HOUSEHOLD WORDS.
A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

“The fitful flame of Young Romance,” fed by the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, Fairy tales and Heathen Mythologies; the wonderful fables of Genii and Magicians; stories of towns springing up, ready-built, out of deserts; tales of cities paved with gold; the Happy Valley of Rasselas; the territories of Oberon and Titania, Robert Owen’s New Harmony, and the land of Cockaigne; Gulliver’s Travels, the Adventures of Peter Wilkins, legends of beggars made kings, and mendicants millionaires; Sinbad the Sailor, Baron Munchausen, Law of Laurieston, Major Longbow, Colonel Crocket, the Poyais loan; illimitable exaggeration; undaunted lying; the most rampant schemes of the most rabid speculators; the wildest visions of the maddest poet; the airiest castle of the most Utopian lunatic—any one of these, and all of them put together, do not exceed the wondrous web of realities that is being daily woven around both hemispheres of the globe. Not to mention conversations carried on thousands of miles apart, by means of electricity, and a hundred other marvels that Science has converted into commonplaces, we would now confine ourselves to the latest “wonderful wonder that has ever been wondered at”—the gold region of California; but more especially to its capital, San Francisco.

The story of the magic growth of this city would have defied belief, had it not rapidly grown up literally under the “eyes of Europe.” When the returns were made to the United States’ authorities in 1831, it contained three hundred and seventy-one individuals, and very few more resided in it up to the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, in the Sacramento River. Even in April, 1849, we learn from a credible eye-witness, that there were only from thirty to forty houses in San Francisco; and that the population was so small, that so many as twenty-five persons could never be seen out of doors at one time. There now lie before us two prints; one of San Francisco, taken in November, 1848, soon after the discovery was made, and another exactly a year afterwards. In the first, we are able to count twenty-six huts and other dwellings dotted about at uneven distances, and four small ships in the harbour. In the second, the habitations are countless. The hollow, upon which the city partly stands, presents a bird’s-eye view of roofs, packed so closely together, that the houses they cover are innumerable; while the sides of the surrounding hills are thickly strewed with tents and temporary dwellings. On every side are buildings of all kinds, begun or half-finished, but the greater part of them mere canvas sheds, open in front, and displaying all sorts of signs, in all languages. Great quantities of goods are piled up in the open air, for want of a place to store them. The streets are full of people, hurrying to and fro, and of as diverse and bizarre a character as the houses: Yankees of every possible variety, native Californians in sarapes and sombreros, Chilians, Sonorians, Kanakas from Hawaii, Chinese with long tails, Malays and others in whose embrowned and bearded visages it is impossible to recognise any especial nationality. In the midst is the plaza, now dignified by the name of Portsmouth Square. It lies on the slope of the hill; and, from a high pole in front of a long one-story adobe building used as the Custom House, the American flag is flying. On the lower side is the Parker House Hotel. The Bay of San Francisco is black with the hulls of ships, and a thick forest of masts intercepts the landscapes of the opposite coast and the islet of Yerba Buena. Flags of all nations flutter in the breeze, and the smoke of three steamers is borne away on its wings in dense wreaths.—The first picture is one of stagnation and poverty, the other presents activity and wealth in glowing colours.

“Verily,” says the correspondent of a Boston Paper, “the place was in itself a marvel. To say that it was daily enlarged by from twenty to thirty houses may not sound very remarkable after all the stories that have been told; yet this, for a country which imported both lumber and houses, and where labour was then ten dollars a day, is an extraordinary growth. The rapidity with which a ready-made house is put up and inhabited, strikes the stranger in San Francisco as little short of magic. He walks over an open lot in his before-breakfast stroll—the next morning, a house complete, with a family inside, blocks up his way. He goes down to the bay and looks out on the shipping—two or three days afterward a row of storehouses, 314staring him in the face, intercepts the view.”

An intelligent traveller from the United States, has recorded his impressions of this marvellous spot, as he saw it in August, 1849:—

“The restless, feverish tide of life in that little spot, and the thought that what I then saw and was yet to see will hereafter fill one of the most marvellous pages of all history, rendered it singularly impressive. The feeling was not decreased on talking that evening with some of the old residents, (that is of six months’ standing,) and hearing their several experiences. Every new comer in San Francisco is overtaken with a sense of complete bewilderment. The mind, however it may be prepared for an astonishing condition of affairs, cannot immediately push aside its old instincts of value and ideas of business, letting all past experiences go for nought and casting all its faculties for action, intercourse with its fellows, or advancement in any path of ambition, into shapes which it never before imagined. As in the turn of the dissolving views, there is a period when it wears neither the old nor the new phase, but the vanishing images of the one and the growing perceptions of the other are blended in painful and misty confusion. One knows not whether he is awake or in some wonderful dream. Never have I had so much difficulty in establishing, satisfactorily to my own senses, the reality of what I saw and heard.”^[1]

The same gentleman, after an absence in the interior of four months, gives a notion of the rapidity with which the city grew, in the following terms:—

“Of all the marvellous phases of the history of the Present, the growth of San Francisco is the one which will most tax the belief of the Future. Its parallel was never known, and shall never be beheld again. I speak only of what I saw with my own eyes. When I landed there, a little more than four months before, I found a scattering town of tents and canvas houses, with a show of frame buildings on one or two streets, and a population of about six thousand. Now, on my last visit, I saw around me an actual metropolis, displaying street after street of well-built edifices, filled with an active and enterprising people and exhibiting every mark of permanent commercial prosperity. Then, the town was limited to the curve of the Bay fronting the anchorage and bottoms of the hills. Now, it stretched to the topmost heights, followed the shore around point after point, and sending back a long arm through a gap in the hills, took hold of the Golden Gate and was building its warehouses on the open strait and almost fronting the blue horizon of the Pacific. Then the gold-seeking sojourner lodged in muslin rooms and canvas garrets, with a philosophic lack of furniture, and ate his simple though substantial fare from pine boards. Now, lofty hotels, gaudy with verandas and balconies, were met with in all quarters, furnished with home luxury, and aristocratic restaurants presented daily their long bills of fare, rich with the choicest technicalities of the Parisian cuisine. Then, vessels were coming in day after day, to lie deserted and useless at their anchorage. Now scarce a day passed, but some cluster of sails, bound outward through the Golden Gate, took their way to all the corners of the Pacific. Like the magic seed of the Indian juggler, which grew, blossomed, and bore fruit before the eyes of his spectators, San Francisco seemed to have accomplished in a day the growth of half a century.”

In San Francisco, everything is reversed. The operations of trade are exactly opposite to those of older communities. There the rule is scarcity of money and abundance of labour, produce, and manufactures; here cash overflows out of every pocket, and the necessaries of existence will not pour in fast enough. Mr. Taylor tells us, that “a curious result of the extraordinary abundance of gold and the facility with which fortunes were acquired, struck me at the first glance. All business was transacted on so extensive a scale that the ordinary habits of solicitation and compliance on the one hand, and stubborn cheapening on the other, seemed to be entirely forgotten. You enter a shop to buy something; the owner eyes you with perfect indifference, waiting for you to state your want: if you object to the price, you are at liberty to leave, for you need not expect to get it cheaper; he evidently cares little whether you buy it or not. One who has been some time in the country will lay down the money, without wasting words. The only exception I found to this rule was that of a sharp-faced Down-Easter just opening his stock, who was much distressed when his clerk charged me seventy-five cents for a coil of rope, instead of one dollar. This disregard for all the petty arts of money-making was really a refreshing feature of society. Another equally agreeable trait was the punctuality with which debts were paid, and the general confidence which men were obliged to place, perforce, in each other’s honesty. Perhaps this latter fact was owing, in part, to the impossibility of protecting wealth, and consequent dependence on an honourable regard for the rights of others.”

While this gentleman was in San Francisco, an instance of the fairy-like manner in which fortunes are accumulated, came under his observation. A citizen of San Francisco died insolvent to the amount of forty-one thousand dollars the previous autumn. His administrators were delayed in settling his affairs, and his real estate advanced so rapidly in value meantime, that after his debts were paid, his heirs derived a yearly income from it of forty thousand dollars!

315The fable of a city paved with gold is realised in San Francisco. Mr. Taylor reports:—“Walking through the town, I was quite amazed to find a dozen persons busily employed in the street before the United States Hotel, digging up the earth with knives and crumbling it in their hands. They were actual gold-hunters, who obtained in this way about five dollars a day. After blowing the fine dirt carefully in their hands, a few specks of gold were left, which they placed in a piece of white paper. A number of children were engaged in the same business, picking out the fine grains by applying to them the head of a pin, moistened in their mouths. I was told of a small boy having taken home fourteen dollars as the result of one day’s labour. On climbing the hill to the Post Office I observed in places, where the wind had swept away the sand, several glittering dots of the real metal, but, like the Irishman who kicked the dollar out of his way, concluded to wait till I should reach the heap. The presence of gold in the streets was probably occasioned by the leakings from the miners’ bags and the sweepings of stores; though it may also be, to a slight extent, native in the earth, particles having been found in the clay thrown up from a deep well.”

The prices paid for labour were at that time equally romantic. The carman of one firm (Messrs. Mellus, Howard, and Co.) drew a salary of twelve hundred a year; and it was no uncommon thing for such persons to be paid from fifteen to twenty dollars, or between three and four pounds sterling per day. Servants were paid from forty to eighty pounds per month. Since this time (August, 1849), however, wages had fallen; the labourers for the rougher kinds of work could—poor fellows—get no more than something above the pay of a Lieutenant-Colonel in the British army, or about four hundred per annum. The scarcity of labour is best illustrated by the cost of washing, which was one pound twelve shillings per dozen. It was therefore found cheaper to put out washing to the antipodes; and to this day, San Francisco shirts are washed and “got up” in China and the Sandwich Islands. So many hundred dozens of dirty, and so many hundred dozens of washed linen form the part of every outward and inward cargo to and from the Golden City.

The profits upon merchandise about the time we are writing of, may be judged of by one little transaction recorded by Mr. Taylor:—“Many passengers,” he writes, “began speculation at the moment of landing. The most ingenious and successful operation was made by a gentleman of New York, who took out fifteen hundred copies of ‘The Tribune’ and other papers, which he disposed of in two hours, at one dollar a-piece! Hearing of this I bethought me of about a dozen papers which I had used to fill up crevices in packing my valise. There was a newspaper merchant at the corner of the City Hotel, and to him I proposed the sale of them, asking him to name a price. ‘I shall want to make a good profit on the retail price,’ said he, ‘and can’t give more than ten dollars for the lot.’ I was satisfied with the wholesale price, which was a gain of just four thousand per cent.”

The prices of food are enormous, and, unhappily, so are the appetites; “for two months after my arrival,” says a respectable authority, “my sensations were like those of a famished wolf;” yet the first glance at the tariff of a San Francisco bill of fare is calculated to turn the keenest European stomach. “Where shall we dine to-day?” asked Mr. Taylor, during his visit. “The restaurants display their signs invitingly on all sides; we have choice of the United States, Tortoni’s, the Alhambra, and many other equally classic resorts, but Delmonico’s, like its distinguished original in New York, has the highest prices and the greatest variety of dishes. We go down Kearney Street to a two-story wooden house on the corner of Jackson. The lower story is a market; the walls are garnished with quarters of beef and mutton; a huge pile of Sandwich Island squashes fills one corner, and several cabbage-heads, valued at two dollars each, show themselves in the window. We enter a little door at the end of the building, ascend a dark, narrow flight of steps and find ourselves in a long, low room, with ceiling and walls of white muslin and a floor covered with oil-cloth. There are about twenty tables disposed in two rows, all of them so well filled that we have some difficulty in finding places. Taking up the written bill of fare, we find such items as the following:—

So that, with but a moderate appetite, the dinner will cost us five dollars, if we are at all epicurean in our tastes. There are cries of ‘steward!’ from all parts of the room—the word ‘waiter’ is not considered sufficiently respectful, seeing that the waiter may have been a lawyer or a merchant’s clerk a few months before. The dishes look very small as they are placed on the table, but they are skilfully cooked and are very palatable 316to men that have ridden in from the diggings.”

Lodging was equally extravagant. A bedroom in an hotel, 50l. per month, and a sleeping berth or “bunk”—one of fifty in the same apartment—1l. 4s. per week. Social intercourse is almost unknown. There are no females, and men have no better resource than gambling, which is carried on to an extent, and with a desperate energy, hardly conceivable. “Gambling,” says a private correspondent, whose letter, dated April 20, 1850, now lies before us, “is carried on here with a bold and open front, so as to alarm and astonish one. Thousands and thousands change hands nightly. Go in, for instance, to a place called ‘Parker House,’ which is a splendid mansion, fitted up as well as any hotel in England; step into the front room, and you see five or six Monte, Roulette, and other gaming-tables, each having a bank of nearly half a bushel of gold and silver, piled up in the centre. That the excitement shall not be wholly devoid of diversion, the Muses lend their aid, and a band plays constantly to crowded rooms! Step into the next building, called ‘El Dorado,’ and there a similar scene is presented, and which is repeated, on a smaller scale, all over the town. The gamblers seem to control the town, but of course their days must be numbered. Fortunes are made or lost daily. People gamble with a freedom and recklessness which you can never dream of. Young men who come here must at all times resist gaming, or it must eventually end in their ruin: the same with drinking, as there is much of it here.”

The variety of habits, manners, tastes, and prejudices, occasioned by the confluence in one spot of almost every variety of the human species, is another bar to a speedy deposit of all these floating and opposite elements into a compact and well assimilated community. “Here,” writes the same gentleman, “we see the character and habits of the English, Irish, Scotch, German, Pole, French, Spaniard, and almost every other nation of Europe. Then you have the South American, the Australian, the Chilian; and finally, the force of this golden mania has dissolved the chain that has hitherto bound China in national solitude, and she has now come forth, like an anchorite from his cell, to join this varied mass of golden speculators. Here we see in miniature just what is done in the large cities of other countries; we have some of our luxuries from the United States and the tropics, butter from Oregon, and for the most part California, Upper or Lower, furnishes us with our beef, &c. The streets are all bustle, as you may imagine, in a place now of nearly thirty thousand inhabitants, independent of a small world of floating population.”

Not the smallest wonder, however, presented in this region, is the rapid manner in which social order was shaped out of the human chaos. When a new placer or “gulch” was discovered, the first thing done was to elect officers and extend the area of order. The result was, that in a district five hundred miles long, and inhabited by one hundred thousand people—who had neither government, regular laws, rules, military or civil protection, nor even locks or bolts, and a great part of whom possessed wealth enough to tempt the vicious and depraved,—there was as much security to life and property as in any part of the Union, and as small a proportion of crime. The capacity of a people for self-government was never so triumphantly illustrated. Never, perhaps, was there a community formed of more unpropitious elements; yet from all this seeming chaos grew a harmony beyond what the most sanguine apostle of Progress could have expected. Indeed, there is nothing more remarkable connected with the capital of El Dorado, than the centre point it has become.

The story of Cadmus, who sowed dragons’ teeth, and harvested armed men, who became the builders of cities; the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel; and the beautiful allegory of the lion lying down with the lamb; are all types of San Francisco. The first, of its sudden rise; the second, of the varieties of the genus Man it has congregated; and the third, of the extremes of those varieties, which range from the Polynesian savage to the most civilised individuals that Europe can produce. It is a coincidence well worthy of note, that, besides the intense attraction possessed from its gold, Upper or New California is of all other places the best adapted, from its geographical position, to become a rendezvous for all nations of the earth, and that the Bay of San Francisco is one of the best and most convenient for shipping throughout the western margin of the American continent. It is precisely the locality required to make a constant communication across the Pacific Ocean with the coasts of China, Japan, and the Eastern Archipelago commercially practicable. Its situation is that which would have been selected from choice for a concentration of delegates from the uttermost ends of the earth. If the Chinese, the Malay, the Ladrone, or the Sandwich Islander had wished to meet his Saxon or Celtic brother on a matter of mutual business, he would—deciding geographically—have selected California as the spot of assembly. The attractive powers of gold could not, therefore, have struck forth over the world from a better point than in and around San Francisco, both for the interests of commerce and for those of human intercourse.

The practical question respecting the Golden City remains yet to be touched. Does it offer wholesome inducements for emigration? On this subject we can do no more than quote the opinions of the intelligent and enterprising gentleman, to whose private letter we have already referred:—“This, I should 317say, is the best country in the world for an active, enterprising, steady young man, provided he can keep his health, as the climate, without due precaution, is not a healthy one. In the summer season, the weather is pleasantly warm from morning till noon, then it is windy till evening, and dusty, and then becomes so cold as to require an over-coat. This weather lasts to October, when the wind gets round to the south-west. It is dry, warm, and pleasant now (April). This and the rainy season are the pleasantest and warmest here. Thousands, on arriving, fall victims to the prevailing disease of dysentery. On the latter account, therefore, I should not advise, or be the indirect means of inducing, any one to make the adventure here, because it is impossible to foresee or calculate whether or not he can stand the climate and inconveniences of this country; and, if so, he is sure to be exposed to a miserable and too often neglected sickness, and ending in a miserable death. I have not been ill myself so far, as my general health has been extremely good, and I never looked so well as now. The climate seems to operate injuriously on bilious habits; but to those who can stand it, it is decidedly pleasanter than England. Fires are never necessary. Out of doors, at night, a great-coat is required, but in the house it is always warm. The whole and only question, with a man making up his mind to locate in California, should be in regard to his health. Business of all descriptions is better here than in any other part of the world, and he who perseveres is sure to succeed.

“There are various opinions afloat, in regard to the fertility of the soil, some holding that there are productive valleys in the interior which would supply sufficient sustenance for home consumption: others assert the reverse. Certain it is, however, that in many parts in the interior, the climate is delightful, but owing to the long continued dry season, I have doubts as to her ever raising a sufficient supply of vegetable necessaries of life: our market now is supplied from the Sandwich Islands and Oregon.

“As to gold mining, it is altogether a lottery; one man may make a large amount daily, another will but just live. There is an inexhaustible quantity of gold, however, but with many it is inconceivably hard to get, as the operations are so many, and health so very precarious, that it is a mere chance matter if you succeed in getting a large sum speedily. It seems a question, whether it would not be advisable for the American Government to work the mines ultimately:

“California must ‘go-a-head:’ the east will pour through the country her immense commerce into the States, and the mines will last for ages. Finally, I would now say to my friends, that, if you are inclined to come to this country, upon this my report of it, you must, to succeed, attend to my warnings as to drinking and gambling, and to my precautions against climate.”

II.—A SUBALTERN’S DAY.

However interesting it might prove to the noble relatives of Ensign Spoonbill to learn his progress, step by step, we must—for reasons of our own—pass over the first few weeks of his new career with only a brief mention of the leading facts.

His brother officers had instructed him in the art of tying on his sash, wearing his forage cap on one side, the secret of distinguishing his right hand from his left, and the mysteries of marching and counter-marching. The art of holding up his head and throwing out his chest, had been carefully imparted by the drill-serjeant of his company, and he had, accordingly, been pronounced “fit for duty.”

What this was may best be shown, by giving an outline of “a subaltern’s day,” as he and the majority of his military friends were in the habit of passing it. It may serve to explain how it happens that British officers are so far in advance of their continental brethren in arms in the science of their profession, and by what process they have arrived at that intellectual superiority, which renders it a matter of regret that more serious interests than the mere discipline and well-being of only a hundred and twenty thousand men have not been confided to their charge.

The scene opens in a square room of tolerable size which, if simply adorned with “barrack furniture,” (to wit, a deal table, two windsor-chairs, a coal scuttle, and a set of fire-irons,) would give an idea of a British subaltern’s “interior,” of rather more Spartanlike simplicity than is altogether true. But to these were added certain elegant “extras,” obtained not out of the surplus of five and three-pence a day—after mess and band subscriptions, cost of uniform, servant’s wages, &c., had been deducted—but on credit, which it was easier to get than to avoid incurring expense. A noble youth, like Ensign Spoonbill, had only to give the word of command to be obeyed by Messrs Rosewood and Mildew, with the alacrity shown by the slaves of the lamp, and in an incredibly short space of time, the bare walls and floor of his apartment were covered with the gayest articles their establishment afforded. They included those indispensable adjuncts to a young officer’s toilette, a full length cheval, and a particularly lofty pier-glass. A green-baize screen converted the apartment into as many separate rooms as its occupant desired, cutting it up, perhaps, a little here and there, but adding, on the whole, a great deal to its comfort and privacy. What was out of the line of Messrs Rosewood and Mildew—and that, as Othello says, was “not much”—the taste of Ensign Spoonbill himself supplied. To his high artistic taste were due the presence of a couple of dozen gilt-framed and highly-coloured prints, representing 318the reigning favorites of the ballet, the winners of the Derby and Leger, and the costumes of the “dressiest,” and consequently the most distinguished corps in the service; the nice arrangement of cherry-stick tubes, amber mouth-pieces, meerschaum bowls, and embroidered bags of Latakia tobacco; pleasing devices of the well-crossed foils, riding whips, and single sticks evenly balanced by fencing masks and boxing gloves; and, on the chimneypiece, the brilliant array of nick-nacks, from the glittering shop of Messrs Moses, Lazarus and Son, who called themselves “jewellers and dealers in curiosities,” and who dealt in a few trifles which were not alluded to above their door-posts.

The maxim of “Early to bed” was not known in the Hundredth; but the exigencies of the service required that Ensign Spoonbill should rise with the reveillée. He complained of it in more forcible language than Dr. Watts’ celebrated sluggard; but discipline is inexorable, and he was not permitted to “slumber again.” This early rising is a real military hardship. We once heard a lady of fashion counselling her friend never to marry a Guardsman. “You have no idea, love, what you’ll have to go through; every morning of his life—in the season—he has to be out with the horrid regiment at half-past six o’clock!”

The Hon. Ensign Spoonbill then rose with the lark, though much against his will, his connection with that fowl having by preference a midnight tendency. Erect at last, but with a strong taste of cigars in his mouth, and a slight touch of whiskey-headache, the Ensign arrayed himself in his blue frock coat and Oxford grey trowsers; wound himself into his sash; adjusted his sword and cap; and, with a faltering step, made the best of his way into the barrack-square, where the squads were forming, which, with his eyes only half-open, he was called upon to inspect, prior to their being re-inspected by both lieutenant and captain. He then drew his sword, and “falling in” in the rear of his company, occupied that distinguished position till the regiment was formed and set in motion.

His duties on the parade-ground were—as a supernumerary—of a very arduous nature, and consisted chiefly in getting in the way of his captain as he continually “changed his flank,” in making the men “lock up,” and in avoiding the personal observation of the adjutant as much as possible; storing his mind, all the time, with a few of the epithets, more vigorous than courtly, which the commanding officer habitually made use of to quicken the movements of the battalion. He enjoyed this recreation for about a couple of hours, sometimes utterly bewildered by a “change of front,” which developed him in the most inopportune manner; sometimes inextricably entangled in the formation of “a hollow square,” when he became lost altogether; sometimes confounding himself with “the points,” and being confounded by the senior-major for his awkwardness; and sometimes following a “charge” at such a pace as to take away his voice for every purpose of utility, supposing he had desired to exercise it in the way of admonitory adjuration to the rear-rank. In this manner he learnt the noble science of strategy, and by this means acquired so much proficiency that, had he been suddenly called upon to manœuvre the battalion, it is possible he might have gone on for five minutes without “clubbing” it.

The regiment was then marched home; and Ensign Spoonbill re-entered the garrison with all the honours of war, impressed with the conviction that he had already seen an immense deal of service; enough, certainly, to justify the ample breakfast which two or three other famished subs—his particular friends—assisted him in discussing, the more substantial part of which, involved a private account with the messman, who had a good many more of the younger officers of the regiment on his books. At these morning feasts—with the exception, perhaps, of a few remarks on drill as “a cussed bore”—no allusion was made to the military exercises of the morning, or to the prospective duties of the day. The conversation turned, on the contrary, on lighter and more agreeable topics;—the relative merits of bull and Scotch terriers; who made the best boots; whether “that gaerl at the pastrycook’s” was “as fine a woman” as “the barmaid of the Rose and Crown;” if Hudson’s cigars didn’t beat Pontet’s all to nothing; who married the sixth daughter of Jones of the Highlanders; interspersed with a few bets, a few oaths, and a few statements not strikingly remarkable for their veracity, the last having reference, principally, to the exploits for which Captain Smith made himself famous, to the detriment of Miss Bailey.

Breakfast over, and cigars lighted, Ensign Spoonbill and his friends, attired in shooting jackets of every pattern, and wearing felt hats of every colour and form, made their appearance in front of the officers’ wing of the barracks; some semi-recumbent on the doorsteps, others lounging with their hands in their coat pockets, others gracefully balancing themselves on the iron railings,—all smoking and talking on subjects of the most edifying kind. These pleasant occupations were, however, interrupted by the approach of an “orderly,” who, from a certain clasped book which he carried, read out the unwelcome intelligence that, at twelve o’clock that day, a regimental court-martial, under the presidency of Captain Huff, would assemble in the officers’ mess-room “for the trial of all such prisoners as might be brought before it,” and that two lieutenants and two ensigns—of whom the Hon. Mr. Spoonbill was one—were to constitute the members. This was a most distressing and unexpected blow, for it had previously been arranged that a badger should be drawn 319by Lieutenant Wadding’s bull bitch Juno, at which interesting ceremony all the junior members of the court were to have “assisted.” It was the more provoking, because the proprietor of the animal to be baited,—a gentleman in a fustian suit, brown leggings, high-lows, a white hat with a black crape round it, and a very red nose, indicative of a most decided love for “cordials and compounds”—had just “stepped up” to say that “the bedger must be dror’d that mornin’,” as he was under a particular engagement to repeat the amusement in the evening for some gents at a distant town and “couldn’t no how, not for no money, forfeit his sacred word.” The majority of the young gentlemen present understood perfectly what this corollary meant, but, with Ensign Spoonbill amongst them, were by no means in a hurry to “fork out” for so immoral a purpose as that of inducing a fellow-man to break a solemn pledge. That gallant officer, however, laboured under so acute a feeling of disappointment, that, regardless of the insult offered to the worthy man’s conscience, he at once volunteered to give him “a couple of sovs” if he would just “throw those snobs over,” and defer his departure till the following day; and it was settled that the badger should be “drawn” as soon as the patrons of Joe Baggs could get away from the court-martial,—for which in no very equable frame of mind they now got ready,—retiring to their several barrack-rooms, divesting themselves of their sporting costume and once more assuming military attire.

At the appointed hour, the court assembled. Captain Huff prepared for his judicial labours by calling for a glass of his favourite “swizzle,” which he dispatched at one draught, and then, having sworn in the members, and being sworn himself, the business began by the appointment of Lieutenant Hackett as secretary. There were two prisoners to be tried: one had “sold his necessaries” in order to get drunk; the second had made use of “mutinous language” when drunk; both of them high military crimes, to be severely visited by those who had no temptation to dispose of their wardrobes, and could not understand why a soldier’s beer money was not sufficient for his daily potations; but who omitted the consideration that they themselves, when in want of cash, occasionally sent a pair of epaulettes to “my uncle,” and had a champagne supper out of the proceeds, at which neither sobriety nor decorous language were rigidly observed.

The case against him who had sold his necessaries—to wit, “a new pair of boots, a shirt, and a pair of stockings,” for which a Jew in the town had given him two shillings—was sufficiently clear. The captain and the pay-serjeant of the man’s company swore to the articles, and the Jew who bought them (an acquaintance of Lieutenant Hackett, to whom he nodded with pleasing familiarity), stimulated by the fear of a civil prosecution, gave them up, and appeared as evidence against the prisoner. He was found “guilty,” and sentenced to three months’ solitary confinement, and “to be put under stoppages,” according to the prescribed formulæ.

But the trial of the man accused of drunkenness and mutinous language was not so readily disposed of; though the delay occasioned by his calling witnesses to character served only to add to the irritation of his virtuous and impartial judges. He was a fine-looking fellow, six feet high, and had as soldier-like a bearing as any man in the Grenadier company, to which he belonged. The specific acts which constituted his crime consisted in having refused to leave the canteen when somewhat vexatiously urged to do so by the orderly serjeant, who forthwith sent for a file of the guard to compel him; thus urging him, when in an excited state, to an act of insubordination, the gist of which was a threat to knock the serjeant down, a show of resistance, and certain maledictions on the head of that functionary. In this, as in the former instance, there could be no doubt that the breach of discipline complained of had been committed, though several circumstances were pleaded in extenuation of the offence. The man’s previous character, too, was very good; he was ordinarily a steady, well-conducted soldier, never shirked his hour of duty, was not given to drink, and, therefore, as the principal witness in his favour said, “the more aisily overcome when he tuck a dhrop, but as harrumless as a lamb, unless put upon.”

These things averred and shown, the Court was cleared, and the members proceeded to deliberate. It was a question only of the nature and extent of the punishment to be awarded. The general instructions, no less than the favourable condition of the case, suggested leniency. But Captain Huff was a severe disciplinarian of the old school, an advocate for red-handed practice—the drum head and the halberds—and his opinion, if it might be called one, had only too much weight with the other members of the Court, all of whom were prejudiced against the prisoner, whom they internally—if not openly—condemned for interfering with their day’s amusements. “Corporal punishment, of course,” said Captain Huff, angrily; and his words were echoed by the Court, though the majority of them little knew the fearful import of the sentence, or they might have paused before they delivered over a fine resolute young man, whose chief crime was an ebullition of temper, to the castigation of the lash, which destroys the soldier’s self-respect; degrades him in the eyes of his fellows; mutilates his body, and leaves an indelible scar upon his mind. But the fiat went forth, and was recorded in “hundreds” against the unfortunate fellow; and Captain Huff having managed to sign the proceedings, carried them off to the commanding officer’s quarters, 320to be “approved and confirmed;” a ratification which the Colonel was not slow to give; for he was one of that class who are in the habit of reconciling themselves to an act of cruelty, by always asserting in their defence that “an example is necessary.” He forgot, in doing so, that this was not the way to preserve for the “Hundredth” the name of a crack corps, and that the best example for those in authority is Mercy.

With minds buoyant and refreshed by the discharge of the judicial functions, for which they were in every respect so admirably qualified, Ensign Spoonbill and his companions, giving themselves leave of absence from the afternoon parade, and having resumed their favourite “mufty,” repaired to an obscure den in a stable-yard at the back of the Blue Boar—a low public house in the filthiest quarter of the town—which Mr. Joseph Baggs made his head-quarters, and there, for a couple of hours, solaced themselves with the agreeable exhibition of the contest between the badger and the dog Juno, which terminated by the latter being bitten through both her fore-paws, and nearly losing one of her eyes; though, as Lieutenant Wadding exultingly observed, “she was a deuced deal too game to give over for such trifles as those.” The unhappy badger, that only fought in self-defence, was accordingly “dror’d,” as Mr. Baggs reluctantly admitted, adding, however, that she was “nuffin much the wuss,” which was more than could be said of the officers of the “Hundredth” who had enjoyed the spectacle.

This amusement ended, which had so far a military character that it familiarised the spectator with violence and bloodshed, though in an unworthy and contemptible degree, badgers and dogs, not men, being their subject, the young gentlemen adjourned to the High Street, to loiter away half an hour at the shop of Messrs. Moses, Lazarus and Son, whose religious observances and daily occupations were made their jest, while they ran in debt to the people from whom they afterwards expected consideration and forbearance. But not wholly did they kill their time there. The pretty pastry-cook, an innocent, retiring girl, but compelled to serve in the shop, came in for her share of their half-admiring and all-insolent persecutions, and when their slang and sentiment were alike exhausted, they dawdled back again to barracks, to dress for the fifth time for mess.

The events of the day, that is, the events on which their thoughts had been centered, again furnished the theme of the general conversation. Enough wine was drunk, as Captain Huff said, with the wit peculiar to him, “to restore the equilibrium;” the most abstinent person being Captain Cushion, who that evening gave convincing proof of the advantages of abstinence, by engaging Ensign Spoonbill in a match at billiards, the result of which was, that Lord Pelican’s son found himself, at midnight, minus a full half of the allowance for which his noble father had given him liberty to draw. But that he had fairly lost the money there could be no doubt, for the officer on the main-guard, who had preferred watching the game to going his rounds, declared to the party, when they afterwards adjourned to take a glass of grog with him before he turned in, that “except Jonathan, he had never seen any man make so good a bridge as his friend Spoonbill,” and this fact Captain Cushion himself confirmed, adding, that he thought, perhaps, he could afford next time to give points. With the reputation of making a good bridge—a Pons asinorum over which his money had travelled—Ensign Spoonbill was fain to be content, and in this satisfactory manner he closed one Subaltern’s day, there being many like it in reserve.

The indefatigable, patient, invincible, inquisitive, sometimes tedious, but almost always amusing German traveller, Herr Kohl, has recently been pursuing his earnest investigations in Belgium. His book on the Netherlands^[2] has just been issued, and we shall translate, with abridgments, one of its most instructive and agreeable chapters;—that relating to Lace-making.

The practical acquaintance of our female readers with that elegant ornament, lace, is chiefly confined to wearing it, and their researches into its quality and price. A few minutes’ attention to Mr. Kohl will enlighten them on other subjects connected with, what is to them a most interesting topic, for lace is associated with recollections of mediæval history, and with the palmy days of the Flemish school of painting. More than one of the celebrated masters of that school have selected, from among his laborious countrywomen, the lace-makers (or, as they are called in Flanders, Speldewerksters), pleasing subjects for the exercise of his pencil. The plump, fair-haired Flemish girl, bending earnestly over her lace-work, whilst her fingers nimbly ply the intricately winding bobbins, figure in many of those highly esteemed representations of homely life and manners, which have found their way from the Netherlands into all the principal picture-galleries of Europe.

Our German friend makes it his practice, whether he is treating of the geology of the earth, or of the manufacture of Swedish bodkins, to begin at the very beginning. He therefore commences the history of lace-making, which, he says, is, like embroidery, an art of very ancient origin, lost, like a multitude of other origins, “in the darkness of by-gone ages.” It may, with truth, be said that it is the national occupation of the women of the Low Countries, and one to 321which they have steadily adhered from very remote times. During the long civil and foreign wars waged by the people of the Netherlands, while subject to Spanish dominion, other branches of Belgic industry either dwindled to decay, or were transplanted to foreign countries; but lace-making remained faithful to the land which had fostered and brought it to perfection, though it received tempting offers from abroad, and had to struggle with many difficulties at home. This Mr. Kohl explains by the fact, that lace-making is a branch of industry chiefly confined to female hands, and, as women are less disposed to travel than men, all arts and handicrafts exclusively pursued by women, have a local and enduring character.

Notwithstanding the overwhelming supply of imitations which modern ingenuity has created, real Brussels lace has maintained its value, like the precious metals and the precious stones. In the patterns of the best bone lace, the changeful influence of fashion is less marked than in most other branches of industry; indeed, she has adhered with wonderful pertinacity to the quaint old patterns of former times. These are copied and reproduced with that scrupulous uniformity which characterises the figures in the Persian and Indian shawls. Frequent experiments have been tried to improve these old patterns, by the introduction of slight and tasteful modifications, but these innovations have not succeeded, and a very skilful and experienced lace-worker assured Mr. Kohl, that the antiquated designs, with all their formality, are preferred to those in which the most elegant changes have been effected.

Each of the lace-making towns of Belgium excels in the production of one particular description of lace: in other words, each has what is technically called its own point. The French word point, in the ordinary language of needlework, signifies simply stitch; but in the terminology of lace-making, the word is sometimes used to designate the pattern of the lace, and sometimes the ground of the lace itself. Hence the terms point de Bruxelles, point de Malines, point de Valenciennes, &c. In England we distinguish by the name of Point, a peculiarly rich and curiously wrought lace formerly very fashionable, but now scarcely ever worn except in Court costume. In this sort of lace the pattern is, we believe, worked with the needle, after the ground has been made with the bobbins. In each town there prevail certain modes of working, and certain patterns which have been transmitted from mother to daughter successively, for several generations. Many of the lace-workers live and die in the same houses in which they were born; and most of them understand and practise only the stitches which their mothers and grandmothers worked before them. The consequence has been, that certain points have become unchangeably fixed in particular towns or districts. Fashion has assigned to each its particular place and purpose; for example:—the point de Malines (Mechlin lace) is used chiefly for trimming nightdresses, pillow-cases, coverlets, &c.; the point de Valenciennes (Valenciennes lace) is employed for ordinary wear or negligé; but the more rich and costly point de Bruxelles (Brussels lace) is reserved for bridal and ball-dresses, and for the robes of queens and courtly ladies.

As the different sorts of lace, from the narrowest and plainest to the broadest and richest, are innumerable; so the division of labour among the lace-workers is infinite. In the towns of Belgium there are as many different kinds of lace-workers, as there are varieties of spiders in Nature. It is not, therefore, surprising that in the several departments of this branch of industry there are as many technical terms and phrases as would make up a small dictionary. In their origin, these expressions were all Flemish; but French being the language now spoken in Belgium, they have been translated into French, and the designations applied to some of the principal classifications of the workwomen. Those who make only the ground, are called Drocheleuses. The design or pattern, which adorns this ground, is distinguished by the general term “the Flowers;” though it would be difficult to guess what flowers are intended to be portrayed by the fantastic arabesque of these lace-patterns. In Brussels the ornaments or flowers are made separately, and afterwards worked into the lace-ground: in other places the ground and the patterns are worked conjointly. The Platteuses are those who work the flowers separately; and the Faiseuses de point à l’aiguille work the figures and the ground together. The Striquese is the worker who attaches the flowers to the ground. The Faneuse works her figures by piercing holes or cutting out pieces of the ground.

The spinning of the fine thread used for lace-making in the Netherlands, is an operation demanding so high a degree of minute care and vigilant attention, that it is impossible it can ever be taken from human hands by machinery. None but Belgian fingers are skilled in this art. The very finest sort of this thread is made in Brussels, in damp underground cellars; for it is so extremely delicate, that it is liable to break by contact with the dry air above ground; and it is obtained in good condition only, when made and kept in a humid subterraneous atmosphere. There are numbers of old Belgian thread-makers who, like spiders, have passed the best part of their lives spinning in cellars. This sort of occupation naturally has an injurious effect on the health, and therefore, to induce people to follow it, they are highly paid.

To form an accurate idea of this operation, it is necessary to see a Brabant Threadspinner at her work. She carefully examines 322every thread, watching it closely as she draws it off the distaff; and that she may see it the more distinctly, a piece of dark blue paper is used as a background for the flax. Whenever the spinner notices the least unevenness, she stops the evolution of her wheel, breaks off the faulty piece of flax, and then resumes her spinning. This fine flax being as costly as gold, the pieces thus broken off are carefully laid aside to be used in other ways. All this could never be done by machinery. It is different in the spinning of cotton, silk, or wool, in which the original threads are almost all of uniform thickness. The invention of the English Flax-spinning Machine, therefore, can never supersede the work of the Belgian Fine Thread Spinners, any more than the Bobbin-Net Machine can rival the fingers of the Brussels lace-makers, or render their delicate work superfluous.

The prices current of the Brabant spinners usually include a list of various sorts of thread suited to lace-making, varying from 60 francs to 1800 francs per pound. Instances have occurred, in which as much as 10,000 francs have been paid for a pound of this fine yarn. So high a price has never been attained by the best spun silk; though a pound of silk, in its raw condition, is incomparably more valuable than a pound of flax. In like manner, a pound of iron may, by dint of human labour and ingenuity, be rendered more valuable than a pound of gold.

Lace-making, in regard to the health of the operatives, has one great advantage. It is a business which is carried on without the necessity of assembling great numbers of workpeople in one place, or of taking women from their homes, and thereby breaking the bonds of family union. It is, moreover, an occupation which affords those employed in it a great degree of freedom. The spinning-wheel and lace-pillows are easily carried from place to place, and the work may be done with equal convenience in the house, in the garden, or at the street-door. In every Belgian town in which lace-making is the staple business, the eye of the traveller is continually greeted with pictures of happy industry, attended by all its train of concomitant virtues. The costliness of the material employed in the work, viz., the fine flax thread, fosters the observance of order and economy, which, as well as habits of cleanliness, are firmly engrafted among the people. Much manual dexterity, quickness of eye, and judgment, are demanded in lace-making; and the work is a stimulater of ingenuity and taste; so that, unlike other occupations merely manual, it tends to rouse rather than to dull the mind. It is, moreover, unaccompanied by any unpleasant and harassing noise; for the humming of the spinning-wheel, and the regular tapping of the little bobbins, are sounds not in themselves disagreeable, or sufficiently loud to disturb conversation, or to interrupt the social song.

In Belgium, female industry presents itself under aspects alike interesting to the painter, the poet, and the philanthropist. Here and there may be seen a happy-looking girl, seated at an open window, turning her spinning-wheel or working at her lace-pillow, whilst at intervals she indulges in the relaxation of a curious gaze at the passers-by in the street. Another young Speldewerkster, more sentimentally disposed, will retire into the garden, seating herself in an umbrageous arbour, or under a spreading tree, her eyes intent on her work, but her thoughts apparently divided between it and some object nearer to her heart. At a doorway sits a young mother, surrounded by two or three children playing round the little table or wooden settle on which her lace-pillow rests. Whilst the mother’s busy fingers are thus profitably employed, her eyes keep watch over the movements of her little ones, and she can at the same time spare an attentive thought for some one of her humble household duties.

Dressmakers, milliners, and other females employed in the various occupations which minister to the exigencies of fashion, are confined to close rooms, surrounded by masses of silk, muslin, &c. They are debarred the healthful practice of working in the open air, and can scarcely venture even to sit at an open window, because a drop of rain or a puff of wind may be fatal to their work and its materials. The lace-maker, on the contrary, whose work requires only her thread and her fingers, is not disturbed by a refreshing breeze or a light shower; and even when the weather is not particularly fine, she prefers sitting at her street-door or in her garden, where she enjoys a brighter light than within doors.

In most of the principal towns of the Netherlands there is one particular locality which is the focus of lace-making industry; and there, in fine weather, the streets are animated by the presence of the busy workwomen. In each of these districts there is usually one wide open street which the Speldewerksters prefer to all others, and in which they assemble, and form themselves into the most picturesque groups imaginable. It is curious to observe them, pouring out of narrow lanes and alleys, carrying with them their chairs and lace-pillows, to take their places in the wide open street, where they can enjoy more of bright light and fresh air than in their own places of abode.

“I could not help contrasting,” says Kohl, “the pleasing aspect of these streets with the close and noisy workrooms in woollen and cotton manufactories. There the workpeople are all separated and classified according to age and sex, and marshalled like soldiers. There domestic and family ties are rudely broken. There chance or exigency separates the young factory girl from her favourite companions, and dooms her to association with strangers. There social conversation and the merry song are drowned in that stunning din 323of machinery, which in the end paralyses even the power of thought.”

Our German friend is a little hard upon factory life. Though not so picturesque, it does not, if candidly viewed, offer so very unfavourable a contrast to that passed by the Belgian Lace Workers.

Quiet enough, in general, is the quaint old town of Lamborough. Why all this bustle to-day? Along the hedge-bound roads which lead to it, carts, chaises, vehicles of every description are jogging along filled with countrymen; and here and there the scarlet cloak or straw bonnet of some female occupying a chair, placed somewhat unsteadily behind them, contrasts gaily with the dark coats, or grey smock-frocks of the front row; from every cottage of the suburb, some individuals join the stream, which rolls on increasing through the streets till it reaches the castle. The ancient moat teems with idlers, and the hill opposite, usually the quiet domain of a score or two of peaceful sheep, partakes of the surrounding agitation.

The voice of the multitude which surrounds the court-house, sounds like the murmur of the sea, till suddenly it is raised to a sort of shout. John West, the terror of the surrounding country, the sheep-stealer and burglar, had been found guilty.

“What is the sentence?” is asked by a hundred voices.

The answer is “Transportation for Life.”

But there was one standing aloof on the hill, whose inquiring eye wandered over the crowd with indescribable anguish, whose pallid cheek grew more and more ghastly at every denunciation of the culprit, and who, when at last the sentence was pronounced, fell insensible upon the greensward. It was the burglar’s son.

When the boy recovered from his swoon, it was late in the afternoon; he was alone; the faint tinkling of the sheep-bell had again replaced the sound of the human chorus of expectation, and dread, and jesting; all was peaceful, he could not understand why he lay there, feeling so weak and sick. He raised himself tremulously and looked around, the turf was cut and spoilt by the trampling of many feet. All his life of the last few months floated before his memory, his residence in his father’s hovel with ruffianly comrades, the desperate schemes he heard as he pretended to sleep on his lowly bed, their expeditions at night, masked and armed, their hasty returns, the news of his father’s capture, his own removal to the house of some female in the town, the court, the trial, the condemnation.

The father had been a harsh and brutal parent, but he had not positively ill-used his boy. Of the Great and Merciful Father of the fatherless the child knew nothing. He deemed himself alone in the world. Yet grief was not his pervading feeling, nor the shame of being known as the son of a transport. It was revenge which burned within him. He thought of the crowd which had come to feast upon his father’s agony; he longed to tear them to pieces, and he plucked savagely a handful of the grass on which he leant. Oh, that he were a man! that he could punish them all—all,—the spectators first, the constables, the judge, the jury, the witnesses,—one of them especially, a clergyman named Leyton, who had given his evidence more positively, more clearly, than all the others. Oh, that he could do that man some injury,—but for him his father would not have been identified and convicted.

Suddenly a thought occurred to him,—his eyes sparkled with fierce delight. “I know where he lives,” he said to himself; “he has the farm and parsonage of Millwood. I will go there at once,—it is almost dark already. I will do as I have heard father say he once did to the Squire. I will set his barns and his house on fire. Yes, yes, he shall burn for it,—he shall get no more fathers transported.”

To procure a box of matches was an easy task, and that was all the preparation the boy made.

The autumn was far advanced. A cold wind was beginning to moan amongst the almost leafless trees, and George West’s teeth chattered, and his ill-clad limbs grew numb as he walked along the fields leading to Millwood. “Lucky it’s a dark night; this fine wind will fan the flame nicely,” he repeated to himself.

The clock was striking nine, but all was quiet as midnight; not a soul stirring, not a light in the parsonage windows that he could see. He dared not open the gate, lest the click of the latch should betray him, so he softly climbed over; but scarcely had he dropped on the other side of the wall before the loud barking of a dog startled him. He cowered down behind the hay-rick, scarcely daring to breathe, expecting each instant that the dog would spring upon him. It was some time before the boy dared to stir, and as his courage cooled, his thirst for revenge somewhat subsided also, till he almost determined to return to Lamborough; but he was too tired, too cold, too hungry,—besides, the woman would beat him for staying out so late. What could he do? where should he go? and as the sense of his lonely and forlorn position returned, so did also the affectionate remembrance of his father, his hatred of his accusers, his desire to satisfy his vengeance; and, once more, courageous through anger, he rose, took the box from his pocket and boldly drew one of them across the sand-paper. It flamed; he stuck it hastily in the stack against which he rested,—it only flickered a little, and went out. In great trepidation, young West once more grasped the whole of the remaining matches in his hand and ignited them but at the same instant the dog barked. 324He hears the gate open, a step is close to him, the matches are extinguished, the lad makes a desperate effort to escape,—but a strong hand was laid on his shoulder, and a deep calm voice inquired, “What can have urged you to such a crime?” Then calling loudly, the gentleman, without relinquishing his hold, soon obtained the help of some farming men, who commenced a search with their lanterns all about the farm. Of course they found no accomplices, nothing at all but the handful of half-consumed matches the lad had dropped, and he all that time stood trembling, and occasionally struggling, beneath the firm but not rough grasp of the master who held him.

At last the men were told to return to the house, and thither, by a different path, was George led till they entered a small, poorly-furnished room. The walls were covered with books, as the bright flame of the fire revealed to the anxious gaze of the little culprit. The clergyman lit a lamp, and surveyed his prisoner attentively. The lad’s eyes were fixed on the ground, whilst Mr. Leyton’s wandered from his pale, pinched features to his scanty, ragged attire, through the tatters of which he could discern the thin limbs quivering from cold or fear; and when at last impelled by curiosity at the long silence, George looked up, there was something so sadly compassionate in the stranger’s gentle look, that the boy could scarcely believe that he was really the man whose evidence had mainly contributed to transport his father. At the trial he had been unable to see his face, and nothing so kind had ever gazed upon him. His proud bad feelings were already melting.

“You look half-starved,” said Mr. Leyton, “draw nearer to the fire, you can sit down on that stool whilst I question you; and mind you answer me the truth. I am not a magistrate, but of course can easily hand you over to justice if you will not allow me to benefit you in my own way.”

George still stood twisting his ragged cap in his trembling fingers, and with so much emotion depicted on his face, that the good clergyman resumed, in still more soothing accents; “I have no wish to do you anything but good, my poor boy; look up at me, and see if you cannot trust me: you need not be thus frightened. I only desire to hear the tale of misery your appearance indicates, to relieve it if I can.”

Here the young culprit’s heart smote him. Was this the man whose house he had tried to burn? On whom he had wished to bring ruin and perhaps death? Was it a snare spread for him to lead to confession? But when he looked on that grave compassionate countenance, he felt that it was not.

“Come, my lad, tell me all.”

George had for years heard little but oaths, and curses, and ribald jests, or the thief’s jargon of his father’s associates, and had been constantly cuffed and punished; but the better part of his nature was not extinguished; and at those words from the mouth of his enemy, he dropped on his knees, and clasping his hands, tried to speak; but could only sob. He had not wept before during that day of anguish; and now his tears gushed forth so freely, his grief was so passionate as he half knelt, half rested on the floor, that the good questioner saw that sorrow must have its course ere calm could be restored.

The young penitent still wept, when a knock was heard at the door, and a lady entered. It was the clergyman’s wife, he kissed her as she asked how he had succeeded with the wicked man in the jail?

“He told me” replied Mr. Leyton, “that he had a son whose fate tormented him more than his punishment. Indeed his mind was so distracted respecting the youth, that he was scarcely able to understand my exhortations. He entreated me with agonising energy to save his son from such a life as he had led, and gave me the address of a woman in whose house he lodged. I was, however, unable to find the boy in spite of many earnest inquiries.”

“Did you hear his name?” asked the wife.

“George West,” was the reply.

At the mention of his name, the boy ceased to sob. Breathlessly he heard the account of his father’s last request, of the benevolent clergyman’s wish to fulfil it. He started up, ran towards the door, and endeavoured to open it; Mr. Leyton calmly restrained him, “You must not escape,” he said.

“I cannot stop here. I cannot bear to look at you. Let me go!” The lad said this wildly, and shook himself away.

“Why, I intend you nothing but kindness.”

A new flood of tears gushed forth; and George West said between his sobs,

“Whilst you were searching for me to help me, I was trying to burn you in your house. I cannot bear it.” He sunk on his knees, and covered his face with both hands.

There was a long silence, for Mr. and Mrs. Leyton were as much moved as the boy, who was bowed down with shame and penitence, to which hitherto he had been a stranger.

At last the clergyman asked, “What could have induced you to commit such a crime?”

Rising suddenly in the excitement of remorse, gratitude, and many feelings new to him, he hesitated for a moment, and then told his story; he related his trials, his sins, his sorrows, his supposed wrongs, his burning anger at the terrible fate of his only parent, and his rage at the exultation of the crowd: his desolation on recovering from his swoon, his thirst for vengeance, the attempt to satisfy it. He spoke with untaught, child-like simplicity, without attempting to suppress the emotions which successively overcame him.

When he ceased, the lady hastened to the 325crouching boy, and soothed him with gentle words. The very tones of her voice were new to him. They pierced his heart more acutely than the fiercest of the upbraidings and denunciations of his old companions. He looked on his merciful benefactors with bewildered tenderness. He kissed Mrs. Leyton’s hand then gently laid on his shoulder. He gazed about like one in a dream who dreaded to wake. He became faint and staggered. He was laid gently on a sofa, and Mr. and Mrs. Leyton left him.

Food was shortly administered to him, and after a time, when his senses had become sufficiently collected, Mr. Leyton returned to the study, and explained holy and beautiful things, which were new to the neglected boy: of the great yet loving Father; of Him who loved the poor, forlorn wretch, equally with the richest, and noblest, and happiest; of the force and efficacy of the sweet beatitude, “Blessed are the Merciful for they shall obtain Mercy.”

I heard this story from Mr. Leyton, during a visit to him in May. George West was then head ploughman to a neighbouring farmer, one of the cleanest, best behaved, and most respected labourers in the parish.

There is more animal food consumed in England than in any other country in the world. We do not merely say more, in proportion to the size of England, and the numbers of its inhabitants—for then we should only utter what every-body must know—but we mean actually more, without any such proportional considerations. Considering, then, this vast amount of animal food, in all its manifold bearings, it is impossible not to be struck with a sense of what vital importance it is to the health and general well-being of the community that this food should be of a perfectly wholesome kind. That very great quantities are not only unwholesome, but of the worst and most injurious kind, we shall now proceed to show. We will set this question clearly before the eyes of the reader, by tracing the brief and eventful history of an ox, from his journey to Smithfield, till he rolls his large eye upward for the last time beneath the unskilful blows of his slaughterer.

A good-natured, healthy, honest-faced ox, is driven out of his meadow at break of day, and finds a number of other oxen collected together in the high road, amidst the shouting and whistling of drovers, the lowing of many deep voices, and the sound of many cudgels. As soon as the expected numbers have all arrived from the different stalls and fields, the journey of twenty miles to the railway commences. Some are refractory—the thrusting and digging of the goad instantly produces an uproar, and even our good-natured ox cannot help contributing his share of lowing and bellowing, in consequence of one of these poignant digs received at random while he was endeavouring to understand what was required of him. From this moment there is no peace or rest in his life. The noise and contest is nearly over after a few miles, though renewed now and then at a cross-road, when the creatures do not know which way they are to go, and some very naturally go one way, and some the other. The contest is also renewed whenever they pass a pond, or brook, as the weather is sultry; and the roads are so dusty, besides the steam from the breath and bodies of the animals, that their journey seems to be through a dense, continuous, stifling cloud. It is noon; and the sun is glaring fiercely down upon the drove. They have as yet proceeded only twelve miles of their journey, but the sleek and healthy skin of our honest-faced ox has already undergone a considerable change—and as for his countenance, it is waxing wroth. His eye has become blood-shot since they passed the last village ale-house, where he made an attempt, in 326passing, just to draw his feverish tongue along the water of the horse-trough, but was suddenly prevented by a violent blow of the hard nob-end of a drover’s stick across the tip of his nose. Besides this, the wound he has received from the goad, has laid bare the skin on his back, and the sun is beginning to act upon this, as well as the flies. By the time the twenty miles are accomplished, he is in no mood at all for the close jam in which he is packed with a number of others in one of the railway cattle-waggons. He bellows aloud his pain and indignation; in which sonorous eloquence he is joined by a bullock at his side, who has lost half one horn by a violent blow from a drover’s stick, because he had stopped to drink from a ditch at the road-side, and persisted in getting a taste. Our ox makes the acquaintance of this suffering individual, and they recount their wrongs to each other; but the idea of escape does not occur to them; they rather resign themselves to endure their destiny with stolidity, if possible. Hunger, however, and worse than this, thirst, causes sensations which are quite beyond all patient endurance; and again they uplift their great voices in anger and distress.

Our rather slow-minded ox has now arrived at the opinion that some mischief is deliberately intended him, and feels convinced that something more is needed in this world than passive submission. But what to do, he knows not. His courage is high—only he does not comprehend his position. Man, and his doings, are a dreadful puzzle to him. His one-horned friend fully coincides in all this. Meantime, they are foaming with heat, and thirst, and fever.

After a day’s torture in this way, the animals are got out of the waggon, by a thrashing process which brings them pell-mell over each other, many landing on their knees, some head foremost, and one or two falling prostrate beneath the hoofs of the rest. The journey to London then commences, the two friends having been separated in the recent confusion.

With the dreadful scenes, among the live cattle, which regularly take place in Smithfield market, our readers have already been made acquainted; it will now be our duty to display before them several equally revolting, and, though in a different way, still more alarming, scenes and doings which occur in this neighbourhood, and in other markets and their vicinities.

Look at this ox, with dripping flanks, half-covered with mud; a horrid wound across his nose; the flesh laid bare in a rent on his back, and festering from exposure to the sun and the flies; his eye-balls rolling fiercely about, and clots of foam dropping from his mouth! Would any one believe that three days ago he was a good-natured, healthy, honest-faced ox? He is waiting to be sold. But who will give a decent price for a poor beast in this unsound condition? He is waiting with a cord round his neck, by which he is fastened to a rail, and in his anguish he has drawn it so tight that he is half-strangled; but he does not care now. He can endure no more, he thinks, because he is becoming insensible. Presently, among several others brought to the same rail, he recognises his friend with the broken horn. They get side by side, and gasp deeply their mutual torments. There are no more loud lowings and bellowings; they utter nothing but gasps and groans. Besides the fractured horn, this bullock has since received a thrust from a goad in his right eye, by which the sight is not only destroyed, but an effect produced which makes it requisite to sell him at any price he will bring. This being agreed upon, he is led away to a slaughter-house near at hand. Our poor ox makes a strong effort to accompany his friend, and with his eye-balls almost starting from his head, tugs at the cord that holds him by the throat, until it breaks. He then hastens after the other, but is quickly intercepted by a couple of drovers, who assail him with such fury, that he turns about, and runs out of the market.

He is in too wretched and worn-out a condition to run fast, so he merely staggers onward amidst the blows, till suddenly a water-cart happens to pass. The sight of the shining drops of water seems to give the poor beast a momentary energy. He runs staggering at it head foremost—his eyes half-shut,—falls with his head against the after-part of the wheel as the cart passes on,—and there lies lolling out his tongue upon the moistened stones. He makes no effort to rise. The drovers form a circle round him, and rain blows all over him; but the ox still lies with his tongue out upon the cool wet stones. They then wrench his tail round till they break it, and practise other cruelties upon him; but all in vain. There he lies.

While the drovers are pausing to wipe their sanguinary and demoniac foreheads, and recover their breath, the ox slowly, and as if in a sort of delirium, raises himself on his legs, and stands looking at the drovers with forlorn vacancy. At this juncture the Market Inspector joins the crowd, and after a brief glance at the various sores and injuries, condemns the ox as diseased—therefore unfit for sale. He is accordingly led off, limping and stumbling to the horse-slaughterer’s in Sharp’s Alley, duly attended by the Inspector, to see that his order of condemnation be carried into effect. They are followed at a little distance by two fellows, whose filthy habiliments show that they have slept amidst horrors, who keep the diseased ox in view with a sort of stealthy, wolfish “eye to business.”

The dying ox, with the drover, and the Inspector, having slowly made their way through the usual market difficulties, and (to those who are not used to it) the equally revolting horrors of the outskirts, finally get into Sharp’s Alley, and enter the terrific den of the licensed horse-slaughter-house.

It is a large knacker’s yard, furnished 327with all the usual apparatus for slaughtering diseased or worn-out horses, and plentifully bestrewn with the reeking members and frightful refuse of the morning’s work. But even before the eye,—usually the first and quickest organ in action,—has time to glance round, the sense of smell is not only assailed, but taken by storm, with a most horrible, warm, moist, effluvium, so offensive, and at the same time so peculiar and potent, that it requires no small resolution in any one, not accustomed to it, to remain a minute within its precincts. Three of the corners are completely filled up with a heap of dead horses lying upon their backs, with their hoofs sticking bolt upright; while two other angles in the yard are filled with a mass of bodies and fragments, whose projecting legs and other members serve as stretchers for raw skins,—flayed from their companions, or from themselves, lying all discoloured, yet in all colours, beneath. By this means the skins are stretched out to dry. A few live animals are in the yard. There is one horse—waiting for his turn—as the ox-party come in; his knees are bent, his head is bowed towards the slushy ground, his dripping mane falling over his face, and almost reaching with its lank end to the dark muddled gore in which his fore hoofs are planted. A strange, ghastly, rattling sound, apparently from the adjoining premises, is kept up without intermission; a sort of inconceivably rapid devil’s-tattoo, by way of accompaniment to the hideous scene.

Two dead horses are being skinned; but all the other animals—of the four-footed class we mean—are bullocks, in different stages of disease, and they are seven in number. These latter have not been condemned by the Inspector, but have been brought here to undergo a last effort for the purpose of being made saleable—washed and scrubbed, so as to have the chance of finding a purchaser by torchlight at some very low price; and failing in this, to be killed before they die, or cut up as soon after they die as possible. They were all distinguished by slang terms according to the nature and stage of their diseases. The two best of these bad bullocks are designated as “choppers;” the three next, whose hides are torn in several places, are called “rough-uns;” while those who are in a drooping and reeking condition, with literally a death-sweat all over them, are playfully called “wet-uns.” To this latter class belongs our poor ox, who is now brought in, and formally introduced by the Inspector, as diseased, and condemned. The others he does not see—or, at least, does not notice—his business being with the ox, who was the last comer. Having thus performed his duty, the Inspector retires!

But what is this ceaseless rattling tattoo that is kept up in the adjoining premises? The walls vibrate with it! Machinery of some kind? Yes—it is a chopping machine; and here you behold the “choppers,” both horses and diseased bullocks, who will shortly be in a fit state for promotion, and will then be taken piece-meal next door. Ay, it is so, in sober and dreadful seriousness. Here, in this Sharp’s Alley, you behold the largest horse-slaughter-house in the city; and here, next door, you will find the largest sausage manufactory in London. The two establishments thus conveniently situated, belong to near relations—brothers, we believe, or brothers-in-law.

Now, while the best of the diseased bullocks or “choppers” are taken to the sausage machine, to be advantageously mixed with the choppings of horse-flesh (to which latter ingredient the angry redness of so many “cured” sausages, saveloys, and all the class of polonies is attributable), who shall venture to deny that, in the callousness of old habits, and the boldness derived from utter impunity and profitable success, a very considerable addition is often made to the stock of the “choppers,” from many of the “rough-uns,” and from some of the more sound parts of the miserable “wet-uns?” Verily this thing may be—“’tis apt, and of great credit,” to the City of London.

But a few words must be said of the “closing scene” of our poor condemned ox. We would, most willingly, have passed this over, leaving it to the imagination of the reader; but as no imagination would be at all likely to approach the fact, we hope we shall be rendering a service to common humanity in doing some violence to our own, and the readers’ feelings, by exposing such scenes to the gaze of day.

Owing to some press of business, the ox was driven to a neighbouring slaughter-house in the Alley. He was led to the fatal spot, sufficiently indicated, even amidst all the rest of the sanguinary floor, by its frightful condition. They placed him in the usual way; the slaughterman approached with his pole-axe, and swinging it round in a half-jocose and reckless manner, to hide his want of practice and skill, he struck the ox a blow on one side of his head, which only made him sink with a groan on his knees, and sway over on one side. In this attitude he lay groaning, while a torrent of blood gushed out of his mouth. He could not be made to rise again to receive the stroke of death or further torment. They kicked him with the utmost violence in the ribs and on the cheek with their iron-nailed shoes, but to no purpose. They then jumped upon him; he only continued to groan. They wrenched his already-broken tail till they broke it again, higher up, in two places. He strove to rise, but sank down as before. Finally they had recourse to the following torture: they closed his nostrils with wet cloths, held tightly up by both hands, so that no breath could escape, and they then poured a bucketful of dirty slaughter-house water into his mouth and down his throat, till with the madness of suffocation the wretched animal was roused to a momentary struggle 328for life, and with a violent fling of the head, which scattered all his torturers, and all their apparatus of wet rags and buckets, he rose frantically upon his legs. The same slaughterman now advanced once more with his pole-axe, and dealt a blow, but again missed his mark, striking only the side of the head. A third blow was more deliberately levelled at him, and this the ox, by an instinct of nature, evaded by a side movement as the axe descended. The slaughterman, enraged beyond measure, and yet more so by the jeers of his companions, now repeated his blows in quick succession, not one of which was effective, but only produced a great rising tumour. The elasticity of this tumour which defeated a death-blow, added to the exhaustion of the slaughterman’s strength, caused this scene of barbarous butchery to be protracted to the utmost, and the groaning and writhing ox did not fall prostrate till he had received as many as fifteen blows. What followed cannot be written.

It is proper to add that scenes like these, resulting from want of skill in the slaughterman, are by no means so common in Smithfield, as in some other markets—Whitechapel more especially. But they occur occasionally in an equal or less degree, in every market of the metropolis.

The two haggard, wolf-eyed fellows who had prowled after the ox, and his Inspector, now step forward and purchase the bruised and diseased corpse of the slaughtered (murdered) animal, and carry it away to be sold to the poor, in small lots by gas-light, on Saturday nights, or in the form of soup; and to the rich, in the disguise of a well-seasoned English German-sausage, or other delicious preserved meat! So much for the Inspector, and the amount of duty he so ably performed!

We make the following extract from a pamphlet recently published, entitled, “An Enquiry into the present state of the Smithfield Cattle Market, and the Dead Meat Markets of the Metropolis.”

“The wet-uns are very far gone in disease, and are so bad that those who have to touch them, carefully cover their hands to avoid immediate contact with such foul substances, naturally fearing the communication of poison. A servant of a respectable master butcher, about a twelvemonth ago, slightly scratched his finger with a bone of one of these diseased animals; the consequence was that he was obliged to go to the hospital, where he was for upwards of six weeks, and the surgeons all agreed that it was occasioned by the poison from the diseased bone. It is also a fact, that if the hands at any time come in contact with this meat, they are frequently so affected by the strong smell of the medicine which had been given to the animal when alive, that it is impossible for a considerable time to get rid of it; and yet, it will scarcely be believed, none of these poisonous substances are thrown away—all goes in some shape or form into the craving stomachs of the hungry poor, or is served up as a dainty for the higher classes. Even cows which die in calving, and still-born calves, are all brought to market and sold. Let these facts be gainsayed; we defy contradiction.”

We must by no means overlook the adventures and sufferings of sheep; nor the unwholesome condition to which great numbers of them are reduced before they are sold as human food.

A sheep is scudding and bouncing over a common, in the morning, with the dew glistening on her fleece. She is full of enjoyment, and knows no care in life. In the evening of the same day, she is slowly moving along a muddy lane, among a large flock; fatigued, her wool matted with dust and slush, her mouth parched with thirst, and one ear torn to a red rag by the dog. He was sent to do it by the shepherd, because she had lagged a little behind, to gaze through a gap in the hedge at a duck-pond in the field. She has been in a constant state of fright, confusion, and apprehension, ever since. At every shout of the shepherd’s voice, or that of his boy, and at every bark of the dog, or sound of the rapid pattering of his feet as he rushes by, she has expected to be again seized, and perhaps torn to pieces. As for the passage of the dog over her back, in one of his rushes along the backs of the flock, as they huddle densely together near some crooked corner or cross-way—in utter confusion as to what they are wanted to do—what they themselves want to do—what is best to do—or what in the world is about to be done—no word of man, or bleat of sheep, can convey any adequate impression of the fright it causes her. On one of these occasions, when going through a narrow turnpike, the dog is sent over their backs to worry the leaders who are going the wrong way, and in her spring forward to escape the touch of his devilish foot, she lacerated her side against a nail in the gatepost, making a long wound.

The sudden pain of this causes her to leap out of the rank, up a bank; and seeing a green field beneath, the instinct of nature makes her leap down, and scour away. In a moment, the dog—the fury—is after her. She puts forth all her strength, all her speed—the wind is filled with the horrors of his voice—of the redoubling sound of his feet—he gains upon her—she springs aside—leaps up banks—over hurdles—through hedges—but he is close upon her;—without knowing it, she has made a circle, and is again nearing the flock, which she reaches just as he springs upon her shoulders and tears her again on the head, and his teeth lacerate anew her coagulated ear. She eventually arrives at the railway station, and is crushed into one of the market waggons; and in this state of exhaustion, fever, and burning thirst, remains for several hours, until she arrives in the suburbs of Smithfield. What she suffers in this place has been already narrated, till finally she is sold, and driven off to be slaughtered. The den where this last horror is perpetrated (for in what other terms can we designate all these unnecessary 329brutalities?) is usually a dark and loathsome cellar. A slanting board is sometimes placed, down which the sheep are forced. But very often there is no such means of descent, and our poor jaded, footsore, wounded sheep—all foul and fevered, and no longer fit food for man—is seized in the half-naked blood-boltered arms of a fellow in a greasy red nightcap, and flung down the cellar, both her fore-legs being broken by the fall. She is instantly clutched by the ruffians below—dragged to a broad and dripping bench—flung upon it, on her back—and then the pallid face and patient eye looks upward!—and is understood.

And shall not we also—the denizens of a Christian land—understand it? Shall we not say—“Yes, poor victim of man’s necessities of food, we know that your death is one of the means whereby we continue to exist—one of the means whereby our generations roll onward in their course to some higher states of knowledge and civilisation—one of the means whereby we gain time to fill, to expand, and to refine the soul, and thus to make it more fitting for its future abode. But, knowing this, we yet must recognise in you, a fellow-creature of the earth, dwelling in our sight, and often close at our side, and trusting us—a creature ever harmless, and ever useful to us, both for food and clothing; nor do we deserve the good with which you supply us, nor even the proud name of Man, if we do not, at the same time, recognise your rightful claim to our humane considerations.”

In the course of last year, there were sold in Smithfield Market, the enormous number of two hundred and thirty-six thousand cattle; and one million, four hundred and seventeen thousand sheep. A practical authority has curiously calculated the number of serious and extensive bruises, caused by sheer brutality, rather than any accidents, in the course of a year. He finds that the amount could not be less than five hundred and twelve thousand. These are only the body-bruises, and do not include any of the various cruelties of blows and cuts on the nose, hocks, horns, tails, ears, legs, &c. Of course, this fevered and bruised flesh rapidly decomposes, and is no longer fit for human food. The flesh of many an animal out of Smithfield, killed on Monday, has become diseased meat by Tuesday evening—a fact too well known. The loss on bruised meat in the year has been calculated, by a practical man, at three shillings a head on every bullock, and sixpence on every sheep, making a total loss of Sixty-Three Thousand Pounds per annum. This loss, it is to be understood, is independent of the quantity of bruised and diseased meat, which ought to be lost, but is sold at various markets, as human food. It is also independent of the numbers of diseased calves and pigs brought to market every week, and sold. Very much of this diseased meat is sold publicly—in Newgate Market, and Tyler’s Market more especially—and at any rate there is a special and regular trade carried on in it. One soup establishment, for the working classes, is said to carry on a business amounting to between four hundred and five hundred pounds weekly, in diseased meat. It is also used by sausage, polony, and saveloy makers; for meat pies, and a-la-mode beef shops; and is very extensively by many of the concocters of preserved meats for home and foreign consumption. It is said that one of the Arctic Expeditions failed, chiefly, in consequence of the preserved meats failing them. They would not keep. Is it any wonder that they would not keep? What they were made of—wholly, or in part—has been sufficiently shown.

“In Newgate Market,” says the writer previously quoted, “the most disgraceful trade is carried on in diseased meat; as a proof of which, we assert that one person has been known to purchase from one hundred and twenty, to one hundred and thirty diseased carcases of beasts weekly; and when it is known that there are from twenty to thirty persons, at the least, engaged in this nefarious practice in this market alone, some idea may be formed of its extent.

“The numbers of diseased sheep from variola ovina, of small-pox, sent to this market, are alarmingly on the increase, and it is much to be feared that this complaint is naturalised among our English flocks. It is very much propagated in the metropolis. It is an acknowledged fact that upwards of one hundred sheep in this state were weekly, and for a considerable period, consigned for sale from one owner, who had purchased largely from abroad, and this took place at the early part of the present year (1848), and was one of the causes of the inquiry in Parliament, and the subsequent act.

“An Inspector is appointed to this market with full powers, acting under a deputation from the Lord Mayor; but the duties of the office must be of a very difficult nature, and probably interfere materially with the other avocations of the Inspector, as we find but little evidence of his activity. Compare our statement above with the return laid before the Board of Trade, and it will appear that of fifty diseased carcases not one on an average is seized.

“Close adjoining to Newgate Market, is Tyler’s Market, it is only separated by Warwick Lane. This market is said to be private property, and that no Inspector has ever been appointed. Every description of diseased meat is sold here in the most undisguised manner: it is celebrated for diseased pork. It has been stated by a practical man, one well acquainted with the facts, and fully capable of forming a correct opinion, that nearly one half of the pigs sold in this market during the pork season of 1847, ending March, 1848, was diseased and unfit for human food; and of all other diseased animals, what has been said of Newgate applies with far greater force to this market. In Leadenhall Market diseased meat is also sold, though not to the same extent. Whitechapel Market is situate to the south of the main or high street bearing the above name. It is rather difficult to describe the trade carried on here. The situation of the shops—long, dark, and narrow, with the slaughterhouses behind—is well adapted for carrying on the disgraceful practices 330in either a wholesale or retail manner to a very great extent. Some of the very worst description of diseased animals brought to Smithfield alive are here slaughtered, and large quantities of meat from the country, totally unfit for food, arrive in every stage of disease, and are sold by the pound and the stone, to a fearful extent. The following are the names of the other meat markets, to all of which some diseased animals and meat find their way,—and to none of them is any Inspector appointed:—

“Clare Market, retail; Newport, wholesale and retail: St. George’s, retail; Oxford, retail; Portman, retail; Brook’s, retail; Sheppard’s, retail; Boro’, retail; Carnaby, retail; Spitalfields, retail; Finsbury, retail. At all of these markets the meat is exposed for sale on Saturday evenings, under the glare of projecting gas burners; and the poor, who receive their wages on that day, and are the principal customers, are deceived by its appearance in this light; their object is of course to obtain the cheapest and the most economical joints; the meat without fat, which is generally most diseased, is selected by them, being considered the most profitable, though the fact is that this species of meat has been proved to be the cause of cancerous diseases, and diseases of the chest and lungs.”

The above was attested by one of the witnesses before the Committee of 1828. To think of these abominations having gone on regularly ever since! Why, it looks as though our legislators had received a communication from one of the Inspectors, assuring honourable gentlemen that “it was all nonsense, all this talk about diseased meat! If the meat was now and then a little queer—though he had never seen such a thing—none of the poor were any the worse for eating it!” But we will answer for one thing;—the Inspector never breathed a word about the preserved meats which so frequently present themselves with a modest air in purple and white china as delicacies for rich men’s tables!

The foreign stock, and the circumstances under which they arrive, must not be passed over. They are confined during four or five, or even six days, in the dark and stifling hold of the vessel, and it frequently occurs that in all this time there is scarcely any food given them (we are assured, on good authority, that there is often none) nor one drop of water. The condition in which they arrive may be conjectured. Besides the extensive preparations for the Monday’s market, which are made by the drovers and salesmen of the home stock during Sunday, the desecration of the “day of rest” is immensely increased by the supply of foreign stock, which arrives at the railway at the same time. Foreign vessels, (we are quoting from evidence before a Committee) bringing cattle, endeavour to arrive here on Sunday as early as possible, in order that the salesman may see the stock before the animals are brought into the market. There is also a very large supply of calves from Holland, which are all carted from Blackwall; and the confusion and uproar there, and at Brewer’s Quay on a Sunday morning, passes all belief. Great quantities of cattle are also sent on Sunday in order to avoid the expense of lairage, or standing-room. About two thousand men and boys are employed in this real Sunday desecration. Need we say, it is of the most shocking and cruel nature? Here is something really worthy of the storm that is so much wasted on minor matters in this much-vexed question.

A Lamb strayed for the first time into the woods, and excited much discussion among other animals. In a mixed company, one day, when he became the subject of a friendly gossip, the goat praised him.

“Pooh!” said the lion, “this is too absurd. The beast is a pretty beast enough, but did you hear him roar? I heard him roar, and, by the manes of my fathers, when he roars he does nothing but cry ba-a-a!” And the lion bleated his best in mockery, but bleated far from well.

“Nay,” said the deer, “I do not think so badly of his voice. I liked him well enough until I saw him leap. He kicks with his hind legs in running, and, with all his skipping, gets over very little ground.”

“It is a bad beast altogether,” said the tiger. “He cannot roar, he cannot run, he can do nothing—and what wonder? I killed a man yesterday, and, in politeness to the new comer, offered him a bit; upon which he had the impudence to look disgusted, and say, ‘No, sir, I eat nothing but grass.’”

So the beasts criticised the Lamb, each in his own way; and yet it was a good Lamb, nevertheless.

The Modern Babylon, so great in other things, has a giant’s appetite for mortality. On an average, a thousand persons die in London weekly, and are, as a rule, buried under the ground on which they fall. In old days there was no general record of the character and locality of this great concentrated mortality; but since the establishment of our present system of registration of births, marriages, and deaths, we are able to test not only how many people die, but where they die and what they die of; and are able to tell moreover, to a considerable extent, how far the mortality may be ascribed to inevitable and how far to removable causes. We can now, in fact, almost say, how many die by the folly of man and how many by the law of nature.

The volumes in which this information is given are by no means attractive at a first glance. They appear under the authority of a government office, and contain column after 331column and page after page of forbidding-looking figures, printed in the smallest and closest of type. Yet these account-books, in which the business done by the great destroyer is posted up from day to day, and year to year, contain some highly curious and important facts.

The average of a thousand deaths a week in London is by no means evenly distributed over the year, or over all parts of the metropolis. Each season and each parish has its peculiarities. Nor is mortality spread evenly over the various years of life, for the grim tyrant has a special appetite for humanity at particular ages.

We have already, in some words about weather wisdom, spoken of certain diagrams in which the changes of our English seasons have been delineated, and in which the characteristics of succeeding years are shown by curved lines. At the Registrar-General’s sanctum—a quiet office in the quietest part of Somerset House—Mr. Farr has reduced those curves to circles, and the results display themselves in the shape of coloured diagrams, showing the varying temperature of years, and the degree in which temperature influences mortality. The mean temperature of the year arrives in spring about the 115th day, and in autumn about the 293rd day of the year. The coldest period is the first three weeks in January, the hottest days being from about the 200th to the 220th of the year. In the diagrams that exhibit these facts, certain spaces represent each one hundred deaths, and we soon see how much more favourable to life in England warm weather is than cold. In hot countries the reverse is the rule, hot seasons being fatal seasons, because excess at either end of the scale it is which does the mischief. In England the plague and other epidemics, which made such havoc amongst our forefathers were brought to killing intensity, in unusually hot seasons. But deficient as our sanitary regulations now are, they have been so greatly improved within the last century or two, that summer is no longer our period of greatest average mortality, unless we suffer from some terrible visitant like cholera, and then, of course, all ordinary calculations are set at nought. Moderation suits all human beings. Our excess of heat or of cold raises the mortality; moderate warmth being more favourable, however, than moderate cold.

Mortality in the Metropolis seems regulated by a variety of circumstances, the principal being the elevation of each district above the level of the river Thames; the number of persons who live in the same house; the size and character of the house as regards ventilation and cleanliness; the state of the sewerage; the number of paupers in the neighbourhood; and the abundant and good, or scanty and bad, supply of water. Each London parish has its rank and value in the registrar’s records of health and death; and the figures are so exact, that there is no evading the verdict they pronounce. At first thought, one might be inclined to expect that all the health would be found where all the wealth and fashion are congregated. But it is not so. As a rule, those districts stand well whose inhabitants are most blessed with the good things of this life, but, running through the catalogue as arranged in the order of their salubrity, we find some localities above the average of health—nay, one at the very top—which fashion knows nothing of.

In these statements of the registrar, the different districts of the Metropolis are placed in a list according to their healthiness, those in which the fewest persons die in a year out of a given equal number, standing first, followed by those next in sanitary order, until we come down to those which are but just above the average for all London. Passing that Rubicon, we see the names of those parishes in which death gets more than his proper proportion of victims every year; and then, one after another, down, down the list, until we reach its lowest depths, in those places where filth and fever reign paramount, and where such a destroyer as Cholera finds hundreds of victims already weakened by previous unhealthy influences, and ready to fall a rapid and easy prey.

Let us go through this graduated scale, that shows how health and disease struggle for the mastery, and how death turns the balance.

First on the list stands Lewisham, a large parish stretching from Blackheath across the open hilly fields towards Norwood, and including the hamlet of Sydenham. Its rural character, scattered population, and good water, explain its pre-eminence on the sanitary scale. The second name on the list carries us at once from a green suburban parish to one of the centres of fashion and aristocracy,—to St. George, Hanover Square. The presence of this parish, so high up on the scale, is due to several circumstances; and its claims to such prominence are more artificial than those of its rural competitor for the palm of healthfulness. The scale is made out from the census of 1841, which was taken during the height of the London season, when St. George’s was of course much fuller than it is on the general average of the year. Its population, too, is to a great extent composed of servants “in place,” and, therefore, generally young and in good health, and who, when dangerously sick, are sent to the hospitals, or to the country to die. The masters and mistresses of St. George’s, also, are so circumstanced, that when in bad health they can try the sea-air, or retire to country seats. All these facts tend to lessen the mortality of the district, and thus tend to place it high up on the sanitary scale. Its advantages are, an average elevation of forty-nine feet above the high water mark of the Thames; its neighbourhood to the parks; its wide open streets; a supply of water drawn from a Company whose system of filtration is very good; a comparatively 332thin population, compared with its extent, there being, in this parish, only sixty-six persons to an acre; and the size and character of its houses, which return an average rental of 153l. a year.

From the fashionable “west end” we have to travel to a suburban spot for the third place in rank on the health-scale. It is the sub-district of Hampstead. All who have been upon its breezy heath, with its elevation three or four hundred feet above the river, and its open view of the surrounding country, will readily understand why Hampstead should rank high in salubrity—though its average of rental may be low, and though more persons (as they do) live in each house than in the houses of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe.

Fourth on the list comes Hackney, which has only thirteen persons to an acre. This advantage will be seen more strongly, when we know that Hampstead has but six, and Lewisham, but two; whilst East London has two hundred and eighty, and Southwark, one hundred and sixty-five persons per acre. Hackney also has water from the New River, a comparatively pure source; and, though its houses are small, with a rental of but 35l., the number of occupants to each is but seven.

For the fifth in order of salubrity we have again to cross the Thames. It is Camberwell. This parish lies very low, being only four feet above the water mark; but, then, it is fringed on one side by the open country; is sheltered from cold winds; is thinly peopled, having only twelve persons to an acre, and only six occupants to a house. Its drainage is, almost necessarily, bad, but its neighbourhood to the green fields compensates for many sanitary evils.

Wandsworth, with a burden of poor rates almost equal in poundage to that inflicted upon Southwark and Lambeth comes next. The recommendations of Wandsworth are, a population of only four to an acre. This indication of ample open spaces explains the general healthiness of the parish. Its position and bad drainage have rendered it liable to very heavy loss from epidemics. Cholera found a larger proportion of victims in Wandsworth than in the densest peopled parish on the north of the river.

“Merry Islington” ranks only seventh in spite of its high and dry position, and its New River water, and its neighbouring fields. Its elevation is eighty-eight feet above the river; its density of population, twenty-five to an acre; its average rental 35l.; its annual deaths, one in fifty.

Kensington and Chelsea follow next, and with them are included Brompton, Hammersmith, and Fulham. They all lie low, but are in pleasant company with fields and open spaces; their people are well to do in the world, and a large portion drink good water.

The City of London district—that is, the portion of the city round about the Mansion House, and including the houses and warehouses of the rich traders, who cluster near the Lord Mayor’s chosen dwelling-place—comes next in order. This is explained by the elevation of the ground, which is thirty-eight feet above the river; by the value of the property (average rental 117l.) which excludes the poor; by the fact that the Lord Mayor and his neighbours do not drink Thames water; and that their wealth enables them to live well, and to obtain the best medical aid,—both for rich and poor. The most affluent also reside out of town, and many of their old people are drafted off in their old age to alms-houses, and to country unions. The mortality of this part of the city is two hundred and fourteen a year out of ten thousand living.

Next after the neighbourhood of the civic ruler, we have the locality which has been chosen for the palace of the sovereign—St. James’s. The population of this parish is dense,—being two hundred and nine to an acre, though its rentals are high. The palace stands in by no means the best portion of the district, but the saving points are the parks and the absence of Thames water.

St. Pancras follows St. James’s, its recommendations being an elevation of eighty feet above the river, and a population not one-third so closely packed as that of the parish occupied by the palace. Its density is sixty persons to an acre. Pancras, however, has many poor, and consequently heavy rates.

Marylebone, its neighbour, claims to follow Pancras, with a greater elevation and a better class of houses, yet with bad drainage and a heavier mortality. In Marylebone two hundred and twenty-two persons die in a year out of ten thousand. The population is more dense than in the poorer district of Pancras, but the near neighbourhood of Regent’s Park and open country about Primrose Hill has, of course, a favourable influence.

We have now to re-cross the river for the thirteenth place upon this London Sanitary Scale. It is Newington, a suburban parish, with a level two feet below the water mark, and with bad water, yet having fewer deaths than more noted and more wealthy quarters. Like Wandsworth, however, it suffered severely from Cholera, as its swampy position would lead one to expect.

The district round the palace of the Archbishop—Lambeth—follows next in order. It is raised but a very few feet above the high water level; its rents are low, its poor rates high, its nuisances many; and its water supply bad. But it has the air-draught from the river on one side, and it is not very far from the fields on the other; and more than all, it has but thirty-nine persons to an acre, and so it escapes with fewer deaths in a year than its unfavourable position would lead one to anticipate. It is, however, another of those spots where Cholera made great havoc.

333From what may be called one river side extremity of South London, we skip over the central water-side parishes, and go to the opposite extremity of the metropolis to find at Greenwich our next healthiest district. Like Lambeth, this place lies low, is badly drained, and has a poor class of houses, and consequently of people. The secret of its position on the scale of health is to be found in the fact that the population is not dense, being only twenty-one to an acre; that it has a fine park for a playground, and is in near neighbourhood to Blackheath, and thence to the open and healthy hills and fields of Kent.

Now we must return again to the centre of London for its next most healthy parish. It is St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields; but having, it is almost needless to say, no rural character, except by name. Trafalgar Square, with its fountains, is almost its only enjoyable open space. The density of population is not over great for such a position; the rental high; the deaths two hundred and forty to ten thousand living each year.

Away east again for our next and last parish that stands above the general average of London. Stepney is the place, with its multitude of small houses at low rentals. It has its water from the river Lea, and its inhabitants have not very far to go when they wish for a ramble in the fields. Its yearly contribution to our total mortality is two hundred and forty-two out of ten thousand souls.

And here a dark line has to be drawn; for Stepney is close down upon the average mortality of all London. Each parish already named pays less than the average tribute to death—those presently to be enumerated pay more. The contributions vary from Clerkenwell, which is the least unhealthy on the black list to Whitechapel, which is the most unhealthy. This last parish indeed is the worst in all the metropolis. Between the two extremes of insalubrity, the districts range in the following order: Clerkenwell, brought down in the scale by its nests of poverty, and doubtless, by its huge over-gorged grave-yard. Bethnal Green, with its host of small houses, and average rental of only 9l. The Strand—the great thoroughfare of fine shops—with a back neighbourhood of filthy alleys and riverside abominations. Shoreditch, with its stock of poor people and old clothes. Westminster—regal, historical Westminster—raised but two feet above the water level, and famous alike for its abbey, its palace, and its rookeries. Bermondsey, just level with the water line, and poisoned by open drains and unsavoury factories. Rotherhithe, damp and foggy. St. Giles’s, another spot renowned for vice, poverty, and dirt. St. George’s, Southwark, low, poor, and densely crowded. Next come the two portions of the City of London, technically described as East London and West London, being in fact those parts beyond the centre surrounding the Mansion House—the portions indeed especially indulged with the frowsiness of Cripplegate and the choked-up smells of Leadenhall; the abominations of Smithfield; the exhalations of the Fleet ditch; the fever-engendering closeness of the courts off Fleet Street; and the smoky, ill-smelling sinuosities of Whitefriars. Next below these “City of London districts” we have Holborn, with a density of two hundred and thirty-seven to an acre, and a yearly mortality of two hundred and sixty-six to ten thousand living. Then St. George’s in the East, with a population far less closely packed than that of Holborn, yet sending two hundred and eighty-nine souls to judgment every year out of ten thousand living. Next St. Saviour’s and St. Olave’s, the two other Southwark parishes who drink Thames water taken from the stream near their own bridge, and therefore below the Fleet ditch. St. Luke’s, the locality of another rookery. And, lastly, the zero of this register, Whitechapel—with its shambles, its poverty, its vice, and its heavy quota of two hundred and ninety deaths a year out of ten thousand living.

This glance at the results displayed in the registrar’s thick volume of figures, published last year, gives us not only an idea of the curious information to be gleaned from the labours of Mr. Farr and his brother officers, but shows also how unevenly death visits the different portions of our huge city. If from our family of two millions the destroyer takes a thousand souls a week to their final account, the first and most certain to fall victims are those who, from ignorance, or recklessness, or poverty, outrage the natural laws by which alone health and life can be preserved.

A comparison between the chances of death which the Londoner runs as compared with those suffered by his fellow countrymen in other districts of England, might be put familiarly somewhat after this fashion. If a man’s acquaintances were fixed at fifty-two in number, and they lived in scattered places over England, he would annually lose one by death in forty-five. If they lived in the southeastern counties, the loss would be at the lower rate of one in fifty-two. If they all lived in London, he would lose one out of thirty-nine.

This additional mortality is the penalty now being, day by day, inflicted upon sinners against sanitary laws in the English metropolis.

Was the heart’s cry of the Ancient Mariner at the recollection of the blessed moment when the fearful curse of life in death fell off him and the heavenly sleep first “slid into his soul.” “Blessings on sleep!” said honest Sancho Panza: “it wraps one all round like a mantle!”—a mantle for the weary human 334frame, lined softly, as with the down of the eider-duck, and redolent of the soothing odours of the poppy. The fabled Cave of Sleep was in the Land of Darkness. No ray of the sun, or moon, or stars, ever broke upon that night without a dawn. The breath of somniferous flowers floated in on the still air from the grotto’s mouth. Black curtains hung round the ever-sleeping god; the Dreams stood around his couch; Silence kept watch at the portals. Take the winged Dreams from the picture, and what is left? The sleep of matter.

The dreams that come floating through our sleep, and fill the dormitory with visions of love or terror—what are they? Random freaks of the fancy? Or is sleep but one long dream, of which we see only fragments, and remember still less? Who shall explain the mystery of that loosening of the soul and body, of which night after night whispers to us, but which day after day is unthought of? Reverie, sleep, trance—such are the stages between the world of man and the world of spirits. Dreaming but deepens as we advance. Reverie deepens into the dreams of sleep—sleep into trance—trance borders on death. As the soul retires from the outer senses, as it escapes from the trammels of the flesh, it lives with increased power within. Spirit grows more spirit-like as matter slumbers. We can follow the development up to the last stage. What is beyond?

says Hamlet—pausing on the brink of eternity, and vainly striving to scan the inscrutable. Trance is an awful counterpart of sleep and death—mysterious in itself, appalling in its hazards. Day after day noise has been hushed in the dormitory—month after month it has seen a human frame grow weaker and weaker, wanner, more deathlike, till the hues of the grave coloured the face of the living. And now he lies, motionless, pulseless, breathless. It is not sleep—is it death?

Leigh Hunt is said to have perpetrated a very bad pun connected with the dormitory, and which made Charles Lamb laugh immoderately. Going home together late one night, the latter repeated the well-known proverb, “A home’s a home, however homely.” “Aye,” added Hunt, “and a bed’s a bed however bedly.” It is a strange thing, a bed. Somebody has called it a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it reluctantly, and leave it with regret. Once within the downy precincts of the four posts, how loth we are to make our exodus into the wilderness of life. We are as enamoured of our curtained dwelling as if it were the Land of Goshen or the Cave of Circe. And how many fervent vows have those dumb posts heard broken! every fresh perjury rising to join its cloud of hovering fellows, each morning weighing heavier and heavier, on our sluggard eyelids. A caustic proverb says;—we are all “good risers at night;” but woe’s me for our agility in the morning. It is a failing of our species, ever ready to break out in all of us, and in some only vanquished after a struggle painful as the sundering of bone and marrow. The Great Frederic of Prussia found it easier, in after life, to rout the French and Austrians, than in youth to resist the seductions of sleep. After many single-handed attempts at reformation, he had at last to call to his assistance an old domestic, whom he charged, on pain of dismissal, to pull him out of bed every morning at two o’clock. The plan succeeded, as it deserved to succeed. All men of action are impressed with the importance of early rising. “When you begin to turn in bed, its time to turn out,” says the old Duke; and we believe his practice has been in accordance with his precept. Literary men—among whom, as Bulwer says, a certain indolence seems almost constitutional—are not so clear upon this point: they are divided between Night and Morning, though the best authorities seem in favour of the latter. Early rising is the best elixir vitæ: it is the only lengthener of life that man has ever devised. By its aid the great Buffon was able to spend half a century—an ordinary lifetime—at his desk; and yet had time to be the most modish of all the philosophers who then graced the gay metropolis of France.

Sleep is a treasure and a pleasure; and, as you love it, guide it warily. Over-indulgence is ever suicidal, and destroys the pleasure it means to gratify. The natural times for our lying down and rising up are plain enough. Nature teaches us, and unsophisticated mankind followed her. Singing birds and opening flowers hail the sunrise, and the hush of groves and the closed eyelids of the parterre mark his setting. But “man hath sought out many inventions.” We prolong our days into the depths of night, and our nights into the splendour of day. It is a strange result of civilisation! It is not merely occasioned by that thirst for varied amusement which characterises an advanced stage of society—it is not that theatres, balls, dancing, masquerades, require an artificial light, for all these are or have been equally enjoyed elsewhere beneath the eye of day. What is the cause, we really are not philosopher enough to say; but the prevalence of the habit must have given no little pungency to honest Benjamin Franklin’s joke, when, one summer, he announced to the Parisians as a great discovery—that the sun rose each morning at four o’clock; and that, whereas, they burnt no end of candles by sitting up at night, they might rise in the morning and have light for nothing. Franklin’s “discovery,” we dare say, produced a laugh at the time, and things went on as before. Indeed so universal is this artificial division of day and night, and so interwoven with it are the social habits, that we shudder at the very idea of returning to the natural order of things. A 335Robespierre could not carry through so stupendous a revolution. Nothing less than an avatar of Siva the Destroyer—Siva with his hundred arms, turning off as many gaspipes, and replenishing his necklace of human skulls by decapitating the leading conservatives—could have any chance of success; and, ten to one, with our gassy splendours, and seducing glitter, we should convert that pagan devil ere half his work was done.

But of all the inventions which perverse ingenuity has sought out, the most incongruous, the most heretical against both nature and art, is Reading in Bed. Turning rest into labour, learning into ridicule. A man had better be up. He is spoiling two most excellent things by attempting to join them. Study and sleep—how incongruous! It is an idle coupling of opposites, and shocks a sensible man as much as if he were to meet in the woods the apparition of a winged elephant. Only fancy an elderly or middle-aged man (for youth is generally orthodox on this point,) sitting up in bed, spectacles on his nose, a Kilmarnock on his head, and his flannel jacket round his shivering shoulders,—doing what? Reading? It may be so—but he winks so often, possibly from the glare of the candle, and the glasses now and then slip so far down on his nose, and his hand now and then holds the volume so unsteadily, that if he himself didn’t assure us to the contrary, we should suppose him half asleep. We are sure it must be a great relief to him when the neglected book at last tumbles out of bed, to such a distance that he cannot recover it.

Nevertheless, we have heard this extraordinary custom excused on the no less extraordinary ground of its being a soporific. For those who require such things, Marryat gives a much simpler recipe—namely, to mentally repeat any scraps of poetry you can recollect; if your own, so much the better. The monks of old, in a similar emergency, used to repeat the seven Penitential Psalms. Either of these plans, we doubt not, will be found equally efficacious, if one is able to use them—if anxiety of mind does not divert him from his task, or the lassitude of illness disable him for attempting it. Sleep, alas! is at times fickle and coy; and, like most sublunary friends, forsakes us when most wanted. Reading in that repertory of many curious things, the “Book of the Farm,” we one day met with the statement that “a pillow of hops will ensure sleep to a patient in a delirious fever when every other expedient fails.” We made a note of it. Heaven forbid that the recipe should ever be needed for us or ours! but the words struck a chord of sympathy in our heart with such poor sufferers, and we saddened with the dread of that awful visitation. The fever of delirium! when incoherent words wander on the lips of genius; when the sufferer stares strangely and vacantly on his ministering friends, or starts with freezing horror from the arms of familiar love! Ah! what a dread tenant has the dormitory then. No food taken for the body, no sleep for the brain! a human being surging with diabolic strength against his keepers—a human frame gifted with superhuman vigour only the more rapidly to destroy itself! Less fearful to the eye, but more harrowing to the soul, is the dormitory whose walls enclose the sleepless victim of Remorse. No poppies or mandragora for him! His malady ends only with the fever of life. Ends? Grief, anxiety, “the thousand several ills that flesh is heir to,” pass away before the lapse of time or the soothings of love, and sleep once more folds its dove-like wings above the couch.

“If there be a regal solitude,” says Charles Lamb, “it is a bed. How the patient lords it there; what caprices he acts without control! How king-like he sways his pillow,—tumbling and tossing, and shifting and lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it to the ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing temples. He changes sides oftener than a politician. Now he lies full length, then half-length, obliquely, transversely, head and feet quite across the bed; and none accuses him of tergiversation. Within the four curtains he is absolute. They are his Mare Clausum. How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man’s self to himself! He is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated on him as his only duty. ’Tis the two Tables of the Law to him. He has nothing to think of but how to get well. What passes out of doors or within them, so he hear not the jarring of them, affects him not.”

In this climate a sight of the sun is prized; but we love to see it most from bed. A dormitory fronting the east, therefore, so that the early sunbeams may rouse us to the dewy beauties of morning, we love. Let there also be festooned roses without the window, that on opening it the perfume may pervade the realms of bed. Our night-bower should be simple—neat as a fairy’s cell, and ever perfumed with the sweet air of heaven. It is not a place for showy things, or costly. As fire is the presiding genius in other rooms, so let water, symbol of purity, be in the ascendant here; water, fresh and unturbid as the thoughts that here make their home—water, to wash away the dust and sweat of a weary world. Let no fracas disturb the quiet of the dormitory. We go there for repose. Our tasks and our cares are left outside, only to be put on again with our hat and shoes in the morning. It is an asylum from the bustle of life—it is the inner shrine of our household gods—and should be respected accordingly. We never entered during the ordinary process of bed-making—pillows tossed here, blankets and sheets pitched hither and thither in wildest confusion, chairs and pitchers in the middle of the floor, feathers and dust everywhere—without a jarring sense that sacrilege was going on, and that the genius loci had 336departed. Rude hands were profaning the home of our slumbers!

A sense of security pervades the dormitory. A healthy man in bed is free from everything but dreams, and once in a lifetime, or after adjudging the Cheese Premium at an Agricultural Show—the nightmare. We once heard a worthy gentleman, blessed with a very large family of daughters, declare he had no peace in his house except in bed. There we feel as if in a City of Refuge, secure alike from the brawls of earth and the storms of heaven. Lightning, say old ladies, won’t come through blankets. Even tigers, says Humboldt, “will not attack a man in his hammock.” Hitting a man when he’s down is stigmatised as villainous all the world over; and lions will rather sit with an empty stomach for hours than touch a man before he awakes. Tricks upon a sleeper! Oh, villainous! Every perpetrator of such unutterable treachery should be put beyond the pale of society. The First of April should have no place in the calendar of the dormitory. We would have the maxim “Let sleeping dogs lie,” extended to the human race. And an angry dog, certainly, is a man roused needlessly from his slumbers. What an outcry we Northmen raised against the introduction of Greenwich time, which defrauded us of fifteen minutes’ sleep in the morning; and how indiscriminate the objurgations lavished upon printers’ devils! Of all sinners against the nocturnal comfort of literary men, these imps are the foremost; and possibly it was from their malpractices in such matters that they first acquired their diabolic cognomen.

The nightcap is not an elegant head-dress, but its comfort is undeniable. It is a diadem of night; and what tranquillity follows our self-coronation! It is priceless as the invisible cap of Fortunatus; and, viewless beneath its folds, our cares cannot find us out. It is graceless. Well; what then? It is not meant for the garish eye of day, nor for the quizzing-glass of our fellow-men, or of the ridiculing race of women; neither does it outrage any taste for the beautiful in the happy sleeper himself. We speak as bachelors, to whom the pleasures of a manifold existence are unknown. Possibly the æsthetics of night are not uncared for when a man has another self to please, and when a pair of lovely eyes are fixed admiringly on his upper story; but such is the selfishness of human nature, that we suspect this abnegation of comfort will not long survive the honeymoon. The French, ever enamoured of effect, and who, we verily believe, even sleep “posé,” sometimes substitute the many-coloured silken handkerchief for the graceless “bonnet-de-nuit.” But all such substitutes are less comfortable and more troublesome; and of all irritating things, the most irritating is a complex operation in undressing. Æsthetics at night, and for the weary! No, no. The weary man frets at every extra button or superfluous knot, he counts impatiently every second that keeps him from his couch, and flies to the arms of sleep as to those of his mistress. Nevertheless, French novelette writers make a great outcry against nightcaps. We remember an instance. A husband—rather a good-looking fellow—suspects that his wife is beginning to have too tender thoughts towards a glossy-ringletted Lothario who is then staying with them. So, having accidentally discovered that Lothario slept in a huge peeked nightcowl, and knowing that ridicule would prove the most effectual disenchanter, he fastened a string to his guest’s bell, and passed it into his own room.

At the dead of night, when all were fast asleep, suddenly Lothario’s bell rang furiously. Upstarted the lady—“their guest must be ill;”—and accompanied by her husband, elegantly coiffed in a turbaned silk handkerchief, she entered the room whence the alarum had sounded. They find Lothario sitting up in bed—his cowl rising pyramid-fashion, a fool’s cap all but the bells—bewildered and in ludicrous consternation at being surprised thus by the fair Angelica; and, unable to conceal his chagrin, he completes his discomfiture by bursting out in wrathful abuse of his laughing host for so betraying his weakness for nightcaps.

The Poetry of the Dormitory! It is an inviting but too delicate a subject for our rough hands. Do not the very words call up a vision? By the light of the stars we see a lovely head resting on a downy pillow; the bloom of the rose is on that young cheek, and the half-parted lips murmur as in a dream: “Edward!” Love is lying like light at her heart, and its fairy wand is showing her visions. May her dreams be happy! “Edward!” Was it a sigh that followed that gentle invocation? What would the youth give to hear that murmur,—to gaze like yonder stars on his slumbering love. Hush! are the morning-stars singing together—a lullaby to soothe the dreamer? A low dulcet strain floats in through the window; and soon, mingling with the breathings of the lute, the voice of youth. The harmony penetrates through the slumbering senses to the dreamer’s heart; and ere the golden curls are lifted from the pillow, she is conscious of all. The serenade begins anew. What does she hear?