[Pg 1]

HARPER’S

NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

No. VI.—NOVEMBER, 1850.—Vol. I.

A PILGRIMAGE TO THE CRADLE OF AMERICAN LIBERTY.

WITH PEN AND PENCIL.

BY BENSON J. LOSSING.[1]

t was a glorious October
morning, mild and brilliant,
when I left Boston to
visit Concord and Lexington.
A gentle land-breeze
during the night had borne
the clouds back to their
ocean birth-place, and not
a trace of the storm was
left except in the saturated
earth. Health returned
with the clear sky, and I
felt a rejuvenescence in
every vein and muscle
when, at dawn, I strolled
over the natural glory of
Boston, its broad and beautifully-arbored
Common. I breakfasted at six,
and at half-past seven left the station of the
Fitchburg rail-way for Concord, seventeen miles
northwest of Boston. The country through
which the road passed is rough and broken, but
thickly settled. I arrived at the Concord station,
about half a mile from the centre of the village,
before nine o’clock, and procuring a conveyance,
and an intelligent young man for a guide, proceeded
at once to visit the localities of interest
in the vicinity. We rode to the residence of
Major James Barrett, a surviving grandson of
Colonel Barrett, about two miles north of the
village, and near the residence of his venerated
ancestor. Major Barrett was eighty-seven years
of age when I visited him; and his wife, with
whom he had lived nearly sixty years, was
eighty. Like most of the few survivors of the
Revolution, they were remarkable for their
mental and bodily vigor. Both, I believe, still
live. The old lady—a small, well-formed woman—was
as sprightly as a girl of twenty, and
moved about the house with the nimbleness of
foot of a matron in the prime of life. I was
charmed with her vivacity, and the sunny radiance
which it seemed to shed throughout her
household; and the half hour that I passed with
that venerable couple is a green spot in the
memory.

MONUMENT AT CONCORD.

Major Barrett was a lad of fourteen when
the British incursion into Concord took place.
He was too young to bear a musket, but, with
every lad and woman in the vicinity, he labored
in concealing the stores and in making cartridges
for those who went out to fight. With oxen
and a cart, himself, and others about his age,
removed the stores deposited at the house of his
grandfather, into the woods, and concealed them,
a cart-load in a place, under pine boughs. In
such haste were they obliged to act on the approach
of the British from Lexington, that, when
the cart was loaded, lads would march on each
side of the oxen and goad them into a trot.
Thus all the stores were effectually concealed,
except some carriage-wheels. Perceiving the
enemy near, these were cut up and burned; so
that Parsons found nothing of value to destroy
or carry away.

From Major Barrett’s we rode to the monument
erected at the site of the old North Bridge,
where the skirmish took place. The road crosses
the Concord River a little above the site of
the North Bridge. The monument stands a
few rods westward of the road leading to the
village, and not far from the house of the Reverend[Pg 722]
Dr. Ripley, who gave the ground for the
purpose. The monument is constructed of
granite from Carlisle, and has an inscription
upon a marble tablet inserted in the eastern
face of the pedestal.[2] The view is from the
green shaded lane which leads from the highway
to the monument, looking westward. The
two trees standing, one upon each side, without
the iron railing, were saplings at the time of the
battle; between them was the entrance to the
bridge. The monument is reared upon a mound
of earth a few yards from the left bank of the
river. A little to the left, two rough, uninscribed
stones from the field mark the graves
of the two British soldiers who were killed and
buried upon the spot.

We returned to the village at about noon, and
started immediately for Lexington, six miles
eastward.

Concord is a pleasant little village, including
within its borders about one hundred dwellings.
It lies upon the Concord River, one of the chief
tributaries of the Merrimac, near the junction
of the Assabeth and Sudbury Rivers. Its Indian
name was Musketaquid. On account of the
peaceable manner in which it was obtained, by
purchase, of the aborigines, in 1635, it was
named Concord. At the north end of the broad
street, or common, is the house of Col. Daniel
Shattuck, a part of which, built in 1774, was
used as one of the depositories of stores when
the British invasion took place. It has been
so much altered, that a view of it would have
but little interest as representing a relic of the
past.

MONUMENT AT LEXINGTON.[4]

The road between Concord and Lexington
passes through a hilly but fertile country. It is
easy for the traveler to conceive how terribly a
retreating army might be galled by the fire of
a concealed enemy. Hills and hillocks, some
wooded, some bare, rise up every where, and
formed natural breast-works of protection to the
skirmishers that hung upon the flank and rear
of Colonel Smith’s troops. The road enters
Lexington at the green whereon the old meeting-house
stood when the battle occurred. The
town is upon a fine rolling plain, and is becoming
almost a suburban residence for citizens of
Boston. Workmen were inclosing the Green,
and laying out the grounds in handsome plats
around the monument, which stands a few yards
from the street. It is upon a spacious mound;
its material is granite, and it has a marble tablet
on the south front of the pedestal, with a long
inscription.[3] The design of the monument is
not at all graceful, and, being surrounded by[Pg 723]
tall trees, it has a very “dumpy” appearance.
The people are dissatisfied with it, and
doubtless, ere long, a more noble structure will
mark the spot where the curtain of the revolutionary
drama was first lifted.

NEAR VIEW OF THE MONUMENT.

After making the drawings here given, I
visited and made the sketch of “Clark’s House.”
There I found a remarkably intelligent old lady,
Mrs. Margaret Chandler, aged eighty-three
years. She has been an occupant
of the house, I believe, ever since the
Revolution, and has a perfect recollection
of the events of the period. Her
version of the escape of Hancock and
Adams is a little different from the published
accounts. She says that on the
evening of the 18th of April, 1775, some
British officers, who had been informed
where these patriots were, came to
Lexington, and inquired of a woman
whom they met, for “Mr. Clark’s
house.” She pointed to the parsonage;
but in a moment, suspecting their design,
she called to them and inquired if it was
Clark’s tavern that they were in search
of. Uninformed whether it was a
tavern or a parsonage where their intended
victims were staying, and supposing
the former to be the most likely
place, the officers replied, “Yes, Clark’s
tavern.” “Oh,” she said, “Clark’s
tavern is in that direction,” pointing
toward East Lexington. As soon as
they departed, the woman hastened to
inform the patriots of their danger, and
they immediately arose and fled to Woburn.
Dorothy Quincy, the intended
wife of Hancock, who was at Mr.
Clark’s, accompanied them in their
flight.

I next called upon the venerable Abijah
Harrington, who was living in the village.
He was a lad of fourteen at the
time of the engagement. Two of his brothers
were among the minute men, but escaped unhurt.
Jonathan and Caleb Harrington, near relatives,
were killed. The former was shot in front of his
own house, while his wife stood at the window
in an agony of alarm. She saw her husband
fall, and then start up, the blood gushing from
his breast. He stretched out his arms toward
her, and then fell again. Upon his hands and
knees he crawled toward his dwelling, and expired
just as his wife reached him. Caleb
Harrington was shot while running from the
meeting-house. My informant saw almost the
whole of the battle, having been sent by his
mother to go near enough, and be safe, to obtain
and convey to her information respecting
her other sons, who were with the minute men.
His relation of the incidents of the morning
was substantially such as history has recorded.
He dwelt upon the subject with apparent delight,
for his memory of the scenes of his early
years, around which cluster so much of patriotism
and glory, was clear and full. I would
gladly have listened until twilight to the voice
of such experience, but time was precious, and
I hastened to East Lexington, to visit his cousin,
Jonathan Harrington, an old man of ninety,
who played the fife when the minute men were
marshaled on the Green upon that memorable
April morning. He was splitting fire-wood in
his yard with a vigorous hand when I rode up;
and as he sat in his rocking-chair, while I
sketched his placid features, he appeared no
older than a man of seventy. His brother,
aged eighty-eight, came in before my sketch
was finished, and I could not but gaze with
wonder upon these strong old men, children of
one mother, who were almost grown to manhood
when the first battle of our Revolution
occurred! Frugality and temperance, co-operating
with industry, a cheerful temper, and a
good constitution, have lengthened their days,
and made their protracted years hopeful and
happy.[5] The aged fifer apologized for the[Pg 724]
rough appearance of his signature, which he
kindly wrote for me, and charged the tremulous
motion of his hand to his labor with the ax.
How tenaciously we cling even to the appearance
of vigor, when the whole frame is tottering
to its fall! Mr. Harrington opened the
ball of the Revolution with the shrill war-notes
of the fife, and then retired from the arena. He
was not a soldier in the war, nor has his life,
passed in the quietude of rural pursuits, been
distinguished except by the glorious acts which
constitute the sum of the achievements of a
GOOD CITIZEN.

I left Lexington at about three o’clock, and
arrived at Cambridge at half past four. It was
a lovely autumnal afternoon. The trees and
fields were still green, for the frost had not yet
been busy with their foliage and blades. The
road is Macadamized the whole distance; and
so thickly is it lined with houses, that the village
of East Lexington and Old
Cambridge seem to embrace
each other in close union.

Cambridge is an old town,
the first settlement
there having been planted
in 1631, contemporaneous
with that of Boston. It
was the original intention
of the settlers to make it
the metropolis of Massachusetts,
and Governor
Winthrop commenced
the erection
of his dwelling there.
It was called New
Town, and in 1632
was palisaded. The
Reverend Mr. Hooker,
one of the earliest
settlers of Connecticut, was the first minister in
Cambridge. In 1636, the General Court provided
for the erection of a public school in New
Town, and appropriated two thousand dollars
for that purpose. In 1638, the Reverend John
Harvard, of Charlestown, endowed the school
with about four thousand dollars. This endowment
enabled them to exalt the academy
into a college, and it was called Harvard University
in honor of its principal benefactor.

Cambridge has the distinction of being the
place where the first printing-press in America
was established. Its proprietor was named Day,
and the capital that purchased the materials
was furnished by the Rev. Mr. Glover. The
first thing printed was the “Freeman’s Oath,”
in 1636; the next was an almanac; and the
next the Psalms, in metre.[6] Old Cambridge
(West Cambridge, or Metonomy, of the Revolution),
the seat of the University, is three miles
from West Boston Bridge, which connects Cambridge
with Boston. Cambridgeport is about
half way between Old Cambridge and the bridge,
and East Cambridge occupies Lechmere’s Point,
a promontory fortified during the
siege of Boston in 1775.

WASHINGTON’S HEAD-QUARTERS AT CAMBRIDGE.

Arrived at Old Cambridge, I parted
company with the vehicle and
driver that conveyed me from
Concord to Lexington, and
hither; and, as the day was
fast declining, I hastened to
sketch the head-quarters of
Washington, an elegant
and spacious
edifice,
standing
in the midst of shrubbery and stately elms, a
little distance from the street, once the highway
from Harvard University to Waltham. At this
mansion, and at Winter Hill, Washington passed
most of his time, after taking command of the
Continental army, until the evacuation of Boston
in the following spring. Its present owner
is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Professor
of Oriental languages in Harvard University, and
widely known in the world of literature as one of
the most gifted men of the age. It is a spot
worthy of the residence of an American bard so
endowed, for the associations which hallow it
are linked with the noblest themes that ever
awakened the inspiration of a child of song.

then to the thoughtful dweller must come the
spirit of the place and hour to weave a gorgeous[Pg 725]
tapestry, rich with pictures, illustrative
of the heroic age of our young republic. My
tarry was brief and busy, for the sun was rapidly
descending—it even touched the forest tops
before I finished the drawing—but the cordial
reception and polite attentions which I received
from the proprietor, and his warm approval of,
and expressed interest for the success of my
labors, occupy a space in memory like that of
a long, bright summer day.

This mansion stands upon the
upper of two terraces, which are
ascended each by five stone steps.
At each front corner of the house
is a lofty elm—mere saplings
when Washington beheld them,
but now stately and patriarchal
in appearance. Other elms, with
flowers and shrubbery, beautify
the grounds around it; while within,
iconoclastic innovation has not
been allowed to enter with its
mallet and trowel, to mar the
work of the ancient builder, and
to cover with the vulgar stucco
of modern art the carved cornices
and paneled wainscots that first enriched it. I
might give a long list of eminent persons whose
former presence in those spacious rooms adds
interest to retrospection, but they are elsewhere
identified with scenes more personal and important.
I can not refrain, however, from
noticing the visit of one, who, though a dark
child of Africa and a bond-woman, received
the most polite attention from the commander-in-chief.
This was Phillis, a slave of Mr.
Wheatley, of Boston. She was brought from
Africa when between seven and eight years
old. She seemed to acquire knowledge intuitively;
became a poet of considerable merit,
and corresponded with such eminent persons
as the Countess of Huntingdon, Earl of Dartmouth,
Reverend George Whitefield, and others.
Washington invited her to visit him at Cambridge,
which she did a few days before the British
evacuated Boston; her master among others,
having left the city by permission, and retired,
with his family, to Chelsea. She passed half an
hour with the commander-in-chief, from whom
and his officers she received marked attention.[7]

THE RIEDESEL HOUSE, CAMBRIDGE.[8]

A few rods above the residence of Professor
Longfellow is the house in which the Brunswick
general, the Baron Riedesel, and his family
were quartered, during the stay of the captive
army of Burgoyne in the vicinity of Boston.
I was not aware when I visited Cambridge,
that the old mansion was still in existence;
but, through the kindness of Mr. Longfellow, I
am able to present the features of its southern
front, with a description. In style it is very
much like that of Washington’s head-quarters,
and the general appearance of the grounds
around is similar. It is shaded by noble linden-trees,
and adorned with shrubbery, presenting
to the eye all the attractions noticed by the
Baroness of Riedesel in her charming letters.[Pg 726][9]
Upon a window-pane on the north side of the
house may be seen the undoubted autograph of
that accomplished woman, inscribed with a diamond
point. It is an interesting
memento, and
is preserved with great
care. The annexed is
a facsimile of it.

During the first moments of the
soft evening twilight I sketched the
“Washington elm,” one of the
ancient anakim of the primeval
forest, older, probably, by
a half century or more,
than the welcome of Samoset
to the white settlers.
It stands upon Washington-street,
near the westerly
corner of the
Common, and is distinguished
by the
circumstance that,
beneath its broad
shadow, General
Washington first
drew his sword
as commander-in-chief
of the
Continental army,
on the 3d
of July, 1775.
Thin lines of
clouds, glowing
in the light of the setting sun like bars of
gold, streaked the western sky, and so prolonged
the twilight by reflection, that I had ample
time to finish my drawing before the night
shadows dimmed the paper.

Early on the following morning I procured a
chaise to visit Charlestown and Dorchester
Heights. I rode first to the former place, and
climbed to the summit of the great obelisk that
stands upon the site of the redoubt upon Breed’s
Hill. As I ascended the steps which lead from
the street to the smooth gravel-walks upon the
eminence whereon the “Bunker Hill Monument”
stands, I experienced a feeling of disappointment
and regret, not easily to be expressed.
Before me was the great memento,
huge and grand—all that patriotic reverence
could wish—but the ditch scooped out by Prescott’s
toilers on that starry night in June, and
the mounds that were upheaved to protect them
from the shots of the astonished Britons, were
effaced, and no more vestiges remain of the
handiwork of those in whose honor and to
whose memory this obelisk was raised, than of
Roman conquests in the shadow of Trajan’s
column—of the naval battles of Nelson around
his monument in Trafalgar-square, or of French
victories in the Place Vendôme. The fosse and
the breast-works were all quite prominent when
the foundation-stone of the monument was laid,
and a little care, directed by good taste, might
have preserved them in their interesting state
of half ruin until the passage of the present century,
or, at least, until the sublime centenary
of the battle should be celebrated. Could the
visitor look upon the
works of the patriots
themselves, associations
a hundred-fold more interesting
would crowd
the mind, for wonderfully
suggestive
of thought[Pg 727]
are the slightest relics of the past when linked
with noble deeds. A soft green sward, as even
as the rind of a fair apple, and cut by eight
straight gravel-walks, diverging from the monument,
is substituted by art for the venerated
irregularities made by the old mattock and
spade. The spot is beautiful to the eye untrained
by appreciating affection for hallowed
things; nevertheless, there is palpable desecration
that may hardly be forgiven.

BUNKER HILL MONUMENT.[10]

The view from the top of the monument, for
extent, variety, and beauty, is certainly one of
the finest in the world. A “York shilling” is
charged for the privilege of ascending the monument.
The view from its summit is “a shilling
show” worth a thousand miles of travel to
see. Boston, its harbor, and the beautiful country
around, mottled with villages, are spread out
like a vast painting, and on every side the eye
may rest upon localities of great historical interest,
Cambridge, Roxbury, Chelsea, Quincy,
Medford, Marblehead, Dorchester, and other
places, where

and the numerous sites of small fortifications
which the student of history can readily call to
mind. In the far distance, on the northwest,
rise the higher peaks of the White Mountains
of New Hampshire; and on the northeast, the
peninsula of Nahant, and the more remote Cape
Anne may be seen. Wonders which present
science and enterprise are developing and forming
are there exhibited in profusion. At one
glance from this lofty observatory may be seen
seven railroads,[11] and many other avenues connecting
the city with the country; and ships
from almost every region of the globe dot the
waters of the harbor. Could a tenant of the old
grave-yard on Copp’s Hill, who lived a hundred
years ago, when the village upon Tri-mountain
was fitting out its little armed flotillas against
the French in Acadia, or sending forth its few
vessels of trade along the neighboring coasts, or
occasionally to cross the Atlantic, come forth
and stand beside us a moment, what a new and
wonderful world would be presented to his vision!
A hundred years ago!

They were men wise in their generation, but
ignorant in practical knowledge when compared
with the present. In their wildest dreams, incited
by tales of wonder that spiced the literature
of their times, they never fancied any thing half
so wonderful as our mighty dray-horse,

WASHINGTON.[13]

I lingered in the chamber of the Bunker Hill
monument as long as time would allow, and
descending, rode back to the city, crossed to
South Boston, and rambled for an hour among
the remains of the fortifications upon the heights
of the peninsula of Dorchester. The present
prominent remains of fortifications are those of
intrenchments cast up during the war of 1812,
and have no other connection with our subject
than the circumstance that they occupy the site
of the works constructed there by order of
Washington. These were greatly reduced in
altitude when the engineers began the erection
of the forts now in ruins, which are properly
preserved with a great deal of care. They occupy
the summits of two hills, which command
Boston Neck on the
left, the city of Boston
in front, and the
harbor on the right.
Southeast from the
heights, pleasantly situated
among gentle
hills, is the village of
Dorchester, so called
in memory of a place
in England of the same
name, whence many
of its earliest settlers
came. The stirring
events which rendered
Dorchester Heights
famous are universally
known.

I returned to Boston
at about one o’clock,
and passed the remainder
of the day in
visiting places of interest
within the city—the
old South meeting-house,
Faneuil
Hall, the Province
House, and the Hancock
House. I am indebted to John Hancock,
Esq., nephew of the patriot, and present proprietor
and occupant of the “Hancock House,”
on Beacon-street, for polite attentions while visiting
his interesting mansion, and for information
concerning matters that have passed under the
eye of his experience of threescore years. He
has many mementoes of his eminent kinsman, and
among them a beautifully-executed miniature of
him, painted in London, in 1761, while he was
there at the coronation of George III.

Near Mr. Hancock’s residence is the State
House, a noble structure upon Beacon Hill, the
corner-stone of which was laid in 1795, by
Governor Samuel Adams, assisted by Paul Revere,
master of the Masonic grand lodge. There
I sketched the annexed picture of the colossal
statue of Washington, by Chantrey, which stands
in the open centre of the first story; also the
group of trophies from Bennington, that hang over
the door of the Senate chamber. Under these
trophies, in a gilt frame, is a copy of the reply of
the Massachusetts Assembly to General Stark’s
letter, that accompanied the presentation of the
trophies. It was written fifty years ago.

MATHER’S VAULT.

After enjoying the view from the top of the
State House a while, I walked to Copp’s Hill,
a little east of Charlestown Bridge, at the north
end of the town, where I tarried until sunset in
the ancient burying-ground. The earliest name
of this eminence was Snow Hill. It was subsequently
named after its owner, William Copp.[14]
It came into the possession of the Ancient and
Honorable Artillery Company by mortgage; and
when, in 1775, they were forbidden by Gage to
parade on the Common, they went to this, their
own ground, and drilled in defiance of his threats.
The fort, or battery, that was built there by the
British, just before the battle of Bunker Hill,
stood near its southeast brow, adjoining the
burying-ground. The remains of many eminent
men repose in that little cemetery. Close by
the entrance is the vault of the Mather family.
It is covered by a plain, oblong structure of
brick, three feet high and about six feet long,
upon which is laid a heavy brown stone slab,
with a tablet of slate, bearing the names of the
principal tenants below.[15]

[Pg 729]

I passed the forenoon
of the next day
in the rooms of the
Massachusetts Historical Society,
where every facility was afforded me
by Mr. Felt, the librarian, for examining
the assemblage of things curious
collected there.[16] The printed books
and manuscripts, relating principally to
American history,
are numerous,
rare, and
valuable.

There is also
a rich depository
of the autographs
of the
Pilgrim fathers
and their immediate
descendants.
There
are no less than
twenty-five
large folio volumes
of valuable
manuscript
letters and other documents; besides which are
six thick quarto manuscript
volumes—a commentary
on the Holy
Scriptures—in the handwriting
of Cotton Mather.
From an autograph
letter of that singular
man the annexed
fac-simile of his writing and signature is given.
Among the portraits in the cabinet
of the society are those of Governor
Winslow, supposed to have been
painted by Vandyke, Increase Mather,
and Peter Faneuil, the founder
of Faneuil Hall.

MATHER’S WRITING.

SPEAKER’S DESK AND WINTHROP’S CHAIR.

CHURCH’S SWORD.

PHILIP’S SAMP-PAN.

I had the pleasure of meeting,
at the rooms of the society, that indefatigable
antiquary, Dr. Webb,
widely known as the American
correspondent of the “Danish Society
of Northern Antiquarians” at
Copenhagen. He was sitting in
the chair that once belonged to
Governor Winthrop, writing upon
the desk of the speaker of the Colonial
Assembly of Massachusetts,
around which the warm debates
were carried on concerning American
liberty, from the time when
James Otis denounced the Writs of
Assistance, until Governor Gage
adjourned the Assembly to Salem,
in 1774. Hallowed by such associations,
the desk is an interesting relic. Dr.
Webb’s familiarity with the collections of the society,
and his kind attentions, greatly facilitated
my search among the six thousand articles for
things curious connected with my subject and
made my brief visit far more profitable to myself
than it would otherwise have been. Among the
relics preserved are the chair that belonged to
Governor Carver; the sword of Miles Standish;
the huge key of Port Royal gate; a samp-pan,
that belonged to Metacomet, or King Philip; and
the sword reputed to have been used by Captain
Church when he cut off that unfortunate sachem’s
head. The dish is about twelve inches in diameter,
wrought out of an elm knot with great
skill. The sword is very rude, and was doubtless
made by a blacksmith of the colony. The
handle is a roughly-wrought piece of ash, and
the guard is made of a wrought-iron plate.

[From Dickens’s Household Words.]

FATE DAYS AND OTHER POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS.

It is a difficult puzzle to reconcile the existence
of certain superstitions that continue to
have wide influence with the enlightenment of the
nineteenth century. When we have read glowing
paragraphs about the wonderful progress
accomplished by the present generation; when
we have regarded the giant machinery in operation
for the culture of the people—moved, in
great part, by the collective power of individual
charity; when we have examined the stupendous
results of human genius and ingenuity
which are now laid bare to the lowliest in the
realm; we turn back, it must be confessed,
with a mournful despondency, to mark the debasing
influence of the old superstitions which
have survived to the present time.

The superstitions of the ancients formed part
of their religion. They consulted oracles as
now men pray. The stars were the arbiters
of their fortunes. Natural phenomena, as lightning
and hurricanes, were, to them, awful expressions
of the anger of their particular deities.
They had their dies atri and dies albi; the
former were marked down in their calendars
with a black character to denote ill-luck, and
the latter were painted in white characters to
signify bright and propitious days. They followed
the finger posts of their teachers. Faith[Pg 730]
gave dignity to the tenets of the star-gazer and
fire-worshiper.

The priests of old taught their disciples to
regard six particular days in the year as days
fraught with unusual danger to mankind. Men
were enjoined not to let blood on these black
days, nor to imbibe any liquid. It was devoutly
believed that he who ate goose on one of
those black days would surely die within forty
more; and that any little stranger who made
his appearance on one of the dies atri would
surely die a sinful and violent death. Men
were further enjoined to let blood from the
right arm on the seventh or fourteenth of March;
from the left arm on the eleventh of April; and
from either arm on the third or sixth of May, that
they might avoid pestilential diseases. These
barbaric observances, when brought before
people in illustration of the mental darkness of
the ancients, are considered at once to be proof
positive of their abject condition. We thereupon
congratulated ourselves upon living in the
nineteenth century; when such foolish superstitions
are laughed at; and perhaps our vanity
is not a little flattered by the contrast which
presents itself, between our own highly cultivated
condition, and the wretched state of our
ancestors.

Yet Mrs. Flimmins will not undertake a sea-voyage
on a Friday; nor would she on any
account allow her daughter Mary to be married
on that day of the week. She has great
pity for the poor Red Indians who will not do
certain things while the moon presents a certain
appearance, and who attach all kinds of
powers to poor dumb brutes; yet if her cat
purrs more than usual, she accepts the warning,
and abandons the trip she had promised
herself on the morrow.

Miss Nippers subscribes largely to the fund
for eradicating superstitions from the minds of
the wretched inhabitants of Kamschatka; and
while she is calculating the advantages to be
derived from a mission to the South Sea Islands,
to do away with the fearful superstitious reverence
in which these poor dear islanders hold
their native flea: a coal pops from her fire,
and she at once augurs from its shape an abundance
of money, that will enable her to set her
pious undertaking in operation; but on no account
will she commence collecting subscriptions
for the anti-drinking-slave-grown-sugar-in-tea
society, because she has always remarked that
Monday is her unlucky day. On a Monday her
poodle died, and on a Monday she caught that
severe cold at Brighton, from the effects of
which she is afraid she will never recover.

Mrs. Carmine is a very strong-minded woman.
Her unlucky day is Wednesday. On a Wednesday
she first caught that flush which she has
never been able to chase from her cheeks, and
on one of these fatal days her Maria took the
scarlet fever. Therefore, she will not go to a
pic-nic on a Wednesday, because she feels convinced
that the day will turn out wet, or that
the wheel will come off the carriage. Yet the
other morning, when a gipsy was caught telling
her eldest daughter her fortune, Mrs. Carmine
very properly reproached the first-born
for her weakness, in giving any heed to the
silly mumblings of the old woman. Mrs. Carmine
is considered to be a woman of uncommon
acuteness. She attaches no importance whatever
to the star under which a child is born—does
not think there is a pin to choose between
Jupiter and Neptune; and she has a positive
contempt for ghosts; but she believes in nothing
that is begun, continued, or ended on a
Wednesday.

Miss Crumple, on the contrary, has seen
many ghosts, in fact, is by this time quite intimate
with one or two of the mysterious brotherhood;
but at the same time she is at a loss to
understand how any woman in her senses, can
believe Thursday to be a more fortunate day
than Wednesday, or why Monday is to be black-balled
from the Mrs. Jones’s calendar. She can
state on her oath, that the ghost of her old
schoolfellow, Eliza Artichoke, appeared at her
bedside on a certain night, and she distinctly
saw the mole on its left cheek, which poor
Eliza, during her brief career, had vainly endeavored
to eradicate, with all sorts of poisonous
things. The ghost, moreover, lisped—so
did Eliza! This was all clear enough to Miss
Crumple, and she considered it a personal insult
for any body to suggest that her vivid apparitions
existed only in her over-wrought imagination.
She had an affection for her ghostly
visitors, and would not hear a word to their
disparagement.

The unearthly warnings which Mrs. Piptoss
had received had well-nigh spoiled all her furniture.
When a relative dies, the fact is not
announced to her in the commonplace form of
a letter; no, an invisible sledge-hammer falls
upon her Broadwood, an invisible power upsets
her loo-table, all the doors of her house unanimously
blow open, or a coffin flies out of the
fire into her lap.

Mrs. Grumple, who is a very economical
housewife, looks forward to the day when the
moon re-appears, on which occasion she turns
her money, taking care not to look at the pale
lady through glass. This observance, she devoutly
believes, will bring her good fortune.
When Miss Caroline has a knot in her lace, she
looks for a present; and when Miss Amelia
snuffs the candle out, it is her faith that the
act defers her marriage a twelvemonth. Any
young lady who dreams the same dream two
consecutive Fridays, will tell you that her
visions will “come true.”

Yet these are exactly the ladies, who most
deplore the “gross state of superstition” in
which many “benighted savages” live, and
willingly subscribe their money for its eradication.
The superstition so generally connected
with Friday, may easily be traced to its source.
It undoubtedly and confessedly has its origin in
scriptural history: it is the day on which the
Saviour suffered. The superstition is the more[Pg 731]
revolting from this circumstance; and it is
painful to find that it exists among persons of
education. There is no branch of the public
service, for instance, in which so much sound
mathematical knowledge is to be found, as in
the Navy. Yet who are more superstitious than
sailors, from the admiral down to the cabin boy?
Friday fatality is still strong among them. Some
years ago, in order to lessen this folly, it was
determined that a ship should be laid down on
a Friday, and launched on a Friday; that she
should be called “Friday,” and that she should
commence her first voyage on a Friday. After
much difficulty a captain was found who owned
to the name of Friday; and after a great deal
more difficulty men were obtained, so little
superstitious, as to form a crew. Unhappily,
this experiment had the effect of confirming the
superstition it was meant to abolish. The
“Friday” was lost—was never, in fact, heard
of from the day she set sail.

Day-fatality, as Miss Nippers interprets it, is
simply the expression of an undisciplined and
extremely weak mind; for, if any person will
stoop to reason with her on her aversion to
Mondays, he may ask her whether the death
of the poodle, or the catching of her cold, are
the two greatest calamities of her life; and, if
so, whether it is her opinion that Monday is set
apart, in the scheme of Nature, so far as it concerns
her, in a black character. Whether for
her insignificant self there is a special day accursed!
Mrs. Carmine is such a strong-minded
woman, that we approach her with no small
degree of trepidation. Wednesday is her dies
ater, because, in the first place, on a Wednesday
she imprudently exposed herself, and is suffering
from the consequences; and, in the second place,
on a Wednesday her Maria took the scarlet fever.
So she has marked Wednesday down in her
calendar with a black character; yet her contempt
for stars and ghosts is prodigious. Now
there is a consideration to be extended to the
friends of ghosts, which Day-fatalists can not
claim. Whether or not deceased friends take
a more airy and flimsy form, and adopt the invariable
costume of a sheet to visit the objects
of their earthly affections, is a question which
the shrewdest thinkers and the profoundest logicians
have debated very keenly, but without
ever arriving at any satisfactory conclusion.

The strongest argument against the positive
existence of ghosts, is, that they appear only to
people of a certain temperament, and under certain
exciting circumstances. The obtuse, matter-of-fact
man, never sees a ghost; and we
may take it as a natural law, that none of these
airy visitants ever appeared to an attorney. But
the attorney, Mr. Fee Simple, we are assured,
holds Saturday to be an unlucky day. It was
on a Saturday that his extortionate bill in poor
Mr. G.’s case, was cut down by the taxing
master; and it was on a Saturday that a certain
heavy bill was duly honored, upon which
he had hoped to reap a large sum in the shape
of costs. Therefore Mr. Fee Simple believes
that the destinies have put a black mark against
Saturday, so far as he is concerned.

The Jew who thought that the thunder-storm
was the consequence of his having eaten a slice
of bacon, did not present a more ludicrous picture,
than Mr. Fee Simple presents with his
condemned Saturday.

We have an esteem for ghost-inspectors,
which it is utterly impossible to extend to Day-fatalists.
Mrs. Piptoss, too, may be pitied; but
Mog, turning her money when the moon makes
her re-appearance, is an object of ridicule. We
shall neither be astonished, nor express condolence,
if the present, which Miss Caroline anticipates
from the knot in her lace, be not forthcoming;
and as for Miss Amelia, who has
extinguished the candle, and to the best of her
belief lost her husband for a twelvemonth, we
can only wish for her, that when she is married,
her lord and master will shake her faith in the
prophetic power of snuffers. But of all the
superstitions that have survived to the present
time, and are to be found in force among people
of education and a thoughtful habit, Day-fatalism
is the most general, as it is the most unfounded
and preposterous. It is a superstition, however,
in which many great and powerful thinkers have
shared, and by which they have been guided; it
owes much of its present influence to this fact;
but reason, Christianity, and all we have comprehended
of the great scheme of which we form
part, alike tend to demonstrate its absurdity, and
utter want of all foundation.

“BATTLE WITH LIFE!”

TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF MADAME ROLAND.

BY REV. JOHN S.C. ABBOTT.[17]

MADAME ROLAND.

The Girondists were led from their dungeons
in the Conciergerie to their execution on
the 31st of October, 1793. Upon that very
day Madame Roland was conveyed from the
prison of St. Pélagié to the same gloomy cells
vacated by the death of her friends. She was
cast into a bare and miserable dungeon, in that
subterranean receptacle of woe, where there
was not even a bed. Another prisoner, moved
with compassion, drew his own pallet into her
cell, that she might not be compelled to throw
herself for repose upon the cold, wet stones.
The chill air of winter had now come, and yet
no covering was allowed her. Through the
long night she shivered with the cold.

The prison of the Conciergerie consists of a
series of dark and damp subterranean vaults,
situated beneath the floor of the Palace of
Justice. Imagination can conceive of nothing
more dismal than these sombre caverns, with
long and winding galleries opening into cells as
dark as the tomb. You descend by a flight of
massive stone steps into this sepulchral abode,
and, passing through double doors, whose iron
strength time has deformed but not weakened,
you enter upon the vast labyrinthine prison,
where the imagination wanders affrighted
through intricate mazes of halls, and arches,
and vaults, and dungeons, rendered only more
appalling by the dim light which struggles
through those grated orifices which pierced the
massive walls. The Seine flows by upon one
side, separated only by the high way of the
quays. The bed of the Seine is above the floor
of the prison. The surrounding earth was consequently
saturated with water, and the oozing
moisture diffused over the walls and the floors
the humidity of the sepulchre. The plash of
the river; the rumbling of carts upon the pavements
overhead; the heavy tramp of countless
footfalls, as the multitude poured into and out
of the halls of justice, mingled with the moaning
of the prisoners in those solitary cells.
There were one or two narrow courts scattered
in this vast structure, where the prisoners could
look up the precipitous walls, as of a well,
towering high above them, and see a few square
yards of sky. The gigantic quadrangular
tower, reared above these firm foundations, was
formerly the imperial palace from which issued
all power and law. Here the French kings
reveled in voluptuousness, with their prisoners
groaning beneath their feet. This strong-hold
of feudalism had now become the tomb of the
monarchy. In one of the most loathsome of
these cells, Maria Antoinette, the daughter of
the Cæsars, had languished in misery as profound
as mortals can suffer, till, in the endurance
of every conceivable insult, she was dragged to
the guillotine.

It was into a cell adjoining that which the
hapless queen had occupied that Madame Roland
was cast. Here the proud daughter of the
emperors of Austria and the humble child of
the artisan, each, after a career of unexampled
vicissitudes, found their paths to meet but a
few steps from the scaffold. The victim of the
monarchy and the victim of the Revolution
were conducted to the same dungeons and perished
on the same block. They met as antagonists
in the stormy arena of the French
Revolution. They were nearly of equal age.
The one possessed the prestige of wealth, and
rank, and ancestral power; the other, the energy
of vigorous and cultivated mind. Both
were endowed with unusual attractions of person,
spirits invigorated by enthusiasm, and the
loftiest heroism. From the antagonism of life
they met in death.

The day after Madame Roland was placed
in the Conciergerie, she was visited by one of
the notorious officers of the revolutionary party,
and very closely questioned concerning the
friendship she had entertained for the Girondists.
She frankly avowed the elevated affection and
esteem with which she cherished their memory,
but she declared that she and they were the
cordial friends of republican liberty; that they
wished to preserve, not to destroy, the Constitution.
The examination was vexatious and
intolerant in the extreme. It lasted for three
hours, and consisted in an incessant torrent of
criminations, to which she was hardly permitted
to offer one word in reply. This examination
taught her the nature of the accusations which
would be brought against her. She sat down
in her cell that very night, and, with a rapid
pen, sketched that defense which has been pronounced
one of the most eloquent and touching
monuments of the Revolution.

Having concluded it, she retired to rest, and[Pg 733]
slept with the serenity of a child. She was
called upon several times by committees sent
from the revolutionary tribunal for examination.
They were resolved to take her life, but were
anxious to do it, if possible, under the forms of
law. She passed through all their examinations
with the most perfect composure, and the
most dignified self-possession. Her enemies
could not withhold their expressions of admiration
as they saw her in her sepulchral cell of
stone and of iron, cheerful, fascinating, and
perfectly at ease. She knew that she was to
be led from that cell to a violent death, and yet
no faltering of soul could be detected. Her
spirit had apparently achieved a perfect victory
over all earthly ills.

The upper part of the door of her cell was
an iron grating. The surrounding cells were
filled with the most illustrious ladies and gentlemen
of France. As the hour of death drew
near, her courage and animation seemed to increase.
Her features glowed with enthusiasm;
her thoughts and expressions were refulgent
with sublimity, and her whole aspect assumed
the impress of one appointed to fill some great
and lofty destiny. She remained but a few
days in the Conciergerie before she was led to
the scaffold. During those few days, by her
example and her encouraging words, she spread
among the numerous prisoners there an enthusiasm
and a spirit of heroism which elevated,
above the fear of the scaffold, even the most
timid and depressed. This glow of feeling and
exhilaration gave a new impress of sweetness
and fascination to her beauty. The length of
her captivity, the calmness with which she contemplated
the certain approach of death, gave
to her voice that depth of tone and slight tremulousness
of utterance which sent her eloquent
words home with thrilling power to every heart.
Those who were walking in the corridor, or
who were the occupants of adjoining cells, often
called for her to speak to them words of encouragement
and consolation.

Standing upon a stool at the door of her own
cell, she grasped with her hands the iron grating
which separated her from her audience.
This was her tribune. The melodious accents
of her voice floated along the labyrinthine avenues
of those dismal dungeons, penetrating cell
after cell, and arousing energy in hearts which
had been abandoned to despair. It was, indeed,
a strange scene which was thus witnessed in
these sepulchral caverns. The silence, as of
the grave, reigned there, while the clear and
musical tones of Madame Roland, as of an angel
of consolation, vibrated through the rusty
bars, and along the dark, damp cloisters. One
who was at that time an inmate of the prison,
and survived those dreadful scenes, has described,
in glowing terms, the almost miraculous
effects of her soul-moving eloquence. She was
already past the prime of life, but she was still
fascinating. Combined with the most wonderful
power of expression, she possessed a voice
so exquisitely musical, that, long after her lips
were silenced in death, its tones vibrated in lingering
strains in the souls of those by whom
they had ever been heard. The prisoners listened
with the most profound attention to her
glowing words, and regarded her almost as a
celestial spirit, who had come to animate them
to heroic deeds. She often spoke of the Girondists
who had already perished upon the guillotine.
With perfect fearlessness she avowed her
friendship for them, and ever spoke of them as
our friends. She, however, was careful never
to utter a word which would bring tears into
the eye. She wished to avoid herself all the
weakness of tender emotions, and to lure the
thoughts of her companions away from every
contemplation which could enervate their energies.

Occasionally, in the solitude of her cell, as
the image of her husband and of her child rose
before her, and her imagination dwelt upon her
desolated home and her blighted hopes—her
husband denounced and pursued by lawless violence,
and her child soon to be an orphan—woman’s
tenderness would triumph over the
heroine’s stoicism. Burying, for a moment, her
face in her hands, she would burst into a flood
of tears. Immediately struggling to regain
composure, she would brush her tears away,
and dress her countenance in its accustomed
smiles. She remained in the Conciergerie but
one week, and during that time so endeared
herself to all as to become the prominent object
of attention and love. Her case is one of the
most extraordinary the history of the world has
presented, in which the very highest degree of
heroism is combined with the most resistless
charms of feminine loveliness. An unfeminine
woman can never be loved by men. She may
be respected for her talents, she may be honored
for her philanthropy, but she can not win the
warmer emotions of the heart. But Madame
Roland, with an energy of will, an inflexibility
of purpose, a firmness of stoical endurance which
no mortal man has ever exceeded, combined
that gentleness, and tenderness, and affection—that
instinctive sense of the proprieties of her
sex—which gathered around her a love as pure
and as enthusiastic as woman ever excited. And
while her friends, many of whom were the most
illustrious men in France, had enthroned her as
an idol in their hearts, the breath of slander
never ventured to intimate that she was guilty
even of an impropriety.

The day before her trial, her advocate, Chauveau
de la Garde, visited her to consult respecting
her defense. She, well aware that no one
could speak a word in her favor but at the peril
of his own life, and also fully conscious that her
doom was already sealed, drew a ring from her
finger, and said to him,

“To-morrow, I shall be no more. I know
the fate which awaits me. Your kind assistance
can not avail aught for me, and would
but endanger you. I pray you, therefore, not
to come to the tribunal, but to accept of this
last testimony of my regard.”

[Pg 734]

The next day she was led to her trial. She
attired herself in a white robe, as a symbol of
her innocence, and her long dark hair fell in
thick curls on her neck and shoulders. She
emerged from her dungeon the vision of unusual
loveliness. The prisoners who were walking
in the corridors gathered around her, and with
smiles and words of encouragement she infused
energy into their hearts. Calm and invincible
she met her judges. She was accused of the
crimes of being the wife of M. Roland and the
friend of his friends. Proudly she acknowledged
herself guilty of both those charges. Whenever
she attempted to utter a word in her defense,
she was brow-beaten by the judges, and
silenced by the clamors of the mob which filled
the tribunal. The mob now ruled with undisputed
sway in both legislative and executive
halls. The serenity of her eye was untroubled,
and the composure of her disciplined spirit unmoved,
save by the exaltation of enthusiasm, as
she noted the progress of the trial, which was
bearing her rapidly and resistlessly to the scaffold.
It was, however, difficult to bring any
accusation against her by which, under the
form of law, she could be condemned. France,
even in its darkest hour, was rather ashamed
to behead a woman, upon whom the eyes of all
Europe were fixed, simply for being the wife
of her husband and the friend of his friends.
At last the president demanded of her that she
should reveal her husband’s asylum. She proudly
replied,

“I do not know of any law by which I can
be obliged to violate the strongest feelings of
nature.”

This was sufficient, and she was immediately
condemned. Her sentence was thus expressed:

“The public accuser has drawn up the present
indictment against Jane Mary Phlippon, the
wife of Roland, late Minister of the Interior, for
having wickedly and designedly aided and assisted
in the conspiracy which existed against the
unity and indivisibility of the Republic, against
the liberty and safety of the French people, by
assembling at her house, in secret council, the
principal chiefs of that conspiracy, and by keeping
up a correspondence tending to facilitate
their treasonable designs. The tribunal having
heard the public accuser deliver his reasons
concerning the application of the law, condemns
Jane Mary Phlippon, wife of Roland, to the
punishment of death.”

She listened calmly to her sentence, and then
rising, bowed with dignity to her judges, and,
smiling, said,

“I thank you, gentlemen, for thinking me
worthy of sharing the fate of the great men
whom you have assassinated. I shall endeavor
to imitate their firmness on the scaffold.”

With the buoyant step of a child, and with a
rapidity which almost betokened joy, she passed
beneath the narrow portal, and descended to
her cell, from which she was to be led, with
the morning light, to a bloody death. The
prisoners had assembled to greet her on her
return, and anxiously gathered around her. She
looked upon them with a smile of perfect tranquillity,
and, drawing her hand across her neck,
made a sign expressive of her doom. But a
few hours elapsed between her sentence and her
execution. She retired to her cell, wrote a few
words of parting to her friends, played upon a
harp, which had found its way into the prison,
her requiem, in tones so wild and mournful,
that, floating in the dark hours of the night,
through these sepulchral caverns, they fell like
unearthly music upon the despairing souls there
incarcerated.

The morning of the 10th of November, 1793,
dawned gloomily upon Paris. It was one of
the darkest days of that reign of terror which,
for so long a period enveloped France in its
sombre shades. The ponderous gates of the
court-yard of the Conciergerie opened that morning
to a long procession of carts loaded with
victims for the guillotine. Madame Roland had
contemplated her fate too long, and had disciplined
her spirit too severely, to fail of fortitude
in this last hour of trial. She came from her
cell scrupulously attired for the bridal of death.
A serene smile was upon her cheek, and the
glow of joyous animation lighted up her features
as she waved an adieu to the weeping
prisoners who gathered around her. The last
cart was assigned to Madame Roland. She
entered it with a step as light and elastic as if
it were a carriage for a pleasant morning’s drive.
By her side stood an infirm old man, M. La
Marche. He was pale and trembling, and his
fainting heart, in view of the approaching terror,
almost ceased to beat. She sustained him
by her arm, and addressed to him words of consolation
and encouragement in cheerful accents
and with a benignant smile. The poor old man
felt that God had sent an angel to strengthen
him in the dark hour of death. As the cart
heavily rumbled along the pavement, drawing
nearer and nearer to the guillotine, two or
three times, by her cheerful words, she even
caused a smile faintly to play upon his pallid
lips.

The guillotine was now the principal instrument
of amusement for the populace of Paris.
It was so elevated that all could have a good
view of the spectacle it presented. To witness
the conduct of nobles and of ladies, of boys and
of girls, while passing through the horrors of a
sanguinary death, was far more exciting than
the unreal and bombastic tragedies of the theatre,
or the conflicts of the cock-pit and the bear
garden. A countless throng flooded the streets;
men, women, and children, shouting, laughing,
execrating. The celebrity of Madame Roland,
her extraordinary grace and beauty, and her
aspect, not only of heroic fearlessness, but of
joyous exhilaration, made her the prominent
object of the public gaze. A white robe gracefully
enveloped her perfect form, and her black
and glossy hair, which for some reason the executioners
had neglected to cut, fell in rich profusion
to her waist. A keen November blast[Pg 735]
swept the streets, under the influence of which,
and the excitement of the scene, her animated
countenance glowed with all the ruddy bloom
of youth. She stood firmly in the cart, looking
with a serene eye upon the crowds which lined
the streets, and listening with unruffled serenity
to the clamor which filled the air. A large
crowd surrounded the cart in which Madame
Roland stood, shouting, “To the guillotine! to
the guillotine!” She looked kindly upon them,
and, bending over the railing of the cart, said
to them, in tones as placid as if she were addressing
her own child, “My friends, I am going
to the guillotine. In a few moments I shall be
there. They who send me thither will ere long
follow me. I go innocent. They will come
stained with blood. You who now applaud our
execution will then applaud theirs with equal
zeal.”

Madame Roland had continued writing her
memoirs until the hour in which she left her cell
for the scaffold. When the cart had almost
arrived at the foot of the guillotine, her spirit
was so deeply moved by the tragic scene—such
emotions came rushing in upon her soul from
departing time and opening eternity, that she
could not repress the desire to pen down her
glowing thoughts. She entreated an officer to
furnish her for a moment with pen and paper.
The request was refused. It is much to be regretted
that we are thus deprived of that unwritten
chapter of her life. It can not be doubted
that the words she would then have written
would have long vibrated upon the ear of a listening
world. Soul-utterances will force their
way over mountains, and valleys, and oceans.
Despotism can not arrest them. Time can not
enfeeble them.

The long procession arrived at the guillotine,
and the bloody work commenced. The victims
were dragged from the carts, and the ax rose
and fell with unceasing rapidity. Head after
head fell into the basket, and the pile of bleeding
trunks rapidly increased in size. The executioners
approached the cart where Madame
Roland stood by the side of her fainting companion.
With an animated countenance and a
cheerful smile, she was all engrossed in endeavoring
to infuse fortitude into his soul. The executioner
grasped her by the arm. “Stay,” said
she, slightly resisting his grasp; “I have one
favor to ask, and that is not for myself. I beseech
you grant it me.” Then turning to the
old man, she said, “Do you precede me to the
scaffold. To see my blood flow would make
you suffer the bitterness of death twice over. I
must spare you the pain of witnessing my execution.”
The stern officer gave a surly refusal,
replying, “My orders are to take you first.”
With that winning smile and that fascinating
grace which were almost resistless, she rejoined,
“You can not, surely, refuse a woman her last
request.” The hard-hearted executor of the law
was brought within the influence of her enchantment.
He paused, looked at her for a moment
in slight bewilderment, and yielded. The poor
old man, more dead than alive, was conducted
upon the scaffold and placed beneath the fatal
ax. Madame Roland, without the slightest
change of color, or the apparent tremor of a
nerve, saw the ponderous instrument, with its
glittering edge, glide upon its deadly mission,
and the decapitated trunk of her friend was
thrown aside to give place for her. With a
placid countenance and a buoyant step, she
ascended the platform. The guillotine was
erected upon the vacant spot between the gardens
of the Tuileries and the Elysian Fields,
then known as the Place de la Revolution.
This spot is now called the Place de la Concorde.
It is unsurpassed by any other place in Europe.
Two marble fountains now embellish the spot.
The blood-stained guillotine, from which crimson
rivulets were ever flowing, then occupied
the space upon which one of these fountains has
been erected; and a clay statue to Liberty
reared its hypocritical front where the Egyptian
obelisk now rises. Madame Roland stood
for a moment upon the elevated platform, looked
calmly around upon the vast concourse, and then
bowing before the colossal statue, exclaimed,
“O Liberty! Liberty! how many crimes are
committed in thy name.” She surrendered herself
to the executioner, and was bound to the
plank. The plank fell to its horizontal position,
bringing her head under the fatal ax. The
glittering steel glided through the groove, and
the head of Madame Roland was severed from
her body.

Thus died Madame Roland, in the thirty-ninth
year of her age. Her death oppressed
all who had known her with the deepest grief.
Her intimate friend Buzot, who was then a
fugitive, on hearing the tidings, was thrown
into a state of perfect delirium, from which he
did not recover for many days. Her faithful
female servant was so overwhelmed with grief,
that she presented herself before the tribunal,
and implored them to let her die upon the same
scaffold where her beloved mistress had perished.
The tribunal, amazed at such transports of
attachment, declared that she was mad, and
ordered her to be removed from their presence.
A man-servant made the same application, and
was sent to the guillotine.

The grief of M. Roland, when apprized of the
event, was unbounded. For a time he entirely
lost his senses. Life to him was no longer endurable.
He knew not of any consolations of
religion. Philosophy could only nerve him to
stoicism. Privately he left, by night, the kind
friends who had hospitably concealed him for
six months, and wandered to such a distance
from his asylum as to secure his protectors from
any danger on his account. Through the long
hours of the winter’s night he continued his
dreary walk, till the first gray of the morning
appeared in the east. Drawing a long stilletto
from the inside of his walking-stick, he placed
the head of it against the trunk of a tree, and
threw himself upon the sharp weapon. The
point pierced his heart, and he fell lifeless upon[Pg 736]
the frozen ground. Some peasants passing by
discovered his body. A piece of paper was
pinned to the breast of his coat, upon which
there were written these words: “Whoever
thou art that findest these remains, respect them
as those of a virtuous man. After hearing of
my wife’s death, I would not stay another day
in a world so stained with crime.”

[From Dickens’s Household Words.]

CHEMICAL CONTRADICTIONS.

Science, whose aim and end is to prove
the harmony and “eternal fitness of things,”
also proves that we live in a world of paradoxes;
and that existence itself is a whirl of contradictions.
Light and darkness, truth and falsehood,
virtue and vice, the negative and positive poles
of galvanic or magnetic mysteries, are evidences
of all-pervading antitheses, which, acting like
the good and evil genii of Persian Mythology,
neutralize each other’s powers when they come
into collision. It is the office of science to solve
these mysteries. The appropriate symbol of the
lecture-room is a Sphinx; for a scientific lecturer
is but a better sort of unraveler of riddles.

Who would suppose, for instance, that water—which
every body knows, extinguishes fire—may,
under certain circumstances, add fuel to
flame, so that the “coming man,” who is to
“set the Thames on fire,” may not be far off.
If we take some mystical gray-looking globules
of potassium (which is the metallic basis of
common pearl-ash) and lay them upon water,
the water will instantly appear to ignite. The
globules will swim about in flames, reminding
us of the “death-fires” described by the Ancient
Mariner, burning “like witches’ oil” on the
surface of the stagnant sea. Sometimes even,
without any chemical ingredient being added,
fire will appear to spring spontaneously from
water; which is not a simple element, as Thales
imagined, when he speculated upon the origin
of the Creation, but two invisible gases—oxygen
and hydrogen, chemically combined. During
the electrical changes of the atmosphere in a
thunder-storm, these gases frequently combine
with explosive violence, and it is this combination
which takes place when “the big rain
comes dancing to the earth.” These fire-and-water
phenomena are thus accounted for; certain
substances have peculiar affinities or attractions
for one another; the potassium has so
inordinate a desire for oxygen, that the moment
it touches, it decomposes the water, abstracts
all the oxygen, and sets free the hydrogen or
inflammable gas. The potassium, when combined
with the oxygen, forms that corrosive substance
known as caustic potash, and the heat,
disengaged during this process, ignites the hydrogen.
Here the mystery ends; and the contradictions
are solved; Oxygen and hydrogen when
combined, become water; when separated the
hydrogen gas burns with a pale, lambent flame.
Many of Nature’s most delicate deceptions are
accounted for by a knowledge of these laws.

Your analytical chemist sadly annihilates,
with his scientific machinations, all poetry. He
bottles up at pleasure the Nine Muses, and
proves them—as the fisherman in the Arabian
Nights did the Afrite—to be all smoke. Even
the Will-o’-the-Wisp can not flit across its own
morass without being pursued, overtaken, and
burnt out by this scientific detective policeman.
He claps an extinguisher upon Jack-o’-Lantern
thus: He says that a certain combination of
phosphorus and hydrogen, which rises from
watery marshes, produces a gas called phosphureted
hydrogen, which ignites spontaneously
the moment it bubbles up to the surface of the
water and meets with atmospheric air. Here
again the Ithuriel wand of science dispels all
delusion, pointing out to us, that in such places
animal and vegetable substances are undergoing
constant decomposition; and as phosphorus exists
under a variety of forms in these bodies, as
phosphate of lime, phosphate of soda, phosphate
of magnesia, &c., and as furthermore the decomposition
of water itself is the initiatory process
in these changes, so we find that phosphorus
and hydrogen are supplied from these sources;
and we may therefore easily conceive the consequent
formation of phosphureted hydrogen.
This gas rises in a thin stream from its watery
bed, and the moment it comes in contact with
the oxygen of the atmosphere, it bursts into a
flame so buoyant, that it flickers with every
breath of air, and realizes the description of
Goethe’s Mephistopheles, that the course of
Jack-o’-Lantern is generally “zig-zag.”

Who would suppose that absolute darkness
may be derived from two rays of light! Yet
such is the fact. If two rays proceed from two
luminous points very close to each other, and
are so directed as to cross at a given point on
a sheet of white paper in a dark room, their
united light will be twice as bright as either
ray singly would produce. But if the difference
in the distance of the two points be diminished
only one-half, the one light will extinguish the
other, and produce absolute darkness. The
same curious result may be produced by viewing
the flame of a candle through two very fine
slits near to each other in a card. So, likewise,
strange as it may appear, if two musical strings
be so made to vibrate, in a certain succession
of degrees, as for the one to gain half a vibration
on the other, the two resulting sounds will
antagonize each other and produce an interval
of perfect silence. How are these mysteries to
be explained? The Delphic Oracle of science
must again be consulted, and among the high
priests who officiate at the shrine, no one possesses
more recondite knowledge, or can recall
it more instructively than Sir David Brewster.
“The explanation which philosophers have
given,” he observes, “of these remarkable phenomena,
is very satisfactory, and may easily be
understood. When a wave is made on the surface
of a still pool of water by plunging a stone
into it, the wave advances along the surface,
while the water itself is never carried forward,[Pg 737]
but merely rises into a height and falls into a
hollow, each portion of the surface experiencing
an elevation and a depression in its turn.
If we suppose two waves equal and similar, to
be produced by two separate stones, and if they
reach the same spot at the same time, that is,
if the two elevations should exactly coincide,
they would unite their effects, and produce a
wave twice the size of either; but if the one
wave should be put so far before the other, that
the hollow of the one coincided with the elevation
of the other, and the elevation of the one
with the hollow of the other, the two waves
would obliterate or destroy one another; the
elevation, as it were, of the one filling up half the
hollow of the other, and the hollow of the one
taking away half the elevation of the other, so
us to reduce the surface to a level. These effects
may be exhibited by throwing two equal
stones into a pool of water; and also may be
observed in the Port of Batsha, where the two
waves arriving by channels of different lengths
actually obliterate each other. Now, as light
is supposed to be produced by waves or undulations
of an ethereal medium filling all nature,
and occupying the pores of the transparent
bodies; and as sound is produced by undulations
or waves in the air: so the successive
production of light and darkness by two bright
lights, and the production of sound and silence
by two loud sounds, may be explained in the
very same manner as we have explained the
increase and obliteration of waves formed on the
surface of water.”

The apparent contradictions in chemistry are,
indeed, best exhibited in the lecture-room, where
they may be rendered visible and tangible, and
brought home to the general comprehension.
The Professor of Analytical Chemistry, J.H.
Pepper, who demonstrates these things in the
Royal Polytechnic Institution, is an expert
manipulator in such mysteries; and, taking a
leaf out of his own magic-book, we shall conjure
him up before us, standing behind his own
laboratory, surrounded with all the implements
of his art. At our recent visit to this exhibition
we witnessed him perform, with much address,
the following experiments: He placed before
us a pair of tall glass vessels, each filled, apparently,
with water; he then took two hen’s
eggs, one of these he dropped into one of the
glass vessels, and, as might have been expected,
it immediately sank to the bottom. He then
took the other egg, and dropped it into the other
vessel of water, but, instead of sinking as the
other had done, it descended only half way, and
there remained suspended in the midst of the
transparent fluid. This, indeed, looked like
magic—one of Houdin’s sleight-of-hand performances—for
what could interrupt its progress?
The water surrounding it appeared as
pure below as around and above the egg, yet
there it still hung like Mahomet’s coffin, between
heaven and earth, contrary to all the
well-established laws of gravity. The problem,
however, was easily solved. Our modern Cagliostro
had dissolved in one half of the water in
this vessel as much common salt as it would
take up, whereby the density of the fluid was
so much augmented that it opposed a resistance
to the descent of the egg after it had passed
through the unadulterated water, which he had
carefully poured upon the briny solution, the
transparency of which, remaining unimpaired,
did not for a moment suggest the suspicion of
any such impregnation. The good housewife,
upon the same principle, uses an egg to test the
strength of her brine for pickling.

Every one has heard of the power which
bleaching gas (chlorine) possesses in taking
away color, so that a red rose held over its
fumes will become white. The lecturer, referring
to this fact, exhibited two pieces of paper;
upon one was inscribed, in large letters, the
word “Proteus;” upon the other no writing
was visible; although he assured us the same
word was there inscribed. He now dipped both
pieces of paper in a solution of bleaching-powder,
when the word “Proteus” disappeared from the
paper upon which it was before visible; while
the same word instantly came out, sharp and
distinct, upon the paper which was previously a
blank. Here there appeared another contradiction:
the chlorine in the one case obliterating, and
in the other reviving the written word; and how
was this mystery explained? Easily enough!
Our ingenious philosopher, it seems, had used
indigo in penning the one word which had disappeared;
and had inscribed the other with a
solution of a chemical substance, iodide of potassium
and starch; and the action which took
place was simply this: the chlorine of the
bleaching solution set free the iodine from the
potassium, which immediately combined with
the starch, and gave color to the letters which
were before invisible. Again—a sheet of white
paper was exhibited, which displayed a broad
and brilliant stripe of scarlet—(produced by a
compound called the bin-iodide of mercury)—when
exposed to a slight heat the color changed
immediately to a bright yellow, and, when this
yellow stripe was crushed by smartly rubbing
the paper, the scarlet color was restored, with
all its former brilliancy. This change of color
was effected entirely by the alteration which the
heat, in the one case, and the friction, in the
other, produced in the particles which reflected
these different colors; and, upon the same principle,
we may understand the change of the color
in the lobster-shell, which turns from black to
red in boiling; because the action of the heat
produces a new arrangement in the particles
which compose the shell.

With the assistance of water and fire, which
have befriended the magicians of every age, contradictions
of a more marvelous character may
be exhibited, and even the secret art revealed
of handling red-hot metals, and passing through
the fiery ordeal. If we take a platinum ladle,
and hold it over a furnace until it becomes of a
bright red heat, and then project cold water into
its bowl, we shall find that the water will remain[Pg 738]
quiescent and give no sign of ebullition—not so
much as a single “fizz;” but, the moment the
ladle begins to cool, it will boil up and quickly
evaporate. So also, if a mass of metal, heated
to whiteness, be plunged in a vessel of cold water,
the surrounding fluid will remain tranquil so long
as the glowing white heat continues; but, the
moment the temperature falls, the water will
boil briskly. Again—if water be poured upon
an iron sieve, the wires of which are made red
hot, it will not run through; but, on the sieve
cooling, it will run through rapidly. These contradictory
effects are easily accounted for. The
repelling power of intense heat keeps the water
from immediate contact with the heated metal,
and the particles of the water, collectively, retain
their globular form; but, when the vessel cools,
the repulsive power diminishes, and the water
coming into closer contact with the heated surface
its particles can no longer retain their
globular form, and eventually expand into a state
of vapor. This globular condition of the particles
of water will account for many very important
phenomena; perhaps it is best exhibited in the
dew-drop, and so long as these globules retain
their form, water will retain its fluid properties.
An agglomeration of these globules will carry
with them, under certain circumstances, so much
force that it is hardly a contradiction to call water
itself a solid. The water-hammer, as it is termed,
illustrates this apparent contradiction. If we introduce
a certain quantity of water into a long
glass tube, when it is shaken, we shall hear the
ordinary splashing noise as in a bottle; but, if
we exhaust the air, and again shake the tube,
we shall hear a loud ringing sound, as if the
bottom of the tube were struck by some hard
substance—like metal or wood—which may
fearfully remind us of the blows which a ship’s
side will receive from the waves during a storm
at sea, which will often carry away her bulwarks.

It is now time to turn to something stronger
than water for more instances of chemical contradictions.
The chemical action of certain poisons
(the most powerful of all agents), upon the human
frame, has plunged the faculty into a maze of
paradoxes; indeed, there is actually a system of
medicine, advancing in reputation, which is founded
on the principle of contraries. The famous Dr.
Hahnemann, who was born at Massieu in Saxony,
was the founder of it, and, strange to say, medical
men, who are notorious for entertaining contrary
opinions, have not yet agreed among themselves
whether he was a very great quack or a very
great philosopher. Be this as it may, the founder
of this system, which is called Homœopathy,
when translating an article upon bark in Dr.
Cullen’s Materia Medica, took some of this medicine,
which had for many years been justly
celebrated for the cure of ague. He had not
long taken it, when he found himself attacked
with aguish symptoms, and a light now dawned
upon his mind, and led him to the inference that
medicines which give rise to the symptoms of a
disease, are those which will specifically cure it,
and however curious it may appear, several illustrations
in confirmation of this principle were
speedily found. If a limb be frost-bitten, we
are directed to rub it with snow; if the constitution
of a man be impaired by the abuse of
spirituous liquors, and he be reduced to that
miserable state of enervation when the limbs
tremble and totter, and the mind itself sinks into
a state of low muttering delirium, the physician
to cure him must go again to the bottle and administer
stimulants and opiates.

It was an old Hippocratic aphorism that two
diseases can not co-exist in the same body,
wherefore, gout has actually been cured by the
afflicted person going into a fenny country and
catching the ague. The fatality of consumption
is also said to be retarded by a common catarrh;
and upon this very principle depends the truth
of the old saying, that rickety doors hang long
on rusty hinges. In other words, the strength
of the constitution being impaired by one disease
has less power to support the morbid action of
another.

We thus live in a world of apparent contradictions;
they abound in every department of
science, and beset us even in the sanctuary of
domestic life. The progress of discovery has
reconciled and explained the nature of some of
them; but many baffle our ingenuity, and still
remain involved in mystery. This much, however,
is certain, that the most opposed and conflicting
elements so combine together as to produce
results, which are strictly in unison with
the order and harmony of the universe.

DESCENT INTO THE CRATER OF A VOLCANO.[18]

BY REV. H.T. CHEEVER.

A descent into the Crater of the Volcano of
Kilauea in the Sandwich Islands, may be
accomplished with tolerable ease by the north-eastern
cliff of the crater, where the side has
fallen in and slidden downward, leaving a
number of huge, outjutting rocks, like giants’
stepping-stones, or the courses of the pyramid
of Ghizeh.

By hanging to these, and the mere aid of a
pole, you may descend the first precipice to
where the avalanche brought up and was stayed—a
wild region, broken into abrupt hills and
deep glens, thickly set with shrubs and old
ohias, and producing in great abundance the
Hawaiian whortleberry (formerly sacred to the
goddess of the volcano), and a beautiful lustrous
blackberry that grows on a branching vine close
to the ground. Thousands of birds find there a
safe and warm retreat; and they will continue,
I suppose, the innocent warblers, to pair and
sing there, till the fires from beneath, having
once more eaten through its foundations, the
entire tract, with all its miniature mountains
and woody glens, shall slide off suddenly into[Pg 739]
the abyss below to feed the hunger of all-devouring
fire.

No one who passes over it, and looks back
upon the tall, jagged cliffs at the rear and side,
can doubt that it was severed and shattered by
one such ruin into its present forms. And the
bottomless pits and yawning caverns, in some
places ejecting hot steam, with which it is
traversed, prove that the raging element which
once sapped its foundations is still busy beneath.

The path that winds over and down through
this tract, crossing some of these unsightly
seams by a natural bridge of only a foot’s
breadth, is safe enough by daylight, if one will
keep in it. But be careful that you do not
diverge far on either side, or let the shades of
night overtake you there, lest a single mis-step
in the grass and ferns, concealing some horrible
hole, or an accidental stumble, shall plunge you
beyond the reach of sunlight into a covered pen-stock
of mineral fire, or into the heart of some
deep, sunken cavern.

One can hardly wander through that place
alone, even in the daytime (as I was in coming
up from the crater at evening), without having
his fancy swarm with forms of evil. In spite of
himself, there will

The way through this tract descends not
abruptly for about half a mile, to a steep bank
of partially decomposed lava, somewhat furrowed
by water-courses, by which you go down
some hundreds of feet more to what every body
calls the Black Ledge.

This is an immense rampart or gallery of
grisly black scoria and lava, about half a mile
wide, running all round the pit, slightly sloping
inward, and not unfrequently overflowed in
eruptions. By it you learn the dimensions of
the great lake to which this is now the shore.
It may be compared to the wide beach of an
ocean, seldom flooded all over except in very
high tides; or to a great field of thick shore
ice, from under which the tide has retired,
leaving it cracked and rent, but not so as to
break up the general evenness of its surface.

The upper crust is generally glossy, cellular,
and cinder-like, brittle and crackling under the
feet; but directly underneath the superficies,
hard and compact, as proved by inspecting the
great seams and fissures, from some of which
flickering currents of hot air, and from others
scalding steam and smoke are continually issuing.
Pound on it, and you will hear deep,
hollow reverberations, and sometimes your pole
will break through a place like the rotten trap-door
of some old ruin, and open upon you a
hideous black hole without bottom.

Over this great volcanic mole or offset, we
proceeded to make our way toward the caldron
in the southeast, pounding before us with our
pole, like men crossing a river to find whether
the ice ahead will bear them. We stopped
every now and then to examine and get up on
to some great cone or oven, which had been
formed after the congelation of the crust, by
pent up gas blowing out from beneath the cooling
lava, raising it as in great bubbles, and
letting its black, viscous vomit dribble from the
top, and flow down sluggishly and congeal before
it had found a level, like ice in very cold
weather over a waterfall. Thus it would flow
over the Black Ledge, hardening sometimes in
round streams like a cable, or in serpentine
forms like a great anaconda; and again it
would spread out from the foot of the cone a
little way, in forms like a bronze lion’s foot.

The surface was frequently broken, or ready
to break, with the weight of one’s body, from
the fiery liquid having subsided after the petrifaction
of the crust. Generally, too, the hardened
lava seemed to have been flowed over, like
ice near the shore when the tide rises and goes
down, with a thin scum of lava that became
shelly and crepitated under the foot like shelly
ice.

Then, as we went further into the bed of the
crater, gradually going down, we would come
to places where, like as in frozen mill-ponds,
whence the water has been drawn off, the
congealed lava had broken in to the depth sometimes
of fifty and one hundred feet. Every
where, too, there were great fissures and cracks,
as in fields of river ice, now and then a large
air-hole, and here and there great bulges and
breaks, and places from which a thin flame
would be curling, or over which you would see
a glimmer like that which trembles over a body
of fresh coals or a recently-burned lime-kiln.
Touch your stick there, and it would immediately
kindle.

There were also deep, wide ditches, through
which a stream of liquid lava had flowed since
the petrifaction of the main body through which
it passed. Cascades of fire are said to be often
seen in the course of these canals or rivers as
they leap some precipice, presenting in the
night a scene of unequaled splendor and sublimity.
In some places the banks or dikes of
these rivers are excavated and fallen in with
hideous crash and ruin; and often you may go
up, if you dare, to the edge on one side and look
over into the gulf, and away under the opposite
overhanging bank, where the igneous fluid has
worn away and scooped it out till the cliff hangs
on air, and seems to topple and lean, like the
tower of Pisa, just ready to fall.

It would be no very comfortable reflection, if
a man were not too curiously eager and bold
and intent upon the novelties he is drinking in
by the senses, to have much reflection or fear
at such a time, to think how easily an earthquake
might tumble down the bank on which
he is standing, undermined in like manner with
that which you are looking at right opposite.

On our left, as we passed on to the Great
Caldron, we explored, as far as was possible
between the heat and vapor, the great bank, or,[Pg 740]
more properly, mountain-side of sulphur and
sulphate of lime (plaster of Paris), and obtained
some specimens of no little beauty. There are
cliffs of sulphur through which scalding hot
vapor is escaping as high up above you as eight
hundred feet; and lower down there are seams
from which lambent and flickering flames are
darting, and jets of hot air will sometimes whirl
by you, involving no little danger by their inhalation.
Around these fissures are yellow and
green incrustations of sulphur, which afford a
new variety of specimens.

When we had got to the leeward of the
caldron, we found large quantities of the finest
threads of metallic vitrified lava, like the spears
and filaments of sealing-wax, called Pele’s hair.
The wind has caught them from the jets and
bubbling springs of gory lava, and carried them
away on its wings till they have lodged in nests
and crevices, where they may be collected like
shed wool about the time of sheep-shearing.
Sometimes this is found twenty miles to the
leeward of the volcano.

The heat and sulphur gas, irritating the
throat and lungs, are so great on that side, that
we had to sheer away off from the brim of the
caldron, and could not observe close at hand the
part where there was the most gushing and
bubbling of the ignifluous mineral fluid. But
we passed round to the windward, and were
thus enabled to get up to the brim so as to look
over for a minute in the molten lake, burning
incessantly with brimstone and fire—

But the lava which forms your precarious
foothold, melted, perhaps, a hundred times, can
not be handled or trusted, and the heat even
there is so great as to burn the skin of one’s
face, although the heated air, as it rises, is
instantly swept off to the leeward by the wind.
It is always hazardous, not to say fool-hardy,
to stand there for a moment, lest your uncertain
foothold, crumbling and crispy by the action of
fire, shall suddenly give way and throw you
instantly into the fiery embrace of death.

At times, too, the caldron is so furiously
boiling, and splashing, and spitting its fires, and
casting up its salient, angry jets of melted lava
and spume, that all approach to it is forbidden.
We slumped several times near it, as a man
will in the spring who is walking over a river
of which the ice is beginning to thaw, and the
upper stratum, made of frozen snow, is dissolved
and rotten. A wary native who accompanied
us wondered at our daring, and would not be
kept once from pulling me back, as with the
eager and bold curiosity of a discoverer, all
absorbed in the view of such exciting wonders,
I was getting too near.

At the time we viewed it, the brim all round
was covered with splashes and spray to the
width of ten or twelve feet. The surface of the
lake was about a mile in its longest diameter,
at a depth of thirty or forty feet from its brim,
and agitated more or less all over, in some
places throwing up great jets and spouts of fiery
red lava, in other places spitting it out like
steam from an escape-pipe when the valves are
half lifted, and again squirting the molten rock
as from a pop-gun.

The surface was like a river or lake when
the ice is going out and broken up into cakes,
over which you will sometimes see the water
running, and sometimes it will be quite hidden.
In the same manner in this lake of fire, while
its surface was generally covered with a crust
of half-congealed, dusky lava, and raised into
elevations, or sunk into depressions, you would
now and then see the live coal-red stream
running along. Two cakes of lava, also, would
meet like cakes of ice, and their edges crushing,
would pile up and fall over, precisely like the
phenomena of moving fields of ice; there was,
too, the same rustling, grinding noise.

Sometimes, I am told, the roar of the fiery
surges is like the heavy beating of surf. Once,
when Mr. Coan visited it, this caldron was
heaped up in the middle, higher above its brim
than his head, so that he ran up and thrust in a
pyrometer, while streams were running off on
different sides. At another time when he saw
it, it had sunk four or five hundred feet below
its brim, and he had to look down a dreadful
gulf to see its fires.

Again, when Mr. Bingham was there, it was
full, and concentric waves were flowing out and
around from its centre. Having carefully observed
its movements a while, he threw a stick
of wood upon the thin crust of a moving wave
where he thought it would bear him, even if it
should bend a little, and then stood upon it a
few moments. In that position, thrusting his
cane down through the cooling tough crust,
about half an inch thick, and immediately withdrawing
it, forthwith there gushed up, like ooze
in a marsh or melted tar under a plank, enough
of the viscid lava to form a globular mass, which
afterward, as it cooled, he broke off and bore
away.

It is not easy for one that has not himself
been in a similar position, to sympathize with
and pardon the traveler at such a point, for he
is unwilling to forbear and leave it till fairly
surfeited and seared with heat and admiration,
or driven off by some sudden spout and roar, or
splash of the caldron. You gaze, and gaze, and
gaze in amazement, without conscious thought,
like a man in a trance, reluctant to go away,
and you want to spend at least a day and night,
viewing close at hand its ever-varying phenomena.

Had we only brought with us wrappers, I
believe we should have been the first to have
slept on the Black Ledge. Now that the edge
of curiosity is a little blunted and the judgment
cool, we can see that there would be a degree
of hazard and temerity in it which is not felt
under the excitement of novelty, and in the full
tide of discovery. Forced by startling admonitions,
of instant danger, I had to quit suddenly
the precarious footing I had gained on the[Pg 741]
caldron’s edge, like a hungry man hurried from
his repast ere he has snatched a mouthful. But
the look I caught there, and the impression of
horror, awfulness, and sublimity thence obtained,
live and will live in my conscious being forever
and ever; and it is this shall help me utter
what many have experienced, and have wished
to say before the poet said it for them:

A moment of being under such circumstances is
an epoch in the history of one’s mind; and he,
perhaps, may be deemed the most highly favored
of mortals who has the most of such epochs in
remembrance, provided only that the incommunicable
thoughts and emotions which, in the
moment of that experience, seemed to permeate
the very substance of the mind, have given it a
moral tone and impulse running through all its
subsequent life. It is thus that thoughts are
waked “to perish never,” being instamped ineffaceably
upon the spiritual frame-work and
foundation stones of the soul, dignifying and
consecrating them to noble uses.

It was not, I trust, without some valuable
additions to our stock of impressions in this line,
that we reluctantly left that spot. Departing
thence, we passed over a tract between the level
of the brim of the caldron and the Black Ledge,
in order to gain again the latter, most strangely
rugged and wild, as if convulsion after convulsion
had upheaved, and sunk, and rent, and piled
the vast mineral and rocky masses; forming here
great hills like the ruins of a hundred towers,
and there deep indentations, while every block
lay upon its fellow, ready to be dislodged, edge-wise,
crosswise, endwise, sidewise, angle-wise,
and every-wise, in the wildest confusion and
variety possible, as if Typhœan giants had been
hurling them at each other in war; or as when
the warring angels

Rocks, too, in earthquake commotions, have
been started from the perpendicular sides of the
crater in this part, and have rolled down eight
hundred or a thousand feet with a force, one
might think, that would almost shake the world.

When we had thus encompassed the crater,
and had returned to the point where we first
came down upon the Black Ledge, it was getting
toward night, and I found myself so excessively
heated and feverish, and throbbing with the
headache, which most persons there suffer from,
as to be unable to go for the castellated and
Gothic specimens into some ovens that are found
in the sides near by.

Leaving, therefore, my companion and the
natives to hunt for them, I proceeded slowly
back, and toiled up, with difficulty, the steep
side of this stupendous crater, which may be set
down at a moderate calculation as not less than
twelve miles in circumference, and one thousand
feet deep. In the centre of this vast sunken
amphitheatre of volcanic fire,

a man looks up to heaven, and to the seared
walls of this great prison, and feels like a pigmy,
or the veriest insect, in contrast with so
mighty and terrible a work of the Lord God
Almighty.

The person who can go down into it, and
come up safe from it, with a light mind, unthankful
and unawed, is as wanting in some
of the best attributes of mental manhood as of
piety; and, let me say with Cowper,

the man who should prove himself so brutishly
insensible to the sublime vestiges of Divine
power, and to the providential care of Divine
goodness.

We spent the night by the volcano. I slept
a little at intervals, just raising myself at every
awakening to look at Pele’s fires, which spouted
and played like fountains, and leaped suddenly
with a flash from place to place, like electricity
on wire in the experiments of the lecture-room.

Once when I arose at midnight and went out
a little beyond the range of our screen, to enjoy
in silence the august and grand spectacle, the
violence of the wind was such as to take off my
unguarded hat, and carry it clear over the brink
of the crater, where it lodged for the night, but
was recovered with little injury in the morning
by one of our courageous natives.

One of the early visitors there said that, on
coming near the rim, he fell upon his hands and
knees awe-struck, and crept cautiously to the
rocky brink, unwilling at once to walk up to
the giddy verge and look down as from a mast-head
upon the fiery gulf at his feet. In a little
time, however, like a landsman after a while at
sea, he was able to stand very near and gaze
unalarmed upon this wonder of the world.

I have myself known seamen that had faced
unfearingly all the perils of the deep, and had
rushed boldly into battle with its mammoth
monsters, to stand appalled on the brink of
Kilauea, and depart without daring to try its
abyss. Gazing upon it, then, at midnight, so
near its brink as we were, was rather venturing
upon the edge of safety, as I found to my cost.
But woe to the man that should have a fit of
somnambulism on the spot where our tent was
pitched that last night. Baron Munchausen’s
seven-leagued boots could hardly save him from
a warm bath in flowing lava cherry-red.

Morning broke again upon our open encampment,
clear and bracing as upon the Green
Mountains of Vermont. With fingers burned
and bleeding from the climbing and crystal-digging
of yesterday, we made all the dispatch
possible in collecting and packing specimens,
but it was one o’clock before we were ready to
leave. Having at length got off the natives[Pg 742]
with their burdens, two for Hilo and two for
Kau, we kneeled for the last time by that wonderful
old furnace, where the hand of God works
the bellows and keeps up his vast laboratory of
elemental fire. Then we mounted our horses
and bade a final good-by, the one for Hilo, and
the other for his happy Hawaiian home.

[From Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal.]

THE EVERY-DAY YOUNG LADY.

The every-day young lady is neither tall nor
short, neither fat nor lean. Her complexion
is not fair, but clear, and her color not bright,
but healthy. She is not vulgarly well, but has
not the least illness in the world. Her face is
oval, and her hair, moderate in quantity, is
usually of a soft brown. Her features are
small and unobtrusive: her nose being what
the French passports call moyen—that is, neither
one thing nor t’other—and her eyes as
gray as glass, but clear and gentle. It is not
the eyes that give her any little character she
has; although, if you have nothing else to do,
and happen to look at them for a minute or so,
they win upon you. They are not varnished
eyes, in which you can see nothing but the brightness;
and not deep eyes, into which your soul
plunges as into a gulf: they are mere common
skylights, winning into them a little bit of heaven,
and giving you an inkling of good temper and
feminine gentleness. Neither is it her air, nor
manner, nor dress, that stamps her individuality,
if she has any, for these belong to the class of
society in which she moves; but altogether she
gives you an idea of young-womanish refinement
and amiableness, and you would think of
her again when alone, if there were not so many
of her friends about her as to divide and dilute,
as it were, your impressions.

The every-day young lady is usually dependent
upon somebody or other, but sometimes she
has a small independence, which is much worse.
In the former case she clings like ivy, adorning,
by her truth and gentleness, the support she is
proud of; while in the other she gives her £30
a year to a relation as an inadequate compensation
for her board and clothing, and lives in a
state of unheard-of bondage and awful gratitude.
Her life is diversified by friendships, in which
her own feelings last the longest; by enmities,
in which she suffers and forgives; and by loves—though
almost always at second-hand. She
is a confidant, a go-between, a bridemaid; but
if she finds herself on the brink of a serious flirtation,
she shrinks into her own foolish little
heart in surprise and timidity, and the affair
never becomes any thing but a mystery, which
she carries with her through life, and which
makes her shake her head on occasions, and
look conscious and experienced, so as to give
people the idea that this young lady has a history.
If the affair does go on, it is a public
wonder how she came to get actually married.
Many persons consider that she must have been
playing a part all along for this very purpose;
that her timidity and bashfulness were assumed,
and her self-denial a ruse; and that, in point of
fact, she was not by any means what she gave
herself out to be—an every-day young lady.

For our part we have known many such
young ladies in our day—and so have you, and
you, and you: the world of society is full of
them. We have a notion of our own, indeed,
that they are the sex; or, in other words, that
they are the class from which are drawn our
conventional notions of womankind, and that the
rest—that is those women who have what is called
character—are counterfeit women. The feminine
virtues are all of a retiring kind, which
does not mean that they are invisible even to
strangers, but that they are seen through a half-transparent
vail of feminine timidity and self-postponement.
In like manner, the physique of
women, truly so called, is not remarkable or
obtrusive: their eyes do not flash at you like a
pistol, nor their voices arrest suddenly your attention,
as if they said “Stand and deliver!”
That men in general admire the exceptions
rather than the rule, may be true, but that is owing
to bad taste, coarseness of mind, or the mere
hurry of society, which prevents them from observing
more than its salient points. For our
part we have always liked every-day young
ladies, and sometimes we felt inclined to love a
few of them; but somehow it never went beyond
inclination. This may have been owing
in part to the headlong life one leads in the
world, but in part likewise—if we may venture
the surmise—to our own sensitiveness preventing
us from poking ourselves upon the sensitiveness
of other people.

A great many every-day young ladies have
been represented in the character of heroines of
romance; but there they are called by other
names, and made to run about, and get into
predicaments, so that one does not know what
to make of them. The Countess Isabelle of
Croye is an extremely every-day young lady;
but look how she runs away, and how she sees
a bishop murdered at supper, and how she is
going to be married to a Wild Boar, and how
at last, after running away again, she gives her
hand and immense possessions to a young Scotsman
as poor as a church mouse! Who can tell,
in such a hurry-skurry, what she is in her individuality,
or what she would turn out to be if
let alone, or if the author had a turn for bringing
out every-day characters? Then we have
every-day young ladies set up for heroines without
doing any thing for it at all, and who look
in the emergencies of life just as if they were
eating bread and butter, or crying over a novel
at home. Of such is Evelina, who has a sweet
look for every person, and every thing, in every
possible situation, and who is expected, on the
strength of that sole endowment, to pass for a
heroine of every-day life. This is obviously
improper; for an every-day young lady has a
principle of development within her like every
body else. If you expose her to circumstances,
these circumstances must act upon her in one[Pg 743]
way or another; they must bring her out; and
she must win a husband for herself, not get him
by accident, blind contact, or the strong necessity
of marrying—a necessity which has no
alternative in the case of a heroine but the
grave.

Such blunders, however, are now at an end;
for a real every-day young lady has come out into
public life, and an illumination has been thrown
upon the class, which must proceed either from
one of themselves or from inspiration.[19] But
we are not going to criticise the book; for that
would bring us to loggerheads with the critics,
not one of whom has the least notion of the nature
of the charm they all confess. This charm consists
in its painting an every-day young lady to
the life, and for the first time; and it by no means
consists, as it is said to do, in the plot, which
is but indifferently concocted, or in the incidents,
that are sometimes destitute both of
social and artistical truth. Anne Dysart herself,
however, is a masterly portrait. Its living
eyes are upon us from first to last, following us
like the eyes of those awful pictures in the
dining-room of long ago, which we could not
escape from in any corner of the room. But
Anne’s eyes are not awful: they are sweet,
calm, gentle. The whole figure is associated
with the quieter and better parts of our nature.
It comes to us, with its shy looks and half-withdrawn
hands, like somebody we knew all
our lives, and still know; somebody who walks
with us, mellowing, but not interrupting our
thoughts; somebody who sits by us when we
are writing or reading, and throws a creamy
hue upon the paper; somebody whose breath
warms us when it is cold, and whose shadow
stands between us and the scorching sun; somebody,
in short, who gives us assurance, we know
not how, of an every-day young lady.

To paint a character which has no salient
points demands a first-rate artist; but to see
the inner life of a quiet, timid, retiring mind,
is the exclusive privilege of a poet. To suppose
that there is no inner life in such minds,
or none worth observing, is a grand mistake.
The crested wave may be a picturesque or
striking object in itself; but under the calm,
smooth surface of the passionless sea there are
beautiful things to behold—painted shells, and
corals, and yellow sands, and sea-plants stretching
their long waving arms up to the light.
How many of us sail on without giving a glance
to such things, our eyes fixed on the frowning
or inviting headland, or peopling the desert air
with phantoms! Just so do we turn away
from what seems to us the void of every-day
life to grapple with the excitements of the
world.

Anne Dysart is not Miss Douglas’s Anne
Dysart: she is yours, ours, everybody’s. She is
the very every-day young lady. The author
did not invent her: she found her where the
Highlandman found the tongs—by the fireside.
And that is her true position, where alone she
is at home. When she goes into society, unless
it be among associates, she is always under
some sort of alarm. She is told that there is
company in the drawing-room, strangers come
to visit—young ladies celebrated for their beauty
and accomplishments—and she treads the stairs
with a beating heart, feeling awkward and
ignorant, and enters with a desperate calmness.
The visitors, however, like her, she is so modest
and unobtrusive; and the every-day young lady
is charmed and even affected by their patronizing
kindness. She is reputed by these persons
as a “nice girl, rather amiable-looking, but
not in the least like the heroine of a novel.”
When she visits them in return, she is at first
oppressed with a feeling of shyness, but at
length still more overpowered by the kindness
with which she is received, and she walks to
the window to conceal her emotion. In this
position our Anne—for we deny that Miss Douglas
has any special property in her—comes out
strong: “As Anne now stood, dressed in deep
mourning, the blackness of her garments only
relieved by a small white collar and a pair of
cuffs, the expression of her countenance very pensive,
her eyes shining mildly in the sunlight
which was reflected from the crimson curtain
upon her at present somewhat pale cheek, Mrs.
Grey, as she whispered to Charlotte, ‘Really,
poor thing, she does look very interesting!’ felt
the influence of her peculiar charm, without,
however, comprehending its source.”

Anne attracts the attention of one of the
company, a harsh-featured, ungraceful person,
under forty, with a large mouth, determined
lips, deep-set, thoughtful eyes, and a confused
mass of dark hair hanging over a large and full
forehead. Whereupon she instantly feels uncomfortable
and frightened. But for all that, it
is settled that the bête noir walks home with
her; and resting the tips of her fingers on his
arm, onward they go, these two fated individuals,
in solemn silence. The conversation which
at length begins consists of unpolite questions
on the gentleman’s part, and constrained answers
on that of the lady; but at length she is
saved from replying to a specially disagreeable
and impertinent interrogatory by stumbling over
a stone.

“Did you fall on purpose?” said he. The
every-day young lady is both frightened and
displeased, and being further urged, feels something
actually resembling indignation. When
they part, it is with a feeling on her part of inexpressible
relief, and she thinks to herself that
she had never before met so singular or so disagreeable
a man.

This is unpromising: but it is correct. The
every-day young lady thinks of the rough, odd
man; and he is struck now and then by a word
or a look in her which piques his curiosity or
interests his feelings. He at length learns to
look into her calm, soft eyes, and sees through
the passionless surface of her character some[Pg 744]
precious things gleaming in its depths. The
following quotation will show at what length he
arrives: “Anne pondered for a few minutes.
She had a rather slow though a sound understanding.
There was some truth in what Mr.
Bolton said, but so great a want of charity, that
she felt from the first as if, some way or other,
he could not be quite right. It was some time,
however, ere she discovered how he was wrong,
and even then perhaps could not have defined
it.” She answered gravely and modestly, but
with less timidity than usual.

“But still, Mr. Bolton, it is possible to be
both agreeable and sincere. I know it is possible,
because I have seen it; and I think that
though there is some truth in what you say, yet,
as far as my very limited experience justifies
me in forming an opinion, I should say that
truth, united with kindness, is appreciated; indeed
I am sure some people have been liked
who never flattered: I knew one person at
least whom every body loved, who would not
have told a falsehood for the world, and who
was all he seemed.”

“I suppose you mean your father? Well,
without exactly sharing in your filial enthusiasm,
I am inclined to believe that he was a superior
man.”

“Are you indeed? Why, may I ask?” said
Anne very timidly, and venturing for the first
time to put a question in her turn.

“Why?” he repeated, with a momentary
return of the wonderful smile. “Because his
daughter has rather more simplicity of mind,
rather more purity of heart, rather more intelligence,
rather less frivolity, rather less artifice,
rather fewer coquettish tricks to flatter the vanity,
and entrap the admiration, of silly men—in short,
rather more sincerity than one meets every day;
I guess she must have had a father somewhat
above the average.” Mr. Bolton spoke in a
low tone, and there was in his voice a depth
and a softness that struck his listener’s ear as
being altogether different from its wont. Whatever
this difference might be, however, it was
not lasting, for when, after a moment’s pause,
he spoke again, it was with an exaggeration
even of his ordinary harshness both of voice and
manner: “But you need not fancy I am paying
you a compliment. You are no angel; and
even during our short acquaintance, I have discovered
in you some faults and follies, and doubtless
there are others behind. In some respects
you are very childish, or perhaps it would be as
correct to say womanish.” With this rude
speech, Mr. Bolton concluded, drawing back
with an air of having nothing more to say, and
assuming a look which seemed to forbid any one
to speak to him.

But this wild man chooses her for a wife,
proposes for her hand—and is refused. Why
so? Because she was an every-day young
lady. He was rich; he had good points—nay,
great ones, in his character: but he was an
uncomfortable man. She could not love him,
and she could not think of marrying a man she
could not love. Had it been the young clergyman,
the case would have been different. A
nice young man was he; and, like all other
young ladies of her class, Anne had her dreams
of gentle happiness, and congeniality of temper,
and poetry, and flowers, and sunsets, and a
genteel cottage. But the young clergyman
could not afford to think of an almost penniless
girl for a wife; and so poor Anne’s episode
was ended before it was well begun; and the
affair would have assumed in her solitary heart
the enduring form of a Mystery, if exigencies
had not arisen to call forth feelings and resolves
that brook no such unsubstantial companions.

This every-day young lady had a brother in
Edinburgh, and the brother fell into folly, and
misery, and sickness, and desperate poverty.
He wanted a friend, a nurse, a servant, and
she knew that his bedside was her natural post.
The difficulty was to get so far with her poor
little funds; but this is accomplished, and instead
of the outside of the mail on a wintry
night, she has even had the good-fortune to
enjoy an inside seat, some gentleman being
seized with the caprice of encountering the frost
and snow. This gentleman, she discovers afterward,
is her discarded lover; and he—how
many discoveries does he make! The every-day
young lady, thrown into the battle of circumstances,
rises with the strife. She who
had been accustomed to sit silent, seeming to
agree with others in what was untrue, merely
from want of courage, now endures without
flinching the extremities even of actual want.
Now come out, one by one, obvious to the sight,
the thousand beautiful things in the depths of
her quiet mind; and the eyes of the odd gentleman
are dimmed with emotion as he looks at
them. Already had she begun to wonder at
this man, to call his austerity melancholy, to
grieve that he was unhappy, to think what he
could be thinking about; and now, when she
and her darling brother are saved, protected,
held up by his strong hand, the hold he takes
of her imagination communicates itself insensibly
to her heart. His features lose their harshness;
his deep-set eyes become soft; his lips
relax; and finally, he cuts his hair. What
more needs be said?

But we take leave to disagree with this individual
in his idea that Anne Dysart has more
simplicity, purity, and quiet intelligence than
other every-day young ladies. She is, on the
contrary, nothing more than a type of the class;
and the fact is proved by the resemblance in
her portrait being at once recognized. We do
not stand upon the color of her hair, or eyes, or
other physical characteristics, for these are
mere averages, and may be very different in
our Anne and yours; but her shyness, hesitation,
and cowardice—her modesty, gentleness,
and truth—these are stereotyped traits, and are
the same in all. But when such qualities rise,
or become metamorphosed, to meet the exigencies
of life, how do we recognize them? By
intuition. We acknowledge in others the principle[Pg 745]
of development we feel in ourselves. Our
fault is, that we pass over as worthy of no remark,
no careful tending, no holy reverence,
the slumbering germs of all that is good and
beautiful in the female character, and suffer
our attention to be engrossed by its affectations
and monstrosities. Let us correct this fever
of the taste. Let us learn to enjoy the still
waters and quiet pastures. When we see an
every-day young lady flitting about our rooms,
or crossing our paths, or wandering by our side,
let us regard her no more as if she were a
shadow, or a part of the common atmosphere,
necessary, though unheeded; let us look upon
her with fondness and respect, and if we would
be blessed ourselves, let us say—God bless
her!

[From Dickens’s Household Words.]

HISTORY AND ANECDOTES OF BANK NOTE FORGERIES.

Viotti’s division of violin-playing into two
great classes—good playing and bad playing—is
applicable to Bank note making. The
processes employed in manufacturing good Bank
notes have been often described; we shall now
cover a few pages with a faint outline of the
various arts, stratagems, and contrivances employed
in concocting bad Bank notes. The picture
can not be drawn with very distinct or
strong markings. The tableaux from which it
is copied are so intertwisted and complicated
with clever, slippery, ingenious scoundrelism,
that a finished chart of it would be worse than
morally displeasing: it would be tedious.

All arts require time and experience for their
development. When any thing great is to be
done, first attempts are nearly always failures.
The first Bank note forgery was no exception
to this rule, and its story has a spice of romance
in it. The affair has never been circumstantially
told; but some research enables us to detail
it:

In the month of August, 1757, a gentleman
living in the neighborhood of Lincoln’s Inn
Fields, named Bliss, advertised for a clerk.
There were, as was usual even at that time,
many applicants; but the successful one was a
young man of twenty-six, named Richard William
Vaughan. His manners were so winning,
and his demeanor so much that of a gentleman
(he belonged indeed to a good county family in
Staffordshire, and had been a student at Pembroke
Hall, Oxford), that Mr. Bliss at once engaged
him. Nor had he occasion, during the
time the new clerk served him, to repent the
step. Vaughan was so diligent, intelligent, and
steady, that not even when it transpired that he
was, commercially speaking, “under a cloud,”
did his master lessen confidence in him. Some
inquiry into his antecedents showed that he had,
while at College, been extravagant; that his
friends had removed him thence; set him up in
Stafford as a wholesale linen-draper, with a
branch establishment in Aldersgate-street, London;
that he had failed, and that there was
some difficulty about his certificate. But so
well did he excuse his early failings, and account
for his misfortunes, that his employer did
not check the regard he felt growing toward
him. Their intercourse was not merely that of
master and servant. Vaughan was a frequent
guest at Bliss’s table; by-and-by a daily visitor
to his wife, and—to his ward.

Miss Bliss was a young lady of some attractions,
not the smallest of which was a handsome
fortune. Young Vaughan made the most of his
opportunities. He was well-looking, well-informed,
dressed well, and evidently made love
well, for he won the young lady’s heart. The
guardian was not flinty-hearted, and acted like
a sensible man of the world. “It was not,”
he said on a subsequent and painful occasion,
“till I learned from the servants, and observed
by the girl’s behavior, that she greatly approved
Richard Vaughan, that I consented; but on
condition that he should make it appear that
he could maintain her. I had no doubt of his
character as a servant, and I knew his family
were respectable. His brother is an eminent
attorney.” Vaughan boasted that his mother
(his father was dead) was willing to re-instate
him in business with a thousand pounds; five
hundred of which was to be settled upon Miss
Bliss for her separate use.

So far all went on prosperously. Providing
Richard Vaughan could attain a position satisfactory
to the Blisses, the marriage was to take
place on the Easter Monday following, which,
the Calendar tells us, happened early in April,
1758. With this understanding, he left Mr.
Bliss’s service, to push his fortune.

Months passed on, and Vaughan appears to
have made no way in the world. He had not
even obtained his bankrupt’s certificate. His
visits to his affianced were frequent, and his
protestations passionate; but he had effected
nothing substantial toward a happy union. Miss
Bliss’s guardian grew impatient; and, although
there is no evidence to prove that the young
lady’s affection for Vaughan was otherwise than
deep and sincere, yet even she began to lose
confidence in him. His excuses were evidently
evasive, and not always true. The time fixed
for the wedding was fast approaching; and
Vaughan saw that something must be done to
restore the young lady’s confidence.

About three weeks before the appointed
Easter Tuesday, Vaughan went to his mistress
in high spirits. All was right: his certificate
was to be granted in a day or two; his family
had come forward with the money, and he was
to continue the Aldersgate business he had
previously carried on as a branch of the Stafford
trade. The capital he had waited so long
for, was at length forthcoming. In fact, here
were two hundred and forty pounds of the five
hundred he was to settle on his beloved. Vaughan
then produced twelve twenty-pound notes;
Miss Bliss could scarcely believe her eyes. She
examined them. The paper she remarked[Pg 746]
seemed rather thicker than usual. “Oh,” said
Bliss, “all Bank bills are not alike.” The girl
was naturally much pleased. She would hasten
to apprize Mistress Bliss of the good news.

Not for the world! So far from letting any
living soul know he had placed so much money
in her hands, Vaughan exacted an oath of secresy
from her, and sealed the notes up in a parcel
with his own seal; making her swear that
she would on no account open it till after their
marriage.

Some days after, that is, “on the twenty-second
of March,” (1758)—we are describing
the scene in Mr. Bliss’s own words—”I was
sitting with my wife by the fireside. The
prisoner and the girl were sitting in the same
room—which was a small one—and, although
they whispered, I could distinguish that Vaughan
was very urgent to have something returned
which he had previously given to her. She
refused, and Vaughan went away in an angry
mood. I then studied the girl’s face, and saw
that it expressed much dissatisfaction. Presently
a tear broke out. I then spoke, and insisted
on knowing the dispute. She refused to
tell, and I told her that, until she did, I would
not see her. The next day I asked the same
question of Vaughan; he hesitated. ‘Oh!’ I
said, ‘I dare say it is some ten or twelve pound
matter—something to buy a wedding bauble
with.’ He answered that it was much more
than that—it was near three hundred pounds!
‘But why all this secresy?’ I said; and he
answered it was not proper for people to know
he had so much money till his certificate was
signed. I then asked him to what intent he
had left the notes with the young lady? He
said, as I had of late suspected him, he designed
to give her a proof of his affection and truth. I
said, ‘You have demanded them in such a way
that it must be construed as an abatement of
your affection toward her.'” Vaughan was
again exceedingly urgent in asking back the
packet; but Bliss, remembering his many evasions,
and supposing that this was a trick, declined
advising his niece to restore the parcel
without proper consideration. The very next
day it was discovered that the notes were
counterfeit.

This occasioned stricter inquiries into Vaughan’s
previous career. It turned out that he
bore the character in his native place of a dissipated,
and not very scrupulous person. The
intention of his mother to assist him was an
entire fabrication, and he had given Miss Bliss
the forged notes solely for the purpose of deceiving
her on that matter. Meanwhile the
forgeries became known to the authorities, and
he was arrested. By what means, does not
clearly appear. The “Annual Register” says
that one of the engravers gave information; but
we find nothing in the newspapers of the time
to support that statement; neither was it corroborated
at Vaughan’s trial.

When Vaughan was arrested he thrust a
piece of paper into his mouth, and began to
chew it violently. It was, however, rescued,
and proved to be one of the forged notes; fourteen
of them were found on his person, and
when his lodgings were searched twenty more
were discovered.

Vaughan was tried at the Old Bailey, on the
seventh of April, before Lord Mansfield. The
manner of the forgery was detailed minutely at
the trial: On the first of March (about a week
before he gave the twelve notes to the young
lady), Vaughan called on Mr. John Corbould, an
engraver, and gave an order for a promissory
note to be engraved with these words:

“No. ——.

“I promise to pay to ——, or Bearer,
——, London ——.”

There was to be a Britannia in the corner.
When it was done, Mr. Sneed (for that was the
alias Vaughan adopted), came again, but objected
to the execution of the work. The Britannia
was not good, and the words “I promise”
were too near the edge of the plate. Another
was in consequence engraved, and on the fourth
of March, Vaughan took it away. He immediately
repaired to a printer, and had forty-eight
impressions taken on thin paper, provided by
himself. Meanwhile, he had ordered, on the
same morning, of Mr. Charles Fourdrinier, another
engraver, a second plate, with what he
called “a direction,” in the words, “For the
Governor and Company of the Bank of England.”
This was done, and about a week
later he brought some paper, each sheet “folded
up,” said the witness, “very curiously, so that
I could not see what was in them. I was going
to take the papers from him, but he said he
must go up-stairs with me, and see them
worked off himself. I took him up-stairs; he
would not let me have them out of his hands.
I took a sponge and wetted them, and put them
one by one on the plate in order for printing
them. After my boy had done two or three of
them, I went down-stairs, and my boy worked
the rest off, and the prisoner came down and
paid me.”

Here the court pertinently asked, “What
imagination had you when a man thus came to
you to print on secret paper, ‘the Governor and
Company of the Bank of England?'”

The engraver’s reply was: “I then did not
suspect any thing. But I shall take care for
the future.” As this was the first Bank of
England note forgery that was ever perpetrated,
the engraver was held excused.

It may be mentioned as an evidence of the
delicacy of the reporters, that, in their account
of the trial, Miss Bliss’s name is not mentioned.
Her designation is “a young lady.” We subjoin
the notes of her evidence:

“A young lady (sworn). The prisoner delivered
me some bills; these are the same (producing
twelve counterfeit bank notes sealed up
in a cover, for twenty pounds each), said that
they were Bank bills. I said they were thicker
paper—he said all bills are not alike. I was to[Pg 747]
keep them till after we were married. He put
them into my hands to show he put confidence
in me, and desired me not to show them to any
body; sealed them up with his own seal, and
obliged me by an oath not to discover them to
any body. And I did not till he had discovered
them himself. He was to settle so much in
stock on me.”

Vaughan urged in his defense, that his sole
object was to deceive his affianced, and that he
intended to destroy all the notes after his marriage.
But it had been proved that the prisoner
had asked one John Ballingar to change
first one, and then twenty of the notes; but
which that person was unable to do. Besides,
had his sole object been to dazzle Miss Bliss
with his fictitious wealth, he would, most probably,
have intrusted more, if not all the notes,
to her keeping.

He was found guilty, and passed the day that
had been fixed for his wedding, as a condemned
criminal.

On the 11th of May, 1758, Richard William
Vaughan was executed at Tyburn. By his
side, on the same gallows, there was another
forger: William Boodgere, a military officer,
who had forged a draught on an army agent
named Calcroft, and expiated the offense with
the first forger of Bank of England notes.

The gallows may seem hard measure to have
meted out to Vaughan, when it is considered
that none of his notes were negotiated, and no
person suffered by his fraud. Not one of the
forty-eight notes, except the twelve delivered to
Miss Bliss, had been out of his possession; indeed,
the imitation must have been very clumsily
executed, and detection would have instantly
followed any attempt to pass the counterfeits.
There was no endeavor to copy the style of
engraving on a real bank note. That was left
to the engraver; and as each sheet passed
through the press twice, the words added at
the second printing, “For the Governor and
Company of the Bank of England,” could have
fallen into their proper place on any one of the
sheets, only by a miracle. But what would
have made the forgery clear to even a superficial
observer, was the singular omission, of the
second “n” in the word England.[20]

The criticism on Vaughan’s note of a bank
clerk examined on the trial was: “There is
some resemblance, to be sure; but this note”
(that upon which the prisoner was tried) “is
numbered thirteen thousand eight hundred and
forty, and we never reach so high a number.”
Besides there was no water-mark in the paper.
The note of which a fac-simile appeared in our
eighteenth number, and dated so early as 1699,
has a regular design in the texture of the paper;
showing that the water-mark is as old as the
bank notes themselves.

Vaughan was greatly commiserated. But
despite the unskillfulness of the forgery, and the
insignificant consequences which followed it, the
crime was considered of too dangerous a character
not to be marked, from its very novelty,
with exemplary punishment. Hanging created
at that time no remorse in the public mind, and
it was thought necessary to set up Vaughan as
a warning to all future bank-note forgers. The
crime was too dangerous not to be marked with
the severest penalties. Forgery differs from
other crimes not less in the magnitude of the
spoil it may obtain, and of the injury it inflicts,
than in the facilities attending its accomplishment.
The common thief finds a limit to his
depredations in the bulkiness of his booty, which
is generally confined to such property as he can
carry about his person; the swindler raises insuperable
and defeating obstacles to his frauds
if the amount he seeks to obtain is so considerable
as to awaken close vigilance or inquiry.
To carry their projects to any very profitable
extent, these criminals are reduced to the hazardous
necessity of acting in concert, and thus
infinitely increasing the risks of detection. But
the forger need have no accomplice; he is burdened
with no bulky and suspicious property;
he needs no receiver to assist his contrivances.
The skill of his own individual right hand can
command thousands; often with the certainty
of not being detected, and oftener with such
rapidity as to enable him to baffle the pursuit
of justice.

It was a long time before Vaughan’s rude
attempt was improved upon: but in the same
year (1758), another department of the crime
was commenced with perfect success; namely,
an ingenious alteration, for fraudulent purposes,
of real bank notes. A few months after Vaughan’s
execution, one of the northern mails was
stopped and robbed by a highwayman; several
bank notes were comprised in the spoil, and the
robber, setting up with these as a gentleman,
went boldly to the Hatfield Post-office, ordered
a chaise and four, rattled away down the road,
and changed a note at every change of horses.
The robbery was, of course, soon made known,
and the numbers and dates of the stolen notes
were advertised as having been stopped at the
bank. To the genius of a highwayman this
offered but a small obstacle, and the gentleman-thief
changed all the figures “1” he could find
into “4’s.” These notes passed currently
enough; but, on reaching the bank, the alteration
was detected, and the last holder was refused
payment. As that person had given a
valuable consideration for the note, he brought
an action for the recovery of the amount; and
at the trial it was ruled by the Lord Chief Justice,
that “any person paying a valuable consideration
for a bank note, payable to bearer, in
a fair course of business, has an understood
right to receive the money of the bank.”

It took a quarter of a century to bring the
art of forging bank notes to perfection. In
1779, this was nearly attained by an ingenious
gentleman, named Mathison, a watchmaker[Pg 748]
from the matrimonial village of Gretna Green.
Having learned the arts of engraving and of simulating
signatures, he tried his hand at the notes
of the Darlington Bank; but, with the confidence
of skill, was not cautious in passing
them, was suspected, and absconded to Edinburgh.
Scorning to let his talent be wasted, he
favored the Scottish public with many spurious
Royal Bank of Scotland notes, and regularly
forged his way by their aid to London. At the
end of February he took handsome lodgings in
the Strand, opposite Arundel-street. His industry
was remarkable: for, by the 12th of March,
he had planed and polished rough pieces of
copper, engraved them, forged the water-mark,
printed and negotiated several impressions. His
plan was to travel and to purchase articles in
shops. He bought a pair of shoe-buckles at
Coventry with a forged note, which was eventually
detected at the Bank of England. He
had got so bold that he paid such frequent visits
in Threadneedle-street, that the bank clerks
became familiar with his person. He was continually
changing notes of one, for another denomination.
These were his originals, which
he procured to make spurious copies of. One
day seven thousand pounds came in from the
Stamp Office. There was a dispute about one
of the notes. Mathison, who was present,
though at some distance, declared, oracularly,
that the note was a good one. How could he
know so well? A dawn of suspicion arose in
the minds of the clerks; one trail led into
another, and Mathison was finally apprehended.
So well were his notes forged that, on the trial,
an experienced bank clerk declared, he could
not tell whether the note handed him to examine
was forged or not. Mathison offered to
reveal his secret of forging the water-mark, if
mercy were shown to him; this was refused,
and he suffered the penalty of his crime.

Mathison was a genius in his criminal way,
but a greater than he appeared in 1786. In
that year perfection seemed to have been
reached. So considerable was the circulation
of spurious paper-money, that it appeared as if
some unknown power had set up a bank of its
own. Notes were issued from it, and readily
passed current, in hundreds and thousands.
They were not to be distinguished from the
genuine paper of Threadneedle-street. Indeed,
when one was presented there, in due course,
so complete were all its parts; so masterly the
engraving; so correct the signatures; so skillful
the water-mark, that it was promptly paid;
and only discovered to be a forgery when it
reached a particular department. From that
period forged paper continued to be presented,
especially at the time of lottery drawing. Consultations
were held with the police. Plans
were laid to help detection. Every effort was
made to trace the forger. Clarke, the best detective
of his day, went, like a sluth-hound, on
the track; for in those days the expressive
word “blood-money” was known. Up to a
certain point there was little difficulty; but, beyond
that, consummate art defied the ingenuity
of the officer. In whatever way the notes
came, the train of discovery always paused at
the lottery-offices. Advertisements offering
large rewards were circulated; but the unknown
forger baffled detection.

While this base paper was in full currency,
there appeared an advertisement in the Daily
Advertiser for a servant. The successful applicant
was a young man, in the employment of
a musical-instrument maker; who, some time
after, was called upon by a coachman, and informed
that the advertiser was waiting in a
coach to see him. The young man was desired
to enter the conveyance, where he beheld a
person with something of the appearance of a
foreigner, sixty or seventy years old, apparently
troubled with the gout. A camlet surtout was
buttoned round his mouth; a large patch was
placed over his left eye; and nearly every part
of his face was concealed. He affected much
infirmity. He had a faint hectic cough; and
invariably presented the patched side to the
view of the servant. After some conversation—in
the course of which he represented himself
as guardian to a young nobleman of great fortune—the
interview concluded with the engagement
of the applicant; and the new servant was
directed to call on Mr. Brank, at 29, Titchfield-street,
Oxford-street. At this interview, Brank
inveighed against his whimsical ward for his
love of speculating in lottery tickets; and told
the servant that his principal duty would be to
purchase them. After one or two meetings, at
each of which Brank kept his face muffled, he
handed a forty and twenty pound bank note;
told the servant to be very careful not to lose
them; and directed him to buy lottery-tickets
at separate offices. The young man fulfilled
his instructions, and at the moment he was returning,
was suddenly called by his employer
from the other side of the street, congratulated
on his rapidity, and then told to go to various
other offices in the neighborhood of the Royal
Exchange, and to purchase more shares. Four
hundred pounds in Bank of England notes were
handed him, and the wishes of the mysterious
Mr. Brank were satisfactorily effected. These
scenes were continually enacted. Notes to a
large amount were thus circulated; lottery-tickets
purchased; and Mr. Brank—always in
a coach, with his face studiously concealed—was
ever ready on the spot to receive them.
The surprise of the servant was somewhat excited;
but had he known that from the period
he left his master to purchase the tickets, one
female figure accompanied all his movements;
that when he entered the offices, it waited at
the door, peered cautiously in at the window,
hovered around him like a second shadow,
watched him carefully, and never left him until
once more he was in the company of his employer—that
surprise would have been greatly
increased.[21] Again and again were these extraordinary[Pg 749]
scenes rehearsed. At last the Bank
obtained a clew, and the servant was taken into
custody. The directors imagined that they had
secured the actor of so many parts; that the
flood of forged notes which had inundated that
establishment would at length be dammed up at
its source. Their hopes proved fallacious, and
it was found that “Old Patch” (as the mysterious
forger was, from the servant’s description,
nick-named) had been sufficiently clever to baffle
the Bank directors. The house in Titchfield-street
was searched; but Mr. Brank had deserted
it, and not a trace of a single implement
of forgery was to be seen.

All that could be obtained was some little
knowledge of “Old Patch’s” proceedings. It
appeared that he carried on his paper coining
entirely by himself. His only confidant was
his mistress. He was his own engraver. He
even made his own ink. He manufactured his
own paper. With a private press he worked
his own notes; and counterfeited the signatures
of the cashiers, completely. But these discoveries
had no effect; for it became evident that
Mr. Patch had set up a press elsewhere. Although
his secret continued as impenetrable,
his notes became as plentiful as ever. Five
years of unbounded prosperity ought to have
satisfied him; but it did not. Success seemed
to pall him. His genius was of that insatiable
order which demands new excitements, and a
constant succession of new flights. The following
paragraph from a newspaper of 1786
relates to the same individual:

“On the 17th of December, ten pounds were
paid into the Bank, for which the clerk, as
usual, gave a ticket to receive a Bank note of
equal value. This ticket ought to have been
carried immediately to the cashier, instead of
which the bearer took it home, and curiously
added an 0 to the original sum, and returning,
presented it so altered to the cashier, for which
he received a note of one hundred pounds. In
the evening, the clerks found a deficiency in
the accounts; and on examining the tickets of
the day, not only that but two others were discovered
to have been obtained in the same
manner. In the one, the figure 1 was altered
to 4, and in another to 5, by which the artist
received, upon the whole, nearly one thousand
pounds.”

To that princely felony, Old Patch, as will be
seen in the sequel, added smaller misdemeanors
which one would think were far beneath his
notice; except to convince himself and his mistress
of the unbounded facility of his genius for
fraud.

At that period, the affluent public were saddled
with a tax on plate; and many experiments
were made to evade it. Among others,
one was invented by a Mr. Charles Price, a
stock-jobber and lottery-office keeper, which,
for a time, puzzled the tax-gatherer. Mr.
Charles Price lived in great style, gave splendid
dinners, and did every thing on the grandest
scale. Yet Mr. Charles Price had no plate!
The authorities could not find so much as a
silver tooth-pick on his magnificent premises.
In truth, what he was too cunning to possess,
he borrowed. For one of his sumptuous entertainments,
he hired the plate of a silversmith in
Cornhill, and left the value in bank notes as security
for its safe return. One of these notes
having proved a forgery, was traced to Mr.
Charles Price; and Mr. Charles Price was not
to be found at that particular juncture. Although
this excited no surprise—for he was
often an absentee from his office for short periods—yet
in due course, and as a formal matter
of business, an officer was set to find him,
and to ask his explanation regarding the false
note. After tracing a man, who he had a strong
notion was Mr. Charles Price, through countless
lodgings and innumerable disguises, the
officer (to use his own expression) “nabbed”
Mr. Charles Price. But, as Mr. Clarke observed,
his prisoner and his prisoner’s lady were
even then “too many” for him; for, although
he lost not a moment in trying to secure the
forging implements, after he had discovered that
Mr. Charles Price, and Mr. Brank, and Old
Patch, were all concentrated in the person of
his prisoner, he found the lady had destroyed
every trace of evidence. Not a vestige of the
forging factory was left. Not the point of a
graver, nor a single spot of ink, nor a shred of
silver paper, nor a scrap of any body’s handwriting,
was to be met with. Despite, however,
this paucity of evidence to convict him,
Mr. Charles Price had not the courage to face
a jury, and eventually he saved the judicature
and the Tyburn executive much trouble and expense,
by hanging himself in Bridewell.

The success of Mr. Charles Price has never
been surpassed; and even after the darkest era
in the history of Bank forgeries—which dates
from the suspension of cash payments, in February,
1797—”Old Patch” was still remembered
as the Cæsar of Forgers.

THE OLDEST INHABITANT OF THE PLACE DE GREVE.

The Police Courts of London have often displayed
many a curious character, many a
strange scene, many an exquisite bit of dialogue;
so have the Police Courts in Ireland, especially
at the Petty Sessions in Kilrush; but we are
not so well aware of how often a scene of rich
and peculiar humor occurs in the Police tribuneaux
of Paris. We will proceed to give the
reader a “taste of their quality.”

An extremely old woman, all in rags, was
continually found begging in the streets, and
the Police having good-naturedly let her off
several times, were at last obliged to take her
in charge, and bring her into the court. Several
magistrates were sitting. The following dialogue
took place between the President and the
old woman.

President.—Now, my good woman, what
have you to say for yourself? You have been[Pg 750]
frequently warned by the Police, but you have
persisted in troubling people with begging.

Old Woman (in a humble, quavering tone).—Ah,
Monsieur le President, it is not so much
trouble to other people as it is to me. I am a
very old woman.

Pres.—Come, come, you must leave off begging,
or I shall be obliged to punish you.

Old W.—But, Monsieur le President, I can
not live without—I must beg—pardon me,
Monsieur—I am obliged to beg.

Pres.—But I say you must not. Can you do
no work?

Old W.—Ah, no, Monsieur; I am too old.

Pres.—Can’t you sell something—little cakes—bonbons?

Old W.—No, Monsieur, I can’t get any little
stock to begin with; and, if I could, I should be
robbed by the gamins, or the little girls, for I’m
not very quick, and can’t see well.

Pres.—Your relations must support you, then.
You can not be allowed to beg. Have you no
son—no daughter—no grandchildren?

Old W.—No, Monsieur; none—none—all
my relations are dead.

Pres.—Well then, your friends must give you
assistance.

Old W.—Ah, Monsieur, I have no friends;
and, indeed, I never had but one, in my life;
but he too is gone.

Pres.—And who was he?

Old W.—Monsieur de Robespierre—le pauvre,
cher homme! (The poor, dear man!)

Pres.—Robespierre!—why what did you
know of him?

Old W.—Oh, Monsieur, my mother was one
of the tricoteurs (knitting-women) who used to
sit round the foot of the guillotine, and I always
stood beside her. When Monsieur de Robespierre
was passing by, in attending his duties,
he used to touch my cheek, and call me (here
the old woman shed tears) la belle Marguerite:
le pauvre, cher homme!

We must here pause to remind the reader
that these women, the tricoteurs, who used to
sit round the foot of the guillotine on the mornings
when it was at its hideous work, were
sometimes called the “Furies;” but only as a
grim jest. It is well known, that, although
there were occasionally some sanguinary hags
among them, yet, for the most part, they were
merely idle, gossiping women, who came there
dressed in neat white caps, and with their
knitting materials, out of sheer love of excitement,
and to enjoy the spectacle.

Pres.—Well, Goody; finish your history.

Old W.—I was married soon after this, and
then I used to take my seat as a tricoteur among
the others; and on the days when Monsieur de
Robespierre passed, he used always to notice
me—le pauvre, cher homme. I used then to be
called la belle tricoteuse, but now—now, I am
called la vielle radoteuse (the old dotardess).
Ah, Monsieur le President, it is what we must
all come to!

The old woman accompanied this reflection
with an inimitable look at the President, which
completely involved him in the we, thus presenting
him with the prospect of becoming an old
dotardess; not in the least meant offensively,
but said in the innocence of her aged heart.

Pres.—Ahem!—silence! You seem to have
a very tender recollection of Monsieur Robespierre.
I suppose you had reason to be grateful
to him?

Old W.—No, Monsieur, no reason in particular;
for he guillotined my husband.

Pres.—Certainly this ought to be no reason
for loving his memory.

Old W.—Ah, Monsieur, but it happened
quite by accident. Monsieur de Robespierre
did not intend to guillotine my husband—he had
him executed by mistake for somebody else—le
pauvre, cher homme!

Thus leaving it an exquisite matter of doubt,
as to whether the “poor dear man” referred to
her husband, or to Monsieur de Robespierre; or
whether the tender epithet was equally divided
between them.

[From Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal.]

STORY OF A KITE.

The setting sun beamed in golden light over
the country; long shadows lay on the cool
grass; the birds, which had been silent through
the sultry heat of the day, sang their joyous
evening hymn: the merry voices of the village
children sounded through the clear air, while
their fathers loitered about enjoying the luxury
of rest after labor. A sun-burned traveler, with
dusty shoes, walked sturdily along the high
road: he was young and strong, and his ruddy
cheeks glowed in the warm light: he carried
his baggage on a stick over his shoulder, and
looked straight on toward the cottages of the
village; and you might see, by the expression
of his face, that his eye was earnestly watching
for the first glimpse of the home that lay among
them, to which he was returning.

The same setting sun threw his golden beams
over the great metropolis: they lighted up
streets, and squares, and parks, whence crowds
were retiring from business or pleasure to their
various places of abode or gay parties: they
pierced even through the smoke of the city, and
gilded its great central dome; but when they
reached the labyrinth of lanes and courts which
it incloses, their radiance was gone, for noxious
vapors rose there after the heat of the day, and
quenched them. The summer sun is dreaded
in those places.

The dusky light found its way with difficulty
through a small and dim window into an upper
room of a house in one of these lanes, and any
one entering it would at first have thought it
was void of any living inhabitant, had not the
restless tossing and oppressed breathing that
proceeded from a bed in one corner borne witness
to the contrary. A weak sickly boy lay
there, his eye fixed on the door. It opened,
and he started up in bed; but at the sight of[Pg 751]
another boy, a few years older than himself,
who came in alone, he sunk back again, crying
in a plaintive voice, “Don’t you see her coming
yet?”

“No, she is not in sight: I ran to the corner
of the lane, and could see nothing of her,” replied
the elder boy, who, as he spoke, knelt
down before the grate, and began to arrange
some sticks in it.

Every thing in the room bespoke poverty;
yet there was an appearance of order, and as
much cleanliness as can be attained in such an
abode. Among the scanty articles of furniture
there was one object that was remarkable as
being singularly out of place, and apparently
very useless there: it was a large paper kite,
that hung from a nail on the wall, and nearly
reached from the low ceiling to the floor.

“There’s eight o’clock just struck, John,”
said the little boy in bed. “Go and look once
more if mother’s not coming yet.”

“It’s no use looking, Jem. It won’t make
her come any faster; but I’ll go to please
you.”

“I hear some one on the stairs.”

“It’s only Mrs. Willis going into the back-room.”

“Oh dear, dear, what shall I do?”

“Don’t cry, Jem. Look, now I’ve put the
wood all ready to boil the kettle the minute
mother comes, and she’ll bring you some tea:
she said she would. Now I’m going to sweep
up the dust, and make it all tidy.”

Jem was quieted for a few minutes by looking
at his brother’s busy operations, carried on
in a bustling, rattling way, to afford all the
amusement possible; but the feverish restlessness
soon returned.

“Take me up, do take me up,” he cried;
“and hold me near the broken pane, please,
John;” and he stretched out his white, wasted
hands.

John kindly lifted out the poor little fellow,
and dragging a chair to the window, sat down
with him on his knee, and held his face close to
the broken pane, through which, however, no
air seemed to come, and he soon began to cry
again.

“What is it, Jem?—what’s the matter?”
said a kind voice at the door, where a woman
stood, holding by the hand a pale child.

“I want mother,” sobbed Jem.

“Mother’s out at work, Mrs. Willis,” said
John; “and she thought she should be home at
half-past seven; but she’s kept later sometimes.”

“Don’t cry,” said Mrs. Willis’s little girl,
coming forward. “Here’s my orange for you.”

Jem took it, and put it to his mouth; but he
stopped, and asked John to cut it in two; gave
back half to the little girl, made John taste the
portion he kept, and then began to suck the
cooling fruit with great pleasure, only pausing
to say, with a smile, “Thank you, Mary.”

“Now lie down again, and try to go to
sleep; there’s a good boy,” said Mrs. Willis;
“and mother will soon be here. I must go
now.”

Jem was laid in bed once more; but he
tossed about restlessly, and the sad wail began
again.

“I’ll tell you what,” said John, “if you will
stop crying, I’ll take down poor Harry’s kite,
and show you how he used to fly it.”

“But mother don’t like us to touch it.”

“No; but she will not mind when I tell her
why I did it this once. Look at the pretty blue
and red figures on it. Harry made it, and
painted it all himself; and look at the long
tail!”

“But how did he fly it? Can’t you show
me how poor Harry used to fly it?”

John mounted on a chest, and holding the
kite at arm’s length, began to wave it about,
and to make the tail shake, while Jem sat up
admiring.

“This was the way he used to hold it up.
Then he took the string that was fastened here—mother
has got it in the chest—and he held
the string in his hand, and when the wind came,
and sent the kite up, he let the string run
through his hand, and up it went over the trees,
up—up—and he ran along in the fields, and it
flew along under the blue sky.”

John waved the kite more energetically as he
described, and both the boys were so engrossed
by it, that they did not observe that the mother,
so longed for, had come in, and had sunk down
on a chair near the door, her face bent and
nearly hidden by the rusty crape on her widow’s
bonnet, while the tears fell fast on her faded
black gown.

“Oh mother, mother!” cried Jem, who saw
her first, “come and take me—come and comfort
me!”

The poor woman rose quickly, wiped her
eyes, and hastened to her sick child, who was
soon nestled in her arms, and seemed to have
there forgotten all his woes.

The kind, good-natured John had meanwhile
hung up the kite in its place, and was looking
rather anxiously at his mother, for he well
understood the cause of the grief that had overcome
her at the sight of his occupation, when
she first came in; but she stroked his hair,
looked kindly at him, and bade him make the
kettle boil, and get the things out of her basket.
All that was wanted for their simple supper
was in it, and it was not long before little Jem
was again laid down after the refreshment of
tea; then a mattress was put in a corner for
John, who was soon asleep; and the mother,
tired with her day’s hard work, took her place
in the bed by the side of her child.

But the tears that had rolled fast down her
cheeks as her lips moved in prayer before sleep
came upon her, still made their way beneath
the closed eyelids, and Jem awoke her by saying,
as he stroked her face with his hot hand,
“Don’t cry, mother; we won’t touch it again!”

“It’s not that, my child; no, no: it’s the
thought of my own Harry. I think I see his[Pg 752]
pleasant face, and his curly hair, and his merry
eyes looking up after his kite.” It was not
often she spoke out her griefs; but now, in the
silent night, it seemed to comfort her.

“Tell me about him, mother, and about his
going away? I like to hear you tell about
him.”

“He worked with father, you know, and a
clever workman he learned to be.”

“But he was much older than me. Shall I
ever be a good workman, mother?”

The question made her heart ache with a
fresh anguish, and she could not answer it; but
replied to his first words, “Yes, he was much
older. We laid three of our children in the
grave between him and John. Harry was
seventeen when his uncle took him to serve out
his time in a merchant-ship. Uncle Ben, that
was ship’s carpenter, it was that took him.—The
voyage was to last a year and a half, for
they were to go to all manner of countries far,
far away. One letter I had. It came on a sad
day the day after poor father died, Jem. And
then I had to leave our cottage in our own
village, and bring you two to London, to find
work to keep you; but I have always taken
care to leave word where I was to be found,
and have often gone to ask after letters. Not
one has ever come again; and it’s six months
past the time when they looked for the ship, and
they don’t know what to think. But I know
what I think: the sea has rolled over my dear
boy, and I shall never see him again—never,
never in this weary world.”

“Don’t cry so, mother dear; I’ll try to go to
sleep, and not make you talk.”

“Yes—try; and if you can only get better,
that will comfort me most.”

Both closed their eyes, and sleep came upon
them once more.

It was eight o’clock in the morning when the
little boy awoke, and then he was alone; but to
that he was accustomed. His mother was
again gone to work, and John was out cleaning
knives and shoes in the neighborhood. The
table, with a small piece of bread and a cup of
blue milk and water on it, stood beside him.
He drank a little, but could not eat, and then
lay down again with his eyes fixed on Harry’s
kite.

“Could he fly it,” or rather, “could he see
John fly it—really out of doors and in the air?”
That was of all things what he most longed to
do. He wondered where the fields were, and if
he could ever go there and see the kite fly under
the blue sky. Then he wondered if John could
fly it in the lane. He crept out of bed, and
tottered to the window.

The lane was very wet and slushy, and a
nasty black gutter ran down it, and oozed out
among the broken stones. There had been a
heavy thunder-shower in the night, and as there
was no foot pavement, and what stones there
were, were very uneven and scattered, the
black pools lodged among them, and altogether
it seemed impossible for a boy to fly a kite
there; for “how could he run along holding
the string? he would tumble among the dirty
pools. There were only four children to be
seen in it now, out of all the numbers that lived
in the houses, though it was a warm summer
morning, and they were dabbling with naked
feet in the mud, and their ragged clothes were
all draggled. Mother would never let him and
John do like that.”

Still he stood, first examining the window,
then looking at the kite; then putting his hand
out through the broken pane, and pondered over
a scheme that had entered his mind.

“John,” he cried, as the door opened, “don’t
you think we could fly Harry’s kite out of the
broken pane?”

At first this idea seemed to John perfectly
chimerical; but after some consultation and explanation
a plan was devised between the two
boys, to complete which they only waited for
their mother’s return. They expected her at
one, for this was only half a day’s work.

Jem was dressed when she returned, and his
excitement made him appear better; but she
saw with grief that he could not touch his dinner;
and her anxiety about him made her, less
unwillingly than she otherwise would have
done, consent to the petition he made, that
“only for this once she would let him and John
fly the kite outside the window.” She stifled
her sigh as she sat down to needlework, lest she
should cast a gloom over the busy preparations
that immediately commenced.

The difficulty had been how to get the kite
out, because the window would not open. To
surmount this, John was to go down to the lane,
taking the kite with him, while Jem lowered
the string out of the broken pane.

“When you get hold of the string, you know,
John, you can fasten it, and then stand on that
large stone opposite, just by where that gentleman
is, and hold up the kite, and then I will
pull.”

All was done accordingly. John did his part
well. Jem pulled; the kite rose to the window,
and fluttered about, for the thunder had been
followed by a high wind, which was felt a little
even in this close place, and the boys gazed at
it with great pleasure. As it dangled loosely
by the window in this manner, the tail became
entangled, and John was obliged to run up to
help to put it right.

“Let it down to me again when I have run
out,” said he, as he tried to disentangle it;
“and I will stand on the stone, and hold it up,
and you can pull again. There’s the gentleman
still, and now there’s a young man besides.
The gentleman has made him look up at the
kite.”

“Come and look, mother,” said Jem: but she
did not hear. “The young man has such a
brown face, and such curly hair.”

“And he’s like—mother, he is crossing
over!” cried John. “He has come into the
house!”

The mother heard now. A wild hope rushed[Pg 753]
through her heart; she started up; a quick
step was heard on the stairs; the door flew
open, and the next moment she was clasped in
her son’s arms!

The joy nearly took away her senses. Broken
words mingled with tears, thanksgivings, and
blessings, were all that were uttered for some
time between them. Harry had Jem on his
knee, and John pressed close to his side, and
was holding his mother tight by the hand, and
looking up in her face, when at last they began to
believe and understand that they once more saw
each other. And then he had to explain how
the ship had been disabled by a storm in the
South Seas; and how they got her into one of
the beautiful islands there, and refitted her, and
after six months’ delay, brought her back safe
and sound, cargo and all; and how he and
Uncle Ben were both strong and hearty.

“How well you look, my dear boy!” said
the happy mother. “How tall, and stout, and
handsome you are!”

“And he’s got his curly hair and bright eyes
still,” said poor wan little Jem, speaking for
the first time.

“But you, mother, and all of you, how pale
you are, and how thin! I know—yes, don’t
say it—I know who’s gone. I went home last
night, mother. I walked all the way to the
village, and found the poor cottage empty, and
heard how he died.”

“Home! You went there?”

“Yes, and the neighbors told me you were
gone to London. But I slept all night in the
kitchen, on some straw. There I lay, and
thought of you, and of him we have lost, and
prayed that I might be a comfort to you yet.”

Joy and sorrow seemed struggling for the
mastery in the widow’s heart; but the present
happiness proved the stronger, and she was
soon smiling, and listening to Harry.

“I had a hard matter to find you,” he said.
“You had left the lodging they directed me to
at first.”

“But I left word where I had come to.”

“Ay, so you had; and an old woman there
told me you were at No. 10 Paradise Row.”

“What could she be thinking of?”

“No one had heard of you in that place.
However, as I was going along back again to
get better information, keeping a sharp look-out
in hopes I might meet you, I passed the end of
this lane, and saw it was called Eden-lane, so I
thought perhaps the old lady had fancied Paradise
and Eden were all the same; and sure
enough, they are both as like one as the other,
for they are wretched, miserable places as ever
I saw. I turned in here, and then No. 10 proved
wrong too; and as I was standing looking
about, and wondering what I had better do
next, a gentleman touched my arm, and pointing
first at the black pools in the broken pavement,
and then up at this window, he said—I
remember his very words, they struck me so—’Do
not the very stones rise up in judgment
against us! Look at these poor little fellows
trying to fly their kite out of a broken pane!’
Hearing him say so, I looked up, and saw my
old kite—by it I found you at last.”

They all turned gratefully toward it, and saw
that it still swung outside, held there safely by
its entangled tail. The talk, therefore, went on
uninterruptedly. Many questions were asked
and answered, and many subjects discussed; the
sad state of poor little Jem being the most pressing.
At the end of an hour a great bustle was
going on in the room: they were packing up all
their small stock of goods, for Harry had succeeded,
after some argument, in persuading his
mother to leave her unhealthy lodging that very
evening, and not to risk even one more night for
poor Jem in that poisonous air. He smoothed
every difficulty. Mrs. Willis gladly undertook
to do the work she had engaged to do; and
with her he deposited money for the rent, and
the key of the room. He declared he had
another place ready to take his mother to; and
to her anxious look he replied, “I did good
service in the ship, and the owners have been
generous to us all. I’ve got forty pounds.”

“Forty pounds!” If he had said, “I have
got possession of a gold district in California,”
he would not have created a greater sensation.
It seemed an inexhaustible amount of wealth.

A light cart was soon hired and packed, and
easily held not only the goods (not forgetting
the kite), but the living possessors of them; and
they set forth on their way.

The evening sun again beamed over the
country; and the tall trees, as they threw their
shadow across the grass, waved a blessing on
the family that passed beneath, from whose
hearts a silent thanksgiving went up that harmonized
with the joyous hymn of the birds.
The sun-burnt traveler, as he walked at the
horse’s head, holding his elder brother’s hand,
no longer looked anxiously onward, for he knew
where he was going, and saw by him his
younger brother already beginning to revive in
the fresh air, and rejoiced in his mother’s expression
of content and happiness. She had
divined for some time to what home she was
going.

“But how did you contrive to get it fixed so
quickly, my kind, good boy?” she said.

“I went to the landlord, and he agreed at
once: and do not be afraid, I can earn plenty
for us all.”

“But must you go to sea again?”

“If I must, do not fear. Did you not always
teach me that His hand would keep me, and
hold me, even in the uttermost parts of the
sea?”

And she felt that there was no room for fear.

A week after this time, the evening sun again
lighted up a happy party. Harry and John
were busied in preparing the kite for flying in a
green field behind their cottage. Under the
hedge, on an old tree trunk, sat their mother,
no longer in faded black and rusty crape, but
neatly dressed in a fresh, clean gown and cap,
and with a face bright with hope and pleasure.[Pg 754]
By her was Jem, with cheeks already filling
out, a tinge of color in them, and eyes full of
delight. On her other side was little Mary
Willis. She had just arrived, and was telling
them how, the very day after they left, some
workmen came and put down a nice pavement
on each side of the lane, and laid a pipe underground
instead of the gutter; and that now it
was as dry and clean as could be; and all the
children could play there, and there were such
numbers of games going on; and they all said
it was the best thing they had done for them
for many a day; and so did their mothers too,
for now the children were not all crowded into
their rooms all day long, but could play out of
doors.

“Depend upon it,” said Harry, “it is that
gentleman’s doing that spoke to me of it the day
I came first. This good old kite has done good
service, and now it shall be rewarded by sailing
up to a splendid height.”

As he spoke, he held it up, the light breeze
caught it, and it soared away over their heads
under the blue sky; while the happy faces that
watched it bore witness to the truth of his
words—that “the good old kite had done good
service.”

[From Sharp’s Magazine.]

THE STATE OF THE WORLD BEFORE ADAM’S TIME.

Among the millions of human beings that
dwell on the earth, how few are those who
think of inquiring into its past history. The
annals of Greece and Rome are imparted to
our children as a necessary and important
branch of education, while the history of the
world itself is neglected, or at the most is confined
to those who are destined for a scientific
profession; even adults are content to receive
on hearsay a vague idea that the globe was in
being for some undefined period preceding the
era of human history, but few seek to know in
what state it existed, or what appearance it
presented.

This is owing, partly, to the hard names and
scientific language in which geologists have
clothed their science, and partly to ignorance of
the beauty and attractive nature of the study;
we dread the long, abstruse-sounding titles of
Ichthyosaurus and Plesiosaurus, and are repelled
by the dry disquisitions on mineralogy into which
professors of the science are apt to stray. The
truth is, however, that geology properly is
divided into two distinct branches; one of these
consists of the less attractive, though equally
useful, investigation of the chemical constituents
of the strata, and the classification of the
fossil flora and fauna which belong to the various
formations; this, which may be styled geology
proper, is the department which belongs
almost exclusively to men of science, and, inasmuch
as it involves the necessity of acquaintance
with the sister sciences of chemistry, mineralogy,
zoology, and botany, is least adapted
to the understanding of the uninitiated. The
other branch, which may be called the history
of geology, presents none of these difficulties;
it is as easy of comprehension, and as suitable
to the popular mind, as any other historical account;
while it presents a variety of interest,
and a revolution of events, before which the
puny annals of modern history sink into insignificance.

Such of our readers as are unacquainted with
the science, will probably be inclined to doubt
the possibility of our being aware of events
which took place ages before Adam was created;
here, however, nature herself steps in, and
becoming her own historian, writes “in the living
rock” the chronicles of past ages, and so
accurately and circumstantially, that we can
say positively, “Here existed the sea at such a
period, and here the tide ebbed and flowed for
centuries;” nay, she shows us the footmarks of
extinct animals, and tells us the size, nature,
habits, and food of creatures which have for unnumbered
ages been buried in the grave of time.
She informs us that here the ocean was calm, and
that there a river flowed into it; here forests
grew and flourished, and there volcanoes vomited
forth lava, while mighty earthquakes heaved
up mountains with convulsive throes. Such are
the events that mark the world’s history, and
we now purpose giving a short sketch of the
various eras in its existence.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the earth,
now so busy and full of life, rolled on its ceaseless
course, a vast, desolate, and sterile globe.
Day and night succeeded one another, and season
followed season, while yet no living form
existed, and still the sun rose upon arid, verdureless
continents, and hot, caldron-like seas,
on which the steaming vapor and heavy fogs
sat like an incubus. This is the earliest period
of which we glean any positive record, and it
is probable that previous to this era the universe
was in a state of incandescence, or intense heat,
and that by the gradual cooling of the globe,
the external surface became hard, and formed
a firm crust, in the same manner that molten
lead, when exposed to the cold air, hardens on
the surface. The vapors which previously
floated around this heated mass, in like manner
became partially condensed, and gradually accumulating
in the hollows, formed the boiling
seas which in after ages were destined to be
vast receptacles teeming with life.

How long such a period continued it is impossible
to say, and were we even able to number
its years, we should in all probability obtain
a total of such magnitude as would render us
unable to form any accurate idea of its extent.
Our ideas of time, like those of space, are comparative,
and so immense was this single period
in geological history, that any interval taken
from human records would fail to present an
adequate idea of it.

As might be expected, this era was marked
by vast and violent convulsions; volcanoes raged
and threw up molten granite, earthquakes heaved[Pg 755]
and uplifted continents, seas were displaced and
inundated the land, and still the earth was enveloped
in vapor and mist, arising from the high
temperature, and the light most probably penetrated
only sufficiently to produce a sickly twilight,
while the sun shot lurid rays through the
dense and foggy atmosphere. Such a world
must have been incompatible with either animal
or vegetable life, and we accordingly find no
remains of either in the rocks which belong to
this early period; their principal characteristic
is a highly crystalline appearance, giving strong
presumptive evidence of the presence of great
heat.

After this era of desolation and gloom, we enter
upon what is technically termed the “Transition
period,” and here we begin to mark the
gradual preparation of the globe for the reception
of its destined inhabitants. The change is,
however, at first very slight, and there is evidence
of frequent convulsions and of a high degree
of temperature; but the action of fire appears
to have declined in force, and aqueous agencies
are exerting themselves. The earlier portion
of this formation is rendered peculiarly interesting
by the fact, that during it the most ancient
forms of life sprang into existence. It is true
that merely a few species of shell-fish, with
some corals, inhabited the depths of the ocean,
while the dry land still remained untenanted;
nevertheless, humble and scanty as they were,
we can not fail to look with interest on the
earliest types of that existence, which has subsequently
reached such perfection in ourselves.

The presence of corals shows, that although
the transition seas had lost their high temperature,
yet they retained a sufficient degree of heat
to encourage the development of animals requiring
warmth. These minute animals possess
the remarkable property of extracting from the
elementary bodies held in solution in the waters,
the materials for forming new rocks. To the
coral animalcule or polype we owe much of the
vast limestone beds which are found in every
part of the world, and many a vessel laden with
the riches and productions of the earth finds a
grave on the sunken reefs that are the fruit of
its labors.

As ages elapsed, and the universe became
better adapted for the reception of life, the
waters swarmed with zoophytes and corals, and
in the silurian strata we find organic remains
abundant; shell-fish are numerous and distinct
in form, and in some instances display a very
interesting anatomical construction. As an instance
we may mention the Trilobite, an animal
of the crustacean order; the front part of its body
formed a large crescent-shaped shield, while the
hinder portion consisted of a broad triangular
tail, composed of segments folding over each
other like the tail of a lobster; its most peculiar
organ, however, was the eye, which was composed
of four hundred minute spherical lenses
placed in separate compartments, and so situated,
that in the animal’s usual place at the bottom
of the ocean it could see every thing around.
This kind of eye is also common to the existing
butterfly and dragon-fly, the former of which has
35,000, and the latter 14,000 lenses.

Continuing to trace the history of this ancient
period, we reach what is called among geologists
the Old Red Sandstone age. The corals, and
the shell-fish, and the crustacea of the former
period have passed away, and in their place we
find fishes; thus presenting to us the earliest
trace of the highest order of the animal kingdom—vertebrata.
The plants in this system are
few, and it would seem as if the condition of the
world was ill-adapted for their growth. Another
peculiar characteristic of this era is the
state of calm repose in which the ocean appears
to have remained; in many rocks the ripple mark
left by the tide on the shores of the ancient seas
is clearly visible; nevertheless considerable volcanic
action must have taken place, if we are to
believe geologists, who find themselves unable
to account otherwise for the preponderance of
mineral matter which seems to have been held
in solution by the waters.

We now pass on to the Carboniferous period,
and a marked change at once strikes us as having
taken place. In the previous era few plants
appear to have existed; now they flourished
with unrivaled luxuriance. Ferns, cacti, gigantic
equisetums, and many plants of which
there are no existing types, grew, and lived,
and died in vast impenetrable forests; while the
bulrush and the cane, or genera nearly allied to
them, occupied the swamps and lowlands. This
is the period when the great coal beds and strata
of ironstone were deposited, which supply us
with fuel for our fires, and materials for our
machinery. The interminable forests that grew
and died in the lapse of centuries were gradually
borne down by the rivers and torrents to the
ocean, at whose bottom they ultimately found
a resting place. A considerable portion of the
land also seems to have been slowly submerged,
as in some cases fossil trees and plants are found
in an upright position, as they originally grew.

There is no period in geological history so
justly deserving of examination as this. To the
coal beds then deposited Great Britain in a great
measure owes national and mercantile greatness.
Dr. Buckland, in speaking of this remote
age, remarks in his Bridgewater Treatise, that
“the important uses of coal and iron in administering
to the supply of our daily wants, give
to every individual among us, in almost every
moment of our lives, a personal concern, of
which but few are conscious, in the geological
events of these very distant eras. We are all
brought into immediate connection with the
vegetation that clothed the ancient earth before
one half of its actual surface had yet been formed.
The trees of the primeval forests have not, like
modern trees, undergone decay, yielding back
their elements to the soil and atmosphere by
which they have been nourished; but treasured
up in subterranean store-houses, have been transformed
into enduring beds of coal, which in these
latter ages have been to man the sources of heat,[Pg 756]
and light, and wealth. My fire now burns with
fuel, and my lamp is shining with the light of
gas derived from coal, that has been buried for
countless ages in the deep and dark recesses of
the earth. We prepare our food, and maintain
our forges and furnaces, and the power of our
steam-engines, with the remains of plants of
ancient forms and extinct species, which were
swept from the earth ere the formation of the
transition strata was completed. Our instruments
of cutlery, the tools of our mechanics, and
the countless machines which we construct by
the infinitely varied applications of iron, are
derived from ore, for the most part coeval with,
or more ancient than the fuel, by the aid of
which we reduce it to its metallic state, and
apply it to innumerable uses in the economy of
human life. Thus, from the wreck of forests
that waved upon the surface of the primeval
lands, and from ferruginous mud that was lodged
at the bottom of the primeval waters, we derive
our chief supplies of coal and iron, those two
fundamental elements of art and industry, which
contribute more than any other mineral production
of the earth to increase the riches, and
multiply the comforts, and ameliorate the condition
of mankind.”

This may justly be styled the golden age of
the pre-adamite world; the globe having now
cooled to a sufficient temperature to promote
the growth of plants without being injurious to
them, is for the first time clothed in all the rich
verdure of a tropical climate. Doubtless the
earth would have presented a lovely aspect, had
it been possible to have beheld it; the mighty
forests unawakened by a sound save that of
the sighing of the wind; the silent seas, in which
the new-born denizens of the deep roamed at
will; the vast inland lakes for ages unruffled
but by the fitful breeze; all present to the
mind’s eye a picture of surpassing, solitary
grandeur.

The creatures that existed, though differing
from those of the previous age, were still confined
to the waters; as yet the dry land remained
untenanted. The fishes give evidence
of a higher organization, and many of them appear
to have been of gigantic dimensions. Some
teeth which have been found of one kind, the
Megalichthys, equal in size those of the largest
living crocodiles.

There is one peculiarity respecting fossil
fishes which is worthy of remark. It is that,
in the lapse of time from one era to another,
their character does not change insensibly, as in
the case of many zoophytes and testacea; on
the contrary, species seem to succeed species
abruptly, and at certain definite intervals. A
celebrated geologist[22] has observed, that not a
single species of fossil fish has yet been found
that is common to any two great geological
formations, or that is living in our own seas.

Continuing our investigation, we next find the
fruitful coal era passing away; scarcely a trace
of vegetation remains; a few species of zoophytes,
shells, and fishes are to be found, and we observe
the impression of footsteps, technically called
ichnites, from the Greek ichnon, a footmark.
These marks present a highly interesting memento
of past ages. Persons living near the
sea-shore must have frequently observed the
distinctness with which the track of birds and
other animals is imprinted in the sand. If this
sand were to be hardened by remaining exposed
to the action of the sun and air, it would form a
perfect mould of the foot; this is exactly what
occurred in these early ages, and the hollow
becoming subsequently filled by the deposition
of new sediment, the lower stone retained the
impression, while the upper one presented a
cast in relief. Many fossil footmarks have been
found in the rocks belonging to this period.

It is evident from the fact of footmarks being
found, that creatures capable of existing on dry
land were formed about this time, and we accordingly
find the remains of a new order—Reptiles.
These animals, which now constitute
but a small family among existing quadrupeds,
then flourished in great size and numbers. Crocodiles
and lizards of various forms and gigantic
stature roamed through the earth. Some of the
most remarkable are those which belong to the
genus Ichthyosaurus, or fish-lizard, so called
from the resemblance of their vertebræ to those
of fishes. This saurian Dr. Buckland describes
as something similar in form to the modern porpoise;
it had four broad feet, and a long and
powerful tail; its jaws were so prodigious that
it could probably expand them to a width of five
or six feet, and its powers of destruction must
have been enormous. The length of some of
these reptiles exceeded thirty feet.

Another animal which lived at this period was
the Plesiosaurus. It lived in shallow seas and
estuaries, and would seem, from its organs of
respiration, to have required frequent supplies
of fresh air. Mr. Conybeare describes it as
“swimming upon, or near the surface, arching
its long neck like the swan, and occasionally
darting it down at the fish which happened to
float within its reach.”

This reptile, which was smaller than the
Ichthyosaurus, has been found as long as from
twelve to fifteen feet. Its appearance and habits
differed from the latter materially. The Ichthyosaurus,
with its short neck, powerful jaws,
and lizard-like body, seems admirably suited to
range through the deep waters, unrivaled in size
or strength, and monarch of the then existing
world; the Plesiosaurus, smaller in size and inferior
in strength, shunned its powerful antagonist,
and, lurking in shallows and sheltered bays,
remained secure from the assaults of its dangerous
foe, its long neck and small head being well
adapted to enable it to dart on its prey, as it lay
concealed amid the tangled sea-weed.

This has been called by geologists the “age
of reptiles;” their remains are found in great
numbers in the lias, oolite, and wealden strata.
These creatures seem to form a connecting link[Pg 757]
between the fishes of the previous era, and the
mammalia of the Tertiary age; the Ichthyosaurus
differed little from a fish in shape, and its
paddles or feet are not unlike fins, the Plesiosaurus,
on the contrary, as its name denotes,
partook more of the quadruped form. Dr. Buckland
in describing it, says: “To the head of a
lizard it united the teeth of a crocodile; a neck
of enormous length, resembling the body of a
serpent; a trunk and tail having the proportions
of an ordinary quadruped; the ribs of a cameleon,
and the paddles of a whale.” Besides these
animals we find the Pterodactyle, half bird and
half reptile; the Megalosaurus, or gigantic
lizard; the Hylæosaurus, or forest lizard; the
Geosaurus, or land lizard, and many others, all
partaking more or less of affinity to both the
piscatory and saurian tribes.

Passing on now to the period when the great
chalk rocks which prevail so much in the southeastern
counties of Great Britain were deposited,
we find the land in many places submerged; the
fossil remains are eminently marine in character,
and the earth must literally have presented a
“world of waters” to the view. Sponges, corals,
star-fish, and marine reptiles inhabited the globe,
and plants, chiefly of marine types, grew on its
surface. Although, however, a great portion
of the earth was under water, it must not therefore
be supposed that it was returning to its
ancient desolation and solitude. The author
whom we last quoted, in speaking of this subject,
says: “The sterility and solitude which
have sometimes been attributed to the depths
of the ocean, exist only in the fictions of poetic
fancy. The great mass of water that covers
nearly three-fourths of the globe is crowded
with life, perhaps more abundantly than the air
and the surface of the earth; and the bottom of
the sea, within a certain depth accessible to light,
swarms with countless hosts of worms and creeping
things, which represent the kindred families
of low degree which crawl upon the land.”

This era seems to have been one of peculiar
tranquillity, for the most part undisturbed by
earthquakes or other igneous forces. The prevailing
characteristic of the scenery was flatness,
and low continents were surrounded by shallow
seas. The earth is now approaching the state
when it will be fit for the reception of man, and
in the next age we find some of the existing
species of animals.

It is worthy of observation, that at the different
periods when the world had attained a
state suitable for their existence, the various
orders of animal and vegetable life were created.
In the “dark ages” of geological history, when
the globe had comparatively lately subsided
from a state of fusion,[23] it was barren, sterile,
and uninhabited; next, the waters having become
cool enough, some of the lowest orders of
shell-fish and zoophytes peopled them; subsequently,
fishes were formed, and for ages constituted
the highest order of animal life; after
this we enter on the age of reptiles, when gigantic
crocodiles and lizard-like forms dwelt in
fenny marshes, or reposed on the black mud of
slow moving rivers, as they crept along toward
the ocean betwixt their oozy banks; and we
now reach the period when the noblest order of
animal life, the class to which man himself belongs,
Mammalia, began to people the earth.

The world now probably presented an appearance
nearly similar to what it does at present.
The land, which in the chalk formation
was under water, has again emerged, and
swarms with life; vast savannahs rich in verdure,
and decked in a luxuriant garb with trees,
plants, grasses, and shrubs, and inland lakes, to
which the elephant, the rhinoceros, and the hippopotamus,
with many extinct races of animals,
came to slake their thirst, form the principal
characteristics of this period.

There is something peculiarly interesting in
looking back to this early age, while Adam was
yet dust. We picture to the mind’s eye the
gigantic Deinotherium, the largest creature of
terrestrial life, raking and grabbing with its
huge tusks the aquatic plants that grew in the
pools and shallow lakes, or, as Dr. Buckland
describes it, sleeping with its head hooked on
to the bank, and its nostrils sustained above
water so as merely to breathe, while the body
remained floating at ease beneath the surface.
We see its twin-brother in greatness, the Megatherium,
as it comes slowly stalking through
the thick underwood, its foot, of a yard in length,
crushing where it treads, and its impenetrable
hide defying the attacks of rhinoceros or crocodile.
In the waters we behold the mighty
whale, monarch of the deep, sporting in the pre-adamite
seas as he now does amid the icebergs
of the Arctic ocean; the walrus and the seal,
now denizens of the colder climes, mingling
with the tropical manati; while in the forests
the owl, the buzzard, and the woodcock, dwelt
undisturbed, and the squirrel and monkey leaped
from bough to bough.

Arrived at the close of the pre-adamite history,
after having traced it from the earliest
ages of which we possess any evidence, down
to the eve of human existence, the reflection
that naturally presents itself to the mind is the
strangeness of the fact, that myriads of creatures
should have existed, and that generation
after generation should have lived and died and
passed away, ere yet man saw the light. We
are so accustomed to view all creatures as
created solely for human use, rather than for
the pleasure of the Divine Creator, that we can
at first scarcely credit the history, though written
by the hand of nature herself; and the human
race sinks into insignificance when it is
shown to be but the last link in a long chain of
creations. Nevertheless, that such, however
humbling it may be, is the fact, we possess indubitable
evidence: and when we consider, as
Mr. Bakewell observes, “that more than three-fifths
of the earth’s present surface are covered[Pg 758]
by the ocean, and that if from the remainder we
deduct the space occupied by polar ice and
eternal snows, by sandy deserts, sterile mountains,
marshes, rivers, and lakes, that the habitable
portion will scarcely exceed one-fifth of
the whole globe; that the remaining four-fifths,
though untenanted by mankind, are, for the most
part, abundantly stocked with animated beings,
that exult in the pleasure of existence, independent
of human control, and in no way subservient
to the necessities or caprices of men;
that such is and has been, for several thousand
years, the actual condition of our planet; we
may feel less reluctance in admitting the prolonged
ages of creation, and the numerous tribes
that lived and flourished, and left their remains
imbedded in the strata which compose the outer
crust of the earth.”

THE MANIA FOR TULIPS IN HOLLAND.

The inordinate passion, which at one time
prevailed for Tulips, amounted to actual
madness, and well deserved the name of Tulipomania,
by which it is distinguished. The Tulip
was introduced into Europe from Constantinople
in the year 1559, according to Gesner. After
it became known to the Dutch merchants and
nobility at Vienna, it became a most important
branch of trade in Holland, and they sent frequently
to Constantinople for roots and seeds of
the flower. In the year 1634, and for three
years after, little else was thought of in Holland
but this traffic; all embarked in it, from the
nobleman to the common laborer, and so successful
were many that they rose rapidly from
abject poverty to affluence; and those who had
been barely able to procure the most scanty
means of subsistence were enabled to set up
their carriages, and enjoy every convenience and
luxury of life; indeed, when we read of the enormous
sums paid for a single root, we can feel
no surprise at the immense and rapid fortunes
which were made. It is on record, that one
wealthy merchant gave his daughter no other
portion to secure an eligible match than a single
root. The plant to this day bears the name
of the “marriage portion.” We find that 2
hogsheads of wine, 4 tuns of beer, 2 lasts of
wheat, 4 lasts of rye, 2 tons of butter, 1000
pounds of cheese, 4 fat oxen, 8 fat swine, and
12 fat sheep, a complete bed, a suit of clothes,
a silver beckess, valued at 2500 florins, were
given in exchange for a single root of the tulip
called the Viceroy. This mode of barter, being
attended with inconvenience, could not be
general, and gave place to sale by weight, by
which immense sums were made. Single roots
have sold for 4400 florins; 2000 florins was a
common price for a root of the Semper Augustus;
and it happened that once, when only two
roots of this species could be procured, the one
at Amsterdam, and the other at Haarlem, 4600
florins, a new carriage, and a pair of horses,
with complete harness, were given for one; and
for the other an exchange made of 12 acres of
land: indeed, land was frequently parted with
when cash could not be advanced for the purchase
of a desired root; and houses, cattle, furniture,
and even clothes, were all sacrificed to
the Tulipomania. In the course of four months,
a person has been known to realize 60,000 florins.
These curious bargains took place in taverns,
where notaries and clerks were regularly
paid for attending; and after the contracts were
completed, the traders of all ranks sat down together
to a splendid entertainment. At these
sales, the usual price of a root of the Viceroy
was £250; a root of the Admiral Liefkuns,
£440; a root of the Admiral Von Eyk, £160;
a root of the Grebbu, £148; a root of the
Schilder, £160; a root of the Semper Augustus,
£550. A collection of Tulips of Wouter
Brockholsminster was disposed of by his executors
for £9000; but they sold a root of the
Semper Augustus separately, for which they got
£300, and a very fine Spanish cabinet, valued
at £1000. The Semper Augustus was, indeed,
in great request. A gentleman received £3000
for three roots which he sold; he had also the
offer of £1500 a year for his plant for seven
years, with an engagement that it should be
given up as found, the increase alone having
been retained during the period. One gentleman
made £6000 in the space of six months.
It was ascertained that the trade in Tulips in one
city alone, in Holland, amounted to £1,000,000
sterling. To such an extent was this extraordinary
traffic carried on, that a system of stock-jobbing
was introduced; and Tulips, which
were bought and sold for much more than their
weight in gold, were nominally purchased without
changing hands at all. Beekmann, in describing
this curious traffic, for which all other
merchandise and pursuit was neglected, mentions
that engagements were entered into, which were
to be fulfilled in six months, and not to be affected
by any change in the value of the root during
that time. Thus, a bargain might be made with
a merchant for a root at the price of 1000 florins.
At the time specified for its delivery, its value
may have risen to 1500 florins, the purchaser
being a gainer of 500 florins. Should it, on the
contrary, have fallen to 800 florins, the purchaser
was then a loser to the amount of 200 florins.
If there had been no fluctuation in the market,
the bargain terminated without an exchange of
the money for the root, so that it became a
species of gambling, at which immense sums
were lost and won. The decline of the trade
was as unexpected as its rise had been surprising.
When settling day came, there were many
defaulters; some from inability to meet their
engagements, and many from dishonesty. Persons
began to speculate more cautiously, and
the more respectable to feel that the system of
gambling, in which they were engaged, was by
no means creditable. The Tulip-holders then
wished to dispose of their merchandise really,
and not nominally, but found, to their disappointment,
that the demand had decreased. Prices
fell—contracts were violated—appeals were[Pg 759]
made to the magistrates in vain; and, after
violent contentions, in which the venders claimed,
and the purchasers resisted payment, the
state interposed, and issued an order invalidating
the contracts, which put an end at once to the
stock-jobbing; and the roots, which had been
valued at £500 each, were now to be had for
£5: and thus ended the most strange commerce
in which Europe had been ever engaged.

Some curious anecdotes connected with the
mania may be found. Among them is one of
a burgomaster, who had made interest for a
friend, and succeeded in obtaining a very lucrative
situation for him. The friend, anxious to
testify his gratitude, entreated of the burgomaster
to allow him to show it by some substantial
proof. His generous benefactor would
accept no favor in return; all he asked was
the gratification of seeing his flower-garden,
which was readily granted. The friends did
not meet again for two years. At the end of
that time, the gentleman went to visit the
burgomaster. On going into his garden, the
first thing that attracted his observation was a
rare Tulip of great value, which he instantly
knew must have been purloined from his garden,
when his treacherous friend had been admitted
into it, two years before. He gave vent
to the most frantic passion—immediately resigned
his place of £1000 per annum—returned
to his house merely to tear up his flower-garden—and,
having completed the work of destruction,
left it, never to return.

We have read of a sailor, who had brought
a heavy load to the warehouse of a merchant,
who only gave him a herring as payment and
refreshment. This was very inadequate to satisfy
the man’s hunger, but perceiving, as he
thought, some onions lying before him, he
snatched up one, and bit it. It happened to
be a Tulip-root, worth a king’s ransom; so we
may conceive the consternation of the merchant,
which is said to have nearly deprived him of
reason.

It has been said that John Barclay, the author
of the romance of “Angenis,” was a victim to
the Tulipomania. Nothing could induce him
to quit the house to which his flower-garden
was attached, though the situation was so unwholesome
that he ran the risk of having his
health destroyed. He kept two fierce mastiffs
to guard the flowers, which he determined never
to abandon.

The passion for Tulips was at its height in
England toward the close of the seventeenth
and the commencement of the eighteenth century.
The tulip is a native of the Levant, and
of many of the eastern countries. Though
common in Persia, it is highly esteemed, and
considered an emblem of love. Chardin tells
us, that when a young Persian wishes to make
his sentiments known to his mistress, he presents
her with one of these flowers, which, of course,
must be the flame-colored one, with black anthers,
so often seen in our gardens; as, Chardin
adds, “He thus gives her to understand, that
he is all on fire with her beauty, and his heart
burned to a coal.” The flower is still highly
esteemed by florists, and has its place among
the few named florists’ flowers. Many suppose
it to be “the Lily of the Field,” mentioned in
the Sermon on the Mount, from its growing in
wild profusion in Syria, and from the extreme
delicacy of the texture of its petals, and from
the wonderful variety and dazzling beauty of its
colors. It may be so; and the flower acquires
from this an interest which nothing else could
give.

THE SALT MINES OF EUROPE.

The salt-mines of Cheshire, and the brine-pits
of Worcestershire, according to the
best authority, not only supply salt sufficient for
the consumption of nearly the whole of England,
but also upward of half a million of tons for exportation.
Rock-salt is by no means confined
to England, it is found in many countries, especially
where strata of more recent date than
those of the coal measures abound. Though
in some instances the mineral is pure and sparkling
in its native state, it is generally dull and
dirty, owing to the matter with which it is associated.
The ordinary shade is a dull red,
from being in contact with marls of that color.
But notwithstanding, it possesses many interesting
features. When the extensive subterranean
halls have been lighted up with innumerable
candles, the appearance is most interesting, and
the visitor, enchanted with the scene, feels himself
richly repaid for the trouble he may have
incurred in visiting the excavations.

The Cheshire mines are from 50 to 150 yards
below the surface. The number of salt-beds is
five; the thinnest of them being only about six
inches, while the thickest is nearly forty feet.
Besides these vast masses, there is a large
quantity of salt mixed up with the marl beds
that intervene. The method of working the
rock-salt is like that adopted for the excavation
of coal; but it is much more safe and pleasant
to visit these than the other, owing to the roof
of the excavations being much more secure,
and the absence of all noxious gases, with the
exception of carbonic acid gas. In the thinner
coal-seams, the roof, or rock lying above the
coal, is supported by wooden pillars as the mineral
is withdrawn; while, in the thicker seams,
pillars of coal are left at intervals to support
the superincumbent mass. The latter is the
plan adopted in the salt-mines. Large pillars
of various dimensions are left to support the
roof at irregular intervals; but these bear a
small proportion to the mass of mineral excavated.
The effect is most picturesque; in
the deep gloom of the excavation, the pillars
present tangible objects on which the eye can
rest, while the intervening spaces stretch away
into night. The mineral is loosened from the
rock by blasting, and the effect of the explosions,
heard from time to time re-echoing through the
wide spaces, and from the distant walls of rock,[Pg 760]
gives a peculiar grandeur and impressiveness to
the scene. The great charm, indeed, on the
occasion of a visit to these mines, even when
they are illuminated by thousands of lights, is
chiefly owing to the gloomy and cavernous appearance,
the dim endless perspective, broken by
the numerous pillars, and the lights half disclosing
and half concealing the deep recesses which
are formed and terminated by these monstrous
and solid projections. The pillars, owing to the
great height of the roof, are very massive. For
twenty feet of rock they are about fifteen feet
thick. The descent to the mines is by a shaft—a
perpendicular opening of six, eight, or ten
feet square; this opening is used for the general
purposes of ventilation, drainage, lifting the
mineral, as well as the miners. It varies in
dimensions according to the extent of the excavations.
In some of the English mines the part
of the bed of rock-salt excavated amounts to
several acres; but in some parts of Europe the
workings are even more extensive. The Wilton
mine, one of the largest in England, is
worked 330 feet below the surface, and from
it, and one or two adjacent mines, upward of
60,000 tons of salt are annually obtained, two-thirds
of which are immediately exported, and
the rest is dissolved in water, and afterward reduced
to a crystaline state by evaporating the
solution. It is not yet two hundred years since
the Cheshire mines were discovered. In the
year 1670, before men were guided by science
in their investigations, an attempt was made to
find coal in the district. The sinking was unsuccessful
relative to the one mineral, but the
disappointment and loss were amply met by the
discovery of the other. From that time till the
present, the rock-salt has been dug, and, as we
have seen, most extensively used in England,
while the surplus supply has become an article
of exportation. Previous to this discovery the
consumption was chiefly supplied from the brine-pits
of Worcestershire.

There is a remarkable deposit of salt in the
valley of Cardona, in the Pyrenees. Two thick
masses of rock-salt, says Ansted, apparently
united at their bases, make their appearance on
one of the slopes of the hill of Cardona. One
of the beds, or rather masses, has been worked,
and measures about 130 yards by 250; but its
depth has not been determined. It consists of
salt in a laminated condition, and with confused
crystalization. That part which is exposed is
composed of eight beds, nearly horizontal, having
a total thickness of fifteen feet; but the beds
are separated from one another by red and variegated
marls and gypsum. The second mass,
not worked, appears to be unstratified, but in
other respects resembles the former; and this
portion, where it has been exposed to the action
of the weather, is steeply scarped, and bristles
with needle-like points, so that its appearance
has been compared to that of a glacier. There
is also an extensive salt-mine at Wieliczka, in
Poland, and the manner of working it was accurately
described some years since. The manner
of descending into the mine was by means
of a large cord wound round a wheel and worked
by a horse. The visitor, seated on a small piece
of wood placed in the loop of the cord, and
grasping the cord with both hands, was let down
two hundred feet, the depth of the first galleries,
through a shaft about eight feet square, sunk
through beds of sand, alternating with limestone,
gypsum, variegated marls, and calcareous schists.
Below the stage, the descent was by wooden
staircases, nine or ten feet wide. In the first
gallery was a chapel, measuring thirty feet in
length by twenty-four in breadth, and eighteen
in height; every part of it, the floor, the roof,
the columns which sustained the roof, the altar,
the crucifix, and several statues, were all cut
out of the solid salt; the chapel was for the use
of the miners. It had always been said that
the salt in this mine had the qualities which
produced magic appearances to an uncommon
degree; but it is now ascertained that its scenery
is not more enchanting than that of the
mines in Cheshire. Gunpowder is now used in
the Polish as in the English mines; but the
manner of obtaining the salt at the time of the
visit we are recording was peculiar, and too
ingenious to be passed over, even though it be
now superseded by the more modern and more
successful mode of blasting. “In the first
place, the overman, or head miner, marked the
length, breadth, and thickness of a block he
wished to be detached, the size of which was
generally the same, namely, about eight feet
long, four feet wide, and two feet thick. A
certain number of blocks being marked, the
workman began by boring a succession of holes
on one side from top to bottom of the block,
the holes being three inches deep, and six inches
apart. A horizontal groove was then cut, half
an inch deep, both above and below, and, having
put into each of the holes an iron wedge,
all the wedges were struck with moderate
blows, to drive them into the mass; the blows
were continued until two cracks appeared, one
in the direction of the line of the holes, and the
other along the upper horizontal line. The
block was now loosened and ready to fall, and
the workman introduced into the crack produced
by the driving of the wedges a wooden
ruler, two or three inches broad, and, moving it
backward and forward on the crack, a tearing
sound was soon heard, which announced the
completion of the work. If proper care had
been taken, the block fell unbroken, and was
then divided into three or four parts, which were
shaped into cylinders for the greater convenience
of transport. Each workman was able to work
out four such blocks every day, and the whole
number of persons employed in the mine, varied
from twelve hundred to about two thousand.”
The mine was worked in galleries; and, at the
time of this visit, these galleries extended to at
least eight English miles. Since then the excavations
have become much more extensive.

The method of preparing rock-salt is very
simple, and differs little from that employed in[Pg 761]
manufacturing salt from springs. The first step
in the process is, to obtain a proper strength of
brine, by saturating fresh water with the salt
brought from the mine. The brine obtained in
a clear state is put into evaporating pans, and
brought as quickly as possible to a boiling heat,
when a skin is formed on the surface, consisting
chiefly of impurities. This skin is taken off, so
also are the first crystals that are formed, and
either thrown aside as useless, or used for agricultural
purposes. The heat is kept at the
boiling point for eight hours, during which period
evaporation is going on—the liquid becoming
gradually reduced, and the salt meanwhile
is being deposited. When this part of the process
is finished, the salt is raked out, put into
moulds, and placed in a drying stove, where it is
dried perfectly, and made ready for the market.

MY NOVEL; OR, VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE.

(Continued from page 672.)

CHAPTER X.

In my next chapter I shall present Squire
Hazeldean in patriarchal state—not exactly
under the fig tree he has planted, but before the
stocks he has reconstructed. Squire Hazeldean
and his family on the village green! The canvas
is all ready for the colors.

But in this chapter I must so far afford a
glimpse into antecedents as to let the reader
know that there is one member of the family
whom he is not likely to meet at present, if ever,
on the village green at Hazeldean.

Our squire lost his father two years after his
birth; his mother was very handsome—and so
was her jointure; she married again at the expiration
of her year of mourning—the object of
her second choice was Colonel Egerton.

In every generation of Englishmen (at least
since the lively reign of Charles II.) there are a
few whom some elegant Genius skims off from
the milk of human nature, and reserves for the
cream of society. Colonel Egerton was one of
these terque, quaterque beati, and dwelt apart on
a top shelf in that delicate porcelain dish—not
bestowed upon vulgar buttermilk—which persons
of fashion call The Great World. Mighty
was the marvel of Pall Mall, and profound was
the pity of Park-lane, when this supereminent
personage condescended to lower himself into a
husband. But Colonel Egerton was not a mere
gaudy butterfly; he had the provident instincts
ascribed to the bee. Youth had passed from him—and
carried off much solid property in its flight;
he saw that a time was fast coming when a home,
with a partner who could help to maintain it,
would be conducive to his comforts, and an occasional
humdrum evening by the fire-side beneficial
to his health. In the midst of one season
at Brighton, to which gay place he had accompanied
the Prince of Wales, he saw a widow
who, though in the weeds of mourning, did not
appear inconsolable. Her person pleased his
taste—the accounts of her jointure satisfied his
understanding; he contrived an introduction, and
brought a brief wooing to a happy close. The
late Mr. Hazeldean had so far anticipated the
chance of the young widow’s second espousals,
that, in case of that event, he transferred, by his
testamentary dispositions, the guardianship of
his infant heir from the mother to two squires
whom he had named his executors. This circumstance
combined with her new ties somewhat
to alienate Mrs. Hazeldean from the pledge
of her former loves; and when she had borne a
son to Colonel Egerton, it was upon that child
that her maternal affections gradually concentrated.

William Hazeldean was sent by his guardians
to a large provincial academy, at which his
forefathers had received their education time out
of mind. At first he spent his holidays with
Mrs. Egerton; but as she now resided either in
London, or followed her lord to Brighton to partake
of the gayeties at the Pavilion—so, as he
grew older, William, who had a hearty affection
for country life, and of whose bluff manners and
rural breeding Mrs. Egerton (having grown
exceedingly refined) was openly ashamed, asked
and obtained permission to spend his vacations
either with his guardians or at the old Hall. He
went late to a small college at Cambridge, endowed
in the fifteenth century by some ancestral
Hazeldean; and left it, on coming of age, without
taking a degree. A few years afterward he
married a young lady, country born and bred
like himself.

Meanwhile his half-brother, Audley Egerton,
may be said to have begun his initiation into the
beau monde before he had well cast aside his coral
and bells; he had been fondled in the lap of
duchesses, and galloped across the room astride
on the canes of embassadors and princes. For
Colonel Egerton was not only very highly connected—not
only one of the Dii majores of fashion—but
he had the still rarer good fortune to be an
exceedingly popular man with all who knew him;
so popular, that even the fine ladies whom he had
adored and abandoned forgave him for marrying
out of “the set,” and continued to be as friendly
as if he had not married at all. People who were
commonly called heartless, were never weary
of doing kind things to the Egertons. When
the time came for Audley to leave the preparatory
school, at which his infancy budded forth
among the stateliest of the little lilies of the
field, and go to Eton, half the fifth and sixth
forms had been canvassed to be exceedingly civil
to young Egerton. The boy soon showed that
he inherited his father’s talent for acquiring
popularity, and that to this talent he added those
which put popularity to use. Without achieving
any scholastic distinction, he yet contrived to
establish at Eton the most desirable reputation
which a boy can obtain—namely, that among his
own contemporaries—the reputation of a boy who
was sure to do something when he grew to be
a man. As a gentleman commoner at Christ[Pg 762]
Church, Oxford, he continued to sustain this high
expectation, though he won no prizes and took
but an ordinary degree; and at Oxford the future
“something” became more defined—it was
“something in public life” that this young man
was to do.

While he was yet at the university, both his
parents died—within a few months of each other.
And when Audley Egerton came of age, he succeeded
to a paternal property which was supposed
to be large, and, indeed, had once been so; but
Colonel Egerton had been too lavish a man to
enrich his heir, and about £1500 a year was all
that sales and mortgages left of an estate that
had formerly approached a rental of ten thousand
pounds.

Still, Audley was considered to be opulent,
and he did not dispel that favorable notion by any
imprudent exhibition of parsimony. On entering
the world of London, the Clubs flew open to receive
him; and he woke one morning to find
himself, not indeed famous—but the fashion.
To this fashion he at once gave a certain gravity
and value—he associated as much as possible
with public men and political ladies—he succeeded
in confirming the notion that he was
“born to ruin or to rule the State.”

Now, his dearest and most intimate friend was
Lord L’Estrange, from whom he had been inseparable
at Eton: and who now, if Audley
Egerton was the fashion, was absolutely the
rage in London.

Harley Lord L’Estrange was the only son of
the Earl of Lansmere, a nobleman of considerable
wealth, and allied by intermarriages to the
loftiest and most powerful families in England.
Lord Lansmere, nevertheless, was but little
known in the circles of London. He lived
chiefly on his estates, occupying himself with
the various duties of a great proprietor, and
rarely came to the metropolis; so that he could
afford to give his son a very ample allowance,
when Harley, at the age of sixteen (having
already attained to the sixth form at Eton), left
school for one of the regiments of the Guards.

Few knew what to make of Harley L’Estrange—and
that was, perhaps, the reason why he was
so much thought of. He had been by far the
most brilliant boy of his time at Eton—not only
the boast of the cricket-ground, but the marvel
of the school-room—yet so full of whims and
oddities, and seeming to achieve his triumphs
with so little aid from steadfast application, that
he had not left behind him the same expectations
of solid eminence which his friend and senior,
Audley Egerton, had excited. His eccentricities—his
quaint sayings and out-of-the-way actions,
became as notable in the great world as they
had been in the small one of public school. That
he was very clever there was no doubt, and that
the cleverness was of a high order might be
surmised not only from the originality but the
independence of his character. He dazzled the
world, without seeming to care for its praise or
its censure—dazzled it, as it were, because he
could not help shining. He had some strange
notions, whether political or social, which rather
frightened his father. According to Southey,
“A man should be no more ashamed of having
been a republican than of having been young.”
Youth and extravagant opinions naturally go
together. I don’t know whether Harley L’Estrange
was a republican at the age of eighteen;
but there was no young man in London who
seemed to care less for being heir to an illustrious
name and some forty or fifty thousand
pounds a year. It was a vulgar fashion in that
day to play the exclusive, and cut persons who
wore bad neckcloths and called themselves Smith
or Johnson. Lord L’Estrange never cut any
one, and it was quite enough to slight some
worthy man because of his neckcloth or his birth,
to insure to the offender the pointed civilities of
this eccentric successor to the Dorimonts and the
Wildairs.

It was the wish of his father that Harley, as
soon as he came of age, should represent the
borough of Lansmere (which said borough was
the single plague of the Earl’s life). But this
wish was never realized. Suddenly, when the
young idol of London still wanted some two
or three years of his majority, a new whim appeared
to seize him. He withdrew entirely from
society—he left unanswered the most pressing
three-cornered notes of inquiry and invitation
that ever strewed the table of a young Guardsman;
he was rarely seen anywhere in his former
haunts—when seen, was either alone or
with Egerton; and his gay spirits seemed wholly
to have left him. A profound melancholy was
written in his countenance, and breathed in the
listless tones of his voice. At this time the
Guards were achieving in the Peninsula their
imperishable renown; but the battalion to which
Harley belonged was detained at home; and
whether chafed by inaction or emulous of glory,
the young Lord suddenly exchanged into a cavalry
regiment, from which a recent memorable
conflict had swept one half the officers. Just
before he joined, a vacancy happening to occur
for the representation of Lansmere, he made it
his special request to his father that the family
interest might be given to his friend Egerton—went
down to the Park, which adjoined the borough,
to take leave of his parents—and Egerton
followed, to be introduced to the electors. This
visit made a notable epoch in the history of
many personages who figure in my narrative,
but at present I content myself with saying, that
circumstances arose which, just as the canvass
for the new election commenced, caused both
L’Estrange and Audley to absent themselves
from the scene of action, and that the last even
wrote to Lord Lansmere expressing his intention
of declining to contest the borough.

Fortunately for the parliamentary career of
Audley Egerton, the election had become to
Lord Lansmere not only a matter of public importance,
but of personal feeling. He resolved
that the battle should be fought out, even in the[Pg 763]
absence of the candidate, and at his own expense.
Hitherto the contest for this distinguished
borough had been, to use the language
of Lord Lansmere, “conducted in the spirit of
gentlemen”—that is to say, the only opponents
to the Lansmere interest had been found in one or
the other of two rival families in the same county;
and as the Earl was a hospitable, courteous man,
much respected and liked by the neighboring
gentry, so the hostile candidate had always interlarded
his speeches with profuse compliments
to his Lordship’s high character, and civil expressions
as to his Lordship’s candidate. But,
thanks to successive elections, one of these two
families had come to an end, and its actual representative
was now residing within the Rules
of the Bench; the head of the other family was
the sitting member, and, by an amicable agreement
with the Lansmere interest, he remained
as neutral as it is in the power of any sitting
member to be amidst the passions of an intractable
committee. Accordingly, it had been hoped
that Egerton would come in without opposition,
when, the very day on which he had abruptly
left the place, a handbill, signed “Haverill
Dashmore, Captain R.N., Baker-street, Portman-square,”
announced, in very spirited language,
the intention of that gentleman to emancipate
the borough from the unconstitutional domination
of an oligarchical faction, not with a view
to his own political aggrandizement—indeed,
at great personal inconvenience—but actuated
solely by abhorrence to tyranny, and patriotic
passion for the purity of election.

This announcement was followed, within two
hours, by the arrival of Captain Dashmore himself,
in a carriage-and-four covered with yellow
favors, and filled, inside and out, with harum-scarum
looking friends who had come down
with him to aid the canvass and share the fun.

Captain Dashmore was a thorough sailor, who
had, however, taken a disgust to the profession
from the date in which a Minister’s nephew had
been appointed to the command of a ship to
which the Captain considered himself unquestionably
entitled. It is just to the Minister to
add, that Captain Dashmore had shown as little
regard for orders from a distance, as had immortalized
Nelson himself; but then the disobedience
had not achieved the same redeeming
success as that of Nelson, and Captain Dashmore
ought to have thought himself fortunate in
escaping a severer treatment than the loss of
promotion. But no man knows when he is well
off; and retiring on half-pay, just as he came
into unexpected possession of some forty or fifty
thousand pounds bequeathed by a distant relation,
Captain Dashmore was seized with a vindictive
desire to enter parliament, and inflict
oratorical chastisement on the Administration.

A very few hours sufficed to show the sea-captain
to be a most capital electioneerer for a
small and not very enlightened borough. It is
true that he talked the saddest nonsense ever
heard from an open window; but then his jokes
were so broad, his manner so hearty, his voice
so big, that in those dark days, before the
schoolmaster was abroad, he would have beaten
your philosophical Radical and moralizing
Democrat hollow. Moreover he kissed all the
women, old and young, with the zest of a sailor
who has known what it is to be three years at sea
without sight of a beardless lip; he threw open
all the public-houses, asked a numerous committee
every day to dinner, and, chucking his
purse up in the air, declared “he would stick to
his guns while there was a shot in the locker.”
Till then, there had been but little political difference
between the candidate supported by
Lord Lansmere’s interest and the opposing parties—for
country gentlemen, in those days, were
pretty much of the same way of thinking, and
the question had been really local—viz., whether
the Lansmere interest should or should not prevail
over that of the two squirearchical families
who had alone, hitherto, ventured to oppose it.
But though Captain Dashmore was really a very
loyal man, and much too old a sailor to think
that the State (which, according to established
metaphor, is a vessel, par excellence), should
admit Jack upon quarter-deck, yet, what with
talking against lords and aristocracy, jobs and
abuses, and searching through no very refined
vocabulary for the strongest epithets to apply
to those irritating nouns-substantive, his bile
had got the better of his understanding, and he
became fuddled, as it were, by his own eloquence.
Thus, though as innocent of Jacobinical
designs as he was incapable of setting the
Thames on fire, you would have guessed him,
by his speeches, to be one of the most determined
incendiaries that ever applied a match to
the combustible materials of a contested election;
while, being by no means accustomed to
respect his adversaries, he could not have treated
the Earl of Lansmere with less ceremony if
his Lordship had been a Frenchman. He usually
designated that respectable nobleman by the
title of “Old Pompous;” and the Mayor, who
was never seen abroad but in top-boots, and the
Solicitor, who was of a large build, received
from his irreverent wit the joint sobriquet of
“Tops and Bottoms!” Hence the election had
now become, as I said before, a personal matter
with my Lord, and, indeed, with the great
heads of the Lansmere interest. The Earl
seemed to consider his very coronet at stake in
the question. “The man from Baker-street,”
with his preternatural audacity, appeared to
him a being ominous and awful—not so much
to be regarded with resentment, as with superstitious
terror: he felt as felt the dignified
Montezuma, when that ruffianly Cortez, with
his handful of Spanish rapscallions, bearded him
in his own capital, and in the midst of his Mexican
splendor—”The gods were menaced if
man could be so insolent!” wherefore said my
Lord, tremulously, “The Constitution is gone if
the Man from Baker-street comes in for Lansmere!”

[Pg 764]

But, in the absence of Audley Egerton, the
election looked extremely ugly, and Captain
Dashmore gained ground hourly, when the Lansmere
Solicitor happily bethought him of a notable
proxy for the missing candidate. The Squire
of Hazeldean, with his young wife, had been invited
by the Earl in honor of Audley; and in the
Squire the Solicitor beheld the only mortal who
could cope with the sea-captain—a man with a
voice as burly, and a face as bold—a man who,
if permitted for the nonce by Mrs. Hazeldean,
would kiss all the women no less heartily than
the Captain kissed them; and who was, moreover,
a taller, and a handsomer, and a younger
man—all three, great recommendations in the
kissing department of a contested election. Yes,
to canvass the borough, and to speak from the
window, Squire Hazeldean would be even more
popularly presentable than the London-bred and
accomplished Audley Egerton himself.

The Squire, applied to and urged on all sides,
at first said bluntly, “that he would do any
thing in reason to serve his brother, but that he
did not like, for his own part, appearing, even
in proxy, as a Lord’s nominee; and, moreover,
if he was to be sponsor for his brother, why,
he must promise and vow, in his name, to be
stanch and true to the land they lived by; and
how could he tell that Audley, when once he
got into the House, would not forget the land,
and then he, William Hazeldean, would be made
a liar, and look like a turncoat!”

But these scruples being overruled by the
arguments of the gentlemen and the entreaties
of the ladies, who took in the election that
intense interest which those gentle creatures
usually do take in all matters of strife and contest,
the Squire at length consented to confront
the Man from Baker-street, and went, accordingly,
into the thing with that good heart and
old English spirit with which he went into
every thing whereon he had once made up his
mind.

The expectations formed of the Squire’s capacities
for popular electioneering were fully
realized. He talked quite as much nonsense as
Captain Dashmore on every subject except the
landed interest; there he was great, for he
knew the subject well—knew it by the instinct
that comes with practice, and compared to which
all your showy theories are mere cobwebs and
moonshine.

The agricultural outvoters—many of whom,
not living under Lord Lansmere, but being
small yeomen, had hitherto prided themselves
on their independence, and gone against my
Lord—could not in their hearts go against one
who was every inch the farmer’s friend. They
began to share in the Earl’s personal interest
against the Man from Baker-street; and big
fellows, with legs bigger round than Captain
Dashmore’s tight little body, and huge whips
in their hands, were soon seen entering the
shops, “intimidating the electors,” as Captain
Dashmore indignantly declared.

These new recruits made a great difference
in the muster-roll of the Lansmere books; and,
when the day for polling arrived, the result was
a fair question for even betting. At the last
hour, after a neck-and-neck contest, Mr. Audley
Egerton beat the Captain by two votes. And
the names of these voters were John Avenal,
resident freeman, and his son-in-law, Mark Fairfield,
an outvoter, who, though a Lansmere
freeman, had settled in Hazeldean, where he
had obtained the situation of head carpenter on
the Squire’s estate.

These votes were unexpected; for, though
Mark Fairfield had come to Lansmere on purpose
to support the Squire’s brother, and though
the Avenals had been always stanch supporters
of the Lansmere Blue interest, yet a severe
affliction (as to the nature of which, not desiring
to sadden the opening of my story, I am considerately
silent) had befallen both these persons,
and they had left the town on the very
day after Lord L’Estrange and Mr. Egerton
had quitted Lansmere Park.

Whatever might have been the gratification
of the Squire, as a canvasser and a brother, at
Mr. Egerton’s triumph, it was much damped
when, on leaving the dinner given in honor of
the victory, at the Lansmere Arms, and about,
with no steady step, to enter the carriage which
was to convey him to his Lordship’s house, a
letter was put into his hands by one of the gentleman
who had accompanied the Captain to
the scene of action; and the perusal of that letter,
and a few whispered words from the bearer
thereof, sent the Squire back to Mrs. Hazeldean
a much soberer man than she had ventured to
hope for. The fact was, that on the day of
nomination, the Captain having honored Mr.
Hazeldean with many poetical and figurative appellations—such
as “Prize Ox,” “Tony Lumpkin,”
“Blood-sucking Vampyre,” and “Brotherly
Warming-Pan,” the Squire had retorted by
a joke upon “Salt Water Jack;” and the Captain,
who, like all satirists, was extremely susceptible
and thin-skinned, could not consent to
be called “Salt Water Jack” by a “Prize Ox”
and a “Blood-sucking Vampyre.” The letter,
therefore, now conveyed to Mr. Hazeldean by
a gentleman, who, being from the Sister Country,
was deemed the most fitting accomplice in
the honorable destruction of a brother mortal,
contained nothing more nor less than an invitation
to single combat; and the bearer thereof,
with the suave politeness enjoined by etiquette
on such well-bred homicidal occasions, suggested
the expediency of appointing the place of
meeting in the neighborhood of London, in order
to prevent interference from the suspicious authorities
of Lansmere.

The natives of some countries—the warlike
French in particular—think little of that formal
operation which goes by the name of Duelling.
Indeed, they seem rather to like it than otherwise.
But there is nothing your thorough-paced
Englishman—a Hazeldean of Hazeldean—considers[Pg 765]
with more repugnance and aversion, than
that same cold-blooded ceremonial. It is not
within the range of an Englishman’s ordinary
habits of thinking. He prefers going to law—a
much more destructive proceeding of the two.
Nevertheless, if an Englishman must fight, why,
he will fight. He says “it is very foolish;” he
is sure “it is most unchristian-like;” he agrees
with all that Philosopher, Preacher, and Press
have laid down on the subject; but he makes
his will, says his prayers, and goes out, like a
heathen!

It never, therefore, occurred to the Squire to
show the white feather upon this unpleasant
occasion. The next day, feigning excuse to attend
the sale of a hunting stud at Tattersall’s,
he ruefully went up to London, after taking a
peculiarly affectionate leave of his wife. Indeed,
the Squire felt convinced that he should
never return home except in a coffin. “It stands
to reason,” said he, to himself, “that a man,
who has been actually paid by the King’s Government
for shooting people ever since he was
a little boy in a midshipman’s jacket, must be
a dead hand at the job. I should not mind if it
was with double-barreled Mantons and small
shot; but ball and pistol! they aren’t human nor
sportsmanlike!” However, the Squire, after
settling his worldly affairs, and hunting up an
old College friend, who undertook to be his
second, proceeded to a sequestered corner of
Wimbledon Common, and planted himself, not
sideways, as one ought to do in such encounters
(the which posture the Squire swore was an
unmanly way of shirking), but full front to the
mouth of his adversary’s pistol, with such sturdy
composure, that Captain Dashmore, who, though
an excellent shot, was at bottom as good-natured
a fellow as ever lived, testified his admiration
by letting off his gallant opponent with a
ball in the fleshy part of his shoulder; after
which he declared himself perfectly satisfied.
The parties then shook hands, mutual apologies
were exchanged, and the Squire, much to his
astonishment to find himself still alive, was conveyed
to Limmer’s Hotel, where, after a considerable
amount of anguish, the ball was extracted,
and the wound healed. Now it was all
over, the Squire felt very much raised in his
own conceit; and, when he was in a humor
more than ordinarily fierce, that perilous event
became a favorite allusion with him.

He considered, moreover, that his brother
had incurred at his hand the most lasting obligations;
and that, having procured Audley’s
return to Parliament, and defended his interests
at the risk of his own life, he had an absolute
right to dictate to that gentleman how to vote—upon
all matters at least connected with the
landed interest. And when, not very long after
Audley took his seat in Parliament (which he
did not do for some months), he thought proper
both to vote and to speak in a manner wholly
belying the promises the Squire had made on
his behalf, Mr. Hazeldean wrote him such a
trimmer, that it could not but produce an unconciliatory
reply. Shortly afterward, the Squire’s
exasperation reached the culminating point,
for, having to pass through Lansmere on a
market-day, he was hooted by the very farmers
whom he had induced to vote for his brother;
and, justly imputing the disgrace to Audley, he
never heard the name of that traitor to the land
mentioned, without a heightened color and an
indignant expletive. Monsieur de Ruqueville—who
was the greatest wit of his day—had,
like the Squire, a half-brother, with whom he
was not on the best of terms, and of whom he
always spoke as his “frère de loin.” Audley
Egerton was thus Squire Hazeldean’s “distant
brother!”—Enough of these explanatory antecedents—let
us return to the Stocks.

CHAPTER XI.

The Squire’s carpenters were taken from the
park pales, and set to work at the parish stocks.
Then came the painter and colored them, a
beautiful dark blue, with a white border—and
a white rim round the holes—with an ornamental
flourish in the middle. It was the gayest
public edifice in the whole village—though
the village possessed no less than three other
monuments of the Vitruvian genius, of the Hazeldeans:
to wit, the alms-house, the school,
and the parish pump.

A more elegant, enticing, coquettish pair of
stocks never gladdened the eye of a justice of
the peace.

And Squire Hazeldean’s eye was gladdened.
In the pride of his heart he brought all the family
down to look at the stocks. The Squire’s
family (omitting the frère de loin) consisted of
Mrs. Hazeldean, his wife; next, of Miss Jemima
Hazeldean, his first cousin; thirdly, of Master
Francis Hazeldean, his only son; and fourthly,
of Captain Barnabas Higginbotham, a distant
relation—who, indeed, strictly speaking, was
not of the family, but only a visitor ten months
in the year. Mrs. Hazeldean was every inch
the lady—the lady of the parish. In her comely,
florid, and somewhat sunburnt countenance,
there was an equal expression of majesty and
benevolence; she had a blue eye that invited
liking, and an aquiline nose that commanded
respect. Mrs. Hazeldean had no affectation of
fine airs—no wish to be greater and handsomer
and cleverer than she was. She knew herself,
and her station, and thanked heaven for it.
There was about her speech and manner something
of that shortness and bluntness which
often characterizes royalty; and if the lady of a
parish is not a queen in her own circle, it is
never the fault of the parish. Mrs. Hazeldean
dressed her part to perfection. She wore silks
that seemed heirlooms—so thick were they, so
substantial and imposing. And over these,
when she was in her own domain, the whitest
of aprons; while at her waist was seen no fiddle-daddle
chatelaine, with breloques and trumpery,[Pg 766]
but a good honest gold watch to mark the
time, and a long pair of scissors to cut off the
dead leaves from her flowers, for she was a
great horticulturist. When occasion needed,
Mrs. Hazeldean could, however, lay by her
more sumptuous and imperial raiment for a
stout riding-habit of blue Saxony, and canter by
her husband’s side to see the hounds throw off.
Nay, on the days on which Mr. Hazeldean drove
his famous fast-trotting cob to the market town,
it was rarely that you did not see his wife on
the left side of the gig. She cared as little as
her lord did for wind and weather, and, in the
midst of some pelting shower, her pleasant face
peeped over the collar and capes of a stout
dreadnought, expanding into smiles and bloom
as some frank rose, that opens from its petals,
and rejoices in the dews. It was easy to see
that the worthy couple had married for love;
they were as little apart as they could help it.
And still, on the first of September, if the house
was not full of company which demanded her
cares, Mrs. Hazeldean “stepped out” over the
stubbles by her husband’s side, with as light a
tread and as blithe an eye as when in the first
bridal year she had enchanted the Squire by
her genial sympathy with his sports.

So there now stands Harriet Hazeldean, one
hand leaning on the Squire’s broad shoulder, the
other thrust into her apron, and trying her best
to share her husband’s enthusiasm for his own
public-spirited patriotism, in the renovation of
the parish stocks. A little behind, with two
fingers leaning on the thin arm of Captain Barnabas,
stood Miss Jemima, the orphan daughter
of the Squire’s uncle, by a runaway imprudent
marriage with a young lady who belonged to a
family which had been at war with the Hazeldeans
since the reign of Charles I., respecting a
right of way to a small wood (or rather spring)
of about an acre, through a piece of furze land,
which was let to a brick-maker at twelve shillings
a year. The wood belonged to the Hazeldeans,
the furze land to the Sticktorights (an old
Saxon family, if ever there was one). Every
twelfth year, when the fagots and timber were
felled, this feud broke out afresh; for the Sticktorights
refused to the Hazeldeans the right to
cart off the said fagots and timber, through
the only way by which a cart could possibly
pass. It is just to the Hazeldeans to say that
they had offered to buy the land at ten times its
value. But the Sticktorights, with equal magnanimity,
had declared that they would not
“alienate the family property for the convenience
of the best squire that ever stood upon
shoe leather.” Therefore, every twelfth year,
there was always a great breach of the peace
on the part of both Hazeldeans and Sticktorights,
magistrates, and deputy-lieutenants though they
were. The question was fairly fought out by
their respective dependents, and followed by
various actions for assault and trespass. As the
legal question of right was extremely obscure,
it never had been properly decided: and, indeed,
neither party wished it to be decided, each at
heart having some doubt of the propriety of its
own claim. A marriage between the younger
son of the Hazeldeans, and a younger daughter
of the Sticktorights, was viewed with equal indignation
by both families; and the consequence
had been that the runaway couple, unblessed
and unforgiven, had scrambled through life as
they could, upon the scanty pay of the husband,
who was in a marching regiment, and the interest
of £1000, which was the wife’s fortune,
independent of her parents. They died, and left
an only daughter, upon whom the maternal
£1000 had been settled, about the time that the
Squire came of age and into possession of his
estates. And though he inherited all the ancestral
hostility toward the Sticktorights, it was not
in his nature to be unkind to a poor orphan who
was, after all, the child of a Hazeldean. Therefore,
he had educated and fostered Jemima with
as much tenderness as if she had been his sister;
put out her £1000 at nurse, and devoted, from
the ready money which had accrued from the
rents during his minority, as much as made
her fortune (with her own accumulated at compound
interest) no less than £4000, the ordinary
marriage portion of the daughters of Hazeldean.
On her coming of age, he transferred this sum
to her absolute disposal, in order that she might
feel herself independent, see a little more of the
world than she could at Hazeldean, have candidates
to choose from if she deigned to marry;
or enough to live upon if she chose to remain
single. Miss Jemima had somewhat availed
herself of this liberty, by occasional visits to
Cheltenham and other watering-places. But
her grateful affection to the Squire was such,
that she could never bear to be long away from
the Hall. And this was the more praise to her
heart, inasmuch as she was far from taking
kindly to the prospect of being an old maid.
And there were so few bachelors in the neighborhood
of Hazeldean, that she could not but
have that prospect before her eyes whenever
she looked out of the Hall windows. Miss Jemima
was indeed one of the most kindly and affectionate
of beings feminine—and if she disliked
the thought of single blessedness, it really was
from those innocent and womanly instincts
toward the tender charities of hearth and home,
without which a lady, however otherwise estimable,
is little better than a Minerva in bronze.
But whether or not, despite her fortune and her
face, which last, though not strictly handsome,
was pleasing—and would have been positively
pretty if she had laughed more often (for when
she laughed there appeared three charming dimples,
invisible when she was grave)—whether
or not, I say, it was the fault of our insensibility
or her own fastidiousness, Miss Jemima approached
her thirtieth year, and was still
Miss Jemima. Now, therefore, that beautifying
laugh of hers was very rarely heard, and
she had of late become confirmed in two opinions,
not at all conducive to laughter. One was[Pg 767]
a conviction of the general and progressive
wickedness of the male sex, and the other was a
decided and lugubrious belief that the world
was coming to an end. Miss Jemima was
now accompanied by a small canine favorite,
true Blenheim, with a snub nose. It was advanced
in life, and somewhat obese. It sate on
its haunches with its tongue out of its mouth,
except when it snapped at the flies. There
was a strong Platonic friendship between Miss
Jemima and Captain Barnabas Higginbotham;
for he too was unmarried, and he had the same
ill opinion of your sex, my dear madam, that
Miss Jemima had of ours. The captain was a
man of a slim and elegant figure—the less said
about the face the better—a truth of which the
Captain himself was sensible, for it was a favorite
maxim of his, “that in a man, every thing
is a slight, gentlemanlike figure.” Captain
Barnabas did not absolutely deny that the world
was coming to an end, only he thought it would
last his time.

Quite apart from the rest, with the nonchalant
survey of virgin dandyism, Francis Hazeldean
looked over one of the high starched neck-cloths
which were then the fashion—a handsome lad,
fresh from Eton for the summer holidays, but
at that ambiguous age, when one disdains the
sports of the boy, and has not yet arrived at the
resources of the man.

“I should be glad, Frank,” said the Squire,
suddenly turning round to his son, “to see you
take a little more interest in duties which, one
day or other you may be called upon to discharge.
I can’t bear to think that the property
should fall into the hands of a fine gentleman,
who will let things go to rack and ruin, instead
of keeping them up as I do.”

And the Squire pointed to the stocks.

Master Frank’s eye followed the direction of
the cane, as well as his cravat would permit;
and he said, dryly,

“Yes, sir; but how came the stocks to be so
long out of repair?”

“Because one can’t see to every thing at
once,” retorted the Squire, tartly. “When a
man has got eight thousand acres to look after,
he must do a bit at a time.”

“Yes,” said Captain Barnabas. “I know
that by experience.”

“The deuce you do!” cried the Squire,
bluntly. “Experience in eight thousand acres!”

“No; in my apartments in the Albany. Number
3A. I have had them ten years, and it was
only last Christmas that I bought my Japan cat.”

“Dear me!” said Miss Jemima; “a Japan
cat! that must be very curious! What sort of
a creature is it?”

“Don’t you know? Bless me, a thing with
three legs, and holds toast! I never thought of
it, I assure you, till my friend Cosey said to me,
one morning, when he was breakfasting at my
rooms, ‘Higginbotham, how is it, that you, who
like to have things comfortable about you, don’t
have a cat?’ ‘Upon my life,’ said I, ‘one
can’t think of every thing at a time;’ just like
you, Squire.”

“Pshaw,” said Mr. Hazeldean, gruffly; “not
at all like me. And I’ll thank you another time,
Cousin Higginbotham, not to put me out when
I am speaking on matters of importance; poking
your cat into my stocks! They look something
like now, don’t they, Harry? I declare
that the whole village seems more respectable.
It is astonishing how much a little improvement
adds to the—to the—”

“Charm of a landscape,” put in Miss Jemima,
sentimentally.

The Squire neither accepted nor rejected the
suggested termination; but leaving his sentence
uncompleted, broke suddenly off with,

“And if I had listened to Parson Dale—”

“You would have done a very wise thing,”
said a voice behind, as the Parson presented
himself in the rear.

“Wise thing! Why surely, Mr. Dale,” said
Mrs. Hazeldean, with spirit, for she always resented
the least contradiction to her lord and
master; perhaps as an interference with her
own special right and prerogative: “why, surely
if it is necessary to have stocks, it is necessary
to repair them.”

“That’s right, go it, Harry!” cried the
Squire, chuckling, and rubbing his hands, as if
he had been setting his terrier at the Parson.
“St—St—at him! Well, Master Dale, what
do you say to that?”

“My dear ma’am,” said the Parson, replying
in preference to the lady; “there are many
institutions in the country which are very old,
look very decayed, and don’t seem of much use;
but I would not pull them down for all that.”

“You would reform them, then,” said Mrs.
Hazeldean, doubtfully, and with a look at her
husband, as much as to say, “He is on politics
now; that’s your business.”

“No, I would not, ma’am,” said the Parson,
stoutly.

“What on earth would you do, then?” quoth
the Squire.

“Just let ’em alone,” said the Parson. “Master
Frank, there’s a Latin maxim which was
often in the mouth of Sir Robert Walpole, and
which they ought to put in the Eton grammar—’Quieta
non movere.’ If things are quiet, let
them be quiet! I would not destroy the stocks,
because that might seem to the ill-disposed like
a license to offend, and I would not repair the
stocks, because that puts it into people’s heads
to get into them.”

The Squire was a stanch politician of the old
school, and he did not like to think that in repairing
the stocks, he had perhaps been conniving
at revolutionary principles.

“This constant desire of innovation,” said
Miss Jemima, suddenly mounting the more
funereal of her two favorite hobbies, “is one of
the great symptoms of the approaching crash.
We are altering, and mending, and reforming,
when in twenty years at the utmost the world[Pg 768]
itself may be destroyed!” The fair speaker
paused, and—

Captain Barnabas said, thoughtfully, “Twenty
years!—the insurance offices rarely compute
the best life at more than fourteen.” He struck
his hand on the stocks as he spoke, and added,
with his usual consolatory conclusion—”The
odds are, that it will last our time, Squire.”

But whether Captain Barnabas meant the
stocks or the world, he did not clearly explain,
and no one took the trouble to inquire.

“Sir,” said Master Frank to his father, with
that furtive spirit of quizzing, which he had acquired
among other polite accomplishments at
Eton; “sir, it is no use now considering whether
the stocks should or should not have been repaired.
The only question is, whom you will get
to put into them.”

“True,” said the Squire, with much gravity.

“Yes, there it is!” said the Parson, mournfully.
“If you would but learn ‘quieta non
movere!'”

“Don’t spout your Latin at me, Parson!”
cried the Squire, angrily; “I can give you as
good as you bring, any day—

There,” added the Squire, turning triumphantly
toward his Harry, who looked with great admiration
at this unprecedented burst of learning
on the part of Mr. Hazeldean; “there, two
can play at that game! And now that we have
all seen the stocks, we may as well go home,
and drink tea. Will you come up and play a
rubber, Dale? No! hang it, man, I’ve not
offended you—you know my ways.”

“That I do, and they are among the things I
would not have altered,” cried the Parson, holding
out his hand cheerfully. The Squire gave
it a hearty shake, and Mrs. Hazeldean hastened
to do the same. “Do come; I am afraid we’ve
been very rude; we are sad blunt folks. Do
come; that’s a dear good man; and of course
poor Mrs. Dale too.” Mrs. Hazeldean’s favorite
epithet for Mrs. Dale was poor, and that for reasons
to be explained hereafter.

“I fear my wife has got one of her bad headaches,
but I will give her your kind message,
and at all events you may depend upon me.”

“That’s right,” cried the Squire, “in half-an-hour,
eh? How d’ye do, my little man?” as
Lenny Fairfield, on his way home from some
errand in the village, drew aside and pulled off
his hat with both hands. “Stop—you see those
stocks—eh? Tell all the bad little boys in the
parish to take care how they get into them—a
sad disgrace—you’ll never be in such a quandary!”

“That at least I will answer for,” said the
Parson.

“And I too,” added Mrs. Hazeldean, patting
the boy’s curly head. “Tell your mother I
shall come and have a good chat with her to-morrow
evening.”

And so the party passed on, and Lenny stood
still on the road, staring hard at the stocks,
which stared back at him from its four great
eyes.

But Lenny did not remain long alone. As
soon as the great folks had fairly disappeared, a
large number of small folks emerged timorously
from the neighboring cottages, and approached
the site of the stocks with much marvel, fear,
and curiosity.

In fact, the renovated appearance of this monster—à
propos des bottes, as one may say—had
already excited considerable sensation among
the population of Hazeldean. And even as when
an unexpected owl makes his appearance in
broad daylight, all the little birds rise from tree
and hedge-row, and cluster round their ominous
enemy, so now gathered all the much excited
villagers round the intrusive and portentous Phenomenon.

“D’ye know what the diggins the Squire did
it for, Gaffer Solomons?” asked one many-childed
matron, with a baby in arms, an urchin of
three years old clinging fast to her petticoat,
and her hand maternally holding back a more
adventurous hero of six, who had a great desire
to thrust his head into one of the grisly apertures.
All eyes turned to a sage old man, the
oracle of the village, who, leaning both hands on
his crutch, shook his head bodingly.

“Maw be,” said Gaffer Solomons, “some of
the boys ha’ been robbing the orchards.”

“Orchards,” cried a big lad, who seemed to
think himself personally appealed to, “why the
bud’s scarce off the trees yet!”

“No more it isn’t!” said the dame with many
children, and she breathed more freely.

“Maw be,” said Gaffer Solomons, “some o’
ye has been setting snares.”

“What for?” said a stout sullen-looking young
fellow, whom conscience possibly pricked to reply.
“What for, when it beant the season? And
if a poor man did find a hear in his pocket i’ the
hay time, I should like to know if ever a squire
in the world would let un off wi’ the stocks—eh?”

That last question seemed a settler, and the
wisdom of Gaffer Solomons went down fifty per
cent. in the public opinion of Hazeldean.

“Maw be,” said the Gaffer, this time with a
thrilling effect, which restored his reputation,
“Maw be some o’ ye ha’ been getting drunk,
and making beestises o’ yoursels!”

There was a dead pause, for this suggestion
applied too generally to be met with a solitary
response. At last one of the women said, with
a meaning glance at her husband, “God bless
the Squire; he’ll make some on us happy women,
if that’s all!”

There then arose an almost unanimous murmur
of approbation among the female part of
the audience; and the men looked at each other,
and then at the Phenomenon, with a very hang-dog
expression of countenance.

“Or, maw be,” resumed Gaffer Solomons, encouraged[Pg 769]
to a fourth suggestion by the success
of its predecessor, “Maw be some o’ the Misseses
ha’ been making a rumpus, and scolding
their goodmen. I heard say in my granfeythir’s
time, that arter old Mother Bang nigh died o’
the ducking-stool, them ‘ere stocks were first
made for the women, out o’ compassion like!
And every one knows the Squire is a koind-hearted
man, God bless un!”

“God bless un!” cried the men heartily; and
they gathered lovingly round the Phenomenon,
like heathens of old round a tutelary temple. But
then rose one shrill clamor among the females,
as they retreated with involuntary steps toward
the verge of the green, whence they glared at
Solomons and the Phenomenon with eyes so
sparkling, and pointed at both with gestures so
menacing, that Heaven only knows if a morsel
of either would have remained much longer to
offend the eyes of the justly enraged matronage
of Hazeldean, if fortunately Master Stirn, the
Squire’s right-hand man, had not come up in
the nick of time.

Master Stirn was a formidable personage—more
formidable than the Squire himself—as,
indeed, a squire’s right-hand is generally more
formidable than the head can pretend to be.
He inspired the greater awe, because, like the
stocks, of which he was deputed guardian, his
powers were undefined and obscure, and he had
no particular place in the out-of-door establishment.
He was not the steward, yet he did
much of what ought to be the steward’s work;
he was not the farm-bailiff, for the Squire called
himself his own farm-bailiff; nevertheless,
Mr. Hazeldean sowed and plowed, cropped and
stocked, bought and sold, very much as Mr.
Stirn condescended to advise. He was not the
park-keeper, for he neither shot the deer nor
superintended the preserves; but it was he
who always found out who had broken a park-pale
or snared a rabbit. In short, what may
be called all the harsher duties of a large landed
proprietor devolved by custom and choice
upon Mr. Stirn. If a laborer was to be discharged,
or a rent enforced, and the Squire knew
that he should be talked over, and that the steward
would be as soft as himself, Mr. Stirn was
sure to be the avenging [Greek: angelos] or messenger,
to pronounce the words of fate; so that he appeared
to the inhabitants of Hazeldean like the
Poet’s Sæva Necessitas, a vague incarnation of
remorseless power, armed with whips, nails, and
wedges. The very brute creation stood in awe
of Mr. Stirn. The calves knew that it was he
who singled out which should be sold to the
butcher, and huddled up into a corner with
beating hearts at his grim footstep; the sow
grunted, the duck quacked, the hen bristled her
feathers and called to her chicks when Mr. Stirn
drew near. Nature had set her stamp upon
him. Indeed it may be questioned whether the
great M. de Chambray himself, surnamed the
Brave, had an aspect so awe-inspiring as that of
Mr. Stirn; albeit the face of that hero was so
terrible, that a man who had been his lackey,
seeing his portrait after he had been dead twenty
years, fell a-trembling all over like a leaf!

“And what the plague are you all doing
here?” said Mr. Stirn, as he waved and smacked
a great cart-whip which he held in his hand,
“making such a hullabaloo, you women, you!
that I suspect the Squire will be sending out to
know if the village is on fire. Go home, will
ye? High time indeed to have the stocks ready,
when you get squalling and conspiring under
the very nose of a justice of the peace, just as
the French Revolutioners did afore they cut off
their King’s head; my hair stands on end to look
at ye.” But already, before half this address
was delivered, the crowd had dispersed in all
directions—the women still keeping together,
and the men sneaking off toward the ale-house.
Such was the beneficent effect of the fatal stocks
on the first day of their resuscitation!

However, in the break up of every crowd
there must be always some one who gets off the
last; and it so happened that our friend Lenny
Fairfield, who had mechanically approached
close to the stocks, the better to hear the oracular
opinions of Gaffer Solomons, had no less
mechanically, on the abrupt appearance of Mr.
Stirn, crept, as he hoped, out of sight behind the
trunk of the elm tree which partially shaded the
stocks; and there now, as if fascinated, he still
cowered, not daring to emerge in full view of
Mr. Stirn, and in immediate reach of the cart-whip,
when the quick eye of the right-hand man
detected his retreat.

“Hallo, you sir—what the deuce, laying a
mine to blow up the stocks! just like Guy Fox
and the Gunpowder Plot, I declares! What
ha’ you got in your willainous little fist, there?”

“Nothing, sir,” said Lenny, opening his palm.

“Nothing—um!” said Mr. Stirn, much dissatisfied;
and then, as he gazed more deliberately,
recognizing the pattern boy of the village,
a cloud yet darker gathered over his brow; for
Mr. Stirn, who valued himself much on his
learning—and who, indeed, by dint of more
knowledge as well as more wit than his neighbors,
had attained his present eminent station in
life—was extremely anxious that his only son
should also be a scholar; that wish,

Master Stirn was a notable dunce at the Parson’s
school, while Lenny Fairfield was the pride and
boast of it; therefore Mr. Stirn was naturally,
and almost justifiably ill-disposed toward Lenny
Fairfield, who had appropriated to himself the
praises which Mr. Stirn had designed for his son.

“Um!” said the right-hand man, glowering
on Lenny malignantly, “you are the pattern boy
of the village, are you? Very well, sir—then I
put these here stocks under your care—and
you’ll keep off the other boys from sitting on
’em, and picking off the paint, and playing three
holes and chuck farthing, as I declare they’ve
been a-doing, just in front of the elewation.
Now you knows your sponsibilities, little boy—and[Pg 770]
a great honor they are too, for the like o’ you.
If any damage be done, it is to you I shall look;
d’ye understand? and that’s what the Squire
says to me; so you sees what it is to be a pattern
boy, Master Lenny!”

With that Mr. Stirn gave a loud crack of the
cart-whip, by way of military honors, over the
head of the vicegerent he had thus created, and
strode off to pay a visit to two young unsuspecting
pups, whose ears and tails he had graciously
promised their proprietor to crop that evening.
Nor, albeit few charges could be more obnoxious
than that of deputy governor or chargé d’affaires
extraordinaire to the Parish Stocks, nor one more
likely to render Lenny Fairfield odious to his
contemporaries, ought he to have been insensible
to the signal advantage of his condition over
that of the two sufferers, against whose ears and
tails Mr. Stirn had no especial motives of resentment.
To every bad there is a worse—and fortunately
for little boys, and even for grown men,
whom the Stirns of the world regard malignly,
the majesty of law protects their ears, and the
merciful forethought of nature deprived their
remote ancestors of the privilege of entailing
tails upon them. Had it been otherwise—considering
what handles tails would have given to
the oppressor, how many traps envy would have
laid for them, how often they must have been
scratched and mutilated by the briars of life,
how many good excuses would have been found
for lopping, docking, and trimming them—I fear
that only the lap-dogs of fortune would have
gone to the grave tail-whole.

CHAPTER XII.

The card-table was set out in the drawing-room
at Hazeldean Hall; though the little party
were still lingering in the deep recess of the
large bay window—which (in itself of dimensions
that would have swallowed up a moderate-sized
London parlor) held the great round tea-table
with all appliances and means to boot—for the
beautiful summer moon shed on the sward so
silvery a lustre, and the trees cast so quiet a
shadow, and the flowers and new-mown hay
sent up so grateful a perfume, that, to close the
windows, draw the curtains, and call for other
lights than those of heaven, would have been an
abuse of the prose of life which even Captain
Barnabas, who regarded whist as the business
of town and the holiday of the country, shrank
from suggesting. Without, the scene, beheld
by the clear moonlight, had the beauty peculiar
to the garden ground round those old-fashioned
country residences which, though a little modernized,
still preserve their original character:
the velvet lawn, studded with large plots of
flowers, shaded and scented here, to the left, by
lilacs, laburnums, and rich seringas—there, to
the right, giving glimpses, over low-clipped
yews, of a green bowling alley, with the white
columns of a summer house built after the Dutch
taste, in the reign of William III.; and in front—stealing
away under covert of those still cedars,
into the wilder landscape of the well-wooded,
undulating park. Within, viewed by
the placid glimmer of the moon, the scene was
no less characteristic of the abodes of that race
which has no parallel in other lands, and which,
alas, is somewhat losing its native idiosyncracies
in this—the stout country gentleman, not the
fine gentleman of the country—the country gentleman
somewhat softened and civilized from the
mere sportsman or farmer, but still plain and
homely, relinquishing the old hall for the drawing-room,
and with books not three months’ old on
his table, instead of Fox’s Martyrs and Baker’s
Chronicle—yet still retaining many a sacred
old prejudice, that, like the knots in his native
oak, rather adds to the ornament of the grain
than takes from the strength of the tree. Opposite
to the window, the high chimney-piece rose
to the heavy cornice of the ceiling, with dark
pannels glistening against the moonlight. The
broad and rather clumsy chintz sofas and settees
of the reign of George III., contrasted at intervals
with the tall backed chairs of a far more
distant generation, when ladies in fardingales,
and gentlemen in trunk-hose, seemed never to
have indulged in horizontal positions. The
walls, of shining wainscot, were thickly covered,
chiefly with family pictures; though now and
then some Dutch fair, or battle-piece, showed
that a former proprietor had been less exclusive
in his taste for the arts. The piano-forte stood
open near the fire-place; a long dwarf bookcase
at the far end, added its sober smile to the
room. That bookcase contained what was
called “The Lady’s Library,” a collection commenced
by the Squire’s grandmother, of pious
memory, and completed by his mother, who had
more taste for the lighter letters, with but little
addition from the bibliomaniac tenderness of the
present Mrs. Hazeldean—who, being no great
reader, contented herself with subscribing to the
Book Club. In this feminine Bodleian, the sermons
collected by Mrs. Hazeldean, the grandmother,
stood cheek-by-jowl beside the novels
purchased by Mrs. Hazeldean, the mother.

But, to be sure, the novels, in spite of very inflammatory
titles, such as “Fatal Sensibility,”
“Errors of the Heart,” &c., were so harmless
that I doubt if the sermons could have had much
to say against their next-door neighbors—and
that is all that can be expected by the rest of
us.

A parrot dozing on his perch—some gold fish
fast asleep in their glass bowl—two or three
dogs on the rug, and Flimsey, Miss Jemima’s
spaniel, curled into a ball on the softest sofa—Mrs.
Hazeldean’s work-table, rather in disorder,
as if it had been lately used—the St. James’s
Chronicle dangling down from a little tripod
near the Squire’s arm-chair—a high screen of
gilt and stamped leather fencing off the card
table; all these, dispersed about a room large
enough to hold them all and not seem crowded,[Pg 771]
offered many a pleasant resting-place for the
eye, when it turned from the world of nature to
the home of man.

But see, Captain Barnabas, fortified by his
fourth cup of tea, has at length summoned courage
to whisper to Mrs. Hazeldean, “don’t you
think the Parson will be impatient for his rubber?”
Mrs. Hazeldean glanced at the Parson,
and smiled; but she gave the signal to the Captain,
and the bell was rung, lights were brought
in, the curtains let down; in a few moments
more the group had collected round the card-tables.
The best of us are but human—that is
not a new truth, I confess, but yet people forget
it every day of their lives—and I dare say there
are many who are charitably thinking at this
very moment, that my Parson ought not to be
playing at whist. All I can say to these rigid
disciplinarians is, “Every man has his favorite
sin: whist was Parson Dale’s!—ladies and gentlemen,
what is yours?” In truth, I must not
set up my poor parson, nowadays, as a pattern
parson—it is enough to have one pattern in a
village no bigger than Hazeldean, and we all
know that Lenny Fairfield has bespoken that
place—and got the patronage of the stocks for
his emoluments! Parson Dale was ordained,
not indeed so very long ago, but still at a time
when churchmen took it a great deal more
easily than they do now. The elderly parson
of that day played his rubber as a matter of
course, the middle-aged parson was sometimes
seen riding to cover (I knew a schoolmaster, a
doctor of divinity, and an excellent man, whose
pupils were chiefly taken from the highest families
in England, who hunted regularly three
times a week during the season), and the young
parson would often sing a capital song—not
composed by David—and join in those rotary
dances, which certainly David never danced before
the ark.

Does it need so long a prolegomenon to excuse
thee, poor Parson Dale, for turning up that ace
of spades with so triumphant a smile at thy partner?
I must own that nothing that well could
add to the Parson’s offense was wanting. In
the first place he did not play charitably, and
merely to oblige other people. He delighted in
the game—he rejoiced in the game—his whole
heart was in the game—neither was he indifferent
to the mammon of the thing, as a Christian
pastor ought to have been. He looked very sad
when he took his shillings out of his purse, and
exceedingly pleased when he put the shillings
that had just before belonged to other people into
it. Finally, by one of those arrangements common
with married people, who play at the same
table, Mr. and Mrs. Hazeldean were invariably
partners, and no two people could play worse;
while Captain Barnabas, who had played at Graham’s
with honor and profit, necessarily became
partner to Parson Dale, who himself played a
good steady parsonic game. So that, in strict
truth, it was hardly fair play—it was almost
swindling—the combination of those two great
dons against that innocent married couple!
Mr. Dale, it is true, was aware of this disproportion
of force, and had often proposed either
to change partners or to give odds, propositions
always scornfully scouted by the Squire and his
lady; so that the Parson was obliged to pocket
his conscience together with the ten points which
made his average winnings.

The strangest thing in the world is the different
way in which whist affects the temper. It
is no test of temper, as some pretend—not at
all! The best tempered people in the world
grow snappish at whist; and I have seen the
most testy and peevish in the ordinary affairs of
life bear their losses with the stoicism of Epictetus.
This was notably manifested in the contrast
between the present adversaries of the Hall
and the Rectory. The Squire who was esteemed
as choleric a gentleman as most in the county,
was the best humored fellow you could imagine
when you set him down to whist opposite the
sunny face of his wife. You never heard one
of these incorrigible blunderers scold each other;
on the contrary, they only laughed when they
threw away the game, with four by honors in
their hands. The utmost that was ever said
was a “Well, Harry, that was the oddest trump
of yours. Ho—ho—ho!” or a “Bless me, Hazeldean—why,
they made three tricks, and you had
the ace in your hand all the time! Ha—ha—ha!”

Upon which occasions Captain Barnabas, with
great good humor, always echoed both the
Squire’s ho—ho—ho! and Mrs. Hazeldean’s ha—ha—ha!

Not so the Parson. He had so keen and
sportsmanlike an interest in the game, that even
his adversaries’ mistakes ruffled him. And you
would hear him, with elevated voice and agitated
gestures, laying down the law, quoting Hoyle,
appealing to all the powers of memory and common
sense against the very delinquencies by
which he was enriched—a waste of eloquence
that always heightened the hilarity of Mr. and
Mrs. Hazeldean. While these four were thus
engaged, Mrs. Dale, who had come with her
husband despite her headache, sate on the sofa
beside Miss Jemima, or rather beside Miss
Jemima’s Flimsey, which had already secured
the centre of the sofa, and snarled at the very
idea of being disturbed. And Master Frank—at
a table by himself—was employed sometimes
in looking at his pumps, and sometimes at Gilray’s
Caricatures, with which his mother had
provided him for his intellectual requirements.
Mrs. Dale, in her heart, liked Miss Jemima
better than Mrs. Hazeldean, of whom she was
rather in awe, notwithstanding they had been
little girls together, and occasionally still called
each other Harry and Carry. But those tender
diminutives belonged to the “Dear” genus, and
were rarely employed by the ladies, except at
those times when—had they been little girls
still, and the governess out of the way—they
would have slapped and pinched each other.[Pg 772]
Mrs. Dale was still a very pretty woman, as
Mrs. Hazeldean was still a very fine woman.
Mrs. Dale painted in water colors and sang, and
made card-racks and pen-holders, and was called
an “elegant, accomplished woman.” Mrs. Hazeldean
cast up the Squire’s accounts, wrote the
best part of his letters, kept a large establishment
in excellent order, and was called “a
clever, sensible woman.” Mrs. Dale had headaches
and nerves, Mrs. Hazeldean had neither
nerves nor headaches. Mrs. Dale said, “Harry
had no real harm in her, but was certainly very
masculine.” Mrs. Hazeldean said, “Carry
would be a good creature, but for her airs and
graces.” Mrs. Dale said, “Mrs. Hazeldean
was just made to be a country squire’s lady.”
Mrs. Hazeldean said, “Mrs. Dale was the last
person in the world who ought to have been a
parson’s wife.” Carry, when she spoke of Harry
to a third person, said, “Dear Mrs. Hazeldean.”
Harry, when she referred incidentally to Carry,
said, “Poor Mrs. Dale.” And now the reader
knows why Mrs. Hazeldean called Mrs. Dale
“poor,” at least as well as I do. For, after all,
the word belonged to that class in the female
vocabulary which may be called “obscure significants,”
resembling the Knox Ompax, which
hath so puzzled the inquirers into the Eleusinian
Mysteries; the application is rather to be illustrated
than the meaning to be exactly explained.

“That’s really a sweet little dog of yours,
Jemima,” said Mrs. Dale, who was embroidering
the word Caroline on the border of a cambric
pocket-handkerchief, but edging a little farther
off, as she added, “he’ll not bite, will he?”
“Dear me, no!” said Miss Jemima; but (she
added, in a confidential whisper), “don’t say he—’tis
a lady dog.” “Oh,” said Mrs. Dale,
edging off still farther, as if that confession of
the creature’s sex did not serve to allay her apprehensions—”oh,
then, you carry your aversion
to the gentlemen even to lap-dogs—that is being
consistent indeed, Jemima!”

Miss Jemima.—”I had a gentleman dog once—a
pug!—they are getting very scarce now.
I thought he was so fond of me—he snapped at
every one else; the battles I fought for him!
Well, will you believe, I had been staying with
my friend Miss Smilecox at Cheltenham. Knowing
that William is so hasty, and his boots are so
thick, I trembled to think what a kick might do.
So, on coming here, I left Buff—that was his
name—with Miss Smilecox.” (A pause.)

Mrs. Dale, looking up languidly.—”Well,
my love.”

Miss Jemima.—”Will you believe it, I say,
when I returned to Cheltenham, only three
months afterward, Miss Smilecox had seduced
his affections from me, and the ungrateful creature
did not even know me again. A pug, too—yet
people say pugs are faithful!!! I am
sure they ought to be, nasty things. I have
never had a gentleman dog since—they are all
alike, believe me—heartless, selfish creatures.”

Mrs. Dale.—”Pugs? I dare say they are!”

Miss Jemima, with spirit.—”Men!—I told
you it was a gentleman dog!”

Mrs. Dale, apologetically.—”True, my love,
but the whole thing was so mixed up!”

Miss Jemima.—”You saw that cold-blooded
case of Breach of Promise of Marriage in the
papers—an old wretch, too, of sixty-four. No
age makes them a bit better. And when one
thinks that the end of all flesh is approaching,
and that—”

Mrs. Dale, quickly, for she prefers Miss
Jemima’s other hobby to that black one upon
which she is preparing to precede the bier of
the universe.—”Yes, my love, we’ll avoid that
subject, if you please. Mr. Dale has his own
opinions, and it becomes me, you know, as a
parson’s wife,” (said smilingly; Mrs. Dale has
as pretty a dimple as any of Miss Jemima’s,
and makes more of that one than Miss Jemima
of three), “to agree with him—that is, in
theology.”

Miss Jemima, earnestly.—”But the thing is
so clear, if you would but look into—”

Mrs. Dale, putting her hand on Miss Jemima’s
lips playfully.—”Not a word more. Pray, what
do you think of the Squire’s tenant at the Casino,
Signor Riccabocca? An interesting creature,
is not he?”

Miss Jemima.—”Interesting! Not to me.
Interesting! Why is he interesting?”

Mrs. Dale is silent, and turns her handkerchief
in her pretty little white hands, appearing
to contemplate the R. in Caroline.

Miss Jemima, half pettishly, half coaxingly.—”Why
is he interesting? I scarcely ever
looked at him; they say he smokes, and never
eats. Ugly, too!”

Mrs. Dale.—”Ugly—no. A fine head—very
like Dante’s—but what is beauty?”

Miss Jemima.—”Very true; what is it indeed?
Yes, as you say, I think there is something
interesting about him; he looks melancholy,
but that may be because he is poor.”

Mrs. Dale.—”It is astonishing how little
one feels poverty when one loves. Charles and
I were very poor once—before the Squire—.”
Mrs. Dale paused, looked toward the Squire,
and murmured a blessing, the warmth of which
brought tears into her eyes. “Yes,” she added,
after a pause, “we were very poor, but we were
happy even then, more thanks to Charles than
to me,” and tears from a new source again
dimmed those quick, lively eyes, as the little
woman gazed fondly on her husband, whose
brows were knit into a black frown over a bad
hand.

Miss Jemima.—”It is only those horrid men
who think of money as a source of happiness.
I should be the last person to esteem a gentleman
less because he was poor.”

Mrs. Dale.—”I wonder the Squire does not
ask Signor Riccabocca here more often. Such
an acquisition we find him!”

The Squire’s voice from the card table.—”Whom
ought I to ask more often, Mrs. Dale?”

[Pg 773]

Parson’s voice impatiently.—”Come—come—come,
Squire; play to my queen of diamonds—do!”

Squire.—”There, I trump it—pick up the
trick, Mrs. H.”

Parson.—”Stop! stop! trump my diamond?”

The Captain, solemnly.—”Trick turned—play
on, Squire.”

Squire.—”The king of diamonds.”

Mrs. Hazeldean.—”Lord! Hazeldean—why,
that’s the most barefaced revoke—ha—ha—ha!
trump the queen of diamonds and play
out the king! well I never—ha—ha—ha!”

Captain Barnabas, in tenor.—”Ha, ha, ha!”

Squire.—”And so I have, bless my soul—ho, ho, ho!”

Captain Barnabas, in bass.—”Ho—ho—ho.”

Parson’s voice raised, but drowned by the
laughter of his adversaries and the firm clear
tone of Captain Barnabas: “Three to our score!—game!”

Squire, wiping his eyes.—”No help for it,
Harry—deal for me! Whom ought I to ask,
Mrs. Dale? (waxing angry). First time I ever
heard the hospitality of Hazeldean called in
question!”

Mrs. Dale.—”My dear sir, I beg a thousand
pardons, but listeners—you know the proverb.”

Squire, growling like a bear.—”I hear nothing
but proverbs ever since we have had that
Mounseer among us. Please to speak plainly,
marm.”

Mrs. Dale, sliding into a little temper at
being thus roughly accosted.—”It was of Mounseer,
as you call him, that I spoke, Mr. Hazeldean.”

Squire.—”What! Rickeybockey?”

Mrs. Dale, attempting the pure Italian accentuation.—”Signor
Riccabocca.”

Parson, slapping his cards on the table in
despair: “Are we playing at whist, or are we
not?”

The Squire, who is fourth player drops the
king to Captain Higginbotham’s lead of the
ace of hearts. Now the Captain has left queen,
knave, and two other hearts—four trumps to the
queen and nothing to win a trick with in the two
other suits. This hand is therefore precisely
one of those in which, especially after the fall
of that king of hearts in the adversary’s hand, it
becomes a matter of reasonable doubt whether
to lead trumps or not. The Captain hesitates,
and not liking to play out his good hearts with
the certainty of their being trumped by the
Squire, nor, on the other hand, liking to open
the other suits in which he has not a card that
can assist his partner, resolves, as becomes a
military man, in such a dilemma, to make a bold
push and lead out trumps, in the chance of finding
his partner strong, and so bringing in his
long suit.

Squire, taking advantage of the much meditating
pause made by the Captain.—”Mrs. Dale,
it is not my fault. I have asked Rickeybockey—time
out of mind. But I suppose I am not
fine enough for those foreign chaps—he won’t
come—that’s all I know!”

Parson, aghast at seeing the Captain play
out trumps, of which he, Mr. Dale, has only
two, wherewith he expects to ruff the suit of
spades of which he has only one (the cards all
falling in suits) while he has not a single other
chance of a trick in his hand: “Really, Squire,
we had better give up playing if you put out my
partner in this extraordinary way—jabber—jabber—jabber!”

Squire.—”Well, we must be good children,
Harry. What!—trumps, Barney? Thank ye
for that!” And the Squire might well be
grateful, for the unfortunate adversary has led
up to ace, king, knave—with two other trumps.
Squire takes the Parson’s ten with his knave,
and plays out ace, king; then, having cleared
all the trumps except the Captain’s queen and
his own remaining two, leads off tierce major
in that very suit of spades of which the Parson
has only one—and the Captain, indeed, but two—forces
out the Captain’s queen, and wins the
game in a canter.

Parson, with a look at the Captain which
might have become the awful brows of Jove,
when about to thunder: “That, I suppose, is
the new fashioned London play! In my time
the rule was ‘First save the game, then try to
win it.'”

Captain.—”Could not save it, sir.”

Parson, exploding.—”Not save it!—two
ruffs in my own hand—two tricks certain till
you took them out! Monstrous! The rashest
trump.”—Seizes the cards—spreads them on
the table, lip quivering, hands trembling—tries
to show how five tricks could have been
gained—(N.B. it is short whist, which Captain
Barnabas had introduced at the Hall) can’t
make out more than four—Captain smiles triumphantly—Parson
in a passion, and not at all
convinced, mixes all the cards together again,
and falling back in his chair, groans, with tears
in his voice: “The cruelest trump! the most
wanton cruelty!”

The Hazeldeans in chorus. “Ho—ho—ho!
Ha—ha—ha!”

The Captain, who does not laugh this time,
and whose turn it is to deal, shuffles the cards
for the conquering game of the rubber with as
much caution and prolixity as Fabius might
have employed in posting his men. The Squire
gets up to stretch his legs, and the insinuation
against his hospitality recurring to his thoughts,
calls out to his wife—”Write to Rickeybockey
to-morrow yourself, Harry, and ask him to come
and spend two or three days here. There, Mrs
Dale, you hear me?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Dale, putting her hands to
her ears in implied rebuke at the loudness of the
Squire’s tone. “My dear sir, do remember that
I’m a sad nervous creature.”

“Beg pardon,” muttered Mr. Hazeldean,[Pg 774]
turning to his son, who, having got tired of the
caricatures, had fished out for himself the great
folio County History, which was the only book
in the library that the Squire much valued, and
which he usually kept under lock and key, in
his study, together with the field-books and
steward’s accounts, but which he had reluctantly
taken into the drawing-room that day, in order
to oblige Captain Higginbotham. For the Higginbothams—an
old Saxon family, as the name
evidently denotes—had once possessed lands in
that very county. And the Captain—during his
visits to Hazeldean Hall—was regularly in the
habit of asking to look into the County History,
for the purpose of refreshing his eyes, and renovating
his sense of ancestral dignity with the
following paragraph therein: “To the left of
the village of Dunder, and pleasantly situated in
a hollow, lies Botham Hall, the residence of the
ancient family of Higginbotham, as it is now
commonly called. Yet it appears by the county
rolls, and sundry old deeds, that the family formerly
styled itself Higges, till, the Manor House
lying in Botham, they gradually assumed the
appellation of Higges-in-botham, and in process
of time, yielding to the corruptions of the vulgar,
Higginbotham.”

“What, Frank! my County History!” cried
the Squire. “Mrs. H., he has got my County
History!”

“Well, Hazeldean, it is time he should know
something about the County.”

“Ay, and History too,” said Mrs. Dale, malevolently—for
the little temper was by no means
blown over.

Frank.—”I’ll not hurt it, I assure you, sir.
But I’m very much interested just at present.”

The Captain, putting down the cards to cut.—”You’ve
got hold of that passage about
Botham Hall, page 706, eh?”

Frank.—”No; I was trying to make out how
far it is to Mr. Leslie’s place, Rood Hall. Do
you know, mother?”

Mrs. Hazeldean.—”I can’t say I do. The
Leslies don’t mix with the county; and Rood
lies very much out of the way.”

Frank.—”Why don’t they mix with the
county?”

Mrs. Hazeldean.—”I believe they are poor,
and therefore I suppose they are proud: they
are an old family.”

Parson, thrumming on the table with great
impatience: “Old fiddledee!—talking of old
families when the cards have been shuffled this
half hour.”

Captain Barnabas.—”Will you cut for your
partner, ma’am?”

Squire, who has been listening to Frank’s inquiries
with a musing air: “Why do you want
to know the distance to Rood Hall?”

Frank, rather hesitatingly.—”Because Randal
Leslie is there for the holidays, sir.”

Parson.—”Your wife has cut for you, Mr.
Hazeldean. I don’t think it was quite fair; and
my partner has turned up a deuce—deuce of
hearts. Please to come and play, if you mean
to play.”

The Squire returns to the table, and in a few
minutes the game is decided, by a dexterous
finesse of the Captain, against the Hazeldeans.
The clock strikes ten: the servants enter with
a tray; the Squire counts up his and his wife’s
losings; and the Captain and Parson divide sixteen
shillings between them.

Squire.—”There, Parson, I hope now you’ll
be in a better humor. You win enough out of
us to set up a coach and four.”

“Tut,” muttered the parson; “at the end of
the year, I’m not a penny the richer for it all.”

And, indeed, monstrous as that assertion
seemed, it was perfectly true, for the Parson
portioned out his gains into three divisions.
One-third he gave to Mrs. Dale, for her own
special pocket-money; what became of the
second third he never owned, even to his better
half—but certain it was, that every time the
Parson won seven-and-sixpence, half-a-crown
which nobody could account for found its way
to the poor-box; while the remaining third, the
Parson, it is true, openly and avowedly retained:
but I have no manner of doubt that, at the
year’s end, it got to the poor quite as safely as
if it had been put into the box.

The party had now gathered round the tray,
and were helping themselves to wine and water,
or wine without water—except Frank, who still
remained poring over the map in the County
History, with his head leaning on his hands, and
his fingers plunged in his hair.

“Frank,” said Mrs. Hazeldean, “I never saw
you so studious before.”

Frank started up, and colored, as if ashamed
of being accused of too much study in any thing.

The Squire, with a little embarrassment in
his voice: “Pray, Frank, what do you know of
Randal Leslie?”

“Why, sir, he is at Eton.”

“What sort of a boy is he?” asked Mrs.
Hazeldean.

Frank hesitated, as if reflecting, and then answered:
“They say he is the cleverest boy in
the school. But then he saps.”

“In other words,” said Mr. Dale with proper
parsonic gravity, “he understands that he was
sent to school to learn his lessons, and he learns
them. You call that sapping—I call it doing
his duty. But pray, who and what is this
Randal Leslie, that you look so discomposed,
Squire?”

“Who and what is he?” repeated the Squire,
in a low growl. “Why, you know, Mr. Audley
Egerton married Miss Leslie the great heiress,
and this boy is a relation of hers. I may say,”
added the Squire, “that he is as near a relation
of mine, for his grandmother was a Hazeldean.
But all I know about the Leslies is, that Mr.
Egerton, as I am told, having no children of his
own, took up young Randal, (when his wife
died, poor woman), pays for his schooling, and
has, I suppose, adopted the boy as his heir. Quite[Pg 775]
welcome. Frank and I want nothing from Mr.
Audley Egerton, thank heaven.”

“I can well believe in your brother’s generosity
to his wife’s kindred,” said the Parson,
sturdily, “for I am sure Mr. Egerton is a man
of strong feeling.”

“What the deuce do you know about Mr.
Egerton? I don’t suppose you could ever have
even spoken to him.”

“Yes,” said the Parson, coloring up and looking
confused, “I had some conversation with him
once;” and observing the Squire’s surprise, he
added—”when I was curate at Lansmere—and
about a painful business connected with the
family of one of my parishioners.”

“Oh! one of your parishioners at Lansmere—one
of the constituents Mr. Audley Egerton
threw over, after all the pains I had taken to
give him his seat. Rather odd you should never
have mentioned this before, Mr. Dale!”

“My dear sir,” said the Parson, sinking his
voice, and in a mild tone of conciliatory expostulation,
“you are so irritable whenever Mr.
Egerton’s name is mentioned at all.”

“Irritable!” exclaimed the Squire, whose
wrath had been long simmering, and now fairly
boiled over. “Irritable, sir! I should think so;
a man for whom I stood godfather at the hustings,
Mr. Dale! a man for whose sake I was
called a ‘prize ox,’ Mr. Dale! a man for whom
I was hissed in a market-place, Mr. Dale! a man
for whom I was shot at, in cold blood, by an
officer in his Majesty’s service, who lodged a ball
in my right shoulder, Mr. Dale! a man who had
the ingratitude, after all this, to turn his back
on the landed interest—to deny that there was
any agricultural distress in a year which broke
three of the best farmers I ever had, Mr. Dale!—a
man, sir, who made a speech on the Currency
which was complimented by Ricardo, a Jew!
Good heavens! a pretty parson you are, to stand
up for a fellow complimented by a Jew! Nice
ideas you must have of Christianity. Irritable,
sir!” now fairly roared the Squire, adding to
the thunder of his voice the cloud of a brow,
which evinced a menacing ferocity that might
have done honor to Bussy D’Amboise or Fighting
Fitzgerald. “Sir, if that man had not been
my own half-brother, I’d have called him out.
I have stood my ground before now. I have
had a ball in my right shoulder. Sir, I’d have
called him out.”

“Mr. Hazeldean! Mr. Hazeldean! I’m shocked
at you,” cried the Parson; and, putting his
lips close to the Squire’s ear, he went on in a
whisper: “What an example to your son!
You’ll have him fighting duels one of these days,
and nobody to blame but yourself.”

This warning cooled Mr. Hazeldean; and
muttering, “Why the deuce did you set me off?”
he fell back into his chair, and began to fan
himself with his pocket-handkerchief.

The Parson skillfully and remorselessly pursued
the advantage he had gained. “And now,
that you may have it in your power, to show
civility and kindness to a boy whom Mr. Egerton
has taken up, out of respect to his wife’s
memory—a kinsman you say of your own—and
who has never offended you—a boy whose diligence
in his studies proves him to be an excellent
companion to your son. Frank,” (here the
Parson raised his voice), “I suppose you wanted
to call on young Leslie, as you were studying
the county map so attentively?”

“Why, yes,” answered Frank, rather timidly.
“If my father did not object to it. Leslie has
been very kind to me, though he is in the sixth
form, and, indeed, almost the head of the school.”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Hazeldean, “one studious
boy has a fellow-feeling for another; and though
you enjoy your holidays, Frank, I am sure you
read hard at school.”

Mrs. Dale opened her eyes very wide, and
stared in astonishment.

Mrs. Hazeldean retorted that look with
great animation. “Yes, Carry,” said she, tossing
her head, “though you may not think Frank
clever, his master finds him so. He got a prize
last half. That beautiful book, Frank—hold
up your head, my love—what did you get it
for?”

Frank, reluctantly.—”Verses, ma’am.”

Mrs. Hazeldean, with triumph.—”Verses!—there,
Carry, verses!”

Frank, in a hurried tone.—”Yes, but Leslie
wrote them for me.”

Mrs. Hazeldean, recoiling.—”O Frank! a
prize for what another did for you—that was
mean.”

Frank, ingenuously.—”You can’t be more
ashamed, mother, than I was when they gave
me the prize.”

Mrs. Dale, though previously provoked at
being snubbed by Harry, now showing the
triumph of generosity over temper: “I beg
your pardon, Frank. Your mother must be as
proud of that shame as she was of the prize.”

Mrs. Hazeldean puts her arm round Frank’s
neck, smiles beamingly on Mrs. Dale, and converses
with her son in a low tone about Randal
Leslie. Miss Jemima now approached Carry,
and said in an “aside,”—”But we are forgetting
poor Mr. Riccabocca. Mrs. Hazeldean,
though the dearest creature in the world, has
such a blunt way of inviting people—don’t you
think if you were to say a word to him, Carry?”

Mrs. Dale kindly, as she wraps her shawl
round her: “Suppose you write the note yourself.
Meanwhile I shall see him, no doubt.”

Parson, putting his hand on the Squire’s
shoulder: “You forgive my impertinence, my
kind friend. We parsons, you know, are apt to
take strange liberties, when we honor and love
folks, as I do you.”

“Pish!” said the Squire, but his hearty smile
came to his lips in spite of himself: “You always
get your own way, and I suppose Frank
must ride over and see this pet of my—”

“Brother’s,” quoth the Parson, concluding
the sentence in a tone which gave to the sweet[Pg 776]
word so sweet a sound that the Squire would
not correct the Parson, as he had been about to
correct himself.

Mr. Dale moved on; but as he passed Captain
Barnabas, the benignant character of his
countenance changed sadly.

“The cruelest trump, Captain Higginbotham!”
said he sternly, and stalked by—majestic.

The night was so fine that the Parson and his
wife, as they walked home, made a little detour
through the shrubbery.

Mrs. Dale.—”I think I have done a good
piece of work to-night.”

Parson, rousing himself from a reverie.—”Have
you, Carry?—it will be a very pretty
handkerchief.”

Mrs. Dale.—”Handkerchief—nonsense, dear.
Don’t you think it would be a very happy thing
for both, if Jemima and Signor Riccabocca could
be brought together?”

Parson.—”Brought together!”

Mrs. Dale.—”You do snap one up so, my
dear—I mean if I could make a match of it.”

Parson.—”I think Riccabocca is a match already,
not only for Jemima, but yourself into
the bargain.”

Mrs. Dale, smiling loftily.—”Well, we shall
see. Was not Jemima’s fortune about £4000?”

Parson dreamily, for he is relapsing fast into
his interrupted reverie: “Ay—ay—I daresay.”

Mrs. Dale.—”And she must have saved! I
dare say it is nearly £6000 by this time; eh!
Charles dear, you really are so—good gracious,
what’s that!”

As Mrs. Dale made this exclamation they
had just emerged from the shrubbery, into the
village green.

Parson.—”What’s what?”

Mrs. Dale, pinching her husband’s arm very
nippingly.—”That thing—there—there.”

Parson.—”Only the new stocks, Carry; I
don’t wonder they frighten you, for you are a
very sensible woman. I only wish they would
frighten the Squire.”

CHAPTER XIII.

Supposed to be a Letter from Mrs. Hazeldean to
—- Riccabocca, Esq., The Casino; but edited,
and indeed composed, by Miss Jemima Hazeldean.

“Dear Sir—To a feeling heart it must always
be painful to give pain to another, and
(though I am sure unconsciously) you have
given the greatest pain to poor Mr. Hazeldean
and myself, indeed to all our little circle, in so
cruelly refusing our attempts to become better
acquainted with a gentleman we so highly esteem.
Do, pray, dear sir, make us the amende
honorable, and give us the pleasure of your company
for a few days at the Hall! May we expect
you Saturday next?—our dinner-hour is
six o’clock.

“With the best compliments of Mr. and Miss Jemima Hazeldean.

“Believe me, my dear sir, yours truly,

“H.H.

“Hazeldean Hall.“

Miss Jemima having carefully sealed this
note, which Mrs. Hazeldean had very willingly
deputed her to write, took it herself into the
stable-yard, in order to give the groom proper
instructions to wait for an answer. But while
she was speaking to the man, Frank, equipped
for riding with more than his usual dandyism,
came also into the yard, calling for his pony in
a loud voice, and singling out the very groom
whom Miss Jemima was addressing—for, indeed,
he was the smartest of all in the Squire’s
stables—told him to saddle the gray pad, and
accompany the pony.

“No, Frank,” said Miss Jemima, “you can’t
have George; your father wants him to go on a
message—you can take Mat.”

“Mat, indeed!” said Frank, grumbling with
some reason; for Mat was a surly old fellow,
who tied a most indefensible neckcloth, and always
contrived to have a great patch in his
boots; besides, he called Frank “Master,”
and obstinately refused to trot down hill;
“Mat, indeed!—let Mat take the message, and
George go with me.”

But Miss Jemima had also her reasons for
rejecting Mat. Mat’s foible was not servility,
and he always showed true English independence
in all houses where he was not invited to
take his ale in the servants’ hall. Mat might
offend Signor Riccabocca, and spoil all. An
animated altercation ensued, in the midst of
which the Squire and his wife entered the yard,
with the intention of driving in the conjugal gig
to the market town. The matter was referred
to the natural umpire by both the contending
parties.

The Squire looked with great contempt on
his son. “And what do you want a groom at
all for? Are you afraid of tumbling off the pony?”

Frank.—”No, sir; but I like to go as a
gentleman, when I pay a visit to a gentleman!”

“Squire, in high wrath.—”You precious
puppy! I think I’m as good a gentleman as
you, any day, and I should like to know when
you ever saw me ride to call on a neighbor,
with a fellow jingling at my heels, like that upstart
Ned Spankie, whose father kept a cotton-mill.
First time I ever heard of a Hazeldean
thinking a livery-coat was necessary to prove
his gentility!”

Mrs. Hazeldean, observing Frank coloring,
and about to reply.—”Hush, Frank, never answer
your father—and you are going to call on
Mr. Leslie?”

“Yes, ma’am, and I am very much obliged
to my father for letting me,” said Frank, taking
the Squire’s hand.

“Well, but, Frank,” continued Mrs. Hazeldean,
“I think you heard that the Leslies were
very poor.”

[Pg 777]

Frank.—”Eh, mother?”

Mrs. Hazeldean.—”And would you run the
chance of wounding the pride of a gentleman,
as well born as yourself, by affecting any show
of being richer than he is?”

Squire, with great admiration.—”Harry, I’d
give £10 to have said that!”

Frank, leaving the Squire’s hand to take his
mother’s.—”You’re quite right, mother—nothing
could be more snobbish!”

Squire.—”Give us your fist too, sir; you’ll
be a chip of the old block, after all.”

Frank smiled, and walked off to his pony.

Mrs. Hazeldean to Miss Jemima.—”Is that
the note you were to write for me?”

Miss Jemima.—”Yes, I supposed you did not
care about seeing it, so I have sealed it and
given it to George.”

Mrs. Hazeldean.—”But Frank will pass
close by the Casino on his way to the Leslies’.
It may be more civil if he leaves the note himself.”

Miss Jemima, hesitatingly.—”Do you think
so?”

Mrs. Hazeldean.—”Yes, certainly. Frank—Frank—as
you pass by the Casino, call on
Mr. Riccabocca, give this note, and say we shall
be heartily glad if he will come.”

Frank nods.

“Stop a bit,” cried the Squire. “If Rickeybockey’s
at home, ’tis ten to one if he don’t ask
you to take a glass of wine! If he does, mind,
’tis worse than asking you to take a turn on the
rack. Faugh! you remember, Harry?—I
thought it was all up with me.”

“Yes,” cried Mrs. Hazeldean, “for Heaven’s
sake, not a drop! Wine indeed!”

“Don’t talk of it,” cried the Squire, making a
wry face.

“I’ll take care, sir!” said Frank, laughing as
he disappeared within the stable, followed by
Miss Jemima, who now coaxingly makes it up
with him, and does not leave off her admonitions
to be extremely polite to the poor foreign
gentleman, till Frank gets his foot into the stirrup;
and the pony, who knows who he has got
to deal with, gives a preparatory plunge or two
and then darts out of the yard.

To be continued.

[From Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal.]

THE EVERY-DAY MARRIED LADY.

It might be supposed that the every-day married
lady was formerly the every-day young
lady, and has now merely changed her condition.
But this is not the case, for nothing is more
common than to see the most holiday spinsters
settle down into the most working-day matrons.
The married lady, in fact, of the species we
would describe, has no descent in particular.
If you can imagine a pupa coming into the
world of itself without any connection with the
larva, or an imago unconscious of the pupa, that
is the every-day married lady. She is born at
the altar, conjured into life by the ceremonial,
and having utterly lost her individual existence,
becomes from that moment a noun of multitude.
People may say, “Oh, this is our old acquaintance,
Miss Smith!” but that is only calling
names, for the identity is gone. If she is any
thing at all but what appertains to the present,
she is the late Miss Smith, who has survived
herself, and changed into a family.

We would insist upon this peculiarity of the
every-day married lady—that her existence is
collective. Her very language is in the plural
number—such as we, ours, and us. She respects
the rights of paternity so much, as never to permit
herself to talk of her children as peculiarly
her own. Her individuality being merged in her
husband and their actual or possible offspring,
she has no private thoughts, no wishes, no hopes,
no fears but for the concern. And this is all the
better for her tranquillity: for although a part
of her husband, she does not quite fancy that he
is a part of her. She leaves at least the business
to his management, and if she does advise and
suggest on occasions, she thinks that somehow
things will come out very well. She feels that
she is only a passenger; and although, as such,
she may recommend the skipper to shorten sail
when weathering a critical point, or, for the sake
of safety, to come to anchor in the middle of the
sea, she has still a certain faith in his skill or
luck, and sleeps quietly in the storm. For this
reason the every day married lady is comfortable
in the figure, and has usually good round features
of her own. The Miss Smith she has survived
had a slender waist and small delicate hands;
but this lady is a very tolerable armful, and the
wedding-ring makes such a hollow on her finger,
that one might think it would be difficult to get
off.

The every-day married lady is commonly reported
to be selfish; but this is a mistake. At
least her selfishness embraces the whole family
circle: it has no personality. When the wife
of a poor man, she will sit up half the night
sewing and darning, but not a stitch for herself:
that can be done at any time; but the boys must
go comfortably to school, and the girls look genteel
on the street, and the husband—to think of
Mr. Brown wanting a button on his shirt! She
looks selfish, because her eye is always on her
own, and because she talks of what she is always
thinking about; but how can one be selfish who
is perpetually postponing herself, who dresses the
plainest, eats the coarsest, and sleeps the least
of the family? She never puts herself forward
in company unless her young ladies want backing;
but yet she never feels herself overlooked,
for every word, every glance bestowed upon
them, is communicated electrically to her. She
is, indeed, in such perfect rapport with the concern,
that it is no uncommon thing for her to go
home chuckling with amusement, overpowered
with delight, from a party at which she had not
once opened her lips. This is the party which
she pronounces to have “gone off” well. Half-observant
people fancy that the calculation is[Pg 778]
made on the score of the jellies and ice, and
singing and dancing, and so on, and influenced
by a secret comparison with her own achievements;
but she has more depth than they imagine,
and finer sympathies—they don’t understand
her.

Not that the every-day married lady is unsocial—not
at all: all comfortable people are
social; but she is partial to her own class, and
does not care to carry her confidences out of it.
She has several intimate friends whom she is
fond of meeting; but besides that, she is a sort
of freemason in her way, and finds out every-day
people by the word and sign. Rank has very
little to do with this society, as you will find if
you observed her sitting at a cottage door,
where, in purchasing a draught of milk, she has
recognized a sister. If these two every-day
married women had been rocked in the same
cradle, they could not talk more intimately; and,
indeed, they have heavy matters to talk about,
for of all the babies that ever came into this
breathing world, theirs were the most extraordinary
babies. The miracle is, that any of them
are extant after such outrageous measles, and
scarlet fevers, and chicken-poxes—prophesied
of, so to speak, even before their birth, by memorabilia
that might have alarmed Dr. Simson.
The interlocutors part very well pleased with
each other: the cottager proud to find that she
has so much in common with a real lady, and
the lady pronouncing the reflection of herself she
had met with to be a most sensible individual.

Although careless in this instance of the circumstance
of rank, the every-day married lady
has but little sympathy with the class of domestic
servants. She looks upon her servants, in
fact, as in some sort her natural enemies, and
her life may therefore be said to be passed at
the best in a state of armed neutrality. She
commonly proceeds on the allowance system;
and this is the best way, as it prevents so many
sickening apprehensions touching that leg of
mutton. Indeed the appetite of servants is a
constant puzzle to her: she can not make it out.
She has a sharp eye, too, upon the policeman,
and wonders what on earth he always looks
down her area for. As for followers, that is
quite out of the question. Servants stay long
enough upon their errands to talk to all the men
and women in the parish; and the idea of having
an acquaintance now and then besides—more
especially of the male sex—tramping into the
kitchen to see them, is wildly unnatural. She
tells of a sailor whom she once detected sitting
in the coolest possible manner by the fireside.
When she appeared, the man rose up and bowed—and
then sat down again. Think of that!
The artful girl said he was her brother!—and
here all the every-day married ladies in the
company laugh bitterly. Since that time she
has been haunted by a sailor, and smells tar in
all sorts of places.

If she ever has a passable servant, whom she
is able to keep for a reasonable number of years,
she gets gradually attached to her, and pets and
coddles her. Betty is a standing testimony to
her nice discrimination, and a perpetual premium
on her successful rearing of servants. But alas!
the end of it all is, that the respectable creature
gets married to the green grocer, and leaves her
indulgent mistress: a striking proof of the heartlessness
and ingratitude of the whole tribe! If
it is not marriage, however, that calls her away,
but bad health; if she goes home unwell, or is
carried to the infirmary—what then? Why,
then, we are sorry to say, she passes utterly
away from the observation and memory of the
every-day married lady. This may be reckoned
a bad trait in her character; and yet it is in
some degree allied to the great virtue of her
life. Servants are the evil principle in her
household, which it is her business to combat
and hold in obedience. A very large proportion
of her time is spent in this virtuous warfare;
and success on her part ought to be considered
deserving of the gratitude of the vanquished,
without imposing burdens upon the victor.

The every-day married lady is the inventor
of a thing which few foreign nations have as
yet adopted either in their houses or languages.
This thing is Comfort. The word can not well
be defined, the items that enter into its composition
being so numerous, that a description would
read like a catalogue. We all understand, however,
what it means, although few of us are
sensible of the source of the enjoyment. A
widower has very little comfort, and a bachelor
none at all; while a married man—provided his
wife be an every-day married lady—enjoys it in
perfection. But he enjoys it unconsciously, and
therefore ungratefully: it is a thing of course—a
necessary, a right, of the want of which he
complains without being distinctly sensible of
its presence. Even when it acquires sufficient
intensity to arrest his attention, when his features
and his heart soften, and he looks round with a
half smile on his face, and says, “This is comfort!”
it never occurs to him to inquire where
it all comes from. His every-day wife is sitting
quietly in the corner: it was not she who lighted
the fire, or dressed the dinner, or drew the curtains,
and it never occurs to him to think that
all these, and a hundred other circumstances of
the moment, owe their virtue to her spiriting,
and that the comfort which enriches the atmosphere,
which sparkles in the embers, which
broods in the shadowy parts of the room, which
glows in his own full heart, emanates from her,
and encircles her like an aureola. We have
suggested, on a former occasion, that our conventional
notions of the sex, in its gentle, modest,
and retiring characteristics, are derived from the
every-day young lady; and in like manner we
venture to opine that the every-day married lady
is the English wife of foreigners and moralists.
Thus she is a national character, and a personage
of history; and yet there she sits all the while
in that corner, knitting something or other, and
thinking to herself that she had surely smelt a
puff of tar as she was passing the pantry.

The curious thing is, that the dispenser of[Pg 779]
comfort can do with a very small share of it
herself. When her husband does not dine at
home, it is surprising what odds and ends are
sufficient to make up the dinner. Perhaps the
best part of it is a large slice of bread-and-butter;
for it is wasting the servants’ time to make
them cook when there is nobody to be at the
table. But she makes up for this at tea: that
is a comfortable meal for the every-day married
lady. The husband, a matter-of-fact, impassive
fellow, swallows down his two or three cups in
utter unconsciousness of the poetry of the occasion;
while the wife pauses on every sip, drinks
in the aroma as well as the infusion, fills slowly
and lingeringly out, and creams and sugars as
if her hands dallied over a labor of love. With
her daughters, in the mean time, grown up, or
even half-grown up, she exchanges words and
looks of motherly and masonic intelligence: she
is moulding them to comfort, initiating them in
every-dayism; and as their heads bend companionably
toward each other, you see at a
glance that the girls will do honor to their
breeding. The husband calls this “dawdling,”
and already begins to fret. Let him: he knows
nothing about it.

It is surprising the affection of the daughters
for their every-day mother. Not that the sentiment
is steady and uniform in its expression, for
sometimes one might suppose mamma to be forgotten,
or at least considered only as a daily
necessary not requiring any special notice. But
wait till a grief comes, and mark to what bosom
the panting girl flies for refuge and comfort;
see with what abandon she flings her arms round
that maternal neck, and with what a passionate
burst the hitherto repressed tears gush forth.
This is something more than habit, something
more than filial trust. There are more senses
than five in human nature—or seven either:
there is a fine and subtle link between these
two beings—a common atmosphere of thought
and feeling, impalpable and imperceptible, yet
necessary to the souls of both. If you doubt it—if
you doubt that there is a moral attraction
in the every-day married lady, irrespective of
blood-affinity, carry your view forward to another
generation, and interrogate those witnesses
who are never mistaken in character, and who
never give false testimony—little children. They
dote on their every-day grandmamma. Their
natures, not yet seared and hardened by the
world, understand hers; and with something
of the fresh perfume of Eden about them still,
they recognize instinctively those blessed souls
to whom God has given to love little children.

This is farther shown when the every-day
married lady dies. What is there in the character
we have drawn to account for the shock
the whole family receives? The husband feels
as if a thunder-cloud had fallen, and gathered,
and blackened upon his heart, through which
he could never again see the sun. The grown-up
children, especially the females, are distracted;
“their purposes are broken off;” they desire to
have nothing more to do with the world: they
lament as those who will not be comforted.
Even common acquaintances look round them,
when they enter the house, with uneasiness and
anxiety—

And so she passes away—this every-day married
lady—leaving memorials of her commonplace
existence every where throughout the
circle in which she lived, moved, and had her
being, and after having stamped herself permanently
upon the constitution, both moral and
physical, of her descendants.

ANECDOTE OF A SINGER.

Signora Grassini, the great Italian singer,
died a few months since at Milan. She
was distinguished not only for her musical
talents, but also for her beauty and powers of
theatrical expression. One evening in 1810,
she and Signor Crescentini performed together
at the Tuileries, and sang in “Romeo and
Juliet.” At the admirable scene in the third
act, the Emperor Napoleon applauded vociferously,
and Talma, the great tragedian, who
was among the audience, wept with emotion.
After the performance was ended, the Emperor
conferred the decoration of a high order on
Crescentini, and sent Grassini a scrap of paper,
on which was written, “Good for 20,000 livres.—Napoleon.“

“Twenty thousand francs!” said one of her
friends—”the sum is a large one.”

“It will serve as a dowry for one of my
little nieces,” replied Grassini quietly.

Indeed few persons were ever more generous,
tender, and considerate toward their family than
this great singer.

Many years afterward, when the Empire had
crumbled into dust, carrying with it in its fall,
among other things, the rich pension of Signora
Grassini, she happened to be at Bologna. There
another of her nieces was for the first time
presented to her, with a request that she would
do something for her young relative. The little
girl was extremely pretty, but not, her friends
thought, fitted for the stage, as her voice was a
feeble contralto. Her aunt asked her to sing;
and when the timid voice had sounded a few
notes, “Dear child,” said Grassini, embracing
her, “you will not want me to assist you.
Those who called your voice a contralto were
ignorant of music. You have one of the finest
sopranos in the world, and will far excel me as
a singer. Take courage, and work hard, my
love: your throat will win a shower of gold.”
The young girl did not disappoint her aunt’s
prediction. She still lives, and her name is
Giulia Grisi.

[Pg 780]

[From Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal.]

WHEN THE SUMMER COMES.

I once knew a little boy, a little child of
three years old; one of those bright creatures
whose fair loveliness seems more of heaven
than of earth—even at a passing glimpse
stirring our hearts, and filling them with purer
and holier thought. But this, the little Francie,
was more of a cherub than an angel,—as we
picture them—with his gladsome hazel eyes,
his dazzling fairness, his clustering golden hair,
and his almost winged step. Such he was, at
least, until sickness laid its heavy hand on him;
then, indeed, when, after days of burning, wasting
fever—hours of weary restlessness—the
little hand at last lay motionless outside the
scarcely whiter coverlet of his tiny bed, the
fair, still head, pressed down upon the pillow,
and the pale face gazing with the silent wonder
of returning consciousness on the anxious ones
around it; then, indeed, a bright yet pitying
look would flit across it, or dwell in the earnest
eyes—a look such as we assign to angels in our
dreams, when some fond fancy seems to bring
them near us, weeping for mortal griefs beyond
their remedy.

It was a strange sickness for one so young—the
struggle of typhus fever with a baby frame;
but life and youth obtained the victory; and
quicker even than hope could venture to expect,
the pulses rallied, the cheeks grew round and
rosy, and the little wasted limbs filled up again.
Health was restored—health, but not strength:
we thought this for a while. We did not wonder
that the weakened limbs refused their office,
and still we waited on in hope, until days, and
even weeks, passed by: then it was found that
the complaint had left its bitter sting, and little
Francie could not walk a step, or even stand.

Many and tedious and painful were the remedies
resorted to; yet the brave little heart bore
stoutly up, with that wonderful fortitude, almost
heroism, which all who have watched by suffering
childhood, when the tractable spirit bends
to its early discipline, must at some time or
other have remarked. Francie’s fortitude might
have afforded an example to many; but a dearer
lesson was given in the hopeful spirit with
which the little fellow himself noted the effect
of each distressing remedy, marking each stage
of progress, and showing off with eager gladness
every step attained, from the first creeping
on the hands and knees, to the tiptoe journey
round the room, holding on by chairs and tables;
then to the clinging to some loving hand; and
then, at last, the graceful balancing of his light
body, until he stood quite erect alone, and so
moved slowly on.

It was in autumn this illness seized on the
little one, just when the leaves were turning,
and the orchard fruits becoming ripe. His
nurse attributed it all to his sitting on a grassy
bank at play on one of those uncertain autumn
days; but he, in his childish way, always maintained
“It was Francie himself—eating red
berries in the holly bower.” However this
may have been, the season and the time seemed
indelibly impressed upon his mind. In all his
long confinement to the house, his thoughts
continually turned to outward objects, to the
external face of nature and the season’s change,
and evermore his little word of hope was this,
“When the summer comes!”

He kept it up throughout the long winter,
and the bleak cold spring. A fairy little carriage
had been provided for him, in which, well
wrapped up from the cold, and resting on soft
cushions, he was lightly drawn along by a servant,
to his own great delight, and the admiration
of many a young beholder. But when any
one—attempting to reconcile him the better to
his position—expatiated on the beauty or comfort
of his new acquisition, his eager look and
word would show how far he went beyond it,
as, quickly interrupting, he would exclaim,
“Wait till the summer comes—then Francie
will walk again!”

During the winter there was a fearful storm,
it shook the windows, moaned in the old trees,
and howled down the chimneys with a most
menacing voice. Older hearts than Francie’s
quailed that night, and he, unable to sleep, lay
listening to it all—quiet, but asking many a
question, as his excited fancy formed similitudes
to the sounds. One time it was poor little
children cruelly turned out, and wailing; then
something trilling, with its last hoarse cry; then
wolves and bears, from far-off other lands. But
all the while Francie knew he was snug and
safe himself: no fears disturbed him, whatever
the noise may have done. Throughout the whole
of it he carried his one steadfast hope, and, in
the morning telling of it all, with all his marvelous
thoughts, he finished his relation with
the never-failing word of comfort, “Ah! there
shall be no loud wind, no waking nights, when
once the summer comes!”

The summer came with its glad birds and
flowers, its balmy air; and who can paint the
exquisite delight of the suffering child that had
waited for it so long? Living almost continually
in the open air he seemed to expect fresh
health and strength from each reviving breath
he drew, and every day would deem himself
capable of some greater effort, as if to prove
that his expectation had not been in vain.

One lovely day he and his little playfellows
were in a group amusing themselves in part of
the garden, when some friends passed through.
Francie, longing to show how much he could
do, entreated hard to be taken with them “along
the walk, just to the holly bower.” His request
was granted, and on he did walk; quick at first,
then slowly slower: but still upheld by his
strong faith in the summer’s genial influence,
he would not rest in any of the offered arms,
though the fitful color went and came, and the
pauses grew more and more frequent. No,
with a heavy sigh he admitted, “‘Tis a very,
very long walk now; but Francie must not be
tired: sure the summer is come.” And so,[Pg 781]
determined not to admit fatigue in the face of
the season’s bright proofs around him, he succeeded
in accomplishing his little task at last.