The Project Gutenberg eBook of Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, fifth series, no. 129, vol. III, June 19, 1886
    
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Title: Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, fifth series, no. 129, vol. III, June 19, 1886

Author: Various

Release date: August 22, 2023 [eBook #71468]

Language: English

Original publication: Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers, 1853

Credits: Susan Skinner, Eric Hutton and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHAMBERS'S JOURNAL OF POPULAR LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART, FIFTH SERIES, NO. 129, VOL. III, JUNE 19, 1886 ***





[Illustration:

CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL

OF

POPULAR

LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART

Fifth Series

ESTABLISHED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS, 1832

CONDUCTED BY R. CHAMBERS (SECUNDUS)

NO. 129.—VOL. III.       SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 1886.       PRICE 1½_d._]




ARACHNE AND MELISSA.


When Anne was queen and ‘Mrs Freeman’ was her mistress, two ladies
known to fame as Arachne and Melissa came one day before the reading
public. Those who are up in the literature of the time will remember
their portraits, which expressed two well-defined and persistent types
of humanity—those who get good from everything like Melissa, and
those who draw only evil like Arachne. Now, each of these ladies has
left behind her a long train of descendants—a wide-spreading _gens_,
as the old Romans would have said—in the people who prefer to drink
vinegar out of a leaden cup or wine out of a golden; who are to their
surroundings as frost or as dew; who see the trodden backward path and
the unsurmounted hills in front through spectacles tinted in black or
in rose-colour; and who sing their Psalm of Life in the minor key,
discordantly, or in the major, with full harmonies. These are the
descendants of the Arachne (spider-born) and Melissa (honey-maker) who,
in Queen Anne’s time, sucked poison or gathered honey; and we meet them
at all four corners of our way.

The Arachnides are for the most part characterised by a strange and
chilling silence, when a few words would remove a painful impression
or enlighten a dangerous ignorance. When they do speak, their words
fall like vocal icicles which freeze and cut at the same time; and
they contrive to make their good advice more painful than other
people’s rebukes, and to give their information the form of a sarcastic
reproach in that you did not know it all before. Their presence in
society reminds one of the winter whose ‘Breath was a chain which
without a sound, The earth and the air and the water bound.’ Where
they are, freedom flags and gaiety declines; and only the most robust
of those moral pachyderms who oppose their thick insensitiveness to
all outside influences whatsoever, can withstand the lethal effect
of the Arachnides. Their small pale eyes wither; their pinched lips
paralyse; their very smiles are the fracture of a crystal more than the
visible sign of a living, friendly heart; and they are the veritable
‘freezing mixtures’ of life. They take strong and unreasoning dislikes
to quite innocent strangers and harmless acquaintances, and will not be
convinced that they have no occasion to do so; they quarrel for a mere
nothing with those who are so unfortunate as to be their friends and
relations, and cannot be induced to make nor to receive an explanation.
No one knows what has offended them, but all at once they become like
anthropomorphous polar bears to those to whom they had been moderately
human a little while before; and more intolerable than ever to those
to whom they had been intolerable enough when things were at their
best. Then they retreat into their own spiritual den to hammer away at
that leaden cup from which they drink the deadly acid that vitiates
all their life and destroys all their happiness. They make the worst
of things in every direction. If a cloud has come across the sky of
others’ friendships, they do what they can to increase the trouble and
to make that permanent which, by the nature of things and without their
evil offices, would have been evanescent. They kill all the tender
little sprouts of growing affection between two young people or two
likely comrades; and what they cannot do by straightforward means, they
do by crooked ones—which comes to the same thing in the end.

If any one is so ill advised as to take one of these Arachnides into
his confidence, he is sure to smart for it. Has he complained of a
common friend?—the grim confidant rasps the little abrasion till it
becomes a gangrened sore, and never lets it alone till it has lost all
power of healing. He does the same by the other—the one complained
of—till what was a mere nothing in the beginning becomes a cancer which
eats into the whole substance of their mutual love, and reduces it
to something worse than death. At no time is one of these Arachnides
a safe confidant; for so surely as the night follows on the day, so
surely will your secret be divulged in one of these moments of pique
and ill-temper for which the Spider-born are famous. Women of the
Spider-born _gens_ are great in this kind of small treachery. Have you
a false tooth?—a well-concealed twist of the poor weak spine?—a tress
of hair that never grew on your own head?—a blemish on your shoulder
beyond the line of the most _décolleté_ dress, and to the world
therefore as though it were not?—and has Arachne found out, or been
told in an impulse of misdirected confidence, one or all these things?
It is only a question of time. In time the whole of society will know
the fact; and that perfect bit of porcelain which the Generals and the
Colonels, the Bishops and the Archdeacons, admired so much, will ring
cracked for ever after. You might just as well have advertised your
secret in the _Times_; and so you find out when too late.

Egotist to their finger-tips, the Arachnides make their own small
annoyances the one great thought of their lives. They do not make much
account of their blessings, only of their misfortunes; and nothing is
so large as a microscopic speck on one of their most luscious fruits.
The fate of empires and the fall of nations are not so important as the
change of a servant or the ill arrangement of a dinner. The loss of a
hundred men in a battle does not touch them so much as the loss of a
row of cabbages in their garden; and a burnt duster out of a set is a
more serious affair in their eyes than a passenger-ship wrecked on the
Cornish coast or a merchant-steamer burnt to the water’s edge. On one
thing only can they be made loquacious—on their own small sufferings.
On these they will descant an hour by the clock, and more to come
after. But speak to them of the heart-anguish of others, and they are
unsympathetic, dumb, indifferent. Their fire burns for themselves
alone; to all the world beyond they have only slag and ice to give.

As a physiognomical sign, the Arachnides do not often look you in the
face. They glance rather than gaze with straight and level eyes; and
they prefer the corners of their eyes to the centres.

How different it is with those others—those Melissides who drink their
wine of life in deep draughts from golden cups; those singers of glad
melodies; those lovers of their kind and rejoicers in the sunshine;
those whose own jocund nature tints the whole outlook with roseate
hues, eloquent of the fresh morning and the young day’s hope! Wherever
they are, things go more easily. They do not suffer troubles to arise,
but put their broad backs to the work when strength is required—handle
the difficulty with their delicate fingers where tact is needed—and
by the marvellous power of their genial tempers, smooth all ruffled
feathers and still all angry seas. Seeing life as a mixed web, where
rare silks are shot through with the coarse fibres of roughened hemp
or common cotton, they prefer not to linger on the hemp nor to fret
over the cotton. They think the good is as true as the bad; and where
they cannot cure they do not contemplate. When two friends fall apart,
they do their level best to bring them together again; and when the
skin of the over-sensitive shows signs of abrasion and inflammation,
they treat it with an anodyne, not an irritant. They are too frank to
be untruthful; but they are too genial to be parsimonious of praise or
pinched in the matter of verbal accuracy. If a little embroidery can
hide the poverty of the original stuff, well, they do embroider; and
they think it no sin to expound a text already given. Thus they make
a grudging admission on the part of A. that B. is not quite such a
ruffian after all as Mr A. imagined, do as much good work as a positive
statement that B. is a very fine fellow indeed, and A. has no fault to
find with him anyhow. By which they knit up that weak bit of the rope,
and the two friends, who had strayed so far apart, are hauled up into
line as before.

When these workers in gold are, what common parlance calls friends,
with the workers in lead, the former have a hard time of it. They are
always at the point where the Arachnides are backing and the Melissides
are pulling—where the one are trying to break and the other doing their
best to hold. The Arachnite takes offence at a word, a look, a gesture,
a thing done or not done; and the Melissite will not have it. ‘Come,
old fellow, what’s up now?’ he says in that round cheery voice of his
which suggests honey and sunshine, or a strong west wind, or anything
else you like both sweet and wholesome. Probably the Arachnite pinches
his lips and says ‘Nothing;’ but ‘nothing’ does not answer the purpose,
and an explanation is forced—if indeed that poor chilled soul can be
forced into anything frank and human. If he cannot, then the other does
his best to laugh away the cloud and to go on as before; but it all
depends on the mood of the Spider-born whether this frankness will be
an offence or a clearance—whether it will win the day or lose it for
ever. Unlike the Arachnite, whose analogue is that liquid which, when
it is struck or stirred ever so lightly, breaks at once into crystals,
the Melissite is almost impossible to freeze. Even his anger has a
touch of generous pity in it, in that a man should be such a fool or so
wrong-headed; and where the one will not forgive the smallest mistake,
the other will forget the gravest wrong and trust to better things
in the future. Tender of heart, he nourishes all good impulses in
himself, and recognises them with gladness in others; and essentially
peace-loving, as the really strong ever are, he is slow to ‘wash his
spears,’ and only when forced by self-respect, goes out to fight his
foes. Generous as a master and genial as an administrator, he puts
up with the worries and disappointments inevitable to his business,
whatever it may be; not troubling the gods with his complaints because
men are made of clay, and every now and then break in the handling
and fly in the firing. On the contrary, he makes the best of things
even when they are bad; and looks to the perfected work rather than
to the abortive, which cannot now be mended. He believes in the
doctrine of encouragement rather than in the theory of repression,
and thinks when men know that they are trusted to do well, they do
better than when they know that they are expected to do ill—with the
handcuffs to follow. He has no great faith in gags and bearing-reins,
whips and spurs, for any kind of team that he may have to manage.
He trusts rather to the cheering voice and the guiding hand; and
his choice of method is justified by its results. In all troublous
times, the Melissite—he who looks at a man’s circumstances from that
man’s own standpoint, and not from one external, unintelligent and
unsympathetic—escapes the doom accorded to the Arachnides, and lives
in peaceful security where these others are not safe, however well
protected. If such as he did not form what Matthew Arnold calls the
remnant, society would stand still like the clogged wheels of a
watch, and men would perish in the moral desert as they perish in the
material. The righteous men who save cities are they who do good to
their brother-men as well as they who pray to God; and ‘he prayeth best
who loveth best’ is a phrase we all know by head, and some of us by
heart and head as well.

In hours of doubt and danger, the Arachnite despairs; but the Melissite
buckles to for the work of decision and deliverances, hoping while a
ray of light remains, or a plank whole out of the wreck. The one cannot
spell success; the other will not learn to say defeat; the one does
not hold on, the other cannot be beaten off. Hence we seldom find the
working Arachnides successful in life; and the bread which they have
to bake for themselves is apt to be both scant in quantity and sour
in quality. The others, on the contrary, for the most part succeed.
They have not only a larger volume of life to bear them on, but they
have also the art of making friends, such as those poor starved
prison-pinched souls do not know. They are thus backed by their own
strength, and given a helping hand by the strength of others; where the
Arachnides get no extraneous aid, and soon come to the end of their own
power. Then they complain of their ill-luck, or speak of secret enemies
who work in the dark against them; and, if women, they go into the
sunless labyrinth of ‘nerves,’ by which they excuse their jealousy and
ill-temper, their sourness and crossness. They say severely that no one
knows what they suffer, save those who are in like manner afflicted,
and that they alone can measure the pain they endure. Perhaps the
good-tempered interlocutor thinks to himself: ‘A little honey mixed in
with all thy vinegar, O Arachnite, would soften much of thy misery and
reduce thy misfortunes to zero; and the milk of human kindness set to
make cream is a better spiritual drink than the poison thou distillest
and the vinegar which makes thee thin; and the poor thin whey, which is
but serum with all the cream and cheese and butter taken out, is bad
nourishment for men or babes.’




IN ALL SHADES.


CHAPTER XXXI.

Delgado had fixed ‘the great and terrible day’ for Wednesday evening.
On Monday afternoon, Harry and Nora, accompanied by Mr Dupuy, went for
a ride in the cool of dusk among the hills together. Trinidad that day
was looking its very best. The tall and feathery bamboos that overhung
the serpentine pathways stood out in exquisite clearness of outline,
like Japanese designs, against the tender background of pearl-gray sky.
The tree ferns rose lush and green among the bracken after yesterday’s
brief and refreshing thunder-shower. The scarlet hibiscus trees beside
the negro huts were in the full blush of their first flowering season.
The poinsettias, not, as in England, mere stiff standard plants from
florists’ cuttings, but rising proudly into graceful trees of free and
rounded growth, with long drooping branches, spread all about their
great rosettes of crimson leaflets to the gorgeous dying sunlight.
The broad green foliage of the ribbed bananas in the negro gardens
put to shame the flimsy tropical make-believes of Kew or Monte Carlo.
For the first time, it seemed to Harry Noel he was riding through the
true and beautiful tropics of poets and painters; and the reason was
not difficult to guess, for Nora—Nora really seemed to be more kindly
disposed to him. After all, she was not made of stone, and they had an
interest in common which the rest of the house of Dupuy did not share
with Nora—the interest in Edward and Marian Hawthorn. You can’t have a
better introduction to any girl’s heart—though I daresay it may be very
wicked indeed to acknowledge it—than a common attachment to somebody or
something tabooed or opposed by the parental authorities.

Mr Dupuy rode first in the little single-file cavalcade, as became
the senior; and Mr Dupuy’s cob had somehow a strange habit of keeping
fifty yards ahead of the other horses, which gave its owner on this
particular occasion no little trouble. Harry and Nora followed behind
at a respectful distance; and Harry, who had bought a new horse of
his own the day before, and who brought up the rear on his fresh
mount, seemed curiously undesirous of putting his latest purchase
through its paces, as one might naturally have expected him to do
under the circumstances. On the contrary, he hung about behind most
unconscionably, delaying Nora by every means in his power; and Mr
Dupuy, looking back from his cob every now and again, grew almost weary
of calling out a dozen times over: ‘Now then, Nora, you can canter up
over this little bit of level, and catch me up, can’t you, surely?’

‘If it weren’t for the old gentleman,’ Harry thought to himself
more than once, ‘I really think I should take this opportunity of
speaking again to Nora’—he always called her ‘Nora’ in his own heart—a
well-known symptom of the advanced stages of the disease—though she was
of course ‘Miss Dupuy’ alone in conversation. ‘Or even if we were on a
decent English road, now, where you can ride two abreast, and have a
_tête-à-tête_ quite as comfortably as in an ordinary drawing-room! But
it’s clearly impossible to propose to a girl when she’s riding a whole
horse’s length in front of you on a one-horse pathway. You can’t shout
out to her: “My beloved, I adore you,” at the top of your voice, as
they do at the opera, especially with her own father—presumably devoted
to the rival interest—hanging ahead within moderate earshot.’ So Harry
was compelled to repress for the present his ardent declaration, and
continue talking to Nora Dupuy about Edward and Marian, a subject
which, as he acutely perceived, was more likely to bring them into
sympathy with one another than any alternative theme he could possibly
have hit upon.

Presently, they descended again upon the plain, and Mr Dupuy was just
about to rejoin them in a narrow lane, almost wide enough for three
abreast, and bordered by a prickly hedge of cactus and pinguin, when,
to Nora’s great surprise, Tom Dupuy, on his celebrated chestnut mare
Sambo Gal, came cantering up in the opposite direction, as if on
purpose to catch and meet them. Tom wasn’t often to be found away from
his canes at that time of day, and Nora had very little doubt indeed
that he had caught a glimpse of Harry and herself from Pimento Valley,
on the zigzag mountain path, without noticing her father on in front of
them, and had ridden out with the express intention of breaking in upon
their supposed _tête-à-tête_.

Mr Dupuy unconsciously prevented him from carrying out this natural
design. Meeting his nephew first in the narrow pathway, he was just
going to make him turn round and ride alongside with him, when Nora,
seized with a sudden fancy, half whispered to Harry Noel: ‘I’m not
going to ride with Tom Dupuy; I can’t endure him; I shall turn and ride
back in the opposite direction.’

‘We must tell your father,’ Harry said, hesitating.

‘Of course,’ Nora answered decidedly.—‘Papa,’ she continued, raising
her voice, ‘we’re going to ride back again and round by Delgado’s hut,
you know—the mountain-cabbage palm-tree way is so much prettier, and
I want to show it to Mr Noel. You and Tom Dupuy can turn and follow
us.—The cob always goes ahead, you see, Mr Noel, if once he’s allowed
to get in front of the other horses.’

They turned back once more in this reversed order, Nora and Harry Noel
leading the way, and Mr Dupuy, abreast with Tom, following behind
somewhat angrily, till they came to a point in the narrow lane where a
gap in the hedge led into a patch of jungle on the right-hand side. An
old negro had crept out of it just before them, carrying on his head,
poised quite evenly, a big fagot of sticks for his outdoor fireplace.
The old man kept the middle of the lane, just in front of them, and
made not the slightest movement to right or left, as if he had no
particular intention of allowing them to pass. Harry had just given
his new horse a tap with the whip, and they were trotting along to get
well in front of the two followers, so he didn’t greatly relish this
untoward obstacle thrown so unexpectedly in his way. ‘Get out of the
road, will you, you there!’ he shouted angrily. ‘Don’t you see a lady’s
coming? Stand aside this minute, my good fellow, and let her pass, I
tell you.’

Delgado turned around, almost as the horse’s nose was upon him, and
looking the young man defiantly in the face, answered with an obvious
sneer: ‘Who is you, sah, dat you speak to me like-a dat? Dis is de
Queen high-road, for naygur an’ for buckra. You doan’t got no right at
all to turn me off it.’

Harry recognised his man at once, and the hot temper of the
Lincolnshire Noels boiled up within him. He hit out at the fellow
with his riding-whip viciously. Delgado didn’t attempt to dodge the
blow—a negro never does—but merely turned his head haughtily, so that
the bundle of sticks pushed hard against the horse’s nose, and set it
bleeding with the force of the sudden turn. Delgado knew it would:
the sticks, in fact, were prickly acacia. The horse plunged and reared
a little, and backed up in fright against the cactus hedge. The sharp
cactus spines and the long aloe-like needles of the pinguin leaves
in the hedgerow goaded his flank severely as he backed against them.
He gave another plunge, and hit up wildly against Nora’s mount. Nora
kept her seat bravely, but with some difficulty. Harry was furious.
Forgetting himself entirely, he knocked the bundle of sticks off the
old man’s head with a sudden swish of his thick riding-crop, and then
proceeded to lay the whip twice or three times about Delgado’s ears
with angry vehemence. To his great surprise, Delgado stood, erect and
motionless, as if he didn’t even notice the blows. Appeased by what
he took to be the man’s submissiveness, Harry dug his heel into his
horse’s side and hurried forward to rejoin Nora, who had ridden ahead
hastily to avoid the turmoil.

‘He’s an ill-conditioned, rude, bad-blooded fellow, that nigger there,’
he said apologetically to his pretty companion. ‘I know him before.
He’s the very same man I told you of the other evening, that wouldn’t
pick my whip up for me the first day I came to Trinidad. I’m glad he’s
had a taste of it to-day for his continual impudence.’

‘He’ll have you up for assault, you may be sure, Mr Noel,’ Nora
answered earnestly. ‘And if Mr Hawthorn tries the case, he’ll give it
against you, for he’ll never allow any white man to strike a negro.
That man’s name is Delgado; he’s an African, you know—an imported
African—and a regular savage; and he had a fearful quarrel once with
papa and Tom Dupuy about the wages, which papa has never forgiven. But
Mr Hawthorn _does_ say’—and Nora dropped her voice a little—‘that he’s
really had a great deal of provocation, and that Tom Dupuy behaved
abominably, which of course is very probable, for what can you expect
from Tom Dupuy, Mr Noel?—But still’—and this she said very loudly ‘all
the negroes themselves will tell you that Louis Delgado’s a regular
rattlesnake, and you must put your foot firmly down upon him if you
want to crush him.’

‘If you put your foot on rattlesnake,’ Louis Delgado cried aloud from
behind, in angry accents, ‘you crush rattlesnake; but rattlesnake sting
you, so you die.’ And then he muttered to himself in lower tones: ‘An’
de rattlesnake has got sting in him tail dat will hurt dat mulatto man
from Englan’, still, dat tink himself proper buckra.’

Tom Dupuy and his uncle had just reached the spot when Louis Delgado
said angrily to himself, in negro soliloquy, this offensive sentence.
Tom reined in and looked smilingly at his uncle as Delgado said it. ‘So
you know something, too, about this confounded Englishman, you wretched
nigger you!’ he said condescendingly. ‘You’ve found out that our friend
Noel’s a woolly-headed mulatto, have you, Delgado?’

Louis Delgado’s eyes sparkled with gratified malevolence as he answered
with a cunning smile: ‘Aha, Mistah Tom Dupuy, you glad to hear dat,
sah! You want to get some information from de poor naygur dis ebenin’,
do you! No, no, sah; de Dupuys an’ me, we is not fren’; we is at
variance one wit de odder. I doan’t gwine to tell you nuffin’ at all,
sah, about de buckra from Englan’. But when mule kick too much, I say
to him often: “Ha, ha, me fren’, you is too proud. You tink you is
horse. I s’pose you doan’t rightly remember dat your own fader wasn’t
nuffin’ but a common jackass!”’

He loved to play with both his intended victims at once, as a cat plays
with a captured mouse before she kills it. Keep him in suspense as long
as you can—that’s the point of the game. Dandle him, and torture him,
and hold him off; but never tell him the truth outright, for good or
for evil, as long as you can possibly help it.

‘Do you really know anything,’ Tom Dupuy asked eagerly, ‘or are you
only guessing, like all the rest of us? Do you mean to tell me you’ve
got any proof that the fellow’s a nigger?—Come, come, Delgado, we may
have quarrelled, but you needn’t be nasty about it. I’ve got a grudge
against this man Noel, and I don’t mind paying you liberally for
anything you can tell me against him.’

But Delgado shook his head doggedly. ‘I doan’t want your money, sah,’
he answered with a slow drawl; ‘I want more dan your money, if I want
anyting. But I doan’t gwine to help you agin me own colour. Buckra for
buckra, an’ colour for colour! If you want to find out about him, why
doan’t you write to de buckra gentlemen over in Barbadoes?’

He kept the pair of white men there, dawdling and parleying, for twenty
minutes nearly, while Harry and Nora went riding away alone towards
the mountain cabbage-palms. It pleased Delgado thus to be able to hold
the two together on the tenter-hooks of suspense—to exercise his power
before the two buckras. At last, Tom Dupuy condescended to direct
entreaty. ‘Delgado,’ he said with much magnanimity, ‘you know I don’t
often ask a favour of a nigger—it ain’t the way with us Dupuys; it
don’t run in the family—but still, I ask you as a personal favour to
tell me whatever you know about this matter: I have reasons of my own
which make me ask you as a personal favour.’

Delgado’s eyes glistened horribly. ‘Buckra,’ he answered with a hideous
grin, dropping all the usual polite formulas, ‘I will tell you for true
den; I will tell you all about it. Dat man Noel is son ob brown gal
from ole Barbadoes. Her name is Budleigh, an’ her fam’ly is brown folks
dat lib at place dem call de Wilderness. I hear all about dem from
Isaac Pourtalès. Pourtalès an’ dis man Noel, dem is bot’ cousin. De man
is brown just same like Isaac Pourtalès!’

‘By George, Uncle Theodore!’ Tom Dupuy cried exultantly, ‘Delgado’s
right—right to the letter. Pourtalès is a Barbadoes man: his father
was one of the Pourtalèses of this island who settled in Barbadoes,
and his mother must have been one of these brown Budleighs. Noel
told us himself the other day his mother was a Budleigh—a Budleigh
of the Wilderness. He’s been over in Barbadoes looking after their
property.—By Jove, Delgado, I’d rather have a piece of news like that
than a hundred pounds!—We shall stick a pin, after all, Uncle Theodore,
in that confounded, stuck-up, fal-lal mulatto-man.’

‘It’s too late to follow them up by the mountain-cabbages,’ Mr Theodore
Dupuy exclaimed with an anxious sigh—how did he know but that at that
very moment this undoubted brown man might be proposing (hang his
impudence) to his daughter Nora?—‘it’s too late to follow them, if we
mean to dress for dinner. We must go home straight by the road, and
even then we won’t overtake them before they’re back at Orange Grove,
I’m afraid, Tom.’

Delgado stood in the middle of the lane and watched them retreating
at an easy canter; then he solemnly replaced the bundle of sticks on
the top of his head, spread out his hands and fingers in the most
expressively derisive African attitudes, and began to dance with
wild glee a sort of imaginary triumphal war-dance over his intended
slaughter. ‘Ha, ha,’ he cried aloud, ‘Wednesday ebenin’—Wednesday
ebenin’! De great and terrible day ob de Lard comin’ for true on
Wednesday ebenin’! Slay, slay, slay, an’ leave not one libbin’ soul
behind in de land ob de Amalekites. Dat is de first an’ de last good
turn I ebber gwine to do for Tom Dupuy, for certain. I doan’t want his
money, I tell him, but I want de blood ob him. On Wednesday night, I
gwine to get it. Ha, ha! We gwine to slay de remnant ob de Amalekites.’
He paused a moment, and poised the bundle more evenly on his head; then
he went on, walking homewards more quietly, but talking to himself
aloud, in a clear, angry, guttural voice, as negroes will do, under
the influence of powerful excitement. ‘What for I doan’t tell dat man
Noel himself dat he is mulatto when him hit me?’ he asked himself with
rhetorical earnestness. ‘Becase I doan’t want to go an’ spoil de fun ob
de whole discovery. If _I_ tell him, dat doan’t nuffin’—even before de
missy. Tom Dupuy is proper buckra: he hate Noel, an’ Noel hate him! He
gwine to tell it so it sting Noel. He gwine to disgrace dat proud man
before de buckras an’ before de missy!’

He paused again, and chewed violently for a minute or two at a piece of
cane he pulled out of his pocket; then he spat out the dry refuse with
a fierce explosion of laughter, and went on again: ‘But I doan’t gwine
to punish Noel like I gwine to punish de Dupuys an’ de missy. Noel is
fren’ ob Mistah Hawtorn, de fren’ ob de naygur: dat gwine to be imputed
to him for righteousness. In de great and terrible day, de angel gwine
to pass ober Noel, same as him pass ober de house ob Israel; but de
house ob de Dupuy shall perish utterly, like de house ob Pharaoh, an’
like de house ob Saul, king ob Israel, whose seed was destroyed out ob
de land, so dat not one ob dem left.’




THE MODERN PRIZE SYSTEM.


It may be accepted as a principle that the education question admits of
no final settlement in a state of progressive civilisation. Methods and
forms, possibly the outcome of much thought and effort, established in
one age, become cumbrous or altogether valueless in the next. They are
found unsuited to the requirements of the later period, during which a
demand has arisen for other kinds of knowledge, or for more advanced
teaching in subjects previously treated in an elementary manner only.
Hence it follows that the minds of enlightened nations become directed
to educational matters with a certain degree of periodicity: from time
to time the education question becomes a burning one.

The most superficial reader of the daily papers or magazines cannot
fail to have been struck latterly by the increasing attention bestowed
on such matters by the people of these countries. So decided an
influence is exerted by these considerations on the public just now,
that we find them furnishing a test in some districts for parliamentary
or other representatives. At social and literary gatherings, such
questions as the following are warmly discussed: Should the State
provide and maintain schools for the people, or should these be largely
left to individual enterprise, as at present?—Should State interference
take the form it has done in recent educational experiments, wherein
two universities and one gigantic scheme of intermediate education have
been framed on the lines of mere examining boards, disbursing public
prize-money?—What is the relative value of the kinds of instruction
ordinarily given in schools?—How may the desire for information be
aroused among the masses, and in what way may the stimulus be best
applied?

These and other questions of a kindred nature occupy the thoughts of
many at this time. It is not our present purpose to deal with the whole
question of education, but to consider very briefly one aspect of
it—namely, prizes and their distribution.

If we inquire what inducements are offered to pupils to excel in
special subjects or to proceed to higher branches of them, we find
that the same general plan is followed in all our institutions, from
the most elementary to the highest—namely, money prizes or their
equivalent in books or medals, the obtaining of which presupposes a
competitive examination. In most instances, the prize-money is paid in
cash to the successful candidate. The age in which we live is eminently
competitive, a fact early recognised by children at school, and still
better understood in after-life. In comparing ourselves with our
neighbours, may it not be a fact that we are an over-examined people?
We may further ask, are examinations always fair tests of ability? Is
the reward system, as we have it, the best means of promoting a higher
culture?

Those who have had any experience at all of examinations must have been
over and over again surprised at the order in which candidates known
to them are placed on the Honour list. There is a certain element of
chance about examinations rapidly conducted that cannot be eliminated,
and which may lead to the disappointment of the most confident hopes.
A diligent student, who has perhaps overtaxed himself physically in
preparation for, or who is over-anxious about the examination, fails
utterly, or is surpassed by some one of very superficial attainments.
It seems to us that the verdict of a teacher, or, to prevent
favouritism, of several teachers, as to the relative merits of the
pupils long under their training and observation, has some advantages
over the examination method at present in vogue, success in which is
as often attained by an unhealthy effort of ‘cramming,’ as by patient
and honest study. Doubtless, examinations for some purposes cannot be
entirely dispensed with, but must remain as necessary evils. Still,
their frequency could be reduced considerably with decided benefit to
the physical, and possibly also to the intellectual, condition of the
rising generation.

The second part of our question remains to be considered: Is the
present reward system the best means of promoting higher culture? Let
us suppose a case. There is a class of twenty pupils engaged upon a
subject for which a valuable prize is offered. Possibly seventeen of
these, from their former experience of their class-fellows, conclude
that the prize lies between the remaining three, and that there is
no use trying for it. The prize and perhaps the subject also have no
longer any interest for them; they cease to study, or at all events do
little. The three amongst whom the prize lies are the most diligent,
who probably like the subject, or learning generally for its own sake,
or who, from vanity or ambition, are anxious to excel. These are they
to whom the stimulus is applied; but they are the very pupils that
need no further stimulus. The spur is virtually withheld from those
requiring it, and applied to those who need it not.

If it be conceded that the need of reform is indicated in such
cases, we must avoid rushing to the opposite extreme in trying to
effect it. No one will suggest that the method of reward as applied
to donkey-races would meet the case. With our present light, we
are not prepared to recommend a thorough-going remedy. Much may,
however, be done for the cause of true culture by modifying the
distribution of prizes. The current notion of a prize is, that it
is a reward for something well done, due as soon as the meritorious
act is accomplished. Etymologically considered, the word conveys
nothing more than that. A higher estimate of the function of a prize
might advantageously be substituted for the one implied in the above
definition. If it were regarded as not merely a reward for something
past and done, but also as a stimulus to further effort in the same
direction, more lasting good might be effected, and a modification
of the present system of distribution would become a necessity. For
example: a large money prize obtained in a junior school, instead of
being paid directly to the successful candidate, might be divided into
two unequal sums, the smaller to provide a medal or book, &c., as a
tangible evidence of distinction; the larger, to be applied as fees
at a neighbouring high-school or college where the favourite subjects
could be studied for a longer period free of cost to the pupil. The
payment of the larger instalment could be made contingent upon the
successful candidate desiring to prosecute his studies further. In the
event of the pupil electing to abandon study in favour of trade or
business, or from mere disinclination, the medal, book, &c., showing
the position attained, might alone be presented, and the balance of the
prize-money be forfeited.

Among other benefits resulting from this scheme we might instance—that
cramming would be diminished to an appreciable extent. A common
practice nowadays with many who enter for prize examinations is
to hurriedly prepare a large number of subjects, selected more
with reference to their maximum of marks than to the tastes of the
pupil, then to obtain the coveted prize, and subsequently to forget
the mass of undigested information with which their memories have
been surfeited, possibly never to return without disgust to the
consideration of them.

We fancy such a modification as sketched above would influence
favourably those who select a subject for its own sake and are desirous
of knowing it perfectly. If successful in the elementary schools, the
means are gained for following it up in a more advanced one till it is
finally mastered, the information having been gradually imparted and
more perfectly assimilated. On the other hand, the scheme would rather
repel those alluded to before, who study hurriedly particular branches
solely for the sake of the money to be gained, only so long as this is
at once paid to them in the form of cash.

The plan recommended appears to be inconsistent with separate or
private educational enterprises, many of which depend for their
maintenance and efficiency on large fees. The want of uniformity in
constitution and management of elementary schools, and the want of
harmonious action resulting from the rivalry between them, scarcely
offer the proper conditions for the full development of the plan. In
a few large towns, where the relations between schools have rendered
its introduction possible, it has been eminently successful. Pupils of
marked intellectual power, belonging to the less opulent classes, have
been induced by the operation of this system to proceed from primary to
intermediate schools, and ultimately to the attainment of the highest
distinctions at the English universities; following specially at each
advancement the subjects of their choice.

Undoubtedly, a complete State-controlled educational scheme embracing
all grades would render possible the general adoption of this method of
applying large money prizes. In offering this suggestion as a plea in
favour of State education we must bear in mind that the State system
depends for its favourable reception on considerations of much greater
moment, which cannot in our present limits be discussed.




TREASURE TROVE.


A STORY IN FOUR CHAPTERS.—CHAP. III.

After a sleepless night of suspense and dread, Bertha, who was always
up first in the little household, lingered in her room until long after
her usual time, not daring to descend, for fear of meeting Jasper
Rodley, and only did so at the personal summons of her father, who
assured her that their visitor had gone.

Contrary to his usual habit, the captain was silent during breakfast;
and the girl’s heart, which had been brightened partly by the departure
of Jasper Rodley, and partly by the thought that it was Wednesday,
interpreted the silence of her father as ominous. After breakfast,
she began to prepare as usual for her weekly visit to Saint Quinians’
market.

‘Bertha,’ said her father, who had lighted his pipe and was stumping up
and down the room, ‘don’t hurry to-day. An hour or so cannot make much
difference. I want to speak to you.’

Pale and trembling, the girl took her seat at the open window, through
which streamed the early sunshine.

‘Jasper Rodley was talking to me for a long time last night,’ continued
the old man. ‘I think he is a nice young fellow, and I am sure you have
made an impression on him.’

Another person better versed in the art of approaching a delicate
subject would have chosen a more circuitous mode of procedure; but the
simple, blunt, old sailor knew very little about conversational wile
and artifice, and could only go straight to the point.

Bertha did not answer, but sat motionless, with her eyes fixed on the
shining rocks and the tumbling sea beyond.

So her father continued: ‘And I don’t think you could do better, in
case he should make any proposal to you about—about marriage, than
accept him. In fact, it is my wish that you should do so.’

Bertha remained silent for some moments; then she moved from her seat,
placed herself on the stool by her father’s side, took his hand in
hers, and said: ‘Father, my dearest wish is to please you and to do all
that you wish. I have but one other friend in the world besides you,
and no other relation. You have been the best of fathers to me, and I
have tried to be a good daughter to you; but I cannot, oh, I cannot
obey you in this!’

‘But, my lass,’ continued the old man, who was evidently moved by the
earnest manner in which the girl spoke, ‘Jasper Rodley is a man of a
thousand—good-looking, of respectable birth, and doing well. He would
make you happy, and another important thing—he would not take you from
me.’

‘Oh, it is not that, father—no, no!’ exclaimed the girl.

‘But you must have some reason for not liking him?’

‘Yes; I have the best of reasons, father. In the first place, you know
very little about him, or you could not speak so highly of him as you
do. He is a man of doubtful character, as you may find out by asking
any one in Saint Quinians. In the second place, I—I don’t love him, and
could never get to love him, or even like him. And in the third place’——

‘Well, lass, well?’

‘In the third place, I am betrothed to another.’

‘Betrothed to another!’ exclaimed her father in amazement. ‘Why, that
is impossible! You never see any one; no one ever comes here; and
I cannot believe that all this time you have been deceiving me by
carrying on a secret acquaintance, when you have so often protested
that you live for me, and me only.’

‘I have never dared tell you, father,’ cried the girl. ‘But it is a
weight off my mind, now that you know. And, father, remember that I am
not a child, and that, fond as I am of you and the old home, I could
not go through life without some love of another kind than that I feel
for you.’

Bertha had never spoken to her father in this style before, and the old
man looked at her with mingled astonishment and reproach. Then he said:
‘Bertha, I have particular reasons for wishing you to marry Jasper
Rodley: I am in his power.’

The girl recalled what Rodley had said to her on the previous
Wednesday, and knew now that there was a mystery in which her father
and Rodley were involved, a mystery which instinctively filled her
with dread that, during all these years of peace and quiet, something
had been enacted between them which had been carefully kept from her,
and that the interview of the previous evening was but the climax of a
long-gathering storm. Many little changes in her father’s manner and
habits during the past four years had mystified her; now they were
partially accounted for, and yet, to her recollection, she had never
seen Jasper Rodley before the present month.

‘In his power, father!’ she exclaimed. ‘How can you be in his power?’

‘That I cannot even tell you, my loved one.’

‘If you went out into the world, and had business dealings with
other men, I could perhaps understand that you, being so simple and
good-minded, might be drawn into the power of bad men, father,’ cried
Bertha. ‘But you see none but me; you get no letters; you never go even
into Saint Quinians, and yet you are in the power of a stranger!’

The old man shook his head, and continued: ‘It is kind of you, Bertha,
to say that I am good-minded; but I am a rogue.’

‘_You_ a rogue—my own, good, dear father!’ exclaimed the girl. ‘No, no!
Were a hundred Rodleys to swear on their knees that you were a rogue, I
would tell them they lied!’

‘Yet, it is true, lass,’ said the old man sadly; ‘and it is to save me
from the consequences of being a rogue, that I ask you to accept Jasper
Rodley’s offer of marriage. You have a week in which to decide.’

‘A week! Seven short days!’ cried his daughter, springing from her
seat. ‘But there is time. I must go, father, now; don’t keep me, for
every minute is of value.’

The old man would have said something; but she hurried from the room,
and in a few minutes had started.

Never before had the four miles between home and Saint Quinians
seemed so long to Bertha; never before had she trod the familiar road
unmindful of the beauties of nature around her, and on this April
morning nature was very beautiful; but she had no eyes for the majestic
green waves splintering into clouds of spray on the shining rocks,
for the white-winged birds riding on the swell, for the sweet-scented
herbage, or the blue sky glimmering between the dark branches of the
pines. Simply she gazed on the gray-walled, red-roofed old town ahead
of her, at the entrance of which some one would be waiting to greet
her with open arms and glad smile. And her heart felt a little sinking
as she gained the sandy eminence whence she generally got a first
sight of his figure coming to meet her, and saw no one! She was later
than usual, certainly; but he would have waited for her, she felt
assured. He was not under the archway, nor coming up the street from
the market-place; nor, when she arrived at the market-place, could she
descry him anywhere.

‘Ah, Miss Bertha!’ said one of her market-friends. ‘And how’s the poor
young gentleman gettin’ on?’

‘The poor young gentleman!’ repeated Bertha. ‘Why, Mrs Hardingson, who
do you mean?’

‘Why, who should I mean but Mr Symonds! Sure-ly you’ve heard of his
a-bein’ picked out of the South Fossy, half-dead and’——

Bertha almost dropped her baskets, and her blood ran cold within her;
then, without waiting to hear further details, she hurried away to
the office in which Harry was. The head partner received her with the
utmost urbanity, and corroborated what the market-woman had said,
stating, that when Harry did not appear at the office at the usual
hour, a messenger was sent to his lodgings, who returned with the
answer that nothing was known about him. Later in the day he was found
lying insensible in the Old Town Ditch. The gentleman added, that
although Harry had had a narrow escape, he was out of danger.

From the office, Bertha went to her lover’s lodgings. The servant told
her that Harry was in bed, very weak and excitable, but that the doctor
spoke hopefully.

She sent him up a long written message, reproaching him with having
kept the facts from her, and bidding him lose no precautions for
getting better, as she had urgent need of him, but avoiding all direct
allusion to what had taken place at home. A painfully scrawled answer
came back to her to the effect that the doctor had assured him that
within a week he ought to be able to get out, and sending her all sorts
of loving messages.

Brief as all this is to tell, Bertha found that she had spent nearly
two hours since her arrival in the town in finding out about Harry,
so that, when she turned again into the market-place to begin her
purchases, it was the usual hour when she was due at home; and by the
time she had finished, the church bells were chiming three o’clock. As
she turned out of the arch on to the homeward road, she felt bewildered
and upset by the events of the past few hours as she had never felt
before, and the central figure in the midst of her mental confusion was
that of Jasper Rodley. Instinctively, she associated him with what had
happened to Harry. All the circumstances pointed to him as being the
author of the harm—the anger in which the two young men had parted,
Harry’s avowed intention of getting an explanation from Rodley, and the
discovery of the former in the Town Ditch a few hours later. To such an
extent were her feelings worked up, that she dreaded arriving at home,
for fear that Jasper Rodley should be there to meet her and to push
his suit; and so, resolving to linger as long as possible, she turned
from the direct road over the sandhills, and struck into a more devious
path, which led amongst the rocks on the edge of the sea.

So busy was she communing with herself that she did not observe the
tide, which she imagined was receding, to be rising fast, and had
proceeded for two miles before she noticed that she was cut off from
the sandhills by a broad, deep, rapidly increasing sheet of troubled
water. For a moment she hesitated, yet not from fear, for familiarity
since early childhood with rocks and tides had saved her more than
once from a similar predicament, and had made her an expert in
rock-scrambling; but from the fact that her absence of mind had caused
her to miss the right path. However, she quickly decided; and in spite
of being heavily handicapped by the burden of two baskets, struck
straight up a ledge of fantastic rock which, she seemed to remember,
communicated even at high tide with the shore. But, to her horror and
dismay, when she arrived at the summit, she beheld a fast running,
angry current separating her from the sand, upon which, not a quarter
of a mile away, stood her father’s house. There was nothing to be done
but to make for the rocks which towered above her on her right hand,
and which she could see were never touched by the waves. Once up there,
and she was safe; but the getting there was a problem even for her with
her youthful strength and activity. As the rising water was already
lapping at her heels and would advance to a level some inches above
her head, there was no time for delay. Before starting, she shouted,
in order to attract the attention of some one in the house; but the
wind was blowing in her teeth, and she knew that she would need all her
breath for the climb before her.

It was a quarter of an hour’s race with the tide. At each one of
Bertha’s upward steps, the green water seemed to make a step. More than
once she slipped back, and was over her ankles in water; but at length
she reached her haven, and sank down on a table of dry rock, utterly
exhausted, her hands torn and bleeding, her dress in tatters and
drenched with water, safe from a fearful death, but face to face with
the prospect of having to pass long dark hours in a wild desolate spot,
and at the risk of being discovered by some of the lawless characters
who made the rocks their homes, their castles, and their storehouses.

It was some time before she was sufficiently recovered to examine her
place of refuge. When she did so, she found that she was on the very
edge of one steep cliff, and at the foot of another as high, but not
so inaccessible. She was well above the water, for, clinging to the
sides of the cliff and springing up between the clefts of the rocks,
were thick stunted bushes, and even here and there the tinted head of a
hardy flower. But suddenly her attention was drawn from the geography
of her surroundings to the mark of a boot on the patch of bright sand
behind the rock. A tremor seized her at first, for she imagined that
she must have chosen a smugglers’ haunt as her place of refuge; but her
fear turned into joy when she noticed that there was but the impression
of a left foot, and that the spot the right foot would have occupied
was marked by a hole such as the ferrule of a thick stick would make,
and she knew that the traces were those of her father. The marks came
up from below, and stopped abruptly at a thick bush. Something prompted
the girl to stir this bush with her foot, and, to her surprise, it
came away in a mass, and displayed an orifice in the rock just large
enough to admit of one man passing. Her curiosity was now aroused,
and overruling all considerations concerning her personal safety, and
the advisability of getting home as soon as possible, she entered the
opening, and found herself in a tolerably large cavern, the sandy floor
of which was covered with marks corresponding to those outside, but
which were especially numerous about a large round stone which, from
its dissimilarity to the material of the cavern, seemed to have been
brought from the beach below. Exerting all her strength, she moved the
stone, and staggered back with an expression of amazement. On a wooden
shelf placed in a hollow she beheld a dozen canvas bags, which, when
she lifted them, clinked with the unmistakable sound of coin. But what
startled her even more than the discovery itself was that each bag bore
upon it, in half-effaced letters, the words, ‘Faraday & Co., Saint
Quinians.’

A terrible light now broke upon her. Faraday & Co. were the bankers in
whose employ Harry Symonds had been when they were robbed four years
previously of three thousand pounds in sovereigns; and she too well
understood now what her father meant when he called himself a rogue,
and what was the nature of the influence which Jasper Rodley had over
him. She stood for some moments irresolute, sick at heart, her brain
in a whirl, and every limb trembling. How should she act? Nothing that
she could do would remove the fact that during the past four years her
father had been making use of coin which belonged to other people,
although, by taking the money away, she could screen him from the
public shame of having it in his possession. Oh! she thought, if Harry
could be with her but for five minutes to decide for her!

Daylight was fast fading away, so that every moment was of value. She
decided that she would get home as soon as possible, tell her father of
her discovery, persuade him to return the money to the bankers, making
up the deficit which he had used, and informing them how and where he
had found it. If this could be done without attracting the notice of
Jasper Rodley, she might defy him to do his worst, and clear her father
of all suspicion. So she replaced the stone, covered up the entrance to
the cave with the bush, and followed the marks on the thin sand-path,
which, to her joy led, over a ridge of rocks hitherto invisible to her,
to the shore. Scarcely had she passed along, when the figure of Jasper
Rodley rose from behind a rock close by the cavern entrance, his eyes
bright with malignant satisfaction at having watched all her movements
unseen.

Bertha found her father in a terrible state of anxiety, and she had to
explain how she had been overtaken by the tide on her homeward journey,
before she could broach the topic uppermost in her mind; and then,
just as she was about to tell the captain of her discovery, Mr Jasper
Rodley walked into the room, and announced his intention of staying the
night, so that she would have no opportunity of speaking to her father
in private until the next day.




WONDERS OF MEMORY.


If ‘all great people have great memories,’ as Sir Arthur Helps declares
in his delightful book entitled _Social Pressure_, it by no means
follows that all those who are possessed of great memories are ‘great
people.’ Many an instance might be cited to show that men of very
moderate intellectual capacity may be endowed with a power of memory
which is truly prodigious. In addition to this, there are plenty of
well-authenticated examples of the extraordinary power of memory
displayed even by idiots. In the Memoirs of Mrs Somerville there is a
curious account of a most extraordinary verbal memory. ‘There was an
idiot in Edinburgh,’ she tells us, ‘of a respectable family who had a
remarkable memory. He never failed to go to the kirk on Sunday; and on
returning home, could repeat the sermon, saying: “Here the minister
coughed; here he stopped to blow his nose.”—During the tour we made
in the Highlands,’ she adds, ‘we met with another idiot who knew the
Bible so perfectly, that if you asked him where such a verse was to be
found, he could tell without hesitation and repeat the chapter.’ These
examples are sufficiently remarkable; but what shall be said of the
case cited by Archdeacon Fearon in his valuable pamphlet on _Mental
Vigour_? ‘There was in my father’s parish,’ says the archdeacon, ‘a man
who could remember the day when every person had been buried in the
parish for thirty-five years, and could repeat with unvarying accuracy
the name and age of the deceased, with the mourners at the funeral.
But he was a complete fool. Out of the line of burials, he had but one
idea, and could not give an intelligible reply to a single question,
nor be trusted to feed himself.’

These phenomenal instances may be matched by the Sussex farm-labourer
George Watson, as we find recorded in Hone’s _Table Book_. Watson could
neither read nor write, yet he was wont to perform wondrous feats of
mental calculation, and his memory for events seemed to be almost
faultless. ‘But the most extraordinary circumstance,’ says Hone, ‘is
the power he possesses of recollecting the events of every day from an
early period of his life. Upon being asked what day of the week a given
day of the month occurred, he immediately names it, and also mentions
where he was and what was the state of the weather. A gentleman who had
kept a diary put many questions to him, and his answers were invariably
correct.’

Of a similar kind is the memory for which Daniel M‘Cartney has
become famous in the United States. The strange story of this man’s
achievements is told by Mr Henkle in the _Journal of Speculative
Philosophy_. M‘Cartney, in 1869, declared that he could remember the
day of the week for any date from January 1827, that is, from the time
when he was nine years and four months old—forty-two and a half years.
He has often been tested, and, so far as Mr Henkle’s account goes,
had not failed to tell his questioner ‘what day it was,’ and to give
some information about the weather, and about his own whereabouts and
doings on any one of the fifteen thousand or more dates that might be
named. When Mr Henkle first met this man of marvellous memory, he was
employed in the office of the Honourable T. K. Rukenbrod, editor of the
_Salem Republican_, where nothing better could be found for M‘Cartney
to do than ‘turn the wheel of the printing-press on two days of each
week.’ On the first formal examination this man underwent, his answers
were tested by reference to the file of a newspaper which gave the
day of the week along with the date. In one case his statement was
disputed, for the day he named was not the same as that given by the
paper; but on further inquiry, it was found that the newspaper was
wrong, for the printer had made a mistake. Short-hand notes of the
conversation were taken at subsequent interviews. The report of these
is very curious reading. Take the following as a sample. ‘_Question._
October 8, 1828? _Answer_ (in two seconds), Wednesday. It was cloudy
and drizzled rain. I carried dinner to my father where he was getting
out coal.—_Question._ February 21, 1829? _Answer_ (in two seconds),
Saturday. It was cloudy in the morning, and clear in the afternoon;
there was a little snow on the ground. An uncle who lived near sold a
horse-beast that day for thirty-five dollars.’ And so the conversation
ran on for hours, ranging over forty years of M‘Cartney’s personal
history. Mr Henkle tells us that if he went over some of the dates
again, after a few days’ interval, the answers, although given in
different terms, were essentially the same, ‘showing distinctly that he
remembered the facts, and not the words previously used.’ M‘Cartney’s
memory is not confined to dates and events; he is a rare calculator,
can give the cube root of such numbers as 59, 319; or 571, 787, &c.;
can repeat some two hundred and fifty hymns, and start about two
hundred tunes; has a singularly extensive and accurate knowledge of
geography, and never forgets the name of a person he has once seen or
read of. With all this singular power of memory, however, he is not a
man whose general grasp of mind is at all noteworthy.

The same may be said of scores of men whose one rich gift of memory has
brought them into prominence. No one has claimed any high intellectual
rank for the renowned ‘Memory Corner Thompson,’ who drew from actual
memory, in twenty-two hours, at two sittings, in the presence of
two well-known gentlemen, a correct plan of the parish of St James,
Westminster, with parts of the parishes of St Marylebone, St Ann, and
St Martin; which plan contained every square, street, lane, court,
alley, market, church, chapel, and all public buildings, with all
stable and other yards, also every public-house in the parish, and
the corners of all streets, with all minutiæ, as pumps, posts, trees,
houses that project and inject, bow-windows, Carlton House, St James’s
Palace, and the interior of the markets, without scale or reference to
any plan, book, or paper whatever; who undertook to do the same for
the parishes of St Andrew, Holborn, St Giles-in-the-Fields, St Paul’s,
Covent Garden, St Mary-le-Strand, St Clement’s, and St George’s; who
could tell the corner of any great leading thoroughfare from Hyde Park
corner or Oxford Street to St Paul’s; who could ‘take an inventory
of a gentleman’s house from attic to ground-floor and write it out
afterwards. He did this at Lord Nelson’s at Merton, and at the Duke of
Kent’s, in the presence of two noblemen.’

Turning, now, from examples like the foregoing, which have been given
to show that a great memory does not argue in all cases any unusual
mental power in other directions, let us look at some of the ‘great
people’ whose ‘great memories’ illustrate the correctness of Sir
Arthur Helps’s dictum. Running over a long list of examples, which the
writer has prepared for his own use in the study of this subject, he
has been struck with the fact, that the last three or four centuries
appear to much greater advantage in this review than any similar period
which preceded them. This, after all, is not surprising, when the
circumstances of modern life are carefully considered; but it is not in
accordance with common opinion. There is a notion abroad that the power
of memory has declined since the invention of writing, and especially
since the invention of printing and the universal spread of cheap books
and newspapers. Nothing could be more mistaken than such a supposition.
If we do not nowadays use the memory as the only registry of facts
within our reach, we _do_ use the memory even more than the ancients,
for the simple reason that our knowledge travels over an immeasurably
wider area, we have more to remember, and, as civilisation and culture
advance, a good memory becomes more and more needful for the work of
life; the general level of intelligence is being raised, and mental
power is developed from age to age. In this general advancement and
growth, memory has its share.

The verbal memory displayed by the old Greek rhapsodists and bards, or
the Icelandic scalds, was undoubtedly remarkable, and is often held up
to the envy of these degenerate days. Yet the modern Shah-nama-Khans,
Koran Khans, and other singers and reciters of Persia, who ‘will recite
for hours together without stammering,’ and the Calmuck national bards,
whose songs and recitations ‘sometimes last a whole day,’ cannot surely
be a whit behind, if indeed they do not far surpass the prodigies of
early ages. We are often reminded of Greek gentlemen who knew their
Homer by heart, in the days when Homer occupied the field almost alone
and there was little else to learn. But what are their exploits by
the side of men like Joseph Justus Scaliger, who ‘committed Homer to
memory in twenty-one days, and the whole Greek poets in three months?’
Casaubon says of Scaliger: ‘There was no subject on which any one could
desire instruction which he was not capable of giving. He had read
nothing which he did not forthwith remember. So extensive and accurate
was his acquaintance with languages, that if during his lifetime he had
made but this single acquisition, it would have appeared miraculous.’

Since the revival of learning in Europe, there have been scores,
yea, hundreds of scholars who have known ‘their Homer’ by heart and
a thousand other things besides. Bishop Saunderson, old Isaac Walton
tells us, could repeat all the odes of Horace, all Tully’s _Offices_,
and the best part of Juvenal and Persius. Euler the mathematician
and Leibnitz the philosopher could recite the _Æneid_ from beginning
to end. In their day, Porson, Elmsley, Parr, and Wakefield, held the
foremost place as scholars, and all, of course, had rare memories; but
the palm must be given to Porson, of whom endless stories are told.
Before he went to Eton, he was able to repeat almost the whole of
Horace, Virgil, Homer, Cicero, and Livy. When, as a practical joke, a
school-fellow slipped the wrong book into Porson’s hand, just as he was
about to read and translate, the boy was not disconcerted, but went on
to read from his memory, as if nothing had occurred. In later life, his
performances approached the miraculous. It would require all our space
to give any fair idea of them; for he not only knew all the great Greek
poets and prose writers pretty well by heart, but could recite whole
plays of Shakspeare, or complete books from _Paradise Lost_, Pope’s
_Rape of the Lock_, Barrow’s sermons, scenes from Foote, Edgeworth’s
_Essay on Irish Bulls_, scores of pages from Gibbon or Rapin. He is
also said to have been able to repeat the whole of the _Moral Tale of
the Dean of Badajoz_, and Smollett’s _Roderick Random_ from the first
page to the last.

Gilbert Wakefield’s memory was also of the gigantic order, but it will
not bear comparison with Porson’s. There were few passages in Homer
or Pindar which he could not recite at a moment’s notice; Virgil and
Horace he knew perfectly; and he could recite entire books from the
Old and New Testaments without halting or failing in a single verse.
There was also John Wyndham Bruce, whose leisure time was devoted to
classical studies. His chief favourite was Æschylus, the whole of whose
plays he had learnt by heart, including the twelve hundred lines of
the _Agamemnon_ collated by Robertellus. He knew his Horace in the
same way, and was quite content, until one day he met with an old
fellow-student at Bonn, who, when he made a quotation, would mention
book, ode, and verse, remarking, that he did not regard any one as
knowing Horace properly unless he could do that. Mr Bruce accordingly
set to work at Horace again, and was not long before he could name the
exact place occupied by a line in any of the famous odes. It would
be hard to believe that Athenian lads could beat the English lads of
fourteen years and under, of whom Archdeacon Fearon tells us in the
pamphlet referred to above. It was the custom in the school to which
he went for the boys to repeat at the end of one of the terms all the
Latin and Greek poetry they had learnt during the year. The usual
quantity for a boy to go in with was from eight to ten thousand lines,
and it took about a week to hear them. ‘One boy in my year,’ he says,
‘repeated the enormous quantity of fourteen thousand lines of Homer,
Horace, and Virgil. I heard him say it.’

Ease in learning foreign languages is sometimes regarded as a mere
matter of memory; while, however, this is not exactly true, it must
be allowed, of course, that skilful linguists are endowed with powers
of memory beyond the average. Here, also, we find that there are no
examples in ancient times that will stand comparison with our great
modern linguists. Our modern facilities for travel and study place us
at an immense advantage. Crassus, when prætor in Asia, was so familiar
with the dialects of Greek, that he was able to try cases and pronounce
judgment in any dialect that might chance to be spoken in his presence.
‘Mithridates, king of twenty-two nations, administered their laws in as
many languages,’ and could harangue each division of his motley array
of soldiers in its own language or dialect.

But what are such linguists as these by the side of the best examples
of recent times? Keeping within the limits of the last hundred years,
we have examples that have never been surpassed or even approached
in former times. Sir William Jones knew thirteen languages well, and
could read with comparative ease in thirty others. John Leyden, a very
inferior man to his great contemporary, had a good acquaintance with
fifteen of the leading European and Asiatic languages. Within the last
few years we have lost two men who could have travelled from the hills
of Connemara or the mountains of Wales to the Ural Mountains, or from
Lisbon or Algiers to Ispahan or Delhi, and hardly met with a language
in which they could not converse or write with ease. The reader will
most likely have anticipated the names of two of the most remarkable
linguists this country has produced—George Borrow and Edward Henry
Palmer. When Borrow was at St Petersburg, he published a little book
called _Targum_, in which he gave translations in prose and poetry from
thirty different languages. Besides speaking the native tongue of every
European nation, Palmer was so perfect a master of Arabic, Persian,
Hindustani, Turkish, and the language of the gipsies, that even natives
were sometimes deceived as to his nationality. Mr Leland says that, one
day in Paris, Palmer ‘entered into conversation with a Zouave or Turco,
a native Arab. After a while the man said: “Why do you wear these
clothes?”—“Why, how should I dress?” exclaimed Palmer.—“Dress like what
you are!” was the indignant reply—“like a _Muslim_!”’

Viscount Strangford may be placed in the same category with these; and
the ‘learned blacksmith’ Elihu Burritt, whose friends claim for him
that he knew all the languages of Europe and most of those of Asia,
must not be left out of sight. But even these do not touch the highest
limit of linguistic skill and power of memory. The most scientific
linguist we have to name, and one of the most remarkable for the
extent of his acquisitions, is Von der Gabelentz, who seems to have
been equally at home with the Suahilis, the Samoyeds, the Hazaras, the
Aimaks, the Dyaks, the Dakotas, and the Kiriris; who could translate
from Chinese into Manchu, compile a grammar or correct the speech of
the inhabitants of the Fiji Islands, New Hebrides, Loyalty Islands,
or New Caledonia. When we come to Cardinal Mezzofanti and Sir John
Bowring, we find the ‘highest record’ as regards the mere number and
variety of tongues that men have been known to acquire. No one can
speak with absolute certainty as to the number of languages Mezzofanti
could converse in with ease. Mrs Somerville says that he professed only
fifty-two.

This brief review of the subject necessarily leaves out of account a
vast number of the most extraordinary and interesting examples. Artists
like Horace Vernet; mathematicians and calculators like Dr Wallis
and Leonard Euler, or G. P. Bidder and young Colburn; musicians like
Mozart; newspaper reporters like the unequalled ‘Memory Woodfall;’
literary men like Lord Macaulay and T. H. Buckle; chess-players like
Paul Morphy and J. H. Blackbourne, have accomplished feats of memory as
marvellous as any of those which have been mentioned.




A TRICK AT THE HELM.


    DEAR BOB,—Come and lend me a hand, like a good fellow. The regatta
    here takes place the day after to-morrow, and the _Redbreast_ is
    entered for it. There will be a very fair show of other crack
    ‘Fives’ for her to try her speed against, and I am more eager than
    usual to carry off the first prize. I think I ought to do it, if
    I can get a first-rate hand like yourself to come and help. You
    recollect my telling you how that crack-brained Irishman O’Gorman
    offered to bet me a hundred pounds that he would carry off as
    many first prizes as I would this season, and how, in a moment
    of irritation, I took the bet? Well, it has come to this—that we
    have each won nine prizes, and that Dartmouth Regatta is the last
    of the season. He can’t possibly be here in the _Cruiskeen Lawn_,
    and consequently, the regatta represents considerably more to me
    than the twenty pounds which they offer for the winning boat. The
    _Redbreast_ is out and away the best five-tonner here at present;
    and unless some wonderful crack arrives between this and then, my
    first prize and my bet ought to be a certainty, bar accidents. But
    I want you. Your experience of this part of the coast is greater
    than mine, and will be invaluable to me; and though Phipps is with
    me, and is a right good fellow in a race, still, he has not your
    skill and knowledge. Besides these weighty reasons, I want very
    much to show you my new little craft, and to enjoy a good dusting
    down together once more. So, just pack your bag, and come for three
    days at least, if you can’t spare more, to your old chum,

            JACK HETHERINGTON.

Such was the letter—dated ‘YACHT _Redbreast_, DARTMOUTH’—which
the Honourable Robert Mervyne took from his pocket more than once
to peruse, as the train rolled him along the lovely Great Western
coast-line, in answer to his friend’s appeal. He was a fine
broad-shouldered fellow, had pulled in his College Eight at Oxford,
and, since that semi-boyish period, had done a great deal of genuine
yachting-work, especially in Corinthian matches in the lower reaches
of the Thames, where he had acquired a skill and experience in the
handling of small craft under racing canvas which fully justified the
confidence which Hetherington reposed in him. Moreover, the coasts of
Devon were well known to him; and to the local knowledge of the pilot
and the technical skill of the yacht-sailor, he added that quickness
of resource which so often makes the gentleman the superior of the
professional. He was delighted at the opportunity afforded him by his
friend’s letter, and had not hesitated a moment in complying with the
request conveyed therein. They were, in fact, far too old chums for
either to fail the other at a pinch; and though it was near the end
of August, he would still have time to get back for the First. So he
smoked his cigar and gazed out at the glancing waters of the sparkling
sea, as he whirled by Dawlish and Teignmouth towards the little
old-fashioned town of Dartmouth, and allowed his thoughts to roam far
ahead in pleasing anticipation of the delights of the coming struggle
for the prize.

As the shades of evening drew on, the train ran into the neglected
little station at Kingswear, and Mervyne found Hetherington waiting
for him on the platform; but, to his surprise, there was a decided
lack of cheerfulness on his countenance, which seemed to betoken some
unpleasant news in the background. It was not long in coming forward.
Hardly had his friend’s modest bag been carried into the hotel—for
the little _Redbreast_ afforded poor accommodation for any but her
owner—than the cause of his gloom came out.

‘It is awfully good of you to come down, old chap,’ he said; ‘but I’m
afraid it’s a wild-goose chase after all, for I’m sorry to say that I
can’t possibly sail to-morrow. It’s a dreadful nuisance,’ he added,
‘and a disgusting piece of roguery to boot.’

‘Why, what’s the matter?’ asked Mervyne in surprise. ‘Have they
disqualified the _Redbreast_, or knocked a hole in her, or what has
happened?’

‘No,’ said his friend; ‘nothing of that sort. It’s a bit of dirty
underhand scheming on the part of that fellow O’Gorman, confound
him! Knowing that he could not get over from Ireland himself to try
conclusions with me, he has got that cad Brewster, the fellow who owns
the _Cockyollybird_, and made himself so notorious at Southampton—to
come round and sail against me; and I hear from the Wight that he left
there three or four days ago with one or two of his own set, vowing
that he will show me the way round the course, and knock one hundred
pounds out of me into the bargain.’

‘Well, but,’ said Mervyne, ‘we ain’t going to be frightened by
Brewster’s brag. Being abroad all this summer, I have not seen the
_Cockyollybird_; but from her record, the _Redbreast_ ought to have a
very fair chance against her.’

‘Yes, yes! It isn’t that; though, I fancy, she’s a trifle better than
we are in running,’ replied Hetherington. ‘But after that disgraceful
affair at Southampton, a lot of small yacht-owners, myself among the
number, put their heads together, and signed an agreement never to race
against him again. One or two of those men are in the harbour now, and
they won’t sail if he does, neither of course can I. I’m pretty sure
that O’Gorman knew that when he got him to come round; and of course he
knows it too.’

‘Then why should he boast so loudly about beating you?’

‘Oh, that’s just to carry it off with a high hand, and appear to be
ignorant of the fact.’

‘And the _Cockyollybird_ is in?’

‘Well, no; she isn’t; but she’s entered for the race, and she is sure
to be here, bar accidents.’

‘She must look pretty sharp, then,’ said Mervyne, ‘or she may be too
late. Keep your courage up, old chap! Perhaps she won’t get in, after
all. Lots of things may happen between this and to-morrow morning.—But
look here! Suppose she _does_ come in, what shall you do? You can’t
race—of course, I see that, and I’m sorry for it; but I should like a
bit of a sail, after coming all this way, and I want to see how the
little craft behaves.’

‘Oh, by all means,’ replied Hetherington eagerly. ‘I had thought of
that. I can’t lie in harbour and see all the craft going out to race;
and I don’t think I could bear to see the racing going on without being
able to join in it. I vote for getting under way early in the morning,
and making tracks to the eastwards. I mean to lay her up with Camper
and Nicholson, and there is nothing more to keep me out now, confound
it!’

‘Capital! that will suit me first-rate. What time do you start?’

‘Oh, any time in the early morning will do. The tide will be flowing
about four A.M. But I daresay you won’t like to turn out as early as
that.—Tell you what—you’d better choose your own time to come on board,
and then you can rouse me out, if I’m not already up.’

‘All right! But what about Phipps?’

‘Oh, he won’t come with us. I’ve told him about Brewster, and, of
course, he’s very sorry; but the Carmichael girls are here in a big
family schooner with an uncle of theirs; and you may be sure Phipps
wouldn’t let that chance slip. So it will be just you and I, that’s
all. And now, let’s jump into the punt, and go on board for ten
minutes, just to show you the little craft.’

So the two friends paddled off to the _Redbreast_, which was lying
snugly under the land by the railway with other small craft of similar
size and draught; and after the peculiar excellences of her interior
fittings had been inspected by the aid of the little swing-lamp—for
it was now nearly dark—and dilated upon enthusiastically by her
owner, they went once more ashore together to dine at the hotel, and
pass the evening over a game of billiards at the neighbouring Yacht
Club. But as they landed, their attention was attracted by a smart
little craft making the best of her way up the calm waters of the
land-locked harbour in tow of a steam-launch. Hetherington looked at
her long and earnestly; at last he said: ‘Ah, there she is! That’s the
_Cockyollybird_, and that’s Brewster steering, confound him! It’s all
up now. We’ll get out of this to-morrow morning.’

They dined; but their quiet game of billiards at the club was rudely
broken in upon by the appearance of the objectionable Brewster
himself, with a couple of friends of similar kidney, who had also
most unmistakably been dining, and who, in addition to their natural
bluster and vulgarity, made themselves more than usually disagreeable
by half-facetious and wholly offensive observations as to the victory
which they intended to score on the morrow, and the humiliation
which they would inflict on those who imagined that they could sail
against them; while ‘my friend O’Gorman’ was frequently referred to by
Brewster himself, evidently for Hetherington’s benefit; and whispered
personalities were greeted by the precious trio with loud bursts of
drunken laughter.

‘I’d like to punch the fellow’s head,’ growled Hetherington to his
friend, chafing angrily at the covert insults.

‘Better let him alone,’ said the other. ‘There’s no glory to be got out
of a row with a drunken sweep like that. He knows he’s an arrant cad,
and it is that very knowledge which makes him carry on like this. Let’s
leave them to enjoy themselves in their own way; and we’ll go and turn
in, as we shall be up early to-morrow.’

So each went his way: Hetherington to his tiny yacht, the other to the
hotel close by.

Mervyne was an ardent yachtsman, as has been said; and perhaps it was
the anticipations of the morrow which made it impossible for him to
take the rest which he had himself advised. Whatever the reason was,
after tossing about for some hours in troubled and unrestful sleep,
he finally found himself wide awake, and likely to remain so; and at
last, jumping out of bed, he threw open his window and keenly inspected
the weather. There was every prospect of a glorious day. He looked at
his watch—it was about four o’clock. The sun had not yet risen; but
the sky was clear and luminous with stars, and, as far as he could
tell, there was a light breeze from the westward. He looked over the
water. The riding lights of the crowded yachts were twinkling away, as
if a town had sprung up in the night on the calm silent waters of the
river. The hoarse hoot of a steamer caught his ear, and he could see
her green eye winking at him as she made her cautious way in mid-stream
to the expectant coal-hulk beyond. He could hear even the tinkle of
her engine-room bell and the husky cry of ‘Starboard!’ from the pilot
who was bringing her in; and as he leaned out of the window to follow
her track, a man-of-war brig struck ‘eight bells’ with a clear musical
ring, an example which was followed a second or two after by her
consorts in the harbour, and by some few large yachts who conformed to
naval fashion in this matter. He turned from the window and glanced
into the dim room. At the other end was his bed, looking tumbled and
unpromising, even in the gloom. He was too wide awake to turn in again.
His mind was made up. The tide would be flowing; the wind seemed fair;
he would dress and rouse up Hetherington, and they would get under way
at once.

His determination was quickly carried out; and he soon found himself
outside the hotel in search of a waterman to take him on board. This
was by no means an easy task; but by the aid of a railway porter, he
managed at last to knock up an individual, who consented, with many
sleepy growls at the unusual hour, to convey him on board. Arrived
alongside, he stepped lightly on the dainty deck, dismissing his surly
friend with a tip so largely in excess of that worthy’s expectations,
as to make him instantly regret not having named a sum double at least
of that which he had demanded. It was getting lighter now; and he
took in at a glance the delicate lines, the admirable workmanship, and
the business-like spars of the little craft, and then turned towards
the hatch to rouse up his chum. But as he did so, he hesitated for the
first time since leaving his bed. Hetherington was probably sleeping
soundly. It would be a shame to spoil his sleep simply because he
himself had failed to rest. He listened for a moment: he could hear
Hetherington snoring away in the little cabin. Then another idea struck
him. Why not get under way himself, without bothering Hetherington at
all? Capital! it would be first-rate fun! He took a look round. The
yacht was made fast to some private moorings, so he would not have to
get her anchor up. He could easily make sail himself. Hetherington
would be delighted to wake up and find himself at sea—that he was sure
of. It was an admirable idea.

No sooner was the notion entertained, than it was put into execution.
His rubber-soled shoes enabled him to walk over the deck with an entire
absence of noise. He took off the sail-covers, and with his broad
shoulders and muscular arms, he found no difficulty in hoisting her
mainsail, though perhaps there was a wrinkle or two which he would
have preferred to get rid of. Her head-sails were mere child’s-play;
and presently, he cast off her moorings, lowered them quietly
overboard, and hurried aft to the tiller. With a gentle breeze from the
north-west, the pretty boat yielded to the pressure of her snow-white
canvas, and with an almost imperceptible incline to her mast, moved
quietly out from the crowd of others among which she had been lying.
Silently she slid through the placid and unruffled waters of the river,
splashed with the white light of many a bright star, and with the
redder gleams of the many riding-lamps, obeying every touch of her helm
so readily as to send a thrill of pleasure through Mervyne’s veins as
he cleverly worked her into the open and pointed her head seawards.
And indeed, with a lovely yacht beneath one’s feet, with a fair wind,
a calm sea, and a brilliant promise of dawn, the man must be sluggish
indeed who does not experience a keen sense of enjoyment.

Once clear of the river and with a good offing, he turned her head
eastwards, making a course for Portland Bill. The wind was, as he had
imagined, in the north-west, and it being off the land, and by no
means strong, the sea was extremely smooth and in places even glassy.
The little beauty sped along on her course, making no fuss whatever,
peeling the bright water evenly away from the polished surface of her
sharp bow, and running it aft with a gentle little hiss, and only the
faintest, dimmest suggestion of a shadowy wake astern. Mervyne would
have liked to get her topsail up, but this he could not well attempt
alone, and he feared to wake Hetherington, for, having got out of the
harbour, he was now possessed with a boyish desire to see how far on
his course he could reach before his chum awoke: however, the tide was
in his favour, and he was making splendid way as it was, so, lighting
his pipe, he gave himself up to all the exquisite enjoyment of the
situation. The beautiful coast, with its brilliant colouring of vivid
green and warm red, familiar to him as an oft studied book, was itself
a constantly changing object of interest and admiration; each trawler,
with the early sun gleaming through the shining mists of morning upon
her tanned canvas, was transfigured into a fairy barque, with sails
of red and burnished gold. Even the long ugly steamers, with their
graduated train of smoke fading away into the limitless haze astern
of them, betrayed no vestige of their commonplace origin, but seemed
to float in mid-air, shadowy and impalpable, throwing ever and anon
a gleam of light from off their bows, more like a flash of summer
lightning than the foam of churning water; while the buoyant motion of
the little craft beneath him, the noiseless speed with which she sliced
her way through the dimpling wavelets, the instant and intelligent
response which she gave to the faintest movement of the helm, left him
absolutely without a shadow to dim his sense of placid contentment.

He began to hope that Hetherington would sleep on for ever. So he
smoked on, and noted with satisfaction that with the rising sun the
breeze was freshening fast: little waves now lifted up their smiling
heads and plashed playfully at the pretty craft as she cut through
them; the tall mast inclined more decidedly before the eager wind;
and the foot of the mainsail began its welcome chorus of flip-flip,
flip-flip-flip as the breeze poured out of it. Berry Head was long
past; Torbay was crossed; the Thatcher and the Oarstone were left faint
and filmy in the far distance on the port quarter, and now the little
vessel was getting a trifle more lively as the water deepened and the
wind increased and the shore receded further and further; and still
Hetherington slept. Mervyne could still hear him snoring at times.
It was rather odd, he thought. Lazy fellow! He need not have been so
careful not to wake him. He wondered what time it was. He took out his
watch. Eight o’clock! And he was getting hungry too. He had better wake
him; so, without leaving the helm, he began thumping over his chum’s
head on the deck with a stick. ‘Hi! Hetherington! Jack! Wake up! Turn
out! Get up, you lazy dog! Eight bells, do you hear?’

But not a sound did he evoke in response; only, as he stopped and
listened, the same loud snoring broke upon his ear. Very odd!
Hetherington was not usually so late or so heavy a sleeper. Next he
slid back the hatch and shouted loudly to his chum to rouse up. Still
no answer—still the same stertorous breathing.

‘Why on earth don’t he wake?’ said Mervyne to himself, and, trusting
the yacht to steer herself for a moment or two, he dived down the
little hatchway and entered the tiny cabin. It was empty! He stared
around in blank astonishment, nearly amounting to dismay, and as he did
so, a snore of almost gigantic volume assailed his ears. It came from
the forecastle. This was more surprising than ever, for Hetherington,
he knew, had no crew on board. An enthusiastic yachtsman, he, in true
Corinthian spirit, worked his little craft himself, with the assistance
of one or two good friends and fellow-spirits like Phipps—no paid
hands being permitted on board during a Corinthian race—and even when
cruising, scrubbed decks and polished brasswork with his own hands,
sleeping also on board in harbour, unlike men of more luxurious habits,
who generally preferred the comforts of a hotel to the straitened
accommodation of a five-tonner, even when it was their own.

Where, then, was Hetherington? and who was the occupant of the
forecastle? He slid aside the little door which separated the cabin
from the quarter assigned to the crew, when such an individual existed,
and looked in. It was very dark in the little close den, but he could
just discern a hammock stretched fore and aft under the deck, and in
that hammock a bearded being sleeping a riotous sleep. He went up to
the hammock and shook it. ‘Here! rouse up, here! Where’s your master?’
he cried.

The figure grunted, shifted its position slowly and uneasily, and
seemed inclined to settle once more into repose, but the shaking being
repeated and continued with increasing violence, a weather-stained,
lurid, and sodden countenance, set in a wild tangle of hair and beard,
appeared over the edge of the hammock, and after staring stupidly with
vacant eyes a moment or two into the gloom, inquired thickly and with
gin-saturated utterance, ‘Wash up?’ and then falling heavily back on
its pillow, instantly resumed its state of stertorous insensibility.
The man was hopelessly and helplessly drunk. But who could he be?

At that moment, a terrible suspicion flashed through Mervyne’s mind
like an electric shock. He turned, and bolted through the little cabin
and up on deck like a shot. The first thing that caught his eye as he
faced aft was the brass rudder-head, and on it, in necessarily small
letters, unperceived by him before, was the one word, _Cockyollybird_.
It was the wrong yacht!

       *       *       *       *       *

Hetherington and Phipps both agree in asserting that they never had
such a race as that in which they won the first prize at Dartmouth; but
the former also adds that that fellow O’Gorman gave a lot of trouble
before paying up the hundred pounds.




CHINA GRASS-CLOTH.


The well-known and popular China, or Chinese, grass-cloth, specimens
of which, generally in the shape of handkerchiefs, are brought home by
most travellers in the East, is now likely to become yet more popular
and have a far more extensive market in Europe than was formerly the
case. This China grass—_soie végétal_, the French call it—is the fibre,
not of a grass, but of a species of nettle, the _Bœhmeria nivea_ and
other specimens of the _urtica_. These nettles are carefully cultivated
in China, where they grow in great quantities, as they do in India
and Ceylon. In India, hitherto, unfortunately, no marked or diligent
attempt at cultivation has been made. These _urticas_ are perennial
herbaceous plants, having broad oval leaves, with a white down beneath.
They are also free from the stinging character of ordinary nettles. In
Ceylon and India, where the plants grow wild, these nettles are cut
just about the time of seeding, bleached by the assistance of the heavy
night-dews and hot mid-day suns, and the fibres gathered together and
spun into ropes or thin twine, from which coarse matting is made. This
primitive way of treating the nettles is not followed in China, and
indeed the employment of the fibre-silk for commercial purposes seems
to be a Chinese secret.

The government of India, seeing what a great benefit might be expected
to arise could a practical and inexpensive method of gathering the
‘vegetable silk’ be found, offered some time back a reward to stimulate
inventors in discovering an economical method for preparing the fibre
of the China grass. Such discovery has at last been made; three French
gentlemen have been successful in perfecting two different inventions
which would seem to completely meet the existing difficulty. Messieurs
Frémy and Urbain of Paris have invented a method for converting
the fibres of the plants into _filasse_ ready for spinning. This
method, however, would not have been of much use had not a M. Favier
constructed a machine for gathering these fibres by decorticating the
stems of the nettles by means of steam. Thus, the fibre is not only
collected cheaply and easily, but the glutinous matter adhering to
it, and which proved such a stumbling-block to our manufacturers, is
removed at the same time. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance
of these inventions. The _urtica_ grows in immense quantities all
over India; and now that the plant and its fibres can be utilised
economically, doubtless much careful attention will be given to the
question of cultivation and the harvesting of these nettles.

Not only is the texture of the cloth manufactured from this fibre
very beautiful—it is principally remarkable for its splendid gloss
and peculiar transparency—but it is extremely strong and durable.
‘Belting’ for machinery has already been made with China grass-fibre,
and on being tested, it was found that it could bear a strain of
eight thousand three hundred and twenty-six pounds to the square
inch; whereas leather could only sustain a pressure of four thousand
two hundred and thirty-nine pounds to the square inch. A piece of
water-hose made of the same fibre was subjected to the high pressure
of six hundred pounds to the square inch, and it was proved that it
only ‘sweated’ as much as a good ordinary hose does under a pressure
of one hundred pounds. So much for its strength and durability, two
great advantages. And, moreover, it is probable, having regard to these
proved facts, that, although the texture of grass-cloth is so light and
transparent, it would offer a considerable and prolonged resistance to
heat and flames.

As to its beauty, most of our readers have had many opportunities
already of forming an opinion on this head. So soon as manufacturers
and _costumiers_ have had a sufficient time for experimenting, we
may expect to see grass-cloth very generally used for dress fabrics,
hangings, curtains, and in many other ways.

Should these inventions, when put to the test and tried on a large
scale, be found to answer as well as the trial experiments, a little
time is only wanted, when a most important and valuable industry will
arise in India, and, more than probably, give work to many thousands
of hands at home. At all events, if all goes right, India will be the
richer in the near future by many millions of pounds sterling. And it
is even likely that serious attempts at acclimatisation and careful
cultivation of these useful nettles will be made in other of our
semi-tropical colonies and possessions.




THE POET’S TREASURES.


    The laughing streams all crystal bright,
      How sweet their murmuring song,
    As, strewn with blossoms and flecked with light,
      They joyously dance along!
    They glance through the valleys like silver wings;
      They twinkle, they gleam, they shine;
    And while my heart in rapture sings,
      They whisper they are mine!

    Like a maiden’s tresses so sleek, so fine,
      They ripple, and wave, and curl;
    They blush ’neath the sunset like rosy wine,
      And sing like a happy girl.
    When, weary, I sink on the emerald sod,
      They dimple, and seem to say:
    ‘We are balm fresh flung from the hand of God;
      Come, bathe in our fairy spray.’

    The warbling birds are my minstrels all;
      Ah! they know that I love them well,
    For I hasten forth, when their voices call,
      To forest or leafy dell;
    On buoyant pinions they come and go,
      Capricious, and wild, and free,
    And I sing to the children of toil and woe
      The songs they sing to me.

    The trees are mine, and the humble flowers
      That sigh ’mid the rustling grass,
    When steeped in the fragrance of summer showers,
      The amorous zephyrs pass.
    When the world grows cold, and I turn away
      From its fickle and loveless throng,
    They nestle around me, and seem to say:
      ‘We love you, poor child of song!’

    They kiss the dust from my weary feet;
      They tremble, and blush, and sigh;
    And the bonny daisy, so fresh, so sweet,
      A tear in her golden eye,
    Seemeth to me, in her gown of white,
      More lovely than all the rest,
    With the beauty of summer in her sight,
      And its sunshine in her breast.

    I own not one inch of the land, not I,
      Nor jewels nor silks I wear,
    Yet, free to roam ’neath the azure sky,
      I am wealthy beyond compare.
    To the plodding worldling, let pomp and pride
      And the treasures of earth be given,
    While I rest content on the fair hillside,
      Rich, rich in the gifts of heaven!

            FANNY FORRESTER.

       *       *       *       *       *

Printed and Published by W. & R. CHAMBERS, 47 Paternoster Row, LONDON,
and 339 High Street, EDINBURGH.

       *       *       *       *       *

_All Rights Reserved._




*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHAMBERS'S JOURNAL OF POPULAR LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART, FIFTH SERIES, NO. 129, VOL. III, JUNE 19, 1886 ***


    

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