ESSAYS OF TRAA^EL 
 
ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 BY 
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 LONDON 
 CHATTO Si WINDUS 
 
 1905 
 

PR sise 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I. THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT : FROM THE CLYDE TO SANDY 
 HOOK 
 
 THE SECOND CABIN 3 
 
 EARLY IMPRESSIONS 11 
 
 STEERAGE SCENES 21 
 
 STEERAGE TYPES 30 
 
 THE SICK MAN 42 
 
 THE STOWAWAYS 53 
 
 PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND REVIEW ... 69 
 
 NEW YORK 81 
 
 II. COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK 93 
 
 COCKERMOUTH 94 
 
 AN EVANGELIST .97 
 
 ANOTHER 100 
 
 LAST OF SMETHURST 102 
 
 III. AN AUTUMN EFFECT 106 
 
 IV. A winter's WALK IN CARRICK AND GALLOWAY . . 131 
 
 Mi.9a244 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 V. FOREST NOTES — 
 
 ON THE PLAINS . 
 IN THE SEASON . 
 IDLE HOURS. 
 A PLEASURE-PARTY 
 THE WOODS IN SPRING 
 MORALITY . 
 VI. A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE 
 VII. RANDOM MEMORIES : ROSA QUO LOCORUM 
 VIII. THE IDEAL HOUSE 
 IX. DAVOS IN WINTER 
 X. HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS . 
 XI. ALPINE DIVERSIONS . 
 XII. THE STIMULATION OF THE ALPS 
 XIII. ROADS . . . . , 
 
 XIV. ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES 
 
 144 
 
 149 
 153 
 157 
 164 
 169 
 175 
 189 
 199 
 207 
 212 
 217 
 222 
 227 
 237 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 
 
 FROM THE CLYDE TO SANDY HOOK 
 
To 
 ROBERT ALAN MOWBRAY STEVENSON 
 
 Our friendship was not only founded before we 
 were born by a community of bloody but is in 
 itself near as old as my life. It began with our 
 early ages, and, like a history, has been continued 
 to the present time. Although we may not be 
 old in the world, we are old to each other, having 
 so long been intimates. We are now widely separ- 
 ated, a great sea and continent intervening ; but 
 memory, like care, mounts into iron ships and 
 rides post behind the horseman. Neither time 
 nor space nor enmity can conquer old affection ; 
 and as I dedicate these sketches, it is not to you 
 only, but to all in the old country, that I send 
 the greeting of my heart. 
 
 R.L.S. 
 
 1^79. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 
 
 THE SECOND CABIN 
 
 I FIRST encountered my fellow-passengers on the 
 Brooniielaw in Glasgow. Thence we descended the 
 Clyde in no familiar spirit, but looking askance on 
 each other as on possible enemies. A few Scandina- 
 vians, who had already grown acquainted on the North 
 Sea, were friendly and voluble over their long pipes ; but 
 among English speakers distance and suspicion reigned 
 supreme. The sun was soon overclouded, the wind 
 freshened and grew sharp as we continued to descend 
 the widening estuary ; and with the falling temperature 
 the gloom among the passengers increased. Two of 
 the women wept. Any one who had come aboard 
 might have supposed we were all absconding from the 
 law. There was scarce a word interchanged, and no 
 common sentiment but that of cold united us, until at 
 length, having touched at Greenock, a pointing arm 
 and a rush to the starboard now announced that our 
 ocean steamer was in sight. There she lay in mid- 
 river, at the Tail of the Bank, her sea-signal flying : 
 a wall of bulwark, a street of white deck-houses, an 
 
4 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 aspiring forest of spars, larger than a church, and 
 soon to be as populous as many an incorporated town 
 in the land to which she was to bear us. 
 
 I was not, in truth, a steerage passenger. Although 
 anxious to see the worst of emigrant life, I had some 
 work to finish on the voyage, and was advised to go 
 by the second cabin, where at least I should have a table 
 at command. The advice was excellent ; but to under- 
 stand the choice, and what I gained, some outline of 
 the internal disposition of the ship will first be neces- 
 sary. In her very nose is Steerage No. 1 , down two pair 
 of stairs. A little abaft, another companion, labelled 
 Steerage No. 2 and 3, gives admission to three 
 galleries, two running forward towards Steerage No. 
 1, and the third aft towards the engines. The 
 starboard forward gallery is the second cabin. Away 
 abaft the engines and below the officers^ cabins, to 
 complete our survey of the vessel, there is yet a third 
 nest of steerages, labelled 4 and 5. The second 
 cabin, to return, is thus a modified oasis in the very 
 heart of the steerages. Through the thin partition 
 you can hear the steerage passengers being sick, 
 the rattle of tin dishes as they sit at meals, the 
 varied accents in which they converse, the crying 
 of their children terrified by this new experience, 
 or the clean flat smack of the parental hand in 
 chastisement. 
 
 There are, however, many advantages for the inhabi- 
 tant of this strip. He does not require to bring his 
 own bedding or dishes, but finds berths and a table 
 completely if somewhat roughly furnished. He enjoys 
 a distinct superiority in diet ; but this, strange to say, 
 differs not only on different ships, but on the same ship 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 5 
 
 according as her head is to the east or west. In my 
 own experience, the principal difference between our 
 table and that of the true steerage passenger was the 
 table itself, and the crockery plates from which we ate. 
 But lest I should show myself ungrateful, let me recapi- 
 tulate every advantage. At breakfast we had a choice 
 between tea and coffee for beverage ; a choice not easy 
 to make, the two were so surprisingly alike. I found 
 that I could sleep after the coffee and lay awake after 
 the tea, which is proof conclusive of some chemical 
 disparity ; and even by the palate I could distinguish 
 a smack of snuff in the former from a flavour of boiling 
 and dish-cloths in the second. As a matter of fact, 
 I have seen passengers, after many sips, still doubting 
 which had been supplied them. In the way of eat- 
 ables at the same meal we were gloriously favoured ; 
 for in addition to porridge, which was common to all, 
 we had Irish stew, sometimes a bit of fish, and some- 
 times rissoles. The dinner of soup, roast fresh beef, 
 boiled salt junk, and potatoes, was, I believe, exactly 
 common to the steerage and the second cabin ; only 
 I have heard it rumoured that our potatoes were of a 
 superior brand ; and twice a week, on pudding-days, 
 instead of duff, we had a saddle-bag filled with 
 currants under the name of a plum-pudding. At tea 
 we were served with some broken meat from the 
 saloon ; sometimes in the comparatively elegant form 
 of spare patties or rissoles ; but as a general thing 
 mere chicken-bones and flakes of fish, neither hot 
 nor cold. If these were not the scrapings of plates 
 their looks belied them sorely ; yet w^e were all too 
 hungry to be proud, and fell to these leavings 
 greedily. These, the bread, which was excellent, and 
 
6 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 the soup and porridge which were both good, formed 
 my whole diet throughout the voyage ; so that except 
 for the broken meat and the convenience of a table I 
 might as well have been in the steerage outright. 
 Had they given me porridge again in the evening, I 
 should have been perfectly contented with the fare. 
 As it was, with a few biscuits and some whisky and 
 water before turning in, I kept my body going and 
 my spirits up to the mark. 
 
 The last particular in which the second cabin pas- 
 senger remarkably stands ahead of his brother of the 
 steerage is one altogether of sentiment. In the 
 steerage there are males and females ; in the second 
 cabin ladies and gentlemen. For some time after I 
 came aboard I thought I was only a male ; but in the 
 course of a voyage of discovery between decks, I came 
 on a brass plate, and learned that I was still a gentle- 
 man. Nobody knew it, of course. I was lost in the 
 crowd of males and females, and rigorously confined 
 to the same quarter of the deck. Who could tell 
 whether I housed on the port or starboard side of 
 steerage No. 2 and 3 ? And it was only there that 
 my superiority became practical ; everywhere else I 
 was incognito, moving among my inferiors with sim- 
 plicity, not so much as a swagger to indicate that I 
 was a gentleman after all, and had broken meat to 
 tea. Still, I was like one with a patent of nobility in 
 a drawer at home ; and when I felt out of spirits I 
 could go down and refresh myself with a look of that 
 brass plate. 
 
 For all these advantages I paid but two guineas. 
 Six guineas is the steerage fare ; eight that by the 
 second cabin ; and when you remember that the 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 7 
 
 steerage passenger must supply bedding and dishes, 
 and, in five cases out of ten, either brings some 
 dainties with him, or privately pays the steward for 
 extra rations, the difference in price becomes almost 
 nominal. Air comparatively fit to breathe, food com- 
 paratively varied, and the satisfaction of being still 
 privately a gentleman, may thus be had almost for 
 the asking. Two of my fellow-passengers in the 
 second cabin had already made the passage by the 
 cheaper fare, and declared it was an experiment not 
 to be repeated. As I go on to tell about my steerage 
 friends, the reader will perceive that they were not 
 alone in their opinion. Out of ten with whom I was 
 more or less intimate, I am sure not fewer than five 
 vowed, if they returned, to travel second cabin ; and 
 all who had left their wives behind them assured me 
 they would go without the comfort of their presence 
 until they could afford to bring them by saloon. 
 
 Our party in the second cabin was not perhaps the 
 most interesting on board. Perhaps even in the 
 saloon there was as much good- will and character. 
 Yet it had some elements of curiosity. There was a 
 mixed group of Swedes, Danes, and Norsemen, one of 
 whom, generally known by the name of 'Johnny,' in 
 spite of his own protests, greatly diverted us by his 
 clever, cross-country efforts to speak English, and 
 became on the strength of that an universal favourite 
 — it takes so little in this world of shipboard to 
 create a popularity. There was, besides, a Scots 
 mason, known from his favourite dish as ' Irish Stew,"" 
 three or four nondescript Scots, a fine young Irish- 
 man, O'Reilly, and a pair of young men who deserve 
 a special word of condemnation. One of them was 
 
8 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 Scots ; the other claimed to be American ; admitted, 
 after some fencing, that he was born in England ; 
 and ultimately proved to be an Irishman born and 
 nurtured, but ashamed to own his country. He had 
 a sister on board, whom he faithfully neglected 
 throughout the voyage, though she was not only sick, 
 but much his senior, and had nursed and cared for 
 him in childhood. In appearance he was like an 
 imbecile Henry the Third of France. The Scotsman, 
 though perhaps as big an ass, was not so dead of 
 heart ; and I have only bracketed them together 
 because they were fast friends, and disgraced them- 
 selves equally by their conduct at the table. 
 
 Next, to turn to topics more agreeable, we had a 
 newly-married couple, devoted to each other, with a 
 pleasant story of how they had first seen each other 
 years ago at a preparatory school, and that very after- 
 noon he had carried her books home for her. I do 
 not know if this story will be plain to southern 
 readers ; but to me it recalls many a school idyll, 
 with wrathful swains of eight and nine confronting 
 each other stride-legs, flushed with jealousy ; for to 
 carry home a young lady's books was both a delicate 
 attention and a privilege. 
 
 Then there was an old lady, or indeed I am not 
 sure that she was as much old as antiquated and 
 strangely out of place, who had left her husband, and 
 was travelling all the way to Kansas by herself. We 
 had to take her own word that she was married ; for 
 it was sorely contradicted by the testimony of her 
 appearance. Nature seemed to have sanctified her 
 for the single state ; even the colour of her hair was 
 incompatible with matrimony, and her husband, I 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 9 
 
 thought, should be a man of saintly spirit and phan- 
 tasmal bodily presence. She was ill, poor thing; her 
 soul turned from the viands ; the dirty tablecloth 
 shocked her like an impropriety; and the whole 
 strength of her endeavour was bent upon keeping her 
 watch true to Glasgow time till she should reach New 
 York. They had heard reports, her husband and she, 
 of some unwarrantable disparity of hours between 
 these two cities ; and with a spirit commendably 
 scientific, had seized on this occasion to put them 
 to the proof. It was a good thing for the old lady ; 
 for she passed much leisure time in studying the 
 watch. Once, when prostrated by sickness, she let 
 it run down. It was inscribed on her harmless mind 
 in letters of adamant that the hands of a watch must 
 never be turned backwards ; and so it behoved her 
 to lie in wait for the exact moment ere she started 
 it again. When she imagined this was about due, 
 she sought out one of the young second-cabin Scots- 
 men, who was embarked on the same experiment as 
 herself and had hitherto been less neglectful. She 
 was in quest of two o'clock ; and when she learned it 
 was already seven on the shores of Clyde, she lifted 
 up her voice and cried ' Gravy ! ' I had not heard 
 this innocent expletive since I was a young child ; 
 and I suppose it must have been the same with the 
 other Scotsmen present, for we all laughed our fill. 
 
 Last but not least, I come to my excellent friend 
 Mr. Jones. It would be difficult to say whether I 
 was his right-hand man, or he mine, during the 
 voyage. Thus at table I carved, while he only 
 scooped gravy ; but at our concerts, of which more 
 anon, he was the president who called up performers 
 
10 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 to sing, and I but his messenger who ran his errands 
 and pleaded privately with the over-modest. I knew 
 I liked Mr. Jones from the moment I saw him. I 
 thought him by his face to be Scottish ; nor could 
 his accent undeceive me. For as there is a lingua 
 franca of many tongues on the moles and in the 
 feluccas of the Mediterranean, so there is a free or 
 common accent among English-speaking men who 
 follow the sea. They catch a twang in a New 
 England Port ; from a cockney skipper, even a Scots- 
 man sometimes learns to drop an ^ ; a word of a 
 dialect is picked up from another hand in the fore- 
 castle ; until often the result is undecipherable, and 
 you have to ask for the man's place of birth. So it 
 was with Mr. Jones. I thought him a Scotsman who 
 had been long to sea ; and yet he was from Wales, 
 and had been most of his life a blacksmith at an 
 inland forge ; a few years in America and half a 
 score of ocean voyages having sufficed to modify his 
 speech into the common pattern. By his own 
 account he was both strong and skilful in his trade. 
 A few years back, he had been married and after a 
 fashion a rich man ; now the wife was dead and the 
 money gone. But his was the nature that looks 
 forward, and goes on from one year to another and 
 through all the extremities of fortune undismayed ; 
 and if the sky were to fall to-morrow, I should look 
 to see Jones, the day following, perched on a step- 
 ladder and getting things to rights. He was always 
 hovering round inventions like a bee over a flower, 
 and lived in a dream of patents. He had with him 
 a patent medicine, for instance, the composition of 
 which he had bought years ago for five dollars from 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 11 
 
 an American pedlar, and sold the other day for a 
 hundred pounds (I think it was) to an English 
 apothecary. It was ' called Golden Oil, cured all 
 maladies without exception ; and I am bound to 
 say that I partook of it myself with good results. 
 It is a character of the man that he was not only 
 perpetually dosing himself with Golden Oil, but 
 wherever there was a head aching or a finger cut, 
 there would be Jones with his bottle. 
 
 If he had one taste more strongly than another, 
 it was to study character. Many an hour have we 
 two walked upon the deck dissecting our neighbours 
 in a spirit that was too purely scientific to be called 
 unkind ; whenever a quaint or human trait slipped 
 out in conversation, you might have seen Jones and 
 me exchanging glances ; and we could hardly go to 
 bed in comfort till we had exchanged notes and 
 discussed the day's experience. We were then like 
 a couple of anglers comparing a day's kill. But the 
 fish we angled for were of a metaphysical species, 
 and we angled as often as not in one another's 
 baskets. Once, in the midst of a serious talk, each 
 found there was a scrutinising eye upon himself; I 
 own I paused in embarrassment at this double detec- 
 tion ; but Jones, with a better civility, broke into 
 a peal of unaffected laughter, and declared, what was 
 the truth, that there was a pair of us indeed. 
 
 EARLY IMPRESSIONS 
 
 We steamed out of the Clyde on Thursday night, 
 and early on the Friday forenoon we took in our 
 
12 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 last batch of emigrants at Lough Foyle, in Ireland, 
 and said farewell to Europe. The company was 
 now complete, and began to draw together, by 
 inscrutable magnetisms, upon the decks. There 
 were Scots and Irish in plenty, a few English, a 
 few Americans, a good handful of Scandinavians, 
 a German or two, and one Russian ; all now belong- 
 ing for ten days to one small iron country on the 
 deep. 
 
 As I walked the deck and looked round upon 
 my fellow-passengers, thus curiously assorted from 
 all northern Europe, I began for the first time to 
 understand the nature of emigration. Day by day 
 throughout the passage, and thenceforward across 
 all the States, and on to the shores of the Pacific, 
 this knowledge grew more clear and melancholy. 
 Emigration, from a word of the most cheerful import, 
 came to sound most dismally in my ear. There is 
 nothing more agreeable to picture and nothing more 
 pathetic to behold. The abstract idea, as conceived 
 at home, is hopeful and adventurous. A young man, 
 you fancy, scorning restraints and helpers, issues forth 
 into life, that great battle, to fight for his own hand. 
 The most pleasant stories of ambition, of difficulties 
 overcome, and of ultimate success, are but as episodes 
 to this great epic of self-help. The epic is composed 
 of individual heroisms ; it stands to them as the victori- 
 ous war which subdued an empire stands to the per- 
 sonal act of bravery which spiked a single cannon 
 and was adequately rewarded with a medal. For in 
 emigration the young men enter direct and by the 
 shipload on their heritage of work ; empty continents 
 swarm, as at the bo's''an''s whistle, with industrious 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 13 
 
 hands, and whole new empires are domesticated to the 
 service of man. 
 
 This is the closet picture, and is found, on trial, to 
 consist mostly of embellishments. The more I saw 
 of my fellow-passengers, the less I was tempted to the 
 lyric note. Comparatively few of the men were below 
 thirty ; many were married, and encumbered with 
 families ; not a few were already up in years ; and 
 this itself was out of tune with my imaginations, for 
 the ideal emigrant should certainly be young. Again, 
 I thought he should offer to the eye some bold type 
 of humanity, with bluff or hawk-like features, and 
 the stamp of an eager and pushing disposition. Now 
 those around me were for the most part quiet, 
 orderly, obedient citizens, family men broken by 
 adversity, elderly youths who had failed to place 
 themselves in life, and people who had seen better 
 days. Mildness was the prevailing character; mild 
 mirth and mild endurance. In a word, I was not 
 taking part in an impetuous and conquering sally, 
 such as swept over Mexico or Siberia, but found 
 myself, like Marmion, ' in the lost battle, borne down 
 by the flying.' 
 
 Labouring mankind had in the last years, and 
 throughout Great Britain, sustained a prolonged and 
 crushing series of defeats. I had heard vaguely of 
 these reverses ; of whole streets of houses standing 
 deserted by the Tyne, the cellar-doors broken and 
 removed for firewood ; of homeless men loitering at 
 the street-corners of Glasgow with their chests beside 
 them ; of closed factories, useless strikes, and starving 
 girls. But I had never taken them home to me or 
 represented these distresses livingly to my imagination. 
 
14 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 A turn of the market may be a calamity as disastrous 
 as the French retreat from Moscow ; but it hardly 
 lends itself to lively treatment, and makes a trifling 
 figure in the morning papers. We may struggle as 
 we please, we are not born economists. The individual 
 is more affecting than the mass. It is by the scenic 
 accidents, and the appeal to the carnal eye, that for 
 the most part we grasp the significance of tragedies. 
 Thus it was only now, when I found myself involved 
 in the rout, that I began to appreciate how sharp had 
 been the battle. We were a company of the rejected ; 
 the drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, 
 all who had been unable to prevail against circum- 
 stances in the one land, were now fleeing pitifully to 
 another ; and though one or two might still succeed, 
 all had already failed. We were a shipful of failures, 
 the broken men of England. Yet it must not be 
 supposed that these people exhibited depression. The 
 scene, on the contrary, was cheerful. Not a tear 
 was shed on board the vessel. All were full of hope 
 for the future, and showed an inclination to innocent 
 gaiety. Some were heard to sing, and all began 
 to scrape acquaintance with small jests and ready 
 laughter. 
 
 The children found each other out like dogs, and 
 ran about the decks scraping acquaintance after their 
 fashion also. ' What do you call your mither ? ' I 
 heard one ask. ' Mawmaw,' was the reply, indicating, 
 I fancy, a shade of difference in the social scale. 
 When people pass each other on the high seas of 
 life at so early an age, the contact is but slight, and 
 the relation more like what we may imagine to be the 
 friendship of flies than that of men ; it is so quickly 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 15 
 
 joined, so easily dissolved, so open in its communica- 
 tions and so devoid of deeper human qualities. The 
 children, I observed, were all in a band, and as thick 
 as thieves at a fair, while their elders were still 
 ceremoniously manoeuvring on the outskirts of ac- 
 quaintance. The sea, the ship, and the seamen were 
 soon as familiar as home to these half-conscious little 
 ones. It was odd to hear them, throughout the 
 voyage, employ shore words to designate portions of 
 the vessel. ' Go Vay doon to yon dyke,' I heard one 
 say, probably meaning the bulwark. I often had my 
 heart in my mouth, watching them climb into the 
 shrouds or on the rails, while the ship went swinging 
 through the waves ; and I admired and envied the 
 courage of their mothers, who sat by in the sun and 
 looked on with composure at these perilous feats. 
 ' He '11 maybe be a sailor," I heard one remark ; 
 ' now 's the time to learn.' I had been on the point 
 of running forward to interfere, but stood back at 
 that, reproved. Very few in the more delicate classes 
 have the nerve to look upon the peril of one dear to 
 them ; but the life of poorer folk, where necessity 
 is so much more immediate and imperious, braces 
 even a mother to this extreme of endurance. And 
 perhaps, after all, it is better that the lad should 
 break his neck than that you should break his spirit. 
 And since I am here on the chapter of the children, I 
 must mention one little fellow, whose family belonged 
 to Steerage No. 4 and 5, and who, wherever he went, 
 was like a strain of music round the ship. He was 
 an ugly, merry, unbreeched child of three, his lint- 
 white hair in a tangle, his face smeared with suet and 
 treacle ; but he ran to and fro with so natural a step, 
 
16 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 and fell and picked himself up again with such grace 
 and good-humour, that he might fairly be called 
 beautiful when he was in motion. To meet him, 
 crowing with laughter and beating an accompaniment 
 to his own mirth with a tin spoon upon a tin cup, 
 was to meet a little triumph of the human species. 
 Even when his mother and the rest of his family lay 
 sick and prostrate around him, he sat upright in their 
 midst and sang aloud in the pleasant heartlessness of 
 infancy. 
 
 Throughout the Friday, intimacy among us men 
 made but a few advances. We discussed the probable 
 duration of the voyage, we exchanged pieces of in- 
 formation, naming our trades, what we hoped to find 
 in the new world, or what we were fleeing from in 
 the old ; and, above all, we condoled together over 
 the food and the vileness of the steerage. One or 
 two had been so near famine that you may say they 
 had run into the ship with the devil at their heels ; 
 and to these all seemed for the best in the best of 
 possible steamers. But the majority were hugely 
 contented. Coming as they did from a country in so 
 low a state as Great Britain, many of them from 
 Glasgow, which commercially speaking was as good as 
 dead, and many having long been out of work, I was 
 surprised to find them so dainty in their notions. I 
 myself lived almost exclusively on bread, porridge, 
 and soup, precisely as it was supplied to them, and 
 found it, if not luxurious, at least sufficient. But 
 these working men were loud in their outcries. It 
 was not ' food for human beings,' it was ' only fit for 
 pigs,' it was ' a disgrace.' Many of them lived almost 
 entirely upon biscuit, others on their own private 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 17 
 
 supplies, and some paid extra for better rations from 
 the ship. This marvellously changed my notion of 
 the degree of luxury habitual to the artisan. I was 
 prepared to hear him grumble, for grumbling is the 
 traveller s pastime ; but I was not prepared to find 
 him turn away from a diet which was palatable to 
 myself. Words I should have disregarded, or taken 
 with a liberal allowance ; but when a man prefers 
 dry biscuit there can be no question of the sincerity 
 of his diso-ust. 
 
 o 
 
 With one of their complaints I could most heartily 
 sympathise. A single night of the steerage had filled 
 them with horror. I had myself suffered, even in my 
 decent second-cabin berth, from the lack of air ; and 
 as the night promised to be fine and quiet, I deter- 
 mined to sleep on deck, and advised all who com- 
 plained of their quarters to follow my example. I 
 dare say a dozen of others agreed to do so, and I 
 thought we should have been quite a party. Yet, 
 when I brought up my rug about seven bells, there 
 was no one to be seen but the watch. That 
 chimerical terror of good night-air, which makes 
 men close their windows, list their doors, and seal 
 themselv'es up with their own poisonous exhalations, 
 had sent all these healthy workmen down below. 
 One Avould think we had been brought up in a fever 
 country ; yet in England the most malarious districts 
 are in the bedchambers. 
 
 I felt saddened at this defection, and yet half- 
 pleased to have the night so quietly to myself. The 
 wind had hauled a little ahead on the starboard bow, 
 and was dry but chilly. I found a shelter near 
 the fire-hole, and made myself snug for the night. 
 
 B 
 
18 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 The ship moved over the uneven sea with a gentle 
 and cradling movement. The ponderous, organic 
 labours of the engine in her bowels occupied the 
 mind, and prepared it for slumber. From time to 
 time a heavier lurch would disturb me as I lay, and 
 recall me to the obscure borders of consciousness ; 
 or I heard, as it were through a veil, the clear note 
 of the clapper on the brass and the beautiful sea- cry, 
 ' All ^s well ! ' I know nothing, whether for poetry 
 or music, that can surpass the effect of these two 
 syllables m the darkness of a night at sea. 
 
 The day dawned fairly enough, and during the 
 early part we had some pleasant hours to improve 
 acquaintance in the open air ; but towards nightfall 
 the wind freshened, the rain began to fall, and the 
 sea rose so high that it was difficult to keep one's 
 footing on the deck. I have spoken of our con- 
 certs. We were indeed a musical ship*'s company, 
 and cheered our way into exile with the fiddle, the 
 accordion, and the songs of all nations. Good, bad, 
 or indifferent — Scottish, English, Irish, Russian, 
 German or Norse, — the songs were received with 
 generous applause. Once or twice, a recitation, 
 very spiritedly rendered in a powerful Scottish accent, 
 varied the proceedings ; and once we sought in vain 
 to dance a quadrille, eight men of us together, to 
 the music of the violin. The performers were all 
 humorous, frisky fellows, who loved to cut capers in 
 private life ; but as soon as they were arranged for 
 the dance, they conducted themselves like so many 
 mutes at a funeral. I have never seen decorum 
 pushed so far ; and as this was not expected, the 
 quadrille was soon whistled down, and the dancers 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 19 
 
 departed under a cloud. Eight Eienchmeu, even 
 eight Englishmen from another rank of society, would 
 have dared to make some fun for themselves and the 
 spectators ; but the working man, when sober, takes 
 an extreme and even melancholy view of personal 
 deportment. A fifth-form schoolboy is not more 
 careful of dignity. He dares not be comical ; his 
 fun must escape from him unprepared, and above all, 
 it must be unaccompanied by any physical demonstra- 
 tion. I like his society under most circumstances, but 
 let me never again join with him in public gambols. 
 
 But the impulse to sing was strong, and triumphed 
 over modesty and even the inclemencies of sea and 
 sky. On this rough Saturday night, we got together 
 by the main deck-house, in a place sheltered from the 
 wind and rain. Some clinging to a ladder which led 
 to the hurricane deck, and the rest knitting arms or 
 taking hands, we made a ring to support the women 
 in the violent lurching of the ship ; and when we 
 were thus disposed, sang to our hearts' content. 
 Some of the songs were appropriate to the scene ; 
 others strikingly the reverse. Bastard doggrel of the 
 music-hall, such as, ' Around her splendid form, I 
 weaved the magic circle," sounded bald, bleak, and 
 pitifully silly. ' We don't want to fight, but, by 
 Jingo, if we do,' was in some measure saved by the 
 vigour and unanimity with which the chorus was 
 thrown forth into the night. I observed a Platt- 
 Deutsch mason, entirely innocent of English, adding 
 heartily to the general effect. And perhaps the 
 German mason is but a fair example of the sincerity 
 with which the song was rendered ; for nearly all 
 with whom I conversed upon the subject were bitterly 
 
20 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 opposed to war, and attributed their own misfortunes, 
 and frequently their own taste for whisky, to the 
 campaigns in Zululand and Afghanistan. 
 
 Every now and again, however, some song that 
 touched the pathos of our situation was given forth ; 
 and you could hear by the voices that took up the 
 burden how the sentiment came home to each. 
 ' The Anchor 's Weighed ' was true for us. We 
 were indeed ' Rocked on the bosom of the stormy 
 deep."* How many of us could say with the singer, 
 ' I 'm lonely to-night, love, without you,' or, ' Go, 
 some one, and tell them from me, to write me a 
 letter from home ' ! And when was there a more 
 appropriate moment for ' Auld Lang Syne "* than 
 now, when the land, the friends, and the affections 
 of that mingled but beloved time were fading and 
 fleeing behind us in the vessel's wake? It pointed 
 forward to the hour when these labours should be 
 overpast, to the return voyage, and to many a meet- 
 ing in the sanded inn, when those who had parted in 
 the spring of youth should again drink a cup of 
 kindness in their age. Had not Burns contemplated 
 emigration, I scarce believe he would have found 
 that note. 
 
 All Sunday the weather remained wild and cloudy ; 
 many were prostrated by sickness ; only five sat down 
 to tea in the second cabin, and two of these departed 
 abruptly ere the meal was at an end. The Sabbath 
 was observed strictly by the majority of the emi- 
 grants. I heard an old woman express her surprise 
 that ' the ship didna gae doon,' as she saw some one 
 pass her with a chess-board on the holy day. Some 
 sang Scottish psalms. Many went to service, and in 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 9A 
 
 true Scottish fashion came back ill pleased with their 
 divine. ' I didna think he was an experienced 
 preacher,' said one girl to me. 
 
 Is was a bleak, uncomfortable day ; but at night, 
 by six bells, although the wind had not yet moderated, 
 the clouds were all wrecked and blown away behind 
 the rim of the horizon, and the stars came out thickly 
 overhead. I saw Venus burning as steadily and 
 sweetly across this hurly-burly of the winds and 
 waters as ever at home upon the summer woods. 
 The engine pounded, the screw tossed out of the 
 water with a roar, and shook the ship from end to 
 end ; the bows battled with loud reports against the 
 billows : and as I stood in the lee-scuppers and looked 
 up to where the funnel leaned out, over my head, 
 vomiting smoke, and the black and monstrous top- 
 sails blotted, at each lurch, a different crop of stars, 
 it seemed as if all this trouble were a thing of small 
 account, and that just above the mast reigned peace 
 unbroken and eternal. 
 
 STEERAGE SCENES 
 
 Our companion (Steerage No. 2 and 3) was a 
 favourite resort. Down one flight of stairs there was 
 a comparatively large open space, the centre occupied 
 by a hatchway, which made a convenient seat for about 
 twenty persons, while barrels, coils of rope, and the 
 carpenter's bench afforded perches for perhaps as 
 many more. The canteen, or steerage bar, was on 
 one side of the stair ; on the other, a no less attrac- 
 tive spot, the cabin of the indefatigable interpreter. 
 
22 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 I have seen people packed into this space like herrings 
 in a barrel, and many merry evenings prolonged there 
 until five bells, when the lights were ruthlessly ex- 
 tinguished and all must go to roost. 
 
 It had been rumoured since Friday that there was 
 a fiddler aboard, who lay sick and unmelodious in 
 Steerage No. 1 ; and on the Monday forenoon, as I 
 came down the companion, I was saluted by some- 
 thing in Strathspey time. A white-faced Orpheus 
 was cheerily playing to an audience of white-faced 
 women. It was as much as he could do to play, and 
 some of his hearers were scarce able to sit ; yet they 
 had crawled from their bunks at the first experimental 
 flourish, and found better than medicine in the music. 
 Some of the heaviest heads began to nod in time, and 
 a degree of animation looked from some of the palest 
 eyes. Humanly speaking, it is a more important 
 matter to play the fiddle, even badly, than to write 
 huge works upon recondite subjects. What could 
 Mr. Darwin have done for these sick women ? But 
 this fellow scraped away ; and the world was posi- 
 tively a better place for all who heard him. We 
 have yet to understand the economical value of these 
 mere accomplishments. I told the fiddler he was a 
 happy man, carrying happiness about with him in his 
 fiddle-case, and he seemed alive to the fact. 
 
 'It is a privilege,' I said. He thought a while 
 upon the word, turning it over in his Scots head, and 
 then answered with conviction, ' Yes, a privilege." 
 
 That night I was summoned by * Merrily danced 
 the Quaker's wife' into the companion of Steerage 
 No. 4 and 5. This was, properly speaking, but a 
 strip across a deck-house, lit by a sickly lantern 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 23 
 
 which swung to and fro with the motion of the ship. 
 Through the open slide-door we had a glimpse of a 
 grey night sea, with patches of phosphorescent foam 
 flying, swift as birds, into the wake, and the horizon 
 rising and falling as the vessel rolled to the wind. 
 In the centre the companion ladder plunged down 
 sheerly like an open pit. Below, on the first landing, 
 and lighted by another lamp, lads and lasses danced, 
 not more than three at a time for lack of space, in 
 jigs and reels and hornpipes. Above, on either side, 
 there was a recess railed with iron, perhaps two feet 
 wide and four long, which stood for orchestra and 
 seats of honour. In the one balcony, five slatternly 
 Irish lasses sat woven in a comely group. In the 
 other was posted Orpheus, his body, which was con- 
 vulsively in motion, forming an odd contrast to his 
 somnolent, imperturbable Scots face. His brother, a 
 dark man with a vehement, interested countenance, 
 who made a god of the fiddler, sat by with open 
 mouth, drinking in the general admiration and 
 throwing out remarks to kindle it. 
 
 'That's a bonny hornpipe now,' he would say, 
 ' it 's a great favourite with performers ; they dance 
 the sand dance to it.' And he expounded the sand 
 dance. Then suddenly, it would be a long ' Hush ! ' 
 with uplifted finger and glowing, supplicating eyes ; 
 'he's going to play "Auld Robin Gray" on one 
 string ! ' And throughout this excruciating move- 
 ment, — ' On one string, that 's on one string ! ' he 
 kept crying. I would have given something myself 
 that it had been on none ; but the hearers were 
 much awed. I called for a tune or two, and thus 
 introduced myself to the notice of the brother, who 
 
M ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 directed his talk to me for some little while, keeping, 
 I need hardly mention, true to his topic, like the 
 seamen to the star. ' He 's grand of it,' he said 
 confidentially. ' His master was a music-hall man.' 
 Indeed the music-hall man had left his mark, for our 
 fiddler was ignorant of many of our best old airs ; 
 ' Logie o' Buchan,' for instance, he only knew as a 
 quick, jigging figure in a set of quadrilles, and had 
 never heard it called by name. Perhaps, after all, 
 the brother was the more interesting performer of the 
 two. I have spoken with him afterwards repeatedly, 
 and found him always the same quick, fiery bit of a 
 man, not without brains; but he never showed to 
 such advantage as when he was thus squiring the 
 fiddler into public note. There is nothing more 
 becoming than a genuine admiration; and it shares 
 this with love, that it does not become contemptible 
 although misplaced. 
 
 The dancing was but feebly carried on. The 
 space was almost impracticably small ; and the Irish 
 wenches combined the extreme of bashfulness about 
 this innocent display with a surprising impudence 
 and roughness of address. Most often, either the 
 fiddle lifted up its voice unheeded, or only a couple of 
 lads would be footing it and snapping fingers on the 
 landing. And such was the eagerness of the brother 
 to display all the acquirements of his idol, and such 
 the sleepy indifference of the performer, that the tune 
 would as often as not be changed, and the hornpipe 
 expire into a ballad before the dancers had cut half a 
 dozen shuffles. 
 
 In the meantime, however, the audience had been 
 growing more and more numerous every moment ; 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 25 
 
 there was hardly standing-room round the top of 
 the companion ; and the strange instinct of the race 
 moved some of the new-comers to close both the 
 doors, so that the atmosphere grew insupportable. 
 It was a good place, as the saying is, to leave. 
 
 The wind hauled ahead with a head sea. By ten 
 at night heavy sprays were flying and drumming over 
 the forecastle ; the companion of Steerage No. 1 had 
 to be closed, and the door of communication through 
 the second cabin thrown open. Either from the con- 
 venience of the opportunity, or because we had already 
 a number of acquaintances in that part of the ship, 
 Mr. Jones and I paid it a late visit. Steerage No. 1 
 is shaped like an isosceles triangle, the sides opposite 
 the equal angles bulging outward with the contour of 
 the ship. It is lined with eight pens of sixteen bunks 
 apiece, four bunks below and four above on either 
 side. At night the place is lit with two lanterns, 
 one to each table. As the steamer beat on her way 
 among the rough billows, the light passed through 
 violent phases of change, and was thrown to and fro 
 and up and down with startling swiftness. You were 
 tempted to wonder, as you looked, how so thin a 
 glimmer could control and disperse such solid black- 
 ness. When Jones and I entered we found a little 
 company of our acquaintances seated together at the 
 triangular foremost table. A more forlorn party, in 
 more dismal circumstances, it would be hard to 
 imagine. The motion here in the ship's nose was 
 very violent ; the uproar of the sea often overpower- 
 ingly loud. The yellow flicker of the lantern spun 
 round and round and tossed the shadows in masses. 
 The air was hot, but it struck a chill from its fcetor. 
 
26 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 From all round in the dark bunks, the scarcely human 
 noises of the sick joined into a kind of farmyard 
 chorus. In the midst, these five friends of mine 
 were keeping up what heart they could in company. 
 Singing was their refuge from discomfortable thoughts 
 and sensations. One piped, in feeble tones, ' Oh why 
 left I my hame ? ' which seemed a pertinent question 
 in the circumstances. Another, from the invisible 
 horrors of a pen where he lay dog-sick upon the 
 upper-shelf, found courage, in a blink of his sufferings, 
 to ffive us several verses of the ' Death of Nelson ' ; 
 
 o 
 
 and it was odd and eerie to hear the chorus breathe 
 feebly from all sorts of dark corners, and ' this day 
 has done his dooty ' rise and fall and be taken up 
 again in this dim inferno, to an accompaniment of 
 plunging, hollow-sounding bows and the rattling 
 spray-showers overhead. 
 
 All seemed unfit for conversation ; a certain dizzi- 
 ness had interrupted the activity of their minds ; and 
 except to sing they were tongue-tied. There was 
 present, however, one tall, powerful fellow of doubt- 
 ful nationality, being neither quite Scotsman nor 
 altogether Irish, but of surprising clearness of con- 
 viction on the highest problems. He had gone 
 nearly beside himself on the Sunday, because of a 
 general backwardness to indorse his definition of 
 mind as ' a living, thinking substance which cannot 
 be felt, heard, or seen' — nor, I presume, although 
 he failed to mention it, smelt. Now he came forward 
 in a pause with another contribution to our culture. 
 
 ' Just by way of change," said he, ' I '11 ask you a 
 Scripture riddle. There 's profit in them too," he 
 added ungrammatically. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT S7 
 
 This was the riddle- 
 
 C and P 
 
 Did agree 
 
 To cut down C ; 
 
 But C and P 
 
 Could not agree 
 
 Without tlie leave of G ; 
 
 All the people cried to see 
 
 The crueltie 
 
 Of C and P. 
 
 Harsh are the words of Mercury after the songs of 
 Apollo ! We were a long while over the problem, 
 shaking our heads and gloomily wondering how a 
 man could be such a fool ; but at length he put us 
 out of suspense and divulged the fact that C and P 
 stood for Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate. 
 
 I think it must have been the riddle that settled 
 us ; but the motion and the close air likewise hurried 
 our departure. We had not been gone long, we 
 heard next morning, ere two or even three out of the 
 five fell sick. We thought it little wonder on the 
 whole, for the sea kept contrary all night. I now 
 made my bed upon the second cabin floor, where, 
 although I ran the risk of being stepped upon, I had 
 a free current of air, more or less vitiated indeed, and 
 running only from steerage to steerage, but at least 
 not stagnant ; and from this couch, as well as the 
 usual sounds of a rough night at sea, the hateful 
 coughing and retching of the sick and the sobs of 
 children, I heard a man run wild with terror be- 
 seeching his friend for encouragement. ' The ship 's 
 going down ! ' he cried with a thrill of agony. ' The 
 ship 's going down ! ^ he repeated, now in a blank 
 whisper, now with his voice rising towards a sob ; and 
 
28 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 his friend might reassure him, reason with him, joke 
 at him — all was in vain, and the old cry came back, 
 ' The ship 's going down ! ^ There was something 
 panicky and catching in the emotion of his tones ; 
 and I saw in a clear flash what an involved and 
 hideous tragedy was a disaster to an emigrant ship. 
 If this whole parishful of people came no more to 
 land, into how many houses would the newspaper 
 carry woe, and what a great part of the web of our 
 corporate human life would be rent across for ever ! 
 
 The next morning when I came on deck I found 
 a new world indeed. The wind was fair ; the sun 
 mounted into a cloudless heaven ; through great dark 
 blue seas the ship cut a swath of curded foam. The 
 horizon was dotted all day with companionable sails, 
 and the sun shone pleasantly on the long, heaving deck. 
 
 We had many fine-weather diversions to beguile 
 the time. There was a single chess-board and a 
 single pack of cards. Sometimes as many as twenty 
 of us would be playing dominoes for love. Feats of 
 dexterity, puzzles for the intelligence, some arith- 
 metical, some of the same order as the old problem 
 of the fox and goose and cabbage, were always wel- 
 come ; and the latter, I observed, more popular as 
 well as more conspicuously well done than the former. 
 We had a regular daily competition to guess the 
 vessel's progress ; and twelve o'clock, when the result 
 was published in the wheel-house, came to be a 
 moment of considerable interest. But the interest 
 was unmixed. Not a bet was laid upon our guesses. 
 From the Clyde to Sandy Hook I never heard a wager 
 offered or taken. We had, besides, romps in plenty. 
 Puss in the Corner, which we had rebaptized, in more 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 29 
 
 manly style, Devil and four Corners, was my own 
 favourite game ; but there were many who preferred 
 another, the humour of which was to box a person's 
 ears until he found out who had cuffed him. 
 
 This Tuesday morning we were all delighted with 
 the change of weather, and in the highest possible 
 spirits. We got in a cluster like bees, sitting between 
 each other's feet under lee of the deck-houses. Stories 
 and laughter went around. The children climbed 
 about the shrouds. White faces appeared for the 
 first time, and began to take on colour from the wind. 
 I was kept hard at work making cigarettes for one 
 amateur after another, and my less than moderate 
 skill was heartily admired. Lastly, down sat the 
 fiddler in our midst and began to discourse his reels, 
 and jigs, and ballads, with now and then a voice or 
 two to take up the air and throw in the interest of 
 human speech. 
 
 Through this merry and good-hearted scene there 
 came three cabin passengers, a gentleman and two 
 young ladies, picking their way with little gracious 
 titters of indulgence, and a Lady-Bountiful air about 
 nothing, which galled me to the quick. I have little 
 of the radical in social questions, and have always 
 nourished an idea that one person was as good as 
 another. But I began to be troubled by this episode. 
 It was astonishing what insults these people managed 
 to convey by their presence. They seemed to throw 
 their clothes in our faces. Their eyes searched us all 
 over for tatters and incongruities. A laugh was 
 ready at their lips ; but they were too well-mannered 
 to indulge it in our hearing. Wait a bit, till they 
 were all back in the saloon, and then hear how wittily 
 
30 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 they would depict the manners of the steerage. We 
 were in truth very innocently, cheerfully, and sensibly 
 engaged, and there was no shadow of excuse for the 
 swaying elegant superiority with which these damsels 
 passed among us, or for the stiff and waggish glances 
 of their squire. Not a word was said ; only when 
 they were gone Mackay sullenly damned their impu- 
 dence under his breath ; but we were all conscious of 
 an icy influence and a dead break in the course of our 
 enjoyment. 
 
 STEERAGE TYPES 
 
 We had a fellow on board, an Irish- American, for 
 all the world like a beggar in a print by Callot ; one- 
 eyed, with great, splay crow's-feet round the sockets ; 
 a knotty squab nose coming down over his moustache ; 
 a miraculous hat ; a shirt that had been white, ay, 
 ages long ago ; an alpaca coat in its last sleeves ; and, 
 without hyperbole, no buttons to his trousers. Even 
 in these rags and tatters, the man twinkled all over 
 with impudence like a piece of sham jewellery ; and I 
 have heard him offer a situation to one of his fellow- 
 passengers with the air of a lord. Nothing could 
 overlie such a fellow ; a kind of base success was 
 written on his brow. He was then in his ill days ; 
 but I can imagine him in Congress with his mouth 
 full of bombast and sawder. As we moved in the 
 same circle, I was brought necessarily into his society. 
 I do not think I ever heard him say anything that 
 was true, kind, or interesting ; but there was enter- 
 tainment in the man's demeanour. You might call 
 him a half- educated Irish Ti gg. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 31 
 
 Our Russian made a remarkable contrast to this 
 impossible fellow. Rumours and legends were current 
 in the steerages about his antecedents. Some said 
 he was a Nihilist escaping ; others set him down for 
 a harmless spendthrift, who had squandered fifty 
 thousand roubles, and whose father had now despatched 
 him to America by way of penance. Either tale 
 might flourish in security ; there was no contradic- 
 tion to be feared, for the hero spoke not one word of 
 English. I got on with him lumberingly enough in 
 broken German, and learned from his own lips that 
 he had been an apothecary. He carried the photo- 
 graph of his betrothed in a pocket-book, and remarked 
 that it did not do her justice. The cut of his head 
 stood out from among the passengers with an air of 
 startling strangeness. The first natural instinct was 
 to take him for a desperado ; but although the 
 features, to our Western eyes, had a barbaric and 
 unhomely cast, the eye both reassured and touched. 
 It was large and very dark and soft, with an expres- 
 sion of dumb endurance, as if it had often looked on 
 desperate circumstances and never looked on them 
 without resolution. 
 
 He cried out when I used the word. ' No, no," he 
 said, ' not resolution.' 
 
 ' The resolution to endure," I explained. 
 
 And then he shrugged his shoulders, and said, 
 ' Ach, y«,' with gusto, like a man who has been 
 flattered in his favourite pretensions. Indeed, he 
 was always hinting at some secret sorrow ; and his 
 life, he said, had been one of unusual trouble and 
 lanxiety ; so the legends of the steerage may have 
 represented at least some shadow of the truth. Once, 
 
32 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 ana once only, he sang a song at our concerts ; stand- 
 ing forth without embarrassment, his great stature 
 somewhat humped, his long arms frequently extended, 
 his Kalmuck head thrown backward. It was a suit- 
 able piece of music, as deep as a cow's bellow and 
 wild like the White Sea. He was struck and charmed 
 by the freedom and sociality of our manners. At 
 home, he said, no one on a journey would speak to 
 him, but those with whom he would not care to speak ; 
 thus unconsciously involving himself in the condemna- 
 tion of his countrymen. But Russia was soon to be 
 changed ; the ice of the Neva was softening under the 
 sun of civilisation ; the new ideas, ' zvie eine feine 
 Violine^ were audible among the big empty drum 
 notes of Imperial diplomacy ; and he looked to see a 
 great revival, though with a somewhat indistinct and 
 childish hope. 
 
 We had a father and son who made a pair of Jacks- 
 of-all-trades. It was the son who sang the ' Death 
 of Nelson' under such contrarious circumstances. 
 He was by trade a shearer of ship plates ; but he 
 could touch the organ, and led two choirs, and 
 played the flute and piccolo in a professional string 
 band. His repertory of songs was, besides, inex- 
 haustible, and ranged impartially from the very best 
 to the very worst within his reach. Nor did he 
 seem to make the least distinction between these 
 extremes, but would cheerily follow up ' Tom Bow- 
 ling "" with ' Around her splendid form.' 
 
 The father, an old, cheery, small piece of man- 
 hood, could do everything connected with tinwork 
 from one end of the process to the other, use almost 
 every carpenter's tool, and make picture frames to 
 
 i 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 33 
 
 boot. ' I sat down with silver plate every Sunday,' 
 said he, ' and pictures on the wall. I have made 
 enough money to be rolling in my carriage. But, 
 sir,' looking at me unsteadily with his bright rheumy 
 eyes, ' I was troubled with a drunken wife.' He took 
 a hostile view of matrimony in consequence. ' It 's an 
 old saying,' he remarked : ' God made 'em, and the 
 devil he mixed 'em.' 
 
 I think he was justified by his experience. It was 
 a dreary story. He would bring home three pounds 
 on Saturday, and on Monday all the clothes would 
 be in pawn. Sick of the useless struggle, he gave up 
 a paying contract, and contented himself with small 
 and ill-paid jobs. *A bad job was as good as a 
 good job for me,' he said ; ' it all went the same way.' 
 Once the wife showed signs of amendment ; she kept 
 steady for weeks on end ; it was again worth while 
 to labour and to do one's best. The husband found 
 a good situation some distance from home, and, to 
 make a little upon every hand, started the wife in 
 a cook-shop ; the children were here and there, busy 
 as mice ; savings began to grow together in the bank, 
 and the golden age of hope had returned again to 
 that unhappy family. But one week my old acquaint- 
 ance, getting earlier through with his work, came 
 home on the Friday instead of the Saturday, and 
 there was his wife to receive him reeling drunk. He 
 ' took and gave her a pair o' black eyes,' for which I 
 pardon him, nailed up the cook-shop door, gave up 
 his situation, and resigned himself to a life of poverty, 
 with the workhouse at the end. As the children 
 came to their full age they fled the house, and 
 established themselves in other countries ; some did 
 
34 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 well, some not so well ; but the father remained at 
 home alone with his drunken wife, all his sound- 
 hearted pluck and varied accomplishments depressed 
 and negatived. 
 
 Was she dead now ? or, after all these years, had 
 he broken the chain, and run from home like a 
 schoolboy ? I could not discover which ; but here at 
 least he was out on the adventure, and still one of 
 the bravest and most youthful men on board. 
 
 ' Now, I suppose, I must put my old bones to 
 work again,** said he ; ' but I can do a turn yet.^ 
 
 And the son to whom he was going, I asked, was 
 he not able to support him ? 
 
 ' Oh yes," he replied. ' But I 'm never happy 
 without a job on hand. And I 'm stout; lean eat 
 almost anything. You see no craze about me."* 
 
 This tale of a drunken wife was paralleled on 
 board by another of a drunken father. He was a 
 capable man, with a good chance in life ; but he had 
 drunk up two thriving businesses like a bottle of 
 sherry, and involved his sons along with him in ruin. 
 Now they were on board with us, fleeing his dis- 
 astrous neighbourhood. 
 
 Total abstinence, like all ascetical conclusions, is 
 unfriendly to the most generous, cheerful, and human 
 parts of man ; but it could have adduced many 
 instances and arguments from among our ship's 
 company. I was one day conversing with a kind and 
 happy Scotsman, running to fat and perspiration in 
 the physical, but with a taste for poetry and a genial 
 sense of fun. I had asked him his hopes in emigrat- 
 ing. They were like those of so many others, vague 
 and unfounded ; times were bad at home ; thev were 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 35 
 
 said to have a turn for the better in the States ; and 
 a man could get on anywhere, he thought. That 
 was precisely the weak point of his position ; for if 
 he could get on in America, why could he not do the 
 same in Scotland ? But I never had the courage to 
 use that argument, though it was often on the tip of 
 my tongue, and instead I agreed with him heartily, 
 adding, with reckless originality, ' If the man stuck 
 to his work, and kept away from drink." 
 
 ' Ah ! ' said he slowly, ' the drink ! You see, that 's 
 just my trouble.' 
 
 He spoke with a simplicity that was touching, 
 looking at me at the same time with something- 
 strange and timid in his eye, half-ashamed, half- 
 sorry, like a good child who knows he should be 
 beaten. Y^ou would have said he recognised a 
 destiny to which he was born, and accepted the 
 consequences mildly. Like the merchant Abudah, 
 he was at the same time fleeing from his destiny and 
 carrying it along with him, the whole at an expense 
 of six guineas. 
 
 As far as I saw, drink, idleness,- and incompetency 
 were the three great causes of emigration, and for all 
 of them, and drink first and foremost, this trick of 
 getting transported overseas appears to me the silliest 
 means of cure. You cannot run away from a weak- 
 ness ; you must some time fight it out or perish ; 
 and if that be so, why not now, and where you 
 stand? Ccvlum no?b animcun. Change Glenlivet for 
 Bourbon, and it is still whisky, only not so good. 
 A sea- voyage will not give a man the nerve to put 
 aside cheap pleasure ; emigration has to be done 
 before we climb the vessel ; an aim in life is the 
 
36 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 only fortune worth the finding ; and it is not to be 
 found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself. 
 
 Speaking generally, there is no vice of this kind 
 more contemptible than another ; for each is but 
 a result and outward sign of a soul tragically ship- 
 wrecked. In the majority of cases, cheap pleasure is 
 resorted to by way of anodyne. The pleasure-seeker 
 sets forth upon life with high and difficult ambitions ; 
 he meant to be nobly good and nobly happy, though 
 at as little pains as possible to himself; and it is 
 because all has failed in his celestial enterprise that 
 you now behold him rolling in the garbage. Hence 
 the comparative success of the teetotal pledge ; because 
 to a man who had nothing it sets at least a negative 
 aim in life. Somewhat as prisoners beguile their 
 days by taming a spider, the reformed drunkard makes 
 an interest out of abstaining from intoxicating drinks, 
 and may live for that negation. There is something, 
 at least, 7iot to be done each day ; and a cold triumph 
 awaits him every evening. 
 
 We had one on board with us, whom I have already 
 referred to under the name of Mackay, who seemed to 
 me not only a good instance of this failure in life of 
 which we have been speaking, but a good type of the 
 intelligence which here surrounded me. Physically he 
 was a small Scotsman, standing a little back as though 
 he were already carrying the elements of a corporation, 
 and his looks somewhat marred by the smallness of his 
 eyes. Mentally, he was endowed above the average. 
 There were but few subjects on which he could not 
 converse with understanding and a dash of wit; deliver- 
 ing himself slowly and with gusto like a man who en- 
 joyed his own sententiousness. He was a dry, quick, 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 37 
 
 pertinent debater, speaking with a small voice, and 
 swinging on his heels to launch and emphasise an argu- 
 ment. When he began a discussion, he could not bear 
 to leave it off, but would pick the subject to the bone, 
 without once relinquishing a point. An engineer by 
 trade, Mackay believed in the unlimited perfectibility 
 of all machines except the human machine. The latter 
 he gave up with ridicule for a compound of carrion and 
 perverse gases. He had an appetite for disconnected 
 facts which I can only compare to the savage taste for 
 beads. What is called information was indeed a passion 
 with the man, and he not only delighted to receive it, 
 but could pay you back in kind. 
 
 With all these capabilities, here was Mackay, already 
 no longer young, on his way to a new country, with no 
 prospects, no money, and but little hope. He was 
 almost tedious in the cynical disclosures of his despair. 
 ' The ship may go down for me,' he would say, ' now 
 or to-morrow. I have nothing to lose and nothing to 
 hope." And again : ' I am sick of the whole damned 
 performance.' He was, like the kind little man, already 
 quoted, another so-called victim of the bottle. But 
 Mackay was miles from publishing his weakness to the 
 world ; laid the blame of his failure on corrupt masters 
 and a corrupt State policy ; and after he had been one 
 night overtaken and had played the buffoon in his cups, 
 sternly, though not without tact, suppressed all refer- 
 ence to his escapade. It was a treat to see him 
 manage this : the various jesters withered under his 
 gaze, and you were forced to recognise in him a certain 
 steely force, and a gift of command which might have 
 ruled a senate. 
 
 In truth it was not whisky that had ruined him ; he 
 
38 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 was ruined long before for all good human purposes but 
 conversation. His eyes were sealed by a cheap, school- 
 book materialism. He could see nothing in the world 
 but money and steam-engines. He did not know what 
 you meant by the word happiness. He had forgotten 
 the simple emotions of childhood, and perhaps never 
 encountered the delights of youth. He believed in 
 production, that useful figment of economy, as if it 
 liad been real like laughter ; and production, without 
 prejudice to liquor, was his god and guide. One day 
 he took me to task — a novel cry to me — upon the 
 over-payment of literature. Literary men, he said, 
 weve more highly paid than artisans ; yet the artisan 
 made threshing-machines and butter-churns, and the 
 man of letters, except in the way of a few useful 
 handbooks, made nothing worth the while. He pro- 
 duced a mere fancy article. Mackay\s notion of a 
 book was Hoppus's Measurer. Now in my time I 
 have possessed and even studied that work ; but if 
 I were to be left to-morrow on Juan Fernandez, 
 Hoppus's is not the book that I should choose for my 
 companion volume. 
 
 I tried to fight the point with Mackay. I made 
 him own that he had taken pleasure in reading books 
 otherwise, to his view, insignificant ; but he was too 
 wary to advance a step beyond the admission. It was 
 in vain for me to argue that here was pleasure ready- 
 made and running from the spring, whereas his ploughs 
 and butter-churns were but means and mechanisms to 
 give men the necessary food and leisure before they start 
 upon the search for pleasure; he jibbed and ran away 
 from such conclusions. The thing was different, he 
 declared, and nothing was serviceable but what had 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 39 
 
 to do with food. ' Eat, eat, eat ! ' he cried ; ' that ^s 
 the bottom and the top.' By an odd irony of cir- 
 cumstance, he grew so much interested in this dis- 
 cussion that he let the hour slip by unnoticed and 
 had to go without his tea. He had enough sense 
 and humour, indeed he had no lack of either, to 
 have chuckled over this himself in private ; and 
 even to me he referred to it with the shadow of a 
 smile. 
 
 Mackay was a hot bigot. He would not hear of 
 religion. I have seen him waste hours of time in argu- 
 ment with all sorts of poor human creatures who 
 understood neither him nor themselves, and he had 
 had the boyishness to dissect and criticise even so 
 small a matter as the riddler's definition of mind. 
 He snorted aloud with zealotry and the lust for in- 
 tellectual battle. Anything, whatever it was, that 
 seemed to him likely to discourage the continued 
 passionate production of corn and steam-engines he 
 resented like a conspiracy against the people. Thus, 
 when I put in the plea for literature, that it was only 
 in good books, or in the society of the good, that a 
 man could get help in his conduct, he declared I was 
 in a different world from him. ' Damn my con- 
 duct ! ' said he. ' I have given it up for a bad job. 
 My question is, " Can I drive a nail ? "'' ' And he 
 plainly looked upon me as one who was insidiously 
 seeking to reduce the people's annual bellyful of corn 
 and steam-engines. 
 
 It may be argued that these opinions spring from 
 the defect of culture ; that a narrow and pinching 
 way of life not only exaggerates to a man the im- 
 portance of material conditions, but indirectly, by 
 
40 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 denying him the necessary books and leisure, keeps 
 his mind ignorant of larger thoughts ; and that hence 
 springs this overwhelming concern about diet, and 
 hence the bald view of existence professed by Mackay. 
 Had this been an English peasant the conclusion 
 would be tenable. But Mackay had most of the 
 elements of a liberal education. He had skirted meta- 
 physical and mathematical studies. He had a thought- 
 ful hold of what he knew, which would be exceptional 
 among bankers. He had been brought up in the 
 midst of hot-house piety, and told, with incongru- 
 ous pride, the story of his own brother's deathbed 
 ecstasies. Yet he had somehow failed to fulfil him- 
 self, and was adrift like a dead thing among external 
 circumstances, without hope or lively preference or 
 shaping aim. And further, there seemed a tendency 
 among many of his fellows to fall into the same blank 
 and unlovely opinions. One thing, indeed, is not to 
 be learned in Scotland, and that is the wav to be 
 happy. Yet that is the whole of culture, and perhaps 
 two-thirds of morality. Can it be that the Puritan 
 school, by divorcing a man from nature, by thinning 
 out his instincts, and setting a stamp of its dis- 
 approval on whole fields of human activity and 
 interest, leads at last directly to material greed ? 
 
 Nature is a good guide through life, and the love 
 of simple pleasures next, if not superior, to virtue ; 
 and we had on board an Irishman who based his 
 claim to the widest and most affectionate popularity 
 precisely upon these two qualities, that he was 
 natural and happy. He boasted a fresh colour, a 
 tight little figure, unquenchable gaiety, and indefatig- 
 able good-will. His clothes puzzled the diagnostic 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 41 
 
 mind, until you heard he had been once a private 
 coachman, when they became eloquent and seemed a 
 part of his biography. His face contained the rest, 
 and, I fear, a prophecy of the future ; the hawk^s 
 nose above accorded so ill with the pink baby's mouth 
 below. His spirit and his pride belonged, you might 
 say, to the nose ; while it was the general shiftlessness 
 expressed by the other that had thrown him from 
 situation to situation, and at length on board the 
 emigrant ship. Barney ate, so to speak, nothing 
 from the galley ; his own tea, butter, and eggs 
 supported him throughout the voyage ; and about 
 mealtime you might often find him up to the elbows 
 in amateur cookery. His was the first voice heard 
 singing among all the passengers ; he was the first 
 who fell to dancing. From Loch Foyle to Sandy 
 Hook, there was not a piece of fun undertaken but 
 there was Barney in the midst. 
 
 You ought to have seen him when he stood up to 
 sing at our concerts — his tight little figure stepping 
 to and fro, and his feet shuffling to the air, his eyes 
 seeking and bestowing encouragement — and to have 
 enjoyed the bow, so nicely calculated between jest 
 and earnest, between grace and clumsiness, with which 
 he brought each song to a conclusion. He was not 
 only a great favourite among ourselves, but his songs 
 attracted the lords of the saloon, who often leaned 
 to hear him over the rails of the hurricane-deck. 
 He was somewhat pleased, but not at all abashed, 
 by this attention ; and one night, in the midst of 
 his famous performance of ' Billy Keogh,' I saw him 
 spin half round in a pirouette and throw an audacious 
 wink to an old gentleman above. 
 
42 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 This was the more characteristic, as, for all his 
 daffing, he was a modest and very polite little fellow 
 among ourselves. 
 
 He would not have hurt the feelings of a fly, nor 
 throughout the passage did he give a shadow of 
 offence ; yet he was always, by his innocent freedoms 
 and love of fun, brought upon that narrow margin 
 where politeness must be natural to walk without a 
 fall. He was once seriously angry, and that in a 
 grave, quiet manner, because they supplied no fish 
 on Friday ; for Barney was a conscientious Catholic. 
 He had likewise strict notions of refinement ; and 
 when, late one evening, after the women had retired, 
 a young Scotsman struck up an indecent song, 
 Barney^s drab clothes were immediately missing from 
 the group. His taste was for the society of gentle- 
 men, of whom, with the reader's permission, there 
 was no lack in our five steerages and second cabin ; 
 and he avoided the rough and positive with a girlish 
 shrinking. Mackay, partly from his superior powers 
 of mind, which rendered him incomprehensible, partly 
 from his extreme opinions, was especially distasteful 
 to the Irishman. I have seen him slink off with 
 backward looks of terror and offended delicacy, while 
 the other, in his witty, ugly way, had been professing 
 hostility to God, and an extreme theatrical readiness 
 to be shipwrecked on the spot. These utterances 
 hurt the little coachman's modesty like a bad word. 
 
 THE SICK MAN 
 
 One night Jones, the young O'Reilly, and myself 
 were walking arm-in-arm and briskly up and down 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 43 
 
 the deck. Six bells had rung ; a head-wind blew 
 chill and fitful, the fog was closing in with a sprinkle 
 of rain, and the fog-whistle had been turned on, and 
 now divided time with its unwelcome outcries, loud 
 like a bull, thrilling and intense like a mosquito. 
 Even the watch lay somewhere snugly out of sight. 
 
 For some time we obser\'ed something lying black 
 and huddled in the scuppers, which at last heaved a 
 little and moaned aloud. We ran to the rails. An 
 elderly man, but whether passenger or seaman it was 
 impossible in the darkness to determine, lay grovelling 
 on his belly in the wet scuppers, and kicking feebly 
 with his outspread toes. We asked him what was 
 amiss, and he replied incoherently, with a strange 
 accent and in a voice unmanned by terror, that he 
 had cramp in the stomach, that he had been ailing 
 all day, had seen the doctor twice, and had walked 
 the deck against fatigue till he was overmastered and 
 had fallen where we found him. 
 
 Jones remained by his side, while O'Reilly and I 
 hurried off to seek the doctor. We knocked in vain 
 at the doctor's cabin ; there came no reply ; nor 
 could we find any one to guide us. It was no time 
 for delicacy ; so we ran once more forward ; and I, 
 whipping up a ladder and touching my hat to the 
 officer of the watch, addressed him as politely as I 
 could — 
 
 ' I beg your pardon, sir ; but there is a man lying 
 bad with cramp in the lee scuppers ; and I can't find 
 the doctor.' 
 
 He looked at me peeringly in the darkness ; and 
 then, somewhat harshly, ' Well, / can't leave the 
 bridge, my man,' said he. 
 
44 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 ' No, sir ; but you can tell me what to do," I 
 returned. 
 
 ' Is it one of the crew ? ' he asked. 
 
 ' I believe him to be a fireman,^ I replied. 
 
 I dare say officers are much annoyed by complaints 
 and alarmist information from their freight of human 
 creatures ; but certainly, whether it was the idea that 
 the sick man was one of the crew, or from some- 
 thing conciliatory in my address, the officer in ques- 
 tion was immediately relieved and mollified ; and 
 speaking in a voice much freer from constraint, 
 advised me to find a steward and despatch him in 
 quest of the doctor, who would now be in the 
 smoking-room over his pipe. 
 
 One of the stewards was often enough to be found 
 about this hour down our companion. Steerage No. 2 
 and 3 ; that was his smoking-room of a night. Let 
 me call him Blackwood. O'Reilly and I rattled down 
 the companion, breathing hurry ; and in his shirt- 
 sleeves and perched across the carpenter's bench upon 
 one thigh, found Blackwood ; a neat, bright, dapper, 
 Glasgow-looking man, with a bead of an eye and 
 a rank twang in his speech. I forget who was with 
 him, but the pair were enjoying a deliberate talk 
 over their pipes. I dare say he was tired with his 
 day's work, and eminently comfortable at that 
 moment ; and the truth is, I did not stop to con- 
 sider his feelings, but told my story in a breath. 
 
 ' Steward,' said I, ' there 's a man lying bad with 
 cramp, and I can't find the doctor.' 
 
 He turned upon me as pert as a sparrow, but with 
 a black look that is the prerogative of man ; and 
 taking his pipe out of his mouth — 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 45 
 
 ' That 's none of my business,' said he. ' I don't 
 care." 
 
 I could have strangled the little ruffian where he 
 sat. The thought of his cabin civility and cabin 
 tips filled me with indignation. I glanced at 
 O'Reilly ; he was pale and quivering, and looked 
 like assault and battery, every inch of him. But 
 we had a better card than violence. 
 
 ' You will have to make it your business,' said 
 I, ' for I am sent to you by the officer on the bridge.' 
 
 Blackwood was fairly tripped. He made no 
 answer, but put out his pipe, gave me one murderous 
 look, and set off upon his errand strolling. From 
 that day forward, I should say, he improved to me 
 in courtesy, as though he had repented his evil 
 speech and were anxious to leave a better im- 
 pression. 
 
 When we got on deck again, Jones was still beside 
 the sick man ; and tw^o or three late stragglers had 
 gathered round, and were offering suggestions. One 
 proposed to give the patient water, which was 
 promptly negatived. Another bade us hold him up ; 
 he himself prayed to be let lie; but as it was at 
 least as well to keep him off the streaming decks, 
 O'Reilly and I supported him between us. It was 
 only by main force that we did so, and neither an 
 easy nor an agreeable duty ; for he fought in his 
 })aroxysms like a frightened child, and moaned miser- 
 ably when he resigned himself to our control. 
 
 ' O let me lie ! ' he pleaded. ' I '11 no' get better 
 anyway.' And then, with a moan that went to my 
 heart, ' O why did I come upon this miserable 
 journey ?' 
 
46 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 I was reminded of the song which I had heard a 
 little while before in the close, tossing steerage : ' O 
 why left I my hame ? ' 
 
 Meantime Jones, relieved of his immediate charge, 
 had gone off to the galley, where we could see a 
 light. There he found a belated cook scouring pans 
 by the radiance of two lanterns, and one of these he 
 sought to borrow. The scullion was backward. 
 ' Was it one of the crew ? ' he asked. And when 
 Jones, smitten with my theory, had assured him that 
 it was a fireman, he reluctantly left his scouring and 
 came towards us at an easy pace, with one of the 
 lanterns swinging from his finger. The light, as it 
 reached the spot, showed us an elderly man, thick-set, 
 and grizzled with years ; but the shifting and coarse 
 shadows concealed from us the expression and even 
 the design of his face. 
 
 So soon as the cook set eyes on him he gave a sort 
 of whistle. 
 
 ' It \s' only a passenger ! ' said he ; and turning 
 about, made, lantern and all, for the galley. 
 
 ' He 's a man anyway,' cried Jones in indignation. 
 
 ' Nobody said he was a woman,' said a gruff voice, 
 which I recognised for that of the bo's'un. 
 
 All this while there was no word of Blackwood or 
 the doctor ; and now the officer came to our side of 
 the ship and asked, over the hurricane-deck rails, if 
 the doctor were not yet come. We told him not. 
 
 ' No .^ ' he repeated with a Ijreathiiig of anger ; and 
 we saw him hurry aft in person. 
 
 Ten minutes after the doctor made his appearance 
 deliberately enough and examined our patient with 
 the lantern. He made little of the case, had the 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 4<7 
 
 man brought aft to the dispensary, dosed him, and 
 sent him forward to his bunk. Two of his neigh- 
 bours in the steerage had now come to our assistance, 
 expressing loud sorrow that such ' a fine cheery body ' 
 should be sick ; and these, claiming a sort of 
 possession, took him entirely under their own care. 
 The drug had probably relieved him, for he struggled 
 no more, and was led along plaintive and patient, but 
 protesting. His heart recoiled at the thought of the 
 steerage. ' O let me lie down upon the bieldy side,"* 
 he cried ; ' O dinna take me down ! "* And again : 
 ' O why did ever I come upon this miserable voyage ? ^ 
 And yet once more, with a gasp and a wailing pro- 
 longation of the fourth word : ' I had no call to 
 come." But there he was ; and by the doctor's 
 orders and the kind force of his two shipmates dis- 
 appeared down the companion of Steerage No. 1 
 into the den allotted him. 
 
 At the foot of our own companion, just where I 
 found Blackwood, Jones and the bo's'un were now 
 engaged in talk. This last was a gruff, cruel-looking 
 seaman, who must have passed near half a century 
 upon the seas ; square-headed, goat-bearded, with 
 heavy blond eyebrows, and an eye without radiance, 
 but inflexibly steady and hard. I had not forgotten 
 his rough speech ; but I remembered also that he 
 had helped us about the lantern ; and now seeing 
 him in conversation with Jones, and being choked 
 with indignation, I proceeded to blow ofl' my steam. 
 
 ' Well,' said I, ' I make you my compliments upon 
 your steward,' and furiously narrated what had hap- 
 pened. 
 
 ' I \'e nothing to do with him,' replied the bo's'un. 
 
48 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 ' They \'e all alike. They wouldn't mind if they saw 
 you all lying dead one upon the top of another." 
 
 This was enough. A very little humanity went a 
 long way with me after the experience of the evening. 
 A sympathy grew up at once between the boVun and 
 myself; and that night, and during the next few 
 days, I learned to appreciate him better. He was a 
 remarkable type, and not at all the kind of man you 
 find in books. He had been at Sebastopol under 
 English colours ; and again in a States ship, ' after 
 the Alabama^ and praying God we shouldn't find 
 her.' He was a high Tory and a high Englishman. 
 No manufacturer could have held opinions more 
 hostile to the working man and his strikes. ' The 
 workmen,' he said, ' think nothing of their country. 
 They think of nothing but themselves. They 're 
 damned greedy, selfish fellows.' He would not hear 
 of the decadence of England. ' They say they send 
 us beef from America,' he argued ; ' but who pays 
 for it ? All the money in the world 's in England.' 
 The Royal Navy was the best of possible services, 
 according to him. ' Anyway the officers are gentle- 
 men,' said he ; ' and you can't get hazed to death by 
 
 a damned non-commissioned as you can in the 
 
 army.' Among nations, England was the first ; then 
 came France. He respected the French navy and 
 liked the French people ; and if he were forced to 
 make a new choice in life, ' by God, he would try 
 Frenchmen ! ' For all his looks and rough, cold 
 manners, I observed that children were never fright- 
 ened by him ; they divined him at once to be a friend ; 
 and one night when he had chalked his hand and 
 went about stealthily setting his mark on people's 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 49 
 
 clothes, it was incongruous to hear this formidable 
 old salt chuckling over his boyish monkey trick. 
 
 In the morning, my first thought was of the sick 
 man. I was afraid I should not recognise him, so 
 baffling had been the light of the lantern ; and found 
 myself unable to decide if he were Scots, English, or 
 Irish. He had certainly employed north-country 
 words and elisions ; but the accent and the pronunci- 
 ation seemed unfamiliar and incongruous in my ear. 
 
 To descend on an empty stomach into Steerage No. 
 1, was an adventure that required some nerve. The 
 stench was atrocious ; each respiration tasted in the 
 throat like some horrible kind of cheese ; and the 
 squalid aspect of the place was aggravated by so many 
 people worming themselves into their clothes in the 
 twilight of the bunks. You may guess if I was 
 pleased, not only for him, but for myself also, when I 
 heard that the sick man was better and had ffone on 
 I deck. 
 
 The morning was raw and foggy, though the sun 
 suffused the fog with pink and amber ; the fog-horn 
 still blew, stertorous and intermittent ; and to add to 
 the discomfort, the seamen were just beginning to 
 wash down the decks. But for a sick man this was 
 heaven compared to the steerage. I found him stand- 
 ing on the hot- water pipe, just forward of the saloon 
 deck house. He was smaller than I had fancied, and 
 plain-looking ; but his face was distinguished by 
 strange and fascinating eyes, limpid grey from a 
 distance, but, when looked into, full of changing 
 colours and grains of gold. His manners were mild 
 and uncompromisingly plain ; and I soon saw that, 
 when once started, he delighted to talk. His accent 
 
 D 
 
50 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 and language had been formed in the most natural 
 way, since he was born in Ireland, had lived a quarter 
 of a century on the banks of Tyne, and was married 
 to a Scots wife. A fisherman in the season, he had 
 fished the east coast from Fisherrow to Whitby. 
 When the season was over, and the great boats, 
 which required extra hands, were once drawn up on 
 shore till the next spring, he worked as a labourer 
 about chemical furnaces, or along the wharves unload- 
 ing vessels. In this comparatively humble way of 
 life he had gathered a competence, and could speak 
 of his comfortable house, his hayfield, and his garden. 
 On this ship, where so many accomplished artisans 
 were fleeing from starvation, he was present on a 
 pleasure trip to visit a brother in New York. 
 
 Ere he started, he informed me, he had been 
 warned against the steerage and the steerage fare, 
 and recommended to bring with him a ham and tea 
 and a spice loaf. But he laughed to scorn such 
 counsels, '/'m not afraid,' he had told his adviser; 
 ' 77/ get on for ten days. I Ve not been a fisherman 
 for nothing." For it is no light matter, as he re- 
 minded me, to be in an open boat, perhaps waist- 
 deep with herrings, day breaking with a scowl, and 
 for miles on every hand lee-shores, unbroken, iron- 
 bound, surf- beat, with only here and there an 
 anchorage where you dare not lie, or a harbour 
 impossible to enter with the wind that blows. The 
 life of a North Sea fisher is one long chapter of 
 exposure and hard work and insufficient fare ; and 
 even if he makes land at some bleak fisher port, 
 perhaps the season is bad or his boat has been un- 
 lucky, and after fifty hours' unsleeping vigilance and 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 51 
 
 toil, not a shop will give him credit for a loaf of 
 bread. Yet the steerage of the emigrant ship had 
 been too vile for the endurance of a man thus rudely 
 trained. He had scarce eaten since he came on board, 
 until the day before, when his appetite was tempted 
 by some excellent pea-soup. We were all much of 
 the same mind on board, and beginning with myself, 
 had dined upon pea-soup not wisely but too well ; 
 only with him the excess had been punished, perhaps 
 because he was weakened by former abstinence, and 
 his first meal had resulted in a cramp. He had 
 determined to live henceforth on biscuit ; and when, 
 two months later, he should return to England, to 
 make the passage by saloon. The second cabin, after 
 due inquiry, he scouted as another edition of the 
 steerage. 
 
 He spoke apologetically of his emotion when ill. 
 ' Ye see, I had no call to be here,' said he ; ' and I 
 thought it was by with me last night. I Ve a good 
 house at home, and plenty to nurse me, and I had no 
 real call to leave them." Speaking of the attentions 
 he had received from his shipmates generally, ' they 
 were all so kind,' he said, ' that there 's none to 
 mention.' And except in so far as I might share in 
 this, he troubled me with no reference to my services. 
 
 But what affected me in the most lively manner 
 w^as the wealth of this day-labourer, paying a two 
 months' pleasure visit to the States, and preparing to 
 return in the saloon, and the new testimony rendered 
 by his story, not so much to the horrors of the steer- 
 age as to the habitual comfort of the working classes. 
 One foggy, frosty December evening, I encountered 
 on Liberton Hill, near Edinburgh, an Irish labourer 
 
5'2 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 trudging homeward from the fields. Our roads lay 
 together, and it was natural that we should fall into 
 talk. He was covered with mud ; an inoffensive, 
 ignorant creature, who thought the Atlantic Cable 
 was a secret contrivance of the masters the better 
 to oppress labouring mankind ; and I confess I was 
 astonished to learn that he had nearly three hundred 
 pounds in the bank. But this man had travelled 
 over most of the world, and enjoyed wonderful oppor- 
 tunities on some American railroad, with two dollars 
 a shift and double pay on Sunday and at night ; 
 whereas my fellow-passenger had never quitted Tyne- 
 side, and had made all that he possessed in that 
 same accursed, down-falling England, whence skilled 
 mechanics, engineers, millwrights, and carpenters were 
 fleeing as from the native country of starvation. 
 
 Fitly enough, we slid off on the subject of strikes 
 and wages and hard times. Being from the Tyne, 
 and a man who had gained and lost in his own 
 pocket by these fluctuations, he had much to say, 
 and held strong opinions on the subject. He spoke 
 sharply of the masters, and, when I led him on, of 
 the men also. The masters had been selfish and 
 obstructive ; the men selfish, silly, and light-headed. 
 He rehearsed to me the course of a meeting at which 
 he had been present, and the somewhat long discourse 
 which he had there pronounced, calling into question 
 the wisdom and even the good faith of the Union 
 delegates ; and although he had escaped himself 
 through flush times and starvation times with a 
 handsomely provided purse, he had so little faith in 
 either man or master, and so profound a terror for 
 the unerring Nemesis of mercantile affairs, that he 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 53 
 
 could think of no hope for our country outside of 
 a sudden and complete political subversion. Down 
 must go Lords and Church and Army ; and capital, 
 by some happy direction, must change hands from 
 worse to better, or England stood condemned. Such 
 principles, he said, were growing ' like a seed."* 
 
 From this mild, soft, domestic man, these words 
 sounded unusually ominous and grave. I had heard 
 enough revolutionary talk among my workmen fellow- 
 passengers ; but most of it was hot and turgid, and 
 fell discredited from the lips of unsuccessful men. 
 This man was calm ; he had attained prosperity and 
 ease ; he disapproved the policy which had been pur- 
 sued by labour in the past ; and yet this was his 
 panacea, — to rend the old country from end to end, 
 and from top to bottom, and in clamour and civil 
 discord remodel it with the hand of violence. 
 
 THE STOWAWAYS 
 
 On the Sunday, among a party of men who were 
 talking in our companion, Steerage No. 2 and 3, we 
 remarked a new figure. He wore tweed clothes, well 
 enough made if not very fresh, and a plain smoking- 
 cap. His face was pale, with pale eyes, and spiritedly 
 enough designed ; but though not yet thirty, a sort 
 of blackguardly degeneration had already overtaken 
 his features. The fine nose had grown fleshy towards 
 the point, the pale eyes were sunk in fat. His hands 
 were strong and elegant ; his experience of life evi- 
 dently varied ; his speech full of pith and verve ; his 
 manners forward, but perfectly presentable. The lad 
 who helped in the second cabin told me, in answer 
 
54 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 to a question, that he did not know who he was, 
 but thought, ' by his way of speaking, and because 
 he was so polite, that he was some one from the saloon.' 
 I was not so sure, for to me there was something 
 equivocal in his air and bearing. He might have 
 been, I thought, the son of some good family who 
 had fallen early into dissipation and run from home. 
 But, making every allowance, how admirable was his 
 talk ! I wish you could have heard him tell his own 
 stories. They were so swingingly set forth, in such 
 dramatic language, and illustrated here and there by 
 such luminous bits of acting, that they could only 
 lose in any reproduction. There were tales of the 
 P. and O. Company, where he had been an officer ; 
 of the East Indies, where in former years he had 
 lived lavishly ; of the Royal Engineers, where he had 
 served for a period ; and of a dozen other sides of 
 life, each introducing some vigorous thumb-nail por- 
 trait. He had the talk to himself that night, we 
 were all so glad to listen. The best talkers usually 
 address themselves to some particular society ; there 
 they are kings, elsewhere camp-followers, as a man 
 may know Russian and yet be ignorant of Spanish ; 
 but this fellow had a frank, headlong power of style, 
 and a broad, human choice of subject, that would 
 have turned any circle in the world into a circle of 
 hearers. He was a Homeric talker, plain, strong, 
 and cheerful ; and the things and the people of which 
 he spoke became readily and clearly present to the 
 minds of those who heard him. This, with a certain 
 added colouring of rhetoric and rodomontade, must 
 have been the style of Burns, who equally charmed 
 the ears of duchesses and hostlers. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 55 
 
 Yet freely and personally as he spoke, many points 
 remained obscure in his narration. The Engineers, 
 for instance, was a service which he praised highly ; 
 it is true there would be trouble with the sergeants ; 
 but then the officers were gentlemen, and his own, in 
 particular, one among ten thousand. It sounded so 
 far exactly like an episode in the rakish, topsy-turvy 
 life of such an one as I had imagined. But then 
 there came incidents more doubtful, which showed an 
 almost impudent greed after gratuities, and a truly 
 impudent disregard for truth. And then there was 
 the tale of his departure. He had wearied, it seems, 
 of Woolwich, and one fine day, with a companion, 
 slipped up to London for a spree. I have a suspicion 
 that spree was meant to be a long one ; but God dis- 
 poses all things ; and one morning, near Westminster 
 Bridge, whom should he come across but the very 
 sergeant who had recruited him at first ! What 
 followed ? He himself indicated cavalierly that he 
 had then resigned. Let us put it so. But these 
 resignations are sometimes very trying. 
 
 At length, after having delighted us for hours, 
 he took himself away from the companion ; and I 
 could ask Mackay who and what he was. ' That ? ' 
 said Mackay. ' Why, that 's one of the stowaways.' 
 
 ' No man,' said the same authority, ' who has had 
 anything to do with the sea, would ever think of pay- 
 ing for a passage.' I give the statement as Mackay's, 
 without endorsement ; yet I am tempted to believe 
 that it contains a grain of truth ; and if you add that 
 the man shall be impudent and thievish, or else dead- 
 broke, it may even pass for a fair representation of the 
 facts. We gentlemen of England who live at home 
 
56 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 at ease have, I suspect, very insufficient ideas on the 
 subject. All the world over, people are stowing away 
 in coal-holes and dark corners, and when ships are 
 once out to sea, appearing again, begrimed and bash- 
 ful, upon deck. The career of these sea- tramps 
 partakes largely of the adventurous. They may be 
 poisoned by coal-gas, or die by starvation in their 
 place of concealment ; or when found they may be 
 clapped at once and ignominiously into irons, thus to 
 be carried to their promised land, the port of destina- 
 tion, and alas ! brought back in the same way to that 
 from which they started, and there delivered over to 
 the magistrates and the seclusion of a county jail. 
 Since I crossed the Atlantic, one miserable stowaway 
 was found in a dying state among the fuel, uttered 
 but a word or two, and departed for a farther country 
 than America. 
 
 When the stowaway appears on deck, he has but 
 one thing to pray for : that he be set to work, which 
 is the price and sign of his forgiveness. After half an 
 hour with a swab or a bucket, he feels himself as 
 secure as if he had paid for his passage. It is not 
 altogether a bad thing for the company, who get more 
 or less efficient hands for nothing but a few plates of 
 junk and duff; and every now and again find them- 
 selves better paid than by a whole family of cabin 
 passengers. Not long ago, for instance, a packet was 
 saved from nearly certain loss by the skill and courage 
 of a stowaway engineer. As was no more than just, 
 a handsome subscription rewarded him for his success : 
 but even without such exceptional good fortune, as 
 things stand in England and America, the stowaway 
 will often make a good profit out of his adventure. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 57 
 
 Four engineers stowed away last summer on the same 
 ship, the Circassia ; and before two days after their 
 arrival each of the four had found a comfortable berth. 
 This was the most hopeful tale of emigration that I 
 heard from first to last ; and as you see, the luck was 
 for stowaways. 
 
 My curiosity was much inflamed by what I heard ; 
 and the next morning, as I was making the round of 
 the ship, I was delighted to find the ex-Royal Engineer 
 engaged in washing down the white paint of a deck 
 house. There was another fellow at work beside him, 
 a lad not more than twenty, in the most miraculous 
 tatters, his handsome face sown with grains of beauty 
 and lighted up by expressive eyes. Four stowaways 
 had been found aboard our ship before she left the 
 Clyde, but these two had alone escaped the ignominy 
 of being put ashore. Alick, my acquaintance of last 
 night, was Scots by birth, and by trade a practical 
 engineer ; the other was from Devonshire, and had 
 been to sea before the mast. Two people more un- 
 like by training, character, and habits it would be 
 hard to imagine ; yet here they were together, scrubbing 
 paint. 
 
 Alick had held all sorts of good situations, and 
 wasted many opportunities in life, I have heard him 
 end a story with these words : ' That was in my 
 golden days, when I used finger-glasses."" Situation 
 after situation failed him ; then followed the de- 
 pression of trade, and for months he had hung round 
 with other idlers, playing marbles all day in the West 
 Park, and going home at night to tell his landlady 
 how he had been seeking for a job. I believe this 
 kind of existence was not unpleasant to Alick himself, 
 
58 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 and he might have long continued to enjoy idleness 
 and a life on tick ; but he had a comrade, let us call 
 him Brown, who grew restive. This fellow was con- 
 tinually threatening to slip his cable for the States, 
 and at last, one Wednesday, Glasgow was left widowed 
 of her Brown. Some months afterwards, Alick met 
 another old chum in Sauchiehall Street. 
 
 ' By the bye, Alick,' said he, ' I met a gentleman in 
 New York who was asking for you.' 
 
 ' Who was that ? ' asked Alick. 
 
 ' The new second engineer on board the So-and-so^^ 
 was the reply. 
 
 ' Well, and who is he ? ' 
 
 ' Brown, to be sure.^ 
 
 For Brown had been one of the fortunate quartette 
 aboard the Circassia. If that was the way of it in 
 the States, Alick thought it was high time to follow 
 Brown's example. He spent his last day, as he put 
 it, 'reviewing the yeomanry,' and the next morning 
 says he to his landlady, ' Mrs. X., I '11 not take 
 porridge to-day, please ; I '11 take some eggs.' 
 
 ' Why, have you found a job ? ' she asked, de- 
 lighted. 
 
 ' Well, yes,' returned the perfidious Alick ; ' I think 
 I '11 start to-day." 
 
 And so, well lined with eggs, start he did, but for 
 America. I am afraid that landlady has seen the 
 last of him. 
 
 It was easy enough to get on board in the con- 
 fusion that attends a vessel's departure ; and in one 
 of the dark corners of Steerage No. 1 , flat in a bunk 
 and with an empty stomach, Alick made the voyage 
 from the Broomielaw to Greenock. That night, the 
 
 I 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 59 
 
 ship's yeoman pulled him out by the heels and had 
 him before the mate. Two other stowaways had 
 already been found and sent ashore ; but by this 
 time darkness had fallen, they were out in the middle 
 of the estuary, and the last steamer had left them till 
 the morning. 
 
 ' Take him to the forecastle and give him a meal," 
 said the mate, ' and see and pack him off the first 
 thing to-morrow.' 
 
 In the forecastle he had supper, a good night's rest, 
 and breakfast ; and was sitting placidly with a pipe, 
 fancying all was over and the game up for good with 
 that ship, when one of the sailors grumbled out an 
 oath at him, with a ' What are you doing there ? ' 
 and ' Do you call that hiding, anyway ? ' There was 
 need of no more ; Alick was in another bunk before 
 the day was older. Shortly before the passengers 
 arrived, the ship was cursorily inspected. He heard 
 the round come down the companion and look into 
 one pen after another, until they came within two of 
 the one in which he lay concealed. Into these last 
 two they did not enter, but merely glanced from 
 without ; and Alick had no doubt that he was per- 
 sonally favoured in this escape. It was the character 
 of the man to attribute nothing to luck and but little 
 to kindness ; whatever happened to him he had 
 earned in his own right amply ; favours came to him 
 from his singular attraction and adroitness, and mis- 
 fortunes he had always accepted with his eyes open. 
 Half an hour after the searchers had departed, the 
 steerage began to fill with legitimate passengers, and 
 the worst of Alick's troubles was at an end. He was 
 soon making himself popular, smoking other people's 
 
60 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 tobacco, and politely sharing their private stock of 
 delicacies, and when night came he retired to his 
 bunk beside the others with composure. 
 
 Next day by afternoon, Lough Foyle being already 
 far behind, and only the rough north-western hills of 
 Ireland within view, Alick appeared on deck to court 
 inquiry and decide his fate. As a matter of fact, he 
 was known to several on board, and even intimate 
 with one of the engineers ; but it was plainly not the 
 etiquette of such occasions for the authorities to avow 
 their information. Every one professed surprise and 
 anger on his appearance, and he was led prisoner 
 before the captain. 
 
 ' What have you got to say for yourself ? ** inquired 
 the captain. 
 
 ' Not much," said Alick ; ' but when a man has 
 been a long time out of a job, he will do things he 
 would not under other circumstances."' 
 
 ' Are you willing to work ? ** 
 
 Alick swore he was burning to be useful. 
 
 'And what can you do ? "" asked the captain. 
 
 He replied composedly that he was a brass-fitter 
 by trade. 
 
 ' I think you will be better at engineering ? ' sug- 
 gested the officer, with a shrewd look. 
 
 ' No, sir," says Alick simply. — ' There 's few can 
 beat me at a lie,' was his engaging commentary to me 
 as he recounted the affair. 
 
 ' Have you been to sea ? ' again asked the captain. 
 
 ' I Ve had a trip on a Clyde steamboat, sir, but no 
 more,^ replied the unabashed Alick. 
 
 ' Well, we must try and find some work for you,^ 
 concluded the officer. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 61 
 
 And hence we behold Alick, clear of the hot 
 engine-room, lazily scraping paint and now and then 
 taking a pull upon a sheet. ' You leave me alone,' 
 was his deduction. ' When I get talking to a man, I 
 can get round him.' 
 
 The other stowaway, whom I will call the Devonian 
 — it was noticeable that neither of them told his 
 name — had both been brought up and seen the world 
 in a much smaller way. His father, a confectioner, 
 died and was closely followed by his mother. His 
 bisters had taken, I think, to dressmaking. He him- 
 self had returned from sea about a year ago and gone 
 to live with his brother, who kept the ' George Hotel ' 
 — ' it was not quite a real hotel,' added the candid 
 fellow — ' and had a hired man to mind the horses.' 
 At first the Devonian was very welcome ; but as time 
 went on his brother not unnaturally grew cool towards 
 him, and he began to find himself one too many at 
 the ' George Hotel.' ' I don't think brothers care 
 much for you,' he said, as a general reflection upon 
 life. Hurt at this change, nearly penniless, and too 
 proud to ask for more, he set off on foot and walked 
 eighty miles to Weymouth, living on the journey as 
 he could. He would have enlisted, but he was too 
 small for the army and too old for the navy ; and 
 thought himself fortunate at last to find a berth on 
 board a trading dandy. Somewhere in the Bristol 
 Channel the dandy sprung a leak and went down ; 
 and though the crew were picked up and brought 
 ashore by fishermen, they found themselves with 
 nothing but the clothes upon their back. His next 
 engagement was scarcely better starred ; for the ship 
 proved so leaky, and frightened them all so heartily 
 
62 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 during a short passage through the Irish Sea, that 
 the entire crew deserted and remained behind upon 
 the quays of Belfast. 
 
 Evil days were now coming thick on the Devonian. 
 He could find no berth in Belfast, and had to work a 
 passage to Glasgow on a steamer. She reached the 
 Broom ielaw on a Wednesday : the Devonian had a 
 bellyful that morning, laying in breakfast manfully to 
 provide against the future, and set off along the quays 
 to seek employment. But he was now not only penni- 
 less, his clothes had begun to fall in tatters ; he had 
 begun to have the look of a street Arab ; and captains 
 will have nothing to say to a ragamuffin ; for in that 
 trade, as in all others, it is the coat that depicts the 
 man. You may hand, reef, and steer like an angel, 
 but if you have a hole in your trousers, it is like a 
 millstone round your neck. The Devonian lost heart 
 at so many refusals. He had not the impudence to 
 beg ; although, as he said, ' when I had money of my 
 own, I always gave it.' It was only on Saturday 
 morning, after three whole days of starvation, that he 
 asked a scone from a milkwoman, who added of her 
 own accord a glass of milk. He had now made up 
 his mind to stow away, not from any desire to see 
 America, but merely to obtain the comfort of a place 
 in the forecastle and a supply of familiar sea-fare. 
 He lived by begging, always from milkwomen, and 
 always scones and milk, and was not once refused. 
 It was vile wet weather, and he could never have 
 been dry. By night he walked the streets, and by 
 day slept upon Glasgow Green, and heard, in the 
 intervals of his dozing, the famous theologians of 
 the spot clear up intricate points of doctrine and 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 63 
 
 appraise the merits of the clergy. He had not much 
 instruction ; he could ' read bills on the street,' but 
 was ' main bad at writing ' ; yet these theologians 
 seem to have impressed him with a genuine sense of 
 amusement. Why he did not go to the Sailors' 
 Home I know not ; I presume there is in Glasgow 
 one of these institutions, which are by far the happiest 
 and the wisest effort of contemporaneous charity ; but 
 I must stand to my author, as they say in old books, 
 and relate the story as I heard it. In the meantime, 
 he had tried four times to stow away in different 
 vessels, and four times had been discovered and 
 handed back to starvation. The fifth time was 
 lucky ; and you may judge if he were pleased to be 
 aboard ship again, at his old work, and with duff 
 twice a week. He was, said Alick, ' a devil for the 
 duff.' Or if devil was not the word, it was one if 
 anything stronger. 
 
 The difference in the conduct of the two was 
 remarkable. The Devonian was as willing as any 
 paid hand, swarmed aloft among the first, pulled his 
 natural weight and firmly upon a rope, and found 
 work for himself when there was none to show him. 
 Alick, on the other hand, was not only a skulker in 
 the grain, but took a humorous and fine gentlemanly 
 view of the transaction. He would speak to me by 
 the hour in ostentatious idleness ; and only if the 
 boVun or a mate came by, fell-to languidly for just 
 the necessary time till they were out of sight. ' I 'm 
 not breaking my heart with it,' he remarked. 
 
 Once there was a hatch to be opened near where 
 
 i he was stationed ; he watched the preparations for a 
 
 second or so suspiciously, and then, ' Hullo,' said he. 
 
64 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 ' here 's some real work coming — I 'm off,' and he was 
 gone that moment. Again, calculating the six guinea 
 passage- money, and the probable duration of the 
 passage, he remarked pleasantly that he was getting 
 six shillings a day for this job, 'and it's pretty dear 
 to the company at that.' ' They are making nothing 
 by me,' was another of his observations ; ' they 're 
 making something by that fellow.' And he pointed 
 to the Devonian, who was just then busy to the eyes. 
 The more you saw of Alick, the more, it must be 
 owned, you learned to despise him. His natural 
 talents were of no use either to himself or others ; 
 for his character had degenerated like his face, and 
 become pulpy and pretentious. Even his power of 
 persuasion, which was certainly very surprising, stood 
 in some danger of being lost or neutralised by over- 
 confidence. He lied in an aggressive, brazen manner, 
 like a pert criminal in the dock ; and he was so vain 
 of his own cleverness that he could not refrain from 
 boasting, ten minutes after, of the very trick by which 
 he had deceived you. ' Why, now I have more 
 money than when I came on board,' he said one 
 night, exhibiting a sixpence, ' and yet I stood myself 
 a bottle of beer before I went to bed yesterday. And 
 as for tobacco, I have fifteen sticks of it.' That was 
 fairly successful indeed ; yet a man of his superiority, 
 and with a less obtrusive policy, might, who knows ? 
 have got the length of half a crown. A man who 
 prides himself upon persuasion should learn the 
 persuasive faculty of silence, above all as to his own 
 misdeeds. It is only in the farce and for dramatic 
 purposes that Scapin enlarges on his peculiar talents 
 to the world at large. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 65 
 
 Scapin is perhaps a good name for this clever, 
 unfortunate Alick ; for at the bottom of all his mis- 
 conduct there was a guiding sense of humour that 
 moved you to forgive him. It was more than half 
 a jest that he conducted his existence. ' Oh, man," 
 he said to me once with unusual emotion, like a man 
 thinking of his mistress, ' I would give up anything 
 for a lark." 
 
 It was in relation to his fellow-stowaway that 
 Alick showed the best, or perhaps I should say the 
 only good, points of his nature. ' Mind you,' he 
 said suddenly, changing his tone, 'mind you that's a 
 good boy. He wouldn't tell you a lie. A lot of 
 them think he is a scamp because his clothes are 
 ragged, but he isn't ; he 's as good as gold.' To hear 
 him, you become aware that Alick himself had a taste 
 for virtue. He thought his own idleness and the 
 other's industry equally becoming. He was no more 
 anxious to insure his own reputation as a liar than 
 to uphold the truthfulness of his companion ; and 
 he seemed unaware of what was incongruous in his 
 
 I attitude, and was plainly sincere in both characters. 
 It was not surprising that he should take an 
 interest in the Devonian, for the lad worshipped and 
 served him in love and wonder. Busy as he was, he 
 
 I would find time to warn Alick of an approaching 
 officer, or even to tell him that the coast was clear, 
 and he might slip off and smoke a pipe in safety. 
 ' Tom,' he once said to him, for that was the name 
 which Alick ordered him to use, ' if you don't like 
 going to the galley, I '11 go for you. You ain't used 
 to this kind of thing, you ain't. But I 'm a sailor ; 
 and I can understand the feelings of any fellow, I 
 
 E 
 
66 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 can.' Again, he was hard up, and casting about for 
 some tobacco, for he was not so liberally used in this 
 respect as others perhaps less worthy, when Alick 
 offered him the half of one of his fifteen sticks. I 
 think, for my part, he might have increased the offer 
 to a whole one, or perhaps a pair of them, and not 
 lived to regret his liberality. But the Devonian 
 refused. ' No,' he said, ' you 're a stowaway like me ; 
 I won't take it from you, I 'II take it from some one 
 who 's not down on his luck.' 
 
 It was notable in this generous lad that he was 
 strongly under the influence of sex. If a woman 
 passed near where he was working, his eyes lit up, his 
 hand paused, and his mind wandered instantly to 
 other thoughts. It was natural that he should 
 exercise a fascination proportionally strong upon 
 women. He begged, you will remember, from 
 women only, and was never refused. Without wish- 
 ing to explain away the charity of those who helped 
 him, I cannot but fancy he may have owed a little 
 to his handsome face, and to that quick, responsive 
 nature, formed for love, which speaks eloquently 
 through all disguises, and can stamp an impression in 
 ten minutes' talk or an exchange of glances. He was 
 the more dangerous in that he was far from bold, 
 but seemed to woo in spite of himself, and with a soft 
 and pleading eye. Ragged as he was, and many a 
 scarecrow is in that respect more comfortably fur- 
 nished, even on board he was not without some 
 curious admirers. 
 
 There was a girl among the passengers, a tall, 
 blonde, handsome, strapping Irishwoman, with a wild, 
 accommodating eye, whom Alick had dubbed Tommy, 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 67 
 
 with that transcendental appropriateness that defies 
 analysis. One day the Devonian was lying for 
 warmth in the upper stoke-hole, which stands open 
 on the deck, when Irish Tommy came past, very 
 neatly attired, as was her custom. 
 
 ' Poor fellow," she said, stopping, ' you haven't a 
 vest.' 
 
 ' No,' he said ; ' I wish I 'ad.' 
 
 Then she stood and gazed on him in silence, until, 
 in his embarrassment, for he knew not how to look 
 under this scrutiny, he pulled out his pipe and began 
 to fill it with tobacco. 
 
 ' Do you want a match ? ' she asked. And before 
 he had time to reply, she ran off and presently 
 returned with more than one. 
 
 That Avas the beginning and the end, as far as our 
 passage is concerned, of what I will make bold to call 
 this love-aflair. There are many relations which go 
 on to marriage and last during a lifetime, in which 
 less human feeling is engaged than in this scene of 
 five minutes at the stoke-hole. 
 
 Rigidly speaking, this would end the chapter of 
 the stowaways ; but in a larger sense of the word I 
 have yet more to add. Jones had discovered and 
 pointed out to me a young woman who was remark- 
 able among her fellows for a pleasing and interesting 
 air. She was poorly clad, to the verge, if not over 
 the line, of disrespectability, with a ragged old jacket 
 and a bit of a sealskin cap no bigger than your fist ; 
 but her eyes, her whole expression, and her manner, 
 even in ordinary moments, told of a true womanly 
 nature, capable of love, anger, and devotion. She 
 had a look, too, of refinement, like one who might 
 
68 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 have been a better lady than most, had she been 
 allowed the opportunity. When alone she seemed 
 preoccupied and sad ; but she was not often alone ; 
 there Avas usually by her side a heavy, dull, gross man 
 in rough clothes, chary of speech and gesture — not 
 from caution, but poverty of disposition ; a man like 
 a ditcher, unlovely and uninteresting; whom she 
 petted and tended and waited on with her eyes as 
 if he had been Amadis of Gaul. It was strange to 
 see this hulking fellow dog-sick, and this delicate, 
 sad woman caring for him. He seemed, from first 
 to last, insensible of her caresses and attentions, and 
 she seemed unconscious of his insensibility. The Irish 
 husband, who sang his wife to sleep, and this Scottish 
 girl serving her Orson, were the two bits of human 
 nature that most appealed to me throughout the 
 voyage. 
 
 On the Thursday before we arrived, the tickets 
 were collected ; and soon a rumour began to go 
 round the vessel ; and this girl, with her bit of seal- 
 skin cap, became the centre of whispering and pointed 
 fingers. She also, it was said, was a stowaway of a 
 sort ; for she was on board with neither ticket nor 
 money ; and the man with whom she travelled was 
 the father of a family, who had left wife and children 
 to be hers. The ship's officers discouraged the story, 
 which may therefore have been a story and no more ; 
 but it was believed in the steerage, and the poor girl 
 had to encounter many curious eyes from that day 
 forth. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 6 9 
 
 PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND REVIEW 
 
 Travel is of two kinds ; and this voyage of mine 
 across the ocean combined both. ' Out of my country 
 and myself I go,' sings the old poet : and I was not 
 only travelling out of my country in latitude and 
 longitude, but out of myself in diet, associates, and 
 consideration. Part of the interest and a great deal 
 of the amusement flowed, at least to me, from this 
 novel situation in the world. 
 
 I found that I had what they call fallen in life 
 with absolute success and verisimilitude. I was taken 
 for a steerage passenger ; no one seemed surprised 
 that I should be so ; and there was nothing but the 
 brass plate between decks to remind me that I had 
 once been a gentleman. In a former book, describing 
 a former journey, I expressed some wonder that I 
 could be readily and naturally taken for a pedlar, 
 and explained the accident by the difference of 
 language and manners between England and France. 
 I must now take a humbler view ; for here I w^as 
 among my own countrymen, somewhat roughly clad, 
 to be sure, but with every advantage of speech and 
 manner; and I am bound to confess that I passed 
 for nearly anything you please except an educated 
 gentleman. The sailors called me ' mate," the officers 
 addressed me as ' my man,** my comrades accepted me 
 without hesitation for a person of their own character 
 and experience, but with some curious information. 
 One, a mason himself, believed I was a mason ; several, 
 and among these at least one of the seaman, judged 
 me to be a petty officer in the American navy ; and 
 I was so often set down for a practical engineer that 
 
70 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 at last I had not the heart to deny it. From all 
 these guesses I drew one conclusion, which told 
 against the insight of my companions. They might 
 be close observers in their own way, and read the 
 manners in the face ; but it was plain that they did 
 not extend their observation to the hands. 
 
 To the saloon passengers also I sustained my part 
 without a hitch. It is true I came little in their 
 way ; but when we did encounter, there was no 
 recognition in their eye, although I confess I some- 
 times courted it in silence. All these, my inferiors 
 and equals, took me, like the transformed monarch 
 in the story, for a mere common, human man. They 
 gave me a hard, dead look, with the flesh about the 
 eye kept unrelaxed. 
 
 With the women this surprised me less, as I had 
 already experimented on the sex by going abroad 
 through a suburban part of London simply attired 
 in a sleeve-waistcoat. The result was curious. I 
 then learned for the first time, and by the exhaustive 
 process, how much attention ladies are accustomed to 
 bestow on all male creatures of their own station ; for, 
 in my humble rig, each one who went by me caused 
 me a certain shock of surprise and a sense of some- 
 thing wanting. In my normal circumstances, it 
 appeared every young lady must have paid me some 
 tribute of a glance ; and though I had often not 
 detected it when it was given, I was well aware of 
 its absence when it Avas withheld. My height seemed 
 to decrease with every woman who passed me, for she 
 passed me like a dog. This is one of my grounds for 
 supposing that what are called the upper classes may 
 sometimes produce a disagreeable impression in what 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 71 
 
 are called the lower ; and I wish some one would 
 continue my experiment, and find out exactly at what 
 stage of toilette a man becomes invisible to the well- 
 regulated female eye. 
 
 Here on shipboard the matter was put to a more 
 complete test ; for, even with the addition of speech 
 and manner, I passed among the ladies for precisely 
 the average man of the steerage. It was one after- 
 noon that I saw this demonstrated. A very plainly 
 dressed woman was taken ill on deck. I think I had 
 the luck to be present at every sudden seizure during 
 all the passage ; and on this occasion found myself 
 in the place of importance, supporting the sufferer. 
 There was not only a large crowd immediately around 
 us, but a considerable knot of saloon passengers lean- 
 ing over our heads from the hurricane-deck. One 
 of these, an elderly managing woman, hailed me with 
 counsels. Of course I had to reply ; and as the talk 
 went on, I began to discover that the whole group 
 took me for the husband. I looked upon my neAv 
 wife, poor creature, with mingled feelings ; and I 
 must own she had not even the appearance of the 
 poorest class of city servant-maids, but looked more 
 like a country wench who should have been employed 
 at a roadside inn. Now was the time for me to go 
 and study the brass plate. 
 
 To such of the officers as knew about me — the 
 doctor, the purser, and the stewards — I appeared in 
 the light of a broad joke. The fact that I spent the 
 better part of my day in writing had gone abroad 
 over the ship and tickled them all prodigiously. 
 Whenever they met me they referred to my absurd 
 occupation with familiarity and breadth of humorous 
 
72 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 intention. Their manner was well calculated to 
 remind me of my fallen fortunes. You may be 
 sincerely amused by the amateur literary efforts of 
 a gentleman, but you scarce publish the feeling to 
 his face. ' Well ! ' they would say : ' still writing ? ' 
 And the smile would widen into a laugh. The 
 purser came one day into the cabin, and, touched to 
 the heart by my misguided industry, offered me some 
 other kind of writing, ' for which," he added pointedly, 
 'you will be paid." This was nothing else than to 
 copy out the list of passengers. 
 
 Another trick of mine which told against my 
 reputation was my choice of roosting-place in an 
 active draught upon the cabin floor. I was openly 
 jeered and flouted for this eccentricity ; and a con- 
 siderable knot would sometimes gather at the door 
 to see my last dispositions for the night. This was 
 embarrassing, but I learned to support the trial with 
 equanimity. 
 
 Indeed I may say that, upon the whole, my new 
 position sat lightly and naturally upon my spirits. I 
 accepted the consequences with readiness, and found 
 them far from difficult to bear. The steerage con- 
 quered me ; I conformed more and more to the type 
 of the place, not only in manner but at heart, grow- 
 ing hostile to the officers and cabin passengers who 
 looked down upon me, and day by day greedier for 
 small delicacies. Such was the result, as I fancy, of 
 a diet of bread and butter, soup and porridge. We 
 think we have no sweet tooth as long as we are full 
 to the brim of molasses ; but a man must have 
 sojourned in the workhouse before he boasts himself 
 indifferent to dainties. Every evening, for instance. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 73 
 
 I was more and more preoccupied about our doubtful 
 fare at tea. If it was delicate my heart was much 
 lightened ; if it was but broken fish I was propor- 
 tionally downcast. The offer of a little jelly from a 
 fellow-passenger more provident than myself caused 
 a marked elevation in my spirits. And I would have 
 gone to the ship's end and back again for an oyster 
 or a chipped fruit. 
 
 In other ways I was content with my position. It 
 seemed no disgrace to be confounded with my com- 
 pany ; for I may as well declare at once I found their 
 manners as gentle and becoming as those of any other 
 class. I do not mean that my friends could have sat 
 down without embarrassment and laughable disaster 
 at the table of a duke. That does not imply an 
 inferiority of breeding, but a difference of usage. 
 Thus I flatter myself that I conducted myself well 
 among my fellow-passengers ; yet my most ambitious 
 hope is not to have avoided faults, but to have com- 
 mitted as few as possible. I know too well that my 
 tact is not the same as their tact, and that my habit 
 of a different society constituted, not only no qualifi- 
 cation, but a positive disability to move easily and 
 becomingly in this. When Jones complimented me 
 — because I ' managed to behave very pleasantly ' to 
 my fellow-passengers, was how he put it — I could 
 follow the thought in his mind, and knew his com- 
 pliment to be such as we pay foreigners on their 
 proficiency in English. I dare say this praise was 
 given me immediately on the back of some unpardon- 
 able solecism, w^hich had led him to review my con- 
 duct as a whole. We are all ready to laugh at the 
 ploughman among lords ; we should consider also 
 
74 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 the case of a lord among the ploughmen. I have 
 seen a lawyer in the house of a Hebridean fisherman ; 
 and I know, but nothing will induce me to disclose, 
 which of these two was the better gentleman. Some 
 of our finest behaviour, though it looks well enough 
 from the boxes, may seem even brutal to the gallery. 
 We boast too often manners that are parochial rather 
 than universal ; that, like a country wine, will not 
 bear transportation for a hundred miles, nor from the 
 parlour to the kitchen. To be a gentleman is to be 
 one all the world over, and in every relation and 
 grade of society. It is a high calling, to which a 
 man must first be born, and then devote himself for 
 life. And, unhappily, the manners of a certain 
 so-called upper grade have a kind of currency, and 
 meet with a certain external acceptation throughout 
 all the others, and this tends to keep us well satisfied J 
 with slight acquirements and the amateurish accom- ^ 
 plishments of a clique. But manners, like art, should 
 be human and central. 
 
 Some of my fellow-passengers, as I now moved 
 among them in a relation of equality, seemed to me 
 excellent gentlemen. They were not rough, nor 
 hasty, nor disputatious ; debated pleasantly, differed 
 kindly ; were helpful, gentle, patient, and placid. 
 The type of manners was plain, and even heavy ; 
 there was little to please the eye, but nothing to 
 shock ; and I thought gentleness lay more nearly at 
 the spring of behaviour than in many more ornate 
 and delicate societies. I say delicate, where I cannot 
 say refined ; a thing ma}^ be fine, like ironwork, with- 
 out being delicate, like lace. There was here less 
 delicacy ; the skin supported more callously the 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 75 
 
 natural surface of events, the mind received more 
 bravely the crude facts of human existence ; but I do 
 not think that there was less effective refinement, less 
 consideration for others, less polite suppression of self. 
 I speak of the best among my fellow-passengers ; for 
 in the steerage, as well as in the saloon, there is a 
 mixture. Those, then, with whom I found myself in 
 sympathy, and of whom I may therefore hope to write 
 with a greater measure of truth, were not only as 
 good in their manners, but endowed with very much 
 the same natural capacities, and about as wise in 
 deduction, as the bankers and barristers of what is 
 called society. One and all were too much interested 
 in disconnected facts, and loved information for its 
 own sake with too rash a devotion ; but people in all 
 classes display the same appetite as they gorge them- 
 selves daily with the miscellaneous gossip of the 
 newspaper. Newspaper-reading, as far as I can make 
 out, is often rather a sort of brown study than an act 
 of culture. I have myself palmed off yesterday's issue 
 on a friend, and seen him re-peruse it for a continu- 
 ance of minutes with an air at once refreshed and 
 solemn. Workmen, perhaps, pay more attention ; 
 but though they may be eager listeners, they have 
 rarely seemed to me either willing or careful thinkers. 
 Culture is not measured by the greatness of the field 
 which is covered by our knowledge, but by the nicety 
 with which we can perceive relations in thai field, 
 whether great or small. Workmen, certainly those 
 who were on board with me, I found wanting in this 
 quality or habit of the mind. They did not perceive 
 relations, but leaped to a so-called cause, and thought 
 the problem settled. Thus the cause of everything 
 
76 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 in England was the form of government, and the cure 
 for all evils was, by consequence, a revolution. It is 
 surprising how many of them said this, and that none 
 should have had a definite thought in his head as he 
 said it. Some hated the Church because they dis- 
 agreed with it ; some hated Lord Beaconsfield because 
 of war and taxes ; all hated the masters, possibly with 
 reason. But these failino;s were not at the root of 
 the matter ; the true reasoning of their souls ran thus 
 — I have not got on ; I ought to have got on ; if 
 there was a revolution I should get on. How ? They 
 had no idea. Why ? Because — because — well, look 
 at America ! 
 
 To be politically blind is no distinction ; we are 
 all so, if you come to that. At bottom, as it seems 
 to me, there is but one question in modern home 
 politics, though it appears in many shapes, and that 
 is the question of money ; and but one political 
 remedy, that the people should grow wiser and better. 
 My workmen fellow-passengers were as impatient and 
 dull of hearing on the second of these points as any 
 member of Parliament ; but they had some glimmer- 
 ings of the first. They would not hear of improve- 
 ment on their part, but wished the world made over 
 again in a crack, so that they might remain impro- 
 vident and idle and debauched, and yet enjoy the 
 comfort and respect that should accompany the 
 opposite virtues ; and it was in this expectation, as 
 far as I could see, that many of them were now on 
 their way to America. But on the point of money 
 they saw clearly enough that inland politics, so far as 
 they were concerned, were reducible to the question 
 of annual income ; a question which should long 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 77 
 
 ago have been settled by a revolution, they did not 
 know how, and which they were now about to settle 
 for themselves, once more they knew not how, by 
 crossing the Atlantic in a steamship of considerable 
 tonnage. 
 
 And yet it has been amply shown them that the 
 second or income question is in itself nothing, and 
 may as well be left undecided, if there be no wisdom 
 and virtue to profit by the change. It is not by a 
 man's purse, but by his character that he is rich or 
 poor. Barney will be poor, Alick will be poor, 
 Mackay will be poor ; let them go where they will, 
 and wreck all the governments under heaven, they 
 will be poor until they die. 
 
 Nothing is perhaps more notable in the average 
 workman than his surprising idleness, and the candour 
 with which he confesses to the failing. It has to me 
 been always something of a relief to find the poor, as a 
 general rule, so little oppressed with work. I can in 
 consequence enjoy my own more fortunate beginning 
 with a better grace. The other day I was living with 
 a farmer in America, an old frontiersman, who had 
 worked and fought, hunted and farmed, from his child- 
 hood up. He excused himself for his defective educa- 
 tion on the ground that he had been overworked from 
 first to last. Even now, he said, anxious as he was, 
 he had never the time to take up a book. In con- 
 sequence of this, I observed him closely ; he was 
 occupied for four or, at the extreme outside, for five 
 hours out of the twenty-four, and then principally in 
 walking ; and the remainder of the day he passed in 
 born idleness, either eating fruit or standing with his 
 back against a door. I have known men do hard 
 
78 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 literary work all morning, and then undergo quite as 
 much physical fatigue by way of relief as satisfied 
 this powerful frontiersman for the day. He, at 
 least, like all the educated class, did so much 
 homage to industry as to persuade himself he was 
 industrious. But the average mechanic recognises 
 his idleness with effrontery ; he has even, as I am 
 told, organised it. 
 
 I give the story as it was told me, and it was told 
 me for a fact. A man fell from a housetop in the city 
 of Aberdeen, and was brought into hospital with 
 broken bones. He was asked what was his trade, and 
 replied that he was a tapper. No one had ever heard 
 of such a thing before ; the officials were filled with 
 curiosity ; they besought an explanation. It appeared 
 that when a party of slaters were engaged upon a 
 roof, they would now and then be taken with a fancy 
 for the public-house. Now a seamstress, for example, 
 might slip away from her work and no one be the 
 wiser; but if these fellows adjourned, the tapping 
 of the mallets would cease, and thus the neighbour- 
 hood be advertised of their defection. Hence the 
 career of the tapper. He has to do the tapping 
 and keep up an industrious bustle on the housetop 
 during the absence of the slaters. When he taps 
 for only one or two the thing is child's-play, but 
 when he has to represent a whole troop, it is then 
 that he earns his money in the sweat of his brow. 
 Then must he bound from spot to spot, redupli- 
 cate, triplicate, sexduplicate his single person- 
 ality, and swell and hasten his blows, until he pro- 
 duce a perfect illusion for the ear, and you would 
 swear that a crowd of emulous masons were continuing 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 79 
 
 merrily to roof the house. It must be a strange sight 
 from an upper window. 
 
 I heard nothing on board of the tapper ; but I was 
 astonished at the stories told by my companions. 
 Skulking, shirking, malingering, were all established 
 tactics, it appeared. They could see no dishonesty 
 where a man who is paid for an hour's work gives 
 half an hour's consistent idling in its place. Thus 
 the tapper would refuse to watch for the police during 
 a burglary, and call himself a honest man. It is not 
 sufficiently recognised that our race detests to work. 
 If I thought that I should have to work every day of 
 my life as hard as I am working now, I should be 
 tempted to give up the struggle. And the workman 
 early begins on his career of toil. He has never 
 had his fill of holidays in the past, and his prospect 
 of holidays in the future is both distant and un- 
 certain. In the circumstances, it would require a 
 high degree of virtue not to snatch alleviations for 
 the moment. 
 
 There were many good talkers on the ship ; and I 
 believe good talking of a certain sort is a common 
 accomplishment among working men. Where books 
 are comparatively scarce, a greater amount of informa- 
 tion will be given and received by word of mouth ; 
 and this tends to produce good talkers, and, what is 
 no less needful for conversation, good listeners. They 
 could all tell a story with eifect. I am sometimes 
 tempted to think that the less literary class show 
 always better in narration ; they have so much more 
 patience with detail, are so much less hurried to reach 
 the points, and preserve so much juster a proportion 
 among the facts. At the same time their talk is 
 
80 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 dry ; they pursue a topic ploddingly, have not an 
 agile fancy, do not throw sudden lights from unex- 
 pected quarters, and when the talk is over they often 
 leave the matter where it was. They mark time 
 instead of marching. They think only to argue, not 
 to reach new conclusions, and use their reason rather 
 as a weapon of offence than as a tool for self- 
 improvement. Hence the talk of some of the 
 cleverest was unprofitable in result, because there was 
 no give and take ; they would grant you as little as 
 possible for premise, and begin to dispute under an 
 oath to conquer or to die. 
 
 But the talk of a workman is apt to be more inter- 
 esting than that of a wealthy merchant, because the 
 thoughts, hopes, and fears of which the workman's 
 life is built lie nearer to necessity and nature. They 
 are more immediate to human life. An income cal- 
 culated by the week is a far more human thing than 
 one calculated by the year, and a small income, simply 
 from its smallness, than a large one. I never wearied 
 listening to the details of a workman's economy, 
 because every item stood for some real pleasure. If 
 he could afford pudding twice a week, you know that 
 twice a week the man ate with genuine gusto and 
 was physically happy ; while if you learn that a rich 
 man has seven courses a day, ten to one the half of 
 them remain un tasted, and the whole is but misspent 
 money and a weariness to the flesh. 
 
 The difference between England and America to a 
 working man was thus most humanly put to me by a 
 fellow-passenger : ' In America,"* said he, ' you get 
 pies and puddings." I do not hear enough, in 
 economy books, of pies and pudding. A man lives in 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 81 
 
 and for the delicacies, adornments, and accidental 
 attributes of life, such as pudding to eat and pleasant 
 books and theatres to occupy his leisure. The bare 
 terms of existence would be rejected with contempt 
 by all. If a man feeds on bread and butter, soup 
 and porridge, his appetite grows wolfish after 
 dainties. And the workman dwells in a borderland, 
 and is always within sight of those cheerless regions 
 where life is more difficult to sustain than worth 
 sustaining. Every detail of our existence, where it is 
 worth while to cross the ocean after pie and pudding, 
 is made alive and enthralling by the presence of 
 genuine desire ; but it is all one to me whether 
 Croesus has a hundred or a thousand thousands in 
 the bank. There is more adventure in the life of 
 the working man who descends as a common soldier 
 into the battle of life, than in that of the millionaire 
 who sits apart in an office, like Von Moltke, and only 
 directs the manoeuvres by telegraph. Give me to hear 
 about the career of him who is in the thick of the 
 business ; to whom one change of market means an 
 empty belly, and another a copious and savoury meal. 
 This is not the philosophical, but the human side of 
 economics ; it interests like a story ; and the life of 
 all who are thus situated partakes in a small way of 
 the charm of Robinson Crusoe ; for every step is 
 critical, and human life is presented to you naked 
 and verging to its lowest terms. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 As we drew near to New York I was at first amused, 
 and then somewhat staggered, by the cautious and the 
 
 F 
 
82 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 grisly tales that went the round. You would have 
 thought we were to land upon a cannibal island. You 
 must speak to no one in the streets, as they would not 
 leave you till you were rooked and beaten. You must 
 enter a hotel with military precautions ; for the least 
 you had to apprehend was to awake next morning 
 without money or baggage, or necessary raiment, a 
 lone forked radish in a bed ; and if the worst befell, 
 you would instantly and mysteriously disappear from 
 the ranks of mankind. 
 
 I have usually found such stories correspond to the 
 least modicum of fact. Thus I was warned, I remem- 
 ber, against the roadside inns of the Cevennes, and 
 that by a learned professor ; and when I reached 
 Pradelles the warning was explained — it was but the 
 far-away rumour and reduplication of a single terrify- 
 ing story already half a century old, and half forgotten 
 in the theatre of the events. So I was tempted to 
 make light of these reports against America. But we 
 had on board with us a man whose evidence it would 
 not do to put aside. He had come near these perils 
 in the body; he had visited a robber inn. The public 
 has an old and well-grounded favour for this class 
 of incident, and shall be gratified to the best of my 
 power. 
 
 My fellow- passenger, whom we shall call M'Naugh- 
 ten, had come from New York to Boston with a com- 
 rade, seeking work. They were a pair of rattling 
 blades ; and, leaving their baggage at the station, 
 passed the day in beer saloons, and with congenial 
 spirits, until midnight struck. Then they applied 
 themselves to find a lodging, and walked the streets 
 till two, knocking at houses of entertainment and 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 83 
 
 being refused admittance, or themselves declining the 
 terms. By two the inspiration of their liquor had 
 begun to wear off; they were weary and humble, and 
 after a great circuit found themselves in the same 
 street where they had begun their search, and in front 
 of a French hotel where they had already sought 
 accommodation. Seeing the house still open, they 
 returned to the charge. A man in a white cap sat 
 in an office by the door. He seemed to welcome 
 them more warmly than when they had first presented 
 themselves, and the charge for the night had some- 
 what unaccountably fallen from a dollar to a quarter. 
 They thought him ill-looking, but paid their quarter 
 apiece, and were shown upstairs to the top of the 
 house. There, in a small room, the man in the white 
 cap wished them pleasant slumbers. 
 
 It was furnished with a bed, a chair, and some 
 conveniences. The door did not lock on the inside ; 
 and the only sign of adornment was a couple of 
 framed pictures, one close above the head of the bed, 
 and the other opposite the foot, and both curtained, 
 as we may sometimes see valuable water-colours, or 
 the portraits of the dead, or works of art more than 
 usually skittish in the subject. It was perhaps in the 
 hope of finding something of this last description that 
 M'Naughten's comrade pulled aside the curtain of the 
 first. He was startlingly disappointed. There was 
 no picture. The frame surrounded, and the curtain 
 was designed to hide, an oblong aperture in the par- 
 tition, through which they looked forth into the dark 
 corridor. A person standing without could easily 
 take a purse from under the pillow, or even strangle 
 a sleeper as he lay abed. M'Naughten and his com- 
 
84 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 rade stared at each other like Vasco's seamen, ' with a 
 wild surmise ' ; and then the latter, catching up the 
 lamp, ran to the other frame and roughly raised the 
 curtain. There he stood, petrified ; and M'Naughten, 
 who had followed, grasped him by the wrist in terror. 
 They could see into another room, larger in size than 
 that which they occupied, where three men sat crouch- 
 ing and silent in the dark. For a second or so these 
 five persons looked each other in the eyes, then the 
 curtain was dropped, and M'Naughten and his friend 
 made but one bolt of it out of the room and down- 
 stairs. The man in the white cap said nothing as 
 they passed him ; and they were so pleased to be once 
 more in the open night that they gave up all notion 
 of a bed, and walked the streets of Boston till the 
 morning. 
 
 No one seemed much cast down by these stories, but 
 all inquired after the address of a respectable hotel ; 
 and I, for my part, put myself under the conduct of 
 Mr. Jones. Before noon of the second Sunday we 
 sighted the low shores outside of New York harbour ; 
 the steerage passengers must remain on board to pass 
 through Castle Garden on the following morning ; 
 but we of the second cabin made our escape along 
 with the lords of the saloon ; and by six o'clock 
 Jones and I issued into West Street, sitting on 
 some straw in the bottom of an open baggage- 
 wagon. It rained miraculously ; and from that 
 moment till on the following night I left New York, 
 there was scarce a lull, and no cessation of the down- 
 pour. The roadways were flooded ; a loud strident 
 noise of falling water filled the air ; the restaurants 
 smelt heavily of wet people and wet clothing. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 85 
 
 It took us but a few minutes, though it cost us a 
 good deal of money, to be rattled along West Street 
 to our destination : ' Reunion House, No. 1 West 
 Street, one minute's walk from Castle Garden ; con- 
 venient to Castle Garden, the Steamboat Landings, 
 California Steamers and Liverpool Ships ; Board and 
 Lodging per day 1 dollar, single meals 25 cents, 
 lodging per night 25 cents ; private rooms for 
 families ; no charge for storage or baggage ; satisfac- 
 tion guaranteed to all persons ; Michael Mitchell, 
 Proprietor." Reunion House was, I may go the 
 length of saying, a humble hostelry. You entered 
 through a long bar-room, thence passed into a little 
 dining-room, and thence into a still smaller kitchen. 
 The furniture was of the plainest ; but the bar was 
 hung in the American taste, with encouraging and 
 hospitable mottoes. 
 
 Jones was well known ; we were received warmly ; 
 and two minutes afterwards I had refused a drink 
 from the proprietor, and was going on, in my plain 
 European fashion, to refuse a cigar, when Mr. 
 Mitchell sternly interposed, and explained the situa- 
 tion. He was offering to treat me, it appeared ; 
 whenever an American bar-keeper proposes any- 
 thing, it must be borne in mind that he is offering 
 to treat ; and if I did not want a drink, I must at 
 least take the cigar. I took it bashfully, feeling I 
 had begun my American career on the wrong foot. 
 I did not enjoy that cigar ; but this may have been 
 from a variety of reasons, even the best cigar often 
 failing to please if you smoke three-quarters of it in 
 a drenching rain. 
 
 For many years America was to me a sort of 
 
86 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 promised land ; ' westward the march of empire holds 
 its way ' ; the race is for the moment to the yomig ; 
 what has been and what is we imperfectly and 
 obscurely know ; what is to be yet lies beyond the 
 flight of our imaginations. Greece, Rome, and 
 Jud;iea are gone by forever, leaving to generations 
 the legacy of their accomplished work ; China still 
 endures, an old-inhabited house in the brand-new city 
 of nations ; England has already declined, since she 
 has lost the States ; and to these States, therefore, 
 yet undeveloped, full of dark possibilities, and grown, 
 like another Eve, from one rib out of the side of 
 their own old land, the minds of young men in Eng- 
 land turn naturally at a certain hopeful period of 
 their age. It will be hard for an American to 
 understand the spirit. But let him imagine a 
 young man, who shall have grown up in an old 
 and rigid circle, following bygone fashions and 
 taught to distrust his own fresh instincts, and who 
 now suddenly hears of a family of cousins, all about 
 his own age, who keep house together by themselves 
 and live far from restraint and tradition ; let him 
 imagine this, and he will have some imperfect notion 
 of the sentiment with which spirited English youths 
 turn to the thought of the American Republic. It 
 seems to them as if, out west, the war of life was 
 still conducted in the open air, and on free barbaric 
 terms ; as if it had not yet been narrowed into 
 parlours, nor begun to be conducted, like some un- 
 just and dreary arbitration, by compromise, costume, 
 forms of procedure, and sad, senseless self-denial. 
 AVhich of these two he prefers, a man with any 
 youth still left in him will decide rightly for him- 
 
THE AMATEUK EMIGRANT 87 
 
 self. He would rather be houseless than denied a 
 pass-key ; rather go without food than partake of 
 a stalled ox in stiff, respectable society ; rather be 
 shot out of hand than direct his life according to the 
 dictates of the world. 
 
 He knows or thinks nothing of the Maine Laws, 
 the Puritan sourness, the fierce, sordid appetite for 
 dollars, or the dreary existence of country towns. A 
 few wild story-books which delighted his childhood 
 form the imaginative basis of his picture of America. 
 In course of time, there is added to this a great 
 crowd of stimulating details — vast cities that grow 
 up as by enchantment ; the birds, that have gone 
 south in autumn, returning with the spring to find 
 thousands camped upon their marshes, and the 
 lamps burning far and near along populous streets ; 
 forests that disappear like snow ; countries larger 
 than Britain that are cleared and settled, one man 
 running forth with his household gods before 
 another, while the bear and the Indian are yet 
 scarce aware of their approach ; oil that gushes from 
 the earth ; gold that is washed or quarried in the 
 brooks or glens of the Sierras ; and all that bustle, 
 courage, action, and constant kaleidoscopic change 
 that Walt Whitman has seized and set forth in his 
 vigorous, cheerful, and loquacious verses. 
 
 Here I was at last in America, and was soon out 
 upon New York streets, spying for things foreign. 
 The place had to me an air of Liverpool ; but such 
 was the rain that not Paradise itself would have 
 looked inviting. We were a party of four, under 
 two umbrellas ; Jones and I and two Scots lads, 
 recent immigrants, and not indisposed to welcome a 
 
88 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 compatriot. They had been six weeks in New 
 York, and neither of them had yet found a single 
 job or earned a single halfpenny. Up to the 
 present they were exactly out of pocket by the 
 amount of the fare. 
 
 The lads soon left us. Now I had sworn by all 
 my gods to have such a dinner as would rouse the 
 dead ; there was scarce any expense at which I 
 should have hesitated ; the devil was in it, but Jones 
 and I should dine like heathen emperors. I set to 
 work, asking after a restaurant ; and I chose the 
 wealthiest and most gastronomical-looking passers-by 
 to ask from. Yet, although I had told them I was 
 willing to pay anything in reason, one and all sent 
 me off to cheap, fixed-price houses, where I would 
 not have eaten that night for the cost of twenty 
 dinners. I do not know if this were characteristic 
 of New York, or whether it was only Jones and I 
 who looked un-dinerly and discouraged enterprising 
 suggestions. But at length, by our own sagacity, 
 we found a French restaurant, where there was a 
 French waiter, some fair French cooking, some so- 
 called French wine, and French coffee to conclude 
 the whole. I never entered into the feelings of 
 Jack on land so completely as when I tasted that 
 coffee. 
 
 I suppose we had one of the ' private rooms for 
 families ' at Reunion House. It was very small, 
 furnished with a bed, a chair, and some clothes- 
 pegs ; and it derived all that was necessary for the 
 life of the human animal through two borrowed 
 lights ; one looking into the passage, and the second 
 opening, without sash, into another apartment, where 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 89 
 
 three men fitfully snored, or in intervals of wakeful- 
 ness, drearily mumbled to each other all night long. 
 It will be observed that this was almost exactly the dis- 
 position of the room in M'Naughten's story. Jones 
 had the bed ; I pitched my camp upon the floor ; he 
 did not sleep until near morning, and I, for my part, 
 never closed an eye. 
 
 At sunrise I heard a cannon fired ; and shortly 
 afterwards the men in the next room gave over snor- 
 ing for good, and began to rustle over their toilettes. 
 The sound of their voices as they talked was low and 
 moaning, like that of people watching by the sick. 
 Jones, who had at last begun to doze, tumbled and 
 murmured, and every now and then opened uncon- 
 scious eyes upon me where I lay. I found myself 
 growing eerier and eerier, for I dare say I was a little 
 fevered by my restless night, and hurried to dress and 
 get downstairs. 
 
 You had to pass through the rain, which still fell 
 thick and resonant, to reach a lavatory on the other 
 side of the court. There were three basin-stands, and 
 a few crumpled towels and pieces of wet soap, white 
 and slippery like fish ; nor should I forget a looking- 
 glass and a pair of questionable combs. Another 
 Scots lad was here, scrubbing his face with a good 
 will. He had been three months in New York and 
 had not yet found a single job nor earned a single 
 halfpenny. Up to the present, he also was exactly 
 out of pocket by the amount of the fare. I began to 
 grow sick at heart for my fellow-emigrants. 
 
 Of my nightmare wanderings in New York I spare 
 to tell. I had a thousand and one things to do ; 
 only the day to do them in, and a journey across the 
 
90 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 continent before me in the evening. It rained with 
 patient fury ; every now and then I had to get under 
 cover for a while in order, so to speak, to give my 
 mackintosh a rest ; for under this continued drench- 
 ing it began to grow damp on the inside. I went to 
 banks, post-offices, railway-offices, restaurants, pub- 
 lishers, booksellers, money-changers, and wherever I 
 went a pool would gather about my feet, and those 
 who were careful of their floors would look on with 
 an unfriendly eye. Wherever I went, too, the same 
 traits struck me : the people were all surprisingly 
 rude and surprisingly kind. The money-changer 
 cross-questioned me like a French commissary, asking 
 my age, my business, my average income, and my 
 destination, beating down my attempts at evasion, 
 and receiving my answers in silence ; and yet when 
 all was over, he shook hands with me up to the 
 elbows, and sent his lad nearly a quarter of a mile 
 in the rain to get me books at a reduction. Again, 
 in a very large publishing and bookselling establish- 
 ment, a man, who seemed to be the manager, received 
 me as I had certainly never before been received in 
 any human shop, indicated squarely that he put no 
 faith in my honesty, and refused to look up the 
 names of books or give me the slightest help or in- 
 formation, on the ground, like the steward, that it 
 was none of his business. I lost my temper at last, 
 said I was a stranger in America and not learned in 
 their etiquette ; but I would assure him, if he went 
 to any bookseller in England, of more handsome 
 usage. The boast was perhaps exaggerated ; but like 
 many a long shot, it struck the gold. The manager 
 passed at once from one extreme to the other ; I may 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 91 
 
 say that from that moment he loaded me with kind- 
 ness ; he gave me all sorts of good advice, wrote me 
 down addresses, and came bareheaded into the rain 
 to point me out a restaurant, where I might lunch, 
 nor even then did he seem to think that he had done 
 enough. These are (it is as well to be bold in state- 
 ment) the manners of America. It is this same 
 opposition that has most struck me in people of 
 almost all classes and from east to west. By the 
 time a man had about strung me up to be the death 
 of him by his insulting behaviour, he himself would 
 be just upon the point of melting into confidence 
 and serviceable attentions. Yet I suspect, although 
 I have met with the like in so many parts, that this 
 must be the character of some particular state or 
 group of states ; for in America, and this again in 
 all classes, you will find some of the softest-mannered 
 gentlemen in the world. 
 
 I was so wet when I got back to Mitchell's toward 
 the evening, that I had simply to divest myself of my 
 shoes, socks, and trousers, and leave them behind for 
 the benefit of New York city. No fire could have 
 dried them ere I had to start ; and to pack them in 
 their present condition was to spread ruin among my 
 other possessions. With a heavy heart I said fare- 
 well to them as they lay a pulp in the middle of a 
 pool upon the floor of Mitchell's kitchen. I wonder 
 if they are dry by now. Mitchell hired a man to 
 carry my baggage to the station, which was hard by, 
 accompanied me thither himself, and recommended 
 me to the particular attention of the officials. No 
 one could have been kinder. Those who are out of 
 pocket may go safely to Reunion House, where they 
 
9S ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 will get decent meals and find an honest and obliging 
 landlord. I owed him this word of thanks, before 
 I enter fairly on the second ^ and far less agreeable 
 chapter of my emigrant experience. 
 
 1 The Second Part here referred to is entitled ' Across the Plains,' 
 and is printed in the vohime so entitled, together with other Memories 
 and Essays. 
 
II 
 
 COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK 
 
 A FRAGMENT 
 
 1871 
 
 Very much as a painter half closes his eyes so that 
 some salient unity may disengage itself from among 
 the crowd of details, and what he sees may thus form 
 itself into a whole ; very much on the same principle, 
 I mav say, I allow a considerable lapse of time to 
 intervene between any of my little journeyings and 
 the attempt to chronicle them. I cannot describe a 
 thing that is before me at the moment, or that has 
 been before me only a very little while before ; I 
 must allow my recollections to get thoroughly strained 
 free from all chaff till nothing be except the pure 
 gold ; allow my memory to choose out what is truly 
 memorable by a process of natural selection ; and I 
 piously believe that in this way I ensure the Survival 
 of the Fittest. If I make notes for future use, or if 
 I am obliged to write letters during the course of my 
 little excursion, I so interfere with the process that I 
 can never again find out what is worthy of being 
 preserved, or what should be given in full length, 
 what in torso, or what merely in profile. This 
 process of incubation may be unreasonably prolonged ; 
 and I am somewhat afraid that I have made this 
 
 93 
 
94 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 mistake with the present journey. Like a bad 
 daguerreotype, great part of it has been entirely 
 lost ; I can tell you nothing about the beginning and 
 nothing about the end ; but the doings of some fifty 
 or sixty hours about the middle remain quite distinct 
 and definite, like a little patch of sunshine on a long, 
 shadowy plain, or the one spot on an old picture 
 that has been restored by the dexterous hand of the 
 cleaner. I remember a tale of an old Scots minister, 
 called upon suddenly to preach, who had hastily 
 snatched an old sermon out of his study and found 
 himself in the pulpit before he noticed that the rats 
 had been making free with his manuscript and eaten 
 the first two or three pages away ; he gravely ex- 
 plained to the congregation how he found himself 
 situated : ' And now,"* said he, ' let us just begin 
 where the rats have left ofF.^ I must follow the 
 divine's example, and take up the thread of my 
 discourse where it first distinctly issues from the 
 limbo of forgetfulness. 
 
 COCKERMOUTH 
 
 I was lighting my pipe as I stepped out of the inn 
 at Cockermouth, and did not raise my head until I 
 was fairly in the street. When I did so, it flashed 
 upon me that I was in England ; the evening sun- 
 light lit up English houses, English faces, an English 
 conformation of street, — as it were, an English 
 atmosphere blew against my face. There is nothing 
 perhaps more puzzling (if one thing in sociology can 
 ever really be more unaccountable than another) than 
 the great gulf that is set between England and Scot- 
 land — a gulf so easy in appearance, in reality so 
 
COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK 95 
 
 difficult to traverse. Here are two people almost 
 identical in blood ; pent up together on one small 
 island, so that their intercourse (one would have 
 thought) must be as close as that of prisoners who 
 shared one cell of the Bastille ; the same in language 
 and religion ; and yet a few years of quarrelsome 
 isolation — a mere forenoon's tiff, as one may call it, 
 in comparison with the great historical cycles — has 
 so separated their thoughts and ways that not unions, 
 not mutual dangers, nor steamers, nor railways, nor 
 all the king's horses and all the king's men, seem able 
 to obliterate the broad distinction. In the tritura- 
 tion of another century or so the corners may 
 disappear ; but in the meantime, in the year of 
 grace 1871, I was as much in a new country as if 
 I had been walking out of the Hotel St. Antoine 
 at Antwerp. 
 
 I felt a little thrill of pleasure at my heart as I 
 realised the change, and strolled away up the street 
 with my hands behind my back, noting in a dull, 
 sensual way how foreign, and yet how friendly, were 
 the slopes of the gables and the colour of the tiles, 
 and even the demeanour and voices of the gossips 
 round about me. 
 
 Wandering in this aimless humour, I turned up a 
 lane and found myself following the course of the 
 bright little river. I passed first one and then 
 another, then a third, several couples out love- 
 making in the spring evening ; and a consequent 
 feeling of loneliness was beginning to grow upon me, 
 when I came to a dam across the river, and a mill — 
 a great, gaunt promontory of building, — half on dry 
 ground and half arched over the stream. The road 
 
96 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 here drew in its shoulders, and crept through between 
 the landward extremity of the mill and a little 
 garden enclosure, with a small house and a large 
 signboard within its privet hedge. I was pleased to 
 fancy this an inn, and drew little etchings in fancy of 
 a sanded parlour, and three-cornered spittoons, and a 
 society of parochial gossips seated within over their 
 churchwardens; but as I drew near, the board dis- 
 played its superscription, and I could read the name 
 of Smethurst, and the designation of ' Canadian Felt 
 Hat Manufacturers." There was no more hope of 
 evening fellowship, and I could only stroll on by the 
 river-side, under the trees. The water was dappled 
 with slanting sunshine, and dusted all over with a 
 little mist of flying insects. There were some 
 amorous ducks, also, whose love-making reminded 
 me of what I had seen a little farther down. But 
 the road grew sad, and I grew weary ; and as I was 
 perpetually haunted with the terror of a return of 
 the tic that had been playing such ruin in my head 
 a week ago, I turned and went back to the inn, and 
 supper, and my bed. 
 
 The next morning, at breakfast, I communicated 
 to the smart waitress my intention of continuing 
 down the coast and through Whitehaven to Furness, 
 and, as I might have expected, I was instantly con- 
 fronted by that last and most worrying form of 
 interference, that chooses to introduce tradition and 
 authority into the choice of a man's own pleasures. 
 I can excuse a person combating my religious or 
 philosophical heresies, because them I have deliber- 
 ately accepted, and am ready to justify by present 
 argument. But I do not seek to justify my pleasures. 
 
 i 
 
COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK 97 
 
 If I prefer tame scenery to grand, a little hot sun- 
 shine over lowland parks and woodlands to the war of 
 the elements round the summit of Mont Blanc ; or 
 if I prefer a pipe of mild tobacco, and the company 
 of one or two chosen companions, to a ball where I 
 feel myself very hot, awkward, and weary, I merely 
 state these preferences as facts, and do not seek to 
 establish them as principles. This is not the general 
 rule, however, and accordingly the waitress was 
 shocked, as one might be at a heresy, to hear the 
 route that I had sketched out for myself. Everybody 
 who came to Cockermouth for pleasure, it appeared, 
 went on to Keswick. It was in vain that I put up a 
 little plea for the liberty of the subject ; it was in 
 vain that I said I should prefer to go to Whitehaven. 
 I was told that there was ' nothing to see there ' — 
 that weary, hackneyed, old falsehood ; and at last, as 
 the handmaiden began to look really concerned, I 
 gave way, as men always do in such circumstances, 
 and agreed that I was to leave for Keswick by a 
 train in the early evening. 
 
 AN EVANGELIST 
 
 Cockermouth itself, on the same authority, was a 
 place with ' nothing to see ' ; nevertheless I saw a 
 good deal, and retain a pleasant, vague picture of 
 the town and all its surroundings. I might have 
 dodged happily enough all day about the main 
 street and up to the castle and in and out of 
 byways, but the curious attraction that leads a 
 person in a strange place to follow, day after day, 
 the same round, and to make set habits for himself 
 in a week or ten days, led me half unconsciously up 
 
 G 
 
98 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 the same road that I had gone the evening before. 
 When I came up to the hat manufactor}', Smethurst 
 himself was standing in the garden gate. He was 
 brushing one Canadian felt hat, and several others 
 had been put to await their turn one above the other 
 on his own head, so that he looked something like 
 the typical Jew old-clothes man. As I drew near, he 
 came sidling out of the doorway to accost me, with 
 so curious an expression on his face that I instinc- 
 tively prepared myself to apologise for some unwitting 
 trespass. His first question rather confirmed me in 
 this belief, for it was whether or not he had seen me 
 going up this way last night ; and after having 
 answered in the affirmative, I waited in some alarm 
 for the rest of my indictment. But the good man's 
 heart was full of peace ; and he stood there brushing 
 his hats and prattling on about fishing, and walk- 
 ing, and the pleasures of convalescence, in a bright 
 shallow stream that kept me pleased and interested, 
 T could scarcely say how. As he went on, he warmed 
 to his subject, and laid his hats aside to go along * 
 the water-side and show me where the large trout 
 commonly lay, underneath an overhanging bank ; 
 and he was much disappointed, for my sake, that 
 there were none visible just then. Then he wandered 
 off on to another tack, and stood a great while out 
 in the middle of a meadow in the hot sunshine, 
 trying to make out that he had known me before, or, \ 
 if not me, some friend of mine, merely, I believe, out 
 of a desire that we should feel more friendly and at 
 our ease with one another. At last he made a little 
 speech to me, of which I wish I could recollect the 
 very words, for they were so simple and unaffected | 
 
COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK 99 
 
 that they put all the best writing and speaking to 
 the blush ; as it is, I can recall only the sense, and 
 that perhaps imperfectly. He began by saying that 
 he had little things in his past life that it gave him 
 especial pleasure to recall ; and that the faculty of 
 receiving such sharp impressions had now died out in 
 himself, but must at my age be still quite lively and 
 active. Then he told me that he had a little raft 
 afloat on the river above the dam which he was going 
 to lend me, in order that I might be able to look 
 back, in after years, upon having done so, and get 
 great pleasure from the recollection. Now, I have a 
 friend of my own who will forgo present enjoyments 
 and suffer much present inconvenience for the sake of 
 manufacturing ' a reminiscence ' for himself ; but 
 there was something singularly refined in this pleasure 
 that the hatmaker found in making reminiscences for 
 others ; surely no more simple or unselfish luxury can 
 be imagined. After he had unmoored his little em- 
 barkation, and seen me safely shoved off into mid- 
 stream, he ran away back to his hats with the air of 
 I a man who had only just recollected that he had 
 i anything to do. 
 
 1 I did not stay very long on the raft. It ought to 
 jhave been very nice punting about there in the cool 
 shade of the trees, or sitting moored to an over- 
 hanging root ; but perhaps the very notion that I 
 was bound in gratitude specially to enjoy my little 
 cruise, and cherish its recollection, turned the whole 
 [thing from a pleasure into a duty. Be that as it 
 I may, there is no doubt that I soon wearied and came 
 ashore again, and that it gives me more pleasure 
 to recall the man himself and his simple, happy 
 
100 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 conversation, so full of gusto and sympathy, than 
 anything possibly connected with his crank, insecure 
 embarkation. In order to avoid seeing him, for I 
 was not a little ashamed of myself for having failed 
 to enjoy his treat sufficiently, I determined to con- 
 tinue up the river, and, at all prices, to find some 
 other way back into the town in time for dinner. 
 As I went, I was thinking of Smethurst with admira- 
 tion ; a look into that man's mind was like a retro- 
 spect over the smiling champaign of his past life, 
 and very different from the Sinai-gorges up which 
 one looks for a terrified moment into the dark souls 
 of many good, many wise, and many prudent men. 
 I cannot be very grateful to such men for their 
 excellence, and wisdom, and prudence. I find myself 
 facing as stoutly as I can a hard, combative existence, 
 full of doubt, difficulties, defeats, disappointments, 
 and dangers, quite a hard enough life without their 
 dark countenances at my elbow, so that what I want 
 is a happy-minded Smethurst placed here and there at 
 ugly corners of my life's wayside, preaching his gospel 
 of quiet and contentment. 
 
 ANOTHER 
 
 I was shortly to meet with an evangelist of 
 another stamp. After I had forced my way through 
 a gentleman's grounds, I came out on the high road, 
 and sat down to rest myself on a heap of stones at 
 the top of a long hill, with Cockermouth lying snugly 
 at the bottom. An Irish beggar-woman, with a 
 beautiful little girl by her side, came up to ask for 
 alms, and gradually fell to telling me the little 
 tragedy of her life. Her own sister, she told me, 
 
COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK liOl 
 
 had seduced her husband from her after many years 
 of married life, and the pair had fled, leaving her 
 destitute, with the little girl upon her hands. She 
 seemed quite hopeful and cheery, and, though she 
 was unaffectedly sorry for the loss of her husband's 
 earnings, she made no pretence of despair at the loss 
 of his affection ; some day she would meet the fugi- 
 tives, and the law would see her duly righted, and in 
 the meantime the smallest contribution was gratefully 
 received. While she was telling all this in the most 
 matter-of-fact way, I had been noticing the approach 
 of a tall man, with a high white hat and darkish 
 clothes. He came up the hill at a rapid pace, and 
 joined our little group with a sort of half- salutation. 
 Turning at once to the woman, he asked her in a 
 business-like way whether she had anything to do, 
 whether she were a Catholic or a Protestant, whether 
 she could read, and so forth ; and then, after a few 
 kind words and some sweeties to the child, he des- 
 patched the mother with some tracts about Biddy 
 and the Priest, and the Orangeman's Bible. I was 
 a little amused at his abrupt manner, for he was 
 still a young man, and had somewhat the air of a 
 navy officer ; but he tackled me with great solemnity. 
 I could make fun of what he said, for I do not think 
 it was very wise ; but the subject does not appear to 
 me just now in a jesting light, so I shall only say 
 that he related to me his own conversion, which had 
 been effected (as is very often the case) through the 
 agency of a gig accident, and that, after having 
 examined me and diagnosed my case, he selected some 
 suitable tracts from his repertory, gave them to me, 
 and, bidding me God-speed, went on his way. 
 
lOS ; aETSSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 LAST OF SMETHURST 
 
 That evening I got into a third-class carriage on 
 my way for Keswick, and was followed almost imme- 
 diately by a burly man in brown clothes. This 
 fellow-passenger was seemingly ill at ease, and kept 
 continually putting his head out of the window, and 
 asking the bystanders if they saw him coming. At 
 last, when the train was already in motion, there 
 was a commotion on the platform, and a way was 
 left clear to our carriage door. He had arrived. In 
 the hurry I could just see Smethurst, red and pant- 
 ing, thrust a couple of clay pipes into my com- 
 panion's outstretched hand, and hear him crying his 
 farewells after us as we slipped out of the station at 
 an ever accelerating pace. I said something about 
 it being a close run, and the broad man, already 
 engaged in filling one of the pipes, assented, and went 
 on to tell me of his own stupidity in forgetting a 
 necessary, and of how his friend had good-naturedly 
 gone down town at the last moment to supply the 
 omission. I mentioned that I had seen Mr. Smeth- 
 urst already, and that he had been very polite to 
 me ; and we fell into a discussion of the hatter's 
 merits that lasted some time and left us quite good 
 friends at its conclusion. The topic was productive 
 of goodwill. We exchanged tobacco and talked 
 about the season, and agreed at last that we should 
 go to the same hotel at Keswick and sup in company. 
 As he had some business in the town which would 
 occupy him some hour or so, on our arrival I was to 
 improve the time and go down to the lake, that I 
 might see a glimpse of the promised wonders. 
 
COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK 103 
 
 The night had fallen already when I reached the 
 water-side, at a place where many pleasure-boats are 
 moored and ready for hire ; and as I went along a 
 stony path, between wood and water, a strong wind 
 blew in gusts from the far end of the lake. The 
 sky was covered with flying scud ; and, as this was 
 ragged, there was quite a wild chase of shadow and 
 moon-glimpse over the surface of the shuddering 
 water. I had to hold my hat on, and was growing 
 rather tired, and inclined to go back in disgust, when 
 a little incident occurred to break the tedium. A 
 sudden and violent squall of wind sundered the low 
 underwood, and at the same time there came one of 
 those brief discharges of moonlight, which leaped 
 into the opening thus made, and showed me three 
 girls in the prettiest flutter and disorder. It was as 
 though they had sprung out of the ground. I 
 accosted them very politely in my capacity of 
 stranger, and requested to be told the names of 
 all manner of hills and woods and places that I did 
 not wish to know, and we stood together for a while 
 and had an amusing little talk. The wind, too, 
 made himself of the party, brought the colour into 
 their faces, and gave them enough to do to repress 
 their drapery ; and one of them, amid much giggling, 
 had to pirouette round and round upon her toes (as 
 girls do) when some specially strong gust had got the 
 advantage over her. They were just high enough up 
 in the social order not to be afraid to speak to a 
 gentleman ; and just low enough to feel a little 
 tremor, a nervous consciousness of wrong-doing — of 
 stolen waters, that gave a considerable zest to our 
 most innocent interview. They were as much dis- 
 
104 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 • 
 
 composed and fluttered, indeed, as if I had been a 
 wicked baron proposing to elope with the whole trio ; 
 but they showed no inclination to go away, and I had 
 managed to get them off hills and waterfalls and on 
 to more promising subjects, when a young man was 
 descried coming along the path from the direction of 
 Keswick. Now whether he was the young man of 
 one of my friends, or the brother of one of them, or 
 indeed the brother of all, I do not know ; but they 
 incontinently said that they must be going, and went 
 away up the path with friendly salutations. I need 
 not say that I found the lake and the moonlight 
 rather dull after their departure, and speedily found 
 my way back to potted herrings and whisky-and- 
 water in the commercial room with my late fellow- 
 traveller. In the smoking-room there was a tall 
 dark man with a moustache, in an ulster coat, who 
 had got the best place and was monopolising most of 
 the talk ; and, as I came in, a whisper came round to 
 me from both sides, that this was the manager of a 
 London theatre. The presence of such a man was 
 a great event for Keswick, and I must own that the 
 manager showed himself equal to his position. He 
 had a large fat pocket-book, from which he produced 
 poem after poem, written on the backs of letters or 
 hotel-bills ; and nothing could be more humorous 
 than his recitation of these elegant extracts, except 
 perhaps the anecdotes with which he varied the 
 entertainment. Seeing, I suppose, something less 
 countrified in my appearance than in most of the 
 company, he singled me out to corroborate some 
 statements as to the depravity and vice of the aris- 
 tocracy, and when he went on to describe some 
 
COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK 105 
 
 gilded saloon experiences, I am proud to say that he 
 honoured my sagacity with one little covert wink 
 before a second time appealing to me for confirma- 
 tion. The wink was not thrown away ; I went in up 
 to the elbows with the manager, until I think that 
 some of the glory of that great man settled by reflec- 
 tion upon me, and that I was as noticeably the second 
 person in the smoking-room as he was the first. 
 For a young man, this was a position of some dis- 
 tinction, I think you will admit. . . . 
 
Ill 
 
 AN AUTUMN EFFECT 
 
 1875 
 
 ^Nous ne de'crivous jamais mieux la nature que lorsque nous 
 nous effor9ons d'exprimer sobrement et simplement Timpression 
 que nous en avons regue.' — M. Andre Theuribt, '^ L'Automne 
 dans les Bois/ Rcviie des Deuoc Mondes, 1st Oct. 1874, p. 562. ^ 
 
 A COUNTRY rapidly passed through under favourable 
 auspices may leave upon us a unity of impression that 
 would only be disturbed and dissipated if we stayed 
 longer. Clear vision goes with the quick foot. Things 
 fall for us into a sort of natural perspective when we 
 see them for a moment in going by ; we generalise 
 boldly and simply, and are gone before the sun is 
 overcast, before the rain falls, before the season can 
 steal like a dial-hand from his figure, before the lights 
 and shadows, shifting round towards nightfall, can 
 show us the other side of things, and belie what they 
 showed us in the morning. We expose our mind to 
 
 1 I had nearly finished the transcription of the following pages, 
 when I saw on a friend's table the number containing the piece from 
 which this sentence is extracted, and, struck with a similarity of title, 
 took it home with me and read it with indescribable satisfaction. I do 
 not know whether I more envy M, Theuriet the pleasure of having 
 written this delightful article, or the reader the pleasure, which I hope 
 he has still before him, of reading it once and again, and lingering over 
 the passages that please him most. 
 
AN AUTUMN EFFECT 107 
 
 the landscape (as we would expose the prepared plate 
 in the camera) for the moment only during which the 
 effect endures ; and we are away before the effect can 
 change. Hence we shall have in our memories a long 
 scroll of continuous wayside pictures, all imbued 
 already with the prevailing sentiment of the season, 
 the weather, and the landscape, and certain to be 
 unified more and more, as time goes on, by the uncon- 
 scious processes of thought. So that we who have 
 only looked at a country over our shoulder, so to 
 speak, as we went by, will have a conception of it far 
 more memorable and articulate than a man who has 
 lived there all his life from a child upwards, and had 
 his impression of to-day modified by that of to- 
 morrow, and belied by that of the day after, till at 
 length the stable characteristics of the country are 
 all blotted out from him behind the confusion of 
 variable effect. 
 
 I began my little pilgrimage in the most enviable 
 of all humours : that in which a person, with a 
 sufficiency of money and a knapsack, turns his back 
 on a town and walks forward into a country of which 
 he knows only by the vague report of others. Such 
 an one has not surrendered his will and contracted for 
 the next hundred miles, like a man on a railway. He 
 may change his mind at every finger-post, and, where 
 ways meet, follow vague preferences freely and go the 
 low road or the high, choose the shadow or the sun- 
 shine, suffer himself to be tempted by the lane that 
 turns immediately into the woods, or the broad road 
 that lies open before him into the distance, and shows 
 him the far-off spires of some city, or a range of 
 mountain-tops, or a rim of sea, perhaps, along a low 
 
108 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 horizon. In short, he may gratify his every whim and 
 fancy, without a pang of reproving conscience, or the 
 least jostle to his self-respect. It is true, however, 
 that most men do not possess the faculty of free 
 action, the priceless gift of being able to live for the 
 moment only ; and as they begin to go forward on 
 their journey, they will find that they have made for 
 themselves new fetters. Slight projects they may 
 have entertained for a moment, half in jest, become 
 iron laws to them, they know not why. They will 
 be led by the nose by these vague reports of which I 
 spoke above ; and the mere fact that their informant 
 mentioned one village and not another will compel 
 their footsteps with inexplicable power. And yet a 
 little while, yet a few days of this fictitious liberty, 
 and they will begin to hear imperious voices calling on 
 them to return ; and some passion, some duty, some 
 worthy or unworthy expectation, will set its hand 
 upon their shoulder and lead them back into the old 
 paths. Once and again we have all made the experi- 
 ment. We know the end of it right well. And yet 
 if we make it for the hundredth time to-morrow, it 
 will have the same charm as ever ; our heart will beat 
 and our eyes will be bright, as we leave the town 
 behind us, and we shall feel once again (as we have 
 felt so often before) that we are cutting ourselves 
 loose for ever from our whole past life, with all its 
 sins and follies and circumscriptions, and go forward 
 as a new creature into a new world. 
 
 It was well, perhaps, that I had this first enthusi- 
 asm to encourage me up the long hill above High 
 Wycombe ; for the day was a bad day for walking at 
 best, and now began to draw towards afternoon, dull, 
 
AN AUTUMN EFFECT 109 
 
 heavy, and lifeless. A pall of grey cloud covered the 
 sky, and its colour reacted on the colour of the land- 
 scape. Near at hand, indeed, the hedgerow trees were 
 still fairly green, shot through with bright autumnal 
 yellows, bright as sunshine. But a little way off, the 
 solid bricks of woodland that lay squarely on slope 
 and hill-top were not green, but russet and grey, and 
 ever less russet and more grey as they drew off into 
 the distance. As they drew off into the distance, 
 also, the woods seemed to mass themselves together, 
 and lie thin and straight, like clouds, upon the limit 
 of one's view. Not that this massing was complete, 
 or gave the idea of any extent of forest, for every here 
 and there the trees would break up and go down into 
 a valley in open order, or stand in long Indian file 
 along the horizon, tree after tree relieved, foolishly 
 enough, against the sky. I say foolishly enough, 
 although I have seen the effect employed cleverly in 
 art, and such long line of single trees thrown out 
 against the customary sunset of a Japanese picture 
 with a certain fantastic effect that was not to be 
 despised ; but this was over water and level land, 
 where it did not jar, as here, with the soft contour of 
 hills and valleys. The whole scene had an indefinable 
 look of being painted, the colour was so abstract and 
 correct, and there was something so sketchy and 
 merely impressional about these distant single trees 
 on the horizon that one was forced to think of it all 
 as of a clever French landscape. For it is rather in 
 nature that we see resemblance to art, than in art to 
 nature ; and we say a hundred times, ' How like a 
 picture ! ' for once that we say, ' How like the truth ! "* 
 The forms in which we learn to think of landscape are 
 
no ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 forms that we have got from painted canvas. Any man 
 can see and understand a picture ; it is reserved for 
 the few to separate anything out of the confusion of 
 nature, and see that distinctly and with intelligence. 
 
 The sun came out before I had been long on my 
 way ; and as I had got by that time to the top 
 of the ascent, and was now treading a labyrinth of 
 confined by-roads, my whole view brightened con- 
 siderably in colour, for it was the distance only that 
 was grey and cold, and the distance I could see no 
 longer. Ov^erhead there was a wonderful carolling of 
 larks which seemed to follow me as I went. Indeed, 
 during all the time I was in that country the larks 
 did not desert me. The air was alive with them 
 from High Wycombe to Tring ; and as, day after day, 
 their ' shrill delight ' fell upon me out of the vacant 
 sky, they began to take such a prominence over other 
 conditions, and form so integral a part of my con- 
 ception of the country, that I could have baptized it 
 ' The Country of Larks.' This, of course, might just 
 as well have been in early spring ; but everything 
 else was deeply imbued with the sentiment of the 
 later year. There was no stir of insects in the grass. 
 The sunshine was more golden, and gave less heat 
 than summer sunshine ; and the shadows under the 
 hedge were somewhat blue and misty. It was only in 
 autumn that you could have seen the mingled green 
 and yellow of the elm foliage, and the fallen leaves 
 that lay about the road, and covered the surface of 
 wayside pools so thickly that the sun was reflected 
 only here and there from little joints and pinholes in 
 that brown coat of proof; or that your ear would 
 have been troubled, as you went forward, by the 
 
AN AUTUMN EFFECT 111 
 
 occasional report of fowling-pieces from all directions 
 and all degrees of distance. 
 
 For a long time this dropping fire was the one 
 sign of human activity that came to disturb me as 
 I walked. The lanes were profoundly still. They 
 would have been sad but for the sunshine and the 
 singing of the larks. And as it was, there came over 
 me at times a feeling of isolation that was not dis- 
 agreeable, and yet was enough to make me quicken 
 my steps eagerly when I saw some one before me on 
 the road. This fellow-voyager proved to be no less 
 a person than the parish constable. It had occurred 
 to me that in a district which was so little populous 
 and so well wooded, a criminal of any intelligence 
 might play hide-and-seek with the authorities for 
 months ; and this idea was strengthened by the aspect 
 of the portly constable as he walked by my side with 
 deliberate dignity and turned-out toes. But a few 
 minutes' converse set my heart at rest. These rural 
 criminals are very tame birds, it appeared. If my 
 informant did not immediately lay his hand on an 
 offender, he was content to wait ; some evening after 
 nightfall there would come a tap at his door, and the 
 outlaw, weary of outlawry, would give himself quietly 
 up to undergo sentence, and resume his position in the 
 life of the country-side. Married men caused him 
 no disquietude whatever; he had them fast by the 
 foot. Sooner or later they would come back to see 
 their wives, a peeping neighbour would pass the word, 
 and my portly constable would walk quietly over and 
 take the bird sitting. And if there were a few who 
 had no particular ties in the neighbourhood, and pre- 
 ferred to shift into another county when they fell 
 
112 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 into trouble, their departure moved the placid con- 
 stable in no degree. He was of Dogberry's opinion ; 
 and if a man would not stand in the Prince's name, 
 he took no note of him, but let him go, and thanked 
 God he was rid of a knave. And surely the crime 
 and the law were in admirable keeping ; rustic con- 
 stable was well met with rustic offender. The officer 
 sitting at home over a bit of fire until the criminal 
 came to visit him, and the criminal coming — it was 
 a fair match. One felt as if this must have been the 
 order in that delightful seaboard Bohemia where 
 Florizel and Perdita courted in such sweet accents, 
 and the Puritan sang Psalms to hornpipes, and the 
 four- and -twenty shearers danced with nosegays in 
 their bosoms, and chanted their three songs apiece at 
 the old shepherd's festival ; and one could not help 
 picturing to oneself what havoc among good people's 
 purses, and tribulation for benignant constables, 
 might be worked here by the arrival, over stile and 
 footpath, of a new Autolycus. 
 
 Bidding good-morning to my fellow-traveller, I 
 left the road and struck across country. It was 
 rather a revelation to pass from between the hedge- 
 rows and find quite a bustle on the other side, 
 a great coming and going of school-children upon 
 by-paths, and, in every second field, lusty horses and 
 stout country-folk a-ploughing. The way I followed 
 took me through many fields thus occupied, and 
 through many strips of plantation, and then over a 
 little space of smooth turf, very pleasant to the feet, 
 set with tall fir-trees and clamorous with rooks 
 making ready for the winter, and so back again into 
 the quiet road. I was now not far from the end of 
 
AN AUTUMN EFFECT 113 
 
 my day's journey. A few hundred yards farther, and, 
 passing through a gap in the hedge, I began to go 
 down hill through a pretty extensive tract of young 
 beeches. I was soon in shadow myself, but the after- 
 noon sun still coloured the upmost boughs of the 
 wood, and made a fire over my head in the autumnal 
 foliage. A little faint vapour lay among the slim 
 tree-stems in the bottom of the hollow ; and from 
 farther up I heard from time to time an outburst of 
 gross laughter, as though clowns were making merry 
 in the bush. There was something about the atmo- 
 sphere that brought all sights and sounds home to one 
 with a singular purity, so that I felt as if my senses 
 had been washed with water. After I had crossed 
 the little zone of mist, the path began to remount 
 the hill ; and just as I, mounting along with it, had 
 got back again, from the head downwards, into the 
 thin golden sunshine, I saw in front of me a donkey 
 tied to a tree. Now, I have a certain liking for 
 donkeys, principally, I believe, because of the delight- 
 ful things that Sterne has written of them. But this 
 was not after the pattern of the ass at Lyons. He 
 was of a white colour, that seemed to fit him rather 
 for rare festal occasions than for constant drudgery. 
 Besides, he was very small, and of the daintiest pro- 
 portions you can imagine in a donkey. And so, sure 
 enough, you had only to look at him to see he had 
 never worked. There was something too roguish and 
 wanton in his face, a look too like that of a schoolboy 
 or a street Arab, to have survived much cudgelling. 
 It was plain that these feet had kicked off sportive 
 children oftener than they had plodded with a freight 
 through miry lanes. He was altogether a fine- 
 
 H 
 
114 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 weather, holiday sort of donkey ; and though he was 
 just then somewhat solemnised and rueful, he still 
 gave proof of the levity of his disposition by impu- 
 dently wagging his ears at me as 1 drew near. I say 
 he was somewhat solemnised just then ; for, with the 
 admirable instinct of all men and animals under 
 restraint, he had so wound and wound the halter 
 about the tree that he could go neither back nor 
 forwards, nor so much as put down his head to 
 browse. There he stood, poor rogue, part puzzled, 
 part angry, part, I believe, amused. He had not 
 given up hope, and dully revolved the problem in his 
 head, giving ever and again another jerk at the few 
 inches of free rope that still remained unwound. A 
 humorous sort of sympathy for the creature took hold 
 upon me. I went up, and, not without some trouble 
 on my part, and much distrust and resistance on the 
 part of Neddy, got him forced backwards until the 
 whole length of the halter was set loose, and he was 
 once more as free a donkey as I dared to make him. 
 I was pleased (as people are) with this friendly action 
 to a fellow-creature in tribulation, and glanced back 
 over my shoulder to see how he was profiting by his 
 freedom. The brute was looking after me ; and no 
 sooner did he catch my eye than he put up his long 
 white face into the air, pulled an impudent mouth at 
 me, and began to bray derisively. If ever any one 
 person made a grimace at another, that donkey made 
 a grimace at me. The hardened ingratitude of his 
 behaviour, and the impertinence that inspired his 
 whole face as he curled up his lip, and showed his 
 teeth, and began to bray, so tickled me, and was so 
 much in keeping with what I had imagined to myself 
 
AN AUTUMN EFFECT 115 
 
 about his character, that I could not find it in my 
 heart to be angry, and burst into a peal of hearty 
 laughter. This seemed to strike the ass as a repartee, 
 so he brayed at me again by way of rejoinder ; and 
 we went on for a while, braying and laughing, until I 
 began to grow aweary of it, and, shouting a derisive 
 farewell, turned to pursue my way. In so doing — it 
 was like going suddenly into cold water — I found 
 myself face to face Avith a prim little old maid. She 
 was all in a flutter, the poor old dear ! She had 
 concluded beyond question that this must be a lunatic 
 who stood laughing aloud at a white donkey in the 
 placid beech-woods. I was sure, by her face, that 
 she had already recommended her spirit most re- 
 ligiously to Heaven, and prepared herself for the 
 worst. And so, to reassure her, I uncovered and 
 besought her, after a very staid fashion, to put me 
 on my way to Great Missenden. Her voice trembled 
 a little, to be sure, but I think her mind was set at 
 rest ; and she told me, very explicitly, to follow the 
 path until I came to the end of the wood, and then I 
 should see the village below me in the bottom of the 
 valley. And, with mutual courtesies, the little old 
 maid and I went on our respective ways. 
 
 Nor had she misled me. Great Missenden was 
 close at hand, as she had said, in the trough of a 
 gentle valley, with many great elms about it. The 
 smoke from its chimneys went up pleasantly in the 
 afternoon sunshine. The sleepy hum of a threshing- 
 machine filled the neighbouring fields and hung about 
 the quaint street corners. A little above, the church 
 sits well back on its haunches against the hillside — 
 an attitude for a church, you know, that makes it 
 
116 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 look as if it could be ever so much higher if it liked ; 
 and the trees grew about it thickly, so as to make a 
 density of shade in the churchyard. A very quiet 
 place it looks ; and yet I saw many boards and posters 
 about threatening dire punishment against those who 
 broke the church windows or defaced the precinct, 
 and offering rewards for the apprehension of those 
 Avho had done the like already. It was fair day in 
 Great Missenden. There were three stalls set up, 
 suhjove, for the sale of pastry and cheap toys; and a 
 great number of holiday children thronged about the 
 stalls and noisily invaded every corner of the strag- 
 gling village. They came round me by coveys, 
 blowing simultaneously upon penny trumpets as 
 though they imagined I should fall to pieces like the 
 battlements of Jericho. I noticed one among them 
 who could make a wheel of himself like a London 
 boy, and seemingly enjoyed a grave pre-eminence 
 upon the strength of the accomplishment. By and 
 by, however, the trumpets began to weary me, and I 
 went indoors, leaving the fair, I fancy, at its height. 
 
 Night had fallen before I ventured forth again. 
 It was pitch-dark in the village street, and the dark- 
 ness seemed only the greater for a light here and 
 there in an uncurtained window or from an open 
 door. Into one such window I was rude enough to 
 peep, and saw within a charming genre picture. In 
 a room, all white wainscot and crimson wall-paper, a 
 perfect gem of colour after the black, empty dark- 
 ness in which I had been groping, a pretty girl was 
 telling a story, as well as I could make out, to an 
 attentive child upon her knee, while an old woman 
 sat placidly dozing over the fire. You may be sure I 
 
AN AUTUMN EFFECT 117 
 
 was not behindhand with a story for myself — a good 
 old story after the manner of G. P. R. James and 
 the village melodramas, with a wicked squire, and 
 poachers, and an attorney, and a virtuous young man 
 with a genius for mechanics, who should love, and 
 protect, and ultimately marry the girl in the crimson 
 room. Baudelaire has a few dainty sentences on the 
 fancies that we are inspired with when we look 
 through a window into other people's lives ; and I 
 think Dickens has somewhere enlarged on the same 
 text. The subject, at least, is one that I am seldom 
 weary of entertaining. I remember, night after night, 
 at Brussels, watching a good family sup together, 
 make merry, and retire to rest ; and night after night 
 I waited to see the candles lit, and the salad made, 
 and the last salutations dutifully exchanged, without 
 any abatement of interest. Night after night I 
 found the scene rivet my attention and keep me 
 awake in bed with all manner of quaint imaginations. 
 Much of the pleasure of the Arabian Nights hinges 
 upon this Asmodean interest ; and we are not weary 
 of lifting other people's roofs, and going about behind 
 the scenes of life with the Caliph and the serviceable 
 Giaffar. It is a salutary exercise, besides ; it is 
 salutary to get out of ourselves and see people living 
 together in perfect unconsciousness of our existence, 
 as they will live when we are gone. If to-morrow 
 the blow falls, and the worst of our ill fears is realised, 
 the girl will none the less tell stories to the child on 
 her lap in the cottage at Great Missenden, nor the 
 good Belgians light their candle, and mix their salad, 
 and go orderly to bed. 
 
 The next morning was sunny overhead and damp 
 
118 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 underfoot, with a thrill in the air like a reminiscence 
 of frost. I went up into the sloping garden behind 
 the inn and smoked a pipe pleasantly enough, to 
 the tune of my landlady's lamentations over sundry 
 cabbages and cauliflowers that had been spoiled by 
 caterpillars. She had been so much pleased in the 
 summer-time, she said, to see the garden all hovered 
 over by white butterflies. And now, look at the end 
 of it ! She could nowise reconcile this with her 
 moral sense. And, indeed, unless these butterflies 
 are created with a side-look to the composition of 
 improving apologues, it is not altogether easy, even 
 for people who have read Hegel and Dr. M'Cosh, to 
 decide intelligibly upon the issue raised. Then I fell 
 into a long and abstruse calculation with my land- 
 lord ; having for object to compare the distance 
 driven by him during eight years' service on the box 
 of the Wendover coach with the girth of the round 
 world itself. We tackled the question most con- 
 scientiously, made all necessary allowance for Sundays 
 and leap-years, and were just coming to a triumphant 
 conclusion of our labours when we were stayed by a 
 small lacuna in my information. I did not know the 
 circumference of the earth. The landlord knew it, 
 to be sure — plainly he had made the same calculation 
 twice and once before, — but he wanted confidence in 
 his own figures, and from the moment I showed 
 myself so poor a second seemed to lose all interest in 
 the result. 
 
 Wendover (which was my next stage) lies in the 
 same valley with Great Missenden, but at the foot 
 of it, where the hills trend off on either hand like a 
 coast-line, and a great hemisphere of plain lies, like 
 
AN AUTUMN EFFECT 119 
 
 a sea, before one, I went up a chalky road, until I 
 had a good outlook over the place. The vale, as it 
 opened out into the plain, was shallow, and a little 
 bare, perhaps, but full of graceful convolutions. From 
 the level to which I have now attained the fields were 
 exposed before me like a map, and I could see all 
 that bustle of autumn field-work which had been hid 
 from me yesterday behind the hedgerows, or shown 
 to me only for a moment as I followed the footpath. 
 Wendover lay well down in the midst, with moun- 
 tains of foliage about it. The great plain stretched 
 away to the northward, variegated near at hand with 
 the c[uaint pattern of the fields, but growing ever 
 more and more indistinct, until it became a mere 
 hurly-burly of trees and bright crescents of river, and 
 snatches of slanting road, and finally melted into the 
 ambiguous cloud-land over the horizon. The sky was 
 an opal-grey, touched here and there with blue, and 
 with certain faint russets that looked as if they were 
 reflections of the colour of the autumnal woods below. 
 I could hear the ploughmen shouting to their horses, 
 the uninterrupted carol of larks innumerable over- 
 head, and, from a field where the shepherd was 
 marshalling his flock, a sweet tumultuous tinkle of 
 sheep-bells. All these noises came to me very thin 
 and distinct in the clear air. There was a wonderful 
 sentiment of distance and atmosphere about the day 
 and the place. 
 
 I mounted the hill yet farther by a rough staircase 
 of chalky footholds cut in the turf. The hills about 
 Wendover and, as far as I could see, all the hills in 
 Buckinghamshire, wear a sort of hood of beech planta- 
 tion ; but in this particular case the hood had been 
 
120 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 suffered to extend itself into something more like a 
 cloak, and hung down about the shoulders of the 
 hill in wide folds, instead of lying flatly along the 
 summit. The trees grew so close, and their boughs 
 were so matted together, that the whole wood looked 
 as dense as a bush of heather. The prevailing colour 
 was a dull, smouldering red, touched here and there 
 with vivid yellow. But the autumn had scarce ad- 
 vanced beyond the outworks ; it was still almost 
 summer in the heart of the wood ; and as soon as 
 I had scrambled through the hedge, I found myself 
 in a dim green forest atmosphere under eaves of 
 virgin foliage. In places where the wood had itself 
 for a background and the trees were massed together 
 thickly, the colour became intensified and almost 
 gem-like : a perfect fire of green, that seemed none 
 the less green for a few specks of autumn gold. None 
 of the trees were of any considerable age or stature ; 
 but they grew well together, I have said ; and as the 
 road turned and wound among them, they fell into 
 pleasant groupings and broke the light up pleasantly. 
 Sometimes there would be a colonnade of slim, straight 
 tree-stems with the light running down them as down 
 the shafts of pillars, that looked as if it ought to 
 lead to something, and led only to a corner of sombre 
 and intricate jungle. Sometimes a spray of delicate 
 foliage would be thrown out flat, the light lying 
 flatly along the top of it, so that against a dark 
 background it seemed almost luminous. There was 
 a great hush over the thicket (for, indeed, it was 
 more of a thicket than a wood) ; and the vague 
 rumours that went among the tree-tops, and the 
 occasional rustling of big birds or hares among the 
 
AN AUTUMN EFFECT 121 
 
 undergrowth, had in them a note of almost treacherous 
 steal thiness, that put the imagination on its guard 
 and made me walk warily on the russet carpeting of 
 last year's leaves. The spirit of the place seemed to 
 be all attention ; the wood listened as I went, and 
 held its breath to number my footfalls. One could 
 not help feeling that there ought to be some reason 
 for this stillness ; whether, as the bright old legend 
 goes, Pan lay somewhere near in siesta, or whether, 
 perhaps, the heaven was meditating rain, and the first 
 drops would soon come pattering through the leaves. 
 It was not unpleasant, in such an humour, to catch 
 sight, ever and anon, of large spaces of the open plain. 
 This happened only where the path lay much upon 
 the slope, and there was a flaw in the solid leafy 
 thatch of the wood at some distance below the level 
 at which I chanced myself to be walking ; then, indeed, 
 little scraps of foreshortened distance, miniature fields, 
 and Lilliputian houses and hedgerow trees would 
 appear for a moment in the aperture, and grow larger 
 and smaller, and change and melt one into another, 
 as I continued to go forward, and so shift my point 
 of view. 
 
 For ten minutes, perhaps, I had heard from some- 
 where before me in the wood a strange, continuous 
 noise, as of clucking, cooing, and gobbling, now and 
 again interrupted by a harsh scream. As I advanced 
 towards this noise, it began to grow lighter about 
 me, and I caught sight, through the trees, of sundry 
 gables and enclosure walls, and something like the 
 tops of a rickyard. And sure enough, a rickyard it 
 proved to be, and a neat little farm- steading, with 
 the beech-woods growing almost to the door of it. 
 
122 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 Just before me, however, as I came upon the path, 
 the trees drew back and let in a wide flood of day- 
 light on to a circular lawn. It was here that the 
 noises had their origin. More than a score of pea- 
 cocks (there are altogether thirty at the farm), a 
 proper contingent of peahens, and a great multitude 
 that I could not number of more ordinary barn-door 
 fowls, were all feeding together on this little open 
 lawn among the beeches. They fed in a dense crowd, 
 which swayed to and fro, and came hither and thither 
 as by a sort of tide, and of which the surface was 
 agitated like the surface of a sea as each bird guzzled 
 his head along the ground after the scattered corn. 
 The clucking, cooing noise that had led me thither 
 was formed by the blending together of countless 
 expressions of individual contentment into one col- 
 lective expression of contentment, or general grace 
 during meat. Every now and again a big peacock 
 would separate himself from the mob and take a 
 stately turn or two about the lawn, or perhaps mount 
 for a moment upon the rail, and there shrilly publish 
 to the world his satisfaction with himself and what 
 he had to eat. It happened, for my sins, that none 
 of these admirable birds had anything beyond the 
 merest rudiment of a tail. Tails, it seemed, were out 
 of season just then. But they had their necks for 
 all that ; and by their necks alone they do as much 
 surpass all the other birds of our grey climate as they 
 fall in quality of song below the blackbird or the lark. 
 Surely the peacock, with its incomparable parade of 
 glorious colour and the scrannel voice of it issuing 
 forth, as in mockery, from its painted throat, must, 
 like my landlady's butterflies at Great Missenden, have 
 
AN AUTUMN EFFECT 123 
 
 been invented by some skilful fabulist for the consola- 
 tion and support of homely virtue : or rather, perhaps, 
 by a fabulist not quite so skilful, who made points for 
 the moment without having a studious enough eye to 
 the complete effect ; for I thought these melting 
 greens and blues so beautiful that afternoon, that I 
 would have given them my vote just then before the 
 sweetest pipe in all the spring woods. For indeed 
 there is no piece of colour of the same extent in 
 nature, that will so flatter and satisfy the lust of a 
 man's eyes ; and to come upon so many of them, after 
 these acres of stone-coloured heavens and russet woods, 
 and grey-brown ploughlands and white roads, was 
 like going three whole days' journey to the southward, 
 or a month back into the summer. 
 
 I was sorry to leave Peacock Farm — for so the place 
 is called, after the name of its splendid pensioners — 
 and go forwards again in the quiet woods. It began 
 to grow both damp and dusk under the beeches ; and 
 as the day declined the colour faded out of the 
 foliage ; and shadow, without form and void, took 
 the place of all the fine tracery of leaves and delicate 
 gradations of living green that had before accom- 
 panied my walk. I had been sorry to leave Peacock 
 Farm., but I was not sorry to find myself once more 
 in the open road, under a pale and somewhat troubled- 
 looking evening sky, and put my best foot foremost 
 for the inn at Wendover. 
 
 Wendover, in itself, is a straggling, purposeless 
 sort of place. Everybody seems to have had his own 
 opinion as to how the street should go ; or rather, 
 every now and then a man seems to have arisen with 
 a new idea on the subject, and led away a little sect 
 
124 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 of neighbours to join in his heresy. It would have 
 somewhat the look of an abortive watering-place, such 
 as we may now see them here and there along the 
 coast, but for the age of the houses, the comely quiet 
 design of some of them, and the look of long habita- 
 tion, of a life that is settled and rooted, and makes it 
 worth while to train flowers about the windows, and 
 otherwise shape the dwelling to the humour of the 
 inhabitant. The church, which might perhaps have 
 served as rallying-point for these loose houses, and 
 pulled the township into something like intelligible 
 unity, stands some distance off among great trees ; but 
 the inn (to take the public buildings in order of im- 
 portance) is in what I understand to be the principal 
 street : a pleasant old house, with bay-windows, and 
 three peaked gables, and many swallows' nests plastered 
 about the eaves. 
 
 The interior of the inn was answerable to the out- 
 side : indeed, I never saw any room much more to be 
 admired than the low wainscoted parlour in which I 
 spent the remainder of the evening. It was a short 
 oblong in shape, save that the fireplace was built 
 across one of the angles so as to cut it partially off, 
 and the opposite angle was similarly truncated by a 
 corner cupboard. The wainscot was white, and there 
 was a Turkey carpet on the floor, so old that it might 
 have been imported by Walter Shandy before he re- 
 tired, worn almost through in some places, but in 
 others making a good show of blues and oranges, 
 none the less harmonious for being somewhat faded. 
 The corner cupboard was agreeable in design ; and 
 there were just the right things upon the shelves — 
 decanters and tumblers, and blue plates, and one red 
 
AN AUTUMN EFFECT 125 
 
 rose in a glass of water. The furniture was old- 
 fashioned and stiff. Everything was in keeping, down 
 to the ponderous leaden inkstand on the round table. 
 And you may fancy how pleasant it looked, all flushed 
 and flickered over by the light of a brisk companion- 
 able fire, and seen, in a strange, tilted sort of per- 
 spective, in the three compartments of the old mirror 
 above the chimney. As I sat reading in the great 
 armchair, I kept looking round with the tail of my 
 e3^e at the quaint, bright picture that was about me, 
 and could not help some pleasure and a certain child- 
 ish pride in forming part of it. The book I read was 
 about Italy in the early Renaissance, the pageantries 
 and the light loves of princes, the passion of men for 
 learning, and poetry, and art ; but it was written, by 
 good luck, after a solid, prosaic fashion, that suited 
 the room infinitely more nearly than the matter ; and 
 the result was that I thought less, perhaps, of Lippo 
 Lippi, or Lorenzo, or Politian, than of the good 
 Englishman who had written in that volume what he 
 knew of them, and taken so much pleasure in his 
 solemn polysyllables. 
 
 I was not left without society. My landlord had 
 a very pretty little daughter, whom we shall call 
 Lizzie. If I had made any notes at the time, I 
 might be able to tell you something definite of her 
 appearance. But faces have a trick of growing more 
 and more spiritualised and abstract in the memory, 
 until nothing remains of them but a look, a haunting 
 expression ; just that secret quality in a face that is 
 apt to slip out somehow under the cunningest painters 
 touch, and leave the portrait dead for the lack of it. 
 And if it is hard to catch with the finest of cameFs- 
 
126 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 hair pencils, you may think how hopeless it must be 
 to pursue after it with clumsy words. If I say, for 
 instance, that this look, which I remember as Lizzie, 
 was something wistful that seemed partly to come of 
 slyness and in part of simplicity, and that I am inclined 
 to imagine it had something to do with the daintiest 
 suspicion of a cast in one of her large eyes, I shall 
 have said all that I can, and the reader will not be 
 much advanced towards comprehension. I had struck 
 up an acquaintance with this little damsel in the 
 morning, and professed much interest in her dolls, 
 and an impatient desire to see the large one which 
 was kept locked away for great occasions. And so I 
 had not been very long in the parlour before the door 
 opened, and in came Miss Lizzie with two dolls tucked 
 clumsily under her arm. She was followed by her 
 brother John, a year or so younger than herself, not 
 simply to play propriety at our interview, but to 
 show his own two whips in emulation of his sister's 
 dolls. I did my best to make myself agreeable to 
 my visitors, showing much admiration for the dolls 
 and dolls' dresses, and, with a very serious demeanour, 
 asking many questions about their age and character. 
 I do not think that Lizzie distrusted my sincerity, 
 but it was evident that she was both bewildered and 
 a little contemptuous. Although she was ready her- 
 self to treat her dolls as if they were alive, she seemed 
 to think rather poorly of any grown person who could 
 fall heartily into the spirit of the fiction. Sometimes 
 she would look at me with gravity and a sort of dis- 
 quietude, as though she really feared I must be out 
 of my wits. Sometimes, as when I inquired too par- 
 ticularly into the question of their names, she laughed 
 
AN AUTUMN EFFECT 127 
 
 at me so long and heartily that I began to feel almost 
 embarrassed. But when, in an evil moment, I asked 
 to be allowed to kiss one of them, she could keep her- 
 self no longer to herself. Clambering down from the 
 chair on which she sat perched to show me. Cornelia- 
 like, her jewels, she ran straight out of the room and 
 into the bar — it was just across the passage, — and I 
 could hear her telling her mother in loud tones, but 
 apparently more in sorrow than in merriment, that 
 the gentleman in the parlouj' zvanted to hiss Dolly. I 
 fancy she was determined to save me from this humili- 
 ating action, even in spite of myself, for she never 
 gave me the desired permission. She reminded me 
 of an old dog I once knew, who would never suffer 
 the master of the house to dance, out of an exagge- 
 rated sense of the dignity of that master's place and 
 carriage. 
 
 After the young people were gone there was but 
 one more incident ere I went to bed. I heard a party 
 of children go up and down the dark street for a while, 
 singing together sweetly. And the mystery of this 
 little incident was so pleasant to me that I purposely 
 refrained from asking who they were, and wherefore 
 they went singing at so late an hour. One can rarely 
 be in a pleasant place without meeting with some 
 pleasant accident. I have a conviction that these 
 children would not have gone singing before the inn 
 unless the inn-parlour had been the delightful place 
 it was. At least, if I had been in the customary 
 public room of the modern hotel, with all its dispro- 
 portions and discomforts, my ears would have been 
 dull, and there would have been some ugly temper 
 or other uppermost in my spirit, and so they 
 
128 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 would have wasted their songs upon an unworthy 
 hearer. 
 
 Next morning I went along to visit the church. It 
 is a long-backed red-and-white building, very much 
 restored, and stands in a pleasant graveyard among 
 those great trees of which I have spoken already. 
 The sky was drowned in a mist. Now and again 
 pulses of cold wind went about the enclosure, and set 
 the branches busy overhead, and the dead leaves 
 scurrying into the angles of the church buttresses. 
 Now and again, also, I could hear the dull sudden 
 fall of a chestnut among the grass — the dog would 
 bark before the rectory door — or there would come a 
 clinking of pails from the stable-yard behind. But 
 in spite of these occasional interruptions — in spite, 
 also, of the continuous autumn twittering that filled 
 the trees — the chief impression somehow was one as 
 of utter silence, insomuch that the little greenish bell 
 that peeped out of a window in the tower disquieted 
 me with a sense of some possible and more inhar- 
 monious disturbance. The grass was wet, as if with 
 a hoar frost that had just been melted. I do not 
 know that ever I saw a morning more autumnal. As 
 I went to and fro among the graves, I saw some 
 flowers set reverently before a recently erected tomb, 
 and drawing near was almost startled to find they lay 
 on the grave of a man seventy-two years old when he 
 died. We are accustomed to strew flowers only over 
 the young, where love has been cut short untimely, 
 and great possibilities have been restrained by death. 
 We strew them there in token that these possibilities, 
 in some deeper sense, shall yet be realised, and the 
 touch of our dead loves remain with us and guide us 
 
AN AUTUMN EFFECT 129 
 
 to the end. And yet there was more significance, 
 perhaps, and perhaps a greater consolation, in this 
 little nosegay on the grave of one who had died old. 
 We are apt to make so much of the tragedy of death, 
 and think so little of the enduring tragedy of some 
 men's lives, that we see more to lament for in a life 
 cut off in the midst of usefulness and love, than in 
 one that miserably survives all love and usefulness, 
 and goes about the world the phantom of itself, with- 
 out hope, or joy, or any consolation. These flowers 
 seemed not so much the token of love that survived 
 death, as of something yet more beautiful — of love 
 that had lived a man's life out to an end with him, 
 and been faithful and companionable, and not weary 
 of loving, throughout all these years. 
 
 The morning cleared a little, and the sky was once 
 more the old stone-coloured vault over the sallow 
 meadows and the russet woods, as I set forth on a 
 dog-cart from Wendover to Tring. The road lay for 
 a good distance along the side of the hills, with the 
 great plain below on one hand, and the beech-woods 
 above on the other. The fields were busy with people 
 ploughing and sowing ; every here and there a jug of 
 ale stood in the angle of the hedge, and I could see 
 many a team wait smoking in the furrow as plough- 
 man or sower stepped aside for a moment to take a 
 draught. Over all the brown ploughlands, and under 
 all the leafless hedgerows, there was a stout piece of 
 labour abroad, and, as it were, a spirit of picnic. 
 The horses smoked and the men laboured and shouted 
 and drank in the sharp autumn morning ; so that one 
 had a strong effect of large, open-air existence. The 
 fellow who drove me was something of a humourist ; 
 
130 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 and his conversation was all in praise of an agri- 
 cultural labourer's way of life. It was he who called 
 my attention to these jugs of ale by the hedgerow ; 
 he could not sufficiently express the liberality of these 
 men's wages ; he told me how sharp an appetite was 
 given by breaking up the earth in the morning air, 
 whether with plough or spade, and cordially admired 
 this provision of nature. He sang O fortunatos agri- 
 colas ! indeed, in every ' possible key, and with many 
 cunning inflections, till I began to wonder what was 
 the use of such people as Mr. Arch, and to sing the 
 same air myself in a more diffident manner. 
 
 Tring was reached, and then Tring railway-station ; 
 for the two are not very near, the good people of 
 Tring having held the railway, of old days, in extreme 
 apprehension, lest some day it should break loose in 
 the town and work mischief. I had a last walk, 
 among russet beeches as usual, and the air filled, as 
 usual, with the carolling of larks ; I heard shots 
 fired in the distance, and saw, as a new sign of the 
 fulfilled autumn, two horsemen exercising a pack of 
 fox-hounds. And then the train came and carried 
 me back to London. 
 
IV 
 
 A WINTER'S WALK IN CARRICK 
 AND GALLOWAY 
 
 A FRAGMENT 
 
 1876 
 
 At the famous bridge of Doon, Kyle, the central 
 district of the shire of Ayr, marches with Carrick, 
 the most southerly. On the Carrick side of the 
 river rises a hill of somewhat gentle conformation, 
 cleft with shallow dells, and sown here and there 
 with farms and tufts of wood. Inland, it loses itself, 
 joining, I suppose, the great herd of similar hills 
 that occupies the centre of the Lowlands. Towards 
 the sea it swells out the coast-line into a pro- 
 tuberance, like a bay-window in a plan, and is 
 fortified against the surf behind bold crags. This 
 hill is known as the Brown Hill of Carrick, or, more 
 shortly, Brown Carrick. 
 
 It had snowed overnight. The fields were all 
 sheeted up ; they were tucked in among the snow, 
 and their shape was modelled through the pliant 
 counterpane, like children tucked in by a fond mother. 
 The wind had made ripples and folds upon the surface, 
 like what the sea, in quiet weather, leaves upon the 
 sand. There was a frosty stifle in the air. An 
 
 131 
 
132 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 effusion of coppery light on the summit of Brown 
 Carrick showed where the sun was trying to look 
 through ; but along the horizon clouds of cold fog 
 had settled down, so that there was no distinction 
 of sky and sea. Over the white shoulders of the 
 headlands, or in the opening of bays, there was 
 nothing but a great vacancy and blackness ; and the 
 road as it drew near the edge of the cliff seemed to 
 skirt the shores of creation and void space. 
 
 The snow crunched under foot, and at farms all 
 the dogs broke out barking as they smelt a passer-by 
 upon the road. I met a fine old fellow, who might 
 have sat as the father in 'The Cottar's Saturday 
 Night,"* and who swore most heathenishly at a cow 
 he was driving. And a little after I scraped acquaint- 
 ance with a poor body tramping out to gather cockles. 
 His face was wrinkled by exposure ; it was broken up 
 into flakes and channels, like mud beginning to dry, 
 and weathered in two colours, an incongruous pink 
 and grey. He had a faint air of being surprised 
 — which, God knows, he might well be — that life 
 had gone so ill with him. The shape of his trousers 
 was in itself a jest, so strangely were they bagged 
 and ravelled about his knees ; and his coat was all 
 bedaubed with clay as though he had lain in a rain- 
 dub during the New Year's festivity. I will own I 
 was not sorry to think he had had a merry New 
 Year, and been young again for an evening ; but I 
 was sorry to see the mark still there. One could not 
 expect such an old gentleman to be much of a dandy, 
 or a great student of respectability in dress ; but 
 there might have been a wife at home, who had 
 brushed out similar stains after fiftv New Years, now 
 
A WINTER^S WALK IN GALLOWAY 133 
 
 become old, or a round-armed daughter, who would 
 wish to have him neat, were it only out of self-respect 
 and for the ploughman sweetheart when he looks 
 round at night. Plainly, there was nothing of this 
 in his life, and years and loneliness hung heavily on 
 his old arms. He was seventy-six, he told me ; and 
 nobody would give a day's work to a man that 
 age : they would think he couldn't do it. ' And, 
 'deed,' he went on, with a sad little chuckle, ' 'deed, 
 I doubt if I could.' He said good-bye to me at a 
 footpath, and crippled wearily off to his work. It 
 will make your heart ache if you think of his old 
 fingers groping in the snow. 
 
 He told me I was to turn down beside the school- 
 house for Dunure. And so, when I found a lone 
 house among the snow, and heard a babble of childish 
 voices from within, I struck off into a steep road 
 leading downwards to the sea. Dunure lies close 
 under the steep hill : a haven among the rocks, a 
 breakwater in consummate disrepair, much apparatus 
 for drying nets, and a score or so of fishers' houses. 
 Hard by, a few shards of ruined castle overhang the 
 sea, a few vaults, and one tall gable honeycombed 
 with windows. The snow lay on the beach to the 
 tidemark. It was daubed on to the sills of the ruin : 
 it roosted in the crannies of the rock like white sea- 
 birds ; even on outlying reefs there would be a little 
 cock of snow, like a toy lighthouse. Everything 
 was grey and white in a cold and dolorous sort of 
 shepherd's plaid. In the profound silence, broken 
 only by the noise of oars at sea, a horn was sounded 
 twice ; and I saw the postman, girt with two bags, 
 pause a moment at the end of the clachan for letters. 
 
134 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 It is, perhaps, characteristic of Dunure that none were 
 brought him. 
 
 The people at the public-house did not seem well 
 pleased to see me, and though I would fain have stayed 
 by the kitchen fire, sent me ' ben the hoose ' into the 
 guest-room. This guest-room at Dunure was painted 
 in quite aesthetic fashion. There are rooms in the 
 same taste not a hundred miles from London, where 
 persons of an extreme sensibility meet together 
 without embarrassment. It was all in a fine dull 
 bottle-green and black ; a grave harmonious piece 
 of colouring, with nothing, so far as coarser folk can 
 judge, to hurt the better feelings of the most exquisite 
 purist. A cherry-red half window-blind kept up an 
 imaginary warmth in the cold room, and threw quite 
 a glow on the floor. Twelve cockle-shells and a half- 
 penny china figure were ranged solemnly along the 
 mantel-shelf. Even the spittoon was an original note, 
 and instead of sawdust contained sea-shells. And as 
 for the hearthrug, it would merit an article to itself, 
 and a coloured diagram to help the text. It was 
 patchwork, but the patchwork of the poor ; no glow- 
 ing shreds of old brocade and Chinese silk, shaken 
 together in the kaleidoscope of some tasteful house- 
 wife's fancy ; but a work of art in its own way, and 
 plainly a labour of love. The patches came exclusively 
 from people''s raiment. There was no colour more 
 brilliant than a heather mixture ; ' My Johnny's grey 
 breeks,' well polished over the oar on the boat's thwart, 
 entered largely into its composition. And the spoils 
 of an old black cloth coat, that had been many a 
 Sunday to church, added something (save the mark !) 
 of preciousness to the material. 
 
A WINTER^S WALK IN GALLOWAY 135 
 
 While I was at luncheon four carters came in — 
 long -limbed, muscular Ayrshire Scots, with lean, 
 intelligent faces. Four quarts of stout were ordered ; 
 they kept filling the tumbler with the other hand as 
 they drank ; and in less time than it takes me to 
 write these words the four quarts were finished — 
 another round was proposed, discussed, and negatived 
 — and they were creaking out of the village with 
 their carts. 
 
 The ruins drew you towards them. You never saw 
 any place more desolate from a distance, nor one that 
 less belied its promise near at hand. Some crows and 
 gulls flew away croaking as I scrambled in. The 
 snow had drifted into the vaults. The clachan 
 dabbled with snow, the white hills, the black sky, 
 the sea marked in the coves with faint circular 
 wrinkles, the whole world, as it looked from a loop- 
 hole in Dunure, was cold, wretched, and out-at-elbows. 
 If you had been a wicked baron and compelled to 
 stay there all the afternoon, you would have had 
 a rare fit of remorse. How you would have heaped 
 up the fire and gnawed your fingers ! I think it 
 would have come to homicide before the evening — if 
 it were only for the pleasure of seeing something red ! 
 And the masters of Dunure, it is to be noticed, were 
 remarkable of old for inhumanity. One of these 
 vaults where the snow had drifted was that 'black 
 voute ' where ' Mr. Alane Stewart, Com mend atour 
 of Crossraguel,' endured his fiery trials. On the 1st 
 and 7th of September 1570 (ill dates for Mr. Alan !), 
 Gilbert, Earl of Cassilis, his chaplain, his baker, his 
 cook, his pantryman, and another servant, bound the 
 poor Commendator ' betwix an iron chimlay and a 
 
136 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 fire," and there cruelly roasted him until he signed 
 away his abbacy. It is one of the ugliest stories of 
 an ugly period, but not, somehow, without such a 
 flavour of the ridiculous as makes it hard to sym- 
 pathise quite seriously with the victim. And it is 
 consoling to remember that he got away at last, and 
 kept his abbacy, and, over and above, had a pension 
 from the Earl until he died. 
 
 Some way beyond Dunure a wide bay, of somewhat 
 less unkindly aspect, opened out. Colzean plantations 
 lay all along the steep shore, and there was a wooded 
 hill towards the centre, where the trees made a sort 
 of shadowy etching over the snow. The road went 
 down and up, and past a blacksmith's cottage that 
 made fine music in the valley. Three compatriots of 
 Burns drove up to me in a cart. They were all 
 drunk, and asked me jeeringly if this was the way 
 to Dunure. I told them it was ; and my answer 
 was received with unfeigned merriment. One gentle- 
 man was so much tickled he nearly fell out of the 
 cart ; indeed, he was only saved by a companion, 
 who either had not so fine a sense of humour or had 
 drunken less. 
 
 ' The toune of Mayboll,' says the inimitable Aber- 
 crummie,^ * stands upon an ascending ground from 
 east to west, and lyes open to the south. It hath 
 one principall street, with houses upon both sides, 
 built of freestone ; and it is beautifyed with the 
 situation of two castles, one at each end of this 
 street. That on the east belongs to the Erie of 
 Cassilis. On the west end is a castle, which belonged 
 sometime to the laird of Blairquan, which is now the 
 
 ^ William Abercrombie. See Fasti Ecdesice Scoticance, under 
 'Maybole' (Part iii.). 
 
A WINTERS WALK IN GALLOWAY 137 
 
 tolbuith, and is adorned with a pyremide [conical 
 roof], and a row of ballesters round it raised from the 
 top of the staircase, into which they have mounted a 
 fyne clock. There be four lanes which pass from the 
 principall street ; one is called the Black Vennel, 
 which is steep, declining to the south-west, and leads 
 to a lower street, which is far larger than the high 
 chiefe street, and it runs from the Kirkland to the 
 Well Trees, in which there have been many pretty 
 buildings, belonging to the severall gentry of the 
 countrey, who were wont to resort thither in winter, 
 and divert themselves in converse together at their 
 owne houses. It was once the principall street of the 
 town ; but many of these houses of the gentry having 
 been decayed and ruined, it has lost much of its 
 ancient beautie. Just opposite to this vennel, there 
 is another that leads north-west, from the chiefe street 
 to the green, which is a pleasant plott of ground, 
 enclosed round with an earthen wall, wherein they 
 were wont to play football, but now at the Gowff 
 and byasse-bowls. The houses of this towne, on 
 both sides of the street, have their several gardens 
 belonging to them ; and in the lower street there 
 be some pretty orchards, that yield store of good 
 fruit. ^ As Patterson says, this description is near 
 enough even to-day, and is mighty nicely written 
 to boot. I am bound to add, of my own experience, 
 that Maybole is tumbledown and dreary. Prosper- 
 ous enough in reality, it has an air of decay; and 
 though the population has increased, a roofless house 
 every here and there seems to protest the contrary. 
 The women are more than well-favoured, and the men 
 fine tall fellows ; but they look slipshod and dissi- 
 
138 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 pated. As they slouched at street corners, or stood 
 about gossiping in the snow, it seemed they would 
 have been more at home in the slums of a large city 
 than here in a country place betwixt a village and a 
 town. I heard a great deal about drinking, and a 
 great deal about religious revivals : two things in 
 which the Scottish character is emphatic and most 
 unlovely. In particular, I heard of clergymen who 
 were employing their time in explaining to a delighted 
 audience the physics of the Second Coming. It is 
 not very likely any of us will be asked to help. If 
 we were, it is likely we should receive instructions 
 for the occasion, and that on more reliable authority. 
 And so I can only figure to myself a congregation 
 truly curious in such flights of theological fancy, as 
 one of veteran and accomplished saints, who have 
 fought the good fight to an end and outlived all 
 worldly passion, and are to be regarded rather as a 
 part of the Church Triumphant than the poor, im- 
 perfect company on earth. And yet I saw some 
 young fellows about the smoking-room who seemed, 
 in the eyes of one who cannot count himself strait- 
 laced, in need of some more practical sort of teaching. 
 They seemed only eager to get drunk, and to do 
 so speedily. It was not much more than a week 
 after the New Year ; and to hear them return on 
 their past bouts with a gusto unspeakable was not 
 altogether pleasing. Here is one snatch of talk, for 
 the accuracy of which I can vouch — 
 
 ' Y^e had a spree here last Tuesday ? ' 
 
 ' We had that ! ' 
 
 ' I wasna able to be oot o' my bed. Man, I was 
 awful bad on Wednesday.' 
 
A WINTER'S WALK IN GALLOWAY 139 
 
 ' Ay, ye were gey bad." 
 
 And you should have seen the bright eyes, and 
 heard the sensual accents ! They recalled their 
 doings with devout gusto and a sort of rational 
 pride. Schoolboys, after their first drunkenness, are 
 not more boastful ; a cock does not plume himself 
 with a more unmingled satisfaction as he paces forth 
 among his harem ; and yet these were grown men, 
 and by no means short of wit. It was hard to sup- 
 pose they were very eager about the Second Coming : 
 it seemed as if some elementary notions of temperance 
 for the men and seemliness for the women would 
 have gone nearer the mark. And yet, as it seemed 
 to me typical of much that is evil in Scotland, May- 
 bole is also typical of much that is best. Some of 
 the factories, which have taken the place of weaving 
 in the town^s economy, were originally founded and 
 are still possessed by self-made men of the sterling, 
 stout old breed — fellows who made some little bit 
 of an invention, borrowed some little pocketful of 
 capital, and then, step by step, in courage, thrift 
 and industry, fought their way upwards to an assured 
 position. 
 
 Abercrummie has told you enough of the Tolbooth ; 
 but, as a bit of spelling, this inscription on the Tol- 
 booth bell seems too delicious to withhold : ' This bell 
 is founded at MaiboU Bi Danel Geli, a Frenchman, 
 the 6th November, 1696, Bi appointment of the 
 heritors of the parish of Maiyboll.' The Castle 
 deserves more notice. It is a large and shapely 
 tower, plain from the ground upwards, but with a 
 zone of ornamentation running about the top. In a 
 general way this adornment is perched on the very 
 
140 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 summit of the chimney-stacks; but there is one 
 corner more elaborate than the rest. A very heavy 
 string-course runs round the upper story, and just 
 above this, facing up the street, the tower carries a 
 small oriel window, fluted and corbelled and carved 
 about with stone heads. It is so ornate it has some- 
 what the air of a shrine. And it was, indeed, the 
 casket of a very precious jewel, for in the room to 
 which it gives light lay, for long years, the heroine of 
 the sweet old ballad of ' Johnnie Faa ' — she who, at 
 the call of the gipsies' songs, ' came tripping down 
 the stair, and all her maids before her.' Some people 
 say the ballad has no basis in fact, and have written, 
 I believe, unanswerable papers to the proof. But in 
 the face of all that, the very look of that high oriel 
 window convinces the imagination, and we enter into 
 all the sorrows of the imprisoned dame. We con- 
 ceive the burthen of the long, lack-lustre days, when 
 she leaned her sick head against the mullions, and 
 saw the burghers loafing in Maybole High Street, and 
 the children at play, and ruffling gallants riding by 
 from hunt or foray. We conceive the passion of odd 
 moments, when the wind threw up to her some snatch 
 of song, and her heart grew hot within her, and her 
 eyes overflowed at the memory of the past. And even 
 if the tale be not true of this or that lady, or this or 
 that old tower, it is true in the essence of all men 
 and women : for all of us, some time or other, hear 
 the gipsies singing ; over all of us is the glamour 
 cast. Some resist and sit resolutely by the fire. 
 Most go and are brought back again, like Lady 
 Cassilis. A few, of the tribe of Waring, go and are 
 seen no more ; only now and again, at springtime, 
 
A WINTERS WALK IN GALLOWAY 141 
 
 when the gipsies' song is afloat in the amethyst 
 evening, we can catch their voices in the glee. 
 
 By night it was clearer, and Maybole more visible 
 than during the day. Clouds coursed over the sky in 
 great masses ; the full moon battled the other way, 
 and lit up the snow with gleams of flying silver ; the 
 town came down the hill in a cascade of brown 
 gables, bestridden by smooth white roofs, and 
 spangled here and there with lighted windows. At 
 either end the snow stood high up in the darkness, 
 on the peak of the Tolbooth and among the chimneys 
 of the Castle. As the moon flashed a bulPs-eye 
 glitter across the town between the racing clouds, the 
 white roofs leaped into relief over the gables and the 
 chimney-stacks, and their shadows over the white 
 roofs. In the town itself the lit face of the clock 
 peered down the street ; an hour was hammered 
 out on Mr. Geli^s bell, and from behind the red 
 curtains of a public-house some one trolled out — a 
 compatriot of Burns, again ! — ' The saut tear blin's 
 my e'e."* 
 
 Next morning there was sun and a flapping wind. 
 From the street corners of Maybole I could catch 
 breezy glimpses of green fields. The road underfoot 
 was wet and heavy — part ice, part snow, part water ; 
 and any one I met greeted me, by way of salutation, 
 with 'A fine thowe' (thaw). My way lay among 
 rather bleak hills, and past bleak ponds and dilapi- 
 dated castles and monasteries, to the Highland-looking 
 village of Kirkoswald. It has little claim to notice, 
 save that Burns came there to study surveying in the 
 summer of 1777, and there also, in the kirkyard, the 
 original of Tarn o' Shanter sleeps his last sleep. It 
 
142 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 is worth noticing, however, that this was the first 
 place I thought ' Highland-looking/ Over the hill 
 from Kirkoswald a farm-road leads to the coast. As 
 I came down above Turnberry, the sea view was 
 indeed strangely different from the day before. The 
 cold fogs were all blown away; and there was Ailsa 
 Craig, like a refraction, magnified and deformed, of 
 the Bass Rock ; and there were the chiselled mountain- 
 tops of Arran, veined and tipped with snow ; and 
 behind, and fainter, the low, blue land of Can tyre. 
 Cottony clouds stood in a great castle over the top of 
 Arran, and blew out in long streamers to the south. 
 The sea was bitten all over with white ; little ships, 
 tacking up and down the Firth, lay over at different 
 angles in the wind. On Shanter they were ploughing 
 lea ; a cart foal, all in a field by himself, capered and 
 whinnied as if the spring were in him. 
 
 The road from Turnberry to Girvan lies along 
 the shore, among sand-hills and by wildernesses of 
 tumbled bent. Every here and there a few cottages 
 stood together beside a bridge. They had one odd 
 feature, not easy to describe in words : a triangular 
 porch projected from above the door, supported at 
 the apex by a single upright post ; a secondary door 
 was hinged to the post, and could be hasped on 
 either cheek of the real entrance ; so, whether the 
 wind was north or south, the cotter could make 
 himself a triangular bight of shelter where to set his 
 chair and finish a pipe with comfort. There is one 
 objection to this device ; for, as the post stands in 
 the middle of the fairway, any one precipitately 
 issuing from the cottage must run his chance of a 
 broken head. So far as I am aware, it is peculiar to 
 
A WINTER'S WALK IN GALLOWAY 143 
 
 the little corner of country about Girvan. And that 
 corner is noticeable for more reasons : it is certainly 
 one of the most characteristic districts in Scotland. 
 It has this movable porch by way of architecture ; it 
 has, as we shall see, a sort of remnant of provincial 
 costume, and it has the handsomest population in the 
 Lowlands. . . . 
 
V 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 1875-6 
 
 ON THE PLAIN 
 
 Perhaps the reader knows already the aspect of the 
 great levels of the Gatinais, where they border with 
 the wooded hills of Fontainebleau. Here and there 
 a few grey rocks creep out of the forest as if to sun 
 themselves. Here and there a few apple-trees stand 
 together on a knoll. The quaint, undignified tartan 
 of a myriad small fields dies out into the distance ; 
 the strips blend and disappear ; and the dead flat lies 
 forth open and empty, with no accident save perhaps 
 a thin line of trees or faint church spire against the 
 sky. Solemn and vast at all times, in spite of petti- 
 ness in the near details, the impression becomes more 
 solemn and vast towards evening. The sun goes 
 down, a swollen orange, as it were into the sea. A 
 blue-clad peasant rides home, with a harrow smoking 
 behind him among the dry clods. Another still 
 works with his wife in their little strip. An immense 
 shadow fills the plain ; these people stand in it up 
 to their shoulders ; and their heads, as they stoop 
 over their work and rise again, are relieved from 
 time to time against the golden sky. 
 
 144 
 
FOREST NOTES 145 
 
 These peasant farmers are well off* nowadays, and 
 not by any means overworked ; but somehow you 
 always see in them the historical representative of 
 the serf of yore, and think not so much of present 
 times, which may be prosperous enough, as of the old 
 days when the peasant was taxed beyond possibility 
 of payment, and lived, in Michelet's image, like a 
 hare between two furrows. These very people now 
 weeding their patch under the broad sunset, that 
 very man and his wife, it seems to us, have suffered 
 all the wrongs of France. It is they who have been 
 their country's scapegoat for long ages ; they who, 
 generation after generation, have sowed and not 
 reaped, reaped and another has garnered ; and who 
 have now entered into their reward, and enjoy their 
 good things in their turn. For the days are gone by 
 when the Seigneur ruled and profited. ' Le Seigneur,** 
 says the old formula, ' enferme ses manants comme 
 sous porte et gonds, du ciel a la terre. Tout est a 
 lui, foret chenue, oiseau dans Pair, poisson dans Teau, 
 bete au buisson, Ponde (|ui coule, la cloche dont le son 
 au loin roule." Such was his old state of sovereignty, 
 a local god rather than a mere king. And now you may 
 ask yourself where he is, and look round for vestiges 
 of my late lord, and in all the country-side there is 
 no trace of him but his forlorn and fallen mansion. 
 At the end of a long avenue, now sown Avith grain, 
 in the midst of a close full of cypresses and lilacs, 
 ducks and crowing chanticleers and droning bees, the 
 old chateau lifts its red chimneys and peaked roofs 
 and turning vanes into the wind and sun. There is 
 a glad spring bustle in the air, perhaps, and the 
 lilacs are all in flower, and the creepers green about 
 
146 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 the broken balustrade : but no spring shall revive the 
 honour of the place. Old women of the people, little 
 children of the people, saunter and gambol in the 
 walled court or feed the ducks in the neglected moat. 
 Plough-horses, mighty of limb, browse in the long 
 stables. The dial-hand on the clock waits for some 
 better hour. Out on the plain, where hot sweat 
 trickles into men^s eyes, and the spade goes in deep 
 and comes up slowly, perhaps the peasant may feel a 
 movement of joy at his heart when he thinks that 
 these spacious chimneys are now cold, which have so 
 often blazed and flickered upon gay folk at supper, 
 while he and his hollow-eyed children watched through 
 the night with empty bellies and cold feet. And 
 perhaps, as he raises his head and sees the forest 
 lying like a coast-line of low hills along the sea-level 
 of the plain, perhaps forest and chateau hold no 
 unsimilar place in his affections. 
 
 If the chateau was my lord's, the forest was my 
 lord the king's ; neither of them for this poor Jacques. 
 If he thought to eke out his meagre way of life by 
 some petty theft of wood for the fire, or for a new 
 roof-tree, he found himself face to face with a whole 
 department, from the Grand Master of the Woods 
 and Waters, who was a high-born lord, down to the 
 common sergeant, who was a peasant like himself, and 
 wore stripes or a bandoleer by way of uniform. For 
 the first offence, by the Salic law, there was a fine of 
 fifteen sols ; and should a man be taken more than 
 once in fault, or circumstances aggravate the colour of 
 his guilt, he might be whipped, branded, or hanged. 
 There was a hangman over at Melun, and, I doubt 
 not, a fine tall gibbet hard by the town gate, where 
 
FOREST NOTES 147 
 
 Jacques might see his fellows dangle against the sky 
 as he went to market. 
 
 And then, if he lived near to a cover, there would 
 be the more hares and rabbits to eat out his harvest, 
 and the more hunters to trample it down. My lord 
 has a new horn from England. He has laid out seven 
 francs in decorating it with silver and gold, and 
 fitting it with a silken leash to hang about his 
 shoulder. The hounds have been on a pilgrimage to 
 the shrine of Saint Mesmer, or Saint Hubert in the 
 Ardennes, or some other holy intercessor who has 
 made a speciality of the health of hunting-dogs. In 
 the grey dawn the game was turned and the branch 
 broken by our best piqueur. A rare day's hunting 
 lies before us. Wind a jolly flourish, sound the 
 hien-aller with all your lungs. Jacques must stand 
 by, hat in hand, while the quarry and hound and 
 huntsman sweep across his field, and a year's sparing 
 and labouring is as though it had not been. If he 
 can see the ruin with a good enough grace, who 
 knows but he may fall in favour with my lord ; who 
 knows but his son may become the last and least 
 among the servants at his lordship's kennel — one of 
 the two poor varlets who get no wages and sleep at 
 night among the hounds ? ^ 
 
 For all that, the forest has been of use to Jacques, 
 not only warming him with fallen wood, but giving 
 him shelter in days of sore trouble, when my lord of 
 the chateau, with all his troopers and trumpets, had 
 been beaten from field after field into some ultimate 
 
 ^ * Deux poures varlez qui n'ont nulz gages et qui gissoient la nuit 
 avec les chiens. ' See Champollion-Figeac's Louis et Charles d^ Orleans ^ 
 i. 63, and for my lord's English horn, ibid. 96. 
 
148 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 fastness, or lay over-seas in an English prison. In 
 these dark days, when the watch on the church 
 steeple saw the smoke of burning villages on the 
 sky-line, or a clump of spears and fluttering pennons 
 drawing nigh across the plain, these good folk gat 
 them up, with all their household gods, into the 
 wood, whence, from some high spur, their timid 
 scouts might overlook the coming and going of the 
 marauders, and see the harvest ridden down, and 
 church and cottage go up to heaven all night in 
 flame. It was but an unhomely refuge that the 
 woods afforded, where they must abide all change of 
 weather and keep house with wolves and vipers. 
 Often there was none left alive, when they returned, 
 to show the old divisions of field from field. And 
 yet, as times went, when the wolves entered at night 
 into depopulated Paris, and perhaps De Retz was 
 passing by with a company of demons like himself, 
 even in these caves and thickets there were glad hearts 
 and grateful prayers. 
 
 Once or twice, as I say, in the course of the ages, 
 the forest may have served the peasant well, but at 
 heart it is a royal forest, and noble by old associa- 
 tions. These woods have rung to the horns of all 
 the kings of France, from Philip Augustus down- 
 wards. They have seen Saint Louis exercise the 
 dogs he brought with him from Egypt ; Francis i. 
 go a-hunting with ten thousand horses in his train ; 
 and Peter of Russia following his first stag. And so 
 they are still haunted for the imagination by royal 
 hunts and progresses, and peopled with the faces of 
 memorable men of yore. And this distinction is not 
 only in virtue of the pastime of dead monarchs. 
 
FOREST NOTES 149 
 
 Great events, great revolutions, great cycles in the 
 affairs of men, have here left their note, here taken 
 shape in some significant and dramatic situation. 
 It was hence that Guise and his leaguers led Charles 
 the Ninth a prisoner to Paris. Here, booted and 
 spurred, and with all his dogs about him, Napoleon 
 met the Pope beside a woodland cross. Here, on his 
 way to Elba not so long after, he kissed the eagle of 
 the Old Guard, and spoke words of passionate fare- 
 well to his soldiers. And here, after Waterloo, rather 
 than yield its ensign to the new power, one of his 
 faithful regiments burned that memorial of so much 
 toil and glory on the Grand Master's table, and 
 drank its dust in brandy, as a devout priest consumes 
 the remnants of the Host. 
 
 IN THE SEASON 
 
 Close into the edge of the forest, so close that the 
 trees of the hoimage stand pleasantly about the last 
 houses, sits a certain small and very quiet village. 
 There is but one street, and that, not long ago, was a 
 green lane, where the cattle browsed between the door- 
 steps. As you go up this street, drawing ever nearer 
 the beginning of the wood, you will arrive at last 
 before an inn where artists lodge. To the door (for I 
 imagine it to be six o'clock on some fine summer's even), 
 half a dozen, or maybe half a score, of people have 
 brought out chairs, and now sit sunning themselves, 
 and waiting the onuiibus from Melun. If you go on 
 into the court you will find as many more, some in 
 the billiard-room over absinthe and a match of corks, 
 
150 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 some without over a last cigar and a vermouth. The 
 doves coo and flutter from the dovecot ; Hortense is 
 drawing water from the well ; and as all the rooms 
 open into the court, you can see the white-capped cook 
 over the furnace in the kitchen, and some idle painter, 
 who has stored his canvases and washed his brushes, 
 jangling a waltz on the crazy, tongue-tied piano in 
 the salle-a-manger. ' Edmoud, encore tin vei'rnoutli^'' 
 cries a man in velveteen, adding in a tone of apolo- 
 getic afterthought, ' un double, s'il vous plait.'' ' Where 
 are you working ? ' asks one in pure white linen from 
 top to toe. ' At the Carrefour de FEpine,' returns the 
 other in corduroy (they are all gaitered, by the way). 
 * I couldn't do a thing to it. I ran out of white. 
 Where were you ? ' 'I wasn't working. I was looking 
 for motives.' Here is an outbreak of jubilation, and 
 a lot of men clustering together about some new- 
 comer with outstretched hands ; perhaps the ' corre- 
 spondence ' has come in and brought So-and-so from 
 Paris, or perhaps it is only So-and-so who has walked 
 over from Chailly to dinner. 
 
 ' A table. Messieurs! ' cries M. Siron, bearing through 
 the court the first tureen of soup. And immediately 
 the company begins to settle down about the long 
 tables in the dining-room, framed all round with 
 sketches of all degrees of merit and demerit. There 's 
 the big picture of the huntsman winding a horn with 
 a dead boar between his legs, and his legs — well, his 
 legs in stockings. And here is the little picture of a 
 raw mutton-chop, in which Such-a-one knocked a 
 hole last summer with no worse a missile than a 
 plum from the dessert. And under all these works 
 of art so much eating goes forward, so much drinking. 
 
FOREST NOTES 151 
 
 so much jabbering in French and English, that it 
 would do your heart good merely to peep and listen 
 at the door. One man is telling how they all went 
 last year to the fete at Fleury, and another how well 
 So-and-so would sing of an evening : and here are a 
 third and fourth making plans for the whole future of 
 their lives; and there is a fifth imitating a conjurer 
 and making faces on his clenched fist, surely of all arts 
 the most difficult and admirable ! A sixth has eaten 
 his fill, lights a cigarette, and resigns himself to 
 digestion. A seventh has just dropped in, and calls 
 for soup. Number eight, meanwhile, has left the 
 table, and is once more trampling the poor piano 
 under powerful and uncertain fingers. 
 
 Dinner over, people drop outside to smoke and 
 chat. Perhaps we go along to visit our friends at the 
 other end of the village, where there is always a good 
 welcome and a good talk, and perhaps some pickled 
 oysters and white wine to close the evening. Or a 
 dance is organised in the dining-room, and the piano 
 exhibits all its paces under manful jockeying, to the 
 light of three or four candles and a lamp or two, 
 while the waltzers move to and fro upon the wooden 
 floor, and sober men, who are not given to such light 
 pleasures, get up on the table or the sideboard, and sit 
 there looking on approvingly over a pipe and a tumbler 
 of wine. Or sometimes — suppose my lady moon 
 looks forth, and the court from out the half-lit 
 dining-room seems nearly as bright as by day, and the 
 light picks out the window-panes, and makes a clear 
 shadow under every vine-leaf on the wall — sometimes 
 a picnic is proposed, and a basket made ready, and a 
 good procession formed in front of the hotel. The 
 
152 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 two trumpeters in honour go before; and as we file 
 down the long alley, and up through devious foot- 
 paths among rocks and pine-trees, with every here and 
 there a dark passage of shadow, and every here and 
 there a spacious outlook over moonlit woods, these 
 two precede us and sound many a jolly flourish as 
 they walk. We gather ferns and dry boughs into 
 the cavern, and soon a good blaze flutters the shadows 
 of the old bandits' haunt, and shows shapely beards 
 and comely faces and toilettes ranged about the 
 wall. The bowl is lit, and the punch is burnt and 
 sent round in scalding thimblefuls. So a good hour 
 or two may pass with song and jest. And then we 
 go home in the moonlit morning, straggling a good 
 deal among the birch tufts and the boulders, but ever 
 called together again, as one of our leaders winds his 
 horn. Perhaps some one of the party will not heed 
 the summons, but chooses out some by-way of his 
 own. As he follows the winding sandy road, he 
 hears the flourishes grow fainter and fainter in the 
 distance, and die finally out, and still walks on in the 
 strange coolness and silence and between the crisp 
 lights and shadows of the moonlit woods, until 
 suddenly the bell rings out the hour from far-away 
 Chailly, and he starts to find himself alone. No 
 surf-bell on forlorn and perilous shores, no passing 
 knell over the busy market-place, can speak with a 
 more heavy and disconsolate tongue to human ears. 
 Each stroke calls up a host of ghostly reverberations 
 in his mind. And as he stands rooted, it has grown 
 once more so utterly silent that it seems to him he 
 might hear the church bells ring the hour out all the 
 world over, not at Chailly only, but in Paris, and 
 
FOREST NOTES 153 
 
 away in outlandish cities, and in the village on the 
 river, where his childhood passed between the sun and 
 flowers. 
 
 IDLE HOURS 
 
 The woods by night, in all their uncanny effect, are 
 not rightly to be understood until you can compare 
 them with the woods by day. The stillness of the 
 medium, the floor of glittering sand, these trees that 
 go streaming up like monstrous sea-weeds and waver 
 in the movino^ winds like the weeds in submarine 
 currents, all these set the mind working on the thought 
 of what you may have seen off" a foreland or over the 
 side of a boat, and make you feel like a diver, down 
 in the quiet water, fathoms below the tumbling, 
 transitory surface of the sea. And yet in itself, as I 
 say, the strangeness of these nocturnal solitudes is not 
 to be felt fully without the sense of contrast. You 
 must have risen in the morning and seen the woods 
 as they are by day, kindled and coloured in the sun's 
 light ; you must have felt the odour of innumerable 
 trees at even, the unsparing heat along the forest 
 roads, and the coolness of the groves. 
 
 And on the first morning you will doubtless rise 
 betimes. If you have not been wakened before by the 
 visit of some adventurous pigeon, you will be wakened 
 as soon as the sun can reach your window — for there 
 are no blind or shutters to keep him out — and the 
 room, with its bare wood floor and bare whitewashed 
 walls, shines all round you in a sort of glory of re- 
 flected lights. You may doze a while longer by 
 snatches, or lie awake to study the charcoal men and 
 dogs and horses with which former occupants have 
 
154 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 defiled the partitions : Thiers, with wily profile ; local 
 celebrities, pipe in hand ; or, maybe, a romantic 
 landscape splashed in oil. Meanwhile artist after 
 artist drops into the salle-a-manger for coffee, and 
 then shoulders easel, sunshade, stool, and paint-box, 
 bound into a fagot, and sets off for what he calls 
 his ' motive.'' And artist after artist, as he goes 
 out of the village, carries with him a little following 
 of dogs. For the dogs, who belong only nominally 
 to any special master, hang about the gate of 
 the forest all day long, and whenever any one 
 goes by who hits their fancy, profit by his escort, 
 and go forth with him to play an hour or two 
 at hunting. They would like to be under the trees 
 all day. But they cannot go alone. They require 
 a pretext. And so they take the passing artist as 
 an excuse to go into the woods, as they might take a 
 walking-stick as an excuse to bathe. With quick 
 ears, long spines, and bandy legs, or perhaps as 
 tall as a greyhound and with a bulldog''s head, this 
 company of mongrels will trot by your side all day 
 and come home with you at night, still showing white 
 teeth and wagging stunted tail. Their good humour 
 is not to be exhausted. You may pelt them with 
 stones if you please, and all they will do is to give 
 you a wider berth. If once they come out with you, 
 to you they will remain faithful, and with you 
 return ; although if you meet them next morning in 
 the street, it is as like as not they will cut you with 
 a countenance of brass. 
 
 The forest — a strange thing for an Englishman — 
 is very destitute of birds. This is no country where 
 every patch of wood among the meadows gibes up an 
 
FOREST NOTES 155 
 
 increase of song, and every valley wandered through 
 by a streamlet rings and reverberates from side to 
 side with a profusion of clear notes. And this rarity 
 of birds is not to be regretted on its own account 
 only. For the insects prosper in their absence, and 
 become as one of the plagues of Egypt. Ants swarm 
 in the hot sand ; mosquitos drone their nasal drone ; 
 wherever the sun finds a hole in the roof of the forest, 
 you see a myriad transparent creatures coming and 
 going in the shaft of light ; and even between-whiles, 
 even where there is no incursion of sun-rays into the 
 dark arcade of the wood, you are conscious of a con- 
 tinual drift of insects, an ebb and flow of infinitesimal 
 living things between the trees. Nor are insects the 
 only evil creatures that haunt the forest. For you 
 may plump into a cave among the rocks, and find 
 yourself face to face with a wild boar, or see a crooked 
 viper slither across the road. 
 
 Perhaps you may set yourself down in the bay 
 between two spreading beech-roots with a book on 
 your lap, and be awakened all of a sudden by a 
 friend : ' I say, just keep where you are, will you ? 
 You make the j oiliest motive.' And you reply : 
 • Well, I don't mind, if I may smoke.' And there- 
 after the hours go idly by. Your friend at the easel 
 labours doggedly a little way off, in the wide shadow 
 of the tree ; and yet farther, across a strait of glaring 
 sunshine, you see another painter, encamped in the 
 shadow of another tree, and up to his waist in the 
 fern. You cannot watch your own effigy growing out 
 of the white trunk, and the trunk beginning to stand 
 forth from the rest of the wood, and the whole 
 picture getting dappled over with the flecks of sun 
 
156 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 that slip through the leaves overhead, and, as a wind 
 goes by and sets the trees a-talking, flicker hither and 
 thither like butterflies of light. But you know it 
 is going forward ; and, out of emulation with the 
 painter, get ready your own palette, and lay out the 
 colour for a woodland scene in words. 
 
 Your tree stands in a hollow paved with fern and 
 heather, set in a basin of low hills, and scattered over 
 with rocks and junipers. All the open is steeped in 
 pitiless sunlight. Everything stands out as though 
 it were cut in cardboard, every colour is strained into 
 its highest key. The boulders are some of them 
 upright and dead like monolithic castles, some of 
 them prone like sleeping cattle. The junipers — 
 looking, in their soiled and ragged mourning, like 
 some funeral procession that has gone seeking the 
 place of sepulchre three hundred years and more in 
 wind and rain — are daubed in forcibly against the 
 glowing ferns and heather. Every tassel of their 
 rusty foliage is defined with pre-Raphaelite minute- 
 ness. And a sorry figure they make out there in 
 the sun, like misbegotten yew-trees ! The scene is 
 all pitched in a key of colour so peculiar, and lit up 
 with such a discharge of violent sunlight, as a man 
 might live fifty years in England and not see. 
 
 Meanwhile at your elbow some one tunes up a 
 song, words of Ronsard to a pathetic tremulous air, 
 of how the poet loved his mistress long ago, and 
 pressed on her the flight of time, and told her how 
 white and quiet the dead lay under the stones, and 
 how the boat dipped and pitched as the shades 
 embarked for the passionless land. Yet a little 
 while, sang the poet, and there shall be no more 
 
FOREST NOTES 157 
 
 love ; only to sit and remember loves that might 
 have been. There is a falling flourish in the air that 
 remains in the memory and comes back in incon- 
 gruous places, on the seat of hansoms or in the warm 
 bed at night, with something of a forest savour. 
 
 ' You can get up now,' says the painter ; ' I 'm at 
 the background." 
 
 And so up you get, stretching yourself, and go 
 your way into the wood, the daylight becoming- 
 richer and more golden, and the shadows stretching 
 farther into the open. A cool air comes along the 
 highways, and the scents awaken. The fir-trees 
 breathe abroad their ozone. Out of unknown 
 thickets comes forth the soft, secret, aromatic odour 
 of the woods, not like a smell of the free heaven, but 
 as though court ladies, who had known these paths 
 in ages long gone by, still walked in the summer 
 evenings, and shed from their brocades a breath of 
 musk or bergamot upon the woodland winds. One 
 side of the long avenues is still kindled with the sun, 
 the other is plunged in transparent shadow. Over 
 the trees the west begins to burn like a furnace ; and 
 the painters gather up their chattels, and go down, 
 by avenue or footpath, to the plain. 
 
 A PLEASURE-PARTY 
 
 As this excursion is a matter of some length, and, 
 moreover, we go in force, we have set aside our usual 
 vehicle, the pony-cart, and ordered a large wagonette 
 from Lejosne's. It has been waiting for near an 
 hour, while one went to pack a knapsack, and t'other 
 hurried over his toilette and coffee ; but now it is 
 
158 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 filled from end to end with merry folk in summer 
 attire, the coachman cracks his whip, and amid much 
 applause from round the inn door off we rattle at 
 a spanking trot. The way lies through the forest, 
 up hill and down dale, and by beech and pine wood, 
 in the cheerful morning sunshine. The English 
 get down at all the ascents and walk on ahead for 
 exercise ; the French are mightily entertained at this, 
 and keep coyly underneath the tilt. As we go we 
 carry with us a pleasant noise of laughter and light 
 speech, and some one will be always breaking out into 
 a bar or two of opera bouffe. Before we get to the 
 Route Ronde here comes Desprez, the colourman 
 from Fontainebleau, trudging across on his weekly 
 peddle with a case of merchandise ; and it is ' Desprez, 
 leave me some malachite green ^ ; ' Desprez, leave me 
 so much canvas ' ; ' Desprez, leave me this, or leave 
 me that'; M. Desprez standing the while in the sun- 
 light with grave face and many salutations. The 
 next interruption is more important. For some time 
 back we have had the sound of cannon in our ears ; 
 and now, a little past Franchard, we find a mounted 
 trooper holding a led horse, who brings the wagonette 
 to a stand. The artillery is practising in the Quadri- 
 lateral, it appears ; passage along the Route Ronde 
 formally interdicted for the moment. There is no- 
 thing for it but to draw up at the glaring cross-roads, 
 and get down to make fun with the notorious 
 Cocardon, the most ungainly and ill-bred dog of all 
 the ungainly and ill-bred dogs of Barbizon, or clamber 
 about the sandy banks. And meanwhile the doctor, 
 with sun umbrella, wide Panama, and patriarchal 
 beard, is busy wheedling and (for aught the rest of 
 
FOREST NOTES 159 
 
 us know) bribing the too facile sentry. His speech 
 is smooth and dulcet, his manner dignified and 
 insinuating. It is not for nothing that the Doctor 
 has voyaged all the world over, and speaks all 
 languages from French to Patagonian. He has not 
 come home from perilous journeys to be thwarted by 
 a corporal of horse. And so we soon see the soldier's 
 mouth relax, and his shoulders imitate a relenting 
 heart. ' En voiture. Messieurs, Mesdames,'' sings the 
 Doctor ; and on we go again at a good round pace, 
 for black care follows hard after us, and discretion 
 prevails not a little over valour in some timorous 
 spirits of the party. At any moment we may meet 
 the sergeant, who will send us back. At any moment 
 we may encounter a flying shell, which will send us 
 somewhere farther off than Grez. 
 
 Grez — for that is our destination — has been highly 
 recommended for its beauty. ^ Ily a de Veau,'' people 
 have said, with an emphasis, as if that settled the 
 question, which, for a French mind, I am rather led 
 to think it does. And Grez, when we get there, is 
 indeed a place worthy of some praise. It lies out of 
 the forest, a cluster of houses, with an old bridge, an 
 old castle in ruin, and a quaint old church. The 
 inn garden descends in terraces to the river ; stable- 
 yard, kailyard, orchard, and a space of lawn, fringed 
 with rushes and embellished with a green arbour. 
 On the opposite bank there is a reach of English- 
 looking plain, set thickly with willows and poplars. 
 And between the two lies the river, clear and deep, 
 and full of reeds and floating lilies. Water-plants 
 cluster about the starlings of the long low bridge, 
 and stand half-way up upon the piers in green luxuri- 
 
160 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 ance. They catch the dipped oar with long antennae, 
 and chequer the slimy bottom with the shadow of 
 their leaves. And the river wanders hither and 
 thither among the islets, and is smothered and 
 broken up by the reeds, like an old building in the 
 lithe, hardy arms of the climbing ivy. You may 
 watch the box where the good man of the inn keeps 
 fish alive for his kitchen, one oily ripple following 
 another over the top of the yellow deal. And you 
 can hear a splashing and a prattle of voices from the 
 shed under the old kirk, where the village women 
 wash and wash all day among the fish and water- 
 lilies. It seems as if linen washed there should be 
 specially cool and sweet. 
 
 We have come here for the river. And no sooner 
 have we all bathed than we board the two shallops 
 and push ofl' gaily, and go gliding under the trees and 
 gathering a great treasure of water-lilies. Some one 
 sings ; some trail their hands in the cool water ; some 
 lean over the gunwale to see the image of the tall 
 poplars far below, and the shadow of the boat, with 
 the balanced oars and their own head protruded, glide 
 smoothly over the yellow floor of the stream. At 
 last, the day declining — all silent and happy, and up 
 to the knees in the wet lilies — we punt slowly back 
 again to the landing-place beside the bridge. There 
 is a wish for solitude on all. One hides himself in 
 the arbour with a cigarette ; another goes a walk in 
 the country with Cocardon ; a third inspects the 
 church. And it is not till dinner is on the table, and 
 the inn's best wine goes round from glass to glass, 
 that we begin to throw ofl' the restraint and fuse once 
 more into a jolly fellowship. 
 
FOREST NOTES 161 
 
 Half the party are to return to-night with the 
 wagonette ; and some of the others, loath to break up 
 good company, will go with them a bit of the way 
 and drink a stirrup-cup at Marlotte. It is dark in 
 the wagonette, and not so merry as it might have 
 been. The coachman loses the road. So-and-so 
 tries to light fireworks with the most indifferent 
 success. Some sing, but the rest are too weary to 
 applaud ; and it seems as if the festival were fairly at 
 an end — 
 
 ' Nous avons fait la noce, 
 Rentrons a nos foyers ! ' 
 
 And such is the burthen, even after we have come to 
 Marlotte and taken our places in the court at Mother 
 Antonine's. There is punch on the long table out in 
 the open air, where the guests dine in summer weather. 
 The candles flare in the night wind, and the faces 
 round the punch are lit up, with shifting emphasis, 
 against a background of complete and solid darkness. 
 It is all picturesque enough ; but the fact is, we are 
 aweary. We yawn ; we are out of the vein ; we have 
 made the wedding, as the song says, and now, for 
 pleasure's sake, let 's make an end on 't. When here 
 comes striding into the court, booted to mid-thigh, 
 spurred and splashed, in a jacket of green cord, the 
 great, famous, and redoubtable Blank ; and in a 
 moment the fire kindles again, and the night is 
 witness of our laughter as he imitates Spaniards, 
 Germans, Englishmen, picture-dealers, all eccentric 
 ways of speaking and thinking, with a possession, 
 a fury, a strain of mind and voice, that would rather 
 suggest a nervous crisis than a desire to please. We 
 are as merry as ever when the trap sets forth again, 
 
 L 
 
162 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 and say farewell noisily to all the good folk going 
 farther. Then, as we are far enough from thoughts 
 of sleep, we visit Blank in his quaint house, and sit 
 an hour or so in a great tapestried chamber, laid with 
 furs, littered with sleeping hounds, and lit up, in 
 fantastic shadow and shine, by a wood fire in a 
 mediaeval chimney. And then we plod back through 
 the darkness to the inn beside the river. 
 
 How quick bright things come to confusion ! 
 When we arise next morning, the grey showers fall 
 steadily, the trees hang limp, and the face of the 
 stream is spoiled with dimpling raindrops. Yester- 
 day's lilies encumber the garden walk, or begin, dis- 
 mally enough, their voyage towards the Seine and the 
 salt sea. A sickly shimmer lies upon the dripping 
 house-roofs, and all the colour is washed out of the 
 green and golden landscape of last night, as though 
 an envious man had taken a water - colour sketch 
 and blotted it together with a sponge. We go out 
 a-walking in the wet roads. But the roads about 
 Grez have a trick of their own. They go on for a 
 while among clumps of willows and patches of vine, 
 and then, suddenly and without any warning, cease 
 and determine in some miry hollow or upon some 
 bald knowe ; and you have a short period of hope, 
 then right-about face, and back the way you came ! 
 So we draw about the kitchen fire and play a round 
 game of cards for ha'pence, or go to the billiard-room 
 for a match at corks ; and by one consent a messenger 
 is sent over for the wagonette — Grez shall be left 
 to-morrow. 
 
 To-morrow dawns so fair that two of the party 
 agree to walk back for exercise, and let their knap- 
 
FOREST NOTES 163 
 
 sacks follow by the trap. I need hardly say they are 
 neither of them French ; for, of all English phrases, the 
 phrase ' for exercise ' is the least comprehensible across 
 the Straits of Dover. All goes well for a while with 
 the pedestrians. The wet woods are full of scents in 
 the noontide. At a certain cross, where there is a 
 guardhouse, they make a halt, for the forester's wife 
 is the daughter of their good host at Barbizon. 
 And so there they are hospitably received by the 
 comely woman, with one child in her arms and 
 another prattling and tottering at her gown, and 
 drink some syrup of quince in the back parlour, with 
 a map of the forest on the wall, and some prints of 
 love-affairs and the great Napoleon hunting. As they 
 draw near the Quadrilateral, and hear once more the 
 report of the big guns, they take a by-road to avoid 
 the sentries, and go on a while somewhat vaguely, 
 with the sound of the cannon in their ears and the 
 rain beginning to fall. The ways grow wider and 
 sandier ; here and there there are real sand-hills, as 
 though by the sea-shore ; the fir- wood is open and 
 grows in clumps upon the hillocks, and the race of 
 sign-posts is no more. One begins to look at the 
 other doubtfully. ' I am sure we should keep more to 
 the right,' says one ; and the other is just as certain 
 they should hold to the left. And now, suddenly, 
 the heavens open, and the rain falls * sheer and strong 
 and loud," as out of a shower-bath. In a moment 
 they are as wet as shipwrecked sailors. They cannot 
 see out of their eyes for the drift, and the water 
 churns and gurgles in their boots. They leave the 
 track and try across country with a gambler's despera- 
 tion, for it seems as if it were impossible to make 
 
164 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 the situation worse ; and, for the next hour, go 
 scrambling from boulder to boulder, or plod along 
 paths that are now no more than rivulets, and across 
 waste clearings where the scattered shells and broken 
 fir-trees tell all too plainly of the cannon in the 
 distance. And meantime the cannon grumble out 
 responses to the grumbling thunder. There is such a 
 mixture of melodrama and sheer discomfort about all 
 this, it is at once so grey and so lurid, that it is far 
 more agreeable to read and write about by the 
 chimney-corner than to suffer in the person. At last 
 they chance on the right path, and make Franchard 
 in the early evening, the sorriest pair of wanderers 
 that ever welcomed English ale. Thence, by the Bois 
 d'Hyver, the Ventes- Alexandre, and the Pins Brules, 
 to the clean hostelry, dry clothes, and dinner. 
 
 THE WOODS IN SPRING 
 
 I think you will like the forest best in the sharp 
 early springtime, when it is just beginning to re- 
 awaken, and innumerable violets peep from among 
 the fallen leaves ; when two or three people at most 
 sit down to dinner, and, at table, you will do well to 
 keep a rug about your knees, for the nights are chill, 
 and the salle-a-manger opens on the court. There is 
 less to distract the attention, for one thing, and the 
 forest is more itself. It is not bedotted with artists' 
 sunshades as with unknown mushrooms, nor bestrewn 
 with the remains of English picnics. The hunting 
 still goes on, and at any moment your heart may be 
 brought into your mouth as you hear far-away horns ; 
 or you may be told by an agitated peasant that the 
 
FOREST NOTES 165 
 
 Vicomte has gone up the avenue, not ten minutes 
 since, ' a fond de train, monsieur, et avec doiize 
 piqueurs.'' 
 
 If you go up to some coign of vantage in the system 
 of low hills that permeates the forest, you will see 
 many different tracts of country, each of its own cold 
 and melancholy neutral tint, and all mixed together 
 and mingled the one into the other at the seams. 
 You will see tracts of leafless beeches of a faint 
 yellowish grey, and leafless oaks a little ruddier in the 
 hue. Then zones of pine of a solemn green ; and, 
 dotted among the pines, or standing by themselves in 
 rocky clearings, the delicate, snow-white trunks of 
 birches, spreading out into snow-white branches yet 
 more delicate, and crowned and canopied with a 
 purple haze of twigs. And then a long, bare ridge 
 of tumbled boulders, with bright sand-breaks between 
 them, and wavering sandy roads among the bracken 
 and brown heather. It is all rather cold and un- 
 homely. It has not the perfect beauty, nor the 
 gem-like colouring, of the wood in the later year, 
 when it is no more than one vast colonnade of verdant 
 shadow, tremulous with insects, intersected here and 
 there by lanes of sunlight set in purple heather. The 
 loveliness of the woods in March is not, assuredly, of 
 this blowzy rustic type. It is made sharp with a 
 grain of salt, with a touch of ugliness. It has a 
 sting like the sting of bitter ale; you acquire the love 
 of it as men acquire a taste for olives. And the 
 wonderful clear, pure air wells into your lungs the 
 while by voluptuous inhalations, and makes the eyes 
 bright, and sets the heart tinkling to a new tune^ — 
 or, rather, to an old tune ; for you remember in your 
 
166 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 boyhood something akin to this spirit of adventure, 
 this thirst for exploration, that now takes you master- 
 fully by the hand, plunges you into many a deep 
 grove, and drags you over many a stony crest. It 
 is as if the whole wood were full of friendly voices 
 calling you farther in, and you turn from one side to 
 another, like Buridan'^s donkey, in a maze of pleasure. 
 Comely beeches send up their white, straight, 
 clustered branches, barred with green moss, like so 
 many fingers from a half-clenched hand. Mighty oaks 
 stand to the ankles in a fine tracery of underwood ; 
 thence the tall shaft climbs upwards, and the great 
 forest of stalwart boughs spreads out into the golden 
 evening sky, where the rooks are flying and calling. 
 On the sward of the Bois d'Hyver the firs stand well 
 asunder with outspread arms, like fencers saluting ; 
 and the air smells of resin all around, and the sound 
 of the axe is rarely still. But strangest of all, and 
 in appearance oldest of all, are the dim and wizard 
 upland districts of young wood. The ground is 
 carpeted with fir-tassel, and strewn with fir-apples 
 and flakes of fallen bark. Rocks lie crouching in 
 the thicket, guttered with rain, tufted with lichen, 
 white with years and the rigours of the changeful 
 seasons. Brown and yellow butterflies are sown and 
 carried away again by the light air — like thistledown. 
 The loneliness of these coverts is so excessive, that 
 there are moments when pleasure draws to the verge 
 of fear. You listen and listen for some noise to 
 break the silence, till you grow half mesmerised by 
 the intensity of the strain; your sense of your own 
 identity is troubled ; your brain reels, like that of 
 some gymnosophist poring on his own nose in Asiatic 
 
FOREST NOTES 167 
 
 jungles ; and should you see your own outspread 
 feet, you see them, not as anything of yours, but as 
 a feature of the scene around you. 
 
 Still the forest is always, but the stillness is not 
 always unbroken. You can hear the wind pass in 
 the distance over the tree-tops ; sometimes briefly, 
 like the noise of a train ; sometimes with a long 
 steady rush, like the breaking of waves. And some- 
 times, close at hand, the branches move, a moan goes 
 through the thicket, and the wood thrills to its heart. 
 Perhaps you may hear a carriage on the road to 
 Fontainebleau, a bird gives a dry continual chirp, the 
 dead leaves rustle underfoot, or you may time your 
 steps to the steady recurrent strokes of the woodman^s 
 axe. From time to time, over the low grounds, a 
 flight of rooks goes by ; and from time to time the 
 cooing of wild doves falls upon the ear, not sweet and 
 rich and near at hand as in England, but a sort of 
 voice of the woods, thin and far away, as fits these 
 solemn places. Or you hear suddenly the hollow, 
 eager, violent barking of dogs ; scared deer flit past 
 you through the fringes of the wood ; then a man or 
 two running, in green blouse, with gun and game-bag 
 on a bandoleer ; and then, out of the thick of the 
 trees, comes the jar of rifle-shots. Or perhaps the 
 hounds are out, and horns are blown, and scarlet- 
 coated huntsmen flash through the clearings, and the 
 solid noise of horses galloping passes below you, 
 where you sit perched among the rocks and heather. 
 The boar is afoot, and all over the forest, and in all 
 neighbouring villages, there is a vague excitement 
 and a vague hope ; for who knows whither the chase 
 may lead ? and even to have seen a single piqueur, 
 
168 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 or spoken to a single sportsman, is to be a man of 
 consequence for the night. 
 
 Besides men who shoot and men who ride with 
 the hounds, there are few people in the forest, 
 in the early spring, save woodcutters plying their 
 axes steadily, and old women and children gather- 
 ing wood for the fire. You may meet such a party 
 coming home in the twilight : the old woman laden 
 with a fagot of chips, and the little ones hauling 
 a long branch behind them in her wake. That is 
 the worst of what there is to encounter ; and if I 
 tell you of what once happened to a friend of mine, 
 it is by no means to tantalise you with false hopes ; 
 for the adventure was unique. It was on a very cold, 
 still, sunless morning, with a flat grey sky and a 
 frosty tingle in the air, that this friend (who shall 
 here be nameless) heard the notes of a key-bugle 
 played with much hesitation, and saw the smoke of a 
 fire spread out along the green pine- tops, in a remote 
 uncanny glen, hard by a hill of naked boulders. He 
 drew near warily, and beheld a picnic party seated 
 under a tree in an open. The old father knitted a 
 sock, the mother sat staring at the fire. The eldest 
 son, in the uniform of a private of dragoons, was 
 choosing out notes on a key-bugle. Two or three 
 daughters lay in the neighbourhood picking violets. 
 And the whole party as grave and silent as the woods 
 around them ! My friend watched for a long time, 
 he says ; but all held their peace ; not one spoke or 
 smiled ; only the dragoon kept choosing out single 
 notes upon the bugle, and the father knitted away 
 at his work and made strange movements the while 
 with his flexible eyebrows. They took no notice 
 
FOREST NOTES 169 
 
 whatever of my friend^s presence, which was disquiet- 
 ing in itself, and increased the resemblance of the 
 whole party to mechanical waxworks. Certainly, he 
 affirms, a wax figure might have played the bugle 
 with more spirit than that strange dragoon. And 
 as this hypothesis of his became more certain, the 
 awful insolubility of why they should be left out 
 there in the woods with nobody to wind them up 
 again when they ran down, and a growing disquietude 
 as to what might happen next, became too much for 
 his courage, and he turned tail, and fairly took to 
 his heels. It might have been a singing in his ears, 
 but he fancies he was followed as he ran by a peal 
 of Titanic laughter. Nothing has ever transpired to 
 clear up the mystery ; it may be they were automata ; 
 or it may be (and this is the theory to which I lean 
 myself) that this is all another chapter of Heine's 
 ' Gods in Exile ' ; that the upright old man with the 
 eyebrows was no other than Father Jove, and the 
 young dragoon with the taste for music either Apollo 
 or Mars. 
 
 MORALITY 
 
 Strange indeed is the attraction of the forest for 
 the minds of men. Not one or two only, but a 
 great chorus of grateful voices have arisen to spread 
 abroad its fame. Half the famous writers of modern 
 France have had their word to say about Fontaine- 
 bleau. Chateaubriand, Michelet, Beranger, George 
 Sand, de Senancour, Flaubert, Murger, the brothers 
 Goncourt, Theodore de Banville, each of these has 
 done something to the eternal praise and memory of 
 these woods. Even at the very worst of times, even 
 
170 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 when the picturesque was anathema in the eyes of 
 all Persons of Taste, the forest still preserved a 
 certain reputation for beauty. It was in 1730 that 
 the Abbe Guilbert published his Historical Description 
 of the Palace, Town, and Forest of Fontainebleau. 
 And very droll it is to see him, as he tries to set 
 forth his admiration in terms of what was then 
 permissible. The monstrous rocks, etc., says the 
 Abbe ' sont admirees avec surprise des voyageurs qui 
 s'ecrient aussitot avec Horace : Ut mihi devio rupes 
 et vacuum nemus mirari libet."' The good man is 
 not exactly lyrical in his praise ; and you see how 
 he sets his back against Horace as against a trusty 
 oak. Horace, at any rate, was classical. For the 
 rest, however, the Abbe likes places where many 
 alleys meet ; or w^hich, like the Belle-Etoile, are kept 
 up ' by a special gardener," and admires at the Table 
 du Roi the labours of the Grand Master of Woods 
 and Waters, the Sieur de la Falure, ' qui a fait faire 
 ce magnifique endroit." 
 
 But indeed, it is not so much for its beauty that 
 the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for 
 that subtle something, that quality of the air, that 
 emanation from the old trees, that so wonderfully 
 changes and renews a weary spirit. Disappointed 
 men, sick Francis Firsts and vanquished Grand 
 Monarchs, time out of mind have come here for 
 consolation. Hither perplexed folk have retired out 
 of the press of life, as into a deep bay-window on 
 some night of masquerade, and here found quiet and 
 silence, and rest, the mother of wisdom. It is the 
 great moral spa ; this forest without a fountain is 
 itself the great fountain of Juventius. It is the best 
 
FOREST NOTES 171 
 
 place in the world to bring an old sorrow that has 
 been a long while your friend and enemy ; and if, 
 like Beranger's, your gaiety has run away from home 
 and left open the door for sorrow to come in, of all 
 covers in Europe, it is here you may expect to find 
 the truant hid. With every hour you change. The 
 air penetrates through your clothes, and nestles to 
 your living body. You love exercise and slumber, 
 long fasting and full meals. You forget all your 
 scruples and live a while in peace and freedom, and 
 for the moment only. For here, all is absent that 
 can stimulate to moral feeling. Such people as you 
 see may be old, or toil-worn, or sorry ; but you see 
 them framed in the forest, like figures on a painted 
 canvas ; and for you, they are not people in any 
 living and kindly sense. You forget the grim con- 
 trariety of interests. You forget the narrow lane 
 where all men jostle together in unchivalrous con- 
 tention, and the kennel, deep and unclean, that gapes 
 on either hand for the defeated. Life is simple 
 enough, it seems, and the very idea of sacrifice 
 becomes like a mad fancy out of a last night's dream. 
 Your ideal is not perhaps high, but it is plain 
 and possible. You become enamoured of a life of 
 change and movement and the open air, where the 
 muscles shall be more exercised than the affections. 
 When you have had your will of the forest, you may 
 visit the whole round world. You may buckle on 
 your knapsack and take the road on foot. You may 
 bestride a good nag, and ride forth, with a pair of 
 saddle-bags, into the enchanted East. You may cross 
 the Black Forest, and see Germany wide-spread before 
 you, like a map, dotted with old cities, walled and 
 
172 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 spired, that dream all day on their own reflections 
 in the Rhine or Danube. You may pass the spinal 
 cord of Europe and go down from Alpine glaciers to 
 where Italy extends her marble moles and glasses her 
 marble palaces in the midland sea. You may sleep 
 in flying trains or wayside taverns. You may be 
 awakened at dawn by the scream of the express or 
 the small pipe of the robin in the hedge. For you 
 the rain should allay the dust of the beaten road ; 
 the wind dry your clothes upon you as you walked. 
 Autumn should hang out russet pears and purple 
 grapes along the lane ; inn after inn proffer you their 
 cups of raw wine ; river by river receive your body in 
 the sultry noon. Wherever you went warm valleys 
 and high trees and pleasant villages should compass 
 you about ; and light fellowships should take you by 
 the arm, and walk with you an hour upon your way. 
 You may see from afar off* what it will come to in 
 the end — the weather-beaten red-nosed vagabond, 
 consumed by a fever of the feet, cut off" from all near 
 touch of human sympathy, a waif, an Ishmael, and 
 an outcast. And yet it will seem well — and yet, in 
 the air of the forest, this will seem the best — to 
 break all the network bound about your feet by birth 
 and old companionship and loyal love, and bear your 
 shovelful of phosphates to and fro, in town and 
 country, until the hour of the great dissolvent. 
 
 Or, perhaps, you will keep to the cover. For the 
 forest is by itself, and forest life owns small kinship 
 with life in the dismal land of labour. Men are so 
 far sophisticated that they cannot take the world as 
 it is given to them by the sight of their eyes. Not 
 only what they see and hear, but what they know to 
 
FOREST NOTES 173 
 
 be behind, enter into their notion of a place. If the 
 sea, for instance, lie just across the hills, sea-thoughts 
 will come to them at intervals, and the tenor of their 
 dreams from time to time will suffer a sea-change. 
 And so here, in this forest, a knowledge of its great- 
 ness is for much in the effect produced. You reckon 
 up the miles that lie between you and intrusion. 
 You may walk before you all day long, and not fear 
 to touch the barrier of your Eden, or stumble out of 
 fairyland into the land of gin and steam-hammers. 
 And there is an old tale enhances for the imagination 
 the grandeur of the woods of France, and secures you 
 in the thought of your seclusion. When Charles vi. 
 hunted in the time of his wild boyhood near Senlis, 
 there was captured an old stag, having a collar of 
 bronze about his neck, and these words engraved on 
 the collar : ' Caesar mihi hoc donavit.** It is no 
 wonder if the minds of men were moved at this 
 occurrence and they stood aghast to find themselves 
 thus touching hands with forgotten ages, and follow- 
 ing an antiquity with hound and horn. And even 
 for you, it is scarcely in an idle curiosity that you 
 ponder how many centuries this stag had carried its 
 free antlers through the wood, and how many summers 
 and winters had shone and snowed on the imperial 
 badge. If the extent of solemn wood could thus 
 safeguard a tall stag from the hunter's hounds and 
 horses, might not you also play hide-and-seek, in 
 these groves, with all the pangs and trepidations of 
 man's life, and elude Death, the mighty hunter, for 
 more than the span of human years ? Here, also, 
 crash his arrows ; here, in the farthest glade, sounds 
 the gallop of the pale horse. But he does not hunt 
 
174 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 this cover with all his hounds, for the game is thin 
 and small : and if you were but alert and wary, if you 
 lodged ever in the deepest thickets, you too might live 
 on into later generations and astonish men by your 
 stalwart age and the trophies of an immemorial success. 
 For the forest takes away from you all excuse to 
 die. There is nothing here to cabin or thwart your 
 free desires. Here all the impudencies of the brawl- 
 ing world reach you no more. You may count your 
 hours, like Endymion, by the strokes of the lone 
 woodcutter, or by the progression of the lights and 
 shadows and the sun wheeling his wide circuit through 
 the naked heavens. Here shall you see no enemies 
 but winter and rough weather. And if a pang comes 
 to you at all, it will be a pang of healthful hunger. 
 All the puling sorrows, all the carking repentance, all 
 this talk of duty that is no duty, in the great peace, 
 in the pure daylight of these woods, fall away from 
 you like a garment. And if perchance you come 
 forth upon an eminence, where the wind blows upon 
 you large and fresh, and the pines knock their long 
 stems together, like an ungainly sort of puppets, and 
 see far away over the plain a factory chimney defined 
 against the pale horizon — it is for you, as for the 
 staid and simple peasant when, with his plough, he 
 upturns old arms and harness from the furrow of the 
 glebe. Ay, sure enough, there was a battle there in 
 the old times ; and, sure enough, there is a world out 
 yonder where men strive together with a noise of 
 oaths and weeping and clamorous dispute. So much 
 you apprehend by an athletic act of the imagination. 
 A faint far-off rumour as of Merovingian wars; a 
 leg-end as of some dead religion. 
 
VI 
 
 A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE ^ 
 
 A FRAGMENT 
 
 1879 
 
 Origi7ially intended to serve as the opening chapter of 
 ' Travels with a Donkeij in the Ceveimes.' 
 
 Le Monastier is the chief place of a hilly canton 
 in Haute Loire, the ancient Velay. As the name 
 betokens, the town is of monastic origin ; and it still 
 contains a towered bulk of monastery and a church 
 of some architectural pretensions, the seat of an arch- 
 priest and several vicars. It stands on the side of a 
 hill above the river Gazeille, about fifteen miles from 
 Le Puy, up a steep road where the wolves sometimes 
 pursue the diligence in winter. The road, which is 
 bound for Vivarais, passes through the town from end 
 to end in a single narrow street ; there you may see 
 the fountain where women fill their pitchers; there 
 also some old houses with carved doors and pediments 
 and ornamental work in iron. For Monastier, like 
 Maybole in Ayrshire, was a sort of country capital, 
 where the local aristocracy had their town mansions 
 for the winter ; and there is a certain baron still alive 
 and, I am told, extremely penitent, who found means 
 ^ Reprinted by permission of John Lane. 
 
176 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 to ruin himself by high living in this village on the 
 hills. He certainly has claims to be considered the 
 most remarkable spendthrift on record. How he set 
 about it, in a place where there are no luxuries for 
 sale, and where the board at the best inn comes to 
 little more than a shilling a day, is a problem for the 
 wise. His son, ruined as the family was, went as far 
 as Paris to sow his wild oats ; and so the cases of 
 father and son mark an epoch in the history of cen- ^ 
 tralisation in France. Not until the latter had got 
 into the train was the work of Richelieu complete. 
 
 It is a people of lace-makers. The women sit in 
 the streets by groups of five or six ; and the noise of j 
 the bobbins is audible from one group to another. | 
 Now and then you will hear one woman clattering off 
 prayers for the edification of the others at their work. 
 They wear gaudy shawls, white caps with a gay ribbon 
 about the head, and sometimes a black felt brigand 
 hat above the cap ; and so they give the street colour 
 and brightness and a foreign air. A while ago, when 
 England largely supplied herself from this district i 
 with the lace called torchon^ it was not unusual to 
 earn five francs a day ; and five francs in Monastier 
 is worth a pound in London. Now, from a change 
 in the market, it takes a clever and industrious work- 
 woman to earn from three to four in the week, or 
 less than an eighth of what she made easily a few 
 years ago. The tide of prosperity came and went, as 
 with our northern pitmen, and left nobody the richer. 
 The women bravely squandered their gains, kept the ,: 
 men in idleness, and gave themselves up, as I was < 
 told, to sweethearting and a merry life. From week's 
 end to week's end it was one continuous gala in 
 
A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE 177 
 
 Monastier ; people spent the day in the wine-shops, 
 and the drum or the bagpipes led on the hourrees up 
 to ten at night. Now these dancing days are over. 
 ' II ri'y a phis de jeunesse^ said Victor the gar^on. I 
 hear of no great advance in what are thought the 
 essentials of morality ; but the hourree^ with its 
 rambling, sweet, interminable music, and alert and 
 rustic figures, has fallen into disuse, and is mostly 
 remembered as a custom of the past. Only on the 
 occasion of the fair shall you hear a drum discreetly 
 rattling in a wine-shop or perhaps one of the company 
 singing the measure while the others dance. I am 
 sorry at the change, and marvel once more at the com- 
 plicated scheme of things upon this earth, and how 
 a turn of fashion in England can silence so much 
 mountain merriment in France. The lace-makers 
 themselves have not entirely forgiven our country- 
 women ; and I think they take a special pleasure in 
 the legend of the northern quarter of the town, called 
 L^Anglade, because there the English free-lances were 
 arrested and driven back by the potency of a little 
 Virgin Mary on the wall. 
 
 From time to time a market is held, and the town 
 has a season of revival ; cattle and pigs are stabled in 
 the streets ; and pickpockets have been known to come 
 all the way from Lyons for the occasion. Every 
 Sunday the country folk throng in with davlight to 
 buy apples, to attend mass, and to visit one of the 
 wine-shops, of which there are no fewer than fifty in 
 this little town. Sunday wear for the men is a green 
 tailcoat of some coarse sort of drugget, and usually a 
 complete suit to match. I have never set eyes on such 
 degrading raiment. Here it clings, there bulges ; and 
 
 M 
 
178 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 the human body, with its agreeable and lively lines, is 
 turned into a mockery and laughing-stock. Another 
 piece of Sunday business with the peasants is to take | 
 their ailments to the chemist for advice. It is as 
 much a matter for Sunday as church-going. I have 
 seen a woman who had been unable to speak since 
 the Monday before, wheezing, catching her breath, 
 endlessly and painfully coughing ; and yet she had 
 waited upwards of a hundred hours before coming 
 to seek help, and had the week been twice as long, 
 she would have waited still. There was a canonical ,, 
 day for consultation ; such was the ancestral habit, to | 
 which a respectable lady must study to conform. 
 
 Two conveyances go daily to Le Puy, but they rival 
 each other in polite concessions rather than in speed. 
 Each will wait an hour or two hours cheerfully while 
 an old lady does her marketing or a gentleman finishes ,, 
 the papers in a cafe. The Courrier (such is the name | 
 of one) should leave Le Puy by two in the afternoon 
 on the return voyage, and arrive at Monastier in good 
 time for a six-o^clock dinner. But the driver dares 
 not disoblige his customers. He will postpone his 
 departure again and again, hour after hour ; and I 
 have known the sun to go down on his delay. These 
 purely personal favours, this consideration of men's 
 fancies, rather than the hands of a mechanical clock, 
 as marking the advance of the abstraction, time, makes 
 a more humorous business of stage-coaching than we 
 are used to see it. 
 
 As far as the eye can reach, one swelling line of 
 hill top rises and falls behind another ; and if you 
 climb an eminence, it is only to see new and farther 
 ranges behind these. Many little rivers run from all 
 
A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE 179 
 
 sides in cliffy valleys ; and one of them, a few miles 
 from Monastier, bears the great name of Loire. The 
 mean level of the country is a little more than three 
 thousand feet above the sea, which makes the atmo- 
 sphere proportionally brisk and wholesome. There is 
 little timber except pines, and the greater part of the 
 country lies in moorland pasture. The country is wild 
 and tumbled rather than commanding ; an upland 
 rather than a mountain district ; and the most striking 
 as well as the most agreeable scenery lies low beside 
 the rivers. There, indeed, you will find many corners 
 that take the fancy ; such as made the English noble 
 choose his grave by a Swiss streamlet, where nature is 
 at her freshest, and looks as young as on the seventh 
 morning. Such a place is the course of the Gazeille, 
 where it waters the common of Monastier and thence 
 downwards till it joins the Loire; a place to hear 
 birds singing ; a place for lovers to frequent. The 
 name of the river was perhaps suggested by the 
 sound of its passage over the stones ; for it is a great 
 warbler, and at night, after I was in bed at Monastier, 
 I could hear it go singing down the valley till I fell 
 asleep. 
 
 On the whole, this is a Scottish landscape, although 
 not so noble as the best in Scotland ; and by an odd 
 coincidence, the population is, in its way, as Scottish 
 as the country. They have abrupt, uncouth, Fifeshire 
 manners, and accost you, as if you were trespassing, 
 with an ' Oiist-ce que vous allez ? ' only translatable 
 into the Lowland ' Whaur ye gaun ? ' They keep the 
 Scottish Sabbath. There is no labour done on that 
 day but to drive in and out the various pigs and sheep 
 land cattle that make so pleasant a tinkling in the 
 
180 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 meadows. The lace-makers have disappeared from 
 the street. Not to attend mass would involve social 
 degradation ; and you may find people reading Sunday 
 books, in particular a sort of Catholic Monthly Visitor 
 on the doings of Our Lady of Lourdes. I remember 
 one Sunday, when I was walking in the country, that 
 I fell on a hamlet and found all the inhabitants, 
 from the patriarch to the baby, gathered in the 
 shadow of a gable at prayer. One strapping lass 
 stood with her back to the wall and did the solo part, 
 the rest chiming in devoutly. Not far off, a lad lay 
 flat on his face asleep among some straw, to represent 
 the worldly element. 
 
 Again, this people is eager to proselytise ; and the 
 postmaster's daughter used to argue with me by the 
 half-hour about my heresy, until she grew quite 
 flushed. I have heard the reverse process going on 
 between a Scotswoman and a French girl ; and the 
 arguments in the two cases were identical. Each 
 apostle based her claim on the superior virtue and 
 attainments of her clergy, and clenched the business 
 with a threat of hell-fire. ' Pas hong pretres ici,'' said 
 the Presbyterian, ' bong j^retjrs en Ecosse.'' And the 
 postmaster's daughter, taking up the same weapon, 
 plied me, so to speak, with the butt of it instead of 
 the bayonet. We are a hopeful race, it seems, and 
 easily persuaded for our good. One cheerful circum- 
 stance I note in these guerilla missions, that each 
 side relies on hell, and Protestant and Catholic alike 
 address themselves to a supposed misgiving in their 
 adversary's heart. And I call it cheerful, for faith 
 is a more supporting quality than imagination. 
 
 Here, as in Scotland, many peasant families boast 
 
A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE 181 
 
 a son in holy orders. And here also, the young men 
 have a tendency to emigrate. It is certainly not 
 poverty that drives them to the great cities or across 
 the seas, for many peasant families, I was told, have 
 a fortune of at least 40,000 francs. The lads go 
 forth pricked with the spirit of adventure and the 
 desire to rise in life, and leave their homespun elders 
 grumbling and wondering over the event. Once, 
 at a village called Laussonne, I met one of these dis- 
 appointed parents : a drake who had fathered a wild 
 swan and seen it take wing and disappear. The wild 
 swan in question was now an apothecary in Brazil. 
 He had flown by way of Bordeaux, and first landed in 
 America, bareheaded and barefoot, and with a single 
 halfpenny in his pocket. And now he was an apothe- 
 cary ! Such a wonderful thing is an adventurous life ! 
 I thought he might as well have stayed at home ; but 
 you never can tell wherein a man's life consists, nor in 
 what he sets his pleasure : one to drink, another to 
 marry, a third to write scurrilous articles and be 
 repeatedly caned in public, and now this fourth, 
 perhaps, to be an apothecary in Brazil. As for his 
 old father, he could conceive no reason for the lad's 
 behaviour. ' I had always bread for him,' he said ; 
 ' he ran away to annoy me. He loved to annoy me. 
 He had no gratitude.' But at heart he was swelling 
 with pride over his travelled offspring, and he produced 
 a letter out of his pocket, where, as he said, it was 
 rotting, a mere lump of paper rags, and waved it glori- 
 ously in the air. ' This comes from America,' he 
 cried, ' six thousand leagues away ! ' And the wine- 
 shop audience looked upon it with a certain thrill. 
 I soon became a popular figure, and was known for 
 
182 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 miles in the country. Oust-ce que vous allez? was 
 changed for me into Quoi, vous rentrez au Monastier 
 ce soir ? and in the town itself every urchin seemed to 
 know my name, although no living creature could pro- 
 nounce it. There was one particular group of lace- 
 makers who brought out a chair for me whenever I 
 went by, and detained me from my walk to gossip. 
 They were filled with curiosity about England, its 
 language, its religion, the dress of the women, and 
 were never weary of seeing the Queen^s head on 
 English postage-stamps, or seeking for French words 
 in English Journals. The language, in particular, 
 filled them with surprise. 
 
 ^ Do they speak patois in England ? ' I was once 
 asked ; and when I told them not, ' Ah, then, 
 French ? "" said they. 
 
 ' No, no,' I said, ' not French."* 
 ' Then," they concluded, ' they speak patois.'' 
 You must obviously either speak French or patois. 
 Talk of the force of logic — here it was in all its 
 weakness. I gave up the point, but proceeding i 
 to give illustrations of my native jargon, I was 
 met with a new mortification. Of all patois they 
 declared that mine was the most preposterous and 
 the most jocose in sound. At each new word 
 there was a new explosion of laughter, and some 
 of the younger ones were glad to rise from their 
 chairs and stamp about the street in ecstasy ; and I 
 looked on upon their mirth in a faint and slightly 
 disagreeable bewilderment. ' Bread ,^ which sounds a 
 commonplace, plain-sailing monosyllable in England, 
 was the word that most delighted these good ladies 
 of Monastier ; it seemed to them frolicsome and racy. 
 
 J 
 
A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE 183 
 
 like a page of Pickwick ; and they all got it carefully 
 by heart, as a stand-by, I presume, for winter evenings. 
 I have tried it since then with every sort of accent 
 and inflection, but I seem to lack the sense of 
 humour. 
 
 They were of all ages : children at their first web of 
 lace, a stripling girl with a bashful but encouraging 
 play of eyes, solid married women, and grandmothers, 
 some on the top of their age and some falling towards 
 decrepitude. One and all were pleasant and natural, 
 ready to laugh and ready with a certain quiet solem- 
 nity when that was called for by the subject of our 
 talk. Life, since the fall in wages, had begun to 
 appear to them with a more serious air. The strip- 
 ling girl would sometimes laugh at me in a provocative 
 and not unadmiring manner, if I judge aright ; and one 
 of the grandmothers, who was my great friend of the 
 party, gave me many a sharp word of judgment on 
 my sketches, my heresy, or even my arguments, and 
 gave them with a wry mouth and a humorous twinkle 
 in her eye that were eminently Scottish. But the 
 rest used me with a certain reverence, as something 
 come from afar and not entirely human. Nothing 
 would put them at their ease but the irresistible 
 gaiety of my native tongue. Between the old lady 
 and myself I think there was a real attachment. She 
 was never weary of sitting to me for her portrait, 
 in her best cap and brigand hat, and with all her 
 wrinkles tidily composed, and though she never failed 
 to repudiate the result, she would always insist upon 
 another trial. It was as good as a play to see her 
 sitting in judgment over the last. ' No, no,^ she 
 would say, ' that is not it. I am old, to be sure, but 
 
184 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 I am better-looking than that. We must try again.' 
 When I was about to leave she bade me good-bye for 
 this life in a somewhat touching manner. We should 
 not meet again, she said ; it was a long farewell, and 
 she was sorry. But life is so full of crooks, old lady, 
 that who knows ? I have said good-bye to people for 
 greater distances and times, and, please God, I mean 
 to see them yet again. 
 
 One thing was notable about these women, from 
 the youngest to the oldest, and with hardly an excep- 
 tion. In spite of their piety, they could twang off 
 an oath with Sir Toby Belch in person. There was 
 nothing so high or so low, in heaven or earth or in 
 the human body, but a woman of this neighbourhood 
 would whip out the name of it, fair and square, by 
 way of conversational adornment. My landlady, who 
 was pretty and young, dressed like a lady and avoided 
 patois like a weakness, commonly addressed her child 
 in the language of a drunken bully. And of all the 
 swearers that I ever heard, commend me to an old 
 lady in Gondet, a village of the Loire. I was making 
 a sketch, and her curse was not yet ended when I had 
 finished it and took my departure. It is true she had 
 a right to be angry ; for here was her son, a hulking 
 fellow, visibly the worse for drink before the day was 
 well begun. But it was strange to hear her un- 
 wearying flow of oaths and obscenities, endless like a 
 river, and now and then rising to a passionate shrill- 
 ness, in the clear and silent air of the morning. In 
 city slums, the thing might have passed unnoticed ; 
 but in a country valley, and from a plain and honest 
 countrywoman, this beastliness of speech surprised 
 the ear. 
 
A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE 185 
 
 The Conductor, as he is called, of Roads mid Bridges 
 was my principal companion. He was generally in- 
 telligent, and could have spoken more or less falsetto 
 on any of the trite topics ; but it was his specialty 
 to have a generous taste in eating. This was what 
 was most indigenous in the man ; it was here he was 
 an artist ; and I found in his company what I had 
 long suspected, that enthusiasm and special knowledge 
 are the great social qualities, and what they are about, 
 whether white sauce or Shakespeare's plays, an alto- 
 gether secondary question. 
 
 I used to accompany the Conductor on his profes- 
 sional rounds, and grew to believe myself an expert in 
 the business. I thought I could make an entry in a 
 stone-breaker's time-book, or order manure off the 
 wayside with any living engineer in France. Gondet 
 was one of the places we visited together; and 
 Laussonne, where I met the apothecary's father, was 
 another. There, at Laussonne, George Sand spent a 
 day while she was gathering materials for the Marquis 
 de Villemer ; and I have spoken with an old man, who 
 was then a child running about the inn kitchen, and 
 who still remembers her with a sort of reverence. It 
 appears that he spoke French imperfectly ; for this 
 reason George Sand chose him for companion, and 
 whenever he let slip a broad and picturesque phrase 
 in patois^ she would make him repeat it again and 
 again till it was graven in her memory. The word 
 for a frog particularly pleased her fancy ; and it 
 would be curious to know if she afterwards employed 
 it in her works. The peasants, who knew nothing of 
 letters and had never so much as heard of local colour, 
 could not explain her chattering with this backward 
 
186 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 child ; and to them she seemed a very homely lady 
 and far from beautiful : the most famous man-killer 
 of the age appealed so little to Velaisian swine-herds ! 
 
 On my first engineering excursion, which lay up by 
 Crouzials towards Mount Mezenc and the borders of 
 Ardeche, I began an improving acquaintance with the 
 foreman road-mender. He was in great glee at having 
 me with him, passed me off among his subalterns as 
 the supervising engineer, and insisted on what he 
 called ' the gallantry " of paying for my breakfast in a 
 roadside wine-shop. On the whole, he was a man of 
 great weather- wisdom, some spirits, and a social 
 temper. But I am afraid he was superstitious. 
 When he was nine years old, he had seen one night 
 a company of bourgeois et dames qui faisaient la 
 manege avec des chaises, and concluded that he was 
 in the presence of a witches' Sabbath. I suppose, 
 but venture with timidity on the suggestion, that 
 this may have been a romantic and nocturnal picnic 
 party. Again, coming from Pradelles with his 
 brother, they saw a great empty cart drawn by six 
 enormous horses before them on the road. The driver 
 cried aloud and filled the mountains with the cracking 
 of his whip. He never seemed to go faster than a 
 walk, yet it was impossible to overtake him ; and at 
 length, at the corner of a hill, the whole equipage 
 disappeared bodily into the night. At the time, 
 people said it was the devil qui s''ainusait ajaire ^a. 
 
 I suggested there was nothing more likely, as he 
 must have some amusement. 
 
 The foreman said it was odd, but there was less of 
 that sort of thing than formerly. ' Cest difficile,'' he 
 added, ' a eocpUquer.'' 
 
A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE 187 
 
 When we were well up on the moors and the 
 Conductor was trying some road-metal with the 
 gauge — 
 
 ' Hark ! ^ said the foreman, ' do you hear nothing ? ' 
 
 We listened, and the wind, which was blowing 
 chilly out of the east, brought a faint, tangled 
 jangling to our ears. 
 
 ' It is the flocks of Vivarais,' said he. 
 
 For every summer, the flocks out of all Ardeche are 
 brought up to pasture on these grassy plateaux. 
 
 Here and there a little private flock was being 
 tended by a girl, one spinning with a distaff, another 
 seated on a wall and intently making lace. This last, 
 when we addressed her, leaped up in a panic and put 
 out her arms, like a person swimming, to keep us at 
 a distance, and it was some seconds before we could 
 persuade her of the honesty of our intentions. 
 
 The Conductor told me of another herdswoman 
 from whom he had once asked his road while he was 
 yet new to the country, and who fled from him, 
 driving her beasts before her, until he had given up 
 the information in despair. A tale of old lawlessness 
 may yet be read in these uncouth timidities. 
 
 The winter in these uplands is a dangerous and 
 melancholy time. Houses are snowed up, and way- 
 farers lost in a flurry within hail of their own fireside. 
 No man ventures abroad without meat and a bottle 
 of wine, which he replenishes at every wine-shop ; 
 and even thus equipped he takes the road with terror. 
 All day the family sits about the fire in a foul and 
 airless hovel, and equally without work or diversion. 
 The father may carve a rude piece of furniture, but 
 that is all that will be done until the spring sets in 
 
188 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 again, and along with it the labours of the field. It 
 is not for nothing that you find a clock in the meanest 
 of these mountain habitations. A clock and an 
 almanac, you would fancy, were indispensable in such 
 a life. . . . 
 
VII 
 
 RANDOM MEMORIES: ROSA QUO 
 LOCORUM 
 
 Through what little channels, by what hints and 
 premonitions, the consciousness of the man's art 
 dawns first upon the child, it should be not only 
 interesting but instructive to inquire. A matter of 
 curiosity to-day, it will become the ground of science 
 to-morrow. From the mind of childhood there is 
 more history and more philosophy to be fished up 
 than from all the printed volumes in a library. The 
 child is conscious of an interest, not in literature but 
 in life. A taste for the precise, the adroit, or the 
 comely in the use of words, comes late ; but long 
 before that he has enjoyed in books a delightful 
 dress rehearsal of experience. He is first conscious 
 of this material — I had almost said this practical — 
 pre-occupation ; it does not follow that it really 
 came the first. I have some old fogged negatives in 
 my collection that would seem to imply a prior stage. 
 ' The Lord is gone up with a shout, and God with 
 the sound of a trumpet' — memorial version, I know 
 not where to find the text — rings still in my ear 
 from my first childhood, and perhaps with some- 
 thing of my nurse's accent. There was possibly some 
 sort of image written in my mind by these loud 
 
190 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 words, but I believe the words themselves were what 
 I cherished. I had about the same time, and under 
 the same influence — that of my dear nurse — a 
 favourite author : it is possible the reader has not 
 heard of him — the Rev. Robert Murray M'Cheyne. 
 My nurse and I admired his name exceedingly, so 
 that I must have been taught the love of beautiful 
 sounds before I was breeched ; and I remember two 
 specimens of his muse until this day : — 
 
 ' Behind the hills of Naphtali 
 The sun went slowly down^ 
 Leaving on mountain, tower, and tree, 
 A tinge of golden hrown.' 
 
 There is imagery here, and I set it on one side. 
 The other — it is but a verse — not only contains no 
 image, but is quite unintelligible even to my com- 
 paratively instructed mind, and I know not even how 
 to spell the outlandish vocable that charmed me in 
 my childhood : 
 
 ' Jehovah Tschidkeuu is nothing to her'; ^ — 
 
 I may say, without flippancy, that he was nothing to 
 me either, since I had no ray of a guess of what he 
 was about ; yet the verse, from then to now, a 
 longer interval than the life of a generation, has 
 continued to haunt me. 
 
 I have said that I should set a passage distin- 
 guished by obvious and pleasing imagery, however 
 faint ; for the child thinks much in images, words 
 are very live to him, phrases that imply a picture 
 eloquent beyond their value. Rummaging in the 
 
 ^ 'Jehovah Tsidkenu,' translated in the Authorised Version as 'The 
 Lord our Righteousness' (Jeremiah xxiii. 6 and xxxiii. i6). 
 
ROSA QUO LOCORUM 191 
 
 dusty pigeon-holes of memory, I came once upon a 
 graphic version of the famous Psalm, ' The Lord is 
 my shepherd ' : and from the places employed in its 
 illustration, which are all in the immediate neigh- 
 bourhood of a house then occupied by my father, I 
 am able to date it before the seventh year of my age, 
 although it was probably earlier in fact. The ' pas- 
 tures green ' were represented by a certain suburban 
 stubble-field, where I had once walked with my nurse, 
 under an autumnal sunset, on the banks of the Water 
 of Leith : the place is long ago built up ; no pastures 
 now, no stubble-fields ; only a maze of little streets 
 and smoking chimneys and shrill children. Here, 
 in the fleecy person of a sheep, I seemed to myself 
 to follow something unseen, unrealised, and yet 
 benignant ; and close by the sheep in which I was 
 incarnated — as if for greater security — rustled the 
 skirts of my nurse. ' Death's dark vale ' was a 
 certain archway in the Warriston Cemetery : a for- 
 midable yet beloved spot, for children love to be 
 afraid, — in measure as they love all experience of 
 vitality. Here I beheld myself some paces ahead 
 (seeing myself, I mean, from behind) utterly alone 
 in that uncanny passage ; on the one side of me a 
 rude, knobby, shepherd's staff, such as cheers the 
 heart of the cockney tourist, on the other a rod like 
 a billiard cue, appeared to accompany my progress ; 
 the staff sturdily upright, the billiard cue inclined 
 confidentially, like one whispering, towards my ear. 
 I was aware — I will never tell you how — that the 
 presence of these articles afforded me encourage- 
 ment. The third and last of my pictures illustrated 
 the words : — 
 
192 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 ^ My table Thou hast furnished 
 
 lu presence of my foes : 
 My head Thou dost with oil anoint. 
 And my cup overflows ' : 
 
 and this was perhaps the most interesting of the 
 series. I saw myself seated in a kind of open stone 
 summer-house at table ; over my shoulder a hairy, 
 bearded, and robed presence anointed me from an 
 authentic shoe-horn ; the summer-house was part of 
 the green court of a ruin, and from the far side of 
 the court black and white imps discharged against 
 me ineffectual arrows. The picture appears arbitrary, 
 but I can trace every detail to its source, as Mr. 
 Brock analysed the dream of Alan Armadale. The 
 summer-house and court were muddled together out 
 of Billings' Antiquities of Scotland-^ the imps con- 
 veyed from Bagster's Pilgrim'' s Progress ; the bearded 
 and robed figure from any one of the thousand Bible 
 pictures ; and the shoe-horn was plagiarised from an 
 old illustrated Bible, where it figured in the hand of 
 Samuel anointing Saul, and had been pointed out to 
 me as a jest by my father. It was shown me for a 
 jest, remark ; but the serious spirit of infancy adopted 
 it in earnest. Children are all classics ; a bottle 
 would have seemed an intermediary too trivial — that 
 divine refreshment of whose meaning I had no guess ; 
 and I seized on the idea of that mystic shoe-horn 
 with delight, even as, a little later, I should have 
 written flagon, chalice, hanaper, beaker, or any word 
 that might have appealed to me at the moment as 
 least contaminate with mean associations. In this 
 string of pictures I believe the gist of the psalm to j 
 have consisted ; I believe it had no more to say to 
 
 J 
 
ROSA QUO LOCORUM 193 
 
 me ; and the result was consolatory. I would go to 
 sleep dwelling with restfulness upon these images ; 
 they passed before me, besides, to an appropriate 
 music ; for I had already singled out from that rude 
 psalm the one lovely verse which dwells in the minds 
 of all, not growing old, not disgraced by its associa- 
 tion with long Sunday tasks, a scarce conscious joy in 
 childhood, in age a companion thought : — 
 
 ' In pastures green Thou leadest me. 
 The quiet waters by.' 
 
 The remainder of my childish recollections are all 
 of the matter of what was read to me, and not of 
 any manner in the words. If these pleased me it 
 was unconsciously ; I listened for news of the great 
 vacant world upon whose edge I stood ; I listened for 
 delightful plots that I might re-enact in play, and 
 romantic scenes and circumstances that I might call 
 up before me, with closed eyes, when I was tired of 
 Scotland, and home, and that weary prison of the 
 sick-chamber in which I lay so long in durance. 
 Robinson Ci^usoe ; some of the books of that cheerful, 
 ingenious, romantic soul, Mayne Reid ; and a work 
 rather gruesome and bloody for a child, but very 
 picturesque, called Paul Blake ; these are the three 
 strongest impressions I remember : The Szoiss Family 
 Robinson came next, longo intervallo. At these I 
 played, conjured up their scenes, and delighted to 
 hear them rehearsed unto seventy times seven. I 
 am not sure but what Paid Blake came after I could 
 read. It seems connected with a visit to the country, 
 and an experience unforgettable. The day had been 
 warm ; H and I had played together charmingly 
 
194 ESSAV^S OF TRAVEL 
 
 all day in a sandy wilderness across the road ; then 
 came the evening with a great flash of colour and 
 a heavenly sweetness in the air. Somehow my play- 
 mate had vanished, or is out of the story, as the 
 sages say, but I was sent into the village on an 
 errand ; and, taking a book of fairy tales, went down 
 alone through a fir-wood, reading as I walked. 
 How often since then has it befallen me to be happy 
 even so ; but that was the first time : the shock of 
 that pleasure I have never since forgot, and if my 
 mind serves me to the last, I never shall, for it was 
 then that I knew I loved reading. 
 
 II 
 
 To pass from hearing literature to reading it is to 
 take a great and dangerous step. With not a few, I 
 think a large proportion of their pleasure then comes 
 to an end ; ' the malady of not marking ' overtakes 
 them ; they read thenceforward by the eye alone and 
 hear never again the chime of fair words or the 
 march of the stately period. Non ragioniam of these. 
 But to all the step is dangerous ; it involves coming 
 of age ; it is even a kind of second weaning. In the 
 past all was at the choice of others ; they chose, they 
 digested, they read aloud for us and sang to their 
 own tune the books of childhood. In the future we 
 are to approach the silent, inexpressive type alone, 
 like pioneers ; and the choice of what we are to read 
 is in our own hands thenceforward. For instance, inj 
 the passages already adduced, I detect and applaud] 
 the ear of my old nurse ; they were of her choice, am 
 she imposed them on my infancy, reading the works 
 
ROSA QUO LOCORUM 195 
 
 of others as a poet would scarce dare to read his own ; 
 gloating on the rhythm, dwelling with delight on 
 assonances and alliterations. I know very well my 
 mother must have been all the while trying to 
 educate my taste upon more secular authors ; but the 
 vigour and the continual opportunities of my nurse 
 triumphed, and after a long search, I can find in these 
 earliest volumes of my autobiography no mention of 
 anything but nursery rhymes, the Bible, and Mr. 
 M'Cheyne. 
 
 I suppose all children agree in looking back with 
 delight on their school Readers. We might not now 
 find so much pathos in ' Bingen on the Rhine,' ' A 
 soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers,' or in ' The 
 Soldier's Funeral,' in the declamation of which I was 
 held to have surpassed myself. ' Robert's voice,' said 
 the master on this memorable occasion, ' is not strong, 
 but impressive ' : an opinion which I was fool enough 
 to carry home to my father ; who roasted me for years 
 in consequence. I am sure one should not be so 
 deliciously tickled by the humorous pieces : — 
 
 ' What_, crusty ? cries Will in a taking. 
 Who would not be crusty with half a year's baking ? ' 
 
 I think this quip would leave us cold. The ' Isles of 
 Greece ' seem rather tawdry too ; but on the ' Address 
 to the Ocean,' or on ' The Dying Gladiator,' ' time 
 has writ no wrinkle.' 
 
 ^ 'Tis the morn, but dim and dark. 
 Whither flies the silent lark ?' — 
 
 does the reader recall the moment when his eye first 
 fell upon these lines in the Fourth Reader ; and ' sur- 
 prised with joy, impatient as the wind,' he plunged 
 
196 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 into the sequel ? And there was another piece, this 
 time in prose, which none can have forgotten ; many 
 like me must have searched Dickens with zeal to find 
 it again, and in its proper context, and have perhaps 
 been conscious of some inconsiderable measure of dis- 
 appointment, that it was only Tom Pinch who drove, 
 in such a pomp of poetry, to London. 
 
 But in the Reader we are still under guides. What 
 a boy turns out for himself, as he rummages the 
 bookshelves, is the real test and pleasure. My 
 father"*s library was a spot of some austerity ; the 
 proceedings of learned societies, some Latin divinity, 
 cyclopaedias, physical science, and, above all, optics, 
 held the chief place upon the shelves, and it was only 
 in holes and corners that anything really legible 
 existed as by accident. The Parenfs Assistant, Rob 
 Roy, Waverley, and Guy Mannermg, the Voyages of 
 Captain Woods Rogers, Fuller's and Bunyan's Holy 
 Wars, The Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, The Female 
 Bluebeard, G. Sand's Mare au Diable — (how came it 
 in that grave assembly !), Ains worth's Tower of 
 London, and four old volumes of Punch — these were 
 the chief exceptions. In these latter, which made for 
 years the chief of my diet, I very early fell in love 
 (almost as soon as I could spell) with the Snob 
 Papers. I knew them almost by heart, particularly 
 the visit to the Pontos ; and I remember my surprise 
 when I found, long afterwards, that they were famous, 
 and signed with a famous name ; to me, as I read 
 and admired them, they were the works of Mr. Punch. 
 Time and again I tried to read Rob Roy, with whom 
 of course I was acquainted from the Tales of a 
 Grandfather ; time and again the early part, with 
 
ROSA QUO LOCORUM 197 
 
 Rashleigh and (think of it !) the adorable Diana, 
 choked me off; and I shall never forget the pleasure 
 and surprise with which, lying on the floor one 
 summer evening, I struck of a sudden into the first 
 scene with Andrew Fairservice. 'The worthy Dr. 
 Lightfoot ' — ' mistrysted with a bogle ' — ' a wheen 
 green trash ' — ' Jenny, lass, I think I ha'e her ' : from 
 that day to this the phrases have been unforgotten. 
 I read on, I need scarce say ; I came to Glasgow, I 
 bided tryst on Glasgow Bridge, I met Rob Roy and 
 the Bailie in the Tolbooth, all with transporting 
 pleasure ; and then the clouds gathered once more 
 about my path ; and I dozed and skipped until I 
 stumbled half-asleep into the clachan of Aberfoyle, 
 and the voices of Iverach and Galbraith recalled me 
 to myself. With that scene and the defeat of 
 Captain Thornton the book concluded ; Helen and her 
 sons shocked even the little schoolboy of nine or ten 
 with their unreality ; I read no more, or I did not 
 grasp what I was reading ; and years elapsed before I 
 consciously met Diana and her father among the 
 hills, or saw Rashleigh dying in the chair. When I 
 think of that novel and that evening, I am impatient 
 with all others ; they seem but shadows and im- 
 postors ; they cannot satisfy the appetite which this 
 awakened ; and I dare be known to think it the best 
 of Sir Walter's by nearly as much as Sir Walter is 
 the best of novelists. Perhaps Mr. Lang is right, 
 and our first friends in the land of fiction are always 
 the most real. And yet I had read before this Giiy 
 Mannering^ and some of Wavcrley, with no such 
 delighted sense of truth and humour, and I read 
 immediately after the greater part of the Waverley 
 
198 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 Novels, and was never moved again in the same way 
 or to the same degree. One circumstance is sus- 
 picious : my critical estimate of the Waverley Novels 
 has scarce changed at all since I was ten. Roh Roy^ 
 Guy Mannering^ and Redgauntlet first ; then, a little 
 lower, The Fortunes of Nigel -^ then, after a huge 
 gulf, Ivanlioe and Anne of Geier stein : the rest no- 
 where ; such was the verdict of the boy. Since then 
 The Antiquary^ St. RonarCs Well, Kenilworth, and The 
 Heart of Midlothian have gone up in the scale ; 
 perhaps Ivanlioe and Anne of Geier stein have gone a 
 trifle down ; Diana Vernon has been added to my 
 admirations in that enchanted world of Roh Roy ; I 
 think more of the letters in Redgauntlet, and Peter 
 Peebles, that dreadful piece of realism, I can now 
 read about with equanimity, interest, and I had 
 almost said pleasure, while to the childish critic he 
 often caused unmixed distress. But the rest is the 
 same ; I could not finish The Pirate when I was a 
 child, I have never finished it yet ; Peveril of the Peak 
 dropped half way through from my schoolboy hands, 
 and thouffh I have since waded to an end in a kind 
 of wager with myself, the exercise was quite without 
 enjoyment. There is something disquieting in these 
 considerations. I still think the visit to Ponto's the 
 best part of the Book of Snobs : does that mean that 
 I was right when I was a child, or does it mean that 
 I have never grown since then, that the child is not 
 the man's father, but the man ? and that I came 
 into the world with all my faculties complete, and 
 have only learned sinsyne to be more tolerant of 
 boredom ? . . . 
 
VIII 
 THE IDEAL HOUSE 
 
 Two things are necessary in any neighbourhood where 
 we propose to spend a life : a desert and some living 
 water. 
 
 There are many parts of the earth's face which offer 
 the necessary combination of a certain wildness with 
 a kindly variety. A great prospect is desirable, but 
 the want may be otherwise supplied ; even greatness 
 can be found on the small scale ; for the mind and 
 the eye measure differently. Bold rocks near hand 
 are more inspiriting than distant Alps, and the thick 
 fern upon a Surrey heath makes a fine forest for the 
 imagination, and the dotted yew trees noble moun- 
 tains. A Scottish moor with birches and firs grouped 
 here and there upon a knoll, or one of those rocky 
 seaside deserts of Provence overgrown with rosemary 
 and thyme and smoking with aroma, are places where 
 the mind is never weary. Forests, being more en- 
 closed, are not at first sight so attractive, but they 
 exercise a spell ; they must, however, be diversified 
 with either heath or rock, and are hardly to be con- 
 sidered perfect without conifers. Even sand-hills, 
 with their intricate plan, and their gulls and rabbits, 
 will stand well for the necessary desert. 
 
 199 
 
200 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 The house must be within hail of either a little 
 
 river or the sea. A great river is more fit for poetry 
 
 than to adorn a neighbourhood ; its sweep of waters 
 
 increases the scale of the scenery and the distance of 
 
 one notable object from another ; and a lively burn 
 
 gives us, in the space of a few yards, a greater variety 
 
 of promontory and islet, of cascade, shallow goil, and 
 
 boiling pool, with answerable changes both of song 
 
 and colour, than a navigable stream in many hundred 
 
 miles. The fish, too, make a more considerable 
 
 feature of the brookside, and the trout plumping in 
 
 the shadow takes the ear. A stream should, besides, 
 
 be narrow enough to cross, or the burn hard by a 
 
 bridge, or we are at once shut out of Eden. The 
 
 quantity of water need be of no concern, for the mind 
 
 sets the scale, and can enjoy a Niagara Fall of thirty 
 
 inches. Let us approve the singer of 
 
 ^ Shallow rivers, by whose falls 
 Melodious birds sing madrigals.' 
 
 If the sea is to be our ornamental water, choose an 
 open seaboard with a heavy beat of surf; one much 
 broken in outline, with small havens and dwarf head- 
 lands ; if possible a few islets ; and as a first necessity, 
 rocks reaching out into deep water. Such a rock 
 on a calm day is a better station than the top of 
 Teneriffe or Chimborazo. In short, both for the 
 desert and the water, the conjunction of many near 
 and bold details is bold scenery for the imagination 
 and keeps the mind alive. 
 
 Given these two prime luxuries, the nature of the 
 country where we are to live is, I had almost said, 
 indifferent ; after that inside the garden, we can con- 
 struct a country of our own. Several old trees, a 
 
THE IDEAL HOUSE 201 
 
 considerable variety of level, several well-grown hedges 
 to divide our garden into provinces, a good extent of 
 old well-set turf, and thickets of shrubs and ever- 
 greens to be cut into and cleared at the new owner's 
 pleasure, are the qualities to be sought for in your 
 chosen land. Nothing is more delightful than a 
 succession of small lawns, opening one out of the 
 other through tall hedges; these have all the charm 
 of the old bowling-green repeated, do not require the 
 labour of many trimmers, and afford a series of 
 I changes. You must have much lawn against the 
 early summer, so as to have a great field of daisies, 
 the year's morning frost ; as you must have a wood 
 of lilacs, to enjoy to the full the period of their 
 blossoming. Hawthorn is another of the Spring's 
 ingredients ; but it is even best to have a rough 
 public lane at one side of your enclosure which, at 
 the right season, shall become an avenue of bloom 
 and odour. The old flowers are the best and should 
 grow carelessly in corners. Indeed, the ideal fortune 
 is to find an old garden, once very richly cared for, 
 since sunk into neglect, and to tend, not repair, that 
 neglect ; it will thus have a smack of nature and 
 wildness which skilful dispositions cannot overtake. 
 The gardener should be an idler, and have a gross 
 partiality to the kitchen plots : an eager or toilful 
 gardener misbecomes the garden landscape ; a taste- 
 ful gardener will be ever meddling, will keep the 
 borders raw, and take the bloom off nature. Close 
 adjoining, if you are in the south, an olive-yard, if in 
 the north, a swarded apple-orchard reaching to the 
 stream, completes your miniature domain ; but this 
 is perhaps best entered through a door in the high 
 
202 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 fruit- wall ; so that you close the door behmd you on 
 your sunny plots, your hedges and evergreen jungle, 
 when you go down to watch the apples falling in the 
 pool. It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden 
 for the nose, and the eyes will take care of them- 
 selves. Nor must the ear be forgotten : without birds 
 a garden is a prison-yard. There is a garden near 
 Marseilles on a steep hill-side, walking by which, 
 upon a sunny morning, your ear will suddenly be 
 ravished with a burst of small and very cheerful 
 singing : some score of cages being set out there to 
 sun their occupants. This is a heavenly surprise to 
 any passer-by ; but the price paid, to keep so many 
 ardent and winged creatures from their liberty, will 
 make the luxury too dear for any thoughtful pleasure- 
 lover. There is only one sort of bird that I can 
 tolerate caged, though even then I think it hard, and 
 that is what is called in France the Bec-d'Argent. I 
 once had two of these pigmies in captivity ; and in 
 the quiet, bare house upon a silent street where I was 
 then living, their song, which was not much louder 
 than a bee's, but airily musical, kept me in a perpetual 
 good humour. I put the cage upon my table when I 
 worked, carried it with me when I went for meals, and 
 kept it by my head at night : the first thing in the 
 morning, these maestrini would pipe up. But these, 
 even if you can pardon their imprisonment, are for 
 the house. In the garden the wild birds must plant 
 a colony, a chorus of the lesser warblers that should 
 be almost deafening, a blackbird in the lilacs, a 
 nightingale down the lane, so that you must stroll to 
 hear it, and yet a little farther, tree-tops populous 
 with rooks. 
 
THE IDEAL HOUSE 203 
 
 Your house should not command much outlook; it 
 should be set deep and green, though upon rising 
 ground, or, if possible, crowning a knoll, for the sake 
 of drainage. Yet it must be open to the east, or you 
 will miss the sunrise ; sunset occurring so much later, 
 you can go up a few steps and look the other way. 
 A house of more than two stories is a mere barrack ; 
 indeed the ideal is of one story, raised upon cellars. 
 If the rooms are large, the house may be small : a 
 single room, lofty, spacious, and lightsome, is more 
 palatial than a castleful of cabinets and cupboards. 
 Yet size in a house, and some extent and intricacy 
 of corridor, is certainly delightful to the flesh. The 
 reception room should be, if possible, a place of many 
 recesses, which are ' petty retiring places for confer- 
 ence ' ; but it must have one long wall with a divan : 
 for a day spent upon a divan, among a world of 
 cushions, is as full of diversion as to travel. The 
 eating-room, in the French mode, should be ad hoc : 
 unfurnished, but with a buffet, the table, necessary 
 chairs, one or two of Canaletto's etchings, and a tile 
 fire-place for the winter. In neither of these public 
 places should there be anything beyond a shelf or two 
 of books ; but the passages may be one library from 
 end to end, and the stair, if there be one, lined with 
 volumes in old leather, very brightly carpeted, and 
 leading half-way up, and by way of landing, to a 
 windowed recess with a fire-place ; this window, al- 
 most alone in the house, should command a hand- 
 some prospect. Husband and wife must each possess 
 a studio ; on the woman^s sanctuary I hesitate to 
 dwell, and turn to the man's. The walls are shelved 
 waist-high for books, and the top thus forms a con- 
 
204 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 tinuous table running round the wall. Above are 
 prints, a large map of the neighbourhood, a Corot 
 and a Claude or two. The room is very spacious, 
 and the five tables and two chairs are but as islands. 
 One table is for actual work, one close by for refer- 
 ences in use ; one, very large, for MSS. or proofs that 
 Avait their turn ; one kept clear for an occasion ; and 
 the fifth is the map table, groaning under a collection 
 of large-scale maps and charts. Of all books these 
 are the least wearisome to read and the richest in 
 matter ; the course of roads and rivers, the contour 
 lines and the forests in the maps — the reefs, sound- 
 ings, anchors, sailing marks and little pilot-pictures in 
 the charts — and, in both, the bead-roll of names, 
 make them of all printed matter the most fit to 
 stimulate and satisfy the fancy. The chair in which 
 you write is very low and easy, and backed into a 
 corner ; at one elbow the fire twinkles ; close at the 
 other, if you are a little inhumane, your cage of 
 silver-bills are twittering into song. 
 
 Joined along by a passage, you may reach the great, 
 sunny, glass-roofed, and tiled gymnasium, at the far 
 end of which, lined with bright marble, is your 
 plunge and swimming bath, fitted with a capacious 
 boiler. 
 
 The whole loft of the house from end to end makes 
 one undivided chamber; here are set forth tables on 
 which to model imaginary or actual countries in putty 
 or plaster, with tools and hardy pigments; a car- 
 penter's bench ; and a spared corner for photography, 
 while at the far end a space is kept clear for playing 
 soldiers. Two boxes contain the two armies of some 
 five hundred horse and foot ; two others the ammuni- 
 
 I 
 
THE IDEAL HOUSE 205 
 
 tion of each side, and a fifth the foot-rules and the 
 three colours of chalk, with which you lay down, or, 
 after a day's play, refresh the outlines of the country ; 
 red or white for the two kinds of road (according as 
 they are suitable or not for the passage of ordnance), 
 and blue for the course of the obstructing rivers. 
 Here I foresee that you may pass much happy time ; 
 against a good adversary a game may well continue 
 for a month ; for with armies so considerable three 
 moves will occupy an hour. It will be found to set 
 an excellent edge on this diversion if one of the 
 players shall, every day or so, wTite a report of the 
 operations in the character of army correspondent. 
 
 I have left to the last the little room for winter 
 evenings. This should be furnished in warm positive 
 colours, and sofas and floor thick with rich furs. The 
 hearth, where you burn wood of aromatic quality on 
 silver dogs, tiled round about with Bible pictures ; 
 the seats deep and easy ; a single Titian in a gold 
 frame ; a white bust or so upon a bracket ; a rack 
 for the journals of the week ; a table for the books of 
 the year ; and close in a corner the three shelves full of 
 eternal books that never weary : Shakespeare, Moliere, 
 Montaigne, Lamb, Sterne, De Musset's comedies (the 
 one volume open at Carmosme and the other at 
 Fantasid) ; the Arahian Nights, and kindred stories, 
 in Weber's solemn volumes ; Borrow's Bible in Spain, 
 the Pilgrim's Progress, Guy Mannering and Roh Roy, 
 Monte Cristo and the Vicomte de Bi^agelonne, immortal 
 Boswell sole among biographers, Chaucer, Herrick, 
 and the State Trials. 
 
 The bedrooms are large, airy, with almost no 
 furniture, floors of varnished wood, and at the bed- 
 
206 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 head, in case of insomnia, one shelf of books of a 
 particular and dippable order, such as Pepys^ the 
 Paston Letters^ Burt's Letters from the Highlands^ or 
 the Newgate Calendar. . . . 
 
IX 
 DAVOS IN WINTER 
 
 A MOUNTAIN valley has, at the best, a certain prison- 
 like effect on the imagination, but a mountain valley, 
 an Alpine winter, and an invalid's weakness make up 
 among them a prison of the most effective kind. The 
 roads indeed are cleared, and at least one footpath 
 dodging up the hill ; but to these the health-seeker 
 is rigidly confined. There are for him no cross-cuts 
 over the field, no following of streams, no unguided 
 rambles in the wood. His walks are cut and dry. 
 In five or six different directions he can push as far, 
 and no farther, than his strength permits ; never 
 deviating from the line laid down for him and behold- 
 ing at each repetition the same field of wood and 
 snow from the same corner of the road. This, of 
 itself, would be a little trying to the patience in the 
 course of months ; but to this is added, by the heaped 
 mantle of the snow, an almost utter absence of detail 
 and an almost unbroken identity of colour. Snow, 
 it is true, is not merely white. The sun touches it 
 with roseate and golden lights. Its own crushed 
 infinity of crystals, its own richness of tiny sculpture, 
 fills it, when regarded near at hand, with wonderful 
 depths of coloured shadow, and, though wintrily 
 
 207 
 
208 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 transformed, it is still water, and has watery tones of 
 blue. But, when all is said, these fields of white and 
 blots of crude black forest are but a trite and staring 
 substitute for the infinite variety and pleasantness of 
 the earth's face. Even a boulder, whose front is too 
 precipitous to have retained the snow, seems, if you 
 come upon it in your walk, a perfect gem of colour, 
 reminds you almost painfully of other places, and 
 brings into your head the delights of more Arcadian 
 days — the path across the meadow, the hazel dell, 
 the lilies on the stream, and the scents, the colours, 
 and the whisper of the woods. And scents here are 
 as rare as colours. Unless you get a gust of kitchen 
 in passing some hotel, you shall smell nothing all day 
 long but the faint and choking odour of frost. Sounds, 
 too, are absent : not a bird pipes, not a bough waves, 
 in the dead, windless atmosphere. If a sleigh goes 
 by, the sleigh-bells ring, and that is all ; you work 
 all winter through to no other accompaniment but 
 the crunching of your steps upon the frozen snow. 
 
 It is the curse of the Alpine valleys to be each one 
 village from one end to the other. Go where you 
 please, houses will still be in sight, before and behind 
 you, and to the right and left. Climb as high as an 
 invalid is able, and it is only to spy new habitations 
 nested in the wood. Nor is that all ; for about the 
 health resort the walks are besieged by single people 
 walking rapidly with plaids about their shoulders, by 
 sudden troops of German boys trying to learn to jodel, 
 and by German couples silently and, as you venture 
 to fancy, not quite happily, pursuing love's young 
 dream. You may perhaps be an invalid who likes to 
 make bad verses as he walks about. Alas ! no muse 
 
DAVOS IN WINTER 209 
 
 will suffer this imminence of interruption — and at the 
 second stampede of jodellers you find your modest 
 inspiration fied. Or you may only have a taste for 
 solitude ; it may try your nerves to have some one 
 always in front whom you are visibly overtaking, and 
 some one always behind who is audibly overtaking 
 you, to say nothing of a score or so who brush past 
 you in an opposite direction. It may annoy you to 
 take your walks and seats in public view. Alas ! 
 there is no help for it among the Alps. There are 
 no recesses, as in Gorbio Valley by the oil-mill ; no 
 sacred solitude of olive gardens on the Roccabruna- 
 road ; no nook upon Saint Martin's Cape, haunted by 
 the voice of breakers, and fragrant with the three- 
 fold sweetness of the rosemary and the sea-pines and 
 the sea. 
 
 For this publicity there is no cure, and no allevia- 
 tion ; but the storms of which you will complain so 
 bitterly while they endure, chequer and by their con- 
 trast brighten the sameness of the fair-weather scenes. 
 When sun and storm contend together — when the 
 thick clouds are broken up and pierced by arrows of 
 golden daylight — there will be startling rearrangements 
 and transfigurations of the mountain summits. A sun- 
 dazzling spire of alp hangs suspended in mid-sky among 
 awful glooms and blackness ; or perhaps the edge of 
 some great mountain shoulder will be designed in living 
 gold, and appear for the duration of a glance bright 
 like a constellation, and alone 'in the unapparent.' 
 You may think you know the figure of these hills ; 
 but when they are thus revealed, they belong no 
 longer to the things of earth — meteors we should 
 rather call them, appearances of sun and air that 
 
 o 
 
210 ESSAYS OP TRAVEL , 
 
 endure but for a moment and return no more. Other 
 variations are more lasting, as when, for instance, 
 heavy and wet snow has fallen through some windless 
 hours, and the thin, spiry, mountain pine trees stand 
 each stock-still and loaded with a shining burthen. 
 You may drive through a forest so disguised, the 
 tongue-tied torrent struggling silently in the cleft 
 of the ravine, and all still except the jingle of the 
 sleigh bells, and you shall fancy yourself in some 
 untrodden northern territory — Lapland, Labrador, or 
 Alaska. 
 
 Or, possibly, you arise very early in the morning ; 
 totter down stairs in a state of somnambulism ; take 
 the simulacrum of a meal by the glimmer of one 
 lamp in the deserted coffee-room ; and find yourself 
 by seven o'clock outside in a belated moonlight and 
 a freezing chill. The mail sleigh takes you up and 
 carries you on, and you reach the top of the ascent 
 in the first hour of the day. To trace the fires of 
 the sunrise as they pass from peak to peak, to see the 
 unlit tree-tops stand out soberly against the lighted 
 sky, to be for twenty minutes in a wonderland of 
 clear, fading shadows, disappearing vapours, solemn 
 blooms of dawn, hills half glorified already with the 
 day and still half confounded with the greyness of the 
 western heaven — these will seem to repay you for 
 the discomforts of that early start ; but as the hour 
 proceeds, and these enchantments vanish, you will 
 find yourself upon the farther side in yet another 
 Alpine valley, snow white and coal black, with such 
 another long-drawn congeries of hamlets and such 
 another senseless watercourse bickering along the 
 foot. You have had your moment; but you have 
 
DAVOS IN WINTER 211 
 
 not changed the scene. The mountains are about 
 you like a trap ; you cannot foot it up a hillside and 
 behold the sea as a great plain, but live in holes and 
 corners, and can change only one for another. 
 
X 
 
 HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS 
 
 There has come a change in medical opinion, and 
 a change has followed in the lives of sick folk. A 
 year or two ago and the wounded soldiery of mankind 
 were all shut up together in some basking angle of 
 the Riviera, walking a dusty promenade or sitting in 
 dusty olive-yards within earshot of the interminable 
 and unchanging surf — idle among spiritless idlers ; 
 not perhaps dying, yet hardly living either, and 
 aspiring, sometimes fiercely, after livelier weather and 
 some vivifying change. These were certainly beauti- 
 ful places to live in, and the climate was wooing in 
 its softness. Yet there was a later shiver in the 
 sunshine; you were not certain whether you were 
 being wooed ; and these mild shores would sometimes 
 seem to you to be the shores of death. There was 
 a lack of a manly element ; the air was not reactive ; 
 you might write bits of poetry and practise resigna- 
 tion, but you did not feel that here was a good spot 
 to repair your tissue or regain your nerve. And 
 it appears, after all, that there was something just in 
 these appreciations. The invalid is now asked to 
 lodge on wintry Alps ; a ruder air shall medicine 
 him ; the demon of cold is no longer to be fled from, 
 but bearded in his den. For even Winter has his 
 
 212 
 
HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS 213 
 
 ' clear domestic cave,' and in those places where he 
 may be said to dwell for ever tempers his austerities. 
 
 Any one who has travelled westward by the great 
 transcontinental railroad of America must remember 
 the joy with which he perceived, after the tedious 
 prairies of Nebraska and across the vast and dismal 
 moorlands of Wyoming, a few snowy mountain summits 
 along the southern sky. It is among these mountains 
 in the new State of Colorado that the sick man may 
 find, not merely an alleviation of his ailments, but 
 the possibility of an active life and an honest liveli- 
 hood. There, no longer as a lounger in a plaid, but 
 as a working farmer, sweating at his work, he may 
 prolong and begin anew his life. Instead of the 
 bath-chair, the spade ; instead of the regulated walk, 
 rough journeys in the forest, and the pure, rare air of 
 the open mountains for the miasma of the sick-room 
 — these are the changes offered him, with what 
 promise of pleasure and of self-respect, with what 
 a revolution in all his hopes and terrors, none but an 
 invalid can know. Resignation, the cowardice that 
 apes a kind of courage and that lives in the very air 
 of health resorts, is cast aside at a breath of such 
 a prospect. The man can open the door ; he can be 
 up and doing ; he can be a kind of a man after all 
 and not merely an invalid. 
 
 But it is a far cry to the Rocky Mountains. We 
 cannot all of us go farming in Colorado ; and there 
 is yet a middle term, which combines the medical 
 benefits of the new system with the moral drawbacks 
 of the old. Again the invalid has to lie aside from 
 life and its wholesome duties ; again he has to be an 
 idler amono; idlers ; but this time at a ojreat altitude. 
 
214 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 far among the mountains, with the snow piled before 
 his door and the frost flowers every morning on his 
 window. The mere fact is tonic to his nerves. His 
 choice of a place of wintering has somehow to his 
 own eyes the air of an act of bold contract ; and, 
 since he has wilfully sought low temperatures, he is 
 not so apt to shudder at a touch of chill. He came 
 for that, he looked for it, and he throws it from him 
 with the thought. 
 
 A long straight reach of valley, wall-like mountains 
 upon either hand that rise higher and higher and 
 shoot up new summits the higher you climb ; a few 
 noble peaks seen even from the valley ; a village of 
 hotels ; a world of black and white — black pine- 
 woods, clinging to the sides of the valley, and white 
 snow flouring it, and papering it between the pine- 
 woods, and covering all the mountains with a dazzling 
 curd ; add a few score invalids marching to and fro 
 upon the snowy road, or skating on the ice-rinks, 
 possibly to music, or sitting under sunshades by the 
 door of the hotel — and you have the larger features 
 of a mountain sanatorium. A certain furious river 
 runs curving down the valley ; its pace never varies, 
 it has not a pool for as far as you can follow it ; and 
 its unchanging, senseless hurry is strangely tedious to 
 witness. It is a river that a man could grow to hate. 
 Day after day breaks with the rarest gold upon the 
 mountain spires, and creeps, growing and glowing, 
 down into the valley. From end to end the snow 
 reverberates the sunshine ; from end to end the air 
 tingles with the light, clear and dry like crystal. 
 Only along the course of the river, but high above it, 
 there hangs far into the noon, one waving scarf of 
 
 I 
 
HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS 215 
 
 vapour. It were hard to fancy a more engaging 
 feature in a landscape ; perhaps it is harder to believe 
 that delicate, long-lasting phantom of the atmo- 
 sphere, a creature of the incontinent stream whose 
 course it follows. By noon the sky is arrayed in an 
 unrivalled pomp of colour — mild and pale and melt- 
 ing in the north, but towards the zenith, dark with 
 an intensity of purple blue. What with this dark- 
 ness of heaven and the intolerable lustre of the snow, 
 space is reduced again to chaos. An English painter, 
 coming to France late in life, declared with natural 
 anger that ' the values were all wrong." Had he got 
 among the Alps on a bright day he might have lost 
 his reason. And even to any one who has looked at 
 landscape with any care, and in any way through the 
 spectacles of representative art, the scene has a 
 character of insanity. The distant shining mountain 
 peak is here beside your eye ; the neighbouring dull- 
 coloured house in comparison is miles away ; the 
 summit, which is all of splendid snow, is close at 
 hand ; the nigh slopes, which are black with pine 
 trees, bear it no relation, and might be in another 
 sphere. Here there are none of those delicate grada- 
 tions, those intimate, misty joinings-on and spreadings- 
 out into the distance, nothing of that art of air and 
 light by which the face of nature explains and veils 
 itself in climes which we may be allowed to think 
 more lovely. A glaring piece of crudity, where every- 
 thing that is not white is a solecism and defies the 
 judgment of the eyesight ; a scene of blinding defini- 
 tion ; a parade of daylight, almost scenically vulgar, 
 more than scenically trying, and yet hearty and 
 healthy, making the nerves to tighten and the mouth 
 to smile : such is the winter daytime in the Alps. 
 
216 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 With the approach of evening all is changed. A 
 mountain will suddenly intercept the sun ; a shadow 
 fall upon the valley ; in ten minutes the thermometer 
 will drop as many degrees ; the peaks that are no 
 longer shone upon dwindle into ghosts ; and mean- 
 while, overhead, if the weather be rightly character- 
 istic of the place, the sky fades towards night through 
 a surprising key of colours. The latest gold leaps 
 from the last mountain. Soon, perhaps, the moon 
 shall rise, and in her gentler light the valley shall be 
 mellowed and misted, and here and there a wisp of 
 silver cloud upon a hilltop, and here and there a 
 warmly glowing window in a house, between fire and 
 starlight, kind and homely in the fields of snow. 
 
 But the valley is not seated so high among the 
 clouds to be eternally exempt from changes. The 
 clouds gather, black as ink ; the wind bursts rudely 
 in ; day after day the mists drive overhead, the snow- 
 flakes flutter down in blinding disarray ; daily the 
 mail comes in later from the top of the pass ; people 
 peer through their windows and foresee no end but an 
 entire seclusion from Europe, and death by gradual 
 dry-rot, each in his indifferent inn ; and when at last 
 the storm goes, and the sun comes again, behold a 
 world of unpolluted snow, glossy like fur, bright like 
 daylight, a joy to wallowing dogs and cheerful to the 
 souls of men. Or })erhaps from across storied and 
 malarious Italy, a wind cunningly winds about the 
 mountains and breaks, warm and unclean, upon our 
 mountain valley. Every nerve is set ajar; the con- 
 science recognises, at a gust, a load of sins and negli- 
 gences hitherto unknown ; and the whole invalid 
 world huddles into its private chambers, and silently 
 recognises the empire of the Fohn. 
 
XI 
 ALPINE DIVERSIONS 
 
 There will be no lack of diversion in an Alpine 
 sanitarium. The place is half English, to be sure, 
 the local sheet appearing in double column, text and 
 translation ; but it still remains half German ; and 
 hence we have a band which is able to play, and a 
 company of actors able, as you will be told, to act. 
 This last you will take on trust, for the players, un- 
 like the local sheet, confine themselves to German ; 
 and though at the beginning of winter they come 
 with their wig-boxes to each hotel in turn, long- 
 before Christmas they will have given up the English 
 for a bad job. There will follow, perhaps, a skirmish 
 between the two races ; the German element seeking, 
 in the interest of their actors, to raise a mysterious 
 item, the Kur-taooe, which figures heavily enough 
 already in the weekly bills, the English element 
 stoutly resisting. Meantime in the English hotels 
 home-played farces, tableau oo-vivants^ and even balls 
 enliven the evenings ; a charity bazaar sheds genial 
 consternation ; Christmas and New Year are solem- 
 nised with Pantagruelian dinners, and from time to 
 time the young folks carol and revolve untunefully 
 enough through the figures of a singing quadrille. 
 
 217 
 
9A8 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 xV magazine club supplies you with everything, from 
 the Qitarteyiy to the Sunday at Home. Grand tour- 
 naments are organised at chess, draughts, billiards 
 and whist. Once and again wandering artists drop 
 into our mountain valley, coming you know not 
 whence, going you cannot imagine whither, and be- 
 longing to every degree in the hierarchy of musical 
 art, from the recognised performer who announces a 
 concert for the evening, to the comic German family 
 or solitary long-haired German baritone, who surprises 
 the guests at dinner-time with songs and a collection. 
 They are all of them good to see ; they, at least, are 
 moving ; they bring with them the sentiment of the 
 open road ; yesterday, perhaps, they were in Tyrol, 
 and next week they will be far in Lombardy, while 
 all we sick folk still simmer in our mountain prison. 
 Some of them, too, are welcome as the flowers in 
 May for their own sake ; some of them may have a 
 human voice ; some may have that magic which trans- 
 forms a wooden box into a song-bird, and what wc 
 jeeringly call a fiddle into what we mention with 
 respect as a violin. From that grinding lilt, with 
 which the blind man, seeking pence, accompanies the 
 beat of paddle wheels across the ferry, there is surely 
 a difference rather of kind than of degree to that 
 unearthly voice of singing that bewails and praises 
 the destiny of man at the touch of the true virtuoso. 
 Even that you may perhaps enjoy ; and if you 
 do so you will own it impossible to enjoy it more 
 keenly than here, im Sclmee der Alpen. A hyacinth 
 in a pot, a handful of primroses packed in moss, or 
 a piece of music by some one who knows the way to 
 the heart of a violin, are things that, in this invari- 
 
ALPINE DIVERSIONS 219 
 
 able sameness of the snows and frosty air, surprise 
 you like an adventure. It is droll, moreover, to com- 
 pare the respect with which the invalids attend a 
 concert, and the ready contempt with which they 
 greet the dinner-time performers. Singing which 
 they would hear with real enthusiasm — possibly with 
 tears — from a corner of a drawing-room, is listened 
 to with laughter when it is offered by an unknown 
 professional and no money has been taken at the 
 door. 
 
 Of skating little need be said ; in so snowy a 
 climate the rinks must be intelligently managed ; 
 their mismanagement will lead to many days of 
 vexation and some petty quarrelling, but when all 
 goes well, it is certainly curious, and perhaps rather 
 unsafe, for the invalid to skate under a burning sun, 
 and walk back to his hotel in a sweat, through long 
 tracts of glare and passages of freezing shadow. But 
 the peculiar outdoor sport of this district is tobog- 
 ganing. A Scotchman may remember the low flat 
 board, with the front wheels on a pivot, which was 
 called a hurlie ; he may remember this contrivance, 
 laden with boys, as, laboriously started, it ran rattling 
 down the brae, and was, now successfully, now un- 
 successfully, steered round the corner at the foot ; he 
 may remember scented summer evenings passed in this 
 diversion, and many a grazed skin, bloody cockscomb, 
 and neglected lesson. The toboggan is to the hurlie 
 what the sled is to the carriage ; it is a hurlie upon 
 runners ; and if for a grating road you substitute a 
 long declivity of beaten snow, you can imagine the 
 giddy career of the tobogganist. The correct position 
 is to sit ; but the fantastic will sometimes sit hind- 
 
220 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 foremost, or dare the descent upon their belly or 
 their back. A few steer with a pair of pointed 
 sticks, but it is more classical to use the feet. If 
 the weight be heavy and the track smooth, the 
 toboggan takes the bit between its teeth ; and to 
 steer a couple of full-sized friends in safety requires 
 not only judgment but desperate exertion. On a 
 very steep track, with a keen evening frost, you 
 may have moments almost too appalling to be called 
 enjoyment ; the head goes, the world vanishes ; your 
 blind steed bounds below your weight ; you reach 
 the foot, with all the breath knocked out of your 
 body, jarred and bewildered as though you had just 
 been subjected to a railway accident. Another 
 element of joyful horror is added by the formation 
 of a train ; one toboggan being tied to another, 
 perhaps to the number of half a dozen, only the 
 first rider being allowed to steer, and all the rest 
 pledged to put up their feet and follow their leader, 
 with heart in mouth, down the mad descent. This, 
 particularly if the track begins with a headlong 
 plunge, is one of the most exhilarating follies in the 
 world, and the tobogganing invalid is early reconciled 
 to somersaults. 
 
 There is all manner of variety in the nature of 
 the tracks, some miles in length, others but a few 
 yards, and yet like some short rivers, furious in their 
 brevity. All degrees of skill and courage and taste 
 may be suited in your neighbourhood. But perhaps 
 the true way to toboggan is alone and at night. 
 First comes the tedious climb, dragging your instru- 
 ment behind you. Next a long breathing-space, 
 alone with snow and pinewoods, cold, silent and 
 
ALPINE DIVERSIONS 221 
 
 solemn to the heart. Then you push off"; the 
 toboggan fetches way ; she begins to feel the hill, 
 to glide, to swim, to gallop. In a breath you are 
 out from under the pine trees, and a whole heavenful 
 of stars reels and flashes overhead. Then comes a 
 vicious effort ; for by this time your wooden steed is 
 speeding like the wind, and you are spinning round 
 a corner, and the whole glittering valley and all the 
 lights in all the great hotels lie for a moment at 
 your feet ; and the next you are racing once more 
 in the shadow of the night with close-shut teeth and 
 beating heart. Yet a little while and you will be 
 landed on the highroad by the door of your own 
 hotel. This, in an atmosphere tingling with forty 
 degrees of frost, in a night made luminous with stars 
 and snow, and girt with strange white mountains, 
 teaches the pulse an unaccustomed tune and adds a 
 new excitement to the life of man upon his planet. 
 
XII 
 THE STIMULATION OF THE ALPS 
 
 To any one who should come from a southern sani- 
 tarium to the Alps, the row of sun-burned faces 
 round the table would present the first surprise. He 
 would begin by looking for the invalids, and he would 
 lose his pains, for not one out of five of even the 
 bad cases bears the mark of sickness on his face. 
 The plump sunshine from above and its strong 
 reverberation from below colour the skin like an 
 Indian climate ; the treatment, which consists mainly 
 of the open air, exposes even the sickliest to tan, 
 and a tableful of invalids comes, in a month or two, 
 to resemble a tableful of hunters. But although he 
 may be thus surprised at the first glance, his astonish- 
 ment will grow greater, as he experiences the effects 
 of the climate on himself. In many ways it is a 
 trying business to reside upon the Alps : the stomach 
 is exercised, the appetite often languishes ; the liver 
 may at times rebel ; and because you have come so 
 far from metropolitan advantages, it does not follow 
 that you shall recover. But one thing is undeniable 
 — that in the rare air, clear, cold, and blinding light 
 of Alpine winters, a man takes a certain troubled 
 delight in his existence which can nowhere else be 
 paralleled. He is perhaps no happier, but he is 
 
 222 
 
THE STIMULATION OF THE ALPS 223 
 
 stingingly alive. It does not, perhaps, come out of 
 him in work or exercise, yet he feels an enthusiasm 
 of the blood unknown in more temperate climates. 
 It may not be health, but it is fun. 
 
 There is nothing more difficult to communicate on 
 paper than this baseless ardour, this stimulation of 
 the brain, this sterile joyousness of spirits. You 
 wake every morning, see the gold upon the snow- 
 peaks, become filled with courage, and bless God for 
 your prolonged existence. The valleys are but a 
 stride to you ; you cast your shoe over the hilltops ; 
 your ears and your heart sing; in the words of an 
 unverified quotation from the Scotch psalms, you 
 feel yourself fit ' on the wings of all the winds ^ to 
 ' come flying all abroad.' Europe and your mind are 
 too narrow for that flood of energy. Yet it is notable 
 that you are hard to root out of your bed ; that you 
 start forth, singing, indeed, on your walk, yet are 
 unusually ready to turn home again ; that the best of 
 you is volatile ; and that although the restlessness 
 remains till night, the strength is early at an end. 
 With all these heady jollities, you are half conscious of 
 an underlying languor in the body ; you prove not to 
 be so well as you had fancied ; you weary before you 
 have well begun ; and though you mount at morn- 
 ing with the lark, that is not precisely a song-bird's 
 heart that you bring back with you when you return 
 with aching limbs and peevish temper to your inn. 
 
 It is hard to say wherein it lies, but this joy of 
 Alpine winters is its own reward. Baseless, in a 
 sense, it is more than worth more permanent improve- 
 ments. The dream of health is perfect while it lasts ; 
 and if, in trying to realise it, you speedily wear out 
 
224 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 the dear hallucination, still every day, and many times 
 a day, you are conscious of a strength you scarce 
 possess, and a delight in living as merry as it proves 
 to be transient. 
 
 The brightness — heaven and earth conspiring to 
 be bright — the levity and quiet of the air ; the odd 
 stirring silence — more stirring than a tumult ; the 
 snow, the frost, the enchanted landscape : all have 
 their part in the effect and on the memory, 'tons vous 
 tapent sur la tete ' ; and yet when you have enumerated 
 all, you have gone no nearer to explain or even to 
 (jualify the delicate exhilaration that you feel — 
 delicate, you may say, and yet excessive, greater 
 than can be said in prose, almost greater than 
 an invalid can bear. There is a certain wine of 
 France known in England in some gaseous disguise, 
 but when drunk in the land of its nativity still as a 
 pool, clean as river water, and as heady as verse. It 
 is more than probable that in its noble natural con- 
 dition this was the very wine of Anjou so beloved by 
 Athos in the ' Musketeers.^ Now, if the reader has 
 ever washed down a liberal second breakfast with the 
 wine in question, and gone forth, on the back of these 
 dilutions, into a sultry, sparkling noontide, he will 
 have felt an influence almost as genial, although 
 strangely grosser, than this fairy titillation of the 
 nerves among the snow and sunshine of the Alps. 
 That also is a mode, we need not say of intoxication, 
 but of insobriety. Thus also a man walks in a 
 strong sunshine of the mind, and follows smiling, 
 insubstantial meditations. And whether he be really 
 so clever or so strong as he supposes, in either case 
 he will enjoy his chimera while it lasts. 
 
THE STIMULATION OF THE ALPS 225 
 
 The influence of this giddy air displays itself in 
 many secondary ways. A certain sort of laboured 
 pleasantry has already been recognised, and may 
 perhaps have been remarked in these papers, as a 
 sort peculiar to that climate. People utter their 
 judgments with a cannonade of syllables ; a big word 
 is as good as a meal to them ; and the turn of a 
 phrase goes further than humour or wisdom. By 
 the professional writer many sad vicissitudes have to 
 be undergone. At first he cannot write at all. The 
 heart, it appears, is unequal to the pressure of busi- 
 ness, and the brain, left without nourishment, goes 
 into a mild decline. Next, some power of work 
 returns to him, accompanied by jumping headaches. 
 Last, the spring is opened, and there pours at once 
 from his pen a world of blatant, hustling polysyl- 
 lables, and talk so high as, in the old joke, to be 
 positively offensive in hot weather. He writes it in 
 good faith and with a sense of inspiration ; it is only 
 when he comes to read what he has written that 
 surprise and disquiet seize upon his mind. What is 
 he to do, poor man ? All his little fishes talk like 
 whales. This yeasty inflation, this stiff* and strutting 
 architecture of the sentence has come upon him while 
 he slept ; and it is not he, it is the Alps, who are to 
 blame. He is not, perhaps, alone, which somewhat 
 comforts him. Nor is the ill without a remedy. 
 Some day, when the spring returns, he shall go down 
 a little lower in this world, and remember quieter 
 inflections and more modest language. But here, in 
 the meantime, there seems to swim up some outline 
 of a new cerebral hygiene and a good time coming, 
 when experienced advisers shall send a man to the 
 
226 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 proper measured level for the ode, the biography, or 
 the religious tract ; and a nook may be found between 
 the sea and Chimborazo, where Mr. Swinburne shall 
 be able to write more continently, and Mr. Browning 
 somewhat slower. 
 
 Is it a return of youth, or is it a congestion of the 
 brain ? It is a sort of congestion, perhaps, that leads 
 the invalid, when all goes well, to face the new day 
 with such a bubbling cheerfulness. It is certainly 
 congestion that makes night hideous with visions, all 
 the chambers of a many-storeyed caravanserai, haunted 
 with vociferous nightmares, and many wakeful people 
 come down late for breakfast in the morning. Upon 
 that theory the cynic may explain the whole affair — 
 exhilaration, nightmares, pomp of tongue and all. 
 But, on the other hand, the peculiar blessedness of 
 boyhood may itself be but a symptom of the same 
 complaint, for the two effects are strangely similar ; 
 and the frame of mind of the invalid upon the Alps 
 is a sort of intermittent youth, with periods of lassi- 
 tude. The fountain of Juventus does not play 
 steadily in these parts ; but there it plays, and pos- 
 sibly nowhere else. 
 
XIII 
 ROADS 
 
 1873 
 
 No amateur will deny that he can find more pleasure 
 in a single drawing, over which he can sit a whole quiet 
 forenoon, and so gradually study himself into humour 
 with the artist, than he can ever extract from the 
 dazzle and accumulation of incongruous impressions 
 that send him, weary and stupefied, out of some famous 
 picture-gallery. But what is thus admitted with 
 regard to art is not extended to the (so-called) natural 
 beauties : no amount of excess in sublime mountain 
 outline or the graces of cultivated lowland can do 
 anything, it is supposed, to weaken or degrade the 
 palate. We are not at all sure, however, that modera- 
 tion, and a regimen tolerably austere, even in scenery, 
 are not healthful and strengthening to the taste ; and 
 that the best school for a lover of nature is not to 
 be found in one of those countries where there is no 
 stage effect — nothing salient or sudden, — but a quiet 
 spirit of orderly and harmonious beauty pervades all 
 the details, so that we can patiently attend to each 
 of the little touches that strike in us, all of them 
 
 227 
 
228 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 together, the subdued note of the landscape. It is 
 in scenery such as this that we find ourselves in the 
 right temper to seek out small sequestered loveliness. 
 The constant recurrence of similar combinations of 
 colour and outline gradually forces upon us a sense of 
 how the harmony has been built up, and we become 
 familiar with something of nature^s mannerism. This 
 is the true pleasure of your ' rural voluptuary,"* — not 
 to remain awe-stricken before a Mount Chimborazo ; 
 not to sit deafened over the big drum in the orchestra, 
 but day by day to teach himself some new beauty — 
 to experience some new vague and tranquil sensation 
 that has before evaded him. It is not the people 
 who ' have pined and hungered after nature many a 
 year, in the great city pent,' as Coleridge said in the 
 poem that made Charles Lamb so much ashamed of 
 himself; it is not those who make the greatest 
 progress in this intimacy with her, or who are most 
 quick to see and have the greatest gusto to enjoy. 
 In this, as in everything else, it is minute knowledge 
 and long-continued loving industry that make the 
 true dilettante. A man must have thought much 
 over scenery before he begins fully to enjoy it. It is 
 no youngling enthusiasm on hilltops that can possess 
 itself of the last essence of beauty. Probably most 
 people's heads are growing bare before they can see 
 all in a landscape that they have the capability of 
 seeing ; and, even then, it will be only for one little 
 moment of consummation before the faculties are 
 again on the decline, and they that look out of the 
 windows begin to be darkened and restrained in 
 sight. Thus the study of nature should be carried 
 forward thoroughly and with system. Every gratifi- 
 
ROADS 229 
 
 cation should be rolled long under the tongue, and 
 we should be always eager to analyse and compare, 
 in order that we may be able to give some plausible 
 reason for our admirations. True, it is difficult to 
 put even approximately into words the kind of 
 feelings thus called into play. There is a dangerous 
 vice inherent in any such intellectual refining upon 
 vague sensation. The analysis of such satisfactions 
 lends itself very readily to literary affectations ; and 
 we can all think of instances where it has shown itself 
 apt to exercise a morbid influence, even upon an 
 author's choice of language and the turn of his 
 sentences. And yet there is much that makes the 
 attempt attractive ; for any expression, however 
 imperfect, once given to a cherished feeling, seems 
 a sort of legitimation of the pleasure we take in 
 it. A common sentiment is one of those great 
 goods that make life palatable and ever new. The 
 knowledge that another has felt as we have felt, 
 and seen things, even if they are little things, 
 not much otherwise than we have seen them, will 
 continue to the end to be one of life's choicest 
 pleasures. 
 
 Let the reader, then, betake himself in the spirit 
 we have recommended to some of the quieter kinds 
 of English landscape. In those homely and placid 
 agricultural districts, familiarity will bring into relief 
 many things worthy of notice, and urge them 
 pleasantly home to him by a sort of loving repetition ; 
 such as the wonderful life-giving speed of windmill 
 sails above the stationary country ; the occurrence 
 and recurrence of the same church tower at the end 
 of one long vista after another : and, conspicuous 
 
230 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 among these sources of quiet pleasure, the character 
 and variety of the road itself, along which he takes 
 his way. Not only near at hand, in the lithe con- 
 tortions with which it adapts itself to the interchanges 
 of level and slope, but far away also, when he sees 
 a few hundred feet of it upheaved against a hill and 
 shining in the afternoon sun, he will find it an object 
 so changeful and enlivening that he can always 
 pleasurably busy his mind about it. He may leave 
 the river-side, or fall out of the way of villages, but 
 the road he has always with him ; and, in the true 
 humour of observation, will find in that sufficient 
 company. From its subtle windings and changes of 
 level there arises a keen and continuous interest, that 
 keeps the attention ever alert and cheerful. Every 
 sensitive adjustment to the contour of the ground, 
 every little dip and swerve, seems instinct with life 
 and an exquisite sense of balance and beauty. The 
 road rolls upon the easy slopes of the country, like 
 a long ship in the hollows of the sea. The very 
 margins of waste ground, as they trench a little 
 farther on the beaten way, or recede again to the 
 shelter of the hedge, have something of the same free 
 delicacy of line — of the same swing and wilfulness. 
 You might think for a whole summer's day (and not 
 have thought it any nearer an end by evening) what 
 concourse and succession of circumstances has pro- 
 duced the least of these deflections ; and it is, 
 perhaps, just in this that we should look for the 
 secret of their interest. A foot-path across a meadow 
 — in all its human waywardness and unaccountability, 
 in all the grata protervitas of its varying direction — 
 will always be more to us than a railroad well 
 
ROADS 231 
 
 engineered through a difficult country.^ No reasoned 
 sequence is thrust upon our attention : we seem to 
 have slipped for one lawless little moment out of the 
 iron rule of cause and effect ; and so we revert at once 
 to some of the pleasant old heresies of personification, 
 always poetically orthodox, and attribute a sort of 
 free-will, an active and spontaneous life, to the white 
 riband of road that lengthens out, and bends, and 
 cunningly adapts itself to the inequalities of the land 
 before our eyes. We remember, as we write, some 
 miles of fine wide highway laid out with conscious 
 aesthetic artifice through a broken and richly cultivated 
 tract of country. It is said that the engineer had 
 Hogarth's line of beauty in his mind as he laid them 
 down. And the result is striking. One splendid 
 satisfying sweep passes with easy transition into 
 another, and there is nothing to trouble or dislocate 
 the strong continuousness of the main line of the 
 road. And yet there is something wanting. There 
 is here no saving imperfection, none of those secondary 
 curves and little trepidations of direction that carry, 
 in natural roads, our curiosity actively along with 
 them. One feels at once that this road has not 
 grown like a natural road, but has been laboriously 
 made to pattern ; and that, while a model may be 
 academically correct in outline, it will always be 
 inanimate and cold. The traveller is also aware of 
 a sympathy of mood between himself and the road 
 he travels. We have all seen ways that have wandered 
 into heavy sand near the sea-coast, and trail wearily 
 
 ^ Compare Blake, in the Mar^-iage of Heaven and Hell: * Improve- 
 ment makes straight roads ; but the crooked roads, without improve- 
 ment, are roads of Genius.' 
 
232 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 over the dunes like a trodden serpent : here we too 
 must plod forward at a dull, laborious pace ; and so 
 a sympathy is preserved between our frame of mind 
 and the expression of the relaxed, heavy curves of the 
 roadway. Such a phenomenon, indeed, our reason 
 might perhaps resolve with a little trouble. We 
 might reflect that the present road had been developed 
 out of a tract spontaneously followed by generations 
 of primitive wayfarers ; and might see in its expres- 
 sion a testimony that those generations had been 
 affected at the same ground, one after another, in the 
 same manner as we are affected to-day. Or we might 
 carry the reflection further, and remind ourselves that 
 where the air is invigorating and the ground firm 
 under the traveller's foot, his eye is quick to take 
 advantage of small undulations, and he will turn 
 carelessly aside from the direct way wherever 
 there is anything beautiful to examine or some 
 promise of a wider view ; so that even a bush of 
 wild roses may permanently bias and deform the 
 straight path over the meadow ; whereas, where the 
 soil is heavy, one is preoccupied with the labour of 
 mere progression, and goes with a bowed head heavily 
 and unobservantly forward. Reason, however, will 
 not carry us the whole way ; for the sentiment often 
 recurs in situations where it is very hard to imagine 
 any possible explanation ; and indeed, if we drive 
 briskly along a good, well-made road in an open 
 vehicle, we shall experience this sympathy almost at 
 its fullest. We feel the sharp settle of the springs 
 at some curiously twisted corner ; after a steep ascent, 
 the fresh air dances in our faces as we rattle pre- 
 cipitately down the other side, and we find it difficult 
 
ROADS 233 
 
 to avoid attributing something headlong, a sort of 
 abandon^ to the road itself. 
 
 The mere winding of the path is enough to enliven 
 a long day's walk in even a commonplace or dreary 
 country-side. Something that we have seen from 
 miles back, upon an eminence, is so long hid from us, 
 as we wander through folded valleys or among woods, 
 that our expectation of seeing it again is sharpened 
 into a violent appetite, and as Ave draw nearer we 
 impatiently quicken our steps and turn every corner 
 with a beating heart. It is through these prolonga- 
 tions of expectancy, this succession of one hope to 
 another, that we live out long seasons of pleasure in 
 a few hours' walk. It is in following these capricious 
 sinuosities that we learn, only bit by bit and through 
 one coquettish reticence after another, much as we 
 learn the heart of a friend, the whole loveliness of the 
 country. This disposition always preserves something 
 new to be seen, and takes us, like a careful cicerone, 
 to many different points of distant view before it 
 allows us finally to approach the hoped-for destination. 
 
 In its connection with the traffic, and whole friendly 
 intercourse with the country, there is something very 
 pleasant in that succession of saunterers and brisk 
 and business-like passers-by, that peoples our ways 
 and helps to build up what Walt Whitman calls ' the 
 cheerful voice of the public road, the gay, fresh senti- 
 ment of the road.' But out of the great network of 
 ways that binds all life together from the hill-farm 
 to the city, there is something individual to most, 
 and, on the whole, nearly as much choice on the 
 score of company as on the score of beauty or easy 
 travel. On some we are never long without the sound 
 
234 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 of wheels, and folk pass us by so thickly that we lose 
 the sense of their number. But on others, about 
 little-frequented districts, a meeting is an affair of 
 moment; we have the sight far off of some one 
 coming towards us, the growing definiteness of the 
 person, and then the brief passage and salutation, and 
 the road left empty in front of us for perhaps a great 
 while to come. Such encounters have a wistful interest 
 that can hardly be understood by the dweller in places 
 more populous. We remember standing beside a 
 countryman once, in the mouth of a quiet by-street 
 in a city that was more than ordinarily crowded and 
 bustling ; he seemed stunned and bewildered by the 
 continual passage of different faces ; and after a long 
 pause, during which he appeared to search for some 
 suitable expression, he said timidly that there seemed 
 to be a great deal of meeting thereabouts. The phrase 
 is significant. It is the expression of town-life in the 
 language of the long, solitary country highways. A 
 meeting of one with one was what this man had been 
 used to in the pastoral uplands from which he came ; 
 and the concourse of the streets was in his eyes only 
 an extraordinary multiplication of such ' meetings."* 
 
 And now we come to that last and most subtle 
 quality of all, to that sense of prospect, of outlook, 
 that is brought so powerfully to our minds by a road. 
 In real nature, as well as in old landscapes, beneath 
 that impartial daylight in which a whole variegated 
 plain is plunged and saturated, the line of the road 
 leads the eye forth with the vague sense of desire up 
 to the green limit of the horizon. Travel is brought 
 home to us, and we visit in spirit every grove and 
 hamlet that tempts us in the distance. Sehnsucht — 
 
ROADS 235 
 
 the passion for what is ever beyond — is livingly 
 expressed in that white riband of possible travel that 
 severs the uneven country ; not a ploughman follow- 
 ing his plough up the shining furrow, not the blue 
 smoke of any cottage in a hollow, but is brought to 
 us with a sense of nearness and attainability by this 
 wavering line of junction. There is a passionate 
 paragraph in Werther that strikes the very key. 
 ' When I came hither,' he writes, * how the beautiful 
 valley invited me on every side, as I gazed down into 
 it from the hill-top ! There the wood — ah, that I 
 might mingle in its shadows ! there the mountain 
 summits — ah, that I might look down from them 
 over the broad country ! the interlinked hills ! the 
 secret valleys ! Oh to lose myself among their mys- 
 teries ! I hurried into the midst, and came back 
 without finding aught I hoped for. Alas ! the dis- 
 tance is like the future. A vast whole lies in the 
 twilight before our spirit ; sight and feeling alike 
 plunge and lose themselves in the prospect, and we 
 yearn to surrender our whole being, and let it be 
 filled full with all the rapture of one single glorious 
 sensation ; and alas ! when we hasten to the fruition, 
 when there is changed to here, all is afterwards as it 
 was before, and we stand in our indigent and cramped 
 estate, and our soul thirsts after a still ebbing elixir." 
 It is to this wandering and uneasy spirit of anticipa- 
 tion that roads minister. Every little vista, every 
 little glimpse that we have of what lies before us, 
 gives the impatient imagination rein, so that it can 
 outstrip the body and already plunge into the shadow 
 of the woods, and overlook from the hill-top the plain 
 beyond it, and wander in the windings of the valleys 
 
236 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 that are still far in front. The road is already there 
 — we shall not be long behind. It is as if we were 
 marching with the rear of a great army, and, from far 
 before, heard the acclamation of the people as the 
 vanguard entered some friendly and jubilant city. 
 Would not every man, through all the long miles of 
 march, feel as if he also were within the gates .? 
 
XIV 
 
 ON THE ENJOYMENT OF 
 UNPLEASANT PLACES 
 
 1874 
 
 It is a difficult matter to make the most of any given 
 place, and we have much in our own power. Things 
 looked at patiently from one side after another 
 generally end by showing a side that is beautiful. A 
 few months ago some words were said in the Portfolio 
 as to an ' austere regimen in scenery '' ; and such a 
 discipline was then recommended as ' healthful and 
 strengthening to the taste.' That is the text, so to 
 speak, of the present essay. This discipline in 
 scenery, it must be understood, is something more 
 than a mere walk before breakfast to whet the 
 appetite. For when we are put down in some un- 
 sightly neighbourhood, and especially if we have 
 come to be more or less dependent on what we see, 
 we must set ourselves to hunt out beautiful things 
 with all the ardour and patience of a botanist after a 
 rare plant. Day by day we perfect ourselves in the 
 art of seeing nature more favourably. We learn to 
 live with her, as people learn to live with fretful or 
 violent spouses : to dwell lovingly on what is good, 
 and shut our eyes against all that is bleak or inhar- 
 
 237 
 
238 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 moiiious. We learn, also, to come to each place in 
 the right spirit. The traveller, as Brantome quaintly 
 tells us, ^fait des discours en soi pour se soutenir en 
 chemin'' ; and into these discourses he weaves some- 
 thing out of all that he sees and sufters by the way ; 
 they take their tone greatly from the varying char- 
 acter of the scene ; a sharp ascent brings different 
 thoughts from a level road ; and the man's fancies 
 grow lighter as he comes out of the wood into a 
 clearing. Nor does the scenery any more affect the 
 thoughts than the thoughts affect the scenery. We 
 see places through our humours as through differently 
 coloured glasses. We are ourselves a term in the 
 equation, a note of the chord, and make discord or 
 harmony almost at will. There is no fear for the 
 result, if we can but surrender ourselves sufficiently 
 to the country that surrounds and follows us, so that 
 we are ever thinking suitable thoughts or telling our- 
 selves some suitable sort of story as we go. We 
 become thus, in some sense, a centre of beauty ; 
 we are provocative of beauty, much as a gentle 
 and sincere character is provocative of sincerity 
 and gentleness in others. And even where there 
 is no harmony to be elicited by the quickest and 
 most obedient of spirits, we may still embellish a 
 place with some attraction of romance. We may 
 learn to go far afield for associations, and handle 
 them lightly when we have found them. Sometimes 
 an old print comes to our aid ; I have seen many a 
 spot lit up at once with picturesque imaginations, by 
 a reminiscence of Callot, or Sadeler, or Paul Brill. 
 Dick Turpin has been my lay figure for many an 
 English lane. And I suppose the Trossachs would 
 
ON UNPLEASANT PLACES 239 
 
 hardly be the Trossachs for most tourists if a man of 
 admirable romantic instinct had not peopled it for 
 them with harmonious figures, and brought them 
 thither with minds rightly prepared for the impres- 
 sion. There is half the battle in this preparation. 
 For instance : I have rarely been able to visit, in the 
 proper spirit, the wild and inhospitable places of our 
 own Highlands. I am happier where it is tame and 
 fertile, and not readily pleased without trees. I 
 understand that there are some phases of mental 
 trouble that harmonise well with such surroundings, 
 and that some persons, by the dispensing power of 
 the imagination, can go back several centuries in 
 spirit, and put themselves into sympathy with the 
 hunted, houseless, unsociable way of life that was in 
 its place upon these savage hills. Now, when I am 
 sad, I like nature to charm me out of my sadness, like 
 David before Saul ; and the thought of these past 
 ages strikes nothing in me but an unpleasant pity ; so 
 that I can never hit on the right humour for this sort 
 of landscape, and lose much pleasure in consequence. 
 Still, even here, if I were only let alone, and time 
 enough were given, I should have all manner of 
 pleasures, and take many clear and beautiful images 
 away with me when I left. When we cannot think 
 ourselves into sympathy with the great features of a 
 country, we learn to ignore them, and put our head 
 among the grass for flowers, or pore, for long times 
 together, over the changeful current of a stream. 
 We come down to the sermon in stones, when we are 
 shut out from any poem in the spread landscape. 
 We begin to peep and botanise, we take an interest 
 in birds and insects, we find many things beautiful in 
 
240 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 miniature. The reader will recollect the little 
 summer scene in Wuther'ing Heights — the one warm 
 scene, perhaps, in all that powerful, miserable novel 
 — and the great feature that is made therein by 
 grasses and flowers and a little sunshine : this is in 
 the spirit of which I now speak. And, lastly, we 
 can go indoors ; interiors are sometimes as beautiful, 
 often more picturesque, than the shows of the open 
 air, and they have that quality of shelter of which I 
 shall presently have more to say. 
 
 With all this in mind, I have often been tempted 
 to put forth the paradox that any place is good 
 enough to live a life in, while it is only in a few, 
 and those highly favoured, that we can pass a few 
 hours agreeably. For, if we only stay long enough 
 we become at home in the neighbourhood. Remini- 
 scences spring up, like flowers, about uninteresting 
 corners. We forget to some degree the superior 
 loveliness of other places, and fall into a tolerant and 
 sympathetic spirit which is its own reward and justifi- 
 cation. Looking back the other day on some recollec- 
 tions of my own, I was astonished to find how much I 
 owed to such a residence ; six weeks in one unpleasant 
 country-side had done more, it seemed, to quicken 
 and educate my sensibilities than many years in places 
 that jumped more nearly with my inclination. 
 
 The country to which I refer was a level and tree- 
 less plateau, over which the winds cut like a whip. 
 For miles and miles it was the same. A river, indeed, 
 fell into the sea near the town where I resided ; but 
 the valley of the river was shallow and bald, for as far 
 up as ever I had the heart to follow it. There were 
 roads, certainly, but roads that had no beauty or 
 
ON UNPLEASANT PLACES 241 
 
 interest ; for, as there was no timber, and but little 
 irregularity of surface, you saw your whole walk 
 exposed to you from the beginning : there was no- 
 thing left to fancy, nothing to expect, nothing to see 
 by the wayside, save here and there an unhomely- 
 looking homestead, and here and there a solitary, 
 spectacled stone-breaker ; and you were only accom- 
 panied, as you went doggedly forward, by the gaunt 
 telegraph-posts and the hum of the resonant wires in 
 the keen sea- wind. To one who had learned to know 
 their song in warm pleasant places by the Mediter- 
 ranean, it seemed to taunt the country, and make it 
 still bleaker bv suo^oested contrast. Even the waste 
 places by the side of the road were not, as Hawthorne 
 liked to put it, ' taken back to Nature ' by any decent 
 covering of vegetation. Wherever the land had the 
 chance, it seemed to lie fallow. There is a certain 
 tawny nudity of the South, bare sunburnt plains, 
 coloured like a lion, and hills clothed only in the blue 
 transparent air ; but this was of another description 
 — this was the nakedness of the North ; the earth 
 seemed to know that it was naked, and was ashamed 
 and cold. 
 
 It seemed to be always blowing on that coast. 
 Indeed, this had passed into the speech of the in- 
 habitants, and they saluted each other when they 
 met with ' Breezy, breezy,' instead of the customary 
 ' Fine day ' of farther south. These continual winds 
 were not like the harvest breeze, that just keeps an 
 equable pressure against your face as you walk, and 
 serves to set all the trees talking over your head, or 
 bring round you the smell of the wet surface of the 
 country after a shower. They were of the bitter, 
 
 Q 
 
242 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 hard, persistent sort, that interferes with sight and 
 respiration, and makes the eyes sore. Even such 
 winds as these have their own merit in proper time 
 and place. It is pleasant to see them brandish great 
 masses of shadow. And what a power they have 
 over the colour of the world ! How they ruffle the 
 solid woodlands in their passage, and make them 
 shudder and whiten like a single willow ! There is 
 nothing more vertiginous than a wind like this among 
 the woods, with all its sights and noises ; and the 
 effect gets between some painters and their sober 
 eyesight, so that, even when the rest of their picture 
 is calm, the foliage is coloured like foliage in a gale. 
 There was nothing, however, of this sort to be noticed 
 in a country where there were no trees and hardly 
 any shadows, save the passive shadows of clouds or 
 those of rigid houses and walls. But the wind was 
 nevertheless an occasion of pleasure ; for nowhere 
 could you taste more fully the pleasure of a sudden 
 lull, or a place of opportune shelter. The reader 
 knows what I mean ; he must remember how, when 
 he has sat himself down behind a dyke on a hill- 
 side, he delighted to hear the wind hiss vainly 
 through the crannies at his back ; how his body 
 tingled all over with warmth, and it began to dawn 
 upon him, with a sort of slow surprise, that the 
 country was beautiful, the heather purple, and the 
 far-away hills all marbled with sun and shadow. 
 Wordsworth, in a beautiful passage of the ' Prelude,^ 
 has used this as a figure for the feeling struck in us 
 by the quiet by-streets of London after the uproar 
 of the great thoroughfares ; and the comparison may 
 be turned the other way with as good effect : — 
 
ON UNPLEASANT PLACES S43 
 
 * Meanwhile the roar continues^ till at leugth^ 
 Escaped as from aii enemy, we turn 
 Abruptly into some sequester'd nook. 
 Still as a sheltered place when winds blow loud ! ' 
 
 I remember meeting a man once, in a train, who 
 told me of what must have been quite the most 
 perfect instance of this pleasure of escape. He had 
 gone up, one sunny, windy morning, to the top of 
 a great cathedral somewhere abroad ; I think it was 
 Cologne Cathedral, the great unfinished marvel by 
 the Rhine ; and after a long while in dark stairways, 
 he issued at last into the sunshine, on a platform 
 high above the town. At that elevation it was quite 
 still and warm ; the gale was only in the lower strata 
 of the air, and he had forgotten it in the quiet 
 interior of the church and during his long ascent ; 
 and so you may judge of his surprise when, resting 
 his arms on the sunlit balustrade and looking over 
 into the Place far below him, he saw the good people 
 holding on their hats and leaning hard against the 
 wind as they walked. There is something, to my 
 fancy, quite perfect in this little experience of my 
 fellow-traveller'^s. The ways of men seem always 
 very trivial to us when we find ourselves alone on a 
 church-top, with the blue sky and a few tall pinnacles, 
 and see far below us the steep roofs and foreshortened 
 buttresses, and the silent activity of the city streets ; 
 but how much more must they not have seemed so to 
 him as he stood, not only above other men's business, 
 but above other men's climate, in a golden zone like 
 Apollo's ! 
 
 This was the sort of pleasure I found in the 
 country of which I write. The pleasure was to be 
 
244 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 out of the wind, and to keep it in memory all the 
 time, and hug oneself upon the shelter. And it was 
 only by the sea that any such sheltered places were 
 to be found. Between the black worm-eaten head- 
 lands there are little bights and havens, well screened 
 from the wind and the commotion of the external 
 sea, where the sand and weeds look up into the 
 gazer's face from a depth of tranquil water, and the 
 sea-birds, screaming and flickering from the ruined 
 crags, alone disturb the silence and the sunshine. 
 One such place has impressed itself on my memory 
 beyond all others. On a rock by the water's edge, 
 old fighting men of the Norse breed had planted a 
 double castle ; the two stood wall to wall like semi- 
 detached villas ; and yet feud had run so high be- 
 tween their owners, that one, from out of a window, 
 shot the other as he stood in his own doorway. 
 There is something in the juxtaposition of these 
 two enemies full of tragic irony. It is grim to think 
 of bearded men and bitter women taking hateful 
 counsel together about the two hall-fires at night, 
 when the sea boomed against the foundations and 
 the wild winter wind was loose over the battlements. 
 And in the study we may reconstruct for ourselves 
 some pale figure of what life then was. Not so when 
 we are there ; when we are there such thoughts come 
 to us only to intensify a contrary impression, and 
 association is turned against itself. I remember 
 walking thither three afternoons in succession, my 
 eyes weary with being set against the wind, and how, 
 dropping suddenly over the edge of the down, I 
 found myself in a new world of warmth and shelter. 
 The wind, from which I had escaped, 'as from an 
 
ON UNPLEASANT PLACES 245 
 
 enemy,"' was seemingly (juite local. It carried no 
 clouds with it, and came from such a quarter that 
 it did not trouble the sea within view. The two 
 castles, black and ruinous as the rocks about them, 
 were still distinguishable from these by something- 
 more insecure and fantastic in the outline, something 
 that the last storm had left imminent and the next 
 would demolish entirely. It would be difficult to 
 render in words the sense of peace that took possession 
 of me on these three afternoons. It was helped out, 
 as I have said, by the contrast. The shore was 
 battered and bemauled by previous tempests ; I had 
 the memory at heart of the insane strife of the 
 pigmies who had erected these two castles and lived 
 in them in mutual distrust and enmity, and knew I 
 had only to put my head out of this little cup of 
 shelter to find the hard wind blowing in my eyes ; 
 and yet there were the two great tracts of motionless 
 blue air and peaceful sea looking on, unconcerned 
 and apart, at the turmoil of the present moment and 
 the memorials of the precarious past. There is ever 
 something transitory and fretful in the impression of 
 a high wind under a cloudless sky ; it seems to have 
 no root in the constitution of things ; it must 
 speedily begin to faint and wither away like a cut 
 flower. And on those days the thought of the wind 
 and the thought of human life came very near 
 together in my mind. Our noisy years did indeed 
 seem moments in the being of the eternal silence; 
 and the wind, in the face of that great field of 
 stationary blue, was as the wind of a butterfly's wing. 
 The placidity of the sea was a thing likewise to be 
 remembered. Shelley speaks of the sea as ' hungering 
 
246 ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 
 
 for calm,"' and in this place one learned to understand 
 the phrase. Looking down into these green waters 
 from the broken edge of the rock, or swimming 
 leisurely in the sunshine, it seemed to me that they 
 were enjoying their own tranquillity ; and when now 
 and again it was disturbed by a wind ripple on the 
 surface, or the quick black passage of a fish far below, 
 they settled back again (one could fancy) with relief. 
 
 On shore too, in the little nook of shelter, every- 
 thing was so subdued and still that the least par- 
 ticular struck in me a pleasurable surprise. The 
 desultory crackling of the whin-pods in the afternoon 
 sun usurped the ear. The hot, sweet breath of the 
 bank, that had been saturated all day long with sun- 
 shine, and now exhaled it into my face, was like the 
 breath of a fellow-creature. I remember that I was 
 haunted by two lines of French verse ; in some dumb 
 way they seemed to fit my surroundings and give 
 expression to the contentment that was in me, and 
 I kept repeating to myself — 
 
 ' Moil coeur est un luth suspeiidu, 
 Sitot qu'on le touclie, il resonue.' 
 
 I can give no reason why these lines came to me at 
 
 this time ; and for that very cause I repeat them 
 
 here. For all I know, they may serve to complete 
 
 the impression in the mind of the reader, as they 
 
 were certainly a part of it for me. 
 
 And this happened to me in the place of all 
 
 others where I liked least to stay. When I think of 
 
 it I grow ashamed of my own ingratitude. ' Out of 
 
 the strong came forth sweetness.' There, in the 
 
 bleak and gusty North, I received, perhaps, my 
 
 strongest impression of peace. I saw the sea to be 
 
ON UNPLEASANT PLACES 247 
 
 great and calm ; and the earth, in that little corner, 
 was all alive and friendly to me. So, wherever a 
 man is, he will find something to please and pacify 
 him : in the town he will meet pleasant faces of men 
 and women, and see beautiful flowers at a window, 
 or hear a cage-bird singing at the corner of the 
 gloomiest street ; and for the country, there is no 
 country without some amenity — let him only look 
 for it in the right spirit, and he will surely find. 
 
 THE END 
 
 Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty 
 at the Edinburgh University Press 
 

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