[Pg 1]

HOUSEHOLD WORDS.

A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.

If I have a mission upon this earth, (apart from the patent and notable one of being a frightful example to the rising generation of blighted existence and misused energies)—that mission is, I believe, beef. I am a Cœlebs, not in search of a wife, as in Mrs. Hannah More’s white-neck-clothed novel, but in search of beef. I have travelled far and wide to find it—good, tender, nourishing, juicy, succulent; and when I die, I hope that it will be inscribed on my tombstone: “Here lies one who sought for beef. Tread lightly on his grave: quia multum amavit.”

Next to the Habeas Corpus and the Freedom of the Press, there are few things that the English people have a greater respect for and a livelier faith in than beef. They bear, year after year, with the same interminable unvarying series of woodcuts of fat oxen in the columns of the illustrated newspapers; they are never tired of crowding to the Smithfield Club cattle-show; and I am inclined to think that it is their honest reverence for beef that has induced them to support so long the obstruction and endangerment of the thoroughfares of the metropolis, by oxen driven to slaughter. Beef is a great connecting link and bond of better feeling between the great classes of the commonwealth. Do not dukes hob and nob with top-booted farmers over the respective merits of short-horns and Alderneys? Does not the noble Marquis of Argentfork give an ox to be roasted whole on the village green when his son, the noble Viscount Silvercorrel, comes of age? Beef makes boys. Beef nerves our navvies. The bowmen who won Cressy and Agincourt were beef-fed, and had there been more and better beef in the Crimea a year ago, our soldiers would have borne up better under the horrors of a Chersonesean winter. We feast on beef at the great Christian festival. A baron of beef at the same time is enthroned in St. George’s Hall, in Windsor’s ancient castle, and is borne in by lacqueys in scarlet and gold. Charles the Second knighted a loin of beef; and I have a shrewd suspicion that the famous Sir Bevis of Southampton was but an ardent admirer, and doughty knight-errant in the cause of beef. And who does not know the tradition that even as the first words of the new-born Gargantua were “A boyre, à boyre,” signifying that he desired a draught of Burgundy wine—so the first intelligible sounds that the infant Guy of Warwick ever spake were, “Beef, beef!”

When the weary pilgrim reaches the beloved shores of England after a long absence, what first does he remark—after the incivility of the custom-house officers—but the great tankard of stout and the noble round of cold beef in the coffee-room of the hotel? He does not cry “Io Bacche! Evöe Bacche!” because beef is not Bacchus. He does not fall down and kiss his native soil, because the hotel carpet is somewhat dusty, and the action would be, besides, egregious; but he looks at the beef, and his eyes filling with tears, a corresponding humidity takes place in his mouth; he kisses the beef; he is so fond of it that he could eat it all up; and he does ordinarily devour so much of it to his breakfast, that the thoughtful waiter gazes at him, and murmurs to his napkin, “This man is either a cannibal or a pilgrim grey who has not seen Albion for many years.”

By beef I mean, emphatically, the legitimate, unsophisticated article. Give me my beef, hot or cold, roast, boiled, or broiled; but away with your beef-kickshaws, your beef-stews, your beef-haricoes, your corned beef, your hung beef, and your spiced beef! I don’t think there is anything so contemptible, fraudulent, adulterine in the whole world (of cookery) as a beef sausage. I have heard that it is a favourite dish with pickpockets at their raffle-suppers. I believe it. There was a boy at school with me in the byegone—a day-boy—who used to bring a clammy brownish powder, in a sandwich-box, with him for lunch. He called it powdered beef; and he ate this mahogany, sawdust-looking mixture between slices of stale bread and butter. He was an ill-conditioned boy who had begun the world in the face-grinding sense much too early. He lent halfpence at usury, and dealt in sock (which was our slang for surreptitious sweet-stuff); and I remember with what savage pleasure I fell upon and beat him in the course of a commercial transaction involving a four-bladed penknife he had sold me, and which wouldn’t cut—no,[Pg 2] not even slate-pencil. But the penknife was nothing more than a pretext: I beat him for his beef. He had the ring-worm, and it was bruited about afterwards that he was of Jewish parentage. I believe, when he began life, he turned out but badly.

I am reminded, however, that the subject of beef, as a British institution, has already been treated at some length in this journal.[A] I have merely ventured a few remarks on the bovine topic generally, to preface the experiences I have to record of some recent travels in search of beef I have made in the capital of France. One might employ oneself better, perhaps, than in transcribing the results of a week’s hankering after the flesh-pots of Egypt; and surely the journey in search of bread is long and wearisome enough that we might take beef as it comes, and thankfully. But, as I have said, beef is my mission. I am a collector of bovine experiences, as some men collect editions of Virgil, and some Raffaelle’s virgins, and some broadsides, and some butterflies. And I know that there are moralities to be found in beef as well as in the starry heavens and the vestiges of creation.

Let me first sum up all the knowledge I have acquired on the subject, by stating my firm conviction that there is no beef in Paris,—I mean, no beef fit to be eaten by a philobosopher. Some say that the French cut their meat the wrong way; that they don’t hang it properly; that they don’t hang it enough; that they beat it; that they overcook it. But I have tasted infinite varieties of French beef; of the first, second, and third categories. I have had it burnt to a cinder, and I have had it very nearly raw. I have eaten it in private English families resident in Paris, and dressed by English cooks. It is a delusion: there is no beef in Lutetia.

The first beef I tried in my last campaign was the evening I dined at His Lorship’s. Don’t be alarmed, my democratic friend. I am not upon Lord Cowley’s visiting list, nor are any coronetted cards ever left at my door on the sixth storey. I did not receive a card from the British Embassy on the occasion of the last ball at the Hôtel de Ville; and I am ashamed to confess that, so anxious was I to partake of the hospitality of the Prefect of the Seine (the toilettes and the iced punch are perfect at his balls), that I was mean enough to foreswear temporarily my nationality and to avail myself of the card of Colonel Waterton Privilege of Harshellopolis, Mass.:—said colonel being at that time, and in all probability exceedingly sick, in his stateroom of the United States steamer Forked Lightning, in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. But, by His Lorship’s I mean an Anglo-French restaurant—named after a defunct English city eating-house—situate near the Place de la Concorde, and where I heard that real English roast beef was to be obtained at all hours in first-rate condition.

Now, there is one thing that I do not like abroad; yea, two that are utterly distasteful to me. The one thing is my countrymen’s hotels and restaurants. These houses of refection I have usually found exceedingly uncomfortable. So I was disposed to look somewhat coldly upon His Lordship’s invitation, as printed upon placards, and stencilled on the walls, till I was assured that his beef was really genuine, and that he was an Englishman without guile.

His Lordship’s mansion I found unpretending, even to obscurity. There was no porte-cochère, no courtyard, no gilt railings, nor green verandahs. His Lordship’s hotel was, in fact, only a little slice of a shop, with one dining-room over it; for which I was told he paid an enormous rent—some thousands of francs a-year. In his window were displayed certain English viands pleasant to the sight: a mighty beef-steak pie just cut; the kidney end of a loin of veal, with real English stuffing, palpable to sight; some sausages that might have been pork, and of Epping; some potatoes in their homely brown jackets, just out at elbows, as your well-done potatoes should be, with their flannel under-garments peeping through; and a spherical mass, something of the size and shape of a bombshell, dark in colour, speckled black and white, and that my beating heart told me was a plum-pudding. A prodigious Cheshire cheese, rugged as Helvellyn, craggy as Criffell, filled up the background like a range of yellow mountains. At the base there were dark forests of bottles branded with the names of Allsopp, and Bass, and Guinness, and there were cheering announcements framed and glazed, respecting Pale Ale on draught, L.L. whisky, and Genuine Old Tom.[B] I rubbed my hands in glee. “Ha! ha!” I said internally. “Nothing like our British aristocracy, after all. The true stock, sir! May His Lordship’s shadow never diminish.”

His Lordship’s down-stairs’ apartment was somewhat inconveniently crowded with English grooms and French palefreniers, and with an incorrigible old Frenchman, with a pipe as strong as Samson, a cap, cotton in his ears, and rings in the lobes thereof, who had learnt nothing of English but the oaths, and was cursing some very suspicious-looking meat (not my beef, I hope) most energetically. I have an opinion that stables and the perfume thereof are pretty nearly analogous[Pg 3] the whole world over; so, at the invitation of a parboiled-looking man in a shooting-jacket and a passion (who might have been His Lordship himself for aught I knew), I went up-stairs. There was an outer chamber, with benches covered with red cotton velvet, and cracked marble tables, like an indifferent café; where some bearded men were making a horrible rattle with their dominoes, and smoking their abominable cigars (surely a course of French cigars is enough to cure the most inveterate smoker of his love for the weed). This somewhat discomposed me; but I was fain to push forward into the next saloon where the tables were laid out for dining; and taking my seat, to wait for beef.

There was myself and a black man, and his (white) wife, the Frenchman with the spectacles, and the Frenchman with the bald head (I speak of them generically, for you are sure to meet their fellows at every public dining-table abroad), the poor old Frenchman with the wig, the paralytic head and the shaking hands that trifle with the knives and forks, as though they were red-hot. There were half-a-dozen other sons of Gaul; who, with their beards, cache-nezs, and paletôts, all made to pattern, might have been one another’s brothers; two ancient maiden ladies, who looked like English governesses, who had passed, probably, some five-and-thirty years in Paris, and had begun to speak a little of the language; a rude young Englishman, who took care to make all the company aware of the coarseness of his birthplace; an English working engineer, long resident abroad, much travel-worn, and decidedly oily, who had a voice like a crank, and might have been the identical engineer that Mr. Albert Smith met on the Austrian Lloyd’s steamer; and a large-headed little boy, with a round English jacket, who sat alone, eating mournfully, and whom I could not help fancying to be some little friendless scholar in a great French school, whose jour de sortie it was, and who had come here to play at an English dinner. The days be short to thee, little boy with the large head! May they fly quickly till the welcome holidays, when thou wilt be forwarded, per rail and boat, to the London Bridge station of the South Eastern Railway, to be left till called for. I know from sad experience how very weary are the strange land and the strange bed, the strange lessons and the strange playmates, to thy small English heart!

A gaunt, ossified waiter, with blue black hair, jaws so closely shaven that they gave him an unpleasant resemblance to the grand inquisitor of the holy office in disguise seeking for heretics in a cook-shop, and who was, besides, in a perpetual cold perspiration of anger against the irate man in the shooting jacket below, and carried on fierce verbal warfare with him down the staircase. This waiter rose up against me, rather than addressed me, and charged me with a pike of bread, cutting my ordinarily immense slice from it. I mildly suggested roast beef, wincing, it must be owned, under the eye of the cadaverous waiter; who looked as if he were accustomed to duplicity, and did not believe a word that I was saying.

“Ah! rosbif!” he echoed, “bien saignant n’est ce pas?”

Now, so far from liking my meat “bien saignant” I cannot even abide the sight of it rare, and I told him so. But he repeated “bien saignant,” and vanished.

He came again, though; or rather his Jesuitical head protruded itself over the top of the box where I sat (there were boxes at His Lordship’s) and asked:

“Paint portare? p’lale? ole’ ale?”

I was nettled, and told him sharply that I would try the wine, if he could recommend it. Whereupon there was silence, and then I heard a voice crying down a pipe, “Paint portare!”

He brought me my dinner, and I didn’t like it. It was bien saignant, but it wasn’t beef, and it swam in a dead sea of gravy that was not to my taste; fat from strange animals seemed to have been grafted on to the lean. I did not get on better with the potatoes, which were full of promise, like a park hack, and unsatisfactory in the performance. I tried some plum-pudding afterwards; but, if the proof of the pudding be in the eating, that pudding remains unproved to this day; for, when I tried to fix my fork in it, it rebounded away across the room, and hit the black man on the leg. I would rather not say anything about the porter, if you please; and perhaps it is well to be brief on the subject of the glass of hot gin-and-water I tried afterwards, in a despairing attempt to be convivial; for it smelt of the midnight-lamp like an erudite book, and of the midnight oilcan, and had the flavour of the commercial terebinthium, rather than of the odoriferous Juniperus. I consoled myself with some Cheshire cheese, and asked the waiter if he had the Presse.

“Ze Time is gage,” he answered.

I did not want the Times. I wanted the Presse.

“Sare,” he repeated wrathfully, “Ze Time is gage. Le Journal Anglais (he accentuated this spitefully) is gage.”

He would have no further commerce with me after this; and, doubtlessly thinking that an Englishman who couldn’t eat his beef under-done or indeed at all, and preferred the Presse to the Times newspaper, was an outcast and a renegade, abandoned me to my evil devices, and contented himself with crying “Voila!” from the murky distance without coming when I called. He even declined to attend to receive payment, and handed me over for that purpose to a long French boy in a blouse, whose feet had evidently not long been emancipated from the[Pg 4] pastoral sabots, whose hair was cropped close to his head (in the manner suggesting county gaol at home, and ignorance of small toothcombs abroad), and who had quite a flux of French words, and tried to persuade me to eat civet de lièvre that was to be served up at half-past seven of the clock.

But I would have borne half a hundred disappointments similar to this dinner for the sake of the black man. Legs and feet! he was a character! He sat opposite to me, calm, contented, magnificent, proud. He was as black as my boot, and as shiny. His woolly head, crisped by our bounteous mother Nature, had unmistakeably received a recent touch of the barber’s tongs. He was perfumed; he was oiled; he had moustaches (as I live!) twisted out into long rats’-tails by means of pommade Hongroise. He had a tip. He had a scarlet Turkish cap with a long blue tassel. He had military stripes down his pantaloons. He had patent leather boots. He had shirt-studs of large circumference, pins, gold waistcoat-buttons, and a gorgeous watch-chain. I believe he had a crimson under-waistcoat. He had the whitest of cambric handkerchiefs, a ring on his forefinger, and a stick with an overpowering gold knob. He was the wonderfullest nigger that the eye ever beheld.

He had a pretty little English wife—it is a fact, madam—with long auburn ringlets, who it was plain to see was desperately in love with, and desperately afraid of, him. It was marvellous to behold the rapt, fond gaze with which she contemplated him as he leaned back in his chair after dinner, and refreshed his glistening ivories with a toothpick. Equally marvellous was the condescension with which he permitted her to eat her dinner in his august presence, and suffered her to tie round his neck a great emblazoned shawl like a flag.

Who could he have been? The father of the African twins; the Black Malibran’s brother; Baron Pompey; Prince Mousalakatzic of the Orange River; Prince Bobo; some other sable dignitary of the empire of Hayti; or the renowned Soulouque himself, incognito? Yet, though affable to his spouse, he was a fierce man to the waiter. The old blood of Ashantee, the ancient lineage of Dahomey, could ill brook the shortcomings of that cadaverous servitor. There was an item in the reckoning that displeased him.

“Wass this sa?” he cried, in a terrible voice; “wass this, sa? Fesh your mas’r, sa!”

The waiter cringed and fled, and I laughed.

“Good luck have thou with thine honour: ride on ——” honest black man; but oh, human nature, human nature! I would not be your nigger for many dollars. More rib-roasting should I receive, I am afraid, than ever Uncle Tom suffered from fierce Legree.

I have not dined at His Lordship’s since—I would dine there any day to be sure of the company of the black man—but I have more to say about Beef.

I was inscribed as a sergeant of the Séménofski guards at a very early age. I was entrusted to the care of one of my father’s serfs, named Savéliitch. He taught me to read and write, and was very indignant when he learned that a Frenchman was to be conveyed back to the estate with the annual provision of wine and oil from Moscow. “Nobody can say that the child has not been well fed, well combed, and well washed,” murmured old Savéliitch; “why then spend money on a Frenchman, while there are plenty of native servants in the house!”

M. Beaupré came and engaged himself to teach me French, German, and all the sciences; but he made me teach him my native language, and taught me many things that did me little good. He was fond of brandy, and was, as I was told, too ardent an admirer of ladies. I remember only that one day, when my respected tutor was lying upon his bed in a hopeless state of drunkenness, and I was cutting up a map of Moscow for a kite, my father entered the room, boxed my ears, and turned moussié out of the house, to the great joy of Savéliitch, and to my sorrow. My education being thus brought to a sudden close, I amused myself until I had completed my sixteenth year, in playing at leap-frog, and watching my mother make her exquisite preparations of honey, when one day my father said to my mother:

“Avdotia Vassiliéva, what age is Pétroucha?”

“He has just entered his seventeenth year. Pétroucha was born the same year that Nastasia Garasimova lost her eye, and—”

“Well, well,” my father replied, “he starts for his regiment to-morrow.”

My mother burst into tears, and I jumped for joy.

“Don’t forget, André Pétrovitch,” said my mother to my father, who was writing my letter of introduction, “to remember me to Prince B——, and to bid him show every kindness to Pétroucha.”

“Pétroucha is not going to St. Petersburg,” my father replied. I was heart-broken. I had dreamed of nothing but St. Petersburg. When my father had finished the letter, he turned to me and said:

“This letter is addressed to André Karlovitch, my old companion in arms. He is at Orenberg, and you will join him there.” The kibitka was at the door. The servants had stowed away in it a tea-service, and pies of different sorts tied up in cloths. My parents gave me their blessing. My father said to me, “Good bye, Pierre; serve your Empress with fidelity; obey your superiors, don’t seek favours from them; and remember[Pg 5] the proverb, ‘Take care of your coat while it is new, and of your honour while it is white.’” A hare-skin touloup, or cape, was thrown about me, and over it a fox-skin cloak. Thus equipped, I took my seat in the kibitka, and left my parents, accompanied by Savéliitch.

We arrived that night at Simbirsk, where I committed my first folly by losing one hundred roubles at billiards, while Savéliitch was out, executing some orders from home with which he had been entrusted. I lost this sum to Ivan Lowrine, a captain of hussars. On this occasion I also became intoxicated for the first time. Savéliitch hastened my departure the following morning, and reluctantly paid my losses. I promised him that, henceforth, I would not spend a single kopek without his consent.

We travelled rapidly; and, as we approached our destination, the country became a measureless waste, covered with snow. Presently, the coachman, taking off his hat, asked me anxiously whether we should not return; and, pointing to a white cloud far in the east, said, “That is the bourane!”

I had heard of the bourane, and I knew that it sometimes buried whole caravans of travellers. I knew it to be a tremendous cloud of snow, out of which few people, once fairly in it, ever made their way. But this one seemed to me to be a long way off, so I told the coachman to drive forward. We went at full gallop. The wind rose rapidly, however; the little white cloud became a huge moving snow mountain; very fine flakes began to fall about us; then the wind howled, and in a few minutes we could not see an inch beyond our noses. It was, in truth, the bourane. The horses stopped; the snow began to bury us; Savéliitch began to scold; the coachman played nervously with the horses’ harness—and no house could be seen. We had begun to believe we should be soon buried alive, when we suddenly perceived a black object near us, which we were afraid was a wolf, but which turned out to be a man. We asked our way; he replied that he knew the country under ordinary circumstances, but could not distinguish anything then. Suddenly he cried, “Turn to the left—there you will find a house: I smell the smoke.”

The coachman managed to whip the horses into unusual exertion, and we presently reached a hut lighted by a loutchina (a deal stick which serves for a candle). The ornaments of the little room into which we were ushered were a carbine and a Cossack hat. The Cossack host got us some tea; and then I inquired for a guide. Some one called out from a recess that he was cold, for he had pawned his touloup the day before, for brandy. I offered him a cup of tea, and he advanced to drink it. He was a remarkable fellow in appearance: tall, with very broad shoulders. He wore a black beard, and short hair; his eyes were restless and large; the expression of his face was, at times agreeable, at times malicious. He preferred brandy to tea; and, having held a mysterious conversation with the host, he retired for the night. I did not like the look of affairs; the hut was in the middle of the steppe—very lonely, and very like the meeting-place for thieves.

But we were not robbed; and, the following morning, as we left to proceed on our journey, I gave my hare-skin touloup, much against my servant’s wish, to the guide who had led us to the house. The guide was grateful, and promised that if ever he could be of service to me I should be served. At that time the promise seemed sufficiently ridiculous.

We arrived without further adventure at Orenberg, where I presented my letter to the general, who received me kindly, and then sent me to serve, under the orders of Captain Mirinoff, in the fort of Bélogorsk. This did not please me. The fort was a wretched little village, surrounded by palisades. I stopped before a little wooden house, which, I was informed, was the commandant’s. I entered. In the antechamber I found an old man, seated upon a table, occupied in sewing a blue patch upon one of the elbows of a green uniform. He beckoned me into the inner chamber. It was a clean little room, with an officer’s commission, neatly framed, hanging against the wall, and rude prints surrounding it. In one corner of the room an old lady, with a handkerchief bound round her head, was unwinding some thread from the hands of a little old man with only one eye, who wore an officer’s uniform. The old lady, on seeing me, said:

“Ivan Kourmitch is not at home; but I am his wife. Be good enough to love us, and take a seat, my little father.”

I obeyed, and the old lady sent for her subaltern, the ouriadnik. While the servant was gone, the lady and the officer both questioned me, and judged that it was for some offence that I was sent to Bélogorsk. The lady informed me that Chvabrine, an officer at Bélogorsk, had been sent thither for duelling. The ouriadnik appeared, and was a fine specimen of a Cossack officer.

“Quarter Piote Andréïtch,” said the old lady, “upon Siméon Kouroff. The fellow let his horse break into my garden.”

These, my quarters, looked out upon the dreary steppe. The next morning a little fellow, with a remarkably vivacious appearance, came to see me. I found that he was Chvabrine, the duellist. His lively conversation amused me, and we went together that day to the commandant’s house to dinner. As we approached it I saw about twenty little old invalids, wearing long tails, and three-cornered hats, ranged in order of battle. The commandant, a tall, hale old man, dressed in a cotton nightcap and a morning gown, was reviewing this terrible force. He spoke some civil words to[Pg 6] me, and we left him to complete his military duties. When we arrived at his house, we found the old one-eyed man and Palachka laying the cloth. Presently, the captain’s daughter, Marie, made her appearance. Chvabrine had described her to me as a very foolish person. She was about sixteen years of age, had a fine fresh colour, and was very bashful.

I did not think much of her that day. She blushed terribly when her mother declared that all she could bring her husband in the way of wealth was a comb and a few kopeks. We talked chiefly of the possibility of standing a siege from the Bachkirs; and the commandant declared that if such a siege occurred he would teach the enemy a terrible lesson. I thought of the twenty invalids, and did not feel quite so confident on the subject.

Ivan Kourmitch and his wife Vassilissa were very kind to me, and received me as one of the family. I liked the little one-eyed officer; I became more intimate with Marie.

Father Garasim and his wife Akoulina I was also glad to meet, almost daily, at the commandant’s house. But I soon disliked Chvabrine. He talked lightly and slightingly of Marie, and even of Vassilissa. One day, however, I read to him some amorous verses I had written; he saw at once, and truly, that they were addressed to Marie. He ridiculed them mercilessly, and told me that if I wished to win the love of Marie I had only to give her a pair of ear-rings. I flew into a passion, and asked him how he dared to take away the character of the commandant’s daughter. He replied, impertinently, that he spoke of her from personal experience. I told him to his teeth that he lied. He demanded satisfaction.

I went to the one-eyed officer—whom I found threading mushrooms for Vassilissa—to ask him to act as second. But he declined. In the evening I was at the commandant’s house; and thinking that night that it might be my last, as my duel with Chvabrine was to be early on the morrow, Marie appeared dearer to me than ever. Chvabrine came, and behaved so insolently that I could hardly wait until the morrow.

I was to my time, the next morning, behind a haystack; Chvabrine was also punctual. We had just stripped our coats off, when the one-eyed officer appeared with five invalids, and marched us off in custody.

Vassilissa ordered us to give up our swords, and told Palachka to take them up into the loft; for, in truth, Vassilissa was the commandant of Bélogorsk. She then ordered Ivan Kourmitch to put us in opposite corners of the rooms, and to feed us on bread and water until we repented. Marie was very pale. After a stormy discussion, however, our swords were restored to us, and I parted with my adversary: feigning reconcilement, but secretly agreeing to meet again when the affair had quite blown over. The next night I had an opportunity of talking alone with Marie Ivanovna; and I learned from her—how she blushed as she told me!—that Chvabrine had proposed marriage to her, but that she had refused him. This information explained to me the fellow’s measured scandal. I burned to meet him again.

I had not to wait long. The next day, as I was biting my pen, thinking of a rhyme in an elegy I was composing, the very fellow tapped at my window. I understood him; seized my sword; engaged with him; and fell presently—wounded in the shoulder, and insensible.

When I became once more conscious, I found myself in a strange bed, Savéliitch by my side, and—Marie Ivanovna also. She asked me tenderly how I felt? Savéliitch, faithful fellow, cried out:

“Thanks to Heaven he recovers, after four days of it!”

But Marie interrupted him, and begged him not to disturb me with his loud exclamations. I seized her hand, and she did not withdraw it. Presently I felt her burning lips upon my forehead. I asked her then to become my wife. She begged me to calm myself, if only for her sake, and left me.

Although the barber of the regiment was my only medical adviser, I soon recovered. I and Marie were engaged; but she doubted whether my parents would consent. This doubt I could not help sharing; but the letter I wrote to my father on the subject appeared to both of us so tender and convincing, that we felt certain of its success, and gave ourselves up to the happy dreams of lovers.

I found that Chvabrine was a prisoner in the corn-warehouse, and that Vassilissa had his sword under lock and key. I obtained his pardon from the captain; and, in my happiness at tracing his wretched calumny to offended pride, forgave him. My father, in answer to my appeal, refused my prayer, and informed me that I should soon be removed from Bélogorsk. He also wrote to Savéliitch, and called him “an old dog,” for not having taken better care of me.

I went straight to my mistress. She was bitterly distressed, but adjured me to follow the will of Heaven, and submit. She would never marry me, she declared, without the benediction of my parents, and from that day she avoided me.

This was towards the end of the year seventeen hundred and seventy-three. The inhabitants of the vast and fertile province of Orenberg had only lately acknowledged the sovereignty of the Czar, and were yet discontented, and full of revolutionary ideas. Every month some little insurrection bubbled up. To suppress this harassing state of things, the imperial government had erected fortresses in various parts of the province, and quartered therein Cossack soldiers. These Cossacks in their turn became turbulent; and the severe measures adopted by General[Pg 7] Traubenberg to reduce the army to obedience ended in his cruel murder, and a rising that cost much blood. By severe imperial punishments this rising had been suppressed; and it was only some time after my arrival at Bélogorsk that the authorities perceived how ineffectual their cruel punishments had been.

One evening when I was sitting alone in my room, thinking of doleful things, I was sent for by the commandant. I found him in consultation with Chvabrine, Ivan Ignatiitch, and the ouriadnik of the Cossacks. Neither Marie nor her mother appeared. The subject of our conference was the rising of the Cossacks under Pougatcheff, and his assumption of the style and title of Peter the Third. The commandant had received orders to be on his guard; and, if possible, to exterminate the enemy. Putting on his spectacles, he began to bustle about, and to issue orders to have the cannon cleaned; and to have the Cossacks kept true to the imperial cause.

The ouriadnik had already deserted to the rebel’s camp. A Bachkir had been taken prisoner, with seditious papers upon his person. This prisoner, had been bound and secured in the commandant’s loft; and it was resolved that he should be conducted before us, and be subjected to the torture, in order to extract from him a description of his leader’s strength.

The commandant had scarcely ordered the Bachkir into his presence, when Vassilissa rushed into the chamber, and cried out that the rebels had taken the fortress of Nijnéosern, had hanged all the officers, and were now marching upon Bélogorsk. I thought of Marie, and trembled; but my energy increased with the occasion, and I at once advised the commandant to send the ladies to Orenberg. But Vassilissa would not hear of this. She declared that she would live and die with her husband, but that she thought Marie should be sent away; and that evening—the last Marie might possibly spend at Bélogorsk—the supper-table was surrounded by gloomy faces; and no face I think, was gloomier than mine. We parted early, but I contrived to forget my sword, that I might have an excuse for returning to bid Marie good-bye alone. When I returned, I clasped her in my arms; she sobbed bitterly; and thus we parted. I went home, and, without undressing myself, lay down to sleep.

I was aroused by the entrance of the corporal, who came to announce to me that the Cossack soldiers had all deserted the fortress, and that bands of strange men surrounded us. I thought, with horror, that Marie’s retreat was cut off. Having given some necessary orders to the bearer of this unwelcome news, I hurried off to the commandant’s house, as the day was dawning. On the way I was met by Ivan Ignatiitch, who told me that the commandant was already upon the ramparts, and that it was too late for the commandant’s daughter to be safely conveyed to Orenberg. Terribly agitated, I followed the one-eyed officer to that little eminence protected by a pallisade, which was the only fortification of Bélogorsk. The captain was arranging his soldiers in order of battle. In the dreary distance of the steppe, I could plainly see the Cossacks and the Bachkirs. The commandant ordered Ivan Ignatiitch to point the cannon upon the enemy, and the soldiers all vowed that they would fight to the death.

Presently, as the enemy began to advance in a compact mass, Vassilissa, accompanied by Marie, who would not leave her mother, appeared, to know how affairs stood. Marie’s pale face was turned upon me, and I burned to prove to her that I had a brave spirit worthy of her love. In the midst of the advancing enemy, Pougatcheff, the renowned rebel leader, could be distinguished, mounted upon a white horse. In a few minutes four horsemen advanced from the main body, and rode close up to the ramparts. They were four traitors from the fortress. They called upon us not to resist. The captain replied by a volley which killed one of the four, and the rest rode back to join the advancing army. The balls now began to whistle about us; and at this moment the commandant ordered Vassilissa and Marie to withdraw. The old man blessed his child, embraced his wife, and bade her put a sarafan upon Marie, lest she should require it; the sarafan being the rich robe in which the dead are buried. The pale girl came back to make to me the sign of a last farewell, and then went away with her mother.

The fall of the fortress was soon accomplished. Our soldiers would not fight (though they had very much affected me when they swore to do it), but threw down their arms after the first assault. We were taken prisoners, and dragged by the triumphant rebels through the streets, to an open place, where Pougatcheff was seated surrounded by his officers. He was handsomely dressed; and, as I caught a glimpse of his face through the crowd, I thought it was one I had seen before. Pougatcheff ordered the commandant to swear fidelity to him as his lawful czar. Ivan Kourmitch replied with a defiance. Pougatcheff fluttered a white handkerchief in the air, and in a few moments our poor commandant was swinging from a gibbet. Ivan Ignatiitch shared his commander’s fate: and then my turn came. I was ready to follow my brave brother officers; when Chvabrine, who had found time to cut his hair short and provide himself with a Cossack caftan, to desert to the enemy, whispered something in the chief’s ear. Pougatcheff, without looking at me, said, “Hang him at once!”

The rope was round my neck, and my thoughts were with Heaven, when I was suddenly released. I found that Savéliitch had[Pg 8] thrown himself at the chief’s feet, and told him that a large sum would be paid for my ransom. I was put aside, and remained a horrified spectator of the scenes which ensued. A Cossack killed Vassilissa with his sword, at the foot of her husband’s gibbet, and then Pougatcheff went to Father Garasim’s to dinner. I rushed to the commandant’s house to find Marie; there every room had been ransacked. Presently, however, I found Palachka, and she told me that the commandant’s daughter was at Father Garasim’s house. Wild with terror I rushed thither, for it was to be the scene of Cossack revels. I asked for the father’s wife; and she told me that she had passed Marie off as her niece. The poor girl was safe. I returned home hastily, passing groups of rebels engaged in the work of pillage.

Savéliitch asked me whether I did not remember Pougatcheff. I did not. He was surprised; and reminded me of the drunken fellow to whom I had given my touloup on my way to Orenberg. He was right; that drunken wanderer was now the successful rebel-chief, and I understood the mercy that had been extended to me. But I was much troubled. I could not make up my mind to leave Marie; yet I knew that my duty to my country forbade me to remain in the midst of a rebel camp. While I was thinking deeply of these opposite calls upon my conduct, a Cossack arrived to take me once more before his chief, at the commandant’s house, where I found Pougatcheff seated at a table covered with bottles, and surrounded by eight or ten Cossack officers. The wine had already excited them. Chvabrine and the rebel ouriadnik, who had deserted with the Cossacks from the fort, were of the party.

Pougatcheff welcomed me heartily, and bade his officers make place for me at the banqueting table. I sat down in silence. Here, on the previous night, I had taken leave of Marie.

All were on good terms and quite free with their chief. A march upon Orenberg having been arranged, the officers retired. I was about to follow them, when Pougatcheff bade me remain. When we were alone, he burst into a fit of laughter; telling me he had spared me because of my kindness to him when he was hiding from his enemies, and that now, if I would serve him, he would heap favours upon me. He asked me to tell him frankly whether or not I believed him to be the Czar. I was firm, and told him that he was too clever to believe me, even if I were capable of telling him a lie to serve my purpose. He promised to make me field-marshal if I would remain with him. I replied that I had sworn to serve the Empress; and that, if he wished to do me a favour, he would provide me with an escort to Orenberg. I told him that my life was in his hands, but that I would neither serve him nor promise not to bear arms against him. He behaved well, and said I should be free.

Next morning I found Pougatcheff surrounded by his officers, throwing money to the crowd. He beckoned me to approach, told me to leave instantly for Orenberg, and to tell the garrison to expect him in a week. If they threw open the gates to him they would be well treated: if they resisted they must expect terrible consequences. He then turned to the crowd, and, to my horror, presented Chvabrine to them as their future governor! Chvabrine! Marie’s traducer!

When Pougatcheff had left the square, I hastened to Father Garasim’s house to learn that Marie was in a fever and quite delirious. I rushed to her room—how changed she was! She did not know me. How could I leave the poor orphan at Bélogorsk while Chvabrine remained governor? Suddenly, however, I thought that I might make all haste to Orenberg and return with a strong force, drive the rebels away, and claim my bride. I seized the poor girl’s burning hand, kissed it, took leave of her good protectors, and was soon on my way, determined not to lose a moment.

As we approached Orenberg we saw the state prisoners with their shaven heads and disfigured faces, hard at work upon the fortifications. I was conducted direct to the general, who was lopping the fruit trees in the garden. I related to him the misfortunes of Bélogorsk, and pressed for help. He replied that there would be a council of war in the evening, and that he would be happy to see me at it. I was there punctually. A cup of tea was given to each guest, after which the general called upon all present to deliberate upon the state of affairs. The question was, should the Imperial troops act on the offensive or defensive? He declared that he should require an opinion from each individual; and, as usual, he should begin by asking the opinion of the junior officers. He then turned to me. I stated that the rebels were not in a condition to resist a disciplined army, and therefore urged the propriety of acting vigorously on the offensive: hereupon a little civil functionary, who was taking his third cup of tea with the help of an admixture of rum, suggested that operations should be confined to an offer of seventy or one hundred roubles for the head of Pougatcheff. Every voice was for defensive measures; and, when all present had delivered their opinions, the general, tapping the ashes out of his pipe, declared that he was of the same opinion as the ensign. I looked proudly about me; but the conclusion of the general’s speech turned the triumph to the side of my opponents, for this gallant old soldier declared that he could not assume the responsibility of acting against the decision of the majority; therefore, preparations must be made for a siege, and we must depend upon the fire of the artillery, and the force of vigorous[Pg 9] sorties. I returned to my quarters in a state of wretched despondency. Poor Marie!

Pougatcheff was true to his message. He appeared before Orenberg with a considerable force, and the siege lasted long—with various fortune—until the people within the walls were almost starving. One day when some of our cavalry had dispersed a strong body of Cossacks, I was about to dispatch a loiterer with my Turkish sword, when he raised his hat and saluted me by name. I recognised the ouriadnik of Bélogorsk. He had a letter for me—I tore it open—it was from Marie. It informed me that she was the forced occupant of Chvabrine’s house, and that within three days she would be compelled to marry him or be at his mercy. The girl implored me to fly to her succour.

Almost mad, I spurred my horse, rode at full gallop to the general’s house, threw myself without ceremony into his room, and asked him to give me a battalion of soldiers and fifty Cossacks to drive the rebels out of Bélogorsk. The old soldier began to argue the matter coolly. This exasperated me, and I told him that the daughter of our late valiant commander was in the hands of Chvabrine, and that he was about to force her to marry him. The general thought that she might be very happy with him for a time, and that afterwards, when he had shot him on the ramparts of Orenberg, it would be time enough for me to marry the charming widow. There was no hope of softening the old man. I wandered away in despair. Out of this despair, grew a desperate resolution.

I resolved to leave Orenberg and go alone to Bélogorsk. Savéliitch tried in vain to dissuade me from my purpose, but without effect. I mounted my horse and rode briskly past the sentinels, out of Orenberg, followed by my faithful servant: who was mounted upon a lean horse, which one of the besieged had given him, having no more food for it. We rode hard; but night had closed in when we approached the great ravine where the main body of the rebels, under Pougatcheff, were encamped. Suddenly four or five lusty fellows surrounded me. I struck at the first with my sword—putting spurs to my horse, at the same time, and so escaped; but Savéliitch was overpowered, and, returning to help him, I was overpowered too, and through the darkness of that terrible night, led before the rebel chief that his guard might know whether they should hang me at once or wait till daylight. I was conducted at once to the isbâ, which was called the czar’s palace. This imperial hut was lighted by two tallow candles, and was furnished like any common isbâ, except that the walls were finely papered. Pougatcheff, surrounded by his officers, recognised me at once, and bade all his attendants retire, except two, one of whom was a prisoner escaped from Siberia. This man’s face was hideously disfigured; his nose had been cut off, and his forehead and cheeks branded with red-hot irons. I told my business frankly, and Pougatcheff declared that the oppressor of the orphan should be hanged. But his officers dissuaded him, and one of them suggested that he should try the effects of a little torture upon me. Pougatcheff then questioned me as to the state of Orenberg; and, although I knew that the people were dying of hunger, I declared that it was excellently provisioned. This reply suggested to one of the chief’s confidential friends, the propriety of having me hanged, as an impertinent liar. But Pougatcheff was a generous enemy, and made me declare to him that the commandant’s daughter was my betrothed, and then he bade his officers prepare supper for us, saying that I was an old friend of his. I would have willingly avoided the festivity, but it was impossible; and I saw two little Cossack girls enter to spread the cloth, sadly enough. I ate my fish soup almost in silence.

The festivity was continued until all present were more or less intoxicated, and until Pougatcheff had fallen asleep in his seat. I was then conducted to the place in which I was to sleep, and was there locked up for the night. On the following morning I found a crowd surrounding a kibitka, in which Pougatcheff was seated. He beckoned me to a seat beside him, and to my astonishment shouted to the stout Tartar driver, “To Bélogorsk!” The kibitka slipped quickly over the snow. In a few hours I should see my beloved Marie.

We drew up, after a rapid journey, before the old commandant’s house. Chvabrine hastened out to meet his sovereign; but was troubled when he saw me. Pougatcheff entered the house, drank a glass of brandy, then asked about Marie. Chvabrine said she was in bed. His chief then ordered the traitor to conduct us to her room. The fellow did so, but hesitated at her door,—pretended to have lost the key—then said that the girl was delirious. Pougatcheff forced the door with his foot; and, to my inexpressible horror I saw my dear betrothed lying upon the floor, in coarse peasant clothing, with bread and water before her. She shrieked when she saw me. Pougatcheff asked her what her husband had been doing to her; but she replied vehemently that she was not his wife, and never would be. Pougatcheff turned furiously upon Chvabrine, and Chvabrine, to my disgust, fell upon his knees at the rebel chief’s feet. Then Pougatcheff told Marie that she was safe; but she recognised in him the murderer of her father and closed her eyes in horror. However, he made Chvabrine write a safe-conduct for Marie and me through all the provinces under the control of his followers; and then he went out to inspect the fortifications. I was left alone, and presently Marie came to me, with a smile upon her pale face, dressed in her own becoming clothes.

[Pg 10]

We enjoyed the tenderness of our meeting for a time in silence; but presently I told her my plan—how that it was impossible for her to accompany me to Orenberg, where starvation was playing terrible ravages;—how I had arranged that Savéliitch should conduct her to my father’s house. Remembering my father’s letter, she hesitated; but, at length, my arguments prevailed. In an hour my safe-conduct arrived.

We followed in a few hours, travelling in an old carriage that had belonged to Marie’s father, Palachka being in attendance upon Marie. A little after nightfall we arrived at a small town which we believed to be in the possession of the rebels; but, on giving Pougatcheff’s pass-word to the sentinels, we were instantly surrounded by Russian soldiers, and I was hurried off to prison. I demanded an interview with the commanding officer; but this was refused; and I was told the major had ordered Marie to be taken to him. Blind with fury, I rushed past the sentinels direct into the major’s room, where I found him gambling with his officers. In a moment I recognised him,—as the commander—Lowrine, who had lightened my purse at Simbirsk.

He received me with a hearty greeting, and began to rally me about my travelling companion; but my explanations quieted his raillery, and he went to make his excuses to Marie for his rude message, and to provide her with the best lodging the town afforded. I supped with Lowrine that night, and agreed to do my duty, by joining his troop at once, and sending my betrothed on to Simbirsk, under the care of Savéliitch. Savéliitch had many objections,but I overpowered them; and Marie shed many tears, but I kissed them away before we parted.

The vigorous operations of the following spring brought many reverses to Pougatcheff; at last he was taken. I jumped for joy. I should clasp my beloved Marie once more in my arms. Lowrine laughed at my extravagant delight.

I was about to depart for my father’s house when Lowrine entered my room, and showed me an order for my arrest, and safe conveyance to Kazan, to give evidence against Pougatcheff. This drove me nearly mad with disappointment. There was no evasion to be thought of, and I was escorted on my way to Kazan, between two hussars with drawn swords. I found this place almost in ashes. Here I was at once placed in irons, and locked up in a wretched cell. But my conscience was tranquil, for I had resolved to tell the simple truth about my transactions with Pougatcheff.

On the day after my arrival I appeared before the council. In reply to the questions of my judges—who were evidently prejudiced against me—I told every fact as it had occurred, until I came to Marie, when I suddenly thought that to name her would be to ruin her. I hesitated and was silent. I was then confronted with another prisoner—Chvabrine! He lied my life away; swore that I had been a spy in the service of Pougatcheff, and we were both conducted back to prison.

Meantime, my father had received Marie kindly, and both my parents soon loved her. She explained to them the innocence of my connexion with the rebel chief, and they laughed at my adventures; until one day they received a letter from their relation, Prince Banojik, telling them that I had been convicted; but that, through his interference, my punishment was commuted to perpetual exile in Siberia.

My parents were stricken with grief, and Marie, with the soul of a heroine, started with Palachka and the faithful Savéliitch for St. Petersburg. She heard that the Court was at the summer palace of Tzarskoïé-Selo; and, with the assistance of the wife of a tradesman who served the Empress, gained access to the Palace gardens. Here she met a very agreeable lady, to whom she told her story, mentioning how I suffered because I would not even divulge her own name to exculpate myself. This lady listened attentively, and then promised to take care that the petition on my behalf should be presented to the Empress. A few hours afterwards, Marie was summoned before the Empress herself, in whom she recognised the lady she had met in the garden, and I received my pardon; the Empress being convinced that I was innocent.

Shortly afterwards, we were married.[C]

The thing which drove me from my late purchase of Longfield Hall in Cumberland—after nine months’ trial,—back to town, has been a dead secret, until this present writing. My friends have found a mine of reasons to explain the circumstance: either the county families refused to visit us; or our income was not more than enough to maintain our lodge-keeper; or my eldest daughter had made love to the surgeon’s young man at Nettleton; or I could not get on without my billiards and my five to two at whist; or I had been horse-whipped by Lord Wapshaw for riding over his hounds. There was more behind the curtain than people thought; and a thousand other good-natured explanations.

The actual facts are these: We arrived in Cumberland at the close of last autumn, and were as happy for some months as the days were long—and the days were very long indeed; everybody was kind and hospitable[Pg 11] to us, and, on our parts, my port became a proverb and my daughters a toast. It was “Blathers, come and take pot-luck,” from almost any neighbour I fell in with on my walks; or, “Mr. Blathers, we see nothing of your good wife and family,” from the archdeacon’s lady, though we had been dining at the Cloisters three times within the fortnight; or “Lord and Lady Wapshaw have the——” but, no; the forms of familiarity, through which the high nobility communicate with their intimates, should not be lightly quoted. In a word, then, I was a popular man and “an accession to the county.”

In the early spring time I began to feel the country gentleman’s first grief; it came over with the swallows and, like them, never left my roof. Two of my acquaintances—men I had never esteemed as evil genii—rode over on an April day to Longfield; Sir Chuffin Stumps and Biffin Biffin of the Oaks; they were unusually cordial—quite empressés, my wife subsequently observed—to all of us, and after luncheon they desired to have some conversation with me in my study; that is the apartment wherein I keep my Landed Gentry, my stomach-pump (a capital thing to have in a country-house), and my slippers, and thither my two guests were ushered.

“It has always been the custom, my dear Blathers,” said the baronet, “for the tenant of Longfield Hall to be the president of the Nettleton Cricket-club; that we should offer, that he should accept that honor, is due to his position in the county” (and indeed there was scarcely a flat piece of ground big enough to play upon in all the district, except in my paddock, I well know). “Lather, your predecessor, was president; Singin was president before him; the Longfields of Longfield were presidents time out of mind; and you—Blathers—you will be president now?”

“Of course you will,” agreed Biffin.

“But, my dear sirs,” said I, “what shall I have to do?—what will be my duties, my—”

“Do!—nothing at all,” interrupted Sir Chuffin Stumps, “positively nothing; you have no duties, only privileges; let us have your ground to play upon; dine with us on Wednesdays in the tent, and on the great match-days; give a crust of bread and a shakedown to a swell from any long distance, now and then; you sit at the head of the festive board—your health is drunk continually—you are appealed to upon all the nice points of the game, and your decision is final. It’s a splendid post!”

“Splendid!” echoed Biffin.

“But I have not played at cricket for this thirty years,” I urged. “I don’t know the rules. I couldn’t see the ball, if you were to give me all creation. I’m as blind as a bat.”

“Ha, ha, very good,” laughed the baronet. “A bat—d’ye see, Biffin,—a bat? Blathers will do, depend upon it; he’ll keep the table in a roar. As for the game, Mr. President, it’s just what it used to be—round instead of under, that’s all; and they cut a good deal oftener and stop much less, perhaps, than they used to do.”

“Dear me,” said I, “then there’s not so many of them as there were, I suppose?”

“And as for near-sight,” pursued Sir Chuffin, “play in spectacles. Bumpshus, our great wicket-keeper, he plays in spectacles; Grogram, your vice-president, he plays in spectacles; it’s considered rather an advantage than otherwise to play in spectacles.”

“Certainly,” echoed Biffin, “it’s a great advantage.”

“So good-bye, Blathers,” said both gentlemen rising; “the first of May is our meeting day, and the tent must be up and everything arranged, of course, by that time; but Grogram will write and let you know every particular.”

And that was how I was made P.N.C.C., almost without a struggle.

In the course of a week I received a letter from Grogram, saying that there would be no difficulty whatever about anything; he would settle about the dining-tent, and the dressing-tent, and the cooking-tent, and I should only have the contracts for food and the wine-tasting to manage; the hiring of a bowler, the cutting and rolling of the grass. The coming matches for the year—I should, of course, arrange about myself; and I must be sure, he wrote, to let all the members of the club know of the day of meeting, and all the playing members of every match-day, and to dun Lord Wapshaw for his two years’-due subscriptions, as the treasurer didn’t like to—with some other little matters; and, by the bye, did I happen to have my cricket toggery complete yet? as, if not, he (Grogram) could let me have a registered belt almost for nothing, because he had grown out of it, he was sorry to say, himself; also some improved galvanised india-rubber leg-guards, and some tubular batting-gloves, and a catapult—remarkably cheap. The postscript said, “of course you will come out in flannels and spike-soles.”

I really thought when I first read this letter that I should have died with anxiety. I showed it to Mrs. Blathers, and she fairly burst into tears, and it was hours before we could either of us look our difficulties calmly in the face. Flannels! I had at that moment upon my person the only description of flannel garment which I possessed—a jerkin coming down no distance at all, and not to be dreamt of as a reception-dress to the club and half the county upon the first of May; spike-soles I did happen to have, being a skater, and set them out accordingly; but what possible use a pair of skates could be for cricket I could not imagine. The rest of the things I sent to Grogram for, who accommodated me with them very good-naturedly for fifteen pounds fifteen shillings. I put them all on—one[Pg 12] way and another—but could make no use of the catapult, except to sit in it, and my youngest child had convulsions, because, she sobbed, Pa looked so like that dreadful diver who lived in the pond at the Polytechnic.

I issued all the circulars, and signed myself the obedient servant of two hundred and forty-six strange gentlemen. I set my gardener and my coachman to roll out the cricket-ground. I tasted the bad sherry of the three Nettleton wine-merchants, and made two of them my enemies for life. My advertisements for a bowler were answered by a host of youths, with immense professions and very limited employment; some were from Lord’s, some from the Oval, “the Maribun know’d him well enough,” averred one young gentleman; another—with a great hollow in his hand from constant practice—affirmed, that “if I wanted hart, there I had it, and no mistake;” by which he meant that Art was enshrined in his proper person—and him I chose.

The first of May was as the poets love to paint it: the white tents glittered in sunshine, and the flags fluttered from their tops to a gentle breeze; the wickets were pitched upon the velvet sward, a fiddle and cornopean, concealed in the shrubbery, welcomed every arrival with See the Conquering Hero Comes; and the president’s heart beat high with the sense of his position. I was attired in my full diving-dress, over the Nettleton uniform, and I held a bat in my right hand. The sides were chosen, and the game began; the carriages of the nobility and gentry formed a brilliant circle round the ground; a flying ball, struck by a hand more skilful than common, gave their situation the least touch of peril to enhance it. I myself was placed at one of the wickets, and my new bowler was placed opposite to me; he and I had practised together for a day or two, and he knew the balls I liked. I sent the sixth out to the left with a great bang, to the admiration of all but Grogram—who is a person of saturnine disposition—and got three runs; alas! the unprofessional Wilkins—the swiftest round-hand in the club—then inherited the mission of my destruction by bowling to me; the whizz of his balls absolutely took away my breath, and, if they had struck me, would doubtless have taken away my legs. But I placed the bat resolutely in the earth, and cowered behind it as well as I could manage. At last, after a warning cry of Play!—about as inappropriate a name as he could have called it—a tornado seemed to sweep past me, followed by a smack as of the resistance of flesh, and the wicket-keeper ejaculated “Out!” to my infinite joy.

Then came the happy time of cricket. The danger of the thing being over for that whole innings, you have nothing to do but to lie on the ground with a cigar, and explain how you had intended to have caught that ball, and hit it between long field off and cover point; when you holloa out, “Butter-fingers!” and “Wide!” and “Run it out!” My happiness, however, was but of short duration; the new bowler delivered his deadly weapon against the rest in a manner he had known better than to practise upon me. Wilkins, too, seemed to derive new strength from every bail he struck towards the sky, and reaped the air with that tremendous arm of his more terribly than ever. In an hour and twenty minutes, we were fagging out on our side. The president had his choice of places; and, having observed that the wicket-keepers had either stopped the balls, or much diminished their velocity before they arrived at long-stop, I declared for that happy post. Alas! this was the case no longer. Swift as thought, and infinitely more substantial, the balls rushed with unabated fury beside me; hardly, by leaping into the air, and stretching my legs very wide apart, could I escape the fearful concussion. “Stop ’em! Stop ’em!” screamed the fielders. “Why the deuce don’t he stop ’em?” bawled old Grogram, indignantly. So I waited my opportunity, watching, hat in hand, till one came slower than usual; and then I pounced upon him from behind, as a boy does on a butterfly. The crown of my hat was carried away, indeed, but the missile could not force its way through my person, and I threw it up to the man that hallo’d for it most in triumph; but my reputation as a cricketer was gone for ever.

At dinner I was comparatively successful. Lord Wapshaw was on my right; Sir Chuffin Stumps on my left; two long lines of gentlemen in flannels were terminated, perspectively, by Grogram, opposite; the archdeacon said grace; my new bowler assisted in waiting at table; and everything was upon the most gorgeous scale. Presently, however, the rain came down in torrents, and, in spite of the patent imperviousness of the tent, as vouched for by the vice-president, some umbrellas had to be borrowed from the hall (which were never returned). After dinner, there was a friend of his lordship to be ballotted for, and I distributed the little balls, as directed, and sent round the box. The rule of exclusion was one black ball in ten. There were four black balls to thirty white balls, and I had to publish the fact to all present.

“My friend black-balled, sir?” said the irascible peer. “Impossible! Did you do it?—did you?—did you?” he asked of everybody successively, amidst roars of laughter at his utter want of appreciation of the fundamental end and aim of the institution of vote by ballot. “There must be some mistake, sir,” said he, when they had each and all declined to satisfy such an extraordinary enquiry. “Mr. Blathers, try them again.”

[Pg 13]

This time there were four white balls to thirty black ones, a melancholy result which I had also to announce. His lordship left the tent—the marquee, somebody observed—like a maniac; and, though I swear I did not blackball his man, he never asked me to Hiltham Castle again from that day to this.

Now the season had begun, I became inundated with letters from the presidents of other cricket-clubs, requesting the N.C.C. to play them on some particular day; which, if it suited Wilkins, was invariably inconvenient to Grogram, and if it pleased Grogram, was sure to be the worst in the year for all the rest. So we were requested to name our own day, in a flippant, skittle-playing, come-on-when-you-like sort of manner, throwing upon me still greater responsibilities. The end of it was that the Levant club came to Nettleton, eat our dinner, drank our wine, and beat us; but refused to play a return match, or to give us any dinner whatever. Swiftly Downham, Esq., the man who has a European reputation as mid-wicket-on, honoured us by his company at Longfield “for a couple of nights,” as he bargained, and stayed a fortnight, smoking regularly in the best bedroom. Swiper, the professional batsman, also favoured us, and left me a cotton pocket-handkerchief with a full-length portrait of himself, in exchange, I hope—or else it was robbery—for a plain white silk one of my own. A whole school came over from Chumleyborough to play us, and nine of them took up their quarters at the hall. Fresh from toffey and gingerbeer as they were, I was fool enough to give them a champagne supper, of which the consequences were positively tremendous. They were all of them abominably ill, and the biggest boy kissed my daughter Florence, mistaking her, as he afterwards stated in apology, for one of the maids.

Wednesday, on which the club met, became my dark day of the week, and cast its shadow before and behind it; it was then that I made feud with Wilkins, by deciding that his balls were wide, and exasperated Grogram by declaring his legs were before wicket. I should not have known how these things were, even could I have seen so far; but I gave judgment alternately, now for the ins and now for the outs, with the utmost impartiality. One fine afternoon my own and favourite bowler absconded with about a dozen of the best bats, quite a forest of stumps, and a few watches belonging to the members of the N.C.C.; this was the drop too much that made my cup of patience overflow. I determined to resign, and I did resign.

Staying at Longfield Hall any longer, having ceased to be the president, I felt was not to be thought of, so I disposed of it. I wrote a cheque for a lot of things, embraced Grogram (whom I dearly love), and left the club my catapult. My last act of office was to appoint another bowler—a black man. He does capitally, Wilkins writes; only—from his having been selected by me from a band of tumblers, I suppose—he will always bowl from under his left leg.

We are in the Studio of a friend of ours, whose knowledge of all kinds of Beasts and Birds has never been surpassed, and to whose profound acquaintance with the whole Animal Kingdom, every modern picture-gallery and every print-shop, at home and abroad, bears witness. We have been wanted by our friend as a model for a Rat-catcher. We feel much honored, and are sitting to him in that distinguished capacity, with an awful Bulldog much too near us.

Our friend is, as might be expected, the particular friend of the Lions in the Zoological Gardens, Regent’s Park, London. On behalf of that Royal Family dear to his heart, he offers—standing painting away at his easel, with his own wonderful vigour and ease—a few words of friendly remonstrance to the Zoological Society.

You are an admirable society (says our friend, throwing in, now a bit of our head, and now a bit of the Bulldog’s), and you have done wonders. You are a society that has established in England, a national menagerie of the most beautiful description, and that has placed it freely and in a spirit deserving of the highest commendation within the reach of the great body of the people. You are a society rendering a real service and advantage to the public, and always most sensibly and courteously represented by your excellent Mitchell.

Then why (proceeds our friend), don’t you treat your Lions better?

In the earnestness of his enquiry, our friend looks harder than usual at the Bulldog. The Bulldog immediately droops and becomes embarrassed. All dogs feel that our friend knows all their secrets, and that it is utterly hopeless to attempt to take him in. The last base action committed by this Bulldog is on his conscience, the moment our friend fixes him. “What? You did, eh?” says our friend to the Bulldog. The Bulldog licks his lips with the greatest nervousness,[Pg 14] winks his red eyes, balances himself afresh on his bandy forelegs, and becomes a spectacle of dejection. He is as little like his vagabond self, as that remarkable breed which the French call a bouledogue.

Your birds (says our friend, resuming his work, and addressing himself again to the Zoological Society), are as happy as the day is—he was about to add, long, but glances at the light and substitutes—short. Their natural habits are perfectly understood, their structure is well-considered, and they have nothing to desire. Pass from your birds to those members of your collection whom Mr. Rogers used to call, “our poor relations.” Of course I mean the monkeys. They have an artificial climate carefully prepared for them. They have the blessing of congenial society carefully secured to them. They are among their own tribes and connexions. They have shelves to skip upon, and pigeon-holes to creep into. Graceful ropes dangle from the upper beams of their sitting-rooms, by which they swing, for their own enjoyment, the fascination of the fair sex, and the instruction of the enquiring minds of the rising generation. Pass from our poor relations to that beast, the Hippopotamus—What do you mean?

The last enquiry is addressed, not to the Zoological Society, but to the Bulldog, who has deserted his position, and is sneaking away. Passing his brush into the left thumb on which he holds his palette, our friend leisurely walks up to the Bulldog, and slaps his face! Even we, whose faith is great, expect to see him next moment with the Bulldog hanging on to his nose; but, the Bulldog is abjectly polite, and would even wag his tail if it had not been bitten off in his infancy.

Pass, I was saying (coolly pursues our friend at his easel again), from our poor relations to that impersonation of sensuality, the Hippopotamus. How do you provide for him? Could he find, on the banks of the Nile, such a villa as you have built for him on the banks of the Regent’s canal? Could he find, in his native Egypt, an appropriately furnished drawing-room, study, bath, wash-house, and spacious pleasure-ground, all en suite, and always ready? I think not. Now, I beseech your managing committee and your natural philosophers, to come with me and look at the Lions.

Here, our friend seizes a piece of charcoal and instantly produces, on a new canvas standing on another easel near, a noble Lion and Lioness. The Bulldog (who deferentially resumed his position after having his face slapped), looks on in manifest uneasiness, lest this new proceeding should have something to do with him.

There! says our friend, throwing the charcoal away, There they are! The majestic King and Queen of quadrupeds. The British Lion is no longer a fictitious creature in the British coat of arms. You produce your British Lion every year from this royal couple. And how, with all the vast amount of resources, knowledge, and experience at your command, how do you treat these your great attractions? From day to day, I find the noble creatures patiently wearing out their weary lives in narrow spaces where they have hardly room to turn, and condemned to face in the roughest weather a bitter Nor’-Westerly aspect. Look at those wonderfully-constructed feet, with their exquisite machinery for alighting from springs and leaps. What do you conceive to be the kind of ground to which those feet are, in the great foresight of Nature, least adapted? Bare, smooth, hard boards, perhaps, like the deck of a ship? Yes. A strange reason why you should choose that and no other flooring for their dens!

Why, Heaven preserve us! (cries our friend, frightening the Bulldog very much) do any of you keep a cat? Will any of you do me the favour to watch a cat in a field or garden, on a bright sunshiny day—how she crouches in the mould, rolls in the sand, basks in the grass, delights to vary the surface upon which she rests, and change the form of the substance upon which she takes her ease. Compare such surfaces and substances with the one uniform, unyielding, unnatural, unelastic, inappropriate piece of human carpentery upon which these beautiful animals, with their vexed faces, pace and repace, and pass each other two hundred and fifty times an hour.

It is really incomprehensible (our friend proceeds), in you who should be so well acquainted with animals, to call these boards—or that other uncomfortable boarded object like a Mangle with the inside taken out—a Bed, for creatures with these limbs and these habits. That, a Bed for a Lion and Lioness, which does not even give them a chance of being bruised in a new place? Learn of your cat again, and see how she goes to bed. Did you ever find her, or any living creature, go to bed, without re-arranging to the whim and sensation of the moment, the materials of the bed itself? Don’t you, the Zoological Society, punch and poke your pillows, and settle into suitable places in your beds? Consider then, what the discomfort of these magnificent brutes must be, to whom you leave no diversity of choice, no power of new arrangement, and as to whose unchanging and unyielding beds you begin with a form and substance that have no parallel in their natural lives. If you doubt the pain they must endure, go to museums and colleges where the bones of lions and other animals of the feline tribe who have lived in captivity under similar circumstances, are preserved; and you will find them thickly encrusted with a granulated substance, the result of long lying upon unnatural and uncomfortable planes.

I will not be so pressing as to the feeding of my Royal Friends (pursues the Master), but[Pg 15] even there I think you are wrong. You may rely upon it, that the best regulated families of Lions and Lionesses don’t dine every day punctually at the same hour, in their natural state, and don’t always keep the same kind and quantity of meat in the larder. However, I will readily waive that question of board, if you will only abandon the other.

The time of the sitting being out, our friend takes his palette from his thumb, lays it aside with his brush, ceases to address the Zoological Society, and releases the Bulldog and myself. Having occasion to look closely at the Bulldog’s chest, he turns that model over as if he were made of clay (if I were to touch him with my little finger he would pin me instantly), and examines him without the smallest regard to his personal wishes or convenience. The Bulldog, having humbly submitted, is shown to the door.

“Eleven precisely, to-morrow,” says our friend, “or it will be the worse for you.” The Bulldog respectfully slouches out. Looking out of the window, I presently see him going across the garden, accompanied by a particularly ill-looking proprietor with a black eye—my prototype I presume—again a ferocious and audacious Bulldog, who will evidently kill some other dog before he gets home.

There can be no doubt that the judgment to be formed upon a strike among the operatives in a great factory district, if it is to be worth anything, must be based upon a more difficult chain of reasoning than usually goes to the consideration of irregularities in the appointed course of trade. Perfectly free competition regulates all prices, it is said; and, in most callings, regulates with certainty the price of labour. A self-adjusting power is introduced by it into the usual machinery of commerce. So far as regards labour, the working of it is that, as a rule, every man goes where he can get most value for such work as he can best perform; and every man who wants labour will, to the extent his capital allows, vie with his neighbours in attempting to secure to his service the best labour he can meet with of the sort he wants. That is the ordinary course of trade. Only the true price stands, and that price being the lowest by which men of average capabilities find that they can live, a poor trade entails secret hardships; middling trade a bare subsistence; and none but a very brisk trade affords chance of wealth. So it is with the price of skilled labour; but, with the price of unskilled labour, it is scarcely so. In each class of men possessing special capabilities, there is a given number only, and the aim of each of their employers is to do what he can towards securing for himself, out of that number, the best. For the absolutely unskilled, there can be no competition when a mass of the population, ignorant and in sore need, is pressing forward to receive a dole of such work as it can perform; or, if there be a competition, it is of an inverse kind—a struggle among thousands for the food of hundreds; each striving by the most desperate offer of cheap labour—sometimes even an hour’s work for a farthing—to secure a portion of the necessary subsistence.

Skilled labour is, with but few exceptions, subject to an inevitable law, with which employer and employed alike must be content to bring their operations into harmony. But, with unskilled labour, the compulsion set on the employer is in no proportion to that set on the employed. Wages in that case are not regulated by a just regard to the fair relations between capital and labour; the question among competitors being not who shall, by paying most, attract the most efficient class of servants, and secure the heartiest assistance; but who shall, by paying least, take most advantage of the necessity of people who are struggling for the chance of only a few crumbs of the bread of independence. It thus becomes notorious enough how it is that cheap articles are produced out of the lifeblood of our fellow-creatures. The evil can only be corrected now, by the direct interference of our consciences. Unwholesomely cheap production is a perversion of the common law of trade which will in course of time be blotted out by the advance of education; and there can never be in this country a glut of intelligence and skill, although we may soon have a glut of ignorance. Parallel with the advance of mind, there will run the advance of mind-work, and the diffusion of a right sense of its value will be increased.

Thus it will be seen, that while we believe with all our hearts in the wholesomeness of the great principle of free competition—regard nothing as so really helpful to the labourer, so sure to beget healthy trade and bring out all the powers of the men engaged in it—we do see that there is in society one class, and that a large one, upon which, when men look, they may believe that competition is an evil. The truth is, that the existence of that class, so helpless and so much neglected, is the evil to remove; but while it remains—as wholesome meat may kill a man with a disease upon him—there is an unsound body hurt by it, requiring, O political economist! spoon-meat and medicine, not the substantial bread and beef which doubtless theory can prove and experience affirm, to be the best of nourishment for human bodies. There are fevers among bodies politic as among bodies corporal, and we are disposed to think that half the difficulties opposed to a distinct and general perception of the truths which our economists have ascertained, depend upon the fact that they have not yet advanced—so to speak—from a just theory of nutrition to[Pg 16] the formation of a true system of therapeutics. That which will maintain health is not, necessarily, that which will restore it. Often it happens that a blister or a purge, though it would certainly make sound men sick, will make the sick man whole. May it not also be that what is ruinous to all sound trade shall hereafter come to be known as a social medicine possessed, in certain cases, of a healing power, and applicable therefore to some states of disordered system? We believe that a great many discrepancies of opinion may be reconciled by a view like this. Its justice is hardly to be questioned; although, as to the particular applications of it, there is room for any amount of discussion.

Thus, in the case of the Manchester strike, the workmen—though not of the unskilled class—may state that they are unable to feel the working of the principle of competition; that if they do not get what pay they like at one factory, they are not practically at liberty to get the value of their labour in another. Even the population of one mill, thrown out of work, is too large and too special, as to the nature of the various kinds of skill possessed among its people, to be able to find anything like prompt absorption into other factories; but as masters almost always act in groups for the determination of wages, it is the population, not of one mill, but that of five or six, that becomes discontented; and the best proof of the fact that it is practically unable to better itself even though higher wages may be given elsewhere is, that it does not better itself. There is a curious and decided variation in the rates of wages paid in various factories and manufacturing towns; variations artificially increased by strikes, but the existence of which shows, at any rate, to the satisfaction of the operatives, that rates may be arbitrary, and that the natural law does not work easily in their case which brings the price of any article to its just, uniform level. The Manchester masters point out to their men other masters who pay less than they pay; the operatives point on the other hand, to masters paying more. But it is not in their power to carry their own labour to those masters, as it ought to be, for a free working of the principle of competition. Mechanical and accidental difficulties stand completely in the way, and they are aggravated on both sides by habits of imperfect combination. It is just to state these difficulties, and to show that the instinct of the operative may not be altogether reprehensible when it suggests to him that against the worst uneasiness which he feels in the system to which he belongs, a blister or a bloodletting, in the shape of a strike, is the best remedy. He may be very wrong, as a man is apt to be wrong when doctoring himself. There is an excuse for his quackery in the fact that he has, at present, no physician to call in.

The difficulties of the case, as it is felt by employers and employed in our manufacturing districts, is aggravated, as we have said, by imperfect combinations; for, between the trades’ unions and the masters’ associations there is, in truth, a perfect unity of interest. They who reduce the master’s capital, reduce his power of employing labour; they who wrong the labourer by whom they live, reduce his will and power to do work. At present, men and masters are in many cases combatants, because they never have been properly allies; they have not been content to feel that they are fellow-workers, that the man at the helm and the man at the oars are both in the same boat, and that the better they agree together, the more likely they will be to weather out a storm.

In the case of the existing strike at Manchester, we have read carefully the manifestoes, replies, and counter-replies that have been passing between the opposed bodies for the purpose of being laid before the public; and the fact made in them of all others most manifest is—that the points raised in them are points that ought to have been raised very many months ago; discussed and understood between the masters and the men before the strike, and for the prevention of the strike.

Upon the precise points in dispute we cannot undertake to give a definite opinion. From each party to the quarrel we get half a case, and the halves are not such as the public easily will know how to unite into a distinct whole. Rates of wages, as we have already said, do not appear to be uniform, and while the masters in Manchester desire, as we think, most fairly and properly, to bring a certain class of wages, raised unduly by strikes, to its just and natural rate, pointing to some other place in which the rate is low, the men point to a place where the rates are higher than at Manchester, and say, Come let us strike an average between the two. The offer is refused. It may be necessarily and wisely refused. There are evidently many accessory considerations that affect the nominal day’s wages in this place and that. To the public out of Lancashire it cannot be explained fully by manifestoes. Between masters and men, if they were in any habit of maintaining a right mutual understanding it ought not to be possible that any controversy about them could be pushed to the extremity of open breach. The spinners on strike head one of their documents with the last words of Justice Talfourd: “If I were asked what is the greatest want in English society to mingle class with class, I would say in one word, the want of sympathy.” Most true; but need we say that there is sympathy due from workmen towards employer, as well as from employer towards workmen? It is essential to a correction of the evil thus stated that the operative should either generously be the first to give up hostile prejudices, or[Pg 17] that at the least he should be altogether prompt to second, heart and soul, every attempt of the master to establish a relation of good-will and confidence with him. Men rarely quarrel except through what is wisely called—misunderstanding.

There is some reason that we will not undertake to give, which causes Lancashire, although by no means the only British factory district, to be the district most afflicted by misunderstandings. Nowhere else are the masters so much obstructed by the dictatorial spirit of the men; nowhere else is the law so much interfered with, by the dictatorial spirit of the masters. In Scotland, Yorkshire, and the west of England, masters and men work generally well together, and the law is more or less obeyed; machinery, for instance, not being, as a rule, obstinately left unfenced.

Many pages of this journal have been devoted already to the discouragement of strikes. We have urged invariably that the one perfect remedy against them is the opening up of more and better opportunities of understanding one another, between man and master. In case we may be supposed to be ignorant of the feelings about which we reason, let it be known that every thought—almost every word—upon this subject given in the paragraphs that follow will be the thought or word, not of a speculative person at a distance, but of a Lancashire millowner. At the time of the disastrous Preston strike, a Preston manufacturer, whose men stood by him honestly and well, published at Manchester, a little pamphlet;[D] which, if its counsel had been taken, would assuredly have made the present strike of Manchester impossible. Mr. Justice Talfourd’s last words, placed lately by the men above their manifesto, was then chosen as a motto by the masters. Coming, this gentleman wrote, into Lancashire from a district where good feeling subsisted between the employer and the employed, it was with the utmost surprise that he found labour and capital to be in a state of antagonism throughout the country. From the time when he first began to employ labour in Lancashire, more than a quarter of a century ago, he has made it his strict business to study the system at work around him, and discover the real causes of the evils that undoubtedly exist; and he has no hesitation in saying, that the main cause is a want of cordial feeling—the absence, in fact, of a good understanding between the parties to the labour-contract. This feeling must be established, he adds, or the case never will be mended. Such understanding does not come by any explanations from third parties; it is produced only by direct and habitual intercourse between the parties too often at issue. The Preston manufacturer says that no doubt the masters in Lancashire help their men to be intelligent by spending money liberally upon schools connected directly or indirectly with their mills. Duty is done amply; and, for duty’s sake, too, to children; but, he adds, what is really wanted is the education of the adult intellect. The minds of children, having been prepared by the rudiments of knowledge to receive ideas (whether good or evil), they are then cast adrift to gather and continue their education by absorbing all the notions, all the prejudices, and all the fallacies with which chance may surround them. A dispute arises; there is no sympathy shown to the operatives by the employers; but much real or pretended sympathy is shown by the delegates, who tell them fine-spun theories about the results of trades’ unions; talk to them in an inflated manner about their rights and wrongs; tell them that a strike is the only way of battling for the right. Such men never interfere without widening the breach, on which they get a footing.

So far, the Preston manufacturer says what we have felt and said on numerous occasions. Now let us see how he not only speaks, but acts, and how the doing looks which illustrates the saying.

In the first place, minor acts of friendship to the men may be mentioned:—He has encouraged them to form a Provident Club in connection with his mill, and given them all help in it that would not compromise their independence; at the same time he has encouraged them also to support the benefit clubs out of doors. He has liked them to be led to accumulate savings, never believing that a store of money in the operative’s power would facilitate a strike, but rather knowing that the provident man who has saved property will be especially unwilling to see it dissipated. He has provided his men with a reading-room and a lending library, and secured a fund for its support, while he has removed a cause of soreness that exists in even well-regulated mills, by devoting to their library the fines levied upon operatives for faults of discipline. Such fines are necessary, and the faults for which they are imposed cost, of course, loss to the millowner for which they are no real compensation; nevertheless, if the master puts such shillings into his own pocket, or, as is sometimes the case, gives them as pocket-money to a son, experience declares that they are grudged, and sometimes counted as extortions. Let the fine go to the common account of the men, and the payer of it, instead of being pitied as the victim of a tyrant, will be laughed at—thanked for his donation to the library, and so forth. Practically, also, the result of this system, as the Preston manufacturer has found, is to reduce the number of the fines. Men would so much rather be victims than butts, that acts of neglect are more determinedly avoided, though we may suggest the[Pg 18] general good feeling in the mill as a much better reason for the greater care over the work.

Left to select, by a committee chosen from among themselves, the books to be placed in their library, the men have been found to prefer those which contained useful knowledge—such as manuals of popular science, voyages, and histories.

So much being done to promote among the adults increasing intelligence and good feeling, there remains the most essential thing, the cornerstone of the whole system. It has been the practice of this master to promote weekly discussion—meetings among the operatives in his employment. Topics of the day, opinions of the press, the state of trade, questions concerning competition, discoveries on practical science or mechanics, especially such as affect the cotton-trade; and, lastly, the conduct and discipline of their own mill, provide plenty of matter for the free play of opinion. The master takes every possible opportunity of being present at these meetings; and, from what he has heard in them concerning his own mill, the Preston manufacturer declares that he has derived substantial advantage. It will, very often, he says, happen that the men may fancy themselves to be suffering under a grievance which does not really exist, and which a very little explanation will at once remove. Sometimes, too, a real grievance may be in existence, which the employer needs only to be informed of to remedy. In some mills, this master adds,—such is the fear of the consequence of being thought a grumbler,—that the men will often draw lots to determine who shall be the bearer of a complaint which may have been long seeking expression.

With one extract we will sum up the result of the adoption of this system. “I confess,” says the Preston manufacturer, “that, at the time, having control of a large establishment, I cultivated a habit of meeting and discussing questions with my workmen, both questions affecting the public concernment, and questions relating to our business. I confess that I derived quite as much benefit from these discussions as they did; and how much that was, may be inferred from the fact that, after the institution of that habit, I never had a dispute with my operatives. And I will here say that, at those meetings, I have heard an amount of sound and various information, expressed with a native strength and eloquence such as would have surprised any one not conversant with the Lancashire population. It was from those meetings that I derived the settled conviction which I now entertain, that the operatives do not lack the power, but only the means, of forming sound and independent opinions.”

We believe that we employ ourselves more usefully at this juncture in setting forth general principles like these than in any attempt, by arbitration as third parties in a special case, to introduce that which the Preston manufacturer declares to be only a fresh element of discord.

If you mount the Belvedere of the Jardin des Plantes, at Paris, there is one particular segment of the panorama which forms a very complete and singular picture. The right-hand wing (theatrically speaking) is formed by Jussieu’s famous cedar of Lebanon, planted by his own hands in seventeen hundred and thirty-five; that on the left hand is a clump of yews, firs, and miscellaneous evergreens. The heights of Montmartre crown the horizon; the middle distance is formed by the line of houses that constitute the quays on the right bank of the Seine, broken in the midst by the cupolas of St. Pol, and a little to the left by the barn-like roof of St. Louis dans l’Île. But the whole central space of the landscape is overspread with what might be a lake of brown mud in a half-dried and crumpled state, but which, after a second look, proves a vast expanse of tiled roofs running in parallel rows, and slightly diversified by the tops of trees and by scarcely visible skylights which break up the gray-brown uniformity. That petrified mud-lake consists entirely of the roofs which cover the famous Entrepôt or Halle-aux-Vins, which Napoleon the First propounded (by imperial decree) in eighteen hundred and eight, on the site of the Abbey of St. Victor, where Abelard had listened to the lessons of Guillaume de Champeaux, and where many good bottles of ecclesiastical wine had made their disappearance down monkish throats.

If your curiosity is sufficiently awakened to pay the Entrepôt a nearer visit, you will meet with much to interest. Suppose you walk down Rue Cuvier,—perhaps one of these days we shall have Owen Street, and Faraday Street, in London,—you will reach the Quai Saint Bernard, with the Seine rushing rapidly to the left and in front. You will encounter an eddying stream of pleasure and of business combined, as if the whole population of Paris were dancing a grand Sir Roger de Coverly together; omnibuses flitting backwards and forwards,—Hirondelles, Favorites, Gazelles, Parisiennes; holiday parties laden with eatables, to be washed down, outside the Barrière, by wine untaxed by octroi duty; students and savans bent on taking notes on botany and comparative anatomy; wine merchants and their customers with mouths in tasting trim, bound either for the Halle itself or for Bercy beyond it; troops of children with their nurses and grandmothers, about to spend the afternoon in watching the monkeys; artisans’ cousins from the interior, with hearts palpitating at the hope of beholding living lions, tigers and boa-constrictors,[Pg 19] for the first time in their life; not to mention the man who cuts your portrait in black paper, with the Arab who jumps into the air like a goat and lights on his forefeet like a sportive tomcat, on their way to compete with the giantess, the learned pig, and the fortune-telling pony at the foot of the bridge of Austerlitz. From all these mundane follies the Halle-aux-Vins is secluded, in monastic style, by a light railing covered with stout iron network, which allows it to gaze at the Vanity Fair, while it separates it from too familiar contact with the world. It is in the crowd—without being of it—a convenient, friar-like, differenceless distinction. Exclusiveness, however, of whatever kind, is more apparent than real. At the bottom of Rue Cuvier, turn to your right, and you may enter at once, unless you prefer walking along the Quai to the principal entrance, where there is a letter-box, in case you have a billet-doux to post. The principal restriction imposed upon a stranger is, that he is forbidden to smoke amongst the eaux-de-vie.

Well, now that you are inside it, what do you think of it? Is the wine-market of Paris like any thing else? The name of the establishment puts the London Docks into your head; but, beyond their commercial use and distinction, there is no more analogy between the London Docks, and this little bit of fairy-land, than there was between the caverns of Ætna, where Vulcan made pokers and tongs, and the slopes of Parnassus where the Muses danced. The Halle-aux-Vins is not a building, nor a labyrinthine cellar; it is a complete town, as perfect and unique in its way as Pompeii itself. Once a week, indeed, it resembles the city of the dead; it is silent, solitary, and closed. No business is transacted there on Sundays, save only by the restless spirits which will work unseen, and which contrive to make their escape invisibly, however fast they may be imprisoned.

The Halle is the very concentration and impersonation of French vinous hilarity. It would not do for port and sherry, which require a more solid and stately residence; nor is it sufficiently whimsical and mediæval to serve as a rendezvous for Rhenish, Austrian, and Hungarian volunteers in the grand army of Jean Raisin. Rudesheimer, Voeslan, Gumpoldskirchen, or Luttenberg, could not well sojourn comfortably in any place that had not a touch of a ruined castle in its architecture. But the Entrepôt, whose first stone was laid little more than forty years back, no more pretends to an elderly and dignified mien than does the Bal Mabille (by daylight) or the Château des Fleurs. It is as tasteful and as elegant as if intended to serve as a suburban luncheon-place, where you might call for any known wine in the world, to be sipped under the shade of flowering shrubs, to the accompaniment of sandwiches, sausage-rolls, and ices, handed to you by white-aproned waiters or rosy-cheeked and smart-capped damsels.

Great part of this town consists of houses—summer-houses, dolls-houses,—of one story, with one door, one window, and one chimney; with room in each, for exactly one more than one inmate. An extra apartment is sometimes contrived, by means of a bower, which serves instead of a garden—there is none—though a great deal of gardening is done in the Halle, in tubs, flower-pots, and mignonette-boxes, wherein luxuriant specimens of the culture are observable; myrtles, oleanders, lilacs, orange-trees, bay-trees, and pomegranates, all a-growing and a-blowing. Favoured mansions possess a garden—sometimes as much as three or four mètres square—bedecked with roses, dwarf and standard, lilies of the valley, violets double and single, irises displaying some of the colours of the rainbow, hollyhocks, gilliflowers, blue-bells, and oyster-shells all in a row. There is an abundant supply of excellent water; of course to serve no other purpose whatever than the refreshment of the aforesaid favourites of Flora, though people say more wine is drunk in Paris than ever comes or came into it.

The Halle-aux-Vins houses, which put you in mind of Gulliver’s box in Brobdingnag, are raised from the ground on separate blocks of stone, to keep them dry, which suggests the further idea of the possibility of their being flown away with by an eagle or roc, if they had only a convenient ring in the roof. Of course, the houselings,—detached and separate; no quarrelling with next-door neighbours, nor listening to secrets through thin partition walls,—are ranged in streets, the perusal of whose simple names is sufficient to create a vinous thirst. What do you say to walking out of Rue de Bordeaux into Rue de Champagne, thence traversing Rue de Bourgogne, to reach Rue de la Côte-d’Or, and Rue de Languedoc, before arriving at Rue de Touraine! The Barmecide’s guest would have been in ecstacies, in defiance of the koran, at such a feast.

Moreover, to make things still more pleasant, every one of the euphonious alleys and streets is planted with trees of different ornamental species,—the lime, the horse-chesnut, and other arboreal luxuries. It is a pity that the climate does not permit the growth of cork-trees, bearing crops of ready-cut corks, including bungs, long clarets, and champagne-stoppers. The happy mortal to whom each little lodge belongs, is indicated by a legible inscription giving not only the number of his isolated square counting-house, according to its place in the alley which it lines, whether in single or in double row, but also bearing the town-address of its tenant, and specifying the special liquors in which he deals; thus:—“21, Mossenet, Senior, & Cie.; Quai d’Anjou, 25. Fine wines of[Pg 20] the Côte-d’Or cellar, Rue de Champagne, 17.” Similar biographical sketches are given of other lords of other summer-houses which wink at you with their Venetian blinds behind their fences of trelliswork covered with creeping plants.

The ground-plan of the Halle-aux-Vins is formed of square blocks, consisting of magazins, divided at right angles by the streets we have traversed. The magazins are appropriately named after the rivers of France along whose banks are the most famous vineyards. The Magazin du Rhone, Magazin de L’Yonne, Magazin de la Marne, Magazin de la Seine, and Magazin de la Loire, will serve as guides to the nomenclature of the rest of the establishment. Five principal masses of building are thus divided by clean-swept streets, whose most conspicuous ornaments, besides the little thrifty fir-trees, arbor-vitæ, and junipers in tubs, are groups of all sorts of casks lying about in picturesque attitudes, as if they had purposely arranged themselves in tableaux for the sake of having their portraits drawn; and drays, which are simply long-inclined planes balancing on the axle of the wheel, on which the casks are held by a rope tightened by a four-handled capstan. The elevation of the Halle-aux-Vins is pyramidal in principle. The ground-floor of the blocks is crossed by galleries from which you enter cobwebby rather than mouldy cellars, whose more apt denomination would be the Bordeaux word chais. Each gallery, a sort of rectangular tunnel some three hundred and fifty metres long, is lighted by the sunshine from a grating above, and is traversed by a wooden railway for tubs to roll on straight and soberly. Great precautions are taken against fire. The galleries are closed at each end by double doors of iron grating. The sapeurs pompiers, in various ways, make their vicinity if not their presence felt.

Other storehouses, built over the ground-floor so as to form a second story, are tastefully surrounded with terraces, on which you are strictly forbidden to smoke. These upper magazins are approached from the streets by inclined planes of road-way for the use of vehicles; pedestrians, by stepping up light iron staircases, may more readily breathe the air of the terrace, while sounds of tapping and wine-coopering mingle with the hum of the adjacent city, with the passing music of some military band, or with the roar and the scream of the captive creatures which are stared at by the crowd in the Jardin des Plantes. Vinous and spirituous smells float in the atmosphere from the full casks which lie about, in spite of the coating of plaster with which their ends are covered; and we draw nigh to the vaulted magazins of eau de vie, where every brandy-seller has his own proper numbered store, lighted from above by little square skylights, and where roam groups of inquisitive tasters, or spirit-rappers, anxious to pry into secrets that are closely veiled from the vulgar herd. The sanctum of the shrine is the Depotoir Public, or public gauging and mixing apparatus of cylindrical receivers, and glass-graduated brandyometers, and cranes for raising the barrels to the top of the cylinders. In this presence-chamber of alcoholic majesty, etiquette is strictly observed. Conformably with the rules and regulations of the Entrepôt, the conservator apprises Messieurs the merchants that they are required to mind their P’s and Q’s. It is no more allowable to meddle with the machinery, or to intrude behind the mystic cylinders, than it is to make playthings of the furniture which adorns the altar of a cathedral.

There are paradoxical facts connected with the Halle-aux-Vins which none but the thoroughly initiated can solve. Perhaps it may afford a clue to know that there are two emporia of wine and spirit at Paris; one, the Halle within the barrière, and, therefore subject to the octroi tax, and more immediately connected with the supply of the city itself—the other, Bercy, close by, but outside the barrière, and consequently filled with the goods yet untouched by the troublesome impost. Large as it is, the Entrepôt is not large enough; were it twice as big, it would all be hired. For, of all trades in Paris, the wine-trade is the most considerable. There are now nearly seven hundred wholesale merchants, and about three thousand five hundred retail dealers, without reckoning the épiciers, or grocers, who usually sell wines, spirits, and liqueurs in bottle; taking no account of the innumerable houses where they give to eat, and also give to drink. Not only is it the mission of Parisian commerce to moisten the throats of the metropolis, but it is the natural intermediary of the alcoholic beverages that are consumed in the vineyardless districts of France. The twentieth part of the produce of the empire travels to Paris. But, as the imposts on their arrival are very heavy and moreover press only on the local consumption, means have been taken to store the merchandise in such a way as not to pay the duty till the moment of its sale to the consumer. Hence, there is established on the bank of the Seine where Bercy stands, an assemblage of a thousand or twelve hundred cellars and warehouses—a sort of inland bonding-place—outside the limits of the octroi tax. These are hired by the merchants of the city as receptacles for their stock in hand.

The buildings of the Halle-aux-Vins, within the fiscal boundary, cost altogether thirty millions of francs, estimating the value of the site at one third of that sum. The speculation, however, has not hitherto responded to the hopes that were entertained at the time when it was founded. Whether the rentals (which vary from two francs and a half to five francs the superficial mètre), are[Pg 21] fixed at too low a figure, or whether the wine-merchants, disliking to be watched and hindered in the performance of their trade manipulations, prefer their private magazins at Bercy, the Entrepôt brings in to the city of Paris no more than three hundred thousand francs clear a year, that is, about one per cent for the capital employed. That Jean Raisin is somewhere made the subject of certain mystic rites which are scrupulously screened from public observation may be proved by the simple rules of addition and subtraction.

The wine-trade of Paris amounts to two million two hundred thousand hectolitres; four hundred thousand are consumed in the banlieue, outside the barrière, and seven hundred thousand are sent away, to supply the northern departments. What then becomes of the one million one hundred thousand which are left at Paris? It is made into one million four hundred thousand hectolitres! It may be calculated from the price at the vineyard, the carriage, the taxes, and other etceteras, that unadulterated wine, of however inferior a quality, cannot be sold in Paris for less than half a franc, or fifty centimes, the litre. Now, for considerable quantities retailed in cabarets, the price is as low as forty centimes. The equilibrium is reestablished by clandestine and fraudulent manufacture. On ordinary common wines it is practised to the extent of increasing them on the average as much as three-tenths. Various sweet ingredients are fermented in water. A farmer travelling from Orleans in the same railway carriage with myself, showed me without the slightest hesitation, or concealment, a sample of dried pears which he was taking to Paris to sell to the Bercy wine-brewers. Very inferior raisins, dried fruits in general, and coarse brown sugar, enter into the magic broth. To complete the charm, an addition is made of some high-coloured wine from the south, a little alcohol, and a dash of vinegar and tartaric acid. Such preparations as these are harmless enough; they become grateful to the palate that is habituated to them; and certain adroit manipulators succeed in producing a beverage which attains considerable reputation amongst a wide circle of amateurs. Certainly the so-called petit Macon you get at Paris is a most agreeable drink, when good of its kind. At respectable restaurants, drinking it from a sealed bottle, you may reckon with tolerable safety on its genuineness. In wine shops, where wine is drunk from the cask, its purity is not so certain. The great test is, that manufactured and even light wines will not keep; they must be consumed, like a glass of soda water, as soon as they are ready for the lip. It is said that the lamented Fum the Fourth had a bin of choice wine which he would allow no one to taste, except on special occasions when he chose to call for it himself. But a king, however low he may descend, can hardly go down the cellar-steps with a bunch of keys in one hand and a tallow candle in the other, to decant his own favourite port and sherry. One morning, his Majesty decided that the evening’s feast should be graced by the appearance of some of the treasured nectar. Of course, the underlings had drunk it all themselves, except a single bottle, which they had the marvellous modesty to leave. What was to be done? A panting cupbearer was sent with the final remnant to procure from a confidential purveyor to the palace something as nearly like it as possible. “You shall have it by dinner-time,” said the friend in need; “and by letting me know any morning, you may have more to any extent you want. But,” said the benevolent wizard, in tones of warning—“but, remember, it must be all consumed the same night. It will not keep till next day.”

I hope the impromptu wine-maker was duly careful of the royal health. But in Paris there are said to be a number of cabaretiers, who, from the lees of wine mixed with a decoction of prunes doctored with logwood, sugar of lead, sugar, and eau-de-vie, metamorphose wholesome fountain-water into an infamous potion, which they shamelessly sell as the juice of the grape. The French Encyclopédie, in its article “Vin,” gives a large number of serviceable receipts, which may or may not have been tested at Bercy. If effectual, their value is beyond all price. An elixir to improve instantly the most common wine; A mode of giving to the wine of the worst soil the best quality and the most agreeable taste; A mode of giving to ordinary wines the flavour of Malmsey, Muscat, Alicant, and sherry; The manner of knowing whether there be water in the wine; The means of restoring wine that is changed; Remarks on bottles which spoil the wine; and, The method of improving and clarifying all sorts of wines, whether new or old; would alone be quite sufficient to make the fortune of any man who could scrape a hundred francs together, and with that immense capital start as Parisian wine-merchant. The particulars of these prescriptions are unnecessary for the reader, especially, seeing that I have given him the reference; but I cannot resist transferring for his edification, from L’Editeur, an Oran (Algerian) newspaper for the eighth of November last, an advertisement, giving real names relative to the Liqueur Trasforest, of Bordeaux:—

“This precious composition, very advantageously known for a long time past, and recently brought to perfection by its author, gives to wine of the most inferior crûs a delicious richness, which is easily confounded with the true richness of the Médoc; consequently, it is well appreciated by connoisseurs, who give it the preference over all preparations of this nature. Messieurs the proprietors, merchants, and consumers, who[Pg 22] have not yet employed it, are invited to make a trial of it; there is no doubt as to their being convinced of its excellent properties by the advantages they will derive from it, especially to consignments to beyond the seas. [Much obliged to the philanthropic House of Trasforest.] A great number of retail dealers owe the preference which they enjoy, to this aromatic liquor, which is an agent proper for the preservation of wine, at the same time that it imparts to it a very superior quality and value by the delicate bouquet which it communicates.

“To employ the Liqueur Trasforest properly, you ought in the first place to whip up the wine; let it remain about fifteen days; and not add the Liqueur until the wine is drawn off, so that its mixture with the wine may be perfect. After several days of rest it may be put in bottle; the aroma keeps indefinitely. [That may mean for an indefinitely short period.] Twenty years’ experience and success prove that the high reputation of this excellent production is incontestably merited. A flask suffices to perfume, bonify, and age, a hogshead (barrique) of wine. Price one franc fifty centimes. An allowance of twenty per cent. to wholesale dealers. Orders attended to for ready-money payment. Beware of imitations.

“General entrepôt and special manufacture: Maison Trasforest, Rue Dauphine, 35, and Rue Saint-Martin, 56, opposite the Cours d’Albrest, Bordeaux. (Prepay orders and their answers.) Sole depôt in Oran at the office of the journal L’Editeur. At the same depôt may be had the Gelatinous Powder, for the complete, absolute, and instantaneous clarification of white and red wines, vinegars, eaux-de-vie, and liqueurs.”

I have besides my town residence in Cecil Street—which is confined to a suite of two apartments on the second-floor—a very pleasant country-house belonging to a friend of mine in Devonshire; this latter is my favourite seat, and the abode which I prefer to call my home. I like it well when its encircling glens are loud with rooks, and their great nests are being set up high in the rocking branches; I like it when the butterflies, those courtly ushers of the summer, are doing their noiseless mission in its southern garden, or on the shaven lawn before its front; I like it when its balustraded roof looks down upon a sea of golden corn and islands of green orchards flushed with fruit; but most it pleases me when logs are roaring in its mighty chimneys, and Christmas time is come. Six abreast the witches might ride up them, let their broomsticks prance and curvet as they would. If you entered the hall by the great doors while Robert Chetwood and myself were at our game of billiards at its further end, you could not recognise our features. The galleries are studies of perspective, and the bare, shining staircases as broad as carriage ways. The library, set round from the thick carpet to the sculptured ceiling with ancient books, with brazen clasps, and old-world types, and worm-drilled bindings. The chapel, with its blazoned saints on the dim windows, and the mighty corridors with floors of oak and sides of tapestry, are pictures of the past, and teach whole chapters of the book of history: Red Rose and White Rose, Cavalier and Roundhead, Papist and Protestant, Orangeman and Jacobite have each had their day in Old Tremadyn House. When the great doors slam together, as they sometimes will, to the inexpressible terror of the London butler, they awake a series of thunderclaps which roll from basement to garret: many a warning have they given, in the good old times, to Tremadyns hiding for their lives, and many an arras has been raised and mirror slipped to right or left at that menacing sound. To this day, Robert Chetwood often comes anew upon some hold in which, those who ruled before him have skulked—sometimes in his own reception-rooms, but more commonly in the great chambers where he puts his guests. These chambers are colossal, with huge carved pillars bearing up a firmament of needlework, and dressing-closets large enough for dining-rooms. Every person of note who could or could not by possibility of date or circumstance have slept therein have had the credit of passing a night within Tremadyn House, from the Wandering Jew, Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, down to Charles the First, Peter the Great, and the late Emperor Nicholas. There has been more than one murder in the Red room, several suicides in the Blue, and one ghost still haunts those spots in expiation. Tremadyns in lace cuffs and wigs; in scarlet and ermine; in armour from top to toe, line both the galleries—sold by the last Charles Surface of a dissolute race for ten pounds ten shillings a head. One great Tremadyn dynasty has passed away; Robert Chetwood, late banker in the City of London, not so long ago banker’s clerk, now reigneth in their stead. The Tremadyns came in at the time of the siege of Jericho, or thereabouts, and the Chetwoods about ten years before the siege of Sebastopol; but there the advantage ceases. There is no man kinder to the poor, no man more courteous to all men, no man, whatever his quarterings, in all Devonshire with a better heart than Robert Chetwood. Tremadyn House is open to the county, as it ever was, and his old London friends are not forgotten; a hale and hearty gentleman indeed he is, but he has had many troubles; he is as happy as any man bereaved of children can be, and it was the loss of them that made him buy the house and give up his old haunts and busy way—

[Pg 23]

and that, wherever it may be, is too sad a sight to look upon.

But what a wife the old man had, to make up, as it seemed even to me, for all! I say to me, for one of those lost children, a maiden of seventeen, was my betrothed bride—the gentlest and most gracious creature eyes ever looked upon; I think if I could write my thoughts of her, I should move those to tears who never saw her face, when they read “Gertrude died.” She gave herself to me: the old man never could have given her. I say no more.

This is why Tremadyn House has become to me a home. It pleases Robert Chetwood to have his friend’s son with him, above all, because he was his daughter’s plighted husband, and my father’s friend is trebly dear to me as Gertrude’s father. When the Christmas party has dispersed, and the great house is quite emptied of its score of guests, I still remain with the old couple over the new year. They call me son, as though I were their son, and I call them my parents. If Heaven had willed it so, dear Gertrude and myself could not have hoped for greater wedded happiness, more love between us, than is between those two. “Perhaps,” he says, with a smile I never saw a young man wear, “perhaps it is that my old eyes are getting dim and untrustworthy, but Charlotte seems to me the dearest and most pleasant-looking dame in all the world.” And his wife makes answer that her sight also is just as little to be depended on. To each of them has come the silver hair, and the reverence with it that alone makes it beautiful; and if their steps are slower than in youth, it is not because their hearts are heavier; they are indeed of those, so rare ones, who make us in love with life down even to its close. They always seemed to me as having climbed the hill together their whole lives long, and never was I more astonished than upon this new year’s eve, when, Mrs. Chetwood being with us two in after-dinner talk, as custom was when all her guests were gone, her husband told this history. He had always talked quite openly to me,

and then, at the end of another year of love and confidence, I could not resist inquiring of them how long they two had been one.

“Well, on my word, George,” said the dear old lady, “you should be more discreet than to ask such questions.”

But her husband answered readily:

“This thirty years. I’ve been a married man myself this half-a-century.”

“Why, you don’t mean to say——” said I.

“Yes, I do,” he interrupted. “Of course I do. Charlotte has been my wife too long, I hope, to be jealous now of either Kate or Mary; but I loved them each in turn almost as dearly as I love her. Charlotte,” he added, turning towards her as she sat in the great arm-chair, “you don’t mind George being told about my other two wives, do you?”

“I don’t mind your talking of Mary much,” she answered, “but get over that young Kate’s story as quickly as you can, please.”

And I really thought I detected a blush come over her dear old face while she was speaking.

“It is rather less than half a century ago,” he began, “since I first set foot in this beautiful Devon county. I came down on a short holiday from London, in the summer time, to fish, and I brought with me, besides my rod and basket, a portmanteau full of clothes and about twenty-five pounds in gold, which was the whole amount of my savings. I was junior clerk in a house at that day, with one hundred and twenty pounds a-year, and with as much chance of becoming a partner as you, my dear briefless Charles, have of sitting on the woolsack. From the top of Tremadyn House I could point you out the farm-house where I lodged, and will some day take you to see it,—a mighty homestead, with a huge portico of stone and flights of stone steps leading to the upper chambers from without. On one side was the farm-yard, filled with swine and poultry, with open stalls for cattle, and enormous barns, not so well kept or neat, perhaps, as the present day requires, but a perfect picture of plenty; on the other stood the cider-presses, and beyond, the apple orchards, white with promise, red with fruit, made the air faint with fragrance; half orchard was the garden, too, in fruit, through which, beneath a rustic bridge, my trout stream wandered. Charlotte, you know the place—have I not painted it?”

“You have, Robert,” she said. The tears were in her eyes, ready to fall, I saw.

“There, then, I met Katie. The good man of the house was childless, and she, his cousin, was well cared for as his child. It was no wonder, George: the dark oak parlour seemed to need no light when she shone in it. Like a sunbeam gliding over common places, whatever household matters busied her she graced. Some sweet art seemed to lie in her, superior to mere neatness, as high-heartedness excelleth pride. I put on salmon flies to catch trout. I often fished without any hook at all. I strove to image her fair face and form in the clear waters, by the side of that hapless similitude of myself—the reflex of a forlorn youth in his first love. I did my best at haymaking to please her. I took eternal lessons in the art of making Devon cheese. I got at last so far as to kiss her hand. I drew a little, and she sat to me for her portrait. We sallied out a mushrooming and getting wild flowers, and on our way sang pleasant songs together, and interchanged our little stores[Pg 24] of reading. On the eve before my long put-off departure we were thus roaming: we had to cross a hundred stiles—the choicest blessings of this country I used to think them—and once, instead of offering my hand to help her over, I held out both my arms, and, upon my life, George, the dear girl jumped right into them; and that was how I got to kiss her cheek.”

“What shocking stories you are telling, Robert,” said Mrs. Chetwood, and certainly she was then blushing up under her lace cap to her white hair.

“Well, my dear, nobody was there except Kate and myself, and I think I must know what happened, at least as well as you do: so,” he continued, “after one more visit to the farm-house, Kate and I were married; she gave up all her healthy ways and country pleasures to come and live with me in the busy town; studious of others’ happiness, careful for others’ pain; at all times forgetful of herself: active and diligent, she had ever leisure for a pleasant word and a kind action; and for beauty, no maid nor wife in the world was fit, I believe, to compare with her; to you, George, who knew and loved our dearest Gertrude, I need not describe her mother. She was not long with me, but it soon seemed as if it must have cost my life to have parted with her; yet the girlish glory faded, and the sparkling spirit fled, and the day has been forgiven, though forgotten never, which took my darling Katie from my side.”

The old man paused a little here. Mrs. Chetwood kissed him softly upon the cheek.

“My second wife,” he resumed, “was not so young, and certainly had not the outward graces of my first. She was beautiful, too, in the flower as Kate was in the bud; her face had not the vivacity, nor her eyes the dancing light of Katie’s, but there sat such a serenity upon her features, as we sometimes see upon a lovely landscape when the sun is near its setting; a look which no man ever tires of; and Mary bore me children, and then, much as I had loved the sapling, it seemed to me that the full-fruited tree was dearer yet. She was no country girl from the Devon dales, but a town lady, bred. I had a great house by that time, with all things fitting about me, and my sphere was hers. The pearls suited her pleasant brow, and crowned her still raven tresses as becomingly as the single rose in her hair had adorned simple Kate. I think, if I may say so without ingratitude for my present great happiness, and with the leave of my dear Charlotte, that the happiest hours of my life were spent during those days, when our two children’s voices rang cheerily over the house, and some little scheme of pleasure for them was my everyday desire and Mary’s. Even at the terrible time when boy and girl were being taken from us at once, never did their patient mother seem more dear to me; from when the hush of sickness stole upon us at first, to the day when that white procession left our doors, what a healing spirit was she! When we thought that the thickly folded veil of sorrow had fallen over us for ever, how tenderly she put it aside!

“It must needs have happened that my speech has here been melancholy, but indeed I should not speak of Mary so. She was the blythest, cheerfullest, most comfortable middle-aged wife that man ever had; behind our very darkest trouble a smile was always lying ready to struggle through it, and what a light it shed! One of your resigned immoveable females, who accept every blessing as a temptation, and submit, with precisely the same feelings to what they call every chastening, would have killed me in a week. George, my Mary acted at all times according to her nature, and that nature was as beautiful and blessed as ever fell to the lot of womankind. You might well think that Kate and Mary were two prizes great enough for one man to draw out of the marriage lottery, and yet I drew another. When I lost my beloved Mary, my third wife took her place in my inmost heart.

“Kiss me, Charlotte,” said the old man, tenderly, and again she kissed him on the cheek. “And now,” continued he, “let us fill our glasses, for the New Year is coming on apace; and please to drink to the memory of my two wives, and to the health of her who is still left to me. The two first toasts must necessarily be somewhat painful to my dear Charlotte, and we will, therefore, receive them in silence, but the third we must drink with all the honours.”

So after those, he stood up, glass in hand; and said to her,

“Kate, Mary, Charlotte,—bride, matron, and dame in one, to whom I have been wedded this half-century,—for I have had no other wife, George,—God bless you, dear old heart! We have had a merry Christmas, as we have ever had, and I trust it may be permitted to us to have, still together, one more happy New Year. Hip! hip! hip! Hurrah!” and the echoes of our three times three seemed cheerily to roam all night about Tremadyn House.

Now ready, Price Five Shillings and Sixpence, cloth boards,

THE TWELFTH VOLUME

OF

HOUSEHOLD WORDS,

Containing from No. 280 to No. 303 (both inclusive), and the extra Christmas Number.

The Right of Translating Articles from Household Words is reserved by the Authors.

Published at the Office, No. 16, Wellington Street North, Strand. Printed by Bradbury & Evans, Whitefriars, London.