{625}

CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.

TRUTH IN THE MARVELLOUS.
BY ORDER OF THE LEAGUE.
ARMY PANICS: BY ONE WHO HAS BEEN IN THEM.
GEORGE HANNAY’S LOVE AFFAIR.
LANDSLIPS.
THE WHITEBOYS OF SIXTY YEARS AGO.
CONCISE AND TO THE POINT.
PARTED.

---

No. 144.—Vol. III.

Price 1½d.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 1886.

Antiquarian research, conducted in the prosaic spirit of the present day, has dealt cruel blows at many time-honoured traditions. We are taught that the story of the siege of Troy was a mere romance—that Troy itself never existed; that Arthur’s Round Table was a myth; that the accidental appearance of a Countess’s garter at a ball was not responsible for the institution of the highest order of knighthood; that a certain other Countess never freed the citizens of Coventry by riding through their streets with innocence for her only dress; that the Maid of Orleans was never burned, but married, and lived happy ever afterwards. We hardly know what historic relation we are to be allowed to believe. While, however, historical inquiry has discredited many pleasant stories, hard science has come to the aid of romance, and has testified to the veracity of some narrators who have been accused of imposing on the credulity of the ignorant and superstitious by the relation of wonders unworthy of credence in enlightened times. The stories of the appearance in the heavens of blazing sceptres, fiery serpents, and swords of fire dipped in blood, when read in the light of the calm and unbiased observations of some meteors in recent times, are descriptions of physical phenomena sufficiently rare to be accounted supernatural by nations whose acquaintance with the heavenly bodies did not extend beyond the regular movements of the sun, moon, and planets. There is no doubt that the authors of these accounts related truthfully what they saw, employing the language which best conveyed their impressions.

With what awe the visit of a meteorite may be regarded, even in this nineteenth century, by unlearned country-folk, may be gathered from the account of one which fell at Juvenas, in Ardèche, on the 15th of June 1821, and which formed the subject of a curious procès verbal drawn up by the mayor of the commune. It was first seen at three P.M. as a fireball, in a clear sky, while the sun was shining brightly; and it sunk five feet into the ground. The inhabitants were so alarmed, that it was more than a week before they could make up their minds to search for this strange visitant. ‘They deliberated for a long time whether they should go armed to undertake this operation, which appeared so dangerous; but Claude Serre, the sexton, justly observed that if it was the Evil One, neither powder nor arms would prevail against him—that holy-water would be more effectual; and that he would undertake to make the evil spirit fly;’ after which reassuring speech, they set to work and dug up the aërolite, which weighed over two hundred pounds.

We read in the classic poets that on certain momentous occasions, statues have been so affected as to perspire, as if they were living human beings. These stories have been passed over as mere poetic fictions; but probably they rest on a substantial foundation. The phenomenon is doubtless that which is observed when a fire has been lighted for the first time in a room which has for a lengthened period been allowed to remain cold: the walls and other objects are seen to run down with moisture, which appears as if exuded from their surface. The same thing occurs when a long-continued frost is succeeded by mild weather. The appearance is familiar enough to us, who are accustomed to sudden variations of temperature; but in warmer and more equable climates, the requisite conditions are probably rare; and the appearance of copious moisture on statues composed of substances on which dew is not commonly found, may well have been accounted a prodigy.

We may not be disposed to admit that the fiery cross seen by Constantine was a miraculous intimation; but we cannot set aside the account as necessarily apocryphal; for a celestial cross was seen in Migné, near Poitiers, in December 1826. It was observed during a religious service, and the preacher in his sermon had referred to the cross of Constantine. The awe-struck{626} congregation, on perceiving the visible cross in the sky, of shining silver, edged with red, immediately fell upon their knees, accepting the sign as a divine testimony to the truth of what had just been told them. The source of the phenomenon was afterwards found in a wooden cross which had been erected near the chapel, the shadow of which had been cast by the declining sun on a rising mist.

The Flying Dutchman was obviously another instance of atmospheric reflection, and similar phantom ships have been described by modern travellers. The Enchanted Island, or Isle of Ghosts, which had its place in old charts in the mid-Atlantic, and so perplexed the mariners of the middle ages by its varying appearance, defying all attempts to reach its shores, has since been recognised as a fogbank.

Among the wonders recorded in the reign of William Rufus, it is said that on a night in 1095, the stars seemed falling like a shower of rain from heaven to earth, or, according to the Chronicle of Reims, were driven like dust before the wind. A tradition is recorded as prevailing in Thessaly that on a certain night in August the heavens were opened and burning torches were seen through the aperture. These are clearly but highly coloured accounts, by persons of limited knowledge of natural phenomena, of specially brilliant displays of shooting-stars. The last corresponds with the August meteors.

Bartholin, in his History of Anatomy, speaks of a patrician lady of Verona, Catherine, wife of J. Franciscus Rambaldus, whose skin sparkled with fire when slightly touched. ‘This noble lady,’ he says, ‘the Creator endued with so stupendous a dignity and prerogative of nature, that as oft as her body was but lightly touched with linen, sparks flew out plentifully from her limbs, apparent to her domestic servants, as if they had been struck out of a flint, accompanied also with a noise that was to be heard by all. Oftentimes, when she rubbed her hands upon the sleeve of her smock that contained the sparks within it, she observed a flame with a tailed ray running about, as fired exhalations are wont to do.... This fire was not to be seen but in the dark or in the night, nor did it burn without itself, though combustible matter was applied to it.’ This description of electric sparks is such as would be given by a person who saw the phenomenon for the first time and was ignorant of its cause. The same appearance is sometimes seen by persons of the present generation when divesting themselves of tight-fitting underclothing, and especially when combing their hair with a vulcanite comb; but probably it shows itself only with persons of peculiar constitution.

It is hardly necessary to advert to the part which comets have played in the annals of supernatural manifestations. In classic times, however low the state of knowledge may have been in other departments of physical science, the celestial bodies were never without intelligent observers, and the ancient astronomers no doubt acknowledged comets as having their place in the planetary or sidereal economy. But this knowledge was confined to the learned; to the common people, comets were chariots of fire conveying departed heroes to the abode of demigods. A splendid comet luckily appeared after the death of Julius Cæsar, and confirmed his title to divine honours. In the dark ages, comets were celestial portents, presages of revolution or pestilence. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was accounted profane scepticism to attribute their appearance to natural causes; and even as late as the beginning of the eighteenth century, we find an intelligent writer on the natural curiosities of the world adopting the view that these bodies are not allowed to appear except with the special permission of Divine providence, for a specific purpose, in opposition to the theories of astronomers, who are twitted with assigning long periods to the orbits of comets in order that the predictions of their reappearance may not be falsified in the lifetime of the persons making them.

Whether it was owing to the improved means of spreading intelligence afforded by the invention of printing, or to the excitement of men’s minds consequent upon the political and social events of the time, the sixteenth century was prolific in stories of wonderful sights in the heavens and on the earth. Of the many marvellous accounts then circulated, we select the following, which forms the subject of a tract by Abraham Fleming, and purports to have been taken from the evidence of eye-witnesses. The account is titled, ‘A Straunge and Terrible Wunder wrought very late in the Parish Church of Bungay—namely, the fourth of this August in the yeere of Our Lord 1577 ... with the appearance of an horrible shaped thing sensibly perceived of the people then and there assembled.’ The account is couched in terms appropriate to the solemnity of a special manifestation from the spiritual world, and is interspersed with ejaculations expressive of the awe which filled the people’s minds at their witnessing the occurrences described; but the incidents, briefly told, are as follows: A storm of extraordinary fury was raging while the congregation were assembled at divine service; rain came down like a deluge, lightning flashed, and thunder pealed, so that not only dumb creatures were disquieted, but ‘senseless things void of all life and feeling shook and trembled;’ in other words, the fabric and furniture of the building were shaken by the violence of the storm. While the tempest was at its height, a visitor from the lower regions (as the narrator evidently believed) made his appearance in the midst of the congregation, in the form, ‘as they might discerne it,’ of a dog, of a black colour; ‘the sight whereof, together with the fearful flashes of fire which then were seene, moved such admiration in the mindes of the assemblie that they thought doome’s day was already come.’ The ‘Evil One in such a likenesse’ ran with extraordinary speed down the body of the church among the people. Passing between two persons who were on their knees apparently engaged in prayer, he wrung the necks of both of them in an instant, so that they died where they knelt. As he passed by another man he ‘gave him such a gripe on the back that therewithal he was presently drawen togither and shrunk up as it were a piece of lether scorched in a hot fire; or as the mouth of a purse or bag drawn togither with a string.’ This man,{627} however, did not die. Meanwhile, the parish clerk, who was cleaning out the gutter of the church, also saw the ‘horrible shaped thing,’ and was struck to the ground with a violent clap of thunder, but beyond his fall, was not harmed. The stones of the church and the church door, on being afterwards examined, bore evidence of the power of the demon in the marks of his claws or talons; and all the wires, the wheels, and other things belonging to the clock, were wrung in sunder and broken in pieces.

A similar occurrence is stated to have been witnessed the same day at Blibery, a village seven miles from Bungay. In this case, the demon planted himself upon the rood-loft, from which he flung himself down into the church, and after killing two men and a lad, and burning the hand of another person, flew out of the church ‘in a hideous likeness.’

Before dismissing this story as a fable, bred of the imagination of people terror-stricken by the storm, let us compare it with the account of an occurrence which took place on Malvern Hills on the 1st of July 1826. A party had taken refuge in an iron-roofed hut from an impending storm, and were about to partake of refreshment when the storm came on. A gentleman who was standing at the eastern entrance—the storm had come from the west—saw what seemed to him to be a ball of fire moving along the surface of the ground. It came up and entered the hut, forcing him, as it did so, several paces forward from the doorway. An explosion followed, described by the inhabitants of the village at the foot of the hill (Great Malvern) as terrific. On going in, as soon as he had recovered from the shock, to look after his sisters, he found them on the floor, fainting, as he thought, from terror. Two of them had died instantly; and a third lady, with others of the party, were injured. An examination of the hut showed a large crack in the side opposite to that at which the fireball had entered, leading up to a window, and the iron roof above this was indented.

The correspondence of the leading circumstances of this account with Fleming’s story is remarkable; and had the Malvern incident occurred in the superstitious sixteenth century instead of the scientific nineteenth, it would no doubt have been regarded as a supernatural visitation, and have furnished just such a marvellous story as that of Bungay. In both cases, something was seen to enter a building during a thunderstorm, killing two persons instantly and injuring others, disappearing with a noise described in the one case as a violent clap of thunder, and in the other as a terrific explosion, and leaving behind visible marks of its progress in the material of the building. In each instance, too, a person stationed outside saw something which drove him from his place, but otherwise did not harm him; and in both cases the body, whatever it was, which seemed to be the immediate source of the mischief had a progressive motion, which, though swift, could be followed by the eye. The chief point of difference is in the appearance presented by the vehicle of the destructive agent. In the one case it is likened to a black dog, and in the other to a ball of fire, and it may be said that no two things could be more unlike. As to the form of the so-called dog, little need be said. It is admitted that the church at the time was in such a state of ‘palpable darknesse’ that one person could not perceive another; and in the dark, any ill-defined object that can be perceived at all has a tendency to assume a fantastic shape. It was accompanied by ‘fearful flashes of fire,’ which seem to be distinguished from the lightning, and the effect on those who were touched by it was that of scorching or burning. Whether the vehicle which brought the destructive force into the church, and which was thought to be a fiend, was a mass of highly charged smoke or dust, or a miniature cloud of the kind which, on a grand scale, passed over Malta on the 29th of October 1757, the effects described correspond so entirely with those known to result from a particular kind of thunderstroke, that we cannot accuse the author of writing otherwise than in good faith. The supernatural colouring may fairly be ascribed to want of knowledge in regard to a subject which, even now, is but imperfectly understood. The Malta storm-cloud, which destroyed nearly two hundred lives, and laid in ruins almost everything in its way, is described by Brydone as being at first black, afterwards changing its colour till it became like a flame of fire mixed with black smoke; but he reports that despite the scientific explanations of this extraordinary storm-cloud, the people declared with one voice that it was a legion of demons let loose to punish them for their sins. There were, says he, a thousand people in Malta that were ready to take their oath that they saw the fiends within the cloud, ‘all as black as pitch, and breathing out fire and brimstone.’

Besides those mentioned above, many other strange stories might be instanced which, at the time, were accepted as true accounts of supernatural appearances; and afterwards, when the general belief in spiritual manifestations declined, were denounced as false, because contrary to nature, but have since been recognised as consistent with natural laws. By taking into account the surrounding circumstances, the state of knowledge at the time, the customary modes of expression, &c., we may, from many stories at first sight incredible, arrive at a substratum of truth which may form a valuable addition to the sum of human knowledge. Imbued with a sense of their own superior wisdom, learned men, and others who have thought themselves learned, have sometimes rashly pronounced as impossible, and therefore untrue, phenomena which have since been accepted as facts. In Arago’s Popular Astronomy is an account of a meteorite which struck the earth at Lucé, in the year 1769. It was perceived in the sky by several persons, who watched its progress until it reached the surface of the earth, when it was at once picked up and preserved; but the Academy of Sciences pronounced it impossible for a solid body to have fallen from the heavens. On the 24th of July 1790, a quantity of these stones fell at St Juliac—in the fields, on the roofs of the houses, and in the streets of the village. The fall was preceded by what is described as the passing of a great fire, after which was heard in the air a very loud and extraordinary noise. The facts were certified by the{628} municipality of the place and by some hundreds of the inhabitants; but the affair was treated in the public journals as a ridiculous tale, calculated to excite the compassion not merely of savants, but of all reasonable persons.

Modern scientific research, while continually giving us fresh revelations of that order in nature which is its supreme law, is at the same time constantly narrowing the domain of the impossible. Even the wild dreams of the alchemist appear, to the chemist and physicist of to-day, less groundless than they did eighty or a hundred years ago. The present century, the age of the railway, the electric light, the telegraph and telephone, is certainly not less replete with marvels than any of its predecessors. Many of the achievements of applied science, to which we have now become habituated, if they could have been related to a person living in the middle ages, would make as great demands upon his credulity as the most wonderful stories of past times do upon ours, and problems which have baffled the genius of all past ages, and the insolvability of which had come to be regarded as a matter of faith, have been solved in our own time. And yet we have no ground for assuming that we have approached a limit in the field of discovery, or for claiming finality in our interpretations of nature. We have lifted a corner of the curtain, and are enabled to peep at some of the machinery by which her operations are effected, but much more remains concealed, and we know not what marvels may yet in course of time be made clear to us. There are doubtless more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of—even in our philosophy.

BY FRED. M. WHITE.

IN TWENTY CHAPTERS.—CHAP. IV.

Five years have passed away, bringing strange changes and startling revolutions—years, to some, fraught with misery and regret; years, to others, which have been pregnant with fame and honour; but to the suffering, patient world, only another step nearer to eternity. Five years later, and night in the small German town where honour is wrecked and lives are lost on the hazard of a die. The Kursaal at Homburg sparkling with the glitter of ten thousand lights. Men of all nations were gathered there, drawn together by the strongest cords which bind human destiny—the power of gold. No type of face was wanting; no passion, no emotion that the human visage is capable of, but had its being there: rage, despair, misery, exultation—the whole gamut of man’s passions and triumphs. Women were there too. The bluest-blood recorded in the Almanach de Gotha did not disdain to rub elbows with the last fancy from the Comédie Française; my lord, cold, indifferent, and smiling, sat side by side with the reckless plunger who would have bartered his honour, had that commodity remained to him, for the gold to place upon the colour. On the long green tables, the glittering coins fell with a subdued chink sweeter than the finest music to the hungry ears; a republic the most perfect in the universe, where rich and poor alike are welcomed, with one great destiny—to lose or to gain. There were no wild lamentations there; such vulgar exhibitions were out of place, though feeling cannot be disguised under the deepest mask, for a tremor of the eyelid, a flash of the eye, a convulsive movement of the fingers, betray poor human nature. As the game proceeded with the monotonous cry of the croupier, it was awful to watch the intentness of the faces, how they deepened in interest as the game was made, bending forward till at length ‘Rouge perd et couleur’ came from the level voice again.

The croupiers raked in the glittering stacks of gold, silently, swiftly, but with as much emotion as a child would gather cowslips, and threw the winning on each stake as calmly, knowing full well that in the flight of time it must return. The piles were raked up, and then arose a murmur, a confusion of tongues, reminding the spectator of what the bewilderment at Babel must have been, a clamour which died away to silence at the inthralling ‘Faites votre jeu.’

How the hands clawed at the sparkling treasure; eager, trembling avarice in every finger-tip; from the long, lean, yellow claw of the old withered gamester, to the plump little hand of the bride, who is trying her fortune with silver, fearful lest, driven by despair, some less fortunate player should lay felonious fingers upon the piled-up treasure.

Standing behind the all-absorbed group was a young man with pale, almost ghostly features, and a heavy dark moustache. From his attitude and smile, it was hard to say how fortune had served him, for his face was void of any emotion. He held one piece of gold in his hand, placed it on a colour, waited, and lost. A trifling movement of his lips, pressed tightly together under the dark moustache—that was all. Then for a moment he hesitated, pondered, and suddenly, as if to settle the matter quickly, he detached a coin from his watchchain and leaned forward again. Under him, seated at the table, was a woman winning steadily. A pile of gold was before her; she was evidently in the luckiest vein. The man, with all a gambler’s superstition, placed the coin in her hand. ‘Stake for me,’ he whispered; ‘you have the luck.’

Mechanically, she took the proffered coin, and turned it in her hand; then suddenly a wave of crimson, succeeded by a deathly whiteness, came across her face. She held the coin, then put it carefully aside, and staked another in its place. Then, apparently forgetting her emotion in the all-absorbing interest of the game, she looked at the table. ‘Rouge gagne, et couleur perd,’ came the chant of the croupier. The stakes were raked in, and the money lost. Under his breath, the man uttered a fervent imprecation, slightly shrugged his shoulders, and turned to watch the game again. From that moment the woman lost; her pile dwindled away to one coin beyond the piece of metal tendered her to stake,{629} but still she played on, the man behind watching her play intently. A little varying luck, at one moment a handful of napoleons, at another, reduced to one, the game proceeded. At length the last but one was gone, save the piece tendered to her by the man behind the chair; that she never parted with. As she sat there, words came to her ears vaguely—the voice of the man behind her, and every time he spoke she shivered, as if a cold breath were passing through her heart. A temporary run of luck came to her aid, and so she sat, listening and playing.

The new-comer was another man, evidently an Italian, fine, strong, with an open face and dark passionate eyes. He touched the first man upon the shoulder lightly, speaking in excellent English.

There were four actors there, playing, had they but known it, a ghastly tragedy. The two men were players; the listening woman was another; and across the table, behind the spectators, stood a girl. She had a dark southern face of great beauty—a face cleanly chiselled, and lighted by a pair of wondrous black eyes—eyes bent upon the two men and the woman, playing now with the keenest interest. She shrank back a little as the new-comer entered, and her breath came a little quicker; but there she stayed, watching and waiting for some opportunity. Her look boded ill for some one. Meanwhile, the unconscious actors fixed their attention on the game. The last arrival touched the other man upon the elbow again, a little roughly this time.

‘You have been playing again, Hector?’ he said.

‘I have been playing my friend—yes. It is not in my nature to be in such a place without. What would you have me do, Luigi? I am dying of ennui from this inaction—kicking up my heels here waiting for orders.’

‘I should have thought you could have found something better to occupy your time,’ the man addressed as Luigi returned. ‘Our work is too stern, too holy, to be shared with such frivolity as this. Gold, gold, with no thoughts of anything but this maddening scramble!’

‘My dear Luigi, pray, control yourself. Are you not aware that this sort of thing has been done to death? Do not, as you love me, descend to the level of the descriptive journalist, who comes over here to coin his superlative condemnatory adjectives into money—to lose at this very interesting game. John Bull holds up his hands in horror as he reads the description in his Telegraph, and then he comes to try his luck himself. I, Hector le Gautier, have seen a bishop here.’

‘How fond you are of the sound of your own voice,’ Luigi Salvarini returned. ‘Come outside; I have something important to say to you.’

‘Something connected with the League, I suppose,’ Le Gautier yawned. ‘If it was not yourself I was talking to, I should say, confusion to the League.’

‘How rash you are!’ Salvarini returned in a low tone, accompanied by an admiring glance at his companion. ‘Consider what one word spoken lightly might mean to you. The attendants here, the croupier even, might be a Number in the League.’

‘Very likely,’ Le Gautier replied carelessly; ‘but it is not probable that, if I should whisper the magic words in his ear, he would give me credit for a few napoleons. I am in no mood for business to-night, Luigi; and if you are the good fellow I take you for, you will lend me’——

‘One Brother must always aid another according to his means, says the decree. But, alas! I have nothing.—I came to you with the intention’——

‘Oh, did you?’ Le Gautier asked sardonically. ‘Then, in that case, I must look elsewhere; a few francs is all my available capital.’

‘Hector,’ the Italian exclaimed suddenly, in a hoarse whisper, ‘where is the?’—— He did not finish his sentence, but pointed to the watchchain the other was idly twirling in his fingers.

Le Gautier smiled sarcastically. ‘It is gone,’ he said lightly—‘gone to swell the bloated coffers of the bank. Fortune, alas! had no favour even for that mystic coin. Sacred as it should have been, I am its proud possessor no more.’

‘You are mad, utterly mad!’ Salvarini exclaimed. ‘If it were but known—if it has fallen into the hands of the bank, or a croupier happens to have a Number, think of what it means to you! The coin would be forwarded to the Central Council; the signs would be called in; yours missing’——

‘And one of these admirable German daggers would make acquaintance with my estimable person, with no consolation but the fact of knowing what a handsome corpse I shall make. Bah! A man can only die once, and so long as they do not make me the posthumous hero of a horrible tragedy, I do not care. It is not so very serious, my Luigi.’

‘It is serious; you know it is,’ Luigi retorted. ‘No Brother of the League would have had the sublime audacity, the reckless courage’——

‘L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace,’ Le Gautier returned. ‘I sigh for new temptations; the sight of the gaming-table is to me what the smell of battle afar off is to the war-horse. I came here intending to risk a louis; I have lost everything. There is nothing like courage at the tables; and as it had a spice of danger in it, I risked’——

‘Your life! You do not seem to comprehend the danger.’

‘But, my dear friend, it is exactly that spice of danger that gives the thing its nameless charm. Come, you are hipped, out of sorts. You see the duties of the Order in every action; you see the uplifting of the avenging dagger in every shadow that trembles on the wall. Be a man!’

‘I am all the more disturbed,’ Salvarini observed with moody, uneasy face, ‘that the orders have come. That is the principal reason I am here to look for you. We are translated to London.’

‘That is good news, at anyrate,’ Le Gautier exclaimed briskly. ‘I have been literally dying to get back there. By the bright eyes of Enid—— What is that?’

Above the clamour of tongues and the rattle of the gold pieces, a low laugh was heard distinctly close to the speaker’s elbow. He turned sharply round; but there was no one within a{630} few feet of them. Apparently, it had not disturbed the inthralled players, though the croupier swept his cold eye around to discover the author of this unseemly mirth.

‘Strange!’ Le Gautier observed. ‘I seem to have heard that laugh before, though I cannot remember where.’

‘And so have I,’ Salvarini whispered hoarsely—‘only once, and I hope that I may never hear it again. It is horrible!’

Le Gautier looked at his companion, amazed to see the agitation pictured on his face. It was white and drawn, as if with some inward pain. Salvarini wiped his damp brow as he met the other’s piercing gaze, and tried to still the trembling of his limbs.

‘A passing fancy,’ he explained—‘a fancy which called up a remembrance of my boyhood, the recollection of a vengeance as yet unpaid.—But I am idling; let us get outside. The orders have come, as I tell you, for London. We are to meet the Head Centre at the old address.’

‘And how did the orders come?’ Le Gautier asked.

‘The old mysterious way,’ was the impatient reply; ‘secrecy and darkness; no trust in any one, however worthy he may have proved—the old suspicion, which drags us down, and holds our hands even in the act of striking. I found them on my table when I got in. You and I are to get to London, and there await orders. Our instructions bear the crossed daggers, indicating extreme secrecy and a mission of great danger.’

In spite of his sang froid, Le Gautier could not repress a slight start; and a smile of covert sarcasm, pity almost, rose to his lips as he looked in his companion’s eager, enthusiastic face; the same sort of pity the sharper feels for his unconscious victim when he has him within the toils. Not that the younger man noticed this; his eyes were full of some far-away project, something noble, by their expression.

‘The old story of the monkey and the chestnuts,’ Le Gautier observed with his most sinister smile; ‘the puppets run the risk, and the Head Centres get the glory. If we fall, it is in freedom’s name. That is sufficient epitaph for us poor, silly, fluttering moths.’

‘But the glory of it!’ Salvarini cried—‘think of that!’

‘The glory, yes—the glory of a felon’s grave! The glory lies in the uncertainty. What do we gain, you and I, by the removal of crowned heads? When the last tyrant fell at our leader’s dictate, how much did we benefit by the blow? He was not a bad man; for a king, he was just.’

‘You are in a bitter mood, to-night, Hector,’ Salvarini answered. ‘What will you say when I tell you the appointment has come with your nomination as a Deputy, with a seat at the Council of the Crimson Nine?’

‘My appointment at last! You are joking, Luigi. Surely they had need of better men than I. What of La Fontaine?’

‘Dead,’ Salvarini responded grimly. ‘Treachery was suspected, and it was necessary to remove him.—But what I tell you is true; you are ordered to be present at the next Council at Warsaw, two months hence, when you will give up your badge as an Avenger, and take the premier order.’

‘And I have staked it to-night on the hazard of a die!’ Le Gautier exclaimed, pallid even beyond his usual deathly whiteness. ‘Fool, fool that I was! How can I prevent it becoming known? I am undone!’

‘You do not know the worst,’ Salvarini replied. ‘Come closer, and let me whisper in your ears; even the walls carry such tidings. The Supreme Director is here!’

Le Gautier turned faint and sick as he looked furtively round the room, with its long mirrors and barbaric splendour.

‘Suppose you lend me yours?’ he suggested. ‘You will not want it now. What a mad fool I have been! I wonder if there is any way of recovering it? for I must have it, come what will. With a penalty of’——

‘Death!’

The word, abruptly, sternly uttered, was followed by the same low mocking laugh they had heard before. They looked around in alarm, but no trace of any one could be seen. Standing in the recess of a window, they looked out; but no sign of the mysterious warning, so strangely given.

‘Let us get away from this,’ Le Gautier groaned. ‘I am stifled! Come outside into the open air. My nerves must be unstrung to-night.’

They walked out through the high folding-doors, and disappeared in the darkness. As they left, the woman who had been playing rose from her seat and followed them. Apparently, she was too late, for they had vanished; and with a sigh, she abandoned her evident intention, turning into the Kursaal gardens and throwing herself into a seat. Directly she quitted the saloon, the woman with the dark eyes followed, and tracked the other to the quiet retreat. For some time she stood behind the shadow of a tree, watching her. It was a brilliant moonlight night—clear, calm, and peaceful. Without there, the lighted windows of the gambling saloon could be seen; and ever and anon the murmur of the croupier, the scrape of the rakes, and the subdued clink of the gold, might be heard. But the figure on the seat did not heed these things; she was looking at a coin in her hand, making out as she best could the devices that it bore, strange and puzzling to her.

It was merely a gold coin, in fine a moidore of Portugal; and upon the reverse side, the figure had been rubbed down, and an emblem engraved in its place. There was a figure of Liberty gazing at a rising sun, her foot upon a prostrate dead body, and underneath the words, ‘I strike.’ Over the rising sun, in tiny letters, was the device, ‘In Freedom’s name;’ and at the top, two letters in a monogram. The seated figure noted these things, but, from the expression on her face, they represented nothing to her. Behind the shadow of the tree, the watcher crept closer and closer, trying in vain to get a glimpse of the golden coin. As the seated figure bent over it, tears began to gather in her eyes, overflowing at last, and the passion of sorrow seemed to rise, till her frame was shaken with the sobs she did not strive to master. The woman looking on stepped out from her shelter and crossed the open grass{631} to the other’s side. Her face, on the contrary, was eager, almost hopeful, as she bent forward and touched the weeper on the shoulder. She looked up, surprise mastering her grief for a brief moment.

Few men have gone through a campaign of any duration without having experienced some one or more of those strange incidents of warfare which are known under the name of Panics. Those who have been in them know but too well their peculiarity—how a sudden access of fear seizing upon a body of troops, and communicating itself from man to man with a rapidity that can only be compared to a conflagration in a city built of wood, spreads so quickly that it is impossible to detect its cause, and the coolest observer cannot tell whence the contagion had its origin. Amongst raw levies or young and inexperienced soldiery, such panics are naturally more frequent than amongst tried troops; but history tells us that even the oldest veterans are not proof against their attack.

Napier, in his Peninsular War, devotes but some eight or nine lines to an account of the most remarkable recorded incident of this nature, in which Robert Crauford’s celebrated Light Division—consisting of those three distinguished regiments, the 43d, the 52d, and the 95th—were seized and put to flight by an attack of fear so sudden and causeless that the historian makes no attempt whatever to ascribe a reason for it. ‘The Light Division,’ he writes, ‘encamped in a pinewood, where happened one of those extraordinary panics attributed in ancient times to the influence of a god. No enemy was near, no alarm given, when suddenly the troops, as if seized with a frenzy, started from sleep and disappeared in every direction; nor was there any possibility of allaying this strange terror, until some persons called out that the enemy’s cavalry were amongst them, when the soldiers mechanically ran together, and the illusion was dissipated.’ It seems odd that so diffuse a writer should have seen fit to say so little of so extraordinary an occurrence, more especially when we remember that this same Light Division was the flower of the British army in the Peninsula, and that he writes of it not many pages before as ‘composed of three regiments singularly fitted for difficult service. Long and carefully disciplined by Sir John Moore, they came to the field with such a knowledge of arms, that six years of warfare could not detect a flaw in their system, nor were they ever overmatched in courage and skill.’

The public has been made acquainted with a goodly number of panics during the last few years, the military annals of which have been so replete with the warlike operations of the British arms. Many of us have thrown up our hands and sighed over the decadence of the pristine virtue of our soldiers, or prophesied darkly the downfall of the whole British race. The reason why the world nowadays is more familiar with many of the shortcomings and failings of our troops is not very difficult to find. As, before Agamemnon, lived many brave men whose virtues have not been handed down, so too, perhaps, many little indiscretions on the part of the soldiers of Marlborough and Wellington have passed into oblivion through want of a ‘special war correspondent.’ In spite of press censorship on the part of military officers, sooner or later these lynx-eyed gentlemen, being in the midst of the fighting-men, have seen and recorded in the columns of the daily press very many incidents, the seriousness of which has not been lessened in the telling. Amongst soldiers themselves, a natural pride would make them reticent in such matters; and l’esprit de corps has probably caused more than we know of to be buried in the bosoms of the members of some particular corps.

This reminds us of an unrecorded case of ‘panic’ pure and simple, which was communicated to us, years after its occurrence, by an officer in the regiment concerned. When he spoke of it, he did so with the air of a man fearful of breaking a sacred trust, which even then he seemed to feel hardly justified in betraying, though the regiment had changed its title, and scarcely one of the members in it at the time still remained. Suffice it to say that the regiment was a distinguished infantry one, composed almost entirely of veterans, who had added lustre to their former glories by the courage and bravery with which they had behaved throughout the trying times of the Indian Mutiny. It was shortly after this terrible outbreak had been quelled that the regiment in question was marching from the scene of some of the bloodiest outrages to a new station in a comparatively undisturbed portion of India. Then, as now, marches in that country were usually carried out at night, the sun in the hot season rendering exposure to its influence more or less unsafe to Europeans. They had almost reached the spot where they were to halt for the night—which, by-the-bye, was an exceptionally dark one—in fact, the advance-party had already arrived, when suddenly some sort of commotion and press of men from the rear was noticed by the officers. Before they could divine the cause, the confusion increased, and the regiment, without paying any heed to the commands of the officers, broke its ranks, and fled precipitately into the jungle on either side of the road. As usual, the officers, and even the senior non-commissioned officers, had not shared the general terror, and some few of the privates had at first called upon their comrades to remain steady—but all to no avail. They were regularly broken, and scarcely a man remained. Very soon, an explanation was forthcoming. A number of loose horses came galloping down the road. It was the noise of their hoofs over the hard ground, breaking the stillness of the Indian night, that had mysteriously magnified itself into a vague but all-mastering terror. How complete the panic was may be imagined from the fact that many of the men had fled so far into the jungle that they did not return till the following morning. Every inquiry was made by the colonel into the case; but no one was ever made responsible as the originator; and the regiment mutually agreed to keep the whole affair a profound{632} secret. So well did they do so, that it never leaked out till years afterwards, when time had blunted the sting of publicity.

In South Africa, the disaster of Isandlhwana gave the soldiers’ nerves a severe shaking, and it often happened that false alarms at night led to the rousing of whole camps, and sometimes even to a reckless discharge of firearms. In some cases, friendly natives or even comrades were taken by the excited imagination of a sentry for enemies; in others, unoffending cattle, even a bush or a shrub, became the innocent cause of a fusilade sufficient to have dealt widespread destruction to a host of Zulus.

An odd incident, illustrative of the slightness of the cause—or even, perhaps, of the absence of any cause at all—that gives rise to a panic, occurred on the night of Tel-el-Kebir, amidst a small corner of the force that was bivouacking on the battlefield. The narrator had crawled into a marquee in which, with other commissariat stores, were the rum casks from which the troops had received their liquor ration after the fatigues and excitement of the day’s fight and previous night-march. Besides one or two commissariat issuers in charge of the stores, several ‘odds and ends’ of other corps had found their way into the marquee, preferring to rest under its shelter amidst the casks and biscuit-boxes, than under the open sky with the sand for a bed. Suddenly, in the middle of the night when all were sleeping, a noise and commotion began in the bivouac outside. Before the inhabitants of the tent were sufficiently awake to understand its cause, the curtains were thrust aside by a red-coated soldier, who shouted to us to get up: ‘The Arabs are in the camp—they are upon us!’ Then he disappeared as rapidly as he had come. Every one sprang to his arms, and probably experienced that especially uncomfortable sensation that is caused by a vague feeling of an unseen though imminent danger against which one is ignorant how to guard. Outside, every one around was aroused and up, eagerly striving to discover from what quarter attack was to be expected. Nothing, however, more unpleasant occurred than the advent of a staff-officer asking the cause of the confusion. Probably the truth never did reach headquarters. Afterwards, however, a report gained ground—no other or better reason was ever forthcoming—that the alarm arose from the screams of a sleeping soldier, who, overwrought perhaps by the horrors of the day, had been fighting his battle over again in his dreams!

It is perhaps as well that all cases of panic should be brought forward and investigated. Hushing them up may be satisfactory to those who feel that the credit and reputation of their particular regiment or corps are at stake; but, like all undeclared and secret evils, they are best dealt with by being dragged to light. How else can the soldier learn their absurdity—how else learn to recognise them and reason on the moment whether he be in the presence of a causeless panic or a real danger?

One lesson certainly the few lines of Napier quoted above teach us. The cry of some one that the enemy’s cavalry were amongst them caused the Light Division to rally—it was the dissipation of a vague terror by the substitution for it of a substantial danger.

Enough has been said to show that panics will occur. It is easy to see how fatal may be their results, and how detrimental they are to the morale of an army. A recognition of this fact must convince us of the necessity that exists for neglecting no step that may tend to minimise their occurrence, or, if they must occur, to most efficaciously and speedily counteract their effects. Long since, sailors learnt by experience that real or imagined outbreaks of fire on shipboard were too apt to cause panic and confusion, and thereby increase tenfold the horrors of the situation. To provide against this, the fire-alarm is frequently sounded, with a view to accustoming the crew to take up rapidly their allotted posts, when fire actually does occur, with the calmness and despatch bred of familiarity. This system of accustoming men to sudden alarms of attack was practised with success in the Marine Camp round Suakim, and they probably owed the idea in some measure to their naval training. At anyrate, their camp was particularly free from needless night-alarms, and their sentries earned the somewhat rare distinction of never having been forced throughout the whole campaign.

CHAPTER I.—TOO LATE!

There was a sharp but not unpleasant smell of frost in the air; the small shrubbery around the way-side station of Lochenbreck was covered with a slight coating of hoar-frost, which was being gradually dissipated by the golden rays of the sun, now two or three degrees above the horizon. The bustle of the Twelfth had passed. The ‘knowing ones’ who prefer Wigtownshire moors to those of the West and North Highlands, as being lower rented and yielding quite as good sport, had come and gone, for it was now the latter end of September. It was about eight o’clock A.M.; the South train was due, and it was timed to stop here for five minutes; not so much on account of any passenger or goods traffic it might deposit or receive, as to allow the iron horse to take a huge drink, sufficient to carry it in comfort to Stranraer. That this particular morning, however, there was some passenger traffic expected was evident. Outside the station stood a wagonette, a pony-cart, and a smart ostler in charge of both; inside was the station-master, a porter, and a young lady. The two former were listening for the clang of the signal-bell announcing the train; the latter, in prosaic truth, was endeavouring to keep her feet warm, by pacing rapidly up and down the limited platform. She was a very pretty girl, with a clear, pinky freshness of complexion, a finely chiselled nose, and a small, sweet, though firm mouth.

The signal-bell clanged, and the train came grandly sweeping in. There was but one passenger, but that was the one the young lady was{633} waiting for. When he alighted, she ran forward and gave him her hand, which he shook heartily.

‘Alone?’ she cried.

‘Yes, Nan, alone this time! You’re not sorry, are you?’

‘Oh, no, no! I’ll have you all to myself! And you’ll have such lots of new London stories to tell, and none of your awfully clever city friends to laugh at me.’

The new arrival’s portmanteau, fishing-rods, &c., were put in the pony-cart, and assisting the young girl into the wagonette, he took the reins and started at a smart trot towards Lochenbreck Inn, some eight miles away over the purple moor.

While they are enjoying the heather-scented air, and the delightful moorland scenery, from which the sun had now dispelled the early morning’s mist, it may be as well that the reader should know who the occupants of the wagonette were. Place aux dames; Anne Porteous, aged nineteen, was the daughter of Robert Porteous, innkeeper at Lochenbreck. Robert, however, was not an ordinary innkeeper. He certainly took in guests for bed and board, and, as was said by some, charged very highly for the accommodation; but beyond this, he was proprietor of a loch, and most of the moor encircling it, and could thus give free angling and shooting privileges to his guests. He was quite independent of innkeeping as a means of living; but his father and grandfather before him had kept the inn, and why should not he? Early in life he was left a widower, and Anne was his only daughter. She received an excellent education at S—— Academy, and really took charge of the inn business, for her father was crippled with rheumatism. Her management, however, was an unseen one, for she did not come personally in contact with the guests. But there were exceptions to that rule. One of them was her present companion, George Hannay, the editor of the London magazine, the Olympic. But then the case with him was different from that of an ordinary guest. Her father and he were old friends, and he had been coming about the place since she was a girl in short frocks. The editor was a very keen angler, and as the sport could best be pursued off a boat, when Anne grew older and strong enough, it was her whim and pleasure to row him about while he wielded the rod. Thus they grew great friends; and his autumn visit was looked forward to with joyous expectancy by little Nan. Little, she was not now; years had glided away, and she had almost emerged into womanhood; but still the old friendly relations were kept up between the two. Last summer she had spent with her father’s sister, who kept a pension in Brussels, and it is about her experiences there that the pair are chatting gaily as the vehicle rolls homewards over the leaf-bestrewn road.

As for the editor, he was a tallish, well-developed man, with dark hair, whiskers, and moustache considerably more than sprinkled with gray. At first sight you would guess his age at about fifty. But having regard to his light springy step and genial smile, you might have set him down at about forty, and still have been wrong, for in truth he was only thirty-eight. It was a grand relief for him to leave the Metropolis and his editorial worries behind once a year, and spend a glorious autumn holiday at Lochenbreck—fishing, talking with his old friend Robert, and—well—yes! (of late years, that is to say) enjoying a chat with his pretty little daughter. It was not accidentally that he came alone this time. Usually he brought a roistering squad of literary bohemians, who made the ceiling of the private parlour ring with jest and song till unseemly hours of the morning. And the reason was, he came prepared to offer his heart and hand to the fair Nan! He did not imagine for a moment he was in love with her. Oh, no! he was too old and sedate for such nonsense as that. In his professional capacity he had dissected and analysed so many excruciatingly sentimental love tales, that he imagined himself Cupid-proof. But things had driven his thoughts towards matrimony. He had got tired of his lady-housekeeper, with her Cockneyfied vulgar airs. Now, if he could only get rid of her, he thought, pension her off, or get another situation for her, and place this Scotch girl at the head of his table, how much brighter life would seem to him! Would she take him? Well, he thought she would. Of one thing he was certain, she was really fond of him; there was no rival in the way; and the father was certain to favour the match. He did not care for girlish gush; sound lasting affection, and purity and singleness of mind, were what he wanted.

The wagonette had now arrived at the inn—a quaint old crow-stepped edifice, half covered with ivy, and surrounded by a garden-wall. Old Mr Porteous was at the door, and bade his guest a hearty welcome. Then Anne set to work, and in less than half an hour there was a tempting breakfast smoking on the private parlour table, which Mr Hannay did excellent justice to. To keep him company, his host and hostess sat at table with him, and made believe to partake of the dainties before them; while the truth was, they had had a hearty breakfast three hours before. The sun, which till now had brightened up the room, became overcast, and a few drops from a passing shower rattled against the diamond-paned window. Mr Hannay rose from his chair and looked out. A splendid day for fishing. ‘Come, Nan, my lass,’ he said, ‘let’s to work. It’s a shame to sit here idling, with the loch in such fine trim for trouting.’

‘Well, sir, I suppose I must obey orders,’ she rejoined, and tripping up-stairs, soon returned arrayed in an old frock, and a headpiece of stiff white calico, resembling in design a sou’wester, and suited to protect from sun, rain, or wind. Half an hour later they were floating on the loch; Nan slowly paddling along, her companion industriously whipping the water; both keeping up a desultory conversation. Her experiences at Brussels naturally formed the chief topic. On this subject she spoke with enthusiasm. She had never seen Paris, therefore its miniature presentment impressed her all the more vividly. Hannay was pleased to hear scenes described with her fresh girlish fervour, to which he had long been blasé.{634} Apart from the warm feelings he had towards her, her conversation had a literary charm for him, for she was a born narrator. She took him with her in all her rambles and escapades, and her six months’ residence in the gay little capital seemed exposed to his mental vision as clearly as if he had been her companion. Yet the sly little damsel forgot, quite innocently of course, to tell him of sundry moonlight walks with a certain Scotch student, under the linden trees of the Boulevard des Alliers.

The fishing was progressing but slowly. Perhaps there was thunder in the air; or possibly the angler’s mind was abstracted, and he was thinking of matters of weightier import, than the capture of a few silvery trout. After missing excellent ‘offers’ on two or three occasions, his companion burst into a merry laugh, and asked him if his wits had gone a wool-gathering, ‘I am afraid,’ she continued, gravely shaking her head, ‘that you are still in love with that wicked Mademoiselle Sylvestre.’

Now, the lady referred to was an aged ex-prima donna of the English opera, and a warm friend of his. It pleased Nan, however, to make-believe that their relationship to each other was of a strongly amorous nature, and she missed no opportunity of teasing him about her. Now was a chance to broach the matter he had at heart. For, strange to say, this experienced man of literature and society, this ornament of London drawing-rooms, felt oddly embarrassed in his new relationship of suitor to a simple country girl. True it was, she had no idea of the terrible designs he had on her heart and liberty; but that seemed only to make the matter worse in his eyes. There was not an atom of self-consciousness about her. Her clear gray eyes were crystalline; he fancied he could read every thought of her soul in their transparent depths. No thoughts of love there evidently. It looked almost brutal to disturb their sweet maidenly repose—almost like shooting a trusting, tame rabbit. If there had been but the least spice of coquetry about her, it would have been so much easier for him to have unburdened himself of his heart’s secret—at least so he thought. He never felt so morally limp in all his life, and it was with the courage of despair that he wound up his reel and determined to know his fate then and there. A few intermittent drops of rain began to fall, and seating himself beside her on the thwarts, he shared his waterproof with her. He never yet had spoken, save in the language of raillery; how on earth was he now to address her in accents of love and sentiment? However, it must be done; and he took ‘a header.’

‘My dear Nan,’ he began, ‘it is really too bad of you to mention that estimable old lady. I like her very much, as I am sure would you if you knew her. But she might easily be my mother! Ah, Nan,’ he continued, slipping his arm round her waist underneath the waterproof—‘ah, Nan, there is only one girl in all the world I care a pin for, and it is your own sweet self! Nan—will you be my wife?’

As he spoke the last few words, Nan’s face grew deadly pale; then the truant blood rushed back to her cheeks tumultuously, flushing them carmine.

‘Oh, no, no!’ she piteously cried as she shrunk from him, and gently disengaged his arm from round her waist; ‘oh, no! Mr Hannay, that can never, never be! O how stupid and foolish I’ve been. Forgive me, forgive me, my dearest of friends! But—but—indeed I never looked on you in any way like that. I have been very imprudent—I have been far too free with you—but it was all thoughtlessness. Tell me you don’t for a moment believe I was so wicked as to have done it purposely.’

She put her hands over her face, and sobbed aloud. Here was a nice position for a lover to be in, who an hour ago was confidently dreaming of years of sweet companionship with her who now told him in language not to be misunderstood that such could never, never be. These were not the simulated tears and sobs of a heartless coquette; the honest simple girl had evidently never dreamed of the possibility of him being a wooer. He was too old—that was it. And what a fool he had made of himself! Well, he would just require to swallow it all, and comfort himself with the reflection that no one knew of his folly, for he knew she would never tell. His heart went out in pity to her. He told her never to mind. He even went the length of pretending that he was almost glad she had refused him, for he was so wedded to city life, with its clubs, greenrooms, and what not, that he was certain he would have been a very careless, inattentive husband, and she a neglected, heart-broken wife. In such wise did he comfort the girl, who dried her eyes and tried to look quite gay and cheerful. There was no more fishing; they rowed slowly back to the hotel. Nan insisted on taking the oars; her rejected lover sat musing at the stern. Suddenly he raised his head, and said with a sedate smile: ‘Some one else, eh, Nan?’

His question was not very intelligibly put; but she understood well enough what he meant. Drooping eyelids, a face slightly averted, and a faint blush for answer. After a pause, ‘Papa does not know—at least not yet,’ she timidly said; ‘you’ll not tell him?’

‘Oh, of course not!’ he answered, and biting the end of a fresh cigar, began smoking vigorously. A few minutes, and they were at the Inn jetty, and to old Mr Porteous’ extreme astonishment, without a fin to show for their three hours’ work.

Dinner past, father and daughter and guest adjourned to the private parlour. Anne retired early under the plea of headache. Host and guest continued to enjoy a cheerful glass and gossip all to themselves.

‘By-the-bye, Mr Porteous,’ said the latter as he was lighting his candle preparatory to going up-stairs to bed, ‘I forgot to say my stay this time will be but a brief one. I am expecting every day to have a letter from a friend at Lucerne who wants me to join him in the fishing there. He says the sport is excellent, and I promised to go if he found such to be the case. Good-night!’

The landlord was astonished, but was too well bred to press him to stay. The truth is, our friend had been far more seriously ‘hit’ by simple Nan than he had supposed, or was even yet inclined to admit. Try as he would, sleep{635} refused to come to his tired brain; mocking visions of ‘what might have been’ flitted through his waking dreams; and he arose in the morning more tired than when he went to bed. The post brought him two letters; one of them, he said, required his instant presence in London on an important matter of business; after that, he would go to Switzerland to join his friend in the fishing; and meantime, he would have reluctantly to bid them farewell. Porteous was both surprised and vexed; his daughter was neither, for she felt it would be happier for them both to be apart—at least for the present.

Scarcely less alarming than the fall of an avalanche, and sometimes, indeed, far more destructive, are those sudden descents of earth and other materials commonly known as landslips. The cause of these remarkable calamities—for such they commonly are—may be briefly described. The strata of a mountain or lesser elevation are often found to deviate considerably from a horizontal position; and if shale or any other substance pervious to water forms the lowest stratum, a landslip may take place. For instance, if there be an abundance of rain or melted snow, which percolates down so as to soften the lower stratum, the upper strata are liable to be loosened, and, in process of time, to slide away. Such was the case in Shropshire towards the close of last century, as related by Mr Fletcher of Madeley. This took place at a spot on the Severn between the Grove and the Birches. ‘The first thing that struck me,’ says Mr Fletcher, ‘was the destruction of the little bridge that separated the parish of Madeley from that of Buildwas, and the total disappearing of the turnpike road to Buildwas Bridge, instead of which, nothing presented itself to my view but a confused heap of bushes and huge clods of earth, tumbled one over another. The river also wore a different aspect; it was shallow, noisy, boisterous, and came down from a different point. Following the track made by a great number of spectators who came from the neighbouring parishes, I climbed over the ruins and came to a field well grown with ryegrass, where the ground was greatly cracked in several places, and where large turfs—some entirely, others half-turned up—exhibited the appearance of straight or crooked furrows, as though imperfectly formed by a plough drawn at a venture. Getting from that field over the hedge into a part of the road which was yet visible, I found it raised in one place, sunk in another, concave in a third, hanging on one side in a fourth, and contracted as if some uncommon force had pressed the two hedges together. But the higher part of it surprised me most, and brought directly to remembrance those places of Mount Vesuvius where the solid stony lava had been strongly marked by repeated earthquakes; for the hard beaten gravel which formed the surface of the road was broken every way into huge masses, partly detached from each other, with deep apertures between them, exactly like the shattered lava. This striking likeness of circumstances made me conclude that the similar effect might proceed from the same cause, namely, a strong convulsion on the surface, if not in the bowels, of the earth.’

This conjecture was not confirmed by facts and circumstances related by others; indeed, the latter part of his description proves, almost beyond question, that the various results described were occasioned by a landslip, and not by a shock of an earthquake, of which no one heard anything.

He continues: ‘Going a little further towards Buildwas, I found that the road was again totally lost for a considerable space, having been overturned, absorbed, or tumbled, with the hedges that bounded it, to a considerable distance towards the river. This part of the desolation appeared then to me inexpressibly dreadful. Between a shattered field and the river, there was that morning a bank, on which, besides a great deal of underwood, grew twenty-five large oaks; this wood shot with such violence into the Severn before it, that it forced the water in great volumes a considerable height, like a mighty fountain, and gave the overflowing river a retrograde motion. This is not the only accident which happened to the Severn, for, near the Grove, the channel, which was chiefly of a soft blue rock, burst in ten thousand pieces, and rose perpendicularly about ten yards, heaving up the immense quantity of water and the shoal of fishes that were therein.’

John Philips in his work on Cider alludes to Marcley Hill as the scene of a landslip:

Marcley Hill is near the confluence of the Lug and Wye, about six miles east of Hereford. In the year 1595, it was, says Mr Brown, the editor of White’s Selborne, ‘after roaring and shaking in a terrible manner for three days together, about six o’clock on Sunday morning put in motion, and continued moving for eight hours, in which time it advanced upwards of two hundred feet from its first position, and mounted seventy-two feet higher than it was before. In the place where it set out, it left a gap four hundred feet long, and three hundred and twenty broad; and in its progress it overthrew a chapel, together with trees and houses that stood in its way.’

That interesting naturalist, Mr White of Selborne, gives at length, in one of his letters to the Honourable Daines Barrington, an account of an extraordinary landslip in his own neighbourhood, at a date corresponding with that of the landslip in Shropshire. He says: ‘The months of January and February 1774 were remarkable for great melting snows and vast gluts of rain, so that, by the end of the latter month, the land springs, or levants [eastern; so called, I suppose, because of the prevalence of easterly winds at this season], began to prevail, and to be near as high as in the memorable winter of 1764. The beginning of March also went on in the same tenor, when in the night between the 8th and 9th of that month, a{636} considerable part of the great woody hanger [a local term for an overhanging woody cliff] at Hawkley was torn from its place and fell down, leaving a high freestone cliff naked and bare, and resembling the steep side of a chalk-pit. It appears that this huge fragment, being perhaps sapped and undermined by waters, foundered, and was ingulfed, going down in a perpendicular direction; for a gate which stood in the field on the top of the hill, after sinking with its posts for thirty or forty feet, remained in so true and upright a position as to open and shut with great exactness, just as in its first situation. Several oaks also are still standing [written in 1775 or 1776] and in a state of vegetation, after taking the same desperate leap.

‘That great part of this prodigious mass was absorbed in some gulf below is plain also from the inclining ground at the bottom of the hill, which is free and unencumbered, but would have been buried in heaps of rubbish, had the fragment parted and fallen forward. About a hundred yards from the foot of this hanging coppice stood a cottage by the side of a lane; and two hundred yards lower, on the other side of the lane, was a farmhouse, in which lived a labourer and his family; and just by, a stout new barn. The cottage was inhabited by an old woman, her son, and his wife. These people, in the evening, which was very dark and tempestuous, observed that the brick floors of their kitchens began to heave and part, and that the walls seemed to open and the roofs to crack; but they all agree that no tremor of the ground indicating an earthquake was ever felt, only that the wind continued to make a tremendous roaring in the woods and hangers. The miserable inhabitants, not daring to go to bed, remained in the utmost solicitude and confusion, expecting every moment to be buried under the ruins of their shattered edifices. When daylight came, they were at leisure to contemplate the devastations of the night. They then found that a deep rift, or chasm, had opened under their houses, and torn them as it were in two, and that one end of the barn had suffered in a similar manner; that a pond near the cottage had undergone a strange reverse, becoming deep at the shallow end, and so vice versâ; that many large oaks were removed out of their perpendicular, some thrown down, and some fallen into the heads of neighbouring trees; and that a gate was thrust forward with its hedge full six feet, so as to require a new track to be made to it. From the foot of the cliff, the general course of the ground, which is pasture, inclines in a moderate descent for half a mile, and is interspersed with some hillocks, which were lifted in every direction, as well towards the great woody hanger as from it. In the first pasture the deep clefts began, and running across the lane and under the buildings, made such vast shelves that the road was impassable for some time; and so over to an arable field on the other side, which was strangely torn and disordered. The second pasture-field, being more soft and springy, was protruded forward without many fissures in the turf, which was raised in long ridges resembling graves, lying at right angles to the motion. At the bottom of this inclosure, the soil and turf rose many feet against the bodies of some oaks that obstructed their further course, and terminated this awful commotion.’

Passing by a number of catastrophes of this nature occurring at earlier dates, we propose to give some interesting particulars concerning one which took place in the early part of this century in Switzerland, where they are very frequent.

In one corner of the canton of Schweitz are the lakes Wallenstadt, Zug, and Lowertz. Near the last is a mountain called the Righi, and a smaller one, the Rossberg. The latter is composed of strata of freestone, pudding-stone—a conglomeration of coarse sandstone, with silicious pebbles, flints, &c.; and clay, with frequent blocks of granite, in the lower part. On the 2d of September 1806, a large portion of this mountain—a mass about a thousand feet in width, a hundred feet in depth, and nearly three miles in length—slipped into the valley below. It was not merely the summit or a projecting crag which fell, but an entire bed of strata extending from the top to nearly the bottom. A long continuance of heavy rains had softened the strata of clay, which sloped downwards; and so the mass was set free, and slipped into the valley, a chaos of stones, earth, clay, and clayey mud. For hours before the catastrophe there had been signs of some convulsion approaching. Early in the morning and at intervals during the day there were noises as if the mountain were in the throes of some great pang, so that it seemed to tremble with fear; so much so, that the furniture shook in the houses of the villages of Arth and St Ann. About two o’clock, a superstitious farmer, who dwelt high up the mountain, hearing a strange kind of cracking noise, and thinking it was the work of some demon, ran down to Arth to fetch the priest to exorcise the evil spirit. There were now openings in the turf, and stones were ejected in a few instances. In the hamlet of Unter Rothen, at the foot of the mountain, a man was digging in his garden, when he found his spade thrust back out of the soil, and the earth spurted up like water from a fountain. As the day advanced, the cracks in the ground became larger, portions of rock fell; springs began to flow, and frightened birds took wing in confusion, uttering discordant screams.

About five o’clock, the vast mass of material set loose began to move. At first the movement was slow, and there were repeated pauses. An old man sitting at his door smoking his pipe, was told by a neighbour that the mountain was falling. He thought there was plenty of time, and went indoors to fill his pipe again; but his neighbour ran down the valley, falling repeatedly by reason of the agitation of the ground, and escaped with difficulty. When he looked back to the village, the old man’s house had disappeared. In the space of about three minutes, the vast mass, separated into two portions, had descended three miles, sweeping everything before it. The smaller portion took a course towards the foot of the Righi, destroying the hamlets of Spitzbuhl, Ober and Unter Rothen. Its velocity was such as to carry enormous fragments to a great height up the opposite mountain. A peasant who survived the calamity, was engaged in cutting down a tree near his house, when a noise like thunder arrested his attention; he felt{637} the ground tremble under his feet, and he was immediately thrown down by a current of air. Retaining his presence of mind, a dreadful scene presented itself; the tree he had been cutting down, his house, and every familiar object, had disappeared, and an immense cloud of dust enveloped him.

The ruin effected by the descent of the larger portion was more terrible. It took the direction of the Lake of Lowertz. Among its first victims were nine persons belonging to a party which had come from Berne to climb to the top of the Righi. Besides the village of Goldau, the adjacent villages of Bussingen and Hussloch, and three-fourths of the village of Lowertz, were overwhelmed. But the destruction did not stop here. The larger of the two portions filled up nearly one-fourth of the Lake of Lowertz. The body of water thus displaced formed a wave which swept over the little island of Schwanau in the lake, rising to the height of seventy feet, besides doing a great deal of mischief along the shore, especially to the village of Seewen.

By this disaster nearly five hundred persons lost their lives, and damage was done to the amount of one hundred and twenty thousand pounds. Of all the inhabitants, about twenty were taken alive from the ruins. Two out of a family of seven were saved as by a miracle. At the moment of the catastrophe the father was standing at his own door with his wife and three children. Seeing the mass rolling towards him, he caught up two of the children, bidding his wife follow him with the third. Instead of doing so, however, she turned back into the house to fetch the remaining child, Marianne, and Frances Ulrich, the servant-maid. Frances seized the little girl by the hand, and was leading her out, when the house, which was of timber, seemed to be torn from its foundations, and to turn over and over like a ball, so that she was sometimes on her head and sometimes on her feet. A storm of dust made the day dark as night. The violence of the shock separated her from the child, and she hung head downwards. She was squeezed and bruised a good deal, and her face was much cut and very painful. After some time she released her right hand, and wiped the blood from her face. She then heard Marianne groaning, and calling ‘Frances, Frances!’ The child said that she was lying on her back among stones and bushes, unable to rise; that her hands were at liberty, and that she could see the daylight and the green fields. Frances had imagined that they were buried a great depth under ground; and thought that the last day was come.

After remaining in this state some hours, Frances heard a bell, which she knew to be that of the village church of Steinen, calling the survivors to prayer. The little girl was now crying bitterly from pain and hunger; and the servant-maid tried in vain to comfort her. From sheer exhaustion, however, the cry became weaker, and then ceased entirely. Meanwhile, Frances herself was in a most painful position, hanging with her head downwards, enveloped in the liquid clay, and cold almost beyond endurance. By persevering in her efforts, she at length got her legs free, and so obtained partial relief. A silence of some hours followed. When the dark hours of that terrible night had passed and morning came, she had the satisfaction of knowing that the child was not dead, but had fallen asleep. As soon as she awoke, she began to cry and complain. The church bell now went again for prayers; and Frances heard also the voice of her master making lamentations over his loss. He had succeeded in escaping and rescuing the two children he had with him, though one was for a time partly buried in the fringe of the landslip. Seeking for the other members of his family, he had found the lifeless body of his wife with the child she had taken in her arms, at a distance of more than a quarter of a mile from where his house had stood. All of her that was visible was one of her feet. While digging out her body, he heard the cries of little Marianne. The child was at once disinterred from her living grave; and though one of her legs was broken, she seemed more anxious for the release of Frances than for her own comfort. The maid was soon extricated; but she was bruised and wounded in a frightful manner. For a long time her recovery was very doubtful. Even after she was out of danger, she was unable to bear the light, and was for a lengthened period subject to convulsions and seasons of extreme fear and terror.

A traveller who visited the district about a week after the catastrophe has given an interesting description of his visit: ‘Picture to yourself a rude and mingled mass of earth and stone, bristling with the shattered remains of wooden cottages, and with thousands of heavy trees torn up by their roots and projecting in all directions. In one part you might see a range of peasants’ huts, which the torrent of earth had reached with just force enough to overthrow and break in pieces, but without bringing soil enough to cover them. In another were mills broken in pieces by huge rocks, separated from the top of the mountain, which were even carried high up the Righi on the opposite side. Large pools of water were formed in different places; and many little streams, whose usual channels had been filled up, were bursting out in various places.’

There is living in our neighbourhood an old man, the son of a once famous ‘Whiteboy.’ As such, his bringing-up must have been strangely in keeping with the moonlighting propensities of the present day, and of which we unfortunately hear so much. But not so. ‘Barry,’ as we shall call him, has a horror of Land-leagueism, and will have nothing to do with it. His experience of the Whiteboys, or Moonlighters of sixty years ago, is interesting—at least to me; and I hope the following account will prove so to those who are not quite au fait with the doings of these confederations in Ireland sixty years ago.

Some time since, on the death of a relative, besides other effects willed to me, was a box containing several curios. Amongst them was a genuine letter written in 1823 by Captain Rock, in those days the Moonlight leader of{638} the Whiteboys. Knowing from Barry that his father had been not only an admirer of Captain Rock, but a follower of his, I showed him the letter, hoping that in doing so I would also verify its authenticity. It was as follows:

‘Sure, and that’s a real letter, and no mistake,’ said Barry, handing it back to me after perusal. ‘I remember when I was a gorsoon [boy], my father writing letters just like it, when he and the Boys would meet of nights at our house. Many is the queer thing I heard them plan, when they thought I was asleep in bed; and though I forgets most of their doings now, I remembers a few; and I’ll tell them same to you and welcome, if you likes to hear them. The Whiteboys, and the Bloodsuckers, and the Molly M‘Guires resembles the Moonlighters of the present day; though they were not, so to say, as bad entirely, still they were fidgety creatures enough. ’Tis nigh on sixty years since my father died, and I was a tidy bit of a lad then. He was a follower of Captin Rock, the leader of what we called one kind of Whiteboys, in those days. Captin Rock was, you know, only an imaginary name, just as Captin Moonlight is in these times. I would not say as the Whiteboys in my father’s time was as bad as those as followed them. They said nothing against paying the rent; and a good drop of the crater would do wonders with Captin Rock and his followers. Sure, ’twas hard in name he was, as my father used to say, and not in nature.

‘The Bloodsuckers, who came next, were frightful creatures. They were so called because they took money to inform. ’Twas the price of blood, you see.

‘The famine of 1845 had a demoralising effect on the people, and many and many the poor creature breaking stones on the roadside had a pistol or some weapon of defence hid in the heap beside them. There was one gentleman you would like to hear about, maybe, who met with great troubles at the hands of the Boys. I knew him well, for many a pocketful of apples he gave me; and he was as hard-working and honest a creature as you’d meet with in a day’s walk. The Boys had no ill-will against himself personally; but they thought to frighten him from taking a farm as was “useful to them,”’ said Barry, with a knowing wink. ‘The first thing they did was to send him a threatening letter. Then a man as I knew full well—for many’s the time he and my poor father laid their plans together—he was turned off to shoot him. He stood inside the road-wall where there was an old archway half built up—a mighty convenient place, as he afterwards said, to rest a gun on. But for all that, he didn’t fire the shot that night, for reasons which you’ll hear presently. The Boys were so disappointed, that two of them went at dusk one evening to the gentleman’s own hall door and knocked. Sure enough, just as they thought, he opened it himself for them. On doing so, he saw the two Boys, one with a pistol, the other with a blunderbuss.

“Come out; you are wanted,” says they to him.

“Yes,” replied he; “but wait till I get my hat.”

“Don’t mind your hat,” was the answer; “you’ll do for us without it.”

‘Just then the Missis came into the hall, and hearing the noise, off they went.

‘Weeks afterwards, these men told the Master (as I shall call him, seeing I never likes to mention names) that had he gone in for his hat as he wanted to, they’d have shot him dead just where he stood, for they would have been afraid he was going for help.

“Why didn’t you shoot me the night you were behind the old archway on the old Moiveen road?” he asked one of them.

“The night was cold,” replied the Boy; “and the drop of the crater as the Captin sint me was that strong that it set me to sleep. I axes your pardon now for going to shoot you at all, for you are such a ‘dacent’ [plucky] man, you might be one of the Boys yourself. And to show you I has no ill-will agin you, if there is any little job as you wants done before marning” (meaning murder, of course), “I’ll do it for you meself and welcome.”

‘However, this didn’t see the poor Master at the end of his troubles; there was more before him. A short time after, as the man was ploughing in the field, four of the Boys came and told him to stand aside. Then two of them held him, while the other two put a bullet through the head of each horse, and the poor creatures died the same night. The Boys broke the plough afterwards and warned the man away. They tied notices on it forbidding any one to plough for the Master till he gave up the idea of taking the farm, as Captin Rock wanted it for his own use.

‘But the Master, he was an iligant man surely. Many’s the time, gorsoon though I was, I’d have given my two eyes to help him; but though I was no Whiteboy, and I hated their dirty work, I was the son of one, and you know, “There is honour among thieves.”—Well, as I was saying, the Master was an iligant, foine man. Being a bit handy, he mended his plough, took it in his own hands, and with his loaded gun laid across it, did all the ploughing himself. Maybe you won’t hardly credit me when I tell you that he did most of the work with a mule; and sometimes, to help the poor baste, when the ground was light, he yoked himself with her, whilst an old man who lived with the Master guided the plough. After this, the Boys,{639} seeing they could not frighten him, let him alone.

‘When the Bloodsuckers had had their day, next came the Molly M‘Guires. ’Twas them as had the big blunderbuss called “Roaring Mag,” which maybe you have heard tell of. There was an Englishman who came over to Ireland and laid down a weir to catch our salmon; but the Molly M‘Guires would not have any foreigners come a-fishing to our shores, so they cut away the nets and destroyed the weir. Whenever they performed a bould feat such as this, they made poetry of it, writing it out, and giving a copy to the principal Molly M‘Guire Boys. ’Tis many a year ago since four of the Boys, long since dead, wrote the piece I allude to; and I doubt if there is any one alive but meself who could repeat it for you; but I always had a good mimory,’ concluded Barry proudly.

Molly M‘Guire.

written and composed for the
Boys, by four of ’em.

approved of
by our counsil

Sind—Molly M‘Guire.

‘That’s a fine piece of poetry, isn’t it?’ asked Barry, as he concluded this extraordinary medley, which cannot, I fear, be dignified by the name of rhyme, much less poetry. ‘A grain of powder and shot and a glass or two of the crater would make a Molly M‘Guire your friend for life, maybe. Sure, and many’s the curious thing I’ve known, and many’s the plan made in my hearing by the Boys and my father; but I would never tell on them, though I never had ought to do with their intrigues, as I calls them. But though my poor father was a real Whiteboy, he never had, as I knows of, the dark deeds on his conscience that some of them Moonlighters of the present days has. These is no times to be talking, leastways I keeps my thoughts to meself; but as you seemed anxious-like to hear of them that went before the Moonlighters, I am glad to oblige you. I have been able to do that without mentioning names; and there isn’t many alive who could tell you as well as meself of the doings in Old Oireland of sixty years ago.’

Spartan brevity of speech is still sometimes amusingly illustrated. A most worthy man, unaccustomed to public speaking, being suddenly called upon to address a Sunday school, rose to his feet, and, after vainly struggling for utterance, at last hoarsely muttered: ‘Dear children, don’t ever play with powder.’—The following gallant toast was lately given at a military dinner in Carolina: ‘The ladies—our arms their protection—their arms our reward.’

‘Don’t eat stale Q-cumbers. They will W up,’ is the terse advice of some wit.—Announcements on shop-signs expressed in the succinct style of one connected with a certain restaurant in New York, should serve as startling advertisements: ‘Lunch, 75 cents; square meal, 1 dollar; perfect gorge, 1 dollar 25 cents.’—In the same city, a shopkeeper is said to have stuck upon his door this laconic advertisement: ‘A boy wanted.’ On going to his shop next morning, he beheld a smiling little urchin in a basket, with the following pithy label: ‘Here he is!’—A penny-a-liner would hardly find much employment on the Kansas paper which informed the public that ‘Mr Blank of Missouri got to owning horses that didn’t belong to him, and the next thing he knew he couldn’t get his feet down to the ground.’ Lynched, probably.—A Western writer, speaking of a new play just written by a gentleman of Cincinnati, says: ‘The unities are admirably observed; the dullness which commences with the first act, never flags for a moment until the curtain falls.’

The characteristics of several nations have been summed up in the following concise form: The first thing a Spaniard does on founding a colony is to build a gallows; a Portuguese, to build a church; an Englishman, a drinking-booth; and a Frenchman, a dancing-floor.

A cobbler visited one of the large manufactories the other day, and for the first time in his life saw shoes made by machinery. ‘What do you think of that?’ asked the foreman.—‘It beats awl,’ was the laconic and significant reply.—A ‘sensible’ woman, as Dr Abernethy would have called her, was discovered by a shy man, who made her a rather original proposal. He bought a wedding ring, and sent it to the lady, inclosing a sheet of notepaper with the{640} brief question, ‘Does it fit?’ By return of post he received for answer: ‘Beautifully.’

It is related that Makart, the great Viennese painter, is even more taciturn than Von Moltke, the man who is silent in seven languages. An American, who had been told that the best way to get on friendly terms with the artist would be to play chess with him at the café to which he resorted nightly, watched his opportunity, and, when Makart’s opponent rose, slipped into his chair. At last his dream was about to be realised, he was to spend an evening in Makart’s society. The painter signed to him to play, and the game began, and went on with no other sound than the moving of the pieces. At last the American made the winning move, and exclaimed, ‘Mate!’ Up rose Makart in disgust and stalked out, saying angrily to a friend who asked why he left so early: ‘Oh, I can’t stand playing with a chatterbox!’

The expressions used by some boys and girls if written as pronounced would look like a foreign language. Specimens of boys’ conversation like the following may be called shorthand talking: ‘Warejego lasnight?’ ‘Hadder skate.’—‘Jerfind the ice hard’ngood?’ ‘Yes; hard’nough.’—‘Jer goerlone? ‘No; Bill’n Joe wenterlong.’—‘Howlate jerstay?’ ‘Pastate.’—‘Lemmeknow wenyergoin, woneher? I wanter go’nshowyer howto skate.’—‘H—m, ficoodn’ skate better’n you I’d sell out ’nquit.’ ‘Well, we’ll tryerace ’nseefyercan.’

The well-known answer of the Greeks to the Persian king before the battle of Thermopylæ, was rivalled by the despatch of General Suvaroff to the Russian Empress: ‘Hurrah! Ismail’s ours!’ The Empress returned an answer equally brief: ‘Hurrah! Field-Marshal!’

The message from Lord Charles Beresford to his wife from the fort near Metemmeh was pithy enough: ‘Quite well and cheerful. Privations have been severe; thirst, hunger, battles desperate; but things look better.’

There are some quaint and pithy epistles on record. Quin, when offended by Rich, went away in resentment and wrote: ‘I am at Bath.’ The answer was as laconic, though not quite so civil: ‘Stay there.’

Sibbald, the editor of the Chronicles of Scottish Poetry, resided in London for three or four years, during which time his friends in Scotland were ignorant not only of his movements, but even of his address. In the longrun, his brother, a Leith merchant, contrived to get a letter conveyed to him, the object of which was to inquire into his circumstances and to ask where he lived. His reply ran as follows: ‘Dear Brother—I live in So-ho, and my business is so-so.—Yours, James Sibbald.’

Concise and to the point was the curious letter sent by a farmer to a schoolmaster as an excuse for his son’s absence from school: ‘Cepatomtogoatatrin.’ This meant, kep’ at ’ome to go a-taterin’ (gathering potatoes). A Canadian freshman once wrote home to his father: ‘Dear Papa—I want a little change.’ The fond parent replied by the next post: ‘Dear Charlie—Just wait for it. Time brings change to every one.’

Briefer than these was an epistle of Emile de Girardin to his second wife, with whom he lived on most unfriendly terms. The house was large enough to permit them to dwell entirely separate from one another. One day, Madame de Girardin had an important communication to make to her husband. Taking a small sheet of paper she wrote: ‘The Boudoir to the Library: Would like to go to Switzerland.’—M. de Girardin, imitating her concise style, responded: ‘The Library to the Boudoir: Go.’ That was all.

One of the most laconic wills on record ran thus: ‘I have nothing; I owe a great deal—the rest I give to the poor.’—A similar terse epitaph to the following would have suited that will-maker: ‘Died of thin shoes, January 1839.’

Printed and Published by W. & R. Chambers, 47 Paternoster Row, London, and 339 High Street, Edinburgh.

All rights reserved.

[Transcriber’s note—the following changes have been made to this text.

Page 627: Luée to Lucé—“earth at Lucé”.]