The Project Gutenberg eBook of Household words, no. 330, July 19, 1856
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Title: Household words, no. 330, July 19, 1856
A weekly journal
Author: Charles Dickens
Release date: November 27, 2025 [eBook #77354]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Office, 1856
Credits: Ed Foster and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOUSEHOLD WORDS, NO. 330, JULY 19, 1856 ***
“_Familiar in their Mouths as HOUSEHOLD WORDS._”--SHAKESPEARE.
HOUSEHOLD WORDS.
A WEEKLY JOURNAL.
CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.
N^o. 330.] SATURDAY, JULY 19, 1856. {PRICE 2_d._
{STAMPED 3_d._
TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE DIARY OF ANNE RODWAY.
BIRD HISTORY.
RHINE-LAND.
MILVERSTON WORTHIES.
SCOTCH COAST FOLK.
CHIP.
CHARLES THE FIFTH’S GLOVE.
THE DIARY OF ANNE RODWAY.
IN TWO CHAPTERS. CHAPTER THE FIRST.
March 3rd, 1840. A long letter to-day from Robert, which surprised
and vexed and fluttered me so, that I have been sadly behind-hand
with my work ever since. He writes in worse spirits than last time,
and absolutely declares that he is poorer even than when he went to
America, and that he has made up his mind to come home to London. How
happy I should be at this news, if he only returned to me a prosperous
man! As it is, though I love him dearly, I cannot look forward to the
meeting him again, disappointed and broken down and poorer than ever,
without a feeling almost of dread for both of us. I was twenty-six
last birthday and he was thirty-three; and there seems less chance now
than ever of our being married. It is all I can do to keep myself by
my needle; and his prospects, since he failed in the small stationery
business three years ago, are worse, if possible, than mine. Not that
I mind so much for myself; women, in all ways of life, and especially
in my dressmaking way, learn, I think, to be more patient than men.
What I dread is Robert’s despondency, and the hard struggle he will
have in this cruel city to get his bread--let alone making money enough
to marry me. So little as poor people want to set up in housekeeping
and be happy together, it seems hard that they can’t get it when they
are honest and hearty, and willing to work. The clergyman said in his
sermon, last Sunday evening, that all things were ordered for the best,
and we are all put into the stations in life that are properest for us.
I suppose he was right, being a very clever gentleman who fills the
church to crowding; but I think I should have understood him better
if I had not been very hungry at the time, in consequence of my own
station in life being nothing but Plain Needlewoman.
March 4th. Mary Mallinson came down to my room to take a cup of tea
with me. I read her bits of Robert’s letter, to show her that if she
has her troubles, I have mine too; but I could not succeed in cheering
her. She says she is born to misfortune, and that, as long back as
she can remember, she has never had the least morsel of luck to be
thankful for. I told her to go and look in my glass, and to say if
she had nothing to be thankful for then; for Mary is a very pretty
girl, and would look still prettier if she could be more cheerful and
dress neater. However, my compliment did no good. She rattled her spoon
impatiently in her tea-cup, and said, “If I was only as good a hand at
needlework as you are, Anne, I would change faces with the ugliest girl
in London.” “Not you!” says I, laughing. She looked at me for a moment,
and shook her head, and was out of the room before I could get up and
stop her. She always runs off in that way when she is going to cry,
having a kind of pride about letting other people see her in tears.
March 5th.--A fright about Mary. I had not seen her all day, as she
does not work at the same place where I do; and in the evening she
never came down to have tea with me, or sent me word to go to her. So
just before I went to bed I ran up-stairs to say good-night. She did
not answer when I knocked; and when I stepped softly into the room I
saw her in bed, asleep, with her work not half done, lying about the
room in the untidiest way. There was nothing remarkable in that, and I
was just going away on tip-toe, when a tiny bottle and wine-glass on
the chair by her bedside caught my eye. I thought she was ill and had
been taking physic, and looked at the bottle. It was marked in large
letters, “Laudanum--Poison.” My heart gave a jump as if it was going to
fly out of me. I laid hold of her with both hands, and shook her with
all my might. She was sleeping heavily, and woke slowly, as it seemed
to me--but still she did wake. I tried to pull her out of bed, having
heard that people ought to be always walked up and down when they have
taken laudanum; but she resisted, and pushed me away violently.
“Anne!” says she in a fright. “For gracious sake, what’s come to you!
Are you out of your senses?”
“O, Mary! Mary!” says I, holding up the bottle before her, “If I hadn’t
come in when I did----” And I laid hold of her to shake her again.
She looked puzzled at me for a moment--then smiled (the first time I
had seen her do so for many a long day)--then put her arms round my
neck.
“Don’t be frightened about me, Anne,” she says, “I am not worth it, and
there is no need.”
“No need!” says I, out of breath. “No need, when the bottle has got
Poison marked on it!”
“Poison, dear, if you take it all,” says Mary looking at me very
tenderly; “and a night’s rest if you only take a little.”
I watch her for a moment; doubtful whether I ought to believe what she
said, or to alarm the house. But there was no sleepiness in her eyes,
and nothing drowsy in her voice; and she sat up in bed quite easily
without anything to support her.
“You have given me a dreadful fright, Mary,” says I, sitting down by
her in the chair, and beginning, by this time, to feel rather faint
after being startled so.
She jumped out of bed to get me a drop of water; and kissed me, and
said how sorry she was, and how undeserving of so much interest being
taken in her. At the same time, she tried to possess herself of the
laudanum-bottle which I still kept cuddled up tight in my own hands.
“No,” says I. “You have got into a low-spirited despairing way. I won’t
trust you with it.”
“I am afraid I can’t do without it,” says Mary, in her usual quiet,
hopeless voice. “What with work that I can’t get through as I ought,
and troubles that I can’t help thinking of, sleep won’t come to me
unless I take a few drops out of that bottle. Don’t keep it away from
me, Anne; it’s the only thing in the world that makes me forget myself.”
“Forget yourself!” says I. “You have no right to talk in that way,
at your age. There’s something horrible in the notion of a girl of
eighteen sleeping with a bottle of laudanum by her bedside every night.
We all of us have our troubles. Haven’t I got mine?”
“You can do twice the work I can, twice as well as me,” says Mary. “You
are never scolded and rated at for awkwardness with your needle; and I
always am. You can pay for your room every week; and I am three weeks
in debt for mine.”
“A little more practice,” says I, “and a little more courage, and you
will soon do better. You have got all your life before you--”
“I wish I was at the end of it,” says she, breaking in. “I’m alone in
the world, and my life’s no good to me.”
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself for saying so,” says I. “Haven’t
you got me for a friend. Didn’t I take a fancy to you when first you
left your stepmother, and came to lodge in this house? And haven’t I
been sisters with you ever since? Suppose you are alone in the world,
am I much better off? I’m an orphan, like you. I’ve almost as many
things in pawn as you; and, if your pockets are empty, mine have only
got nine-pence in them, to last me for all the rest of the week.”
“Your father and mother were honest people,” says Mary, obstinately.
“My mother ran away from home, and died in a hospital. My father was
always drunk, and always beating me. My stepmother is as good as dead,
for all she cares about me. My only brother is thousands of miles away
in foreign parts, and never writes to me, and never helps me with a
farthing. My sweetheart--”
She stopped, and the red flew into her face. I knew, if she went on
that way, she would only get to the saddest part of her sad story, and
give both herself and me unnecessary pain.
“My sweetheart is too poor to marry me, Mary,” I said. “So I’m not so
much to be envied, even there. But let’s give over disputing which is
worst off. Lie down in bed, and let me tuck you up. I’ll put a stitch
or two into that work of yours while you go to sleep.”
Instead of doing what I told her, she burst out crying (being very like
a child in some of her ways), and hugged me so tight round the neck,
that she quite hurt me. I let her go on, till she had worn herself out,
and was obliged to lie down. Even then, her last few words, before she
dropped off to sleep, were such as I was half-sorry, half-frightened,
to hear.
“I won’t plague you long, Anne,” she said. “I haven’t courage to go
out of the world as you seem to fear I shall. But I began my life
wretchedly, and wretchedly I am sentenced to end it.”
It was of no use lecturing her again, for she closed her eyes. I tucked
her up as neatly as I could, and put her petticoat over her; for the
bed-clothes were scanty, and her hands felt cold. She looked so pretty
and delicate as she fell asleep, that it quite made my heart ache
to see her, after such talk as we had held together. I just waited
long enough to be quite sure that she was in the land of dreams; then
emptied the horrible laudanum-bottle into the grate, took up her
half-done work, and, going out softly, left her for that night.
March 6th. Sent off a long letter to Robert, begging and entreating
him not to be so down-hearted, and not to leave America without
making another effort. I told him I could bear any trial except the
wretchedness of seeing him come back a helpless, broken-down man,
trying uselessly to begin life again, when too old for a change. It
was not till after I had posted my own letter, and read over parts of
Robert’s again, that the suspicion suddenly floated across me, for the
first time, that he might have sailed for England immediately after
writing to me. There were expressions in the letter which seemed to
indicate that he had some such headlong project in his mind. And
yet, surely if it were so, I ought to have noticed them at the first
reading. I can only hope I am wrong in my present interpretation of
much of what he has written to me--hope it earnestly for both our sakes.
This has been a doleful day for me. I have been uneasy about Robert,
and uneasy about Mary. My mind is haunted by those last words of hers:
“I began my life wretchedly, and wretchedly I am sentenced to end it.”
Her usual melancholy way of talking never produced the same impression
on me that I feel now. Perhaps the discovery of the laudanum-bottle is
the cause of this. I would give many a hard day’s work to know what to
do for Mary’s good. My heart warmed to her when we first met in the
same lodging-house, two years ago; and, although I am not one of the
over-affectionate sort myself, I feel as if I could go to the world’s
end to serve that girl. Yet, strange to say, if I was asked why I was
so fond of her, I don’t think I should know how to answer the question.
March 7th. I am almost ashamed to write it down, even in this journal,
which no eyes but mine ever look on; yet I must honestly confess to
myself, that here I am, at nearly one in the morning, sitting up in
a state of serious uneasiness, because Mary has not yet come home. I
walked with her, this morning, to the place where she works, and tried
to lead her into talking of the relations she has got who are still
alive. My motive in doing this was to see if she dropped anything
in the course of conversation which might suggest a way of helping
her interests with those who are bound to give her all reasonable
assistance. But the little I could get her to say to me led to nothing.
Instead of answering my questions about her stepmother and her brother,
she persisted at first, in the strangest way, in talking of her father,
who was dead and gone, and of one Noah Truscott, who had been the
worst of all the bad friends he had, and had taught him to drink and
game. When I did get her to speak of her brother, she only knew that
he had gone out to a place called Assam, where they grew tea. How he
was doing, or whether he was there still, she did not seem to know,
never having heard a word from him for years and years past. As for her
stepmother, Mary, not unnaturally, flew into a passion the moment I
spoke of her. She keeps an eating-house at Hammersmith, and could have
given Mary good employment in it; but she seems always to have hated
her, and to have made her life so wretched with abuse and ill-usage,
that she had no refuge left but to go away from home, and do her best
to make a living for herself. Her husband (Mary’s father) appears to
have behaved badly to her; and, after his death, she took the wicked
course of revenging herself on her step-daughter. I felt, after this,
that it was impossible Mary could go back, and that it was the hard
necessity of her position, as it is of mine, that she should struggle
on to make a decent livelihood without assistance from any of her
relations. I confessed as much as this to her; but I added that I would
try to get her employment with the persons for whom I work, who pay
higher wages, and show a little more indulgence to those under them,
than the people to whom she is now obliged to look for support. I spoke
much more confidently than I felt, about being able to do this; and
left her, as I thought, in better spirits than usual. She promised to
be back to-night to tea, at nine o’clock, and now it is nearly one in
the morning, and she is not home yet. If it was any other girl I should
not feel uneasy, for I should make up my mind that there was extra
work to be done in a hurry, and that they were keeping her late, and I
should go to bed. But Mary is so unfortunate in everything that happens
to her, and her own melancholy talk about herself keeps hanging on my
mind so, that I have fears on her account which would not distress me
about any one else. It seems inexcusably silly to think such a thing,
much more to write it down; but I have a kind of nervous dread upon me
that some accident--
What does that loud knocking at the street door mean? And those voices
and heavy footsteps outside? Some lodger who has lost his key, I
suppose, And yet, my heart----What a coward I have become all of a
sudden!
More knocking and louder voices. I must run to the door and see what it
is. O, Mary! Mary! I hope I am not going to have another fright about
you; but I feel sadly like it.
March 8th.
March 9th.
March 10th.
March 11th. O, me! all the troubles I have ever had in my life are as
nothing to the trouble I am in now. For three days I have not been able
to write a single line in this journal, which I have kept so regularly,
ever since I was a girl. For three days I have not once thought of
Robert--I, who am always thinking of him at other times. My poor, dear,
unhappy Mary, the worst I feared for you on that night when I sat up
alone was far below the dreadful calamity that has really happened. How
can I write about it, with my eyes full of tears and my hand all of a
tremble? I don’t even know why I am sitting down at my desk now, unless
it is habit that keeps me to my old everyday task, in spite of all the
grief and fear which seem to unfit me entirely for performing it.
The people of the house were asleep and lazy on that dreadful night,
and I was the first to open the door. Never, never, could I describe
in writing, or even say in plain talk, though it is so much easier,
what I felt when I saw two policemen come in, carrying between them
what seemed to me to be a dead girl, and that girl Mary! I caught hold
of her and gave a scream that must have alarmed the whole house; for,
frightened people came crowding down-stairs in their night-dresses.
There was a dreadful confusion and noise of loud talking, but I heard
nothing, and saw nothing, till I had got her into my room, and laid on
my bed. I stooped down, frantic-like, to kiss her, and saw an awful
mark of a blow on her left temple, and felt, at the same time, a feeble
flutter of her breath on my cheek. The discovery that she was not dead
seemed to give me back my senses again. I told one of the policemen
where the nearest doctor was to be found, and sat down by the bedside
while he was gone, and bathed her poor head with cold water. She never
opened her eyes, or moved, or spoke; but she breathed, and that was
enough for me, because it was enough for life.
The policeman left in the room was a big, thick-voiced, pompous man,
with a horrible unfeeling pleasure in hearing himself talk before an
assembly of frightened, silent people. He told us how he had found her,
as if he had been telling a story in a taproom, and began with saying,
“I don’t think the young woman was drunk.” Drunk! My Mary, who might
have been a born lady for all the spirits she ever touched--drunk! I
could have struck the man for uttering the word, with her lying, poor
suffering angel, so white and still and helpless before him. As it
was, I gave him a look; but he was too stupid to understand it, and
went droning on, saying the same thing over and over again in the same
words. And yet the story of how they found her was, like all the sad
stories I have ever heard told in real life, so very, very short. They
had just seen her lying along on the kerb-stone, a few streets off, and
had taken her to the station-house. There she had been searched, and
one of my cards, that I give to ladies who promise me employment, had
been found in her pocket, and so they had brought her to our house.
This was all the man really had to tell. There was nobody near her when
she was found, and no evidence to show how the blow on her temple had
been inflicted.
What a time it was before the doctor came, and how dreadful to hear him
say, after he had looked at her, that he was afraid all the medical men
in the world could be of no use here! He could not get her to swallow
anything; and the more he tried to bring her back to her senses, the
less chance there seemed of his succeeding. He examined the blow on her
temple, and said he thought she must have fallen down in a fit of some
sort, and struck her head against the pavement, and so have given her
brain what he was afraid was a fatal shake. I asked what was to be done
if she showed any return to sense in the night. He said, “Send for me
directly;” and stopped for a little while afterwards stroking her head
gently with his hand, and whispering to himself, “Poor girl, so young
and so pretty!” I had felt, some minutes before, as if I could have
struck the policeman; and I felt now as if I could have thrown my arms
round the doctor’s neck and kissed him. I did put out my hand, when he
took up his hat, and he shook it in the friendliest way. “Don’t hope,
my dear,” he said, and went out.
The rest of the lodgers followed him, all silent and shocked, except
the inhuman wretch who owns the house, and lives in idleness on the
high rents he wrings from poor people like us. “She’s three weeks in my
debt,” says he, with a frown and an oath. “Where the devil is my money
to come from now?” Brute! brute!
I had a long cry alone with her that seemed to ease my heart a little.
She was not the least changed for the better when I had wiped away
the tears, and could see her clearly again. I took up her right hand,
which lay nearest to me. It was tight clenched. I tried to unclasp the
fingers, and succeeded after a little time. Something dark fell out of
the palm of her hand as I straightened it. I picked the thing up, and
smoothed it out, and saw that it was an end of a man’s cravat.
A very old, rotten, dingy strip of black silk, with thin lilac lines,
all blurred and deadened with dirt, running across and across the stuff
in a sort of trellis-work pattern. The small end of the cravat was
hemmed in the usual way, but the other end was all jagged, as if the
morsel then in my hands had been torn off violently from the rest of
the stuff. A chill ran all over me as I looked at it; for that poor,
stained, crumpled end of a cravat seemed to be saying to me, as though
it had been in plain words, “If she dies, she has come to her death by
foul means, and I am the witness of it.”
I had been frightened enough before, lest she should die suddenly
and quietly without my knowing it, while we were alone together; but
I got into a perfect agony now for fear this last worst affliction
should take me by surprise. I don’t suppose five minutes passed all
that woeful night through, without my getting up and putting my cheek
close to her mouth, to feel if the faint breaths still fluttered out
of it. They came and went just the same as at first, though the fright
I was in often made me fancy they were stilled for ever. Just as the
church clocks were striking four, I was startled by seeing the room
door open. It was only Dusty Sal (as they call her in the house) the
maid-of-all-work. She was wrapped up in the blanket off her bed; her
hair was all tumbled over her face; and her eyes were heavy with sleep,
as she came up to the bedside where I was sitting.
“I’ve two hours good before I begin to work,” says she, in her hoarse,
drowsy voice, “and I’ve come to sit up and take my turn at watching
her. You lay down and get some sleep on the rug. Here’s my blanket for
you--I don’t mind the cold--it will keep me awake.”
“You are very kind--very, very kind and thoughtful, Sally,” says I,
“but I am too wretched in my mind to want sleep, or rest, or to do
anything but wait where I am, and try and hope for the best.”
“Then I’ll wait, too,” says Sally. “I must do something; if there’s
nothing to do but waiting, I’ll wait.”
And she sat down opposite me at the foot of the bed, and drew the
blanket close round her with a shiver.
“After working so hard as you do, I’m sure you must want all the little
rest you can get,” says I.
“Excepting only you,” says Sally, putting her heavy arm very clumsily,
but very gently at the same time, round Mary’s feet, and looking hard
at the pale, still face on the pillow. “Excepting you, she’s the only
soul in this house as never swore at me, or give me a hard word that
I can remember. When you made puddings on Sundays, and give her half,
she always give me a bit. The rest of ’em calls me Dusty Sal. Excepting
only you, again, she always called me Sally, as if she knowed me in a
friendly way. I ain’t no good here, but I ain’t no harm neither; and I
shall take my turn at the sitting up--that’s what I shall do!”
She nestled her head down close at Mary’s feet as she spoke those
words, and said no more. I once or twice thought she had fallen asleep,
but whenever I looked at her, her heavy eyes were always wide open.
She never changed her position an inch till the church clocks struck
six; then she gave one little squeeze to Mary’s feet with her arm, and
shuffled out of the room without a word. A minute or two after, I heard
her down below, lighting the kitchen fire just as usual.
A little later, the doctor stepped over before his breakfast time, to
see if there had been any change in the night. He only shook his head
when he looked at her, as if there was no hope. Having nobody else to
consult that I could put trust in, I showed him the end of the cravat,
and told him of the dreadful suspicion that had arisen in my mind, when
I found it in her hand.
“You must keep it carefully, and produce it at the inquest,” he said.
“I don’t know though, that it is likely to lead to anything. The bit
of stuff may have been lying on the pavement near her, and her hand
may have unconsciously clutched it when she fell. Was she subject to
fainting fits?”
“Not more so, sir, than other young girls who are hard-worked and
anxious, and weakly from poor living,” I answered.
“I can’t say that she may not have got that blow from a fall,” the
doctor went on, looking at her temple again. “I can’t say that it
presents any positive appearance of having been inflicted by another
person. It will be important, however, to ascertain what state of
health she was in last night. Have you any idea where she was yesterday
evening?”
I told him where she was employed at work, and said I imagined she must
have been kept there later than usual.
“I shall pass the place this morning,” said the doctor, “in going
my rounds among my patients, and I’ll just step in and make some
inquiries.”
I thanked him, and we parted. Just as he was closing the door, he
looked in again.
“Was she your sister?” he asked.
“No, sir, only my dear friend.”
He said nothing more; but I heard him sigh, as he shut the door softly.
Perhaps he once had a sister of his own, and lost her? Perhaps she was
like Mary in the face?
The doctor was hours gone away. I began to feel unspeakably forlorn
and helpless. So much so, as even to wish selfishly that Robert might
really have sailed from America, and might get to London in time to
assist and console me. No living creature came into the room but Sally.
The first time she brought me some tea; the second and third times she
only looked in to see if there was any change, and glanced her eye
towards the bed. I had never known her so silent before; it seemed
almost as if this dreadful accident had struck her dumb. I ought to
have spoken to her, perhaps, but there was something in her face that
daunted me; and, besides, the fever of anxiety I was in began to dry up
my lips as if they would never be able to shape any words again. I was
still tormented by that frightful apprehension of the past night, that
she would die without my knowing it--die without saying one word to
clear up the awful mystery of this blow, and set the suspicions at rest
for ever which I still felt whenever my eyes fell on the end of the old
cravat.
At last the doctor came back.
“I think you may safely clear your mind of any doubts to which that
bit of stuff may have given rise,” he said. “She was, as you supposed,
detained late by her employers, and she fainted in the work-room. They
most unwisely and unkindly let her go home alone, without giving her
any stimulant, as soon as she came to her senses again. Nothing is
more probable, under these circumstances, than that she should faint
a second time on her way here. A fall on the pavement, without any
friendly arm to break it, might have produced even a worse injury than
the injury we see. I believe that the only ill-usage to which the poor
girl was exposed was the neglect she met with in the work-room.”
“You speak very reasonably, I own, sir,” said I, not yet quite
convinced. “Still, perhaps she may----”
“My poor girl, I told you not to hope,” said the doctor, interrupting
me. He went to Mary, and lifted up her eyelids, and looked at her
eyes while he spoke, then added: “If you still doubt how she came by
that blow, do not encourage the idea that any words of hers will ever
enlighten you. She will never speak again.”
“Not dead! O, sir, don’t say she’s dead!”
“She is dead to pain and sorrow--dead to speech and recognition. There
is more animation in the life of the feeblest insect that flies, than
in the life that is left in her. When you look at her now, try to think
that she is in Heaven. That is the best comfort I can give you, after
telling the hard truth.”
I did not believe him. I could not believe him. So long as she breathed
at all, so long I was resolved to hope. Soon after the doctor was gone,
Sally came in again, and found me listening (if I may call it so) at
Mary’s lips. She went to where my little hand-glass hangs against the
wall, took it down, and gave it to me.
“See if the breath marks it,” she said.
Yes; her breath did mark it, but very faintly. Sally cleaned the
glass with her apron, and gave it back to me. As she did so, she half
stretched out her hand to Mary’s face, but drew it in again suddenly,
as if she was afraid of soiling Mary’s delicate skin with her hard,
horny fingers. Going out, she stopped at the foot of the bed, and
scraped away a little patch of mud that was on one of Mary’s shoes.
“I always used to clean ’em for her,” said Sally, “to save her hands
from getting blacked. May I take ’em off now, and clean ’em again?”
I nodded my head, for my heart was too heavy to speak. Sally took the
shoes off with a slow, awkward tenderness, and went out.
An hour or more must have passed, when, putting the glass over her
lips again, I saw no mark on it. I held it closer and closer. I dulled
it accidentally with my own breath, and cleaned it. I held it over
her again. O, Mary, Mary, the doctor was right! I ought to have only
thought of you in Heaven!
Dead, without a word, without a sign,--without even a look to tell the
true story of the blow that killed her! I could not call to anybody, I
could not cry, I could not so much as put the glass down and give her
a kiss for the last time. I don’t know how long I had sat there with
my eyes burning, and my hands deadly cold, when Sally came in with the
shoes cleaned, and carried carefully in her apron for fear of a soil
touching them. At the sight of that----
I can write no more. My tears drop so fast on the paper that I can see
nothing.
March 12th. She died on the afternoon of the eighth. On the morning
of the ninth, I wrote, as in duty bound, to her stepmother, at
Hammersmith. There was no answer. I wrote again: my letter was returned
to me this morning, unopened. For all that woman cares, Mary might be
buried with a pauper’s funeral. But this shall never be, if I pawn
everything about me, down to the very gown that is on my back. The bare
thought of Mary being buried by the workhouse gave me the spirit to dry
my eyes, and go to the undertaker’s, and tell him how I was placed. I
said, if he would get me an estimate of all that would have to be paid,
from first to last, for the cheapest decent funeral that could be had,
I would undertake to raise the money. He gave me the estimate, written
in this way, like a common bill:
A walking funeral complete 1 13 8
Vestry 0 4 4
Rector 0 4 4
Clerk 0 1 0
Sexton 0 1 0
Beadle 0 1 0
Bell 0 1 0
Six feet of ground 0 2 0
---------
Total £2 8 4
If I had the heart to give any thought to it, I should be inclined to
wish that the Church could afford to do without so many small charges
for burying poor people, to whose friends even shillings are of
consequence. But it is useless to complain; the money must be raised
at once. The charitable doctor--a poor man himself, or he would not be
living in our neighbourhood--has subscribed ten shillings towards the
expenses; and the coroner, when the inquest was over, added five more.
Perhaps others may assist me. If not, I have fortunately clothes and
furniture of my own to pawn. And I must set about parting with them
without delay; for the funeral is to be to-morrow, the thirteenth. The
funeral--Mary’s funeral! It is well that the straits and difficulties I
am in, keep my mind on the stretch. If I had leisure to grieve, where
should I find the courage to face to-morrow?
Thank God, they did not want me at the inquest. The verdict given--with
the doctor, the policeman, and two persons from the place where she
worked, for witnesses--was Accidental Death. The end of the cravat was
produced, and the coroner said that it was certainly enough to suggest
suspicion; but the jury, in the absence of any positive evidence, held
to the doctor’s notion that she had fainted and fallen down, and so
got the blow on her temple. They reproved the people where Mary worked
for letting her go home alone, without so much as a drop of brandy to
support her, after she had fallen into a swoon from exhaustion before
their eyes. The coroner added, on his own account, that he thought the
reproof was thoroughly deserved. After that, the cravat-end was given
back to me, by my own desire; the police saying that they could make
no investigations with such a slight clue to guide them. They may think
so, and the coroner, and doctor, and jury may think so; but, in spite
of all that has passed, I am now more firmly persuaded than ever that
there is some dreadful mystery in connection with that blow on my poor
lost Mary’s temple which has yet to be revealed, and which may come to
be discovered through this very fragment of a cravat that I found in
her hand. I cannot give any good reason for why I think so; but I know
that if I had been one of the jury at the inquest, nothing should have
induced me to consent to such a verdict as Accidental Death.
BIRD HISTORY.
A certain learned physician, named Peter Belon, a native of the town
of Le Mans, the capital of what was then the province of Maine, but is
now the department of the river Sarthe, in France, bethought him that
very little was known in his native country at the time he lived--the
middle of the sixteenth century--of Natural History; and, being moved
by the example of Aristotle (at the trifling distance of nearly
nineteen hundred years) he resolved, having been a great traveller
and eke a great observer (two persons not always united) to give his
fellow-citizens and the world, the benefit of his experience and
opportunities, and take away the reproach which lay like a shadow over
the land.
Prepared by much study for the cultivation of his favourite pursuits,
he left France in the year fifteen hundred and forty-seven, being
at that time twenty-nine years of age, and travelled successively
through Germany, Bohemia, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Palestine, and Asia
Minor, returning to Paris after three years absence with a large
and valuable collection of plants and specimens of natural history,
which he then occupied himself in arranging, preparatory to the
publication of the knowledge he had acquired. The first work which
he produced was a history of strange fishes and serpents, under the
title “De Aquatilibus;” but, tempting as the subject is, I do not at
present intend to examine it, having another of his productions before
me, which (from the fact of its being a borrowed book, and liable,
therefore, to sudden seizure by its owner, who otherwise would never
get it back), more immediately claims my attention.
This coveted volume is the celebrated History of the Nature of Birds,
with their descriptions and lively portraits, taken from Nature, and
written in seven books, and is, perhaps, the principal work on which
is founded Peter Belon’s claim to be considered the father of modern
natural history. In the preface to it he promises--and he keeps his
word far better than might have been expected--that nothing shall
appear in these books which is not perfectly true; there shall be no
false descriptions or portraits of suppositious animals; nothing,
in short, that is not to be found in nature. Appropriate to the
publication of a work on ornithology, Peter Belon caused this volume
to be printed, in the year fifteen hundred and fifty-five, by William
Cavellat, in front of the college of Cambray, in Paris, at the sign
of the Fat Hen (a sure sign that Peter Belon came from Le Mans, a
city famous for its poultry); and that there should be no doubt of
the latter fact, the title-page also bore the living portraiture of
a domestic fowl in very high condition, enclosed within a circle, on
the outer rim of which was inscribed the legend “Gallina in pingui,”
an inscription that need not again be translated. A portrait of Peter
Belon, as he appeared to the justly-admiring world, at the age of
thirty-six, also embellished the volume. The learned physician appears
to have been a man with a good, sensible, honest countenance, wearing a
large Crimean beard, and having a cap on his head, the shape of which,
fortunately, has not yet been adopted for the British army.
Like most other old authors, Peter Belon takes some time before he can
get fairly under weigh. There are, first, the dedication to the most
Christian king--Henry the Second of the name--whose humble scholar the
author declares himself to be. Then follows a homily addressed to the
reader, chiefly for the purpose of assuring him that, in the lively
portraits of the birds which he presents (Ah, could we but reproduce
some of them!), he is not practising on his credulity, but that, such
as he represents them, the fowls are themselves, and that, where he
cannot get an authentic likeness he has refused to invent one.
The royal privilege to publish, sealed with yellow wax--like a bottle
of good old wine--comes next, and finally appear several copies of
verses in praise of the author, by certain of his friends, which
latter had better be skipped, that Peter Belon’s volume, which has in
it a great deal that is worth reading, may unfold its pages for our
gratification. It is not, however, a resumé of the work, or anything
like it, that I intend to make, but simply a dip into it--here and
there--extending some of the quaint fancies, curious digressions, and
sound opinions with which it is interspersed, always desiring our
reader to bear in mind that the author was a physician as well as a
naturalist.
A word or two, before he fairly enters on his theme, may be allowed
him to describe the pains he was in the habit of taking to obtain
correct information. “It was my custom,” he says, “during my sojourn
in Padua, to go down the Brenta every Thursday evening, voyaging
all night in order to reach Venice on Friday morning, and to remain
there on Saturday and Sunday, as much for the convenience of seeing
birds as well as fishes; and after having conferred with fowlers and
fishermen, to return from thence on Sunday evening, thus losing no time
by taking the night-boat, and being ready to continue my studies on
Monday morning. During which time, on the aforesaid days of Friday and
Saturday, there was not a single fowler or fisherman who did not bring
to show me every rare creature he had been able to procure.”
Commencing, then, “ab ovo,” Peter Belon discusses the properties of
eggs; but into the processes of fecundation and hatching which he
describes, I do not propose to enter, the gastronomic view of the
question presenting more novelty. After apologising for the puerility
of the subject, he tells us that in his time the French way of eating
eggs (they have six hundred and eighty-five ways now, if the Almanach
des Gourmands speaks sooth) was by breaking them at the small end
and carefully replacing the shell when emptied into the platter;
while the Germans, on the other hand--reminding us of Blefuscu and
Lilliput--opened their eggs at the side and finished by smashing the
shell; in which latter practice, says Belon, they followed the example
of the ancients, who held it a thing of evil augury to leave the shells
unbroken. Belon then proceeds to discourse on the numerous varieties
of eggs, considering those of pigeons, ostriches, pea-hens, geese, and
swans are ill-flavoured and indigestible,--not objecting to the eggs of
the tortoise or turtle,--but giving the preference, like a person of
taste, to those of the domestic fowl, which, he says, “are supposed by
many in France to assist greatly in prolonging life;” and he instances
the case of Pope Paul the Third, who used, with that end in view, to
eat two new-laid eggs for breakfast every morning. As to their shape,
he remarks that long eggs are supposed to be much better eating than
round ones; but without insisting on this point, he has no hesitation
in declaring that all are highly invigorating, as truffles are, and
artichokes, and raw oysters. Artichokes, indeed, were so much esteemed
in Belon’s time, that “no great nobleman feeling himself unwell would
finish his dinner without them,”--eating them by way of dessert. Belon
objects to hard boiled eggs, or such as are too much fried, “on account
of their engendering bad humours,” but upon poached eggs (œufs pochéz)
he looks with considerable favour. In all cases he prefers plain boiled
eggs (time--three minutes and a quarter) to those which are roasted;
notwithstanding the well-known proverb: “There’s wisdom in the roasting
of eggs.” The best way of preserving eggs, he says, is to keep them in
a cool place, bury them in salt, or dip them in brine.
As the chicken issues naturally from the egg, so dining upon the one is
the regular sequence to breakfasting on the other. The younger your
pullet, says Belon, the easier it is of digestion, though he allows you
occasionally to eat an elderly male bird, when prescribed medicinally
(hormis le coq, qui est souvêt pris pour medicine). “Roasted or grilled
fowls are generally the most savoury; those which are boiled furnish
more humid nourishment to the body. The first are eaten hot, the last
cold.” This rule, however, does not, he tells us, always hold good:
“Because, if any one writing on the quality of the flesh of birds,
happened to be in a country where the people fed on a particular
kind not eaten elsewhere, and a male bird already old and tough were
offered him (avenait qu’on luy presentast de quelque oyseau des-ia viel
et endurcy), he ought not to conclude that its flesh is necessarily
fibrous and hard.” With all respect for the opinion of honest Peter
Belon, I should be inclined to think that a tough old cock, whatever
his nation, was somewhat difficult of digestion. I have a very vivid
recollection of a fowl of this sort at a certain hotel in Abbeville,
where nothing else was to be had for dinner, which the waiter assured
me was not to be surpassed in tenderness; a quality he might have
displayed towards his family when alive, but which certainly did not
belong to him after he was roasted. It is, perhaps, on the tolerant
principle of respecting other people’s prejudices (I can account for
Belon’s conclusion no other way), that he does not exclude even birds
of prey from good men’s feasts. “We know by experience,” he observes
(not his own experience, I hope), “what has taken place in Crete, where
the young ones of the vulture which have fallen from their rocky nests
near Voulèsmeni, have been proved at least as good eating as a fine
capon. And although some of the inhabitants (the greater part, I should
imagine) think that the old birds are not good to eat, because they
feed on carrion, the fact is otherwise; for good falconers say that
the hawk, vulture, and falcon are excellent meat, and being roasted
or boiled, like poultry, are found to be well-tasted and tender.
(Fancy a tender vulture!) We constantly see, if any of these birds
kill themselves, or break a limb in hunting game, that the falconers
do not hesitate to dress them for the table.” In Auvergne, he adds,
the peasants of the Limagne, and in the mountains, too, eat the flesh
of the goivan, a species of eagle; so that it may be concluded that
birds of prey, whether old or young, are tender,--an inference which I
presume to doubt. One saving clause Peter Belon has, which has at all
times done good service. If people generally are not in the habit of
eating kites, owls, and so forth, there are some who do: “tastes merely
differ”--(les appetits des hommes ne se ressemblent en aucune manière).
The transition is easy from these delicacies to other less questionable
birds, and the manner of preparing them for the pot or spit; and
brings Peter Belon to what he evidently likes--a good dinner in a
general way. “You may talk,” he says, “of Spaniards, Portuguese,
English, Flemings, Italians, Hungarians, or Germans, but none of them,
in dinner-giving, come up to the French. The latter begin with meats
disguised a thousand ways (mille petits desguisements de chair); and
this first entry, as it is called, consists of what is soft and liquid,
and ought to be sent in hot, such as soups, fricassees, hashes, and
salads”! (Hot salads are a rarity now-a-days). The second course is
roast and boiled, of different kinds of meat, as well of birds as of
terrestrial animals, “it being well understood that no fish is eaten
except on fast-days.” The dinner ends with “cold things, such as
fruits, preparations of milk and sweets.” This is the outline of a
dinner only; but when Peter Belon enters into a detailed bill of fare,
the newspaper report of a Lord Mayor’s dinner pales beside it. A few
of the names of these dishes--as well as they can be translated--are
worth preserving. What do you think of pilgrim capons--lions--made
of the white meat of pullets; wild boar venison with chestnuts;
diamond-pointed jelly; goslings dressed with malvoisie; feet (whose
feet?) with infernal sauce (pieds à la saulce d’enfer); counterfeit
sea-hog; laurelled quails; partridges with capers; veal sausages; hop
salad; chestnut butterflies; golden-backed woodcock pasties; ox-heel
pasties; plumed peacocks; tipsy cake (gasteaux joyeux); little cabbages
all hot (petits chouy tous chaulds); and, amongst other varieties,
pomegranate salad?
In treating of the uses to which birds have been applied, Peter
Belon does not omit divination. It is pretty clear, however, that
he has no faith in the auruspices, though he lets them down gently.
“These soothsayers exercised their mystery in the contemplation of
the inward parts as well of birds as of other animals, when offered
up for sacrifice. The question must then be asked, whether, by this
inspection, they really could foretell the things that were to come,
and if there were any probability, what they promised turning out true?
There can be little doubt that this system of divination had a very
simple origin, beginning by cajoling private persons, and promising
them what they desired (which is the greatest pleasure men can
receive), and afterwards, by investing it with a religious character,
and turning the same to their own profit.” The French soldiers, in
Belon’s time, imitated the Romans so far as to carry the sacred cock
with their baggage when they took the field; but it was for a very
intelligible species of augury,--to know, by his crowing, when the day
was about to break. Belon had much too good sense to credit either the
superstitions of the Romans or those of his own day, and was probably
only restrained by his fear of the Church, from expressing his opinions
too plainly. Passing from divination to sorcery, he says: “Every
contemplative man must have had reason to despise the ignorant people
who believe that sorcerers have the power attributed to them. We have
seen many condemned to death; but all have been either poor idiots or
madmen. Now, of two things, one must happen: that if they do mischief,
it must either be by the employment of some venomous drug put into
the mouth, or otherwise applied, or by invocations. It is not often
that one hears of people of quality being accused of sorcery--only the
poorer sort; and to tell the truth, no man of judgment would apply
his mind to such absurdities. To prevent the common people from doing
so, it is the custom once a-week to prohibit them formally. It may
easily happen that one of this sort, troubled in his wits, should
fancy incredible things, and even acknowledge to having committed
them; but we must set this down to the nature of their disease.” In
this way sensible Peter Belon disposes of the lycanthropists and other
self-created wizards. On the subject of antipathies, however, he
entertains a belief that it is reasonable; as in the case of the fox
and the stork, which are sworn foes, ever since the practical jokes, I
suppose, which we all know they played on each other.
Being himself a physician, Peter Belon enlarges upon the maladies of
birds; but he tells us that, with the exception of falcons, which are
more especially under the care of man, they are their own doctors.
“The pelican, which builds its nest on the ground, finding its young
stung by a serpent, weeps bitterly, and piercing its own breast, gives
its own blood to cure them.” (This is a new reading of the old story).
“Quails, when they are indisposed, swallow the seeds of hellebore;
and starlings take hemlock. The herb chélidoine (celandine, from the
Greek kelidon, a swallow) derives its name from the fact that the
swallow administers the juice of the plant to her young. The stork
physics himself with marjoram. Wood pigeons, ravens, blackbirds, jays
and partridges take laurel; while turtle-doves, pigeons, and cocks
prescribe bird-weed. Ducks and geese eat sage.” (Sage enters largely
into the affair, in combination with onions, when ducks and geese are
eaten). “Cranes and herons employ marsh rushes. Thrushes and many
smaller birds swallow the seeds of the ivy--which would be hurtful
diet for man (qui seroit viande mauvaise à l’homme).” Not much worse,
however, than hellebore or hemlock! But it would seem that the eagle
family are exempt from the ordinary ailments of birds; for, in speaking
of the Chrysaëtos, or great royal eagle, Belon tells us: “Eagles never
change their place of abode, but always return to the same nest. It has
thus been observed that they are long-lived. But becoming old, the beak
grows so long that it becomes bent, and prevents the bird from eating,
so that it dies, not of any malady, or extreme old age, but simply
because it cannot make use of its beak.” I fear this is not one of the
facts derived from Belon’s own observation.
Our fashionable ladies have passion for eider-down; but did they ever
hear that the vulture can supply them with an article quite as soft?
“Their skin,” says our author, “is almost as thick as that of a kid,
and under the throat is a spot about the breadth of a palm, where the
feathers are reddish, like the hair of a calf; and these feathers have
no quills, any more than those on both sides of the neck and under
the wings, where the down is so white that it shines like silk. The
furriers, after removing the large feathers, leave the down, and curry
the skins for mantles, which are worth a sum of money. In France they
use them chiefly to place on the stomach (what we call bosom-friends).
It would scarcely be believed that the vulture’s skin is so stout,
if one had not seen it. Being in Egypt and on the plains of Arabia
Deserta, we have noticed that the vultures are large and numerous, and
the down from a couple of dozen of these would quite suffice for a
large robe. At Cairo, on the Bezestein, where merchandise is exposed
for sale, the traveller may obtain silken dresses lined with the skins
of vultures, both black and white.”
Belon was a great observer of all the birds of prey, and appears to
have taken many notes of their habits while living near the Monts
d’Or, in Auvergne, under the protection of M. Duprat, the Bishop of
Clermont. It was there he learnt the fact about the peasantry eating
the goivan, called also the boudrée, which he thus describes: “There is
not a peasant in the Limagne (a great plain) of Auvergne who does not
know the goivan, and how to capture him with traps baited with frogs,
or with lime, but more commonly with snares. He is taken principally in
the winter, when he is very good to eat, for he is so fat that no other
bird comes near him in that respect. The peasants lard or boil him, and
find his flesh quite as good as that of a hen. This eagle eats rats,
mice, frogs, lizards, snails, caterpillars, and sometimes serpents.”
That there may be no doubt about the last-named viand being food for
eagles, one of Peter Belon’s lively portraitures follows the statement,
in which a goivan is depicted in the act of dining on a serpent,
twisted into a figure of eight (as, well he might be), and a number
of astonished frogs and fishes scurrying away for dear life,--all
save one philosophical member of the tadpole family, who, sitting on
the tumultuous waves of an adjacent ditch, calmly contemplates the
scene. It is observable throughout the plates in Belon’s work that the
smaller quadrupeds endure the infliction of being devoured alive with
far greater resignation than the Reptilia. I have before me at this
moment the portrait of a rabbit, on whose back a buzzard is standing as
if in the act of going to sing, while the long-eared animal on which
he has pounced seems to apprehend his fate no more than if he were a
music-stand. A mouse in the claws of a speckled magpie, puts on, in
another plate, an air of equal indifference.
Amongst the birds of prey known to the French villagers--and to their
cost--is one called by the singular name of White John (Jan le Blanc),
or The Bird of St. Martin,--but why the latter name was bestowed on
it, Belon is at a loss to discover. The first is obvious enough, for
its belly and part of its tail are of spotless white. This fellow is
very daring, and carries off fowls and rabbits from under the eyes of
the owners; he feeds largely, too, upon partridges and all the smaller
birds, so that he is not a Cheap John, at all events. But Belon has
one comfort: White John has a natural antagonist in the Hobby-hawk,
and the way they fight in the air till they tumble entangled to the
ground and are taken, is quite a pleasant thing to see (moult plaisant
à voir). This combat is not depicted; but on the next page there is a
striking delineation of the manner in which a falconer lures a bird
of prey. He does it in this wise: a hawk having caught a partridge,
stands on its back in the air, quietly devouring it, and the cunning
fowler takes this opportunity of approaching with the leg of another
bird in his hand, which he offers on his knees to the hawk, in the
expectation, apparently, that the greedy bird of prey will give up
the whole for a part. Of the share which the falconer’s dog has in
the transaction, I say nothing; because, though in the foreground of
the picture, he is not a quarter the size of the victim partridge. It
must be confessed that Belon’s descriptions are more satisfactory than
the artist’s illustrations. This remark, however, does not apply to
the actual portraits of the birds, which are in most instances very
accurate. Nothing, for instance, can be better done than the Royal
Kite, which some in France call Huo, and others Escoufle. This bird,
being a lover of carrion, is protected; so much so, that “in England a
fine is imposed on those who kill him.” Belon records a pleasant piece
of pastime which this kite affords the infidels:
“The Turks who live at Constantinople take pleasure in throwing lumps
of raw meat into the air, which the kites pounce upon so rapidly that
they seize and carry it off before it can fall to the ground.”
The Venetian nobles amuse themselves differently--not with kites,
but cormorants. When the weather is calm, they go out on the lagoons
in light boots, two or three dozen in company, each boat being rowed
by six men, and pulled very swiftly. Having surrounded the cormorant
(like French huntsmen with a fox, to prevent him from getting away and
giving them a run), he cannot rise in the air (why not?), but dives
under the water, and every time he shows his head above the surface,
the noblemen let fly at him with their cross-bows, till at last he is
thoroughly done up, is half-suffocated, and gives in. “It is a fine
sight to behold this sport (c’est un beau spectacle de voir un tel
deduit), and also is to see a cormorant having caught a tolerably-sized
eel, which he tries to swallow, but has to fight a long time with
it before he can get it down.” The cormorants themselves are, oddly
enough, not thought good eating by the common people, who say of them
that they are “a dish for the devil” (qui voudroit jestoyer le diable,
il luy faudroit doñer de tels oyseaux); but Belon does not think them
so bad as they say (toute fois ne sont si mauvais qu’on crië).
The stork, unfortunately, did not, when Belon flourished, enjoy the
same immunity; for though he admits that the Romans despised them at
table, he says, “now they are looked upon as a royal dish.” He moreover
tells us that the gizzard of a stork is an antidote to poison, and a
remedy against squinting (le gesier de la cigogne est bon contre les
venins et qui en aura mangé ne sera lousche en sa vie)! It appears also
that even the ostrich, which can digest iron, is itself digested by
Libyan gastronomers, who eat the flesh and sell the feathers.
This tendency to discover what birds are most eatable, is manifested
throughout the volume of Peter Belon. Arriving at the noble Alectrion
or Rooster of the United States, he cites the following recipe, from
Dioscorides, for the concoction of cock-broth. “Take a fine strong old
bird, and having properly trussed him, stuff him well with roots of
fern, the seed of chartamus (whatever that may be), salt of mercury,
and soldanella (a purgative sea-weed), and, having sewn him up, boil
him well down.” A potage this, which bears some resemblance to “the
sillakickaby of the ancients,” described in Peregrine Pickle, and, I
should think, nearly as agreeable.
The majority of the birds in Belon’s book are accurately described and
too well-known to afford much opportunity for quoting from what he says
of their forms and habits, but now and then we meet with a rara avis.
Such, for instance is the “Gellinote de bois” (Gelinotte) which, though
still found in the Ardennes, and occasionally a visitor to Monsieurs
Chevet’s shop in the Palais Royal, is rare enough to merit description
at second-hand. What their price may be I know not, but three hundred
years ago they cost two crowns a-piece, and were only seen at the
banquets of princes and the wedding-feasts of great lords. “The
feathers on the back are like those of the woodcock; the breast and
belly white, spotted with black; the neck is like that of a pheasant;
the head and beak resemble a partridge; the tail feathers are black
with white tips, the large wing-feathers variegated like the owl; down
to the feet the legs are feathered like the grouse.” If the gelinotte
combines the flavour as well as the plumage of the birds just mentioned
(omitting the owl) I should say it is worth the price which Monsieur
Chevet puts upon it before he stuffs it with the truffles.
The Vanneau is another bird which, common enough in the marshy
districts of France (particularly in Bourbon Vendée) is, I believe,
unknown in England. It is a wading-bird, and bears some resemblance to
the peacock: hence, its name, corrupted from paonneau to vanneau; but
the peasants call it dinhuit, on account of its cry. It is crested with
five or six long black feathers, and is of changeable hue: in size it
is not much larger than a plover, and is perched on very high red legs.
There is no question about the estimation as a delicacy in which the
vanneau is still held.
Belon has a good deal to say about quails, and the various modes of
catching them. One way is by means of an instrument made of leather
and bone, which, set in motion, utters a sound like the voice of the
female bird, and is called courcaillet, on hearing which the males run
rapidly and are caught in the fowler’s net; but this device is only
effectual during the season of courting. Every one has noticed how
low the quail’s cages are made. Belon says, it is because they are so
given to jumping and excitement that they would destroy themselves were
the cages higher. Of the crested lark (in French, cochevis), he tells
us, on the authority of several writers of antiquity, that when made
into a broth or roasted--like punch--they cure the colic; we all know
what capital pâtés are made of the lark uncrested. We learn that the
woodcock--how admirable is he, too, in a pâté--though called bécasse,
in French, on account of the length of his bill, ought to be designated
“vvitcoc,” that being an English word, which signifies “cock of the
wood,” and corresponds with the Greek term, “xilomita.” Some people,
Belon says, call him Avis cœca (blind bird), because he suffers himself
to be so easily caught, and he gives a sufficiently lively description
of one mode of effecting his capture. It is as follows:--“He who
desires to take the woodcock must put on a cloak and gloves, the
colour of the dead leaves, and conceal his head and shoulders beneath
a (brown) hat, leaving only two small holes to see through. He must
carry in his hands two sticks covered with cloth of the same colour,
about an inch of the ends of which must be of red cloth, and leaning
upon crutches (rather a lame way of proceeding) must advance leisurely
towards the woodcock, stopping when the bird becomes aware of his
approach. When the woodcock moves on he must follow until the bird
stops again without raising its head. The fowler must then strike the
sticks together very quickly (moult bellement) which will so amuse and
absorb the woodcock that its pursuer may take from his girdle a rod,
to which a horsehair noose is attached, and throw the latter round its
neck, for it is one of the stupidest and most foolish birds that are
known.” I should think so, if it allowed itself to be caught by this
tom-foolery.
Of birds which are not stupid, but knavish rather, even to much theft,
Belon relates that the magpie is called Margot (the diminutive of
Margaret, as Charles the First called his beautiful sister, the wife
of Henry of Navarre); and the jay (Richard), each on account of their
cry. Being somewhat skinny, the jay is thought rather a tough morsel
by those who desire to dine upon him; but he himself eats everything
that comes in his way, and is particularly fond of peas--green peas
perhaps--at a guinea a pound. The common people think that the jay is
subject to the falling sickness, nevertheless they eat him when they
find him on the ground. It is, perhaps, a weakness in human nature
which cannot be remedied, the tendency to make a meal of everything
that has animal life. But for this, how severely might we not
animadvert on the gluttony of those who, not remembering their song in
spring, devour thrushes in the autumn: yet, that is the best time to
eat them, for they are then perfectly delicious as you would say, with
me, if you had made a diligence supper on thrushes travelling through
the Ardennes.
But, I fear, if I read any more of Peter Belon’s volume, I shall write
an article on Gastronomy, a thing I had no notion of when I began. Let
me conclude with something more serious than eating--if anything be
more serious: let me lament, with all the world, that so useful a man
as Peter Belon should have been cut off sadly in the prime of his life
and full vigour of his intellect. He was only forty-five years of age
when he was murdered one night as he traversed the Bois de Boulogne on
his way to Paris; whether for the sake of plunder or revenge is not
known.
RHINE-LAND.
We lean’d beneath the purple vine,
In Andernach, the hoary;
And at our elbows ran the Rhine
In rosy twilight glory.
Athwart the Seven-hills far seen
The sun had fail’d to broaden;
Above us stream’d in fading sheen
The highway he had trodden.
His farewell crimson kiss he left
On clouds suffused with blushes:
One star beam’d down the dewberry-cleft
Across the mirror’d flashes.
From cliffs of slate the vintage call’d
In muffled leafage dusky:
And down the river grandly wall’d,
The grape reel’d ripe and husky.
We reach’d entwining hands to seize
The clusters round us glowing:
Our locks were fondled by the breeze
From southern sandhills blowing.
The long-neck’d flask was not unbent,
The globed green glass unemptied;
The god of honest pleasure lent
Young Love his powers, untempted.
Home-friends we pledged; our bridal-maids;
Sweet wishes gaily squander’d:
We wander’d far in faëry glades,
Up golden heights we wander’d.
Like King and Queen in royal bliss,
We paced a realm enchanted,
A realm rose-vista’d, rich from this,
Tho’ not from this transplanted.
For this Rome’s frontier foot endear’d,
Her armèd heel made holy;
And Ages grey as Time’s own beard,
Wreathed it with melancholy.
Old days it has that live in gleams
Of suns for ever setting:
A moth-wing’d splendour, faint as dreams,
That keeps the fancy fretting.
A gorgeous tracing dash’d with gloom,
And delicately dusted:
To grasp it is to spoil its bloom;
’Twas ours because we trusted.
No longer severing our embrace
Was Night a sword between us;
But richest mystery robed in grace
To lock us close, and screen us.
She droopt in stars; she whisper’d fair;
The wooded crags grew dimmer;
The arrow in the lassie’s hair
Glanced by a silver glimmer.
The ruin-rock renew’d its frown,
With terror less transparent,
Tho’ all its ghosts are hunted down,
And all its knights are errant.
The island in the gray expanse,
We watch’d with colour’d longing:
The mighty river’s old romance
Thro’ many channels thronging.
Ah, then, what voice was that which shed
A breathless scene before us:
We heard it, knowing not we heard;
It rose around and o’er us.
It rose around, it thrill’d with life,
And did infuse a spirit
To misty shapes of ancient strife:
Again I seem to hear it!
The voice is clear, the song is wild,
And has a quaint transition;
The voice is of a careless child
Who sings an old tradition.
He sings it witless of his power;
Beside the rushing eddies,
His singing plants the tall white tower
Mid shades of knights and ladies.
Against the glooming of the west
The grey hawk-ruins darken,
And hand in hand, half breast to breast,
Two lovers gaze and hearken.
MILVERSTON WORTHIES.
From his sixth year, my brother Davie manifested undeniable symptoms
of the divine afflatus, but it was not until fifteen that he commenced
his immortal poem, “The Vengeance of Bernardo Caspiato.” He was a
delicate, pretty, fair boy, with a spiritual countenance, a noble brow,
and abundance of silky brown hair; quite the poet to look at, and very
like my dear mother, as we all daily observed. It was expected that
he would cover the name of Cleverboots with a halo of glory: unlike
some families, we were the first to believe in our hero, and the most
constant in our faith in his splendid future. At the epoch referred to,
Davie began to tie his collar with a black ribbon, to wear his white
throat exposed, and his beautiful hair very long; his appetite did not
fail him in private, but at our little réunions he always partook of
dry toast and strong green tea; was very silent, abstracted, and averse
to men’s society: the women petted him, and called him “all soul.” He
was very kind-hearted and sweet-tempered, and rather vain, which was
nothing more than natural, considering how he was flattered.
He had a little room at the top of the house which looked over the town
to Milverston mere, where the immortal poem was commenced. I remember
he began it on a wet evening, and it opened dismally, with a storm; he
had me up there with my plain sewing to listen to the first stanzas;
and he consulted me about one or two difficult rhymes: he was not
sure whether “horror” and “morrow” were correct. I thought not; and,
his birthday falling three days after, I presented him with a rhyming
dictionary. Subsequently, the poem made rapid progress.
Cousin John had just gone up to London to study law, and my father
wished Davie to be articled to Mr. Briggs, the solicitor at Milverston.
This did not chime in with his taste at all; he stated that it was his
wish to follow the profession of letters. We did not quite understand
this at the time. Cousin Jack said it meant that he wanted to be
the idle gentleman. I had my doubts on the matter. Davie brought my
mother over to his way of thinking. “I shall be very poor, but very
happy, mother,” he used to say; “if you put me to anything else, I
shall be miserable and do no good.” So Davie got his own way; and, as
a preparation for his profession of letters, he stayed at home and
finished “Bernardo Caspiato.” It was a splendid work. I have wept over
it often. The heroine having been executed for witchcraft, her lover,
Bernardo, devotes his life to avenge her; and, after committing a
catalogue of murders, ends by disappearing mysteriously in a flash
of blue lightning to rejoin her in heaven. My mother objected to the
morality of the conclusion; but she acknowledged herself, at the same
time, ignorant of the laws and licence of poetry.
With this great work, and some minor pieces of equal if not superior
merit, my brother Davie went up to London on foot, with ten pounds in
his pocket, and seventeen years of experience on his head. Cousin Jack
had taken comfortable lodgings for him at a small baker’s shop, kept by
a widow woman with a daughter named Lucy. The dear lad wrote us word
that he was quite suited, and that, after a few days to look about
him, he should carry his immortal poem to a publisher. His hopes were
sanguine; his visions of fame magnificent.
To our surprise and grief, Bernardo Caspiato was declined with thanks.
Nobody was inclined to publish it unless the author would bear all the
expenses. Davie would not suffer my father to do this--he would earn
money for himself. We wondered how he could do it; but Cousin Jack
lent him a hand, and somebody who had something to do with a newspaper
bought his minor pieces. He lived, at all events, by his own exertions.
At this time, Lucy began to figure in letters to me marked “private.”
It would be impossible to give the whole story as therein developed,
but I will epitomise it as afterwards heard from his own lips.
He fell enthusiastically in love with Lucy, whose beauty he raved about
as ethereal, heavenly, unsophisticated: before I heard of her at all he
was evidently far gone in the tender passion; and Lucy had listened so
often, and with such a graceful interest, to his literary struggles,
that he fancied he had every reason to believe that his affection was
returned. One morning, however, all these sunny hopes were rudely
dispelled. He had seen once or twice a young man of rustic appearance
in the shop, he had also known him to take tea in the back parlour
with Mrs. Lawley and her daughter, without attaching any significance
to his visits. As Davie sat at breakfast on this particular day, this
individual drove to the door in a gig, and was pleasantly received by
the landlady. He wore quite a festal appearance, and for the first time
a suspicion entered Davie’s mind which changed quickly to a certainty.
After speaking to Mrs. Lawley for a minute or two, the young man ran
out to stop the driver of a waggon loaded with sacks of grain, and,
while holding him in talk, the poor poet from the up-stairs window took
an inventory, as it were, of his rival’s personal graces. He was of
a very tall, straight, and robust figure, with a broad, comely face,
ruddy complexion, and curly brown hair. His voice was like the roll
of an organ, and his laugh the very heartiest of guffaws--altogether,
a very proper man, as Davie, but for his jealousy, must have
acknowledged. The stranger’s rollicking air of gaiety added present
insult to previous injury; and to get out of the hearing of his rich
“ha ha,” which seemed to pervade the whole neighbourhood, Davie
snatched up his hat, intending to walk off his spleen: he pushed
halfway down the stairs, but there paused--just below, in the passage
by the back-parlour door, was the obnoxious rustic, with his arm round
bonny Lucy’s waist, and his lips seeking a kiss; while the damsel’s
hand was put up to shield her cheek, and her tongue was saying, in that
pretty accent which lovers never take as truth, “Don’t, Tom; please
don’t!” Tom caught the uplifted fingers, and held them fast till he
had taken a dozen kisses to indemnify himself for the delay. Davie,
greatly discomfited, retreated to his room, and made cautious surveys
before venturing to leave it again. He quite hated Tom, who was a fine,
single-minded young fellow, guilty of no greater sin against him than
having won blue-eyed Lucy’s heart.
When Mrs. Lawley came up-stairs to remove her lodger’s
breakfast-things, she looked glowing with importance, and, after a
short hesitation, confided to him the great family secret--Mr. Tom
Burton, of Ravenscroft Farm, had offered for Lucy, and they were to be
married that day week. “You’ll have seen him, sir, maybe?” said the
proud mother; “he’s been here as often as twice a-week; and, when I
told him it behoved him to stop at home and attend to his farm, he’d
tell me that corn would grow without watching; and I soon saw what he
meant. So, as Lucy was noways unwilling, I bade ’em have done with
all this courting and courting, and get wed out of hand. Perhaps, Mr.
David, you’ll be so good as go out for the day, and let us have your
room for breakfast--or we should be proud of your company, sir.”
The poor poet almost choked over his congratulations, but he got
them out in a way. Soon after, he saw the lovers cross the street,
arm-in-arm, spruced up for the occasion, and looking as stiff as Sunday
clothes worn on a week-day always make rustic lovers look--everybody
who met them might know what they were. Tom had a rather bashful and
surprised expression; as if he were astonished to find himself part
owner of such a fresh, modest, little daisy of a sweetheart, and were
not quite sure that it was her cottage bonnet just below his great
shoulder, for so long as Davie had them in sight he kept looking down
into it to make sure Lucy was there. Davie’s feelings were almost too
much for him, but he made a magnanimous resolve that as Lucy had been
so good and attentive to him, he would make her a present, and, that
he might endure the deepest pangs, that present should be the wedding
dress and bonnet. He went off accordingly, post haste, to a great
millinery establishment, and purchased a dove-coloured silk dress, and
the most sweetly pretty white bonnet, with orange blossoms, that could
be had for money. When Lucy and Tom returned from their walk, he called
her up-stairs and presented them to her. She contemplated them with
surprised delight, blushing and clasping her hands over them: never was
there anything so beautiful.
Davie bade her try the bonnet on, to see how it would fit, and,
without an atom of coquetry, she put it on, tied the strings under her
chin, and rose on tip-toe to peep at herself in the glass over the
chimney-piece.
“I must let” (Lucy was going to say “Tom,” but she substituted “mother”
instead); “I must let mother see it!” and she ran out of the room,
leaving the door open, with that intent. But somebody met her on the
stairs, and stopped her for examination. Davie tried to shut his ears,
but he could not help hearing that ominous “Don’t, Tom; please don’t;”
though, as balm to his wounded feelings, he also caught the echo of
a--what shall I say?--a slap? a box?--what do you call it when a pretty
maiden brings her hand sharply in contact with her lover’s cheek? Well,
no matter--it is a something which always is or ought to be avenged by
six kisses on the spot; it was condignly punished in this instance,
for Tom lacked modesty even more than French polish. Davie instantly
slammed the door, and sat down to compose his feelings by inditing a
sonnet on “Disappointed Love.” When it was finished--the lines being
flowing and the rhymes musical--he felt more placid and easy in his
mind; but, before the wedding, he withdrew himself from the house, and
went into country lodgings to hide his griefs. In process of time he
rhymed himself into a belief that he was the victim of a disappointed
passion, the prey of a devouring sorrow; that his heart was a wreck,
a ruin, dust, ashes, a stone, dwelling alone; that life was stale, an
unfinished tale, a hopeless, joyless pageant: all because blue-eyed
Lucy had married Tom Burton of Ravenscroft.
This was the early love-romance which furnished my brother Davie
with his cynicism, his similes of darts, flames, and wounds that are
scattered everywhere through his verses. Some of the productions of
his troubled muse, after he fled to Highgate, shall be quoted. What
would have been Lucy’s astonishment could she have heard herself
apostrophised in such burning numbers! her orbs of sunny blue would
have dilated until she would have looked, indeed, a round-eyed Juno.
Here is one of Davie’s effusions from a little manuscript-book, bound
in white vellum, the confidante of his poetical woes at this mournful
era:--
Thou hast come like a mist o’er my glorious dreaming,
Thy image stands up ’twixt my soul and the sun!
Oh! why, when youth’s noontide of gladness was beaming,
Hast thou darken’d all that it shone upon?
To see thee, to love thee, ay, love thee to madness,
To know that thou ne’er couldst be aught to me!
To leave thee! and read in my spirit’s lone sadness,
That the love was all hopeless I centred in thee!
The muse appears at this junction to have been quite troublesome
with her declarations. The following was written one evening instead
of going to dinner like a Christian gentleman to Uncle Sampson’s on
Christmas Day. It stands entitled, I Love Thee! and is written with a
neatness that says little for its spontaneity:--
I love thee! O, never did summer sea
Greet sunshine more gladly than I greet thee!
Like dew to spring flowers, like stars to dusk night
Art thou with thy glances of liquid light!
I love thee, as only those hearts can love
Whose burning devotion is hard to move!
Life, beauty, and hope, thou art all to me,--
A voice and an echo of melody!
It seems rather as if sense were made subordinate to sound in some of
these lucubrations, but they are not so bad for seventeen. Davie came
back to Milverston for a little while at this season, and cultivated
his grief, to the great disorder of our regular household. One night he
stayed out so late that my father went in search of him and found him
by the mere, seeking inspiration from the stars. On this occasion he
produced eight more lines, which seem to have been the utmost his muse
could bring for that one time. It is called, in the vellum book into
which it is carefully transcribed, Tell me, my Heart:--
Tell me, my heart, the reason of thy sadness,
Why peoplest thou thy solitude with dreams?
Why dost thou shun the scenes of mirth and gladness
To find thy echo in the lonely streams?
Alas! my heart, that thy poor love should wander,
Where it can meet with nought but cold disdain!
Sad that its treasures thus my soul should squander
Where it can reap but tears and griefs again!
Good little Lucy would have been sorry, indeed, if she could have known
into what a limbo of anguish Davie was thrown by her marriage; but let
us hope, as she might have done, that the best half of the tortures
were only fancy. I know he had at the worst an excellent appetite for
lamb and asparagus, to which he was very partial. Dear Davie, to read
these effusions, tender imaginations may think of him as fine porcelain
fractured with the world’s hard usage, whereas he is stout and bald,
and wears green spectacles. The law does not undertake to deal with
poetry composed under false pretences, or many would be the sighing
Strephons and doleful Delias brought up for judgment.
Last summer we had Davie at home for a month, and during that time
occurred the grand incremation of Bernardo Caspiato. I shall ever
regard it as a most cruel sacrifice, and Cousin Jack, who instigated
it, as an illiterate character. Davie brought it forth one evening
when we three were together, and read parts of it aloud: Jack
unfeelingly remarked that it was not like good wine, it did not improve
with keeping; that, like fruit plucked immaturely, it was green and
tasteless; it had not acquired mellowness and flavor, and if stored
up for another twenty years it would not taste better. Davie half
coincided with him; but I did not; so grandly majestic as was the march
of the lines, so delicate and true the rhymes, so thrilling the noble
catastrophe. It exasperated me to see Jack, first yawn to the full
extent of his jaws, then snatch the manuscript from Davie, and toss it
up to the ceiling, retreating afterwards in feigned fear lest he should
be crushed by its leaden fall. An ignoble fate was thine,--immortal
Bernardo! Convicted of the respectable sin of dulness--which none
pardon--thou wert condemned to be burnt! Davie did not act with undue
precipitation; Jack urged an immediate execution, but the poet took a
week to consider of it, and many a pang it cost him. Those who have
written immortal poems and destroyed them will appreciate his feelings;
none else can. Let anybody of experience call to mind the last time
he has read through the letters from his first love, just before she
was married to somebody else; or the letters from that particular old
friend, which it is of no use to keep because he is dead, or you have
quarrelled beyond hope of reconciliation, and then some faint idea will
be conceived of the poet’s sensations at this immolation of his first
love, his particular friend, and his pet child--all in one.
It was the summer-season, and warm,--I found it very warm; there was no
fire in the grate, and the match-box on the writing-table was empty.
Jack supplied the want eagerly from his smoking apparatus, and Bernardo
Caspiato shrank into a pinch of tinder. I wept.
“There!” said poor Davie, with a profound sigh, “it took two years to
write and two seconds to destroy--just like an eternal friendship,
an undying affection, or anything of that kind which half a dozen
indiscreet words are at any time enough to annihilate!”
“Have a cigar, old boy; never mind moralising,” said Jack, to whom a
cigar would be consolation for the death of his grandmother; “have a
cigar; the business can’t be helped.”
“Poor Bernardo!” said Davie, as feelingly as if he spoke of a brother,
“poor Bernardo! He gave me many an hour’s delightful occupation. I feel
as if I had lost a friend to whom I had been in the habit of confiding
my sentimental vagaries. I’m not sure that it was right to burn him.”
“Have a cigar,” reiterated Cousin Jack. Davie accepted the offer with a
pensive sigh, put on his green spectacles, and went out for a walk in
mournful mood. It is a serious thing burning immortal poems. Nobody
can tell what losses the world has had in that way--nobody!
SCOTCH COAST FOLK.
FOOTDEE IN THE LAST CENTURY.
The aged lady whose recollections I condense, and combine with my own
observations, says:
Remote, but still distinct, the view appears,
Thro’ the long vista of departed years;
although, towards the conclusion of the American War, the fish town of
Footdee was not one of those “green spots on which memory delights to
dwell.” The town consisted of several rows of low-thatched cottages
running from east to west, between the high-road and the harbour, or,
as it is called, the tide. During the high spring-tides, the furthest
waves came up to the bank of sand on which the ends of the houses were
built. Exteriorly, these cottages appeared comfortless enough, as each
dwelling fronted the back of its opposite neighbour, and, as in the
narrow space between there was a line of dunghills crossed over with
spars, upon which were hung lines, bladders, and buoys, intermixed with
dried dog-fish and skate. Their interior was not more alluring to a
stranger. The earthen-floor was uneven, and sometimes dirty, although
generally sanded over of an evening, or at least every Saturday, in
preparation for the Sabbath. Upon the wood or rafters which stretched
across horizontally from the tops of the walls, was a ceiling of old
oars and bits of drift-wood. The bare rough walls were not whitewashed.
Roof, walls, and rafters were all blackened by smoke from a fire at
one end of the cottage, placed upon the floor, and made of turf and
sea-weed. Soot-drops--curious black glossy accumulations, formed by
a similar process, doubtless, to that which produces stalactites and
stalagmites--hung here and there upon the walls, rafters, and roof.
These collections of pendulous carbon might have been deemed ornaments,
if they had not been signs of defective cleanliness. There was a small
window at each side of the door. Under each window was a clumsy black
bedstead. There was but one small deal table. There were only two or
three chairs, and as many sunkies, or low fixed seats resting upon
stakes driven into the floor, to sit upon. Beside the wall opposite the
door were seen the requisites of the fishing occupation--lines, creels,
murlains, &c. Such were the principal property and furniture visible.
There was no press or cupboard; and the only depository for keeping
things in was a chest or locker, in which lay the precious stores and
the Sunday clothes. The salt-backet, or box, was suspended in the
chimney.
Such were the cottages in the eighteenth century. In the first quarter
of the nineteenth, the cottages were arranged upon the four sides
of squares, with a large open space in the centre; and outside every
cottage, upon the walls, hung fish-hakes or wooden triangles for drying
haddock. Inside the cottages the walls were occasionally whitewashed;
and there was fixed against the wall a series of wooden shelves for the
preservation and display of delft and earthenware crockery. There were
tea-cups in the cupboard in the corner. The little round table was of
pine-deal, but scrubbed into a whiteness by a truly Dutch cleanliness,
which made it rival tables covered with a fair white linen cloth. The
cruisie, an iron lamp of simple structure, consisting of one cup or
ladle, with a narrow lip for the whale-oil and wick, and another cup
of broader and larger dimensions, to receive the droppings, hangs in
the nineteenth, as in many centuries previously, near the chimney, and
produces, Rembrandt-like, lights and shades well worthy of the study of
an artist who should wish to rival the Dutch painters of the present
day, in the pictures they paint to show the effects of a lamp.
The costumes of the fishers were, and continue to be, peculiar. The
elderly men wore broad blue woollen bonnets, coarse blue jackets,
and canvass kilts or short trousers. The younger men were rather
good-looking, had good-humoured faces, and were smarter in their dress.
The women wore caps, the original patterns of which still abound upon
the Continent, which did not prevent their features being injured by
the weather, and their skins being tanned by the sun. The middle-aged
women wore stuff gowns, with large flowered calico wrappers or short
gowns, over them. The young girls wore stuff wrappers and petticoats,
with their hair either drawn back with a large comb, which reached from
ear to ear, or fastened up in a very slovenly and unbecoming manner
with a head-dress of red worsted tape. The boys under fifteen were the
worst clad. They ran about in tattered old garments of their fathers’,
a world too wide, and remained in this condition until they were able
to earn a more decent covering for themselves. The little children of
both sexes were comfortably clad in a simple dress of white plaiding,
called a walliecoat, which, with their fair curly heads and rosy
cheeks, made them look very pretty, as they paddled in the pools of
water, and played with their tiny boats.
In the last century, the fishermen were mostly ignorant of everything
unconnected with their own business. Few of them could read, and none
of the grown-up people could write. Some of the lads could read and
write a little; but as they went to sea in the night, and took their
repose in the day, they were not placed in favourable circumstances for
the development of the social faculties. No instance of intellectual
talent--no single person displaying a tendency towards any art or
science--occurred among them. Music and song, no doubt, contributed
to the enjoyment of their merry meetings; but the music was confined
to a fiddle, and their collection of songs scarcely extended beyond
The Praise of Paul Jones, The Waefu’ Ballad of Captain Glen, and the
Christmas carol of By Southend. As for the women--toiling, as they
were, incessantly--they had no time for mental improvement. But as they
grew old they gained practical knowledge and experience. Many of them
had a knowledge of simple remedies for curing diseases, which obtained
for their prescriptions a preference to those of medical men. Some of
them were supposed to be invested with supernatural powers, which made
it dangerous to offend them.
I may interpose here a general remark. The superstitions which were
sweepingly condemned by the philosophy of the eighteenth century as
falsehood and imposture, the philosophy of the nineteenth finds to be
true in a sense. Instead of rejecting it in a heap, the student of the
present day shakes and washes the rubbish, and separates the grains of
truth from it. What, I may be asked, was it true that old fish-crones
possessed the powers of witchcraft? I have not a doubt of it. The
word witchcraft comes from wiccian, whence witchery, wickedness. It
means evil influence. Gifted with the power of reading characters and
actions, of seeing consequences and calculating results, and capable
of imparting a bias, laying a snare, adapting a temptation, planning a
vengeance, or instilling a physical or moral poison; and years give all
these powers to malignant intelligence.
Anything may be twisted into stupid or incredible shapes. When affairs
did not prosper among the Footdee folk, it was attributed to an evil
foot, an “ill fit.” Prior to setting out upon any expedition or
enterprise, they were careful and particular about the first “fit” they
met in the morning. The Scum of the Well was an object of rivalry every
New Year’s Day morning, Old Style. As the midnight hour approached,
and the last moments of the year came on, the women assembled in a
solemn group, around the large old draw-well, and scolded and scuffled
to decide whose pan or bucket should carry off the first fraught (or
first freight). The superstition of the first foot may afford some
explanation of the phrase Putting his foot into it. Prior to commencing
anything, is it not well to note carefully who may be taking the
initiative for evil in it? Is not the first evil foot astir in it a
serious thing for any enterprise? As for the scum of the well, is not
the energetic housewife who obtains the first supply of the first
necessary of life,--water--likely to surpass all rivals in providing
for her household? I opine it is only a sort of piety due to our
forefathers to guess they were shrewder fellows than we might suppose
from our views of their superstition, witchcraft, and sorcery.
Indeed there is something small in the minds which study superstitions
only to find in them occasions for indulging the sudden elation of
self-glory which Hobbes says is the cause of laughter. Our forefathers
inherited a spirit-world of personifications; and we have inherited
a mass of philosophical abstractions. Our forefathers inherited a
poetical and popular nomenclature, and we express our scientific
generalisations in crack-jaw words of Greek and Latin derivation.
Ghosts, wraiths, witches, fairies, mermaids and water-kelpies, are
personifications which have been covered with ridicule, and undoubtedly
there have been an abundance of ridiculous stories told respecting
them; but I suspect there is philosophy in them after all. The minds of
Coast Folk are peopled from early childhood with spectres belonging to
the land, sea, and sky; and no wonder, since, during long centuries,
catastrophes have desolated the homes of Coast Folk which have issued
mysteriously and terribly from land, sea, and sky. Seven miles from
Aberdeen there is a fishing-village which was buried in a sand-storm in
one night. Almost every soul of the inhabitants was smothered in the
sand-drift, and for many years the spire of the village church alone
marked the spot in the hollow treacherous sand-hills. When a boy I was
warned by words and looks of horror from approaching the fatal locality
where it was thought the wrath of the Almighty had displayed itself
so awfully. Several instances have occurred in which all the men of a
village have gone to sea, and perished in one night. A boat or a corpse
heard of as having been cast ashore on a distant beach, was sometimes
the only tidings ever heard of them. Mermaids have frightened many a
brave man; and, in several of the monthly magazines published in the
last century their existence was as seriously discussed as apparitions
of sea-serpents have been in our own day. Andrew Brands saw one. “I
recollect Andrew perfectly well. He was a stout man, with a broad
good-humoured face, and dark hair, who wore his bonnet upon the back of
his head.” Occasionally employed as a boatman or pilot, he looked more
like a jolly sailor than a sleepy fisherman. One summer day Andrew was
found lying insensible on the hill of Torry which faces the sea upon
the side of the river Dee, opposite to Footdee. When roused, he spoke
confusedly and incoherently. He was thought to be deranged. He was
carried to the ferry and rowed home. After several weeks of delirious
fever he became low and melancholy, and declined to give any account
of his illness. Under medical treatment he recovered, although reduced
to a skeleton. The fearful belief spread through the village that
Andrew Brands had seen something. When questioned after his recovery,
he said in substance: “I was upon the outlook lying upon my breast,
and looking over the top of the rocks, when I saw a creature like a
woman sitting upon a stone. She seemed to have something like a white
sheet, or grave-clothes wrapped around her. Sometimes she combed her
hair, and sometimes she tossed her arms in the air. All her ways were
fearsome, and at last she rushed into the sea, and vanished beneath the
waves. My heart lap (leapt), I grew blind, and I remember nothing more
until I awoke with all my bones sore, and the men lifting me up.” The
medical theory of his illness, as expounded by his doctor, was, that
he had gone out with incipient fever upon him, had fallen asleep in
an exposed situation, and the hallucinations of delirium had done all
the rest. My informant who remembered him well, maintained he had been
unwittingly the Actæon of a bathing Diana at a time when ladies rarely
bathed in Scotland, and had been punished by the vengeance of the
goddess. Probably, however, an accumulation of foam among the stones
of the beach had taken the flickering form of a woman. The white scum
would seem to rise up amidst the black stones, and Andrew Brands was
frightened by a mermaid because he had never been taught the effects
of perspective. Was it in some such way as this that Cytherea herself
was seen by the poetic eyes of a fisherman of Cyprus, issuing from
the froth of the sea until she was wafted in a shell to the shore by
Zephyrus, where the Graces received and adorned her for presentation to
the celestials of Olympus?
Extraordinary physical phenomena generally precede extraordinary
catastrophes. Everybody has heard of the warning blue lights. During
the night which preceded a storm, in which seven men of a seaside
village were lost, an aged man, I have been assured, saw seven blue
lights passing in solemn procession from the roofs of their cottages
towards their grave-yard. He entreated the men to stay at home, and
not to go to sea. But they were obstinate, and went. He told some old
and some young people, who would listen to him, what he had seen, and
had scarcely finished his vaticination when the lightning leaped high
into the sky, the thunder pealed, and a hurricane lashed the sea into
furious madness. The boats were not far from the shore, but before
they could reach it a boat capsized, and seven men were lost within
sight of their families. A week afterwards, at the very hour of the day
corresponding to the hour of the night of the procession of the blue
lights, the funeral procession of the seven fishermen was seen going
from their cottages by the very way the lights had gone; and beneath
the very spots where the lights stood in the churchyard the corpses
rested for evermore. The law of the elders in these villages is, that
no boats ought to go to sea when the old men say they have seen
the blue lights. The blue lights are possibly electrical facts. The
traditions respecting their direction are as variable as the winds. The
guess is not a very hazardous one, that science would agree with the
old men in warning the fishers against going to sea when the air was
charged with electricity after midnight, in the coldest hours of the
twenty-four.
When the Footdee fishers were found in the last century to be no more
scrupulous than other people respecting custom-house oaths, an oath was
framed for them, founded upon their superstitious fears, which proved
to be far more effectual than the ordinary one. It concluded with these
words: “If I do not speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth, may my boat be a bonnet to me.”
Of course the fishers leaned to the side of the smugglers against the
excise and customs officers. Almost everybody did, in the last century
except the lawyers, something of a legal education being necessary
to see the propriety of establishing what Adam Smith, while himself
a Commissioner of the Board of Customs, denounced as the outposts of
Pandemonium. When examined before the courts in smuggling cases, the
fishermen contrived occasionally, under an appearance of simplicity, to
baffle with considerable cunning the cross-examinations of the counsel
for the Crown. Public sympathy was, in those days on the side of the
smugglers, who called themselves free-traders, a designation which
has since attained universal honour. The principle of obedience to
law, the sine quâ non of civilisation, is less easily enthroned upon
uneducated consciences than the principle of buying cheap and selling
dear. Lairds, merchants, and workmen, therefore, all admired the cool
duplicity with which the fishers sometimes evaded the truth when under
cross-examinations. Some of them were once witnesses in a case of
deforcement. The counsel for the prosecution asked a fisherman,--“While
the men were struggling in the water, did you not hear the prisoner
call out, ‘Drown the dogs?’”
“We saw nae dogs there, sir,” was the demure and composed reply.
“I do not ask you what you saw; but, on your oath, did you not hear him
call out, ‘Drown the dogs?’”
“There was nae ony dogs there, sir,” was again the obstinate answer.
Although no man of distinction in science or letters has ever arisen in
any of these villages, it cannot be doubted they have produced many men
whom Poodle or Doodle might have safely trusted upon his legs on the
floor of the House of Commons to answer the questions of honourable and
independent members.
A century ago the fishers, who were hardy, industrious, decorous, and
honest, were nevertheless inveterate swearers--a fault which I did not
observe among them in an offensive degree in the nineteenth century.
Indeed, I have heard more swearing from two admirals in a London club
than I ever heard in fishing villages. In the last century, however,
the fishers would use the most tremendous oaths upon the most trivial
occasions. Anger was not necessary to provoke them; the oaths seeming
to be as necessary to the hauling up of a lugger, or the pushing out
of a boat, as the cries of “Yo-hee O!” Persons unaccustomed to hear
the strong phrases of swearing, feel their minds shocked by the ideas
conveyed by them, being ignorant that they have ceased to convey ideas
to the persons who use them. When a lady rebuked one of them for using
the word deil (devil), he said,
“Eh! mem, I didna think it meant ony ill. Does it mean ony ill? I
thocht it was just a word to dad” (knock) “aboot.”
The wrath of these good-natured and kind-hearted people was notoriously
harmless. Stabs were unknown, and blows rare among them, but the
language of their vituperation was expressive and opprobrious. My
informant has seen a woman in a passion take up a handful of burning
coals, and lay them down without seeming to feel pain. Ladies drilled
in the control of their gestures, if not of their feelings, in
boarding-schools, witnessed, with great astonishment, the violence
with which the women expressed grief and lamentation. The boats were
frequently in great danger in crossing the bar, and on these occasions
the women assembled upon the beach would tear their hair, clap their
hands, and utter piercing cries and shrieks. The simple and natural
principles upon which their marriages were formed, the chastity and
honour in which the married fishers lived, and the connubial and
family happiness of their homes, may explain, in part, the violence
of the emotions and the exuberance of the gestures of the wives when
their husbands were in danger. A fashionable dame of London related
sarcastically that she had known a fisherwoman of the Scotch east
coast who required four men to keep her from throwing herself over the
rocks when her drowned husband was carried into her cottage, become
calm in a fortnight, recommence work in a month, and marry again in a
twelvemonth. The poor child of nature had no sentiment!
The marriages of the fishers were as natural and simple as the unions
of Isaac with Rebekah and Boaz with Ruth. Perversions about dowries,
pin-money, establishments, and settlements, did not interfere with the
natural action of mutual interest and honest preference. They married
young. The young man and young woman had probably played together in
childhood. Running, leaping, tumbling, paddling, laughing, the children
of the fishers are as joyous as their fathers are serious; and if their
mothers could not match them against the children of the Tuileries’
Gardens, or of St. James’s Park, in point of pretty costumes, they
could challenge the world for them in regard to the healthiness of
their respiratory organs and the glee of their animal spirits. The boys
and girls soon become useful, the elder children being early employed
to nurse the younger. Both boys and girls thus grow up in systematic
training for the performance of the duties of their lives.
The boy or lad went out to sea with the men, and worked at the oar
until he got enough of money to buy a share of a boat--and a boat
with its nets costs from a hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds.
When he had a share of a boat, he required some one to bait his lines
and sell his fish. Among the girls he knew, and whose tempers he had
tested in play, he naturally selected the girl he liked best, and asked
her first; and then, perhaps, like Kepler, the great astronomer, he
had a list in his mind, and asked one girl after another until he was
accepted. On the other hand, it is probable the principles of affinity
may sometimes have been in operation for years, and the boat may have
been a greater difficulty than the wife. As soon as they were betrothed
by the consent and blessings of the old folks, the young woman went
to live with her future father and mother-in-law for a week or two,
and in the house with the young man. No doubt she had been taught by
her own mother to search for bait, to tip and bait the lines, and do
all manner of household work; but the fisher-people judged wisely she
would be all the better for knowing all her mother-in-law could teach
her; and her husband would be likely to think all the more of her for
being as clever as his own mother could make her. A few days prior to
the marriage, she returned to her father’s roof, and the ceremony took
place in the house of her childhood. After the ceremony, the young
couple went to a house of their own. They went in procession from the
paternal to the connubial home. A fiddler playing merry strains, headed
the procession, and he was followed by a boat-mate of the bridegroom,
carrying the flag of the boat. When the bride arrived before the door
of the home of her husband, his boat-mates rolled their flag around
her. The spectators witnessed the ceremony in silence until she was
enveloped in the folds, and then they applauded the actors in it with
loud and long cheers. The ceremony seemed to be a public intimation
that the young wife was henceforth placed within the sanctuary of the
honour of the crew, who engaged themselves solemnly to protect her from
insult and injury, as brave men defend their flag.
When a young couple had not money enough to pay for the share of the
boat, the furnishing of the house, and the expenses of the wedding,
they had what was called a penny-wedding. There was nothing royal or
aristocratic in a penny-wedding, to which any one might come who chose
to pay a shilling. The significance and rationale of the penny-wedding
was this: “We are a couple of young people who think it better to
marry than to do worse, and we deem it foolish and wicked to begin the
world with debt. We therefore invite you, good neighbours, to amuse
yourselves by dancing at our marriage, and, by paying as generously
as may be convenient for the amusement, help us to begin the world
with a fair chance of making both ends meet.” A common argument in
favour of the penny-wedding was: the young man wants ten pounds of
his share of the boat, and many persons gave their money who never
went to the dances. The canvas for the penny-wedding took place among
the carpenters, coopers, and sailors of the port; and employers,
shopkeepers, ship-owners, and captains had generally a half-crown to
spare for the young couple. The dinner at a penny-wedding consisted
of abundance of meat and Scotch broth, served in broad pewter dishes.
After dinner, the party adjourned to the links or downs, to dance “the
shame dance;” and then they danced until they were tired. Known bad
characters were inexorably excluded, decorum rigorously maintained,
and “liberties” would have been indeed dangerous in a community in
which every woman lived under the protection of a flag and at least
half-a-score of hard fists. A severe critic of propriety would not
probably have approved the amount of public kissing at a penny-wedding.
Indeed, in this respect, Footdee resembled more the Court of the Neva
than the Courts of the Thames or of the Seine; but in regard to the
moral essentials of the problem of life, if there be a word of truth
in court chronicles, the courtiers and courted of all the three royal
rivers might have learned lessons from the Coast Folk of Footdee.
CHIP.
THE CONGRESSIONAL PRIZE-RING.
The forcible mode in which debates are conducted in the parliament of
the United States, and the personal encounters which sometimes follow
them, are believed by the present generation, to be novelties and only
recently brought to a culminating point by the Honourable Preston
S. Brooks’s life-preserver, upon the head, face, eyes, and body of
Senator Charles Sumner. This is a mistake. Fifty years ago, exciting
debates often ended in a regular stand-up fight in the lobby of the
House of Representatives. The combatants stripped, a ring was formed,
bottle-holders appointed, and the battle fought and reported quite in
the style of Moulsey Hurst and Bell’s Life in London.
In corroboration of this statement we present to our readers the
following paragraph copied from the New York Evening Post of December
the thirteenth, eighteen hundred and five, into the Annual Register for
eighteen hundred and six:--
On Friday last, the well-known Leib, one of the representatives
of Pennsylvania, and the leader of the Duane party, and Joseph H.
Nicholson, one of the representatives of Maryland, met in the Congress
lobby about one o’clock, when Leib immediately called Nicholson
a liar; and, thereupon, commenced one of the best fought battles
recorded in the annals of congressional pugilism. The fight continued
till the sixty-fourth round, when Leib had received such blows as
deterred him from again facing his man. He protracted the fight;
falling after making a feeble hit. In the round which ended the fight,
those who backed him advised him to resign; which he did after a
combat of one hour and seventeen minutes. The combatants were both
very much beaten.
CHARLES THE FIFTH’S GLOVE.
There are few foreign trips, for English holiday-makers, that answer
better than a run into Belgium. Belgium is easily got at, and easily
left. Its features are varied and not vast. You can explore its
interior, inspect its circumference, and take the whole of it in,
without being tired. It is a pocket kingdom. Instead of wearing your
patience, as France does, when you are in a hurry to get from one
end of it to the other, you can dart across it with the ease of a
swallow skimming over the Isle of Wight. Moreover, Belgium is rich in
matters of interest considerably beyond the proportions of its size.
It gives you the idea of an originally extensive country, which has
been subjected, like an ungainly truss of hay, to hydraulic pressure.
For its area, it feeds a very large population. The district of St.
Nicholas, near Ghent, carries five thousand two hundred and ten
souls per square league--the space required, in savage life, for the
maintenance of a single individual. The large towns lie so close
together, that, as soon as you have done with one, by entering a
railway carriage you are landed in another in two, three, four, or five
quarters of an hour.
A lovely May morning blesses, with its lucky omen, our approach to
the frontier. All nature smiles as we glide along. The orchards
are bedecked in white, pink, and green. Get ready your tubs, O
cyder-drinkers, the apple-trees promise you a plentiful supply!
Remember, however, that there’s many a slip between the apple-blossom
and the lip. The sower strides over the well-powdered earth with
measured step, and with white apron heavily laden. “Take that, old
lady,” he mentally exclaims, as each handful is scattered, “and give
me fifty-fold back again.” The cows in the meadows lie basking in the
sun, with their feet doubled under them. They are chewing the cud,
to give the grass a short respite, and to allow it a little time to
grow in peace. The homesteads are overtopped by clumps of poplars,
whose young and maidenly leaves blush ruddy pink at the touch of
the sunbeam. On the skirts of the forest are prudent oaks, who are
waiting till the blackthorn winter is over, before they put on their
summer fashions. Along the road which crosses our railway come Flemish
wagons, like triumphal cars in the processions of Ceres, and not of
Bacchus, but of the twin gods Baccy and Beer. And so we rush over a
flat fertile land, till we pass Roubaix, a wilderness of bricks and
mortar. Tourcoing also, and ditto; both very rural in their aspect for
manufacturing towns, and with atmospheres that Bradford and Leeds might
envy. At Mouscron, we are safely over the border. The custom-house
officers, I suppose, are ordered to ascertain whether new arrivals are
personally cleanly in their habits; for, as soon as they have inspected
my oiled-silk sponge-bag, my comb, and my bit of soap (which latter
they don’t supply you with at inns), they tell me I may lock up our
baggage again. It is too bad that they should rumple Mademoiselle’s
muslin-dress, with which she intends to make a sensation, into a wisp,
and should further annoy her by calling her Madame; but they are not a
bad set of fellows on the whole, nor wanting in a certain cordiality
of manner. They look at my passport, enter it in their book, and then
bid me good morning by name, as if they had known me for the last ten
years. They are Flemings, no doubt. You may know a Flemish man or woman
by the friendly vocatives with which they interlard their conversation.
Mon ami or mon cher ami is ever on their lips, while addressing you.
“What are you looking for, my friend?” asked a market-woman, whom
I had never in my life seen before--unless, perhaps, twenty years
ago, when she must have been a little girl. “I want half a hundred
cauliflower plants,” I replied.--“Ah, my dear friend, you won’t find
that for another fortnight. But you’ll come and see me again in another
fortnight; you’ll come to me for them, won’t you, my dear friend?”
Returned once more to our railway carriage, a change has come over
the spirit of our journey. We lose the red-legged soldiery of France,
exchanging them for others with grey and pepper-and-salt continuations.
The military, too, are men of taller stature, with more flesh upon
their bones. Generally, the Belgians feed better than the natives of
the north of France, and show it in their personal appearance. Piebald
or rusty-brown monks and nuns flutter about and read their breviaries
in greater profusion. Belgium is still a monastic stronghold of
brotherhoods and sisterhoods; and the clergy are struggling hard for an
increase of power.
The aspect of the country from Mouscron to Ghent is ever rich and
highly cultivated. The crops are mostly grown in ridges, with deep
furrows between them, indicative of a strong clayey loam, but wet. Of
wood, as in France, little is to be seen compared with England, except
where congregated into forests. Here and there are a few plantations of
Scotch firs, set very thick, to spindle them up for poles and railings.
Railway travelling is cheaper (by something like a third), than in
France, and, consequently much cheaper than in England; children under
eight years of age pay half-price; under three, and in arms, nothing;
but certainly the article you get for your money is inferior in quality
to that furnished by the first-named country. In France every traveller
is allowed sixty pounds (French) of luggage gratis, independent of his
small personalities; in Belgium none at all. Whatever you do not take
into the carriage with you, such as a carpet-bag or basket of moderate
weight, has to be paid for in addition to your ticket. The first-class
carriages are handsome and comfortable, but small. The third-class
chars-à-bancs are open at the sides, exposed to the wind, the rain, and
the snow, which sometimes rake them fore and aft; in inclement weather,
they are not fit to carry sheep and cattle, much less human beings.
Dogs in Belgium pay third-class fare, but are snugly stowed away in
a baggage-wagon. In one of these locomotive pens for men, women, and
tender children, a fat hog might have his health seriously injured as
the consequence of a long day’s journey.
The State is the sole proprietor of nearly all the Belgian railways;
and while it paternally confers on its subjects the benefit of cheap
circulation and traffic, it might also modify an arrangement which is
no other than unfeeling, and is deficient in that humanity which a
government ought to exercise towards all under its protecting sway,
without reference to wealth or rank. The second-class carriages are
tolerable, with stuffed seats and a little horizontal stripe of
stuffing to ease the back, and ladies may travel in them; but they are
of scant dimensions, very naked inside, and unprovided with any hooks
for hats or caps, or with receptacles for sticks and umbrellas. The
seats are fancifully arranged with a sort of passage left between them,
to give the means of stepping from one to the other, as if you were
occupying a little parlour; but the result is no addition to comfort.
The signal for starting is given, not by the whistle of the engine, but
by a little musical flourish, a tir-ely, consisting of three notes,
blown on his bugle by the conductor of the train. Of the officials,
general civility and obliging behaviour is the rule. The passengers’
luggage department would be improved by assimilation with the system
adopted in France. But nations are often like wilful children; they
are determined to have a way of their own, for the sake of having it.
They refuse to attend to good advice, because it is counsel given by
another; and they persist in some evidently inconvenient mode of doing
things, merely to show that they are independent agents, and that they
can and will follow their own devices.
Ghent, with its hundred thousand inhabitants and its considerable
trade, has still the air of a town half-asleep, as if you had caught
it yawning and stretching at half-past three on a summer’s morning.
Its extent is much exaggerated in the current printed descriptions.
Charles the Fifth’s time-honoured pun--“I could put Paris into my Gand”
(that is, my glove)--is apocryphal and highly improbable. If you doubt
it, mount the tower of the beffroi. People who lose their way in a
labyrinth of lanes, always fancy they have travelled over an enormous
area. Now, the map of Ghent puts you in mind of a Medusa’s head, or of
the clustered worms that are taken out into the country, on a sultry
day, to participate in the pleasures of a fishing party. Buy a map of
Ghent, colour the streets blue, the river Escaut yellow, the river Lys
red, and you will have a faithful representation of the famous Gordian
knot, if you happen never to have seen one before. I long wandered
about the streets of Ghent, trying to find the city, and could not.
It is a town made up of bits of west-ends, Faubourg St. Germains, and
fashionable suburbs, with no heart or kernel to it--no Cheapside, no
Ludgate Hill, no Rue de Rivoli, no Rue St. Honoré. There is a slight
recovery of suspended animation in the Marché-aux-Grains and the Rue
des Champs; but the pulse, even there, beats very feebly. The market
tries (when it is not market-day) to manifest its vitality in an
unhealthy, spasmodic way, by book-stalls of amatory literature, over
which a little censorship would be no great tyranny. In the street, to
enter a fashionable lace and embroidery shop, we had to ring at the
glass-door, as if it had been a private house. After waiting, while the
lady up-stairs gave a touch of arrangement to her cap and her hair,
we were duly admitted to make our purchase, much in the style of a
morning call. Elsewhere, in the modern quarters, you see unbroken lines
of large, handsome, well-painted houses, hybrids between a palace and
a ladies’ boarding-school. Business may be transacted therein, but it
is done in the quietest possible way. You see dentelles (lace), or
calicots (calicos), engraved on a neat brass-plate on a house-door,
as if some private individual,--Monsieur Dentelles, or Madame Veuve
Calicots,--were living there on their property, in great state and
dignified retirement. The older portions of the town are decorated
with houses built before the window-tax was born or thought of,--with
quaint, pointed gable ends, as if a child had been trying to cut fancy
conic sections out of a red brick wall. But in whatever direction you
wend your way, you can’t go twenty steps without crossing a bridge. For
the convenience at once of the land-carriage and the canal navigation,
these are swing bridges; often you have to wait while a barge, laden
perhaps with vegetable mould for the pot-plants in training by one of
the Vans,--Van Houtte, Van Schaffelt, or Van Geert,--intercepts the
passage. The time is not exactly lost, because it allows you to stare
about you without rudeness. But soon, the bridge-swinger takes his toll
from the barge, which he collects by means of a wooden shoe at the end
of a string fastened to a fishing-rod; the isthmus of planks is then
replaced, and resounds with the pattering of gros sabots. Certainly,
the popular costume is droll, in its extremes. At top, the women wear
a close-worked cottage hat of straw, with three dabs of blue ribbon
stuck on behind; at foot, they are garnished with masses of hollow
timber, which must be a serious drain on the Belgian forests. But hats
worn by women at the same time with sabots, are, in French eyes, or
in eyes accustomed to France, as utterly anomalous a combination as a
fish-tailed mermaid, or a man-headed centaur are considered, on cool
reflection, by Professor Owen. Conspicuous in the air rise the portly
towers of St. Nicholas, St. Michel, and St. Bavon, around which, and
the lofty houses, multitudinous swifts, whirl and scream, in delight at
the abundance of their insect game. The canals are propitious to the
propagation of gnats. Where is the carcase, there are the vultures; and
where are the gnats, there flock the swifts.
That the quietude of the town is more apparent than real, and that busy
life is going on within, is plain from the Belgian fashion of sticking
looking-glasses outside the houses, at angles (sometimes they glance
in three directions) which allow the inmates to catch a glimpse of
passers-by, without being seen themselves. “Au Nouveau Miroir,” (the
new looking-glass) is occasionally used as the sign of an inn. The
mirrors are generally on a level with the first-floor; and a smaller
one receives the rays it reflects straight from the entrance door; so
that Not at home is easily responded to the inquiries of a dun, or
worse, a bore. It is not one city alone which adopts the system of
quicksilvered peepers; nor is the custom new, but was probably first
introduced by peculiarities of historical and political situation. In
Belgium, it has not always been convenient to open the door to every
new-comer.
“If you please, monsieur,” we politely ask, “have the goodness to tell
us which is the way to the Botanic Garden?”
“N’entends Français,” is the reply, accompanied by a disclamatory shake
of the head. It is a reminder that the Flemish tongue is master here,
in actual fact, if not by legal right. Even the government is obliged
to come to a compromise, and affix the names of the streets to their
corners both in Flemish and in French. The railway porter, who handed
us our luggage, was deaf and dumb as far as we were concerned, and
signed us over to a brother medium. The coachman who drove us to our
inn just comprehended the words “Hôtel de Flandre”--and a capital and
recommendable hotel it is--but he comprehended no more of the further
clever remarks addressed to him. Many of the Gantois who do speak
French manage it so badly, and are so decidedly not at home in it, that
you feel quite delighted at your own superiority to them, born Belgians
though they be. But Flemish has so close a relationship to our own
vernacular, that the names of trades over the shops, the bills, and the
public notices, are as amusing to read as it is to hear a foreigner
speak broken English. Drap Straet is Cloth, or Draper’s Street. One
man sells alle soorte of wares; another offers you cart-grease under
the name of wagen smeer; kelder te huren is cellar to hire; kamer te
huren is chamber to hire. A koperslager is a coppersmith. Professions
which require no interpreter are the bakker, the matte-maeker, the
timmerman, the apotheker en drogiste, and the boekhandlaer. The three
grand literary elements are announced for sale as pennen, inkt, en
papier. If your family is small, you may be content with securing Een
Huis to let; but should you be expecting a large and sudden increase,
you had better engage Twee Huyzen, if adjacent. In the Apelmerkt, you
could hardly mistake the fruit that is sold there. When thirsty, you
may go and drink a glass of dobbel-bier at the hospitable sign of De
Roose; or you may prefer to patronise the Oliphant (without a castle),
or the Bruyn Visch,--that is to say, the Red Herring. Good little boys
and girls punctually attend a zondagschool. Booksellers’ windows invite
you to the perusal of Flemish novels; such as Een Zwanenzang (a swan’s
song), by Jan Van Beers, and De Zending der Vrow (Woman’s Mission), by
Hendrik Conscience.
“How triste, how sad it is for you not to be able to speak Flemish!”
ejaculated a dame who sold goeden drank, but who could not, though
she would, converse with me. In such cases, it rarely strikes the
tongue-tied Flemings belonging to the portion of society below the
middle-class, that they are like the fox who was minus a tail. They
are content with, and would have other people learn, a language which
confines them, as tightly as a tether fastens a cow, to a few score
square leagues of the earth’s vast superficies. But a striking point
in Flemish popular manners, is the forming themselves into bands
and societies. These little close corporations are perhaps, in some
degree, the result of their narrowly-diffused tongue. And so the
blue-bloused archers of one town go and shoot against the black-capped
long-bows of another, distant a quarter-of-a-day’s pedestrian journey;
the chorus-club of Schoutenhoul will pay a fraternal visit to the
orpheonists of Raspenscraep. In the French army, the French Flemings
hang together like bees at swarming-time. Here at Ghent, the workmen,
even at leisure hours and meal-times, form themselves into companies.
Young people, both girls and boys, run together in distinct and
closely-grouped herds, like flocks of young lambs at the same age. One
would think that babies in Flanders came all at once, in falls, in
imitation of the lambing season with Southdowns and Leicesters.
But the Botanic garden--where is it? Let us first look at our map,
and then at the corner of the street, and endeavour to pilot our way
thither. In Belgian towns, generally, if you use your eyes with the
slightest expression of inquiring curiosity, up starts a phantom
before you, like a most impertinent Jack-in-the-box, calling himself a
commissionaire, but who must not be confounded with a superior being,
the French commissionaire. Where these creatures come from, I cannot
tell. They suddenly appear before you, as if the air had curdled itself
into human form. Peep into a shop window, and you have one at your
elbow; gaze up at a steeple, and, when you look down, you will find
a commissionaire between your legs; turn the angle of a street, on a
walk of discovery, and round the corner you knock your nose against a
commissionaire. They start from behind doors, down staircases, out of
cellars, from the dark mouths of narrow lanes; and I believe that, upon
inquiry, they would be found now and then to drop from the roofs. They
follow you about with the hungry look of a beast of prey, regarding
you as the game on their preserve, and themselves as very forbearing
to spare you a little while. I do not say that no respectable man
exercises the calling of commissionaire; but, whenever such jewels are
found, they ought to be set in sterling gold. In age, they vary from
sixteen to sixty. They deal in cigars, and have often a select female
acquaintance. They are mostly seedy in garment, cloudy in complexion,
uncleanly in person, offensive in breath, jargonic in speech, forward
in manner, and given to drink. Commissionaires attach themselves to
every hotel, as leeches hang to the side of their vessel, ready to
fix on anything that has blood or money to yield; and these consider
themselves the head of their profession. But there are wandering
commissionaires who prowl about the streets, willing to make themselves
useful in any way--too useful, at times, many people might think.
One fellow, who pleaded his large family at home, and whom I took for
an hour or two to get over the ground more quickly, disappeared every
time we came to anything that required more than a minute to examine.
Each disappearance had for its object the injection of a dram into his
weakly stomach, which relieved me from listening to his account of
the lions. But, after a little unsteadiness, he tripped and tumbled
on the ground, and concluded by running into an iron post with a
violence that must have done serious damage to the post. I confess to a
prejudice against Belgian commissionaires, and never employ them when
I can help it. They attack you in the very churches. “You won’t leave
the cathedral without paying the concièrge,” was the parting remark
of a young commissionaire whose services I persisted in declining;
and, while hunting for the Botanic garden, I can’t proceed without
interruption, but am obliged to say to a person who continually crosses
my path, “I have already told you three times I do not want you. Cannot
you take an answer, and leave me to myself?”
The garden, when found at last, is a painful instead of a pleasurable
sight, and must be far from gratifying to the citizens of Ghent. It
is a warning to avoid, and not an example to follow, as all botanic
gardens ought to be. The hardy perennials are the only plants in good
condition; among these is a remarkable Andromeda arborea. The enormous
carp, rising and sinking in their pond, are a lingering remnant of
former prosperity. In the houses, dirt, dust, thrips, scale, red
spider, and aphis, threaten to get the upper hand, and to establish
their dynasty on a permanent footing. A fine Doum palm, in a handsome
but filthy cage of glass, excites pity by its wretched want of comfort.
Other unhappy captives, lank and lean, bald and mangy, beg hard for
some one to have compassion on them. There are many noble specimens in
a deplorable way.
Two small-leaved standard myrtles, in boxes, cannot be less than a
hundred and fifty or two hundred years old. Their trunks measure
thirteen or fourteen inches in circumference; it would be difficult to
find many such in Europe. A leading English nurseryman has endeavoured
to get them across the water; it is a pity he cannot, for they would
be properly cared for here. There are many other far-from-every-day
myrtles, which the head of the establishment seems trying hard to kill.
He is the Celestine Doudet of greenhouse evergreens; his pupils do not
thrive; his oleanders are in the last stage of suffering. The alleged
excuse is want of sufficient accommodation and hands; but when a thing
is to be done, it is not a bad plan to do it yourself. Had I such
handsome orange trees, so neglected, so begrimed with soot, I would get
up at three in the morning, and, in my shirt-sleeves, with an apron
on, with a bucket of soapsuds and a sponge in hand, would mount an A
ladder and work away, day after day, till the task was done. But are
there no such things as garden engines in Ghent? A Victoria, in a tank,
contrives to wash itself partially, though tattered and torn about the
leaves; but it is not clear what business a pit of pine-apples has in a
place for study, where scantiness of room is complained of. One plant,
or two, are all right and proper, but a botanical lecturer does not
want a crop of anything.
Near the entrance of the garden stands a vase, conspicuously mounted on
a pedestal, in which grows what the official who did the honours was
pleased to point out as a rose-bush grafted on an oak-tree. I shook my
head in disgust at the falsehood. “Look,” he insisted, “the stem is
an oak-stem, the side branches are covered with oak-leaves, and the
central twig is the rose which has been grafted in the middle. You can
see that its leaves are rose-leaves, can’t you?--and it is full of buds
coming into flower.”
“No, no; it is only a trick,” I answered, without apologising for
flatly contradicting him. “You have perforated the stem of the oak from
the root to the top; through the tube thus made you have inserted the
stem of a rooted rose-bush; but there is no union between the two, like
the junction of a scion with the stock. It grows independently in the
earth, as the oak-plant does, although encased within it; and you call
that grafting a rose on an oak, which I am gardener enough to know to
be impossible.”
“Ah! you know that. You have found it out. And yet, many people, when
they see this specimen, go away persuaded that we have succeeded in
grafting a rose on an oak.”
I made no further remark than my looks expressed; but I thought
that botanic gardens were instituted for the teaching of accurate
information and useful facts, and not to mislead ignorant persons and
to propagate error. An educational establishment, subsidised partly
by the government and partly by the town, forgets its duties when
it blazons forth a charlatanism which would upset the principles of
vegetable physiology and stultify the hard-earned acquirements of
science.
On the 18th of July was published, price Five Shillings and Sixpence,
neatly bound in cloth,
THE THIRTEENTH VOLUME
OF
HOUSEHOLD WORDS,
Containing the Numbers issued between the Nineteenth of January and
the Twelfth of July, Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-six.
Complete sets of Household Words may always be had.
_The Right of Translating Articles from_ HOUSEHOLD WORDS
_is reserved by the Authors_.
Published at the Office, No. 16, Wellington Street North, Strand.
Printed by BRADBURY & EVANS, Whitefriars, London.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
This is from Volume XIV of the series.
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted
to the public domain.
Transcriber has generated a Table of Contents.
This file uses _underscores_ to indicate italic text.
This file uses =equal signs= to indicate boldface text.
Itemized changes from the original text:
On page 1, changed “for” to “for.”,
near “morsel of luck to be thankful”
On page 1, changed “bed-side” to “bedside”,
near “the chair by her”
On page 4, changed “sweet-heart” to “sweetheart”,
near “with a farthing. My”
On page 8, changed “be” to “he”,
near “wrings from poor people”
On page 20, changed “bird” to “Bird”,
near “or The Bird of St. Martin”
On page 29, changed “melody!"” to “melody!”,
near “and an echo of”
On page 29, changed “again!"” to “again!”,
near “reap but tears and griefs”
On page 42, changed “third class” to “third-class”,
near “chars-à-bancs are open at the side”
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