rope, such as would not have held a person's hat on that blustering day. . And with all these protestations of hurry, they proved irrespon- sible like children. Kelmar himself, shrewd old Russian Jew, with a smirk that seemed just to have concluded a bargain to its satisfaction, intrusted himself and us devoutly to that boy. Yet the boy was patently falla- cious ; and for that matter a most unsympathetic urchin, raised apparently on gingerbread. He was bent on his own pleasure, nothing else; and Kelmar followed him to his ruin, with the same shrewd smirk. If the boy said there was ''a hole there in the hill" — a hole, pure and simple, neither more nor less — Kelmar and his Jew girls would follow him a hundred yards to look com- placently down that hole. For two hours we looked for houses ; and for two hours they followed us, smell- ing trees, picking flowers, foisting false botany on the unwary. Had we taken five, with that vile lad to head them off on idle divagations, for five they would have smiled and stumbled through the woods. However, we came forth at length, and as by acci- dent, upon a lawn, sparse planted like an orchard, but with forest instead of fruit trees. That was the site of Silverado mining town. A piece of ground was levelled up, where Kelmar's store had been; and facing that we 35 1 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS saw Rufe Hanson's house, still bearing on its front the legend Silverado Hotel. Not another sign of habitation. Silverado town had all been carted from the scene ; one of the houses was now the schoolhouse far down the road ; one was gone here, one there, but all were gone away. It was now a sylvan solitude, and the silence was unbroken but by the great, vague voice of the wind. Some days before our visit, a grizzly bear had been sporting round the Hansons' chicken-house. Mrs. Hanson was at home alone, we found. Rufe had been out after a "bar," had risen late, and was now gone, it did not clearly appear whither. Perhaps he had had wind of Kelmar's coming, and was now ensconced among the underwood, or watching us from the shoul- der of the mountain. We, hearing there were no houses to be had, were for immediately giving up all hopes of Silverado. But this, somehow, was not to Kelmar's fancy. He first proposed that we should ''camp some- veres around, ain't it } " waving his hand cheerily as though to weave a spell; and when that was firmly re- jected, he decided that we must take up house with the Hansons. Mrs. Hanson had been, from the first, flus- tered, subdued, and a little pale ; but from this propo- sition she recoiled with haggard indignation. So did we, who would have preferred, in a manner of speaking, death. But Kelmar was not to be put by. He edged Mrs. Hanson into a corner, where for a long time he threatened her with his forefinger, like a character in Dickens ; and the poor woman, driven to her entrench- ments, at last remembered with a shriek that there were still some houses at the tunnel. Thither we went; the Jews, who should already have WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL been miles into Lake County, still cheerily accompany- ing us. For about a furlong we followed a good road along the hillside through the forest, until suddenly that road widened out and came abruptly to an end. A can- on, woody below, red, rocky, and naked overhead, was here walled across by a dump of rolling stones, danger- ously steep, and from twenty to thirty feet in height. A rusty iron chute on wooden legs came flying, like a monstrous gargoyle, across the parapet. It was down this that they poured the precious ore ; and below here the carts stood to wait their lading, and carry it mill- ward down the mountain. The whole cafion was so entirely blocked, as if by some rude guerilla fortification, that we could only mount by lengths of wooden ladder, fixed in the hill- side. These led us round the farther corner of the dump ; and when they were at an end, we still persevered over loose rubble and wading deep in poison oak, till we struck a triangular platform, filling up the whole glen, and shut in on either hand by bold projections of the mountain. Only in front the place was open like the proscenium of a theatre, and we looked forth into a great realm of air, and down upon treetops and hilltops, and far and near on wild and varied country. The place still stood as on the day it was deserted : a line of iron rails with a bifurcation; a truck in working order; a world of lumber, old wood, old iron ; a blacksmith's forge on one side, half buried in the leaves of dwarf madronas ; and on the other, an old brown wooden house. Fanny and I dashed at the house. It consisted of three rooms, and was so plastered against the hill, that one room was right atop of another, that the upper floor was 353 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS more than twice as large as the lower, and that all three apartments must be enteredfrom a different side and level. Not a window-sash remained. The door of the lower room was smashed, and one panel hung in splinters. We entered that, and found a fair amount of rubbish : sand and gravel that had been sifted in there by the mountain winds; straw, sticks, and stones; a table, a barrel; a plate-rack on the wall; two home-made boot- jacks, signs of miners and their boots; and a pair of papers pinned on the boarding, headed respectively ''Funnel No. i," and ''Funnel No. 2," but with the tails torn away. The window, sashless of course, was choked with the green and sweetly smelling foliage of a bay ; and through a chink in the floor, a spray of poison oak had shot up and was handsomely prospering in the interior. It was my first care to cut away that poison oak, Fanny standing by at a respectful distance. That was our first improvement by which we took possession. The room immediately above could only be entered by a plank propped against the threshold, along which the intruder must foot it gingerly, clutching for support to sprays of poison oak, the proper product of the coun- try. Herein was, on either hand, a triple tier of beds, where miners had once lain; and the other gable was pierced by a sashless window and a doorless doorway opening on the air of heaven, five feet above the ground. As for the third room, which entered squarely from the ground level, but higher up the hill and further up the canon, it contained only rubbish and the uprights for another triple tier of beds. The whole building was overhung by a bold, lion- like, red rock. Poison oak, sweet bay trees, calycan- 354 WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL thus, brush, and chaparral, grew freely but sparsely all about it. In front, in the strong sunshine, the platform lay overstrewn with busy litter, as though the labours of the mine might begin again to-morrow in the morning. Following back into the canon, among the mass of rotting plant and through the flowering bushes, we came to a great crazy staging, with a wry windlass on the top; and clambering up, we could look into an open shaft, leading edgeways down into the bowels of the mountain, trickling with water, and lit by some stray sun-gleams, whence I know not. In that quiet place the still, far-away tinkle of the water-drops was loudly audible. Close by, another shaft led edgeways up into the superincumbent shoulder of the hill. It lay partly open ; and sixty or a hundred feet above our head, we could see the strata propped apart by solid wooden wedges, and a pine, half undermined, precariously nodding on the verge. Here also a rugged, horizontal tunnel ran straight into the unsunned bowels of the rock. This secure angle in the mountain's flank was, even on this wild day, as still as my lady's chamber. But in the tunnel a cold, wet draught tempestuously blew. Nor have I ever known that place otherwise than cold and windy. Such was our first prospect of Juan Silverado. I own I had looked for something different : a clique of neigh- bourly houses on a village green, we shall say, all empty to be sure, but swept and varnished; a trout stream brawling by ; great elms or chestnuts, humming with bees and nested in by song-birds; and the mountains standing round about, as at Jerusalem. Here, moun- 355 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS tain and house and the old tools of industry were all alike rusty and downfalling. The hill was here wedged up, and there poured forth its bowels in a spout of broken mineral; man with his picks and powder, and nature with her own great blasting tools of sun and rain, labouring together at the ruin of that proud moun- tain. The view up the canon was a glimpse of devas- tation ; dry red minerals sliding together, here and there a crag, here and there dwarf thicket clinging in the general glissade, and over all a broken outline trenching on the blue of heaven. Downwards indeed, from our rock eyrie, we beheld the greener side of nature; and the bearing of the pines and the sweet smell of bays and nutmegs commended themselves gratefully to our senses. One way and another, now the die was cast. Silverado be it! After we had got back to the Toll House, the Jews were not long of striking forward. But I observed that one of the Hanson lads came down, before their de- parture, and returned with a ship's kettle. Happy Han- sons! Nor was it until after Kelmar was gone, if I remember rightly, that Rufe put in an appearance to arrange the details of our installation. The latter part of the day, Fanny and I sat in the ve- randah of the Toll House, utterly stunned by the up- roar of the wind among the trees on the other side of the valley. Sometimes, we would have it it was like a sea, but it was not various enough for that; and again, we thought it like the roar of a cataract, but it was too changeful for the cataract; and then we would decide, speaking in sleepy voices, that it could be compared with nothing but itself. My mind was entirely preoc- 356 WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL cupied by the noise. I hearkened to it by the hour, gapingly hearkened, and let my cigarette go out. Sometimes the wind would make a sally nearer hand, and send a shrill, whistling crash among the foliage on our side of the glen; and sometimes a backdraught would strike into the elbow where we sat, and cast the gravel and torn leaves into our faces. But for the most part, this great, streaming gale passed unweariedly by us into Napa Valley, not two hundred yards away, visible by the tossing boughs, stunningly audible, and yet not moving a hair upon our heads. So it blew all night long while I was writing up my journal, and after we were in bed, under a cloudless, starset heaven ; and so it was blowing still next morning when we rose. It was a laughable thought to us, what had become of our cheerful, wandering Hebrews. We could not suppose they had reached a destination. The meanest boy could lead them miles out of their way to see a gopher-hole. Boys, we felt to be their special danger; none others were of that exact pitch of cheerful irrele- vancy to exercise a kindred sway upon their minds: but before the attractions of a boy their most settled resolutions would be wax. We thought we could fol- low in fancy these three aged Hebrew truants wander- ing in and out on hilltop and in thicket, a demon boy trotting far ahead, their will-o'-the-wisp conductor ; and at last about midnight, the wind still roaring in the darkness, we had a vision of all three on their knees upon a mountain-top around a glow-worm. 357 CHAPTER III THE RETURN Next morning we were up by half-past five, accord- ing to agreement, and it was ten by the clock before our Jew boys returned to pick us up: Kelmar, Mrs. Kelmar, and Abramina, all smiling from ear to ear, and full of tales of the hospitality they had found on the other side. It had not gone unrewarded; for I observed with interest that the ship's kettles, all but one, had been ''placed." Three Lake County families, at least, endowed for life with a ship's kettle. Come, this was no misspent Sunday. The absence of the kettles told its own story : our Jews said nothing about them ; but, on the other hand, they said many kind and comely things about the people they had met. The two women, in particular, had been charmed out of them- selves by the sight of a young girl surrounded by her admirers; all evening, it appeared, they had been tri- umphing together in the girl's innocent successes, and to this natural and unselfish joy they gave expression in language that was beautiful by its simplicity and truth. Take them for all in all, few people have done my heart more good; they seemed so thoroughly entitled to happiness, and to enjoy it in so large a measure and so 358 WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL free from after-thought ; almost they persuaded me to be a Jew. There was, indeed, a chink of money in their talk. They particularly commended people who were well to do. "He don't care — ain't it.?" was their highest word of commendation to an individual fate; and here 1 seem to grasp the root of their philosophy — it was to be free from care, to be free to make these Sunday wanderings, that they so eagerly pursued after wealth ; and all this carefulness was to be careless. The fine, good humour of all three seemed to declare they had attained their end. Yet there was the other side to it; and the recipients of kettles perhaps cared greatly. No sooner had they returned, than the scene of yes- terday began again. The horses were not even tied with a straw rope this time — it was not worth while; and Kelmar disappeared into the bar, leaving them un- der a tree on the other side of the road. I had to devote myself I stood under the shadow of that tree for, I suppose, hard upon an hour, and had not the heart to be angry. Once some one remembered me, and brought me out a half a tumblerful of the playful, innocuous American cocktail. I drank it, and lo ! veins of living fire ran down my leg; and then a focus of conflagration remained seated in my stomach, not unpleasantly, for quarter of an hour. I love these sweet, fiery pangs, but I will not court them. The bulk of the time I spent in repeating as much French poetry as I could remem- ber to the horses, who seemed to enjoy it hugely. And now it went — ** O ma vieille Font-georges Ou volent les rouges-gorges : " 359 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS and again, to a more trampling measure — " Et tout tremble, Irun, Coimbre, Santander, Almodovar, Sitot qu'on entend le timbre Des cymbales de Bivar." The redbreasts and the brooks of Europe, in that dry and songless land ; brave old names and wars, strong cities, cymbals, and bright armour, in that nook of the moun- tain, sacred only to the Indian and the bear! This is still the strangest thing in all man's travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous memories. There is no foreign land ; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the earth. But while I was thus wandering in my fancy, great feats had been transacted in the bar. Corwin the bold had fallen, Kelmar was again crowned with laurels, and the last of the ship's kettles had changed hands. If I had ever doubted the purity of Kelmar's motives, if I had ever suspected him of a single eye to business in his eternal dallyings, now at least, when the last kettle was disposed of, my suspicions must have been allayed. I dare not guess how much more time was wasted; nor how often we drove off, merely to drive back again and renew interrupted conversations about nothing, before the Toll House was fairly left behind. Alas! and not a mile down the grade there stands a ranche in a sunny vineyard, and here we must all dismount again and enter. Only the old lady was at home, Mrs. Guele, a brown old Swiss dame, the picture of honesty ; and with her 360 WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL we drank a bottle of wine and had an age-long conver- sation, which would have been highly delightful if Fanny and I had not been faint with hunger. The ladies each narrated the story of her marriage, our two Hebrews with the prettiest combination of sentiment and finan- cial bathos. Abramina, specially, endeared herself with every word. She was as simple, natural, and engaging as a kid that should have been brought up to the busi- ness of a money-changer. One touch was so resplen- dently Hebraic that I cannot pass it over. When her *'old man" wrote home for her from America, her old man's family would not intrust her with the money for the passage, till she had bound herself by an oath — on her knees, I think she said — not to employ it otherwise. This had tickled Abramina hugely, but I think it tickled me fully more. Mrs. Guele told of her home-sickness up here in the long winters ; of her honest, country-woman troubles and alarms upon the journey ; how in the bank at Frank- fort she had feared lest the banker, after having taken her cheque, should deny all knowledge of it — a fear I have myself every time I go to a bank; and how cross- ing the Luneburger Heath, an old lady, witnessing her trouble and finding whither she was bound, had given her ''the blessing of a person eighty years old, which would be sure to bring her safely to the States. And the first thing I did," added Mrs. Guele, *'was to fall downstairs." At length we got out of the house, and some of us into the trap, when — judgment of Heaven ! — here came Mr. Guele from his vineyard. So another quarter of an hour went by ; till at length, at our earnest pleading, we 361 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS set forth again in earnest, Fanny and I white-faced and silent, but the Jews still smiling. The heart fails me. There was yet another stoppage ! And we drove at last into Calistoga past two in the afternoon, Fanny and I having breakfasted at six in the morning, eight mortal hours before. We were a pallid couple; but still the Jews were smiling. So ended our excursion with the village usurers ; and, now that it was done, we had no more idea of the na- ture of the business, nor of the part we had been playing in it, than the child unborn. That all the people we had met were the slaves of Kelmar, though in various de- grees of servitude; that we ourselves had been sent up the mountain in the interests of none but Kelmar; that the money we laid out, dollar by dollar, cent by cent, and through the hands of various intermediaries, should all hop ultimately into Kelmar's till ; — these were facts that we only grew to recognise in the course of time and by the accumulation of evidence. At length all doubt was quieted, when one of the kettle-holders con- fessed. Stopping his trap in the moonlight, a little way out of Calistoga, he told me, in so many words, that he dare not show face there with an empty pocket. ''You see, I don't mind if it was only five dollars, Mr. Stevens," he said, *'but I must give Mr. Kelmar something/' Even now, when the whole tyranny is plain to me, I cannot find it in my heart to be as angry as perhaps I should be with the Hebrew tyrant. The whole game of business is beggar my neighbour; and though per- haps that game looks uglier when played at such close quarters and on so small a scale, it is none the more in- trinsically inhumane for that. The village usurer is not 362 WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL SO sad a feature of humanity and human progress as the millionaire manufacturer, fattening on the toil and loss of thousands, and yet declaiming from the platform against the greed and dishonesty of landlords. If it were fair for Cobden to buy up land from owners whom he thought unconscious of its proper value, it was fair enough for my Russian Jew to give credit to his farm- ers. Kelmar, if he was unconscious of the beam in his own eye, was at least silent in the matter of his broth- er's mote. 3(5^ THE ACT OF SQUATTING There were four of us squatters — myself and my wife, the King and Queen of Silverado; Sam, the Crown Prince ; and Chuchu, the Grand Duke. Chuchu, a set- ter crossed with spaniel, was the most unsuited for a rough life. He had been nurtured tenderly in the soci- ety of ladies ; his heart was large and soft ; he regarded the sofa-cushion as a bed-rock necessary of existence. Though about the size of a sheep, he loved to sit in ladies' laps; he never said a bad word in all his blame- less days ; and if he had seen a flute, I am sure he could have played upon it by nature. It may seem hard to say it of a dog, but Chuchu was a tame cat. The king and queen, the grand duke, and a basket of cold provender for immediate use, set forth from Calis- toga in a double buggy; the crown prince, on horse- back, led the way like an outrider. Bags and boxes and a second-hand stove were to follow close upon our heels by Hanson's team. It was a beautiful still day ; the sky was one field of azure. Not a leaf moved, not a speck appeared in heaven. Only from the summit of the mountain one little snowy wisp of cloud after another kept detaching itself, like smoke from a volcano, and blowing southward in some high stream of air: Mount Saint Helena still at her inter- minable task, making the weather, like a Lapland witch. .364 THE ACT OF SQUATTING By noon we had come in sight of the mill : a greaf brown building, half-way up the hill, big as a factory, two stories high, and with tanks and ladders along the roof; which, as a pendicle of Silverado mine, we held to be an outlying province of our own. Thither, then, we went, crossing the valley by a grassy trail; and there lunched out of the basket, sitting in a kind of por- tico, and wondering, while we ate, at this great bulk of useless building. Through a chink we could look far down into the interior, and see sunbeams floating in the dust and striking on tier after tier of silent, rusty machinery. It cost six thousand dollars, twelve hun- dred English sovereigns; and now, here it stands de- serted, like the temple of a forgotten religion, the busy millers toiling somewhere else. All the time we were there, mill and mill town showed no sign of life ; that part of the mountain-side, which is very open and green, was tenanted by no living creature but ourselves and the insects ; and nothing stirred but the cloud manu- factory upon the mountain summit. It was odd to com- pare this with the former days, when the engine was in full blast, the mill palpitating to its strokes, and the carts came rattling down from Silverado, charged with ore. By two we had been landed at the mine, the buggy was gone again, and we were left to our own reflections and the basket of cold provender, until Hanson should arrive. Hot as it was by the sun, there was something chill in such a home-coming, in that world of wreck and rust, splinter and rolling gravel, where for so many years no fire had smoked. Silverado platform filled the whole width of the can- on. Above, as I have said, this was a wild, red, stony 365 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS gully in the mountains; but below it was a wooded dingle. And through this, I was told, there had gone a path between the mine and the Toll House — our natural north-west passage to civilization. I found and followed it, clearing my way as I went through fallen branches and dead trees. It went straight down that steep canon, till it brought you out abruptly over the roofs of the hotel. There was nowhere any break in the de- scent. It almost seemed as if, were you to drop a stone down the old iron chute at our platform, it would never rest until it hopped upon the Toll House shingles. Signs were not wanting of the ancient greatness of Silverado. The footpath was well marked, and had been well trod- den in the old days by thirsty miners. And far down, buried in foliage, deep out of sight of Silverado, I came on a last outpost of the mine — a mound of gravel, some wreck of wooden aqueduct, and the mouth of a tunnel, like a treasure grotto in a fairy story. A stream of water, fed by the invisible leakage from our shaft, and dyed red with cinnabar or iron, ran trippingly forth out of the bowels of the cave; and, looking far under the arch, I could see something like an iron lantern fastened on the rocky wall. It was a promising spot for the imagi- nation. No boy could have left it unexplored. The stream thenceforward stole along the bottom of the dingle, and made, for that dry land, a pleasant warbling in the leaves. Once, I suppose, it ran splash- ing down the whole length of the canon, but now its head waters had been tapped by the shaft at Silverado, and for a great part of its course it wandered sunless among the joints of the mountain. No wonder that it should better its pace when it sees, far before it, day- ^66 THE ACT OF SQUATTING light whitening in the arch, or that it should come trotting forth into the sunlight with a song. The two stages had gone by when 1 got down, and the Toll House stood, dozing in sun and dust and silence, like a place enchanted. My mission was after hay for bedding, and that I was readily promised. But when I mentioned that we were waiting for Rufe, the people shook their heads. Rufe was not a regular man any way, it seemed ; and if he got playing poker Well, poker was too many for Rufe. I had not yet heard them bracketted together; but it seemed a natu- ral conjunction, and commended itself swiftly to my fears ; and as soon as I returned to Silverado and had told my story, we practically gave Hanson up, and set ourselves to do what we could find do-able in our desert-island state. The lower room had been the assayer's oifice. The floor was thick with debris — part human, from the former occupants; part natural, sifted in by mountain winds. In a sea of red dust there swam or floated sticks, boards, hay, straw, stones, and paper; ancient newspapers, above all — for the newspaper, especially when torn, soon becomes an antiquity — and bills of the Silverado boarding-house, some dated Silverado, some Calistoga Mine. Here is one, verbatim; and if any one can calculate the scale of charges, he has my envious admiration. Calistoga Mine, May 3rd, 1875. John Stanley To S. Chapman, Cr, To board from April ist, to April 30 . . . $25 75 " " " May 1st, to 3rd . . . . 2 00 27 75 367 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS Where is John Stanley mining now ? Where is S. Chapman, within whose hospitable walls we were to lodge ? The date was but five years old, but in that time the world had changed for Silverado ; like Palmyra in the desert, it had outlived its people and its purpose ; we camped, like Layard, amid ruins, and these names spoke to us of pre-historic time. A boot-jack, a pair of boots, a dog-hutch, and these bills of Mr. Chapman's were the only speaking relics that we disinterred from all that vast Silverado rubbish-heap ; but what would I not have given to unearth a letter, a pocket-book, a diary, only a ledger, or a roll of names, to take me back, in a more personal manner, to the past ? It pleases me, besides, to fancy that Stanley or Chapman, or one of their companions, may light upon this chronicle, and be struck by the name, and read some news of their anterior home, coming, as it were, out of a subsequent epoch of history in that quarter of the world. As we were tumbling the mingled rubbish on the floor, kicking it with our feet, and groping for these written evidences of the past, Sam, with a somewhat whitened face, produced a paper bag. ** What's this?" said he. It contained a granulated powder, something the colour of Gregory's Mixture, but rosier ; and as there were several of the bags, and each more or less broken, the powder was spread widely on the floor. Had any of us ever seen giant powder ? No, nobody had ; and instantly there grew up in my mind a shadowy belief, verging with every moment nearer to certitude, that I had somewhere heard somebody describe it as just such a powder as the one around us. I have learnt since that it is a substance not unlike tallow, 368 THE ACT OF SQUATTING and is made up in rolls for all the world like tallow candles. Fanny, to add to our happiness, told us a story of a gentleman who had camped one night, like ourselves, by a deserted mine. He was a handy, thrifty fellow, and looked right and left for plunder, but all he could lay his hands on was a can of oil. After dark he had to see to the horses with a lantern ; and not to miss an op- portunity, filled up his lamp from the oil can. Thus equipped, he set forth into the forest. A little while af- ter, his friends heard a loud explosion ; the mountain echoes bellowed, and then all was still. On examina- tion, the can proved to contain oil, with the trifling ad- dition of nitro-glycerine ; but no research disclosed a trace of either man or lantern. It was a pretty sight, after this anecdote, to see us sweeping out the giant powder. It seemed never to be far enough away. And, after all, it was only some rock pounded for assay. So much for the lower room. We scraped some of the rougher dirt off the floor, and left it. That was our sitting-room and kitchen, though there was nothing to sit upon but the table, and no provision for a fire except a hole in the roof of the room above, which had once con- tained the chimney of a stove. To that upper room we now proceeded. There were the eighteen bunks in a double tier, nine on either hand, where from eighteen to thirty-six miners had once snored together all night long, John Stanley, perhaps, snoring loudest. There was the roof, with a hole in it through which the sun now shot an arrow. There was the floor, in much the same state as the one below, 369 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS though, perhaps, there was more hay, and certainly there was the added ingredient of broken glass, the man who stole the window-frames having apparently made a miscarriage with this one. Without a broom, without hay or bedding, we could but look about us with a be- ginning of despair. The one bright arrow of day, in that gaunt and shattered barrack, made the rest look dirtier and darker, ,and the sight drove us at last into the open. Here, also, the handiwork of man lay ruined : but the plants were all alive and thriving; the view below was fresh with the colours of nature; and we had exchanged a dim, human garret for a corner, even although it were untidy, of the blue hall of heaven. Not a bird, not a beast, not a reptile. There was no noise in that part of the world, save when we passed beside the staging, and heard the water musically falling in the shaft. We wandered to and fro. We searched among that drift of lumber — wood and iron, nails and rails, and sleepers and the wheels of trucks. We gazed up the cleft into the bosom of the mountain. We sat by the margin of the dump and saw, far below us, the green treetops standing still in the clear air. Beautiful per- fumes, breaths of bay, resin, and nutmeg, came to us more often and grew sweeter and sharper as the afternoon de- clined. But still there was no word of Hanson. I set to with pick and shovel, and deepened the pool behind the shaft, till we were sure of sufficient water for the morning; and by the time I had finished, the sun had begun to go down behind the mountain shoul- der, the platform was plunged in quiet shadow, and a chill descended from the sky. Night began early in our cleft. Before us, over the margin of the dump, we could 370 THE ACT OF SQUATTING see the sun still striking aslant into the wooded nick be- low, and on the battlemented, pine-bescattered ridges on the farther side. There was no stove, of course, and no hearth in our lodging, so we betook ourselves to the blacksmith's forge across the platform. If the platform be taken as a stage, and the out-curving margin of the dump to represent the line of the footlights, then our house would be the first wing on the actor's left, and this blacksmith's forge, although no match for it in size, the foremost on the right. It was a low, brown cottage, planted close against the hill, and overhung by the foli- age and peeling boughs of a madrona thicket. Within it was full of dead leaves and mountain dust, and rub- bish from the mine. But we soon had a good fire brightly blazing, and sat close about it on impromptu seats. Chuchu, the slave of sofa-cushions, whimpered for a softer bed ; but the rest of us were greatly revived and comforted by that good creature — fire, which gives us warmth and light and companionable sounds, and colours up the emptiest building with better than fres- coes. For a while it was even pleasant in the forge, with the blaze in the midst, and a look over our shoul- ders on the woods and mountains where the day was dying like a dolphin. It was between seven and eight before Hanson ar- rived, with a waggonful of our effects and two of his wife's relatives to lend him a hand. The elder showed surprising strength. He would pick up a huge pack- ing-case, full of books of all things, swing it on his shoulder, and away up the two crazy ladders and the breakneck spout of rolling mineral, familiarly termed a 37» THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS path, that led from the cart-track to our house. Even for a man unburthened, the ascent was toilsome and precarious; but Irvine scaled it with a light foot, car- rying box after box, as the hero whisks the stage child up the practicable footway beside the waterfall of the fifth act. With so strong a helper, the business was speedily transacted. Soon the assayer's office was thronged with our belongings, piled higgledy-pig- gledy, and upside down, about the floor. There were our boxes, indeed, but my wife had left her keys in Cal- istoga. There was the stove, but, alas ! our carriers had forgot the chimney, and lost one of the plates along the road. The Silverado problem was scarce solved. Rufe himself was grave and good-natured over his share of blame ; he even, if I remember right, expressed regret. But his crew, to my astonishment and anger, grinned from ear to ear, and laughed aloud at our dis- tress. They thought it ''real funny" about the stove- pipe they had forgotten ; " real funny " that they should have lost a plate. As for hay, the whole party refused to bring us any till they should have supped. See how late they were! Never had there been such a job as coming up that grade! Nor often, I suspect, such a game of poker as that before they started. But about nine, as a particular favour, we should have some hay. So they took their departure, leaving me still staring, and we resigned ourselves to wait for their return. The fire in the forge had been suffered to go out, and we were one and all too weary to kindle another. We dined, or, not to take that word in vain, we ate after a fashion, in the nightmare disorder of the assayer's office, perched among boxes. A single candle lighted us. It 372 THE ACT OF SQUATTING could scarce be called a house-warming; for there was, of course, no fire, and with the two open doors and the open window gaping on the night, like breaches in a fortress, it began to grow rapidly chill. Talk ceased; nobody moved but the unhappy Chuchu, still in quest of sofa-cushions, who tumbled complainingly among the trunks. It required a certain happiness of disposi- tion to look forward hopefully, from so dismal a begin- ning, across the brief hours of night, to the warm shin- ing of to-morrow's sun. But the hay arrived at last, and we turned, with our last spark of courage, to the bedroom. We had improved the entrance, but it was still a kind of rope-walking; and it would have been droll to see us mounting, one after another, by candle-light, under the open stars. The western door — that which looked up the canon, and through which we entered by our bridge of flying plank — was still entire, a handsome, panelled door, the most finished piece of carpentry in Silverado. And the two lowest bunks next to this we roughly filled with hay for that night's use. Through the opposite, or eastern-looking gable, with its open door and win- dow, a faint, diffused starshine came into the room like mist; and when we were once in bed, we lay, awaiting sleep, in a haunted, incomplete obscurity. At first the silence of the night was utter. Then a high wind be- gan in the distance among the treetops, and for hours continued to grow higher. It seemed to me much such a wind as we had found on our visit; yet here in our open chamber we were fanned only by gentle and re- freshing draughts, so deep was the canon, so close our house was planted under the overhanging rock. 373 THE hunter's family There is quite a large race or class of people in Amer- ica, for whom we scarcely seem to have a parallel in England. Of pure white blood, they are unknown or unrecognisable in towns; inhabit the fringe of settle- ments and the deep, quiet places of the country ; rebel- lious to all labour, and pettily thievish, like the English gipsies ; rustically ignorant, but with a touch of wood- lore and the dexterity of the savage. Whence they came is a moot point. At the time of the war, they poured north in crowds to escape conscription; lived during summer on fruits, wild animals, and petty theft ; and at the approach of winter, when these supplies failed, built great fires in the forest, and there died stoically by starvation. They are widely scattered, however, and easily recognised. Loutish, but not ill-looking, they will sit all day, swinging their legs on a field fence, the mind seemingly as devoid of all reflection as a Suffolk peasant's, careless of politics, for the most part incapa- ble of reading, but with a rebellious vanity and a strong sense of independence. Hunting is their most con- genial business, or, if the occasion offers, a little ama- teur detection. In tracking a criminal, following a particular horse along a beaten highway, and drawing 374 THE HUNTER'S FAMILY inductions from a hair or a footprint, one of those som- nolent, grinning Hodges will suddenly display activity of body and finesse of mind. By their names ye may know them, the women figuring as Loveina, Larsenia, Serena, Leanna, Orreana; the men answering to Alvin, Alva, or Orion, pronounced Orrion, with the accent on the first. Whether they are indeed a race, or whether this is the form of degeneracy common to all back- woodsmen, they are at least known by a generic by- word, as Poor Whites or Low-downers. I will not say that the Hanson family was Poor White, because the name savours of offence; but I may go as far as this — they were, in many points, not unsimilar to the people usually so-called. Rufe himself combined two of the qualifications, for he was both a hunter and an amateur detective. It was he who pursued Russel and Dollar, the robbers of the Lake Port stage, and cap- tured them the very morning after the exploit, while they were still sleeping in a hayfield. Russel, a drunken Scotch carpenter, was even an acquaintance of his own, and he expressed much grave commiseration for his fate. In all that he said and did, Rufe was grave. I never saw him hurried. When he spoke, he took out his pipe with ceremonial deliberation, looked east and west, and then, in quiet tones and few words, stated his business or told his story. His gait was to match ; it would never have surprised you if, at any step, he had turned round and walked away again, so warily and slowly, and with so much seeming hesitation did he go about. He lay long in bed in the morning — rarely indeed, rose be- fore noon; he loved all games, from poker to clerical croquet; and in the Toll House croquet ground I have 375 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS seen him toiling at the latter with the devotion of a curate. He took an interest in education, was an active member of the local school-board, and when I was there, he had recently lost the schoolhouse key. His waggon was broken, but it never seemed to occur to him to mend it. Like all truly idle people, he had an artistic eye. He chose the print stuff for his wife's dresses, and counselled her in the making of a patchwork quilt, always, as she thought, wrongly, but to the more edu- cated eye, always with bizarre and admirable taste — the taste of an Indian. With all this, he was a perfect, unoffending gentleman in word and act. Take his clay pipe from him, and he was fit for any society but that of fools. Quiet as he was, there burned a deep, per- manent excitement in his dark blue eyes; and when this grave man smiled, it was like sunshine in a shady place. Mrs. Hanson {nee, if you please, Lovelands) was more commonplace than her lord. She was a comely woman, too, plump, fair-coloured, with wonderful white teeth ; and in her print dresses (chosen by Rufe) and with a large sun-bonnet shading her valued complexion, made, I assure you, a very agreeable figure. But she was on the surface, what there was of her, out-spoken and loud- spoken. Her noisy laughter had none of the charm of one of Hanson's rare, slow-spreading smiles; there was no reticence, no mystery, no manner about the woman : she was a first-class dairymaid, but her husband was an unknown quantity between the savage and the noble- man. She was often in and out with us, merry, and healthy, and fair; he came far seldomer — only, indeed, when there was business, or now and again, to pay a 376 THE HUNTER'S FAMILY visit of ceremony, brushed up for the occasion, with his wife on his arm, and a clean clay pipe in his teeth. These visits, in our forest state, had quite the air of an event, and turned our red canon into a salon. Such was the pair who ruled in the old Silverado Ho- tel, among the windy trees, on the mountain shoulder overlooking the whole length of Napa Valley, as the man aloft looks down on the ship's deck. There they kept house, with sundry horses and fowls, and a family of sons, Daniel Webster, and I think George Washing- ton, among the number. Nor did they want visitors. An old gentleman, of singular stolidity, and called Breedlove — I think he had crossed the plains in the same caravan with Rufe — housed with them for awhile during our stay; and they had besides a permanent lodger, in the form of Mrs. Hanson's brother, Irvine Lovelands. I spell Irvine by guess ; for I could get no information on the subject, just as I could never find out, in spite of many inquiries, whether or not Rufe was a contraction for Rufus. They were all cheerfully at sea about their names in that generation. And this is surely the more notable where the names are all so strange, and even the family names appear to have been coined. At one time, at least, the ancestors of all these Alvins and Alvas, Loveinas, Lovelands, and Breedloves, must have taken serious council and found a certain poetry in these denominations; that must have been, then, their form of literature. But still times change; and their next de- scendants, the George Washingtons and Daniel Web- sters, will at least be clear upon the point. And anyway, and however his name should be spelt, this Irvine Love- lands was the most unmitigated Caliban I ever knew. 377 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS Our very first morning at Silverado, when we were full of business, patching up doors and windows, mak- ing beds and seats, and getting our rough lodging into shape, Irvine and his sister made their appearance to- gether, she for neighbourliness and general curiosity; he, because he was working for me, to my sorrow, cut- ting firewood at 1 forget how much a day. The way that he set about cutting wood was characteristic. We were at that moment patching up and unpacking in the kitchen. Down he sat on one side, and down sat his sister on the other. Both were chewing pine-tree gum, and he, to my annoyance, accompanied that simple pleasure with profuse expectoration. She rattled away, talking up hill and down dale, laughing, tossing her head, showing her brilliant teeth. He looked on in silence, now spitting heavily on the floor, now putting his head back and uttering a loud, discordant, joyless laugh. He had a tangle of shock hair, the colour of wool ; his mouth was a grin; although as strong as a horse, he looked neither heavy nor yet adroit, only leggy, coltish, and in the road. But it was plain he was in high spirits, thoroughly enjoying his visit; and he laughed frankly whenever we failed to accomplish what we were about. This was scarcely helpful : it was even, to amateur car- penters, embarrassing; but it lasted until we knocked off work and began to get dinner. Then Mrs. Hanson remembered she should have been gone an hour ago ; and the pair retired, and the lady's laughter died away among the nutmegs down the path. That was Irvine's first day's work in my employment — the devil take him! The next morning he returned and, as he was this time alone, he bestowed his conversation upon us with 378 THE HUNTER'S FAMILY great liberality. He prided himself on his intelligence; asked us if we knew the school ma'am. He didn't think much of her, anyway. He had tried her, he had. He had put a question to her. If a tree a hundred feet high were to fall a foot a day, how long would it take to fall right down } She had not been able to solve the prob- lem. " She don't know nothing," he opined. He told us how a friend of his kept a school with a revolver, and chuckled mightily over that; his friend could teach school, he could. All the time he kept chewing gum and spitting. He would stand a while looking down ; and then he would toss back his shock of hair, and laugh hoarsely, and spit, and bring forward a new subject. A man, he told us, who bore a grudge against him, had poisoned his dog. ''That was a low thing for a man to do now, wasn't it ? It wasn't like a man, that, nohow. But I got even with him: I pisoned his dog." His clumsy utterance, his rude embarrassed manner, set a fresh value on the stupidity of his remarks. I do not think I ever appreciated the meaning of two words un- til I knew Irvine — the verb, loaf, and the noun, oaf; between them, they complete his portrait. He could lounge, and wriggle, and rub himself against the wall, and grin, and be more in everybody's way than any other two people that I ever set my eyes on. Nothing that he did became him ; and yet you were conscious that he was one of your own race, that his mind was cumbrously at work, revolving the problem of existence like a quid of gum, and in his own cloudy manner en- joying life, and passing judgment on his fellows. Above all things, he was delighted with himself. You would not have thought it, from his uneasy manners and trou- 379 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS bled, Struggling utterance ; but he loved himself to the marrow, and was happy and proud like a peacock on a rail. His self-esteem was, indeed, the one joint in his har- ness. He could be got to work, and even kept at work, by flattery. As long as my wife stood over him, cry- ing out how strong he was, so long exactly he would stick to the matter in hand; and the moment she turned her back, or ceased to praise him, he would stop. His physical strength was wonderful; and to have a woman, stand by and admire his achievements, warmed his heart like sunshine. Yet he was as cowardly as he was powerful, and felt no shame in owning to the weakness. Something was once wanted from the crazy platform over the shaft, and he at once refused to ven- ture there — ''did not like," as he said, ''foolin' round them kind o' places," and let my wife go instead of him, looking on with a grin. Vanity, where it rules, is usually more heroic: but Irvine steadily approved himself, and expected others to approve him; rather looked down upon my wife, and decidedly expected her to look up to him, on the strength of his superior prudence. Yet the strangest part of the whole matter was per- haps this, that Irvine was as beautiful as a statue. His features were, in themselves, perfect; it was only his cloudy, uncouth, and coarse expression that disfigured them. So much strength residing in so spare a frame was proof sufficient of the accuracy of his shape. He must have been built somewhat after the pattern of Jack Sheppard ; but the famous housebreaker, we may be cer- tain, was no lout. It was by the extraordinary powers of 380 THE HUNTER'S FAMILY his mind no less than by the vigour of his body, that he broke his strong prison with such imperfect implements, turning the very obstacles to service. Irvine, in the same case, would have sat down and spat, and grum- bled curses. He had the soul of a fat sheep, but, re- garded as an artist's model, the exterior of a Greek God. It was a cruel thought to persons less favoured in their birth, that this creature, endowed — to use the language of theatres — with extraordinary *' means," should so manage to misemploy them that he looked ugly and almost deformed. It was only by an effort of abstrac- tion, and after many days, that you discovered what he was. By playing on the oaf's conceit, and standing closely over him, we got a path made round the corner of the dump to our door, so that we could come and go with decent ease ; and he even enjoyed the work, for in that there were boulders to be plucked up bodily, bushes to be uprooted, and other occasions for athletic display: but cutting wood was a different matter. Anybody could cut wood; and, besides, my wife was tired of supervising him, and had other things to attend to. And, in short, days went by, and Irvine came daily, and talked and lounged and spat; but the firewood re- mained intact as sleepers on the platform or growing trees upon the mountain-side. Irvine, as a woodcutter, we could tolerate; but Irvine as a friend of the family, at so much a day, was too bald an imposition, and at length, on the afternoon of the fourth or fifth day of our connection, I explained to him, as clearly as I could, the light in which I had grown to regard his presence. I pointed out to him that I could not continue to give 381 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS him a salary for spitting on the floor; and this expres- sion, which came after a good many others, at last penetrated his obdurate wits. He rose at once, and said if that was the way he was going to be spoke to, he reckoned he would quit. And, no one interposing, he departed. So far, so good. But we had no firewood. The next afternoon, I strolled down to Rufe's and consulted him on the subject. It was a very droll interview, in the large, bare north room of the Silverado Hotel, Mrs. Han- son's patchwork on a frame, and Rufe, and his wife, and 1, and the oaf himself, all more or less embarrassed. Rufe announced there was nobody in the neighbour- hood but Irvine who could do a day's work for any- body. Irvine, thereupon, refused to have any more to do with my service; he ''wouldn't work no more for a man as had spoke to him 's I had done." I found my- self on the point of the last humiliation — driven to be- seech the creature whom I had just dismissed with insult : but I took the high hand in despair, said there must be no talk of Irvine coming back unless matters were to be differently managed; that I would rather chop firewood for myself than be fooled ; and, in short, the Hansons being eager for the lad's hire, I so imposed upon them with merely affected resolution, that they ended by begging me to re-employ him again, on a solemn promise that he should be more industrious. The promise, I am bound to say, was kept. We soon had a fine pile of firewood at our door; and if Caliban gave me the cold shoulder and spared me his conversa- tion, I thought none the worse of him for that, nor did I find my days much longer for the deprivation. 38a THE HUNTER'S FAMILY The leading spirit of the family was, I am inclined to fancy, Mrs. Hanson. Her social brilliancy somewhat dazzled the others, and she had more of the small change of sense. It was she who faced Kelmar, for instance ; and perhaps, if she had been alone, Kelmar would have had no rule within her doors. Rufe, to be sure, had a fme, sober, open-air attitude of mind, seeing the world with- out exaggeration — perhaps, we may even say, without enough; for he lacked, along with the others, that com- mercial idealism which puts so high a value on time and money. Sanity itself is a kind of convention. Perhaps Rufe was wrong; but, looking on life plainly, he was unable to perceive that croquet or poker were in any way less important than, for instance, mending his waggon. Even his own profession, hunting, was dear to him mainly as a sort of play; even that he would have neglected, had it not appealed to his imagination. His hunting-suit, for instance, had cost I should be afraid to say how many bucks — the currency in which he paid his way: it was all befringed, after the Indian fashion, and it was dear to his heart. The pictorial side of his daily business was never forgotten. He was even anxious to stand for his picture in those buckskin hunt- ing clothes; and I remember how he once warmed al- most into enthusiasm, his dark blue eyes growing perceptibly larger, as he planned the composition in which he should appear, ''with the horns of some real big bucks, and dogs, and a camp on a crick" (creek, stream). There was no trace in Irvine of this woodland poetry. He did not care for hunting, nor yet for buckskin suits. He had never observed scenery. The world, as it ap- 3S3 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS peared to him, was almost obliterated by his own great grinning figure in the foreground: Caliban Malvolio. And it seems to me as if, in the persons of these broth- ers-in-law, we had the two sides of rusticity fairly well represented : the hunter living really in nature ; the clod- hopper living merely out of society : the one bent up in every corporal agent to capacity in one pursuit, doing at least one thing keenly and thoughtfully, and thoroughly alive to all that touches it; the other in the inert and bestial state, walking in a faint dream, and taking so dim an impression of the myriad sides of life that he is truly conscious of nothing but himself It is only in the fast- nesses of nature, forests, mountains, and the back of man's beyond, that a creature endowed with five senses can grow up into the perfection of this crass and earthy vanity. In towns or the busier country sides, he is roughly reminded of other men's existence; and if he learns no more, he learns at least to fear contempt. But Irvine had come scatheless through life, conscious only of himself, of his great strength and intelligence ; and in the silence of the universe, to which he did not lis- ten, dwelling with delight on the sound of his own thoughts. 384 THE SEA FOGS A CHANGE in the colour of the light usually called me in the morning. By a certain hour, the long, vertical chinks in our western gable, where the boards had shrunk and separated, flashed suddenly into my eyes as stripes of dazzling blue, at once so dark and splendid that I used to marvel how the qualities could be com- bined. At an earlier hour, the heavens in that quarter were still quietly coloured, but the shoulder of the moun- tain which shuts in the canon already glowed with sunlight in a wonderful compound of gold and rose and green ; and this too would kindle, although more mildly and with rainbow tints, the fissures of our crazy gable. If I were sleeping heavily, it was the bold blue that struck me awake ; if more lightly, then I would come to myself in that earlier and fairier light. One Sunday morning, about five, the first brightness called me. I rose and turned to the east, not for my de- votions, but for air. The night had been very still. The little private gale that blew every evening in our canon, for ten minutes or perhaps a quarter of an hour, had swiftly blown itself out; in the hours that followed not a sigh of wind had shaken the treetops ; and our barrack, for all its breaches, was less fresh that morning than of 385 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS wont. But I had no sooner reached the window than I forgot all else in the sight that met my eyes, and I made but two bounds into my clothes, and down the crazy plank to the platform. The sun was still concealed below the opposite hill- tops, though it was shining already, not twenty feet above my head, on our own mountain slope. But the scene, beyond a few near features, was entirely changed. Napa valley was gone; gone were all the lower slopes and woody foothills of the range; and in their place, not a thousand feet below me, rolled a great level ocean. It was as though 1 had gone to bed the night before, safe in a nook of inland mountains, and had awakened in a bay upon the coast. I had seen these inundations from below ; at Calistoga 1 had risen and gone abroad in the early morning, coughing and sneezing, under fathoms on fathoms of gray sea vapour, like a cloudy sky — a dull sight for the artist, and a painful experience for the invalid. But to sit aloft one's self in the pure air and under the unclouded dome of heaven, and thus look down on the submergence of the valley, was strangely different and even delightful to the eyes. Far away were hilltops like little islands. Nearer, a smoky surf beat about the foot of precipices and poured into all the coves of these rough mountains. The colour of that fog ocean was a thing never to be forgotten. For an instant, among the Hebrides and just about sundown, I have seen something like it on the sea itself. But the white was not so opaline; nor was there, what surpris- ingly increased the effect, that breathless, crystal still- ness over all. Even in its gentlest moods the salt sea travails, moaning among the weeds or lisping on the 386 THE SEA FOGS sand ; but that vast fog ocean lay in a trance of silence, nor did the sweet air of the morning tremble with a sound. As I continued to sit upon the dump, I began to ob- serve that this sea was not so level as at first sight it appeared to be. Away in the extreme south, a little hill of fog arose against the sky above the general surface, and as it had already caught the sun, it shone on the horizon like the topsails of some giant ship. There were huge waves, stationary, as it seemed, like waves in a frozen sea; and yet, as I looked again, I was not sure but they were moving after all, with a slow and august advance. And while I was yet doubting, a promontory of the hills some four or five miles away, conspicuous by a bouquet of tall pines, was in a single instant overtaken and swallowed up. It reappeared in a little, with its pines, but this time as an islet, and only to be swallowed up once more and then for good. This set me looking nearer, and I saw that in every cove along the line of mountains the fog was being piled in higher and higher, as though by some wind that was inaudible to me. I could trace its progress, one pine tree first growing hazy and then disappearing after another; although sometimes there was none of this fore-running haze, but the whole opaque white ocean gave a start and swallowed a piece of mountain at a gulp. It was to flee these poisonous fogs that I had left the seaboard, and climbed so high among the moun- tains. And now, behold, here came the fog to besiege me in my chosen altitudes, and yet came so beautifully that my first thought was of welcome. The sun had now gotten much higher, and through 387 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS all the gaps of the hills it cast long bars of gold across that white ocean. An eagle^ or some other very great bird of the mountain, came wheeling over the nearer pine-tops, and hung, poised and something sideways, as if to look abroad on that unwonted desolation, spy- ing, perhaps with terror, for the eyries of her comrades. Then, with a long cry, she disappeared again towards Lake County and the clearer air. At length it seemed to me as if the flood were beginning to subside. The old landmarks, by whose disappearance I had measured its advance, here a crag, there a brave pine tree, now be- gan, in the inverse order, to make their reappearance into daylight. I judged all danger of the fog was over. This was not Noah's flood ; it was but a morning spring, and would now drift out seaward whence it came. So, mightily relieved, and a good deal exhilarated by the sight, I went into the house to light the fire. I suppose it was nearly seven when I once more mounted the platform to look abroad. The fog ocean had swelled up enormously since last I saw it; and a few hundred feet below me, in the deep gap where the Toll House stands and the road runs through into Lake County, it had already topped the slope, and was pour- ing over and down the other side like driving smoke. The wind had climbed along with it; and though I was still in calm air, I could see the trees tossing below me, and their long, strident sighing mounted to me where 1 stood. Half an hour later, the fog had surmounted all the ridge on the opposite side of the gap, though a shoulder of the mountain still warded it out of our canon. Napa valley and its bounding hills were now utterly blotted THE SEA FOGS out. The fog, sunny white in the sunshine, was pour- ing over into Lake County in a huge, ragged cataract, tossing treetops appearing and disappearing in the spray. The air struck with a little chill, and set me coughing. It smelt strong of the fog, like the smell of a washing- house, but with a shrewd tang of the sea salt. Had it not been for two things — the sheltering spur which answered as a dyke, and the great valley on the other side which rapidly engulfed whatever mounted — our own little platform in the canon must have been already buried a hundred feet in salt and poisonous air. As it was, the interest of the scene entirely occupied our minds. We were set just out of the wind, and but just above the fog; we could listen to the voice of the one as to music on the stage ; we could plunge our eyes down into the other, as into some flowing stream from over the parapet of a bridge; thus we looked on upon a strange, impetuous, silent, shifting exhibition of the powers of nature, and saw the familiar landscape chang- ing from moment to moment like figures in a dream. The imagination loves to trifle with what is not. Had this been indeed the deluge, I should have felt more strongly, but the emotion would have been similar in kind. I played with the idea, as the child flees in de- lighted terror from the creations of his fancy. The look of the thing helped me. And when at last I began to flee up the mountain, it was indeed partly to escape from the raw air that kept me coughing, but it was also part in play. As I ascended the mountain-side, I came once more to overlook the upper surface of the fog; but it wore a different appearance from what I had beheld at daybreak. 389 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS For, first, the sun now fell on it from high overhead, and its surface shone and undulated like a great norland moor country, sheeted with untrodden morning snow. And next the new level must have been a thousand or fifteen hundred feet higher than the old, so that only five or six points of all the broken country below me, still stood out. Napa valley was now one with Sonoma on the west. On the hither side, only a thin scattered fringe of bluffs was unsubmerged; and through all the gaps the fog was pouring over, like an ocean, into the blue clear sunny country on the east. There it was soon lost ; for it fell instantly into the bottom of the val- leys, following the water-shed ; and the hilltops in that quarter were still clear cut upon the eastern sky. Through the Toll House gap and over the near ridges on the other side, the deluge was immense. A spray of thin vapour was thrown high above it, rising and falling, and blown into fantastic shapes. The speed of its course was like a mountain torrent. Here and there a few treetops were discovered and then whelmed again ; and for one second, the bough of a dead pine beckoned out of the spray like the arm of a drowning man. But still the imagination was dissatisfied, still the ear waited for something more. Had this indeed been water (as it seemed so, to the eye), with what a plunge of rever- berating thunder would it have rolled upon its course, disembowelling mountains and deracinating pines ! And yet water it was, and sea-water at that — true Pacific billows, only somewhat rarefied, rolling in mid air among the hilltops. I climbed still higher, among the red rattling gravel and dwarf underwood of Mount Saint Helena, until I 390 THE SEA FOGS could look right down upon Silverado, and admire the favoured nook in which it lay. The sunny plain of fog was several hundred feet higher; behind the protecting spur a gigantic accumulation of cottony vapour threat- ened, with every second, to blow over and submerge our homestead; but the vortex setting past the Toll House was too strong; and there lay our little platform, in the arms of the deluge, but still enjoying its unbroken sun- shine. About eleven, however, thin spray came flying over the friendly buttress, and I began to think the fog had hunted out its Jonah after all. But it was the last effort. The wind veered while we were at dinner, and began to blow squally from the mountain summit; and by half-past one, all that world of sea-fogs was utterly routed and flying here and there into the south in little rags of cloud. And instead of a lone sea-beach, we found ourselves once more inhabiting a high mountain- side, with the clear green country far below us, and the light smoke of Calistoga blowing in the air. This was the great Russian campaign for that season. Now and then, in the early morning, a little white lake- let of fog would be seen far down in Napa Valley ; but the heights were not again assailed, nor was the sur- rounding world again shut off from Silverado. ?9i THE TOLL HOUSE The Toll House, standing alone by the wayside under nodding pines, with its streamlet and water-tank; its backwoods, toll-bar, and well trodden croquet ground ; the ostler standing by the stable door, chewing a straw ; a glimpse of the Chinese cook in the back parts; and Mr. Hoddy in the bar, gravely alert and serviceable, and equally anxious to lend or borrow books; — dozed all day in the dusty sunshine, more than half asleep. There were no neighbours, except the Hansons up the hill. The traffic on the road was infinitesimal ; only, at rare intervals, a couple in a waggon, or a dusty farmer on a spring-board, toiling over "the grade" to that metro- politan hamlet, Calistoga; and, at the fixed hours, the passage of the stages. The nearest building was the schoolhouse, down the road ; and the school-ma'am boarded at the Toll House, walking thence in the morning to the little brown shanty, where she taught the young ones of the district, and re- turning thither pretty weary in the afternoon. She had chosen this outlying situation, I understood, for her health. Mr. Corwin was consumptive; so was Rufe; so was Mr. Jennings, the engineer. In short, the place was a kind of small Davos : consumptive folk consort- 392 THE TOLL HOUSE ing on a hilltop in the most unbroken idleness. Jen^ nings never did anything that I could see, except now and then to fish, and generally to sit about in the bar and the verandah, waiting for something to happen. Corwin and Rufe did as little as possible; and if the school-ma'am, poor lady, had to work pretty hard all morning, she subsided when it was over into much the same dazed beatitude as all the rest. Her special corner was the parlour — a very genteel room, with Bible prints, a crayon portrait of Mrs. Cor- win in the height of fashion, a few years ago, another of her son (Mr. Corwin was not represented), a mirror, and a selection of dried grasses. A large book was laid religiously on the table — "From Palace to Hovel," I believe, its name — full of the raciest experiences in England. The author had mingled freely with all classes, the nobility particularly meeting him with open arms; and I must say that traveller had ill requited his reception. His book, in short, was a capital instance of the Penny Messalina school of literature; and there arose from it, in that cool parlour, in that silent, way- side, mountain inn, a rank atmosphere of gold and blood and "Jenkins," and the "Mysteries of London," and sickening, inverted snobbery, fit to knock you down. The mention of this book reminds me of an- other and far racier picture of our island life. The lat- ter parts of Rocambole are surely too sparingly con- sulted in the country which they celebrate. No man's education can be said to be complete, nor can he pro- nounce the world yet emptied of enjoyment, till he has made the acquaintance of "the Reverend Patterson, director of the Evangelical Society." To follow the ^9i THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS evolutions of that reverend gentleman, who goes through scenes in which even Mr. Duffield would hesi- tate to place a bishop, is to rise to new ideas. But, alas! there was no Patterson about the Toll House. Only, alongside of *' From Palace to Hovel," a sixpenny *'Ouida" figured. So literature, you see, was not un- represented. The school-ma'am had friends to stay with her, other school-ma'ams enjoying their holidays, quite a bevy of damsels. They seemed never to go out, or not beyond the verandah, but sat close in the little parlour, quietly talking or listening to the wind among the trees. Sleep dwelt in the Toll House, like a fixture: summer sleep, shallow, soft, and dreamless. A cuckoo-clock, a great rarity in such a place, hooted at intervals about the echoing house; and Mr. Jennings would open his eyes for a moment in the bar, and turn the leaf of a news- paper, and the resting school-ma'ams in the parlour would be recalled to the consciousness of their inaction. Busy Mrs. Corwin and her busy Chinaman might be heard indeed, in the penetralia, pounding dough or rat- tling dishes ; or perhaps Rufe had called up some of the sleepers for a game of croquet, and the hollow strokes of the mallet sounded far away among the woods : but with these exceptions, it was sleep and sunshine and dust, and the wind in the pine trees, all day long. A little before stage time, that castle of indolence awoke. The ostler threw his straw away and set to his preparations. Mr. Jennings rubbed his eyes; happy Mr. Jennings, the something he had been waiting for all day about to happen at last! The boarders gathered in the verandah, silently giving ear, and gazing down the 394 THE TOLL HOUSE road with shaded eyes. And as yet there was no sign for the senses, not a sound, not a tremor of the moun- tain road. The birds, to whom the secret of the hoot- ing cuckoo is unknown, must have set down to instinct this premonitory bustle. And then the first of the two stages swooped upon the Toll House with a roar and in a cloud of dust; and the shock had not yet time to subside, before the second was abreast of it. Huge concerns they were, well-horsed and loaded, the men in their shirt-sleeves, the women swathed in veils, the long whip cracking like a pistol ; and as they charged upon that slumbering hostelry, each shepherding a dust storm, the dead place blossomed into life and talk and clatter. This the Toll House.? — with its city throng, its jostling shoulders, its infinity of instant business in the bar ? The mind would not receive it! The heartfelt bustle of that hour is hardly credible ; the thrill of the great shower of letters from the post-bag, the childish hope and interest with which one gazed in all these strangers' eyes. They paused there but to pass: the blue-clad China-boy, the San Francisco magnate, the mystery in the dust coat, the secret memoirs in tweed, the ogling, well-shod lady with her troop of girls ; they did but flash and go ; they were hull-down for us behind life's ocean, and we but hailed their topsails on the line. Yet, out of our great solitude of four and twenty mountain hours, we thrilled to their momentary presence ; gauged and divined them, loved and hated ; and stood light-headed in that storm of human electricity. Yes, like Piccadilly Circus, this is also one of life's crossing-places. Here I beheld one man, already famous or infamous, a centre of pistol- ^95 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS shots : and another who, if not yet known to rumour, will fill a column of the Sunday paper when he comes to hang — a burly, thick-set, powerful Chinese desper- ado, six long bristles upon either lip ; redolent of whis- key, playing cards, and pistols ; swaggering in the bar with the lowest assumption of the lowest European manners; rapping out blackguard English oaths in his canorous oriental voice; and combining in one person the depravities of two races and two civilizations. For all his lust and vigour, he seemed to look cold upon me from the valley of the shadow of the gallows. He imagined a vain thing; and while he drained his cock- tail, Holbein's death was at his elbow. Once, too, I fell in talk with another of these flitting strangers — like the rest, in his shirt-sleeves and all begrimed with dust — and the next minute we were discussing Paris and London, theatres and wines. To him, journeying from one human place to another, this was a trifle; but to me! No, Mr. Lillie, I have not forgotten it. And presently the city-tide was at its flood and began to ebb. Life runs in Piccadilly Circus, say, from nine to one, and then, there also, ebbs into the small hours of the echoing policemen and the lamps and stars. But the Toll House is far up stream, and near its rural springs; the bubble of the tide but touches it. Before you had yet grasped your pleasure, the horses were put to, the loud whips volleyed, and the tide was gone. North and south had the two stages vanished, the towering dust subsided in the woods; but there was still an interval before the flush had fallen on your cheeks, before the ear became once more contented with the silence, or the seven sleepers of the Toll House 390 THE TOLL HOUSE dozed back to ttieir accustomed corners. Yet a little, and the ostler would swing round the great barrier across the road ; and in the golden evening, that dreamy inn begin to trim its lamps and spread the board for supper. As I recall the place — the green dell below; the spires of pine; the sun-warm, scented air; that gray, gabled inn, with its faint stirrings of life amid the slum- ber of the mountains — I slowly awake to a sense of ad- miration, gratitude, and almost love. A fine place, after all, for a wasted life to doze away in — the cuckoo clock hooting of its far home country ; the croquet mal- lets, eloquent of English lawns ; the stages daily bring- ing news of the turbulent world away below there; and perhaps once in the summer, a salt fog pouring over- head with its tale of the Pacific. A STARRY DRIVE In our rule at Silverado, there was a melancholy inter- regnum. The queen and the crown prince with one accord fell sick; and, as I was sick to begin with, our lone position on Mount Saint Helena was no longer tenable, and we had to hurry back to Calistoga and a cottage on the green. By that time we had begun to realize the difficulties of our position. We had found what an amount of labour it cost to support life in our red canon ; and it was the dearest desire of our hearts to get a China-boy to go along with us when we re- turned. We could have given him a whole house to himself, self-contained, as they say in the advertise- ments ; and on the money question we were prepared to go far. Kong Sam Kee, the Calistoga washerman, was entrusted with the affair; and from day to day it languished on, with protestations on our part and mel- lifluous excuses on the part of Kong Sam Kee. At length, about half-past eight of our last evening, with the waggon ready harnessed to convey us up the grade, the washerman, with a somewhat sneering air, produced the boy. He was a handsome, gentlemanly lad, attired in rich dark blue, and shod with snowy white ; but, alas ! he had heard rumours of Silverado. ^03 A STARRY DRIVE He knew it for a lone place on the mountain-side, with no friendly wash-house near by, where he might smoke a pipe of opium o' nights with other China-boys, and lose his little earnings at the game of tan ; and he first backed out for more money ; and then, when that de- mand was satisfied, refused to come point-blank. He was wedded to his wash-houses; he had no taste for the rural life; and we must go to our mountain servant- less. It must have been near half an hour before we reached that conclusion, standing in the midst of Calis- toga high street under the stars, and the China-boy and Kong Sam Kee singing their pigeon English in the sweetest voices and with the most musical inflections. We were not, however, to return alone; for we brought with us Joe Strong, the painter, a most good- natured comrade and a capital hand at an omelette. I do not know in which capacity he was most valued — as a cook or a companion ; and he did excellently well in both. The Kong Sam Kee negotiation had delayed us un- duly ; it must have been half-past nine before we left Calistoga, and night came fully ere we struck the bot- tom of the grade. I have never seen such a night. It seemed to throw calumny in the teeth of all the painters that ever dabbled in starlight. The sky itself was of a ruddy, powerful, nameless, changing colour, dark and glossy like a serpent's back. The stars, by innumer- able millions, stuck boldly forth like lamps. The milky way was bright, like a moonlit cloud; half heaven seemed milky way. The greater luminaries shone each more clearly than a winter's moon. Their light was dyed in every sort of colour — red, like fire; blue, like 399 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS Steel; green, like the tracks of sunset; and so sharply did each stand forth in its own lustre that there was no appearance of that flat, star-spangled arch we know so well in pictures, but all the hollow of heaven was one chaos of contesting luminaries — a hurly-burly of stars. Against this the hills and rugged tree-tops stood out redly dark. As we continued to advance, the lesser lights and milky ways first grew pale, and then vanished; the countless hosts of heaven dwindled in number by suc- cessive millions; those that still shone had tempered their exceeding brightness and fallen back into their cus- tomary wistful distance ; and the sky declined from its first bewildering splendour into the appearance of a common night. Slowly this change proceeded, and still there was no sign of any cause. Then a whiteness like mist was thrown over the spurs of the mountain. Yet a while, and, as we turned a corner, a great leap of silver light and net of forest shadows fell across the road and upon our wondering waggonful ; and, swimming low among the trees, we beheld a strange, misshapen, waning moon, half-tilted on her back. " Where are ye when the moon appears ?" so the old poet sang, half-taunting, to the stars, bent upon a courtly purpose. "As the sunlight round the dim earth's midnight tower of shadow pours, Streaming past the dim, wide portals, Viewless to the eyes of mortals, Till it floods the moon's pale islet or the morning's golden shores." So sings Mr. Trowbridge, with a noble inspiration. And so had the sunlight flooded that pale islet of the moon, and 400 A STARRY DRIVE her lit face put out, one after another, that galaxy of stars. The wonder of the drive was over; but, by some nice conjunction of clearness in the air and fit shadow in the valley where we travelled, we had seen for a little while that brave display of the midnight heavens. It was gone, but it had been ; nor shall I ever again behold the stars with the same mind. He who has seen the sea commoved with a great hurricane, thinks of it very differ- ently from him who has seen it only in a calm. And the difference between a calm and a hurricane is not greatly more striking than that between the ordinary face of night and the splendour that shone upon us in that drive. Two in our waggon knew night as she shines upon the tropics, but even that bore no comparison. The nameless colour of the sky, the hues of the star-fire, and the incredible projection of the stars themselves, starting from their orbits, so that the eye seemed to dis- tinguish their positions in the hollow of space — these were things that we had never seen before and shall never see again. Meanwhile, in this altered night, we proceeded on our way among the scents and silence of the forest, reached the top of the grade, wound up by Hanson's, and came at last to a stand under the flying gargoyle of the chute. Sam, who had been lying back, fast asleep, with the moon on his face, got down, with the remark that it was pleasant "to be home." The waggon turned and drove away, the noise gently dying in the woods, and we clambered up the rough path, Caliban's great feat of engineering, and came home to Silverado. The moon shone in at the eastern doors and windows, and over the lumber on the platform. The one tall pine 401 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS beside the ledge was steeped in silver. Away up the canon, a wild cat welcomed us with three discordant squalls. But once we had lit a candle, and began to review our improvements, homely in either sense, and count our stores, it was wonderful what a feeling of possession and permanence grew up in the hearts of the lords of Silverado. A bed had still to be made up for Strong, and the morning's water to be fetched, with clink- ing pail ; and as we set about these household duties, and showed off our wealth and conveniences before the stranger, and had a glass of wine, I think, in honour of our return, and trooped at length one after another up the flying bridge of plank, and lay down to sleep in our shattered, moon-pierced barrack, we were among the happiest sovereigns in the world, and certainly ruled over the most contented people. Yet, in our absence, the palace had been sacked. Wild cats, so the Hansons said, had broken in and carried off a side of bacon, a hatchet, and two knives. EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A MINE No one could live at Silverado and not be curious about the story of the mine. We were surrounded by so many evidences of expense and toil, we lived so en- tirely in the wreck of that great enterprise, like mites in the ruins of a cheese, that the idea of the old din and bustle haunted our repose. Our own house, the forge, the dump, the chutes, the rails, the windlass, the mass of broken plant; the two tunnels, one far below in the green dell, the other on the platform where we kept our wine ; the deep shaft, with the sun-glints and the water- drops ; above all, the ledge, that great gaping slice out of the mountain shoulder, propped apart by wooden wedges, on whose immediate margin, high above our heads, the one tall pine precariously nodded — these stood for its greatness; while, the dog-hutch, boot- jacks, old boots, old tavern bills, and the very beds that we inherited from bygone miners, put in human touches and realised for us the story of the past. I have sat on an old sleeper, under the thick madronas near the forge, with just a look over the dump on the green world below, and seen the sun lying broad among the wreck, and heard the silence broken only by the tinkling water in the shaft, or a stir of the royal family 403 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS about the battered palace, and my mind has gone back to the epoch of the Stanleys and the Chapmans, with a grand tuttt of pick and drill, hammer and anvil, echoing about the canon ; the assayer hard at it in our dining- room ; the carts below on the road, and their cargo of red mineral bounding and thundering down the iron chute. And now all gone — all fallen away into this sunny silence and desertion : a family of squatters din- ing in the assayer's office, making their beds in the big sleeping room erstwhile so crowded, keeping their wine in the tunnel that once rang with picks. But Silverado itself, although now fallen in its turn into decay, was once but a mushroom, and had succeeded to other mines and other flitting cities. Twenty years ago, away down the glen on the Lake County side there was a place, Jonestown by name, with two thousand inhabitants dwelling under canvas, and one roofed house for the sale of whiskey. Round on the western side of Mount Saint Helena, there was at the same date, a sec- ond large encampment, its name, if it ever had one, lost for me. Both of these have perished, leaving not a stick and scarce a memory behind them. Tide after tide of hopeful miners have thus flowed and ebbed about the mountain, coming and going, now by lone prospectors, now with a rush. Last, in order of time came Sil- verado, reared the big mill, in the valley, founded the town which is now represented, monumentally, by Hanson's, pierced all these slaps and shafts and tunnels, and in turn declined and died away. *' Our noisy years seem moments in the wake Of the eternal silence." 404 EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A MINE As to the success of Silverado in its time of being, two reports Were current. According to the first, six hundred thousand dollars were taken out of that great upright seam, that still hung open above us on crazy wedges. Then the ledge pinched out, and there fol- lowed, in quest of the remainder, a great drifting and tunnelling in all directions, and a great consequent effu- sion of dollars, until, all parties being sick of the ex- pense, the mine was deserted, and the town decamped. According to the second version, told me with much secrecy of manner, the whole affair, mine, mill, and town, were parts of one majestic swindle. There had never come any silver out of any portion of the mine; there was no silver to come. At midnight trains of packhorses might have been observed winding by de- vious tracks about the shoulder of the mountain. They came from far away, from Amador or Placer, laden with silver in "old cigar boxes." They discharged their load at Silverado, in the hour of sleep ; and before the morning they were gone again with their mysterious drivers to their unknown source. In this way, twenty thousand pounds' worth of silver was smuggled in un- der cover of night, in these old cigar boxes ; mixed with Silverado mineral; carted down to the mill; crushed, amalgamated, and refined, and despatched to the city as the proper product of the mine. Stock-jobbing, if it can cover such expenses, must be a profitable business in San Francisco. 1 give these two versions as I got them. But I place little reliance on either, my belief in history having been greatly shaken. For it chanced that 1 had come to dwell in Silverado at a critical hour ; great events in its history 405 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS were about to happen — did happen, as I am led to be- lieve; nay, and it will be seen that I played a part in that revolution myself. And yet from first to last I never had a glimmer of an idea what was going on; and even now, after full reflection, profess myself at sea. That there was some obscure intrigue of the cigar-box order, and that I, in the character of a wooden puppet, set pen to paper in the interest of somebody, so much, and no more, is certain. Silverado, then under my immediate sway, belonged to one whom 1 will call a Mr. Ronalds. I only knew him through the extraordinarily distorting medium of local gossip, now as a momentous jobber; now as a dupe to point an adage ; and again, and much more probably, as an ordinary Christian gentleman like you or me, who had opened a mine and worked it for a while with bet- ter and worse fortune. So, through a defective window- pane, you may see the passer-by shoot up into a hunch- backed giant, or dwindle into a pot-bellied dwarf To Ronalds, at least, the mine belonged; but the notice by which he held it would run out upon the 30th of June — or rather, as I suppose, it had run out already, and the month of grace would expire upon that day, after which any American citizen might post a notice of his own, and make Silverado his. This, with a sort of quiet slyness, Rufe told me at an early period of our acquaintance. There was no silver, of course; the mine ''wasn't worth nothing, Mr. Stevens," but there was a deal of old iron and wood around, and to gain posses- sion of this old wood and iron, and get a right to the water, Rufe proposed, if I had no objections, to **jump the claim." 406 EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A MINE Of course, I had no objection. But I was filled with wonder. If all he wanted was the wood and iron, what, in the name of fortune, was to prevent him taking them .?^ "His right there was none to dispute." He might lay hands on all to-morrow, as the wild cats had laid hands upon our knives and hatchet. Besides, was this mass of heavy mining plant worth transportation ? If it was, why had not the rightful owners carted it away ? If it was, would they not preserve their title to these movables, even after they had lost their title to the mine ? And if it were not, what the better was Rufe ? Nothing would grow at Silverado ; there was even no wood to cut; beyond a sense of property, there was nothing to be gained. Lastly, was it at all credible that Ronalds would forget what Rufe remembered ? The days of grace were not yet over: any fme morning he might appear, paper in hand, and enter for another year on his inheritance. However, it was none of my busi- ness; all seemed legal; Rufe or Ronalds, all was one to me. On the morning of the 27th, Mrs. Hanson appeared with the milk as usual, in her sun-bonnet. The time would be out on Tuesday, she reminded us, and bade me be in readiness to play my part, though I had no idea what it was to be. And suppose Ronalds came ? we asked. She received the idea with derision, laughing aloud with all her fme teeth. He could not find the mine to save his life, it appeared, without Rufe to guide him. Last year, when he came, they heard him **up and down the road a hollerin' and a raisin' Cain." And at last he had to come to the Hansons in despair, and bid Rufe, "Jump into your pants and shoes, and show 407 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS me where this old mine is, anyway!" Seeing that Ronalds had laid out so much money in the spot, and that a beaten road led right up to the bottom of the dump, I thought this a remarkable example. The sense of local- ity must be singularly in abeyance in the case of Ronalds. That same evening, supper comfortably over, Joe Strong busy at work on a drawing of the dump and the opposite hills, we were all out on the platform together, sitting there, under the tented heavens, with the same sense of privacy as if we had been cabined in a parlour, when the sound of brisk footsteps came mounting up the path. We pricked our ears at this, for the tread seemed lighter and firmer than was usual with our country neighbours. And presently, sure enough, two town gentlemen, with cigars and kid gloves, came de- bouching past the house. They looked in that place like a blasphemy. ''Good evening," they said. For none of us had stirred ; we all sat stiff with wonder. "Good evening," I returned; and then, to put them at their ease, '* A stiff climb," I added. *'Yes," replied the leader; "but we have to thank you for this path." I did not like the man's tone. None of us liked it. He did not seem embarrassed by the meeting, but threw us his remarks like favours, and strode magisterially by us towards the shaft and tunnel. Presently we heard his voice raised to his companion. "We drifted every sort of way, but couldn't strike the ledge." Then again: "It pinched out here." And once more: "Every miner that ever worked upon it says there's bound to be a ledge somewhere." 408 EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A MINE These were the snatches of his talk that reached us, and they had a damning significance. We, the lords of Silverado, had come face to face with our superior. It is the worst of all quaint and of all cheap ways of life that they bring us at last to the pinch of some humilia- tion. I liked well enough to be a squatter when there was none but Hanson by; before Ronalds, I will own, I somewhat quailed. I hastened to do him fealty, said I gathered he was the Squattee, and apologised. He threatened me with ejection, in a manner grimly plea- sant — more pleasant to him, I fancy, than to me; and then he passed off into praises of the former state of Silverado. "It was the busiest little mining town you ever saw : " a population of between a thousand and fifteen hundred souls, the engine in full blast, the mill newly erected ; nothing going but champagne, and hope the order of the day. Ninety thousand dollars came out; a hundred and forty thousand were put in, making a net loss of fifty thousand. The last days, I gathered, the days of John Stanley, were not so bright; the cham- pagne had ceased to flow, the population was already moving elsewhere, and Silverado had begun to wither in the branch before it was cut at the root. The last shot that was fired knocked over the stove chimney, and made that hole in the roof of our barrack, through which the sun was wont to visit slug-a-beds towards afternoon. A noisy last shot, to inaugurate the days of silence. Throughout this interview, my conscience was a good deal exercised; and I was moved to throw my- self on my knees and own the intended treachery. But then I had Hanson to consider. I was in much the 409 THE SILVEEIADO SQUATTERS same position as Old Rowley, that royal humourist, whom " the rogue had taken into his confidence." And again, here was Ronalds on the spot. He must know the day of the month as well as Hanson and I. If a broad hint were necessary, he had the broadest in the world. For a large board had been nailed by the crown prince on the very front of our house, between the door and window, painted in cinnabar — the pigment of tha country — with doggrel rhymes and contumelious pic- tures, and announcing, in terms unnecessarily figur- ative, that the trick was already played, the claim al- ready jumped, and Master Sam the legitimate successor of Mr. Ronalds. But no, nothing could save that man ; quern deus vult perdere, prim dementat As he came so he went, and left his rights depending. Late at night, by Silverado reckoning, and after we were all abed, Mrs. Hanson returned to give us the newest of her news. It was like a scene in a ship's steerage: all of us abed in our different tiers, the single candle struggling with the darkness, and this plump, handsome woman, seated on an upturned valise beside the bunks, talking and showing her fine teeth, and laughing till the rafters rang. Any ship, to be sure, with a hundredth part as many holes in it as our bar- rack, must long ago have gone to her last port. Up to that time I had always imagined Mrs. Hanson's loqua- city to be mere incontinence, that she said what was uppermost for the pleasure of speaking, and laughed and laughed again as a kind of musical accompaniment. But I now found there was an art in it. I found it less communicative than silence itself. I wished to know why Ronalds had come; how he had found his way 410 EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A MINE without Rufe; and why, being on the spot, he had not refreshed his title. She talked interminably on, but her replies were never answers. She fled under a cloud of words; and when I had made sure that she was pur- posely eluding me, I dropped the subject in my turn, and let her rattle where she would. She had come to tell us that, instead of waiting for Tuesday, the claim was to be jumped on the morrow. How ? If the time were not out, it was impossible. Why ? If Ronalds had come and gone, and done noth- ing, there was the less cause for hurry. But again I could reach no satisfaction. The claim was to be jumped next morning, that was all that she would condescend upon. And yet it was not jumped the next morning, nor yet the next, and a whole week had come and gone before we heard more of this exploit. That day week, however, a day of great heat, Hanson, with a little roll of paper in his hand, and the eternal pipe alight; Breed- love, his large, dull friend, to act, I suppose, as witness; Mrs. Hanson, in her Sunday best; and all the children, from the oldest to the youngest; — arrived in a proces- sion, tailing one behind another up the path. Caliban was absent, but he had been chary of his friendly visits since the row; and with that exception, the whole family was gathered together as for a marriage or a christening. Strong was sitting at work, in the shade of the dwarf madronas near the forge ; and they planted themselves about him in a circle, one on a stone, another on the waggon rails, a third on a piece of plank. Grad- ually the children stole away up the canon to where there was another chute, somewhat smaller than the 411 THE SILVERADO SQLfATTERS one across the dump; and down this chute, for the rest of the afternoon, they poured one avalanche of stones after another, waking the echoes of the glen. Mean- time we elders sat together on the platform, Hanson and his friend smoking in silence like Indian sachems, Mrs. Hanson rattling on as usual with an adroit volu- bility, saying nothing, but keeping the party at their ease like a courtly hostess. Not a word occurred about the business of the day. Once, twice, and thrice I tried to slide the subject in, but was discouraged by the stoic apathy of Rufe, and beaten down before the pouring verbiage of his wife. There is nothing of the Indian brave about me, and I began to grill with impatience. At last, like a highway robber, I cornered Hanson, and bade him stand and deliver his business. Thereupon he gravely rose, as though to hint that this was not a proper place, nor the subject one suitable for squaws, and I, following his example, led him up the plank into our barrack. There he bestowed himself on a box, and unrolled his papers with fastidious deliberation. There were two sheets of note-paper, and an old mining notice, dated May 30th, 1879, part print, part manuscript, and the latter much obliterated by the rains. It was by this identical piece of paper that the mine had been held last year. For thirteen months it had endured the weather and the change of seasons on a cairn behind the shoulder of the canon; and it was now my business, spreading it before me on the table, and sitting on a valise, to copy its terms, with some necessary changes, twice over on the two sheets of note-paper. One was then to be placed on the same cairn — a ''mound of rocks " 412 EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A MINE the notice put it; and the other to be lodged for regis- tration. Rufe watched me, silently smoking, till I came to the place for the locator's name at the end of the first copy ; and when I proposed that he should sign, I thought I saw a scare in his eye. ''I don't think that'll be neces- sary," he said slowly; "just you write it down." Per- haps this mighty hunter, who was the most active member of the local school board, could not write. There would be nothing strange in that. The constable of Calistoga is, and has been for years, a bed-ridden man, and, if I remember rightly, blind. He had more need of the emoluments than another, it was explained ; and it was easy for him to ''depytize," with a strong accent on the last. So friendly and so free are popular institutions. When I had done my scrivening, Hanson strolled out, and addressed Breedlove, ' ' Will you step up here a bit ?" and after they had disappeared a little while into the chaparral and madrona thicket, they came back again, minus a notice, and the deed was done. The claim was jumped ; a tract of mountain-side, fifteen hundred feet long by six hundred wide, with all the earth's precious bowels, had passed from Ronalds to Hanson, and, in the passage, changed its name from the ** Mam- moth " to the *' Calistoga." I had tried to get Rufe to call it after his wife, after himself, and after Garfield, the Republican Presidential candidate of the hour — since then elected, and, alas! dead — but all was in vain. The claim had once been called the Calistoga before, and he seemed to feel safety in returning to that. And so the history of that mine became once more 4f3 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS plunged in darkness, lit only by some monster pyro- technical displays of gossip. And perhaps the most curious feature of the whole matter is this: that we should have dwelt in this quiet corner of the mountains, with not a dozen neighbours, and yet struggled all the while, like desperate swimmers, in this sea of falsities and contradictions. Wherever a man is, there will be a lie. 414 TOILS AND PLEASURES I MUST try to convey some notion of our life, of how the days passed and what pleasure we took in them, of what there was to do and how we set about doing it, in our mountain hermitage. The nouse, after we had repaired the worst of the damages, and filled in some of the doors and windows with white cotton cloth, became a healthy and a pleasant dwelling-place, always airy and dry, and haunted by the outdoor per- fumes of the glen. Within, it had the look of habita- tion, the human look. You had only to go into the third room, which we did not use, and see its stones, its sifting earth, its tumbled litter; and then return to our lodging, with the beds made, the plates on the rack, the pail of bright water behind the door, the stove crackling in a corner, and perhaps the table roughly laid against a meal, — and man's order, the little clean spots that he creates to dwell in, were at once con- trasted with the rich passivity of nature. And yet our house was everywhere so wrecked and shattered, the air came and went so freely, the sun found so many portholes, the golden outdoor glow shone in so many open chinks, that we enjoyed, at the same time, some of the comforts of a roof and much of the gaiety and 4«5 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS brightness of al fresco life. A single shower of rain, to be sure, and we should have been drowned out like mice. But ours was a Californian summer, and an earthquake was a far likelier accident than a shower of rain. Trustful in this fine weather, we kept the house for kitchen and bedroom, and used the platform as our summer parlour. The sense of privacy, as I have said already, was complete. We could look over the dump on miles of forest and rough hilltop ; our eyes com- manded some of Napa Valley, where the train ran, and the little country townships sat so close together along the line of the rail. But here there was no man to in- trude. None but the Hansons were our visitors. Even they came but at long intervals, or twice daily, at a stated hour, with milk. So our days, as they were never in- terrupted, drew out to the greater length; hour melted insensibly into hour; the household duties, though they were many, and some of them laborious, dwindled into mere islets of business in a sea of sunny day-time ; and it appears to me, looking back, as though the far greater part of our life at Silverado had been passed, propped upon an elbow, or seated on a plank, listening to the silence that there is among the hills. My work, it is true, was over early in the morning. I rose before any one else, lit the stove, put on the water to boil, and strolled forth upon the platform to wait till it was ready. Silverado would then be still in shadow, the sun shining on the mountain higher up. A clean smell of trees, a smell of the earth at morning, hung in the air. Regularly, every day, there was a single bird, not singing, but awkwardly chirruping among the 416 TOILS AND PLEASURES green madronas, and the sound was cheerful, natu- ral, and stirring. It did not hold the attention, nor in- terrupt the thread of meditation, like a blackbird or a nightingale; it was mere woodland prattle, of which the mind was conscious like a perfume. The freshness of these morning seasons remained with me far on into the day. As soon as the kettle boiled, I made porridge and coffee; and that, beyond the literal drawing of water, and the preparation of kindling, which it would be hy- perbolical to call the hewing of wood, ended my do- mestic duties for the day. Thenceforth my wife laboured single-handed in the palace, and I lay or wandered on the platform at my own sweet will. The little corner near the forge, where we found a refuge under the ma- dronas from the unsparing early sun, is indeed connected in my mind with some nightmare encounters over Eu- clid, and the Latin Grammar. These were known as Sam's lessons. He was supposed to be the victim and the sufferer; but here there must have been some mis- conception, for whereas I generally retired to bed after one of these engagements, he was no sooner set free than he dashed up to the Chinaman's house, where he had installed a printing press, that great element of civ- ilization, and the sound of his labours would be faintly audible about the canon half the day. To walk at all was a laborious business ; the foot sank and slid, the boots were cut to pieces, among sharp, uneven, rolling stones. When we crossed the platform in any direction, it was usual to lay a course, following as much as possible the line of waggon rails. Thus, if water were to be drawn, the water-carrier left the house 4^7 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS along some tilting planks that we had laid down, and not laid down very well. These carried him to that great highroad, the railway; and the railway served him as far as to the head of the shaft. But from thence to the spring and back again he made the best of his unaided way, staggering among the stones, and wading in low growth of the calycanthus, where the rattlesnakes lay hissing at his passage. Yet I liked to draw water. It was pleasant to dip the gray metal pail into the clean, colourless, cool water; pleasant to carry it back, with the water lipping at the edge, and a broken sunbeam quivering in the midst. But the extreme roughness of the walking confined us in common practice to the platform, and indeed to those parts of it that were most easily accessible along the line of rails. The rails came straight forward from the shaft, here and there overgrown with little green bushes, but still entire, and still carrying a truck, which it was Sam's delight to trundle to and fro by the hour with various ladings. About midway down the platform, the railroad trended to the right, leaving our house and coasting along the far side within a few yards of the madronas and the forge, and not far off the latter, ended in a sort of platform on the edge of the dump. There, in old days, the trucks were tipped, and their load sent thundering down the chute. There, besides, was the only spot where we could approach the margin of the dump. Anywhere else, you took your life in your right hand when you came within a yard and a half to peer over. For at any moment the dump might begin to slide and carry you down and bury you below its ruins. Indeed, the neighbourhood of an old mine is a place be- 418 TOILS AND PLEASURES set with dangers. For as still as Silverado was, at any moment the report of rotten wood might tell us that the platform had fallen into the shaft ; the dump might be- gin to pour into the road below ; or a wedge slip in the great upright seam, and hundreds of tons of mountain bury the scene of our encampment. I have already compared the dump to a rampart, built certainly by some rude people, and for prehistoric wars. It was likewise a frontier. All below was green and woodland, the tall pines soaring one above another, each with a firm outline and full spread of bough. All above was arid, rocky, and bald. The great spout of broken mineral, that had dammed the canon up, was a crea- ture of man's handiwork, its material dug out with a pick and powder, and spread by the service of the trucks. But nature herself, in that upper district, seemed to have had an eye to nothing besides mining; and even the natural hill-side was all sliding gravel and precarious boulder. Close at the margin of the well leaves would decay to skeletons and mummies, which at length some stronger gust would carry clear of the canon and scatter in the subjacent woods. Even moisture and de- caying vegetable matter could not, with all nature's alchemy, concoct enough soil to nourish a few poor grasses. It is the same, they say, in the neighbour- hood of all silver mines ; the nature of that precious rock being stubborn with quartz and poisonous with cinnabar. Both were plenty in our Silverado. The stones sparkled white in the sunshine with quartz; they were all stained red with cinnabar. Here, doubtless, came the Indians of yore to paint their faces for the war-path ; and cin- nabar, if I remember rightly, was one of the few articles 419 THE SILVERADO SQLfATTERS of Indian commerce. Now, Sam had it in his undis- turbed possession, to pound down and slake, and paint his rude designs with. But to me it had always a fine flavour of poetry, compounded out of Indian story and Hawthornden's allusion : '^Desire, alas! desire a Zeuxis new, From Indies borrowing gold, from Eastern skies Most bright cinoper . . ." Yet this is but half the picture ; our Silverado platform has another side to it. Though there was no soil, and scarce a blade of grass, yet out of these tumbled gravel- heaps and broken boulders, a flower garden bloomed as at home in a conservatory. Calycanthus crept, like a hardy weed, all over our rough parlour, choking the railway, and pushing forth its rusty, aromatic cones from between two blocks of shattered mineral. Azaleas made a big snow-bed just above the well. The shoul- der of the hill waved white with Mediterranean heath. In the crannies of the ledge and about the spurs of the tall pine, a red flowering stone-plant hung in clusters. Even the low, thorny chaparral was thick with pea-like blossom. Close at the foot of our path nutmegs pros- pered, delightful to the sight and smell. At sunrise, and again late at night, the scent of the sweet bay trees filled the canon, and the down-blowing night wind must have borne it hundreds of feet into the outer air. All this vegetation, to be sure, was stunted. The madrona was here no bigger than the manzanita ; the bay was but a stripling shrub ; the very pines, with four or five exceptions in all our upper canon, were not so 420 TOILS AND PLEASURES tall as myself, or but a little taller, and the most of them came lower than my waist. For a prosperous forest tree, we must look below, where the glen was crowded with green spires. But for flowers and ravishing per- fume, we had none to envy : our heap of road-metal was thick with bloom, like a hawthorn in the front of June; our red, baking angle in the mountain, a laboratory of poignant scents. It was an endless wonder to my mind, as I dreamed about the platform, following the progress of the shadows, where the madrona with its leaves, the azalea and calycanthus with their blossoms, could find moisture to support such thick, wet, waxy growths, or. the bay tree collect the ingredients of its perfume. But there they all grew together, healthy, happy, and happy- making, as though rooted in a fathom of black soil. Nor was it only vegetable life that prospered. We had, indeed, few birds, and none that had much of a voice or anything worthy to be called a song. My morn- ing comrade had a thin chirp, unmusical and monoto- nous, but friendly and pleasant to hear. He had but one rival : a fellow with an ostentatious cry of near an octave descending, not one note of which properly followed another. This is the only bird I ever knew with a wrong ear; but there was something enthralling about his performance. You listened and listened, thinking each time he must surely get it right ; but no, it was always wrong, and always wrong the same way. Yet he seemed proud of his song, delivered it with execution and a manner of his own, and was charming to his mate. A very incorrect, incessant human whistler had thus a chance of knowing how his own music pleased the world. Two great birds — eagles, we thought — 421 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS dwelt at the top of the canon, among the crags that were printed on the sky. Now and again, but very rarely, they wheeled high over our heads in silence, or with a distant, dying scream; and then, with a fresh impulse, winged fleetly forward, dipped over a hilltop, and were gone. They seemed solemn and ancient things, sailing the blue air: perhaps coeval with the mountain where they haunted, perhaps emigrants from Rome, where the glad legions may have shouted to be- hold them on the morn of battle. But if birds were rare, the place abounded with rattle- snakes — the rattlesnakes* nest, it might have been named. Wherever we brushed among the bushes, our passage woke their angry buzz. One dwelt habitually in the wood-pile, and sometimes, when we came for firewood, thrust up his small head between two logs, and hissed at the intrusion. The rattle has a legendary credit; it is said to be awe-inspiring, and, once heard, to stamp it- self forever in the memory. But the sound is not at all alarming; the hum of many insects, and the buzz of the wasp convince the ear of danger quite as readily. As a matter of fact, we lived for weeks in Silverado, coming and going, with rattles sprung on every side, and it never occurred to us to be afraid. I used to take sun- baths and do calisthenics in a certain pleasant nook among azalea and calycanthus, the rattles whizzing on every side like spinning-wheels, and the combined hiss or buzz rising louder and angrier at any sudden move- ment; but I was never in the least impressed, nor ever attacked. It was only towards the end of our stay, that a man down at Calistoga, who was expatiating on the terrifying nature of the sound, gave me at last a very good 422 . TOILS AND PLEASURES imitation; and it burst on me at once that we dwelt in the very metropolis of deadly snakes, and that the rat- tle was simply the commonest noise in Silverado. Im- mediately on our return, we attacked the Hansons on the subject. They had formerly assured us that our canon was favoured, like Ireland, with an entire im- munity from poisonous reptiles; but, with the perfect inconsequence of the natural man, they were no sooner found out than they went off at score in the contrary direction, and we were told that in no part of the world did rattlesnakes attain to such a monstrous bigness as among the warm, flower-dotted rocks of Silverado. This is a contribution rather to the natural history of the Hansons, than to that of snakes. One person, however, better served by his instinct, had known the rattle from the first; and that was Chu- chu, the dog. No rational creature has ever led an existence more poisoned by terror than that dog's at Silverado. Every whiz of the rattle made him bound. His eyes rolled; he trembled; he would be often wet with sweat. One of our great mysteries was his terror of the mountain. A little away above our nook, the azaleas and almost all the vegetation ceased. Dwarf pines not big enough to be Christmas trees, grew thinly among loose stone and gravel scaurs. Here and there a big boulder sat quiescent on a knoll, having paused there till the next rain in his long slide down the moun- tain. There was here no ambuscade for the snakes, you could see clearly where you trod; and yet the higher I went, the more abject and appealing became Chuchu's terror. He was an excellent master of that composite language in which dogs communicate with 423 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS men, and he would assure me, on his honour, that there was some peril on the mountain ; appeal to me, by all that 1 held holy, to turn back; and at length, finding all was in vain, and that 1 still persisted, ignorantly fool- hardy, he would suddenly whip round and make a bee- line down the slope for Silverado, the gravel showering after him. What was he afraid of? There were ad- mittedly brown bears and California lions on the moun- tain ; and a grizzly visited Rufe's poultry yard not long before, to the unspeakable alarm of Caliban, who dashed out to chastise the intruder, and found himself, by moon- light, face to face with such a tartar. Something at least there must have been: some hairy, dangerous brute lodged permanently among the rocks a little to the north-west of Silverado, spending his summer there- about, with wife and family. And there was, or there had been, another animal. Once, under the broad daylight, on that open stony hillside, where the baby pines were growing, scarcely tall enough to be a badge for a MacGregor's bonnet, I came suddenly upon his innocent body, lying mummi- fied by the dry air and sun : a pigmy kangaroo. I am ingloriously ignorant of these subjects ; had never heard of such a beast ; thought myself face to face with some incomparable sport of nature ; and began to cherish hopes of immortality in science. Rarely have I been conscious of a stranger thrill than when I raised that singular creature from the stones, dry as a board, his innocent heart long quiet, and all warm with sunshine. His long hind legs were stiff, his tiny forepaws clutched upon his breast, as if to leap ; his poor life cut short upon that mountain by some unknown accident. But 434 TOILS AND PLEASURES the kangaroo rat, it proved, was no such unknown animal; and my discovery was nothing. Crickets were not wanting. I thought I could make out exactly four of them, each with a corner of his own, who used to make night musical at Silverado. In the matter of voice, they far excelled the birds, and their ringing whistle sounded from rock to rock, calling and replying the same thing, as in a meaningless opera. Thus, children in full health and spirits shout together, to the dismay of neighbours; and their idle, happy, deafening vociferations rise and fall, like the song of the crickets. I used to sit at night on the platform, and wonder why these creatures were so happy ; and what was wrong with man that he also did not wind up his days with an hour or two of shouting; but I suspect that all long-lived animals are solemn. The dogs alone are hardly used by nature; and it seems a manifest in- justice for poor Chuchu to die in his teens, after a life so shadowed and troubled, continually shaken with alarm, and the tear of elegant sentiment permanently in his eye. There was another neighbour of ours at Silverado, small but very active, a destructive fellow. This was a black, ugly fly — a bore, the Hansons called him — who lived by hundreds in the boarding of our house. He entered by a round hole, more neatly pierced than a man could do it with a gimlet, and he seems to have spent his life in cutting out the interior of the plank, but whether as a dwelling or a store-house, I could never find. When I used to lie in bed in the morning for a rest — we had no easy-chairs in Silverado — I would hear, hour after hour, the sharp cutting sound of his labours, and from time to time a dainty shower of 425 THE SILVERADO SQIJATTERS sawdust would fall upon the blankets. There lives no more industrious creature than a bore. And now that I have named to the reader all our animals and insects without exception — only I find I have forgotten the flies — he will be able to appreciate the singular privacy and silence of our days. It was not only man who was excluded : animals, the song of birds, the lowing of cattle, the bleating of sheep, clouds even, and the variations of the weather, were here also wanting; and as, day after day, the sky was one dome of blue, and the pines below us stood motionless in the still air, so the hours themselves were marked out from each other only by the series of our own affairs, and the sun's great period as he ranged westward through the heavens. The two birds cackled a while in the early morning; all day the water tinkled in the shaft, the bores ground sawdust in the planking of our crazy palace — infinitesimal sounds ; and it was only with the return of night that any change would fall on our surroundings, or the four crickets begin to flute together in the dark. Indeed, it would be hard to exaggerate the pleasure that we took in the approach of evening. Our day was not very long, but it was very tiring. To trip along un- steady planks or wade among shifting stones, to go to and fro for water, to clamber down the glen to the Toll House after meat and letters, to cook, to make fires and beds, were all exhausting to the body. Life out of doors, besides, under the fierce eye of day, draws largely on the animal spirits. There are certain hours in the af- ternoon when a man, unless he is in strong health or en- joys a vacant mind, would rather creep into a cool cor- ner of a house and sit upon the chairs of civilization. 426 TOILS AND PLEASURES About that time, the sharp stones, the planks, the up- turned boxes of Silverado, began to grow irksome to my body ; I set out on that hopeless, never-ending quest for a more comfortable posture ; I would be fevered and weary of the staring sun ; and just then he would begin courteously to withdraw his countenance, the shadows lengthened, the aromatic airs awoke, and an indescri- bable but happy change announced the coming of the night. The hours of evening, when we were once curtained in the friendly dark, sped lightly. Even as with the crickets, night brought to us a certain spirit of rejoicing. It was good to taste the air; good to mark the dawning of the stars, as they increased their glittering company; good, too, to gather stones, and send them crashing down the chute, a wave of light. It seemed, in some way, the reward and the fulfilment of the day. So it is when men dwell in the open air; it is one of the simple pleasures that we lose by living cribbed and covered in a house, that, though the coming of the day is still the most inspiriting, yet day's departure, also, and the return of night refresh, renew, and quiet us ; and in the pas- tures of the dusk we stand, like cattle, exulting in the absence of the load. Our nights were never cold, and they were always still, but for one remarkable exception. Regularly, about nine o'clock, a warm wind sprang up, and blew for ten minutes, or maybe a quarter of an hour, right down the canon, fanning it well out, airing it as a mother airs the night nursery before the children sleep. As far as I could judge, in the clear darkness of the night, this wind was purely local : perhaps dependent on the con- 427 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS figuration of the glen. At least, it was very welcome to the hot and weary squatters ; and if we were not abed already, the springing up of this lilliputian valley-wind would often be our signal to retire. I was the last to go to bed, as I was still the first to rise. Many a night 1 have strolled about the platform, taking a bath of darkness before 1 slept. The rest would be in bed, and even from the forge I could hear them talking together from bunk to bunk. A single candle in the neck of a pint bottle was their only illumination ; and'yet the old cracked house seemed literally bursting with the light. It shone keen as a knife through all the vertical chinks; it struck upward through the broken shingles ; and through the eastern door and window, it fell in a great splash upon the thicket and the over- hanging rock. You would have said a conflagration, or at the least a roaring forge ; and behold, it was but a candle. Or perhaps it was yet more strange to see the procession moving bedwards round the corner of the house, and up the plank that brought us to the bed- room door; under the immense spread of the starry heavens, down in a crevice of the giant mountain, these few human shapes, with their unshielded taper, made so disproportionate a figure in the eye and mind. But the more he is alone with nature, the greater man and his doings bulk in the consideration of his fellow-men. 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