Household words, no. 304, January 19, 1856
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Date: 2024-12-19T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: English literature -- Periodicals

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Title: Household words, no. 304, January 19, 1856

A weekly journal

Editor: Charles Dickens

Release date: December 19, 2024 [eBook #74938]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Office, 1856

Credits: Carla Foust 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. 304, JANUARY 19, 1856 ***

“Familiar in their Mouths as HOUSEHOLD WORDS.”—Shakespeare.

HOUSEHOLD WORDS.

A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.

No. 304.]

{Price 2d.
{Stamped 3d.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 19, 1856

INSULARITIES.

It is more or less the habit of every country—more or less commendable in every case—to exalt itself and its institutions above every other country, and be vain-glorious. Out of the partialities thus engendered and maintained, there has arisen a great deal of patriotism, and a great deal of public spirit. On the other hand, it is of paramount importance to every nation that its boastfulness should not generate prejudice, conventionality, and a cherishing of unreasonable ways of acting and thinking, which have nothing in them deserving of respect, but are ridiculous or wrong.

We English people, owing in a great degree to our insular position, and in a small degree to the facility with which we have permitted electioneering lords and gentlemen to pretend to think for us, and to represent our weaknesses to us as our strength, have been in particular danger of contracting habits which we will call for our present purpose, Insularities. Our object in this paper, is to string together a few examples.

On the continent of Europe, generally, people dress according to their personal convenience and inclinations. In that capital which is supposed to set the fashion in affairs of dress, there is an especial independence in this regard. If a man in Paris has an idiosyncracy on the subject of any article of attire between his hat and his boots, he gratifies it without the least idea that it can be anybody’s affair but his; nor does anybody else make it his affair. If, indeed, there be anything obviously convenient or tasteful in the peculiarity, then it soon ceases to be a peculiarity, and is adopted by others. If not, it is let alone. In the meantime, the commonest man in the streets does not consider it at all essential to his character as a true Frenchman, that he should howl, stare, jeer, or otherwise make himself offensive to the author of the innovation. That word has ceased to be Old Boguey to him since he ceased to be a serf, and he leaves the particular sample of innovation to come in or go out upon its merits.

Our strong English prejudice against anything of this kind that is new to the eye, forms one of our decided insularities. It is disappearing before the extended knowledge of other countries consequent upon steam and electricity, but it is not gone yet. The hermetically-sealed, black, stiff, chimney-pot, a foot and a half high, which we call a hat, is generally admitted to be neither convenient nor graceful; but, there are very few middle-aged gentlemen within two hours’ reach of the Royal Exchange, who would bestow their daughters on wide-awakes, however estimable the wearers. Smith Payne and Smith, or Ransom and Co., would probably consider a run upon the house not at all unlikely, in the event of their clerks coming to business in caps, or with such felt-fashions on their heads as didn’t give them the head-ache, and as they could wear comfortably and cheaply. During the dirt and wet of at least half the year in London, it would be a great comfort and a great saving of expense to a large class of persons, to wear the trousers gathered up about the leg, as a Zouave does, with a long gaiter below—to shift which, is to shift the whole mud-incumbered part of the dress, and to be dry, and clean directly. To such clerks, and others with much outdoor work to do, as could afford it, Jack-boots, a much more costly article, would, for similar reasons, be excellent wear. But what would Griggs and Bodger say to Jack-boots? They would say, “This sort of thing, sir, is not the sort of thing the house has been accustomed to, you will bring the house into the Gazette, you must ravel out four inches of trousers daily, sir, or you must go.”

Some years ago, we, the writer, not being in Griggs and Bodger’s, took the liberty of buying a great-coat which we saw exposed for sale in the Burlington Arcade, London, and which appeared to be in our eyes the most sensible great-coat we had ever seen. Taking the further liberty to wear this great-coat after we had bought it, we became a sort of Spectre, eliciting the wonder and terror of our fellow creatures as we flitted along the streets. We accompanied the coat to Switzerland for six months; and, although it was perfectly new there, we found it was not regarded as a portent of the least importance. We accompanied it to Paris for another six months; and, although it was perfectly new there too, nobody minded it. This coat so intolerable to Britain, was nothing more nor less than the loose wide-sleeved mantle, easy to put on, easy to put off, and crushing nothing beneath it, which everybody now wears.

During hundreds of years, it was the custom in England to wear beards. It became, in course of time, one of our Insularities to shave close. Whereas, in almost all the other countries of Europe, more or less of moustache and beard was habitually worn, it came to be established in this speck of an island, as an Insularity from which there was no appeal, that an Englishman, whether he liked it or not, must hew, hack, and rasp his chin and upper lip daily. The inconvenience of this infallible test of British respectability was so widely felt, that fortunes were made by razors, razor-strops, hones, pastes, shaving-soaps, emollients for the soothing of the tortured skin, all sorts of contrivances to lessen the misery of the shaving process and diminish the amount of time it occupied. This particular Insularity even went some miles further on the broad highway of Nonsense than other Insularities; for it not only tabooed unshorn civilians, but claimed for one particular and very limited military class the sole right to dispense with razors as to their upper lips. We ventured to suggest in this journal that the prohibition was ridiculous, and to show some reasons why it was ridiculous. The Insularity having no sense in it, has since been losing ground every day.

One of our most remarkable Insularities is a tendency to be firmly persuaded that what is not English is not natural. In the Fine Arts department of the French Exhibition, recently closed, we repeatedly heard, even from the more educated and reflective of our countrymen, that certain pictures which appeared to possess great merit—of which not the lowest item was, that they possessed the merit of a vigorous and bold Idea—were all very well, but were “theatrical.” Conceiving the difference between a dramatic picture and a theatrical picture, to be, that in the former case a story is strikingly told, without apparent consciousness of a spectator, and that in the latter case the groups are obtrusively conscious of a spectator, and are obviously dressed up, and doing (or not doing) certain things with an eye to the spectator, and not for the sake of the story; we sought in vain for this defect. Taking further pains then, to find out what was meant by the term theatrical, we found that the actions and gestures of the figures were not English. That is to say,—the figures expressing themselves in the vivacious manner natural in a greater or less degree to the whole great continent of Europe, were overcharged and out of the truth, because they did not express themselves in the manner of our little Island—which is so very exceptional, that it always places an Englishman at a disadvantage, out of his own country, until his fine sterling qualities shine through his external formality and constraint. Surely nothing can be more unreasonable, say, than that we should require a Frenchman of the days of Robespierre, to be taken out of his jail to the guillotine with the calmness of Clapham or the respectability of Richmond Hill, after a trial at the Central Criminal Court in eighteen hundred and fifty-six. And yet this exactly illustrates the requirement of the particular Insularity under consideration.

When shall we get rid of the Insularity of being afraid to make the most of small resources, and the best of scanty means of enjoyment? In Paris (as in innumerable other places and countries) a man who has six square feet of yard, or six square feet of housetop, adorns it in his own poor way, and sits there in the fine weather because he likes to do it, because he chooses to do it, because he has got nothing better of his own, and has never been laughed out of the enjoyment of what he has got. Equally, he will sit at his door, or in his balcony, or out on the pavement, because it is cheerful and pleasant and he likes to see the life of the city. For the last seventy years his family have not been tormenting their lives with continual enquiries and speculations whether other families, above and below, to the right and to the left, over the way and round the corner, would consider these recreations genteel, or would do the like, or would not do the like. That abominable old Tyrant, Madame Grundy, has never been of his acquaintance. The result is, that, with a very small income and in a very dear city, he has more innocent pleasure than fifty Englishmen of the same condition; and is distinctly, in spite of our persuasion to the contrary (another Insularity!) a more domestic man than the Englishman, in regard of his simple pleasures being, to a much greater extent, divided with his wife and children. It is a natural consequence of their being easy and cheap, and profoundly independent of Madame Grundy.

But, this Insularity rests, not to the credit of England, on a more palpable foundation than perhaps any other. The old school of Tory writers did so pertinaciously labor to cover all easily available recreations and cheap reliefs from the monotony of common life, with ridicule and contempt, that great numbers of the English people got scared into being dull, and are only now beginning to recover their courage. The object of these writers, when they had any object beyond an insolent disparagement of the life-blood of the nation, was to jeer the weaker members of the middle class into making themselves a poor fringe on the skirts of the class above them, instead of occupying their own honest, honorable, independent place. Unfortunately they succeeded only too well, and to this grievous source may be traced many of our present political ills. In no country but England have the only means and scenes of relaxation within the reach of some million or two of people been systematically lampooned and derided. This disgraceful Insularity exists no longer. Still, some weak traces of its contemptuous spirit may occasionally be found, even in very unlikely places. The accomplished Mr. Macaulay, in the third volume of his brilliant History, writes loftily about “the thousands of clerks and milliners who are now thrown into raptures by the sight of Loch Katrine and Loch Lomond.” No such responsible gentleman, in France or Germany, writing history—writing anything—would think it fine to sneer at any inoffensive and useful class of his fellow subjects. If the clerks and milliners—who pair off arm in arm, by thousands, for Loch Katrine and Loch Lomond, to celebrate the Early Closing Movement, we presume—will only imagine their presence poisoning those waters to the majestic historian as he roves along the banks, looking for Whig Members of Parliament to sympathise with him in admiration of the beauties of Nature, we think they will be amply avenged in the absurdity of the picture.

Not one of our Insularities is so astonishing in the eyes of an intelligent foreigner, as the Court Newsman. He is one of the absurd little obstructions perpetually in the way of our being understood abroad. The quiet greatness and independence of the national character seems so irreconcileable with its having any satisfaction in the dull slipslop about the slopes and the gardens, and about the Prince Consort’s going a-hunting and coming back to lunch, and about Mr. Gibbs and the ponies, and about the Royal Highnesses on horseback and the Royal infants taking carriage exercise, and about the slopes and the gardens again, and the Prince Consort again, and Mr. Gibbs and the ponies again, and the Royal Highnesses on horseback again, and the Royal infants taking carriage exercise again, and so on for every day in the week and every week in the year, that in questions of importance the English as a people, really miss their just recognition. Similar small beer is chronicled with the greatest care about the nobility in their country-houses. It is in vain to represent that the English people don’t care about these insignificant details, and don’t want them; that aggravates the misunderstanding. If they don’t want them, why do they have them? If they feel the effect of them to be ridiculous, why do they consent to be made ridiculous? If they can’t help it, why, then the bewildered foreigner submits that he was right at first, and that it is not the English people that is the power, but Lord Aberdeen, or Lord Palmerston, or Lord Aldborough, or Lord Knowswhom.

It is an Insularity well worth general consideration and correction, that the English people are wanting in self-respect. It would be difficult to bear higher testimony to the merits of the English aristocracy than they themselves afford in not being very arrogant or intolerant, with so large a public always ready to abase themselves before titles. On all occasions, public and private, where the opportunity is afforded, this readiness is to be observed. So long as it obtains so widely, it is impossible that we should be justly appreciated and comprehended, by those who have the greatest part in ruling us. And thus it happens that now we are facetiously pooh-poohed by our Premier in the English capital, and now the accredited representatives of our arts and sciences are disdainfully slighted by our Ambassador in the French capital, and we wonder to find ourselves in such curious and disadvantageous comparison with the people of other countries. Those people may, through many causes, be less fortunate and less free; but, they have more social self-respect: and that self-respect must, through all their changes, be deferred to, and will assert itself. We apprehend that few persons are disposed to contend that Rank does not receive its due share of homage on the continent of Europe; but, between the homage it receives there, and the homage it receives in our island, there is an immense difference. Half-a-dozen dukes and lords, at an English county ball, or public dinner, or any tolerably miscellaneous gathering, are painful and disagreeable company; not because they have any disposition unduly to exalt themselves, or are generally otherwise than cultivated and polite gentlemen, but, because too many of us are prone to twist ourselves out of shape before them, into contortions of servility and adulation. Elsewhere, Self-respect usually steps in to prevent this; there is much less toadying and tuft-hunting; and the intercourse between the two orders is infinitely more agreeable to both, and far more edifying to both.

It is one of our Insularities, if we have a royal or titled visitor among us, to use expressions of slavish adulation in our public addresses that have no response in the heart of any breathing creature, and to encourage the diffusion of details respecting such visitor’s devout behaviour at church, courtly behaviour in reception-rooms, decent behaviour at dinner-tables, implying previous acquaintance with the uses of knife, fork, spoon, and wine-glass,—which would really seem to denote that we had expected Orson. These doubtful compliments are paid nowhere else, and would not be paid by us if we had a little more self-respect. Through our intercourse with other nations, we cannot too soon import some. And when we have left off representing, fifty times a day, to the King of Brentford and the Chief Tailor of Tooley Street, that their smiles are necessary to our existence, those two magnificent persons will begin to doubt whether they really are so, and we shall have begun to get rid of another Insularity.

BEN SERRAQ.

The French-Algerian magistrate’s chaouch or sheriff’s-officer, Djilali by name, was recovering a little from the out-of-countenance condition into which he had been thrown by his failure in giving a miraculous turn to the embezzlement of a couple of sacks of wheat from the backs of a pair of donkeys: he straightened his back, stood stiff on his legs, and abruptly entered with ineffable zeal on the discharge of his functions as chief-constable and crier-of-the-court. He felt himself in one of those happy moments when, after having well deserved a good beating, he was ready to transfer the favour to the first person he met. He was an eight-day clock wound up again, when just at the point of running down and coming to a stop. As he opened and shut the police-room doors with the loudest bangings and clappings—shouting for the plaintiffs to appear, and hustling everybody who stood in his way as he swaggered about the antechamber—the assembly present, still impressed with the sack-and-donkey scene they had witnessed, whispered from mouth to mouth and from ear to ear that, in the memory of mekrazeni, so accomplished a chaouch had never been seen.

Suddenly, a confused noise was heard out of doors. As it approached, the sounds grew louder; and at last the ear could distinguish the most energetic oaths in the Arab language, and the music which proceeds from fisticuffs and kicks when applied to divers parts of the human body. Djilali’s voice rose above the tumult, and his stick accompanied the melody of his voice. Finally, the door opened, and a group of men, singularly interlaced together, rolled into, rather than entered the room. When Djilali, by a succession of the most skilful movements, had succeeded in putting a little restraint and order into this tempestuous storm of arms and legs, the eye could manage to distinguish a group of five men, four of whom had quite enough to do to enforce on the fifth a little respect. The last-named worthy was of lofty stature and vigorously limbed. His garments torn to shreds, and his sorry face, attested participation in a recent struggle; but his hands, tied behind his back and fastened by a rope to his neck, were evidence that he had not been victorious. His companions held him fast with a degree of caution which showed that even in the state to which he was reduced, they were not quite sure he would not make his escape. Four ropes’-ends, which dangled from his wrists and his neck, were tightly grasped with exaggerated uneasiness and tenacity. Scarcely had the five new comers subsided into calmness, when an unanimous exclamation arose from the midst of the audience, “’Tis Ben Serraq! What has he been doing now?”

M. Richard, the presiding magistrate, inquired somewhat severely:

“What has the man done, that you should bring him bound in that cruel way?”

“’Tis Ben Serraq!” was the answer he received from the quartette of voices.

“Ah, Ben Serraq! A professional robber belonging to the Sefhha, is he not?”

“The very same!” said the Coryphæus of the associated plaintiffs.

“Yes, sure enough; ’tis I, Ben Serraq,” growled the prisoner, in a voice which reminded you of a wild beast roaring at night.

“But I was informed that he had amended his mode of life, and that lately he has been living at peace with his neighbours?”

“I have always lived at peace with my neighbours. I am a good Mussulman, fearing Allah and the law. I am calumniated.”

“Hold your tongue,” said the court, “and do not speak till you are spoken to.”

“It is true,” explained plaintiff number one, “that, for some time past, he has let us be quiet, and only committed distant robberies; but a few days since, he stole one of our bullocks.”

“Sidi Bou Krari!” roared the savage. “How dare they slander a poor innocent creature like me in that way?”

“But is the fact clearly proved?” the president inquired. “How did it occur?”

“It is as plain as can be,” stated plaintiff number two. “There is not the least doubt about the matter.”

“That’s what you get by serving the French!” muttered Ben Serraq, with the air of a Cato. “What ingratitude, gracious Allah, Lord of the universe!”

At this juncture, Djilali received orders to prevent the accused, by any means whatever, from making lengthy interruptions to the recital of the plaintiffs’ wrongs. As to short exclamations that will break forth, the chaouch might allow them to burst from their safety-valve, seeing the material impossibility of confining them within the lips of a subject like the present defendant.

“Come, then,” said the court, decidedly, “one of you explain the business.”

“Don’t mind what they say,” Ben Serraq roared out. “They are liars. Besides, they have a spite against me.”

“As I said just now,” the complainant stated, “the case is plain. Our herds were grazing in the neighbourhood of Ben Serraq’s tent. On driving them home in the evening we discovered that a bullock was missing. My brethren and myself immediately took the field, to discover some trace of the robbery, but we could discover nothing. At last, after several days of fruitless search, it entered into our heads to have a look at Ben Serraq’s tent. We had suspected him, in consequence of what had happened some months previously.”

“Barbarians!” yelled the untamed innocent; “to violate the tent of an honest Mussulman!”

“But we had no need to enter it; which, moreover, we should not have done without the kaïd’s authorisation.”

“Quite right,” said the magistrate, approvingly.

“We met his wife, as she was coming from the water.”

“What an abomination!” howled the biped brute; “to stop a woman on the road!”

“And who, for the promise of a trifling reward, told us the whole affair.”

“A capital witness!—a she-beggar, who betrays me!”

“She explained that it was her husband who stole our bullock, in order to provide himself with a store of salt meat.”

“Sidi Bou Krari! That a woman should lie like that!”

“She then showed us several goat-skins filled with the meat.”

“As if a Mussulman were not allowed to keep salted meat in his tent!”

“And, to remove all doubt as to where the meat came from, she showed us the bullock’s head lying in one corner of the tent, still in a state sufficiently preserved to enable us to recognise the animal.”

“What a horrible she-vagabond! But her evidence is good for nothing; I had given her a beating not two days before.”

“Our only thought then was to seize the wild-boar who is now before you. There was the difficulty; for this son of Satan is as strong as no one else, and can knock down a camel with a blow of his fist.”

“What a joke! I am as mild as a sheep.”

“Twenty of us met in company, and at dawn of day, informed by his wife—”

“What a pity I did not strangle her, as I meant to!”

“Informed by his wife that he was still asleep, we rushed down upon him; and, after a hard struggle, contrived to bind him in the way you see, as he lay on his mat.”

“Sidi Abd-Allah! What treachery! To attack a good Mussulman as he lay asleep!”

“And a good thing it was that we did attack him in that way; for, although he was hardly awake, he managed, while he was wrestling with us, to break one of Oulid Sekrad’s legs, and to put out one of Ali Oud Ama’s eyes. He smashed in five or six of poor Bou Senan’s teeth, and bit Otsman Oud Messassit’s back savagely.”

“Justice of the Master of the World! is it possible to lie in this way? On the contrary, I have been half killed by you. Don’t you see my face is covered with blood?”

“Son of a dog! you well know the blood is from poor Oud Messassit’s body.”

“Sidi Abd-Allah!” exclaimed Ben Serraq. But it was of no use invoking the saints. Djilali called for a towel and a basin of water, and with them washed Ben Serraq’s face. The experiment established the fact that that interesting individual had not received the slightest scratch, and that the bite on the unfortunate Oud Messassit’s back must have been the only source of the stains.

“Well, Ben Serraq,” said the president; “although I cannot entertain any reasonable doubt of your guilt, you are, nevertheless, at liberty to speak—let us hear what you have to say in justification.”

“Ah! I am allowed to explain! Well; you will soon see! In the first place, my wife is a she-vagabond—everybody knows it—don’t they, Djilali?”

But Djilali, who was particularly anxious to conceal all cognisance of the defendant’s affairs, only replied,—“May your tent catch fire! Pray, what connection have I ever had with you, that I should know how your wife employs herself?”

“Very well; ’tis of no consequence. But the fact is notorious and incontestable—the she-dog betrays my honour.”

“I will take your word for it,” said the court; “and then?—”

“She has taken a fancy to Oud Raï, whose people’s shepherds have treated me so shamefully. I have often said to her, ‘Fatma, my darling, things cannot go on in this manner; your improper conduct sets everybody talking, and a modest and virtuous man, like myself, will soon be the laughing-stock of the whole country, and that on your account. Mind what you are about, else I shall be obliged to beat you; and you are aware, my beloved, that, when I do hit, I hit rather hard.’”

“But I do not see what reference your matrimonial tribulations can have to the business now before us.”

“I beg your pardon—you will see directly. I admonished her, therefore, with the utmost gentleness, in accordance with my natural disposition. But it was a waste of time and breath. She persevered in her infamous conduct till I was obliged, as a gentleman, to administer to her and to Oud Raï one day, a considerable number of kicks and thumps.”

“But, again I ask, what have these details to do with the theft of which you stand accused? Explain yourself, more clearly.”

“What! cannot a man of your great genius see, now, how things have been managed?”

“I have an idea I can; but probably not in the same light as you do.”

“What! don’t you see that Oud Raï and my wretch of a wife, to be avenged of the beating I gave them, have subtracted the bullock in question without my knowledge, and have cut it up in my tent, in order to compromise me with the authorities? Sidi Bou Krari! it is as clear as the sun, that. Don’t you see that I am a virtuous husband calumniated by a criminal wife?”

A subdued murmur, mingled with stifled laughter arose in the assembly at the victim air which Ben Serraq tried hard to assume, and also at listening to the singular pleading which he had improvised.

“Ben Serraq,” said the magistrate, in a sceptical tone, “your case must be a very bad one, to compel you to employ such poor arguments for its defence. How could your wife play you such a trick as you describe without your knowledge, since your accusers found your tent filled with the animal’s remains, the head particularly being so conspicuous and recognisable an object?”

“What is there extraordinary in that?” asked Ben Serraq, not in the slightest degree disconcerted. “My wife is so artful, and I am so simple and innocent, that she could easily contrive to conceal the matter.”

“Come; these are wretched arguments. For a man like you, who has had so many transactions with the authorities, it is not a clever way of getting out of the scrape.”

“I invoke Allah and his justice!” screamed Ben Serraq with the throat of a wild boar. “I am a poor persecuted innocent; there is nothing proved against me, absolutely nothing. The case at least is doubtful,—that is incontestable,—and in cases of doubt the law requires me to take an oath. Put me on my oath; I will swear on the Koran, on Sidi Bou Krari, on whatever book you please, I am as innocent as a suckling.”

“No doubt. You will take a hundred oaths as readily as one. But, unfortunately for you, I have not forgotten your previous character, and must consider the charge as completely established.”

“Allah! Lord of the Universe! Justice is not to be had in this country.”

“Honest men will say the contrary, when they hear you are caught, and especially when they see you transported to France: whither I intend requesting you to be sent.”

“That’s the reward people get for serving the French!” swaggered Ben Serraq, as Coriolanus might have done when banished by ungrateful Rome.

“Not bad, by my faith! You doubtless consider you are rendering people a service by easing them of their purses.”

“I have been of service to you in time of warfare, by marching constantly at the head of your columns.”

“True; you have sometimes marched at the head of our columns as a guide; but most assuredly you insisted upon heavy wages, as far as I can recollect. Besides, that is no reason why you should be allowed, in recompense, to plunder the whole human race. You ought to have reformed, as you promised you would, and then we should have forgotten the past.”

“I am slandered! I am a victim!”

“Retain that idea for your consolation, and hold your tongue. Djilali, take some of the men on guard and lead this fellow to prison.”

“Sidi, Sidi!” pleaded Ben Serraq, “can you not deliver me from these bonds, which give me horrible pain?”

“Very well; I will. Djilali, unfasten the ropes, which, in fact, are a little too tight. It is impossible for him to make his escape now; only, take some of the cavalry with you, and keep a sharp eye on him on the way to prison.”

“O, Sidi! such precautions are unnecessary. I am as gentle as a lamb.” And Ben Serraq made his exit escorted by a numerous suite of mekrazenis, at the head of whom was Djilali, and who, feeling the greatness of his responsibility, marched as if he were carrying the world. But an Arab chief in alliance with the French, named Ben Safi, whispered to the president as soon as the prisoner had disappeared,

“Perhaps you were wrong to let his arms be untied.”

“That is rather too good,” the magistrate replied. “How, do you suppose, can he contrive to escape from the custody of ten soldiers, and in the midst of the town?”

“I have seen him escape,” Ben Safi explained, “under circumstances that would make one believe there was something diabolical in his composition. One night, when he had the impudence to come and rob in my own smala, we contrived to seize him by killing the horse he had stolen from us, and under which it chanced that he was caught as it fell. I had his hands tied behind his back, and I ordered one of my men to kill him like a dog, from behind, with a pistol-shot. The shot was fired; but my gentleman, instead of dropping down dead, as he ought to have done, jumped up as lively as a grasshopper, and disappeared as if a flash of lightning had carried him off. The bullet had only cut the cords which bound him, and had been flattened on the palm of his hand. We were stupefied with astonishment.”

“And well you might be!” said the official head of the Arab bureau, beginning to feel a little fidgety. “I now believe I should have acted more prudently if I had forbidden his being unpinioned till he was safely lodged in prison.”

“I am sure you would;” interposed Ben Tekrouide, a second friendly chief. “I have always been told that this fellow is a perfect demon, in human shape. At the market of Kremis, he once robbed a man of his ass, without his being aware of the theft, although he was sitting on its back at the time.”

“Indeed!” said the magistrate, in a fidget. “I should be very glad to know that he was definitely in custody under lock and key.”

“He has the strength of twenty men,” observed Ben Maoudj, a third philo-Gallic chieftain. “He once stole a camel laden with wheat from a caravan proceeding to the south; and, as the animal was unable to travel over the rocky road by which he wanted to pass, he took it on his back, wheat and all, and carried it in that way for half-a-night’s march.”

“That must be a slight exaggeration,” remarked the president, now feeling horribly uncomfortable. “Nevertheless, I should like to be quite sure that he had reached the inside of the prison walls. They are very long about it; they ought to be back by this time.”

“Do you wish that I should go and see?” asked Ben Safi, pitying his friend’s uneasiness.

“I shall be much obliged to you.”

At the moment when Ben Safi was leaving the court, a distant clamour was heard from without, followed by several successive gunshots. A sound of many footsteps was audible, as if a crowd of men were approaching. The doors were thrown open violently, and Djilali made his appearance. His clothes were torn and soiled with dirt, and his right eye seemed to have suffered severely.

“Ouf!” he puffed out, “my back is broken! May Sidi Abd-Allah burn me, if he is a man.”

“Explain yourself. Tell me!” said the court, on thorns. “Ben Serraq?—”

“Ben Serraq, indeed? If ever you contrive to get him into prison, I will consent to be roasted alive.”

“He has escaped, then?”

“How should it be otherwise: he is the devil in person?”

“Have the goodness to tell me how you could have been so stupid as to let a single man break away from ten of you.”

“The thing was very simple, and he was not long about it. When we got to the prison, at the instant when they opened the door, he unceremoniously seized the sentinel’s gun; he twisted it round like the sails of a windmill, and threw down three-fourths of our number flat on our backs. I immediately rushed upon him; together with the rest who were still on their legs, and you see”—here he exhibited his exterior, including his black and swollen eye—“what I got by it. After having nearly felled me by putting his doubled fist into my eye, he seized me by the skin, and threw me, like a bundle of old clothes, on the top of my comrades. We were all left rolling pell-mell together; and, when I got up, I saw that demon already landed on the other side of the river. The guard came out and fired more than thirty musket-shots at him while he was climbing up the bank; but, bless me! they might just as well have dusted his back with pepper and salt. The bullets were flattened without hurting him.”

“The thing is prodigious!”

“After he got to the other side of the river, no one knows what became of him. Some say that he burrowed into the ground, whilst others declare that he took flight with a couple of great black wings that suddenly grew out of his sides and unfolded wide. The soldiers belonging to the guard will have it that he laid hold of a horse that was grazing there, that he jumped on its back, and set off at full gallop.”

LANGTHWAITE.

Langthwaite was in a state of excitement; its morals were perturbed, and its ideas confused; its old landmarks were being swept away, and it did not approve of its new landmarks. Langthwaite notions were being assaulted, and Langthwaite’s morality was put to shame. Madame Floriani, the Italian widow, had dared to defy the authority and disturb the influence of Mr. Bentley, the young incumbent. Was Langthwaite to be ruled over by a strange woman who introduced foreign customs, and upset the existing institutions, or was its government to be a virtuous hierarchy as before? Was the cousin of a dean, or the widow of an Italian count, to be considered the first personage of the vale? This grave question was what Langthwaite was called on to decide; and the quiet valley in the heart of the mountains lashed itself into a state of perturbation, strongly suggestive of the famous tempest that was brewed in a teapot.

The origin of the evil was this:—

When old Jacob White the miser, who built Whitefield House of stone and marble, and furnished it with painted deal and calico—died, he left all his wealth to a certain niece of his, his sister’s child, who had been born and bred and married in Rome, and who was now Count Floriani’s widow. She was his only relative; and, although it went sorely against him to leave his wealth to one who was more than half a foreigner, yet family pride at last conquered national prejudice, and Madame la Comtessa Floriani was made the heiress of Whitefield House and the lands circumjacent. This good fortune brought that Romanised young Englishwoman from the blue skies and rich light of Italy, to a remote village in the heart of the Cumberland mountains.

The society of Langthwaite was peculiar, and beyond measure dull. Dull, because bigoted. The ideas of the denizens ran in the narrowest of all narrow gauges, out of which not a mind dared to move. The peculiarity of Langthwaite was its power of condemnation. Everything was wicked in its more than puritanic eyes. Life was a huge snare; the affections were temptations; amusements were sins; pleasure was a crime; novel-writers “had much to answer for,” and novel-readers were next door to iniquity; an actor was a being scarcely less reprehensible than a murderer; and an artist was lost to all moral sense—if, indeed, it ever chanced that artists were spoken of at all, for the Langthwaite intellect did not penetrate far into the regions of art. No one “living in the world” had a conscience, and no foreigners had the faintest notion of virtue. Langthwaite was the centre of salvation, and outside its sphere revolved desolation and ruin.

There was a national school at Langthwaite, where all the ladies went on different days and at different hours, to superintend, some the work, and some the spelling; and there was a Sunday school where everyone fought for a class. It was the cordon bleu of Langthwaite to have a class in the Sunday school. There were a great many dissenting chapels, and a great many missionary meetings. Religious excitement being the principal dissipation at Langthwaite, school feasts, Dorcas meetings, district visitings, missionary sermons, awakening preachings, and prayer meetings, were infinite. The parish clergyman, Mr. Bentley, said that the parish was well-worked; and so it was. It was worked until its mental condition was in such a state of turmoil and unrest that no one knew exactly what to believe.

To this society came Rosa Floriani, the widow of an Italian artist-count, certainly, and the semi-papistical latitudinarian, perhaps. Why she came to Langthwaite seemed a mystery to many. But it was in truth no mystery:—she thought it was only right to live among her tenants, and to do her best to the society which gave her her fortune.

She was a beautiful woman, about twenty-eight or thirty years of age, with fine blue eyes, and light auburn hair, as soft and shining as silk, braided in two thick wavy masses of imprisoned curls. She was very pale, as if she had lived much in darkened rooms; but her lips were red, and so were her nostrils. She was about the middle size; one of those women with small bones and soft outlines who keep young and supple to the last. She was negligent but coquettish in her dress; with such taste in all her arrangements, that, when she received her visitors in a white muslin dressing-gown and small morning-cap, clinging, like trellis-work against flowers, to the curling hair, she seemed to be far better dressed than the Miss Grandvilles in their silks and satins, and jewellery and lace, and grander than their grand carriage with a footman six feet high. She was excessively indolent in her habits; at least the Langthwaite world said so; never, by any chance, “dressed” at eleven or twelve o’clock, which was the general time for paying morning visits in that part of the world; and always receiving her monde, as she called them, upstairs in her dressing-room, in this kind of pretty negligence—very often wearing slippers, not shoes; little slippers of blue, or rose, or brown satin, trimmed round with lace and ribbon, clacking on the ground as she walked, for they had no heels. And indeed it was said that Madame Floriani had been seen in the middle of the day, and even in the evening, in the same undress, which was very near to a crime in Langthwaite. But her abode was worse than her attire. She had fitted up Whitefield House with all her Roman treasures, and they scandalised Langthwaite. The Miss Grandvilles said they were quite shocked, and Mr. Bentley spoke through his nose, and sighed as he called the pretty woman “heathenish.” She had casts of many of the best statuary set about her apartments—Saint Catherine’s Marriage, the Madonna, Saint Sebastian, the Judgment of Paris, a Venus or two, and a few martyrdoms. All this was like fire to stubble among the people of Langthwaite. But Madame Floriani, totally unconscious of the effect she was producing, only thought the Langthwaitians very cold in matters of art, and strangely ignorant of real merit.

She was an artist herself; and sometimes when they came in their grand, stiff, expensive, and ungraceful toilettes, they found her dressed in a man’s brown holland blouse, girded with a broad leathern band: while a little blue velvet cap, with a long tassel, was stuck jauntily on the top of her graceful head, just above those curly handfuls of bright auburn hair. Whereat they were doubly shocked; and the Miss Grandvilles, very tall, bony and desiccated gladiators, said she was really very unfeminine, and that it positively was not proper.

Madame Floriani’s worst enemy was Mr. Bentley. Mr. Bentley was the young incumbent of Langthwaite. He was not more than thirty as it was, and he looked like twenty. He was a tall, round, boyish person, with a round face, and round cheeks highly coloured, an innocent little snub nose, with those wide flat nostrils that make a greybeard look a youth, light-grey eyes, narrow shoulders, red hands—very red—with the fingers always swollen, as if from chronic chilblains, and a full, unformed mouth, swollen, too, like a boy’s. But in spite of this round face, with its ludicrous boyishness, Mr. Bentley had taken up the condemnatory and ascetic side. His sermons breathed more than Judaic severity; hatred of pleasure, hatred of art, hatred of liberation, hatred of everything but extreme Calvinistic tenets, church-going, and missionary meetings. This was Mr. Bentley’s profession of faith as far as he dare utter it even in Langthwaite. Yet his solemn looks and severe words were in such ludicrous contrast to that round, red, apple-face of his, which nature intended to express jollity, that more than once Madame Floriani looked up and laughed, saying, with her sweet voice and foreign accent, “But, Monsieur l’Abbé, assuredly you do not believe in yourself when you speak so!”

Which words used to make Mr. Bentley furious. As he said to the Miss Grandvilles, his fast allies, it was very painful to see Madame Floriani’s unconverted state of mind. Thus the war between the pretty foreign woman and the grave young clergyman went on, and Langthwaite stood aghast.

Madame Floriani thought she must do something for the place; so, after every one had called, she began to give parties. Everyone went to the first out of curiosity. Even Mr. Bentley who disapproved of her so much that he called nearly every day at Whitefield—to try and convert her—even he went. Though in general he was never seen at any evening party, where the object was not to sing hymns and hear a chapter expounded. But he made an exception. Madame Floriani had arranged her rooms very prettily. She had brought in all the flowers from the greenhouse, and placed them about the hall and drawing-room. She had wreathed the chandeliers with evergreens mixed in with flowers; while large baskets of flowers, evergreens, and moss, were placed on pedestals all about, and brilliantly lighted. The rooms were a flood of light, all excepting the little room off the drawing-room, which old Jacob White had called the study, and which Madame Rosa said was her boudoir; and this was dark. One candelabrum of two wax-lights only, placed on a beautiful little buhl table, reflected by two large mirrors set in deep gold frames of grapes and vine leaves, and falling on a marble statue of Ariadne, set within a draperied recess—this was all the light which Madame Floriani allowed in her boudoir. Many objects of art were about; there were models of the Coliseum and the Tower of Pisa, of the Lion in the Rock of Lucerne, of the Parthenon at Athens, and there were busts of famous men—Dante, and Petrarch, and Tasso—and pictures; a Magdalen by Giorgione, a Venus by Correggio, and views of Italy and Greece; and there was a carved book-case full of splendidly bound books, one was clasped with ivory and one had precious stones upon the cover; these, with curtains and draperies of rich rose-coloured silk, made up the furniture of Madame Rosa’s boudoir. A new style of room in Langthwaite. They could not understand it. The soft dim light, the living beauty on the walls, the wealth, the art, the management of effect, all perplexed the worthy mountaineers, and went far to convict Madame Floriani of some undesirable characteristics. The Miss Grandvilles, who led public opinion on matters of taste and propriety, peered into it curiously, but stepped back again immediately, as if it had been a sorcerer’s cave; and by way of being facetiously condemnatory, spoke to Madame Floriani of the “great white woman in the corner” as something they did not understand, nor quite approve of.

The widow looked at them with the surprised open-eyed look that had become familiar to her since she came to Langthwaite, and then with her silvery good-humoured laugh cried out, “Why, my dear mademoiselle, that is Ariadne!”

“I wonder how you can like those horrible Greek stories!” said the eldest Miss Grandville severely. “We who know so much better things, to encourage those dreadful superstitions and idolatries in any way—it is shocking!”

“But, my dear demoiselle, you don’t think that I believe in Ariadne as the Greeks did!” said Madame Rosa. “It’s the art, not the goddess one loves!”

“Art!” cried Miss Grandville, disdainfully, “art! What is art, I should like to know, but the worship of the creature. Art is more nearly successful, Madame Floriani, than I am afraid you think it is?”

“Ah, mademoiselle! pity me, spare me! I have been brought up among the great things of art, and opened my eyes on the Coliseum—I have lived where Michelangelo worked—I have drank in love of art with my first breath. I cannot forget its rich lessons in this ascetic doctrine of yours. On the contrary, I find in your beautiful country so much to love and admire, that I wonder you are so little gifted with the power of appreciating and reproducing the beauty He has created.”

This was a long speech for Madame Rosa, and strangely free from foreign idioms. For she was excited, and forgot to be careful.

“My dear Madame,” said Mrs. Bentley, solemnly; “you speak of natural religion only.”

“Come! come! we must not discuss theology at a soirée,” she exclaimed, “that would be a misuse of time indeed. Will you waltz, Miss Grandville!” And before that horrified lady could return an answer, the pretty widow had glided across the room in her peculiar manner of grace and lightness; and, going to the piano, dashed into a maddening waltz. Now, to begin with, only two young ladies of the Langthwaite’s society could waltz, and these were the daughters of a retired Captain, who had the good luck to own relatives in London. But they were thought bold and light in Langthwaite (although as good girls as ever breathed), because they went to the opera and the theatres when they were in town, and confessed to the polka, and waltzing. They were very pretty, lively, and good-natured; and when Madame Rosa played her waltz, they both stood up and said, that if others would dance they would. There was no response. Some said, “What bold girls those Miss Winters are!” and others, “Oh! Laura and Helen Winter will go the whole way with any woman of the world! We can’t expect anything from them.” And one old maid, who had never had an offer, nor heard a word of love in her life, bit the end off the adjective “disgusting,” and flounced her shawl—Shetland—tightly round her, as she thanked Heaven, that she had never done such a thing when she was young! And then when Rosa turned round on her music-stool, with her hands in her lap, and said, “Eh bien! who will dance?” Mr. Bentley came up, “Excuse me, Madame Floriani,” he said rather nervously, for the widow looked so arch and lovely, that it required all Langthwaite severity to resist her. “You are a stranger to our customs, and you do not understand us yet. I hope that after you have been among us for a little time we shall be good friends and be able to work together. But we have banished all these frivolities from Langthwaite. My flock, I am happy to say, does not dance.”

“Not dance, Monsieur! and why?” cried Rosa, with a burst of laughter, real southern laughter, such as you never hear in polite society in England now.

“I look on dancing, Madame Floriani, as an invention of the enemy.”

“What enemy?—the Russians? Oh no, I assure you, les Russes did not introduce the dance. That is drôle; I did not know you were such good patriots down here!” And she laughed again.

“But Madame Floriani,” said Miss Grandville, coming to the rescue; “we don’t ourselves think dancing proper.”

“Not proper!” said Rosa, flushing to her temples, “what monstrous ideas! What impropriety can there be in a party of young people amusing themselves with dancing or anything else convenable?”

“It is a worldly amusement,” said Miss Grandville stiffly.

“And a degradation of the immortal nature,” said Mr. Bentley.

Madame Rosa looked from one to the other as if they had been Aztecs or Red Indians, or any other unusual specimens of humanity; then, utterly unable to find any sort of answer to such sentiments, turned back to the piano and rattled off a brilliant fantasia, which no one understood and every one thought noisy.

It was the same with the games that Madame Rosa proposed. For, when dancing was forbidden, she thought she would enliven her society by games. At first every one refused to take part in them. They were dull, childish, uninteresting, a waste of time; but at last she gained over some of the younger girls to a stray Cantab or two, whom she had managed to get hold of somehow, no one knew how. “She must have fished them out of the lake,” said Miss Grandville; for, indeed, Cantabs were rare animals in Langthwaite, owing to the character for dullness and cant which that beautiful vale had gained in the university. A few used to come, certainly: generally pale young men wearing spectacles and afflicted with colds; but Madame Floriani soon learnt to distinguish the various types, and to fly this type as she would poison. Yet even when she had gone so far as to positively establish games at her soirées, the Miss Grandvilles and the Bentleyites used to sit by grimly, and protest in loud whispers against the downward course of things in Langthwaite.

Madame Floriani was almost disheartened. Had it not been for that strange little bit of principle in her, that she owed it to the society of her place to do something pleasant for it, she would have given up the attempt of amusing it in despair. But it was a matter of conscientiousness, and she did not like to be defeated. Fortunately, just at the moment when she was most dispirited, she found that she had really made some way. Her fascinating manners, her beauty, her grace, her knowledge of the world, the purity and innocence of her mind, her tact, and her imperturbable good-humour, at last had their weight. Added to which exterior circumstances, that great want of the human heart—that want of life, of pleasure, of sensation, which no ascetic folly can destroy, however it may distort—began to make itself felt. The Miss Winters and many of the younger girls ranged themselves on Madame Floriani’s side. They helped her in her soirées; they played at her games; they shared her picnics; they shot at her archery meetings, nay, they even danced to her waltzes; though Mr. Bentley was so angry that he did not speak to Miss Laura when he met her the next day, because he said, as the eldest, she ought to have known better, and was leading her younger sisters to destruction. Which made Laura cry, poor girl; but Helen called their incumbent a detestable little fellow; though she felt as if she had spoken blasphemy when she said it. Altogether Langthwaite was decidedly divided into two parties, because of the waltzing that went on at Madame Floriani’s Wednesday evenings.

No one could understand Mr. Bentley. He was the bitterest enemy Madame Floriani had; at least to judge by his conversation; and, yet, if it were so, why did he go so constantly to Whitefield House? and why, if he disapproved so highly of her conduct, did he still continue to attend her evening parties? He never missed one, by any chance, though the Miss Grandvilles and others were only waiting for his lead to follow him to open secession. And why did he turn pale when he saw her coming down the lane, and why did he turn red when he shook her hand? Miss Augusta Grandville, the youngest—she was thirty-four—who had been the beauty of the family and gave herself still the airs of a juvenile—Miss Augusta who had always been his fast ally, his most indefatigable district visitor, his head class teacher, his unfailing satellite, who would not have missed a missionary meeting nor a bible class for all the world—Miss Augusta was uneasy. She did not like these symptoms; she did not like Mr. Bentley’s leniency in still continuing to visit Madame Rosa; her voice was for war, an open declared right honest war, and she would be the incumbent’s shield-bearer. So, she said to him one day, after a peculiarly joyous evening at Whitefield House; adding what she thought an irresistible argument, or rather inducement: “If you will give up Madame Floriani, my sisters and I will follow you.” At which Mr. Bentley stammered and blushed; then sighed, and said nasally, “We must still hope for her conversion.”

Apple-cheeked Mr. Bentley was unhappy. He began even to look so: which was somewhat difficult to that insignificant countenance of his. But apple-cheeked Mr. Bentley was in love. Disguise it as he might to himself and to others, deny it, scorn and reject it—it was none the less true—he was in love with Madame Floriani. True, she was a heathen; but then her natural graces were so many! True, she was a woman of the world, an artist, a lover of frivolity—but then she was kind to the poor and so gentle in her temper! True, she was all that he most reprobated, all that he most abhorred; but then he loved her. What should he do? Marry her, and so lose his influence over the world he had governed so long? But should he lose his influence? The Grandvilles would be angry; perhaps they would leave Langthwaite—he wished they might; but he could manage all the rest. He should be rich too; very rich; and money always gives power. Mr. Bentley had no pious horror of that side of worldliness. Yes, on the whole he should be better off; even in Langthwaite. Yes, he would marry her.

These were his reasonings spread out over many days and weeks, during which time he was much at Whitefield House, often to Madame Rosa’s great inconvenience and annoyance. And indeed of late she had adopted the habit of denying herself; an offence which took all Mr. Bentley’s love to forgive. For it was a falsehood, he said; and worse—forcing her servants to lie for her. While Rosa only answered, “Mais, Monsieur l’Abbé, it is a thing seen—it is understood—everybody knows what it means when one says that Madame is not at home, or does not receive to-day.”

“In the world, that may be,” said Mr. Bentley; “but we do not understand such positions here.”

“Monsieur l’Abbé! are you not the same here as any where else? What is there so peculiarly virtuous in Langthwaite that you must make laws for yourselves against all the rest of the world, and condemn all the rest of the world? You don’t seem to think that there is any crime in pride and hatred, and self-sufficiency, and all that—only in happiness and gaiety of heart. It is monstrous!” cried Rosa, excited.

“Madame Floriani, I beg of you one favour, I have asked it before. Do not call me monsieur l’abbé, I am not a Romish priest, but a Protestant minister,” said Mr. Bentley, gravely.

“Oh, pardon!” cried Rosa, with a toss of her graceful head, and making that pretty little noise with her lips which you hear every Italian make when perplexed or dissatisfied. “Oh, pardon! It is so natural to me to call men of your profession abbés or curés, that I forget. I will try to remember.”

“At least there is one great difference between us,” said Mr. Bentley, turning very red.

“What do you mean?” asked the pretty widow tranquilly.

“Shall I tell you?” said the incumbent, in a voice that was meant to be caressing.

“If you please,” answered Rosa, nestling herself back in her easy chair, and putting up her feet on a tabouret.

“I mean,” said Mr. Bentley, after a short pause, and making a desperate rush, like a cart-horse at a fence. “I mean, that we Protestant clergy may marry, and the Romanist priest cannot.”

“Yes, that is true; and I don’t like married priests,” said Rosa quietly.

“Why, Madame Floriani?” asked the incumbent, trembling.

“From association, I suppose. It is distasteful to me.”

“Then you would not yourself?—” stammered Mr. Bentley.

“What?” and Rosa lifted up her eyes in astonishment at his voice.

“Marry a clergyman!” said Mr. Bentley, with a kind of roar; and down he came on his knees, first seizing her hand.

Madame Floriani slowly raised herself from a reclining posture. She looked at the young incumbent blushing and trembling on the ground before her; and gently drew away the hand he was holding between his own. And his own were so red! She was going to speak seriously; but—I am grieved to say it of Rosa who ought to have known better—the young man’s apple-face and awkward attitude were so ludicrous—the remembrance of all his absurd attempts at solemnity and asceticism came up so vividly in contrast with the ridicule and humiliation of his present position—it was such an unlooked-for offer, and was made so clumsily, that her gravity gave way, and she burst into a fit of laughter.

It was very wrong, and there was no excuse to be made for her; but the situation was very ridiculous—though she should not have laughed for all that. Mr. Bentley started up, seized his hat and very tight umbrella—it was a glorious day in July, but Mr. Bentley patronised umbrellas—and rushed from the house; turning round at the door to say, angrily, “Your place shall know me no more, madame!”

And so war was finally declared, and Miss Augusta Grandville was satisfied. I doubt if she would have been as content if she had known the full particulars of the casus belli. Mr. Bentley said it was the hardened and impenetrable nature of Madame Floriani—how that he had sought to convert her, and she had answered him only with mockery—and Madame Floriani said nothing. She only laughed; and drew a certain sketch, which she showed to the Winter girls under the strictest vows of secresy. Which, to their honour be it said, they religiously kept. Though, when Helen Winter met Mr. Bentley the day after she had seen that drawing, she turned so red in trying to look grave, that Laura pinched her arm, and said, “Helen! don’t be silly,” below her breath.

The Bentleyites were the strongest. In a short time Madame Rosa’s Wednesday evenings were almost deserted. All the very good avoided her and her house as if a moral plague existed around her. The Miss Grandvilles, indeed, very nearly cut her. They scarcely bowed when they saw her, and passed her very stiffly even in church. Sometimes they were afflicted with sudden short-sightedness, and did not see her at all. Miss Augusta, through being triumphant, could afford to be magnanimous; and she was a shade less distant in her manner: when met with Mr. Bentley, she was positively gracious. Then the Cantabs went back to their respective colleges, and the leaves began to fall. In the dreary autumn weather—the rain and fog and drizzling mist—that now came on, even her own adherents could not come out so often to see her; so that the sweet face grew sad in thinking of the bright sky and the warm hearts of Italy; and the joyous spirits sank in this social solitude, for want of love and sympathy to sustain it. The days were so grey and dark, she could not even paint; and in the Langthwaite lending library, were only dull histories or biographies. The mud and the rain frightened the soft half-foreigner, and kept her much within doors, moping in a dull Cumberland house, where the clouds came down so low, that they sometimes rested on the roof; and where the only visitors she saw were half-a-dozen good-hearted country girls, with not an idea amongst them beyond Berlin work or babies’ caps; which, to a woman accustomed to the best and most intellectual society of Rome, was scarcely sufficient mental distraction. What was she to do?—fight or retire? She thought of Italy, of her friends there, of the treasures of art, of the beauty, the free life, the ease, the love, the fulness of existence,—and she covered her face in her hands, while tears forced their way through her fingers. Then she thought of Mr. Bentley, and of his offer and of how he looked when he was down on his knees before her; and she laughed till she had a pain in her side. But she could not laugh for ever at Mr. Bentley and his offer, and the ennui of her life began to grow insupportable. It was reported at last that she was going away. It was Laura Winter who said so first, by Rosa’s permission, one day after she had been at Whitefield House. Madame Floriani had cried, and said that she was ill: the constant damp did not agree with her; and she had grown very thin and sallow rather than pale as she used to be; and she said, too, that she was dull; she could not bear it any longer. Her heart was Italian. It would not live in such an atmosphere; and then she had cried dreadfully, and Laura had cried too, for sympathy. As girls in the country always do.

So, Rosa owned herself beaten. Langthwaite morality had been too strong for her, and Langthwaite coldness too severe. Mr. Bentley had won the battle, and she cared now only for her retreat. She packed up her pictures and her books, her statues and her blue silk curtains; advertised Whitefield House for sale; and sold it well too. A retired sugar-broker bought it, and furnished it in gold and velvet. He had not a picture, nor a bust, nor a book; but he had hangings that cost a small fortune, and an assortment of colours that must surely please some one, as none in the whole rainbow were absent. Rosa had nothing to do with this; all she cared for, was to get out of Langthwaite, and to leave Cumberland clouds for Italian sunshine. She went to make her farewell calls. And, after having kissed all the Miss Grandvilles on both cheeks—for she was a generous, forgiving woman, with a loving heart and a perfect temper, and would not bear malice if she died for it—and after having shaken hands cordially with Mr. Bentley—who, like a foolish fat schoolboy, attempted to sulk—she turned her sweet face to the south, and left a climate that was killing her, and a people who did not love her, for the beauty and the graciousness of Italy.

But she left the seeds of discord behind her that soon bore deadly fruit. Deprived of their patroness, the Florianites sank to the ground. They were snubbed, maltreated, slighted, and all but extinguished. And when Miss Augusta Grandville at last got Mr. Bentley to consent to their marriage, not one of them was invited to the wedding. It was the day of retribution, and the Bentley faction were unsparing.

Madame Floriani did not forget her old adherents when she was established in her Roman home again; and after the Grandville marriage had turned out notoriously ill—for Miss Augusta was imperious, and Mr. Bentley obstinate—she invited the two Winter girls to Rome, and actually sent a man-servant all the way down to Langthwaite to take care of them on their journey. Which royal act nearly canonised her, though Mrs. Bentley said it was ridiculous, “And, good gracious! could not those two girls take care of themselves—if indeed they went at all, which if they had been her sisters they should not have done?”

Madame Floriani was very kind to her old friends. She took them everywhere, and fêted and petted them beyond measure. Their soft, pretty English faces, with their bright cheeks and long fair ringlets, made a sensation among the dark eyes and raven locks at Rome. The Miss Winters were decidedly the belles of their society—which is a woman’s state of paradise. Madame Floriani with her foreign notions set about marrying her young ladies. A task not very difficult; for foreigners like English wives; because they can trust them so much; and English women like foreign husbands, because they are more polite than their own countrymen. So Madame Rosa married them both—one to a count and the other to a baron. And when they went back to Langthwaite, which they did for their wedding trip, the people called them my lord and my lady, and treated them like queens. Even Mrs. Bentley yielded the past, which was a marvellous distinction, and made up for a great deal of the past. After all, then, Rosa had not entirely lost; the days of her teaching survived in her disciples, for Laura Winter settled at Langthwaite, and remodelled society there after the Floriani system. And now that Mr. Bentley was married, of course his influence was lessened; and all the young ladies who had tried to touch his heart by their austerity, now thought more of Laura’s foreign friends who came to see her, and who thought life without innocent laughter not worth the living.

MURMURS.

Why wilt thou make bright music

Give forth a sound of pain?

Why wilt thou weave fair flowers

Into a weary chain?

Why turn each cool grey shadow

Into a world of fears?

Why think the winds are wailing?

Why call the dewdrops tears?

Voices of happy Nature,
And Heaven’s sunny gleam,
Reprove thy sick heart’s fancies,
Upbraid thy foolish dream.

Listen! I will tell thee
The song Creation sings,
From humming bees in heather,
To fluttering angels’ wings:

Not alone did angels sing it
To the poor shepherds’ ear,
But the spherèd Heavens chant it,
And listening Ages hear.

Above thy poor complaining
Rises that holy lay;
When the starry night grows silent,
Then speaks the sunny day.

O, leave thy sick heart’s fancies,
And lend thy little voice
To the silver song of Glory,
That bids the World rejoice!

OUR WICKED MIS-STATEMENTS.

We meant to say no more upon the subject of the strike of Lancashire masters against Factory law, until we had seen the issue of a question raised before one of the superior courts; but the publication, by the National (or, as it should read, Lancashire) Association, of a pamphlet written by Miss Martineau, which attacks our veracity, compels us to speak, or to hazard misinterpretation of our silence. If no question of public justice were involved, we should prefer misinterpretation to the task of showing weakness in a sick lady whom we esteem. We have a respect for Miss Martineau, won by many good works she has written and many good deeds she has done, which nothing that she now can say or do will destroy; and we most heartily claim for her the respect of our readers as a thing not to be forfeited for a few hasty words, or for a scrap or two of argument too readily adopted upon partial showing.

The pamphlet in question is an essay written, as we are told in an introduction, for the Westminster Review, and declined on account of its manner of treatment. When we say that a part of its manner is to accuse this journal of “unscrupulous statements, insolence, arrogance, and cant,” and that amidst much abuse of “Mr. Dickens or his contributor”—“his partner in the disgrace,” another part of its manner is to abuse Mr. Dickens personally for “conceit, insolence, and wilful one-sidedness,” it will be seen that the editor of the Review exercised the discretion of a gentleman. We regret very much indeed that the National (or Lancashire) Association has been less discreet, and, by issuing the paper as a pamphlet at its own expense, has been less friendly to the lady than the lady wished to be to them. We are reluctantly compelled to show, that both in tone and argument Miss Martineau’s pamphlet, published by the Lancashire Association to Prevent the Fencing of Machinery, is—we will not forget her claims upon our forbearance, and we will say—a mistake.

And first, as to the tone. Using in her reply the manner pointed out by us, Miss Martineau says, that certain articles in the eleventh volume of this journal[A] put forward inaccurate statements, “in a temper and by language which convey their own condemnation.” But, lest it should be thought that what was wrong in us cannot be quite right in herself, Miss Martineau adds, on the same page, “I like courtesy as well as anybody can do; but when vicious legislation and social oppression are upheld by men in high places, the vindication of principle, and exposure of the mischief, must come before consideration of private feeling.” Now, confessing for a moment our defect of temper, might we not say, very fairly, that a writer who believes in his heart that resistance to a given law dooms large numbers of men to mutilation, and not few to horrible deaths, may honestly speak with some indignation of the resistance by which those deaths are produced; and that the same right to be angry is not equally possessed by an advocate who argues that the deaths cannot be helped, and that nobody has a right to meddle specially in any way with a mill-owner’s trade? But if any dispassionate reader of the articles to which Miss Martineau refers should pass from them to the personal invective with which they are met, he will not fail to perceive that we attacked only what we held to be an evil course of opposition to a necessary law, and abided firmly by the leading features of the case, apart from any personal consideration. We spoke plainly, as the case required, and with the earnest feeling that the case called forth; but it will be found, on reference, that in not one of these articles was an attack made upon any person whomsoever; that the chairman of the National Association was not named; that when cases of accident were necessarily cited, it was enough for us to say “a certain mill,” because we spoke of principles and not of persons. It will be found, also, that we took pains to disconnect our plain speaking upon one shortcoming; from a general disparagement of mill-owners; and that we went quite out of our way to occupy no inconsiderable part of these papers with a cordial reminder of the excellent enterprises and fine spirit that belonged to chieftains of the cotton class. Miss Martineau says for herself, that “in a matter of political morality so vital as this, there must be no compromise and no mistake.” We felt so too; but also felt that it would be a great mistake and a great compromise of principle, to intrude personalities on the discussion of it.

The history of the present pamphlet, given by its author in a letter to the “Association of Factory Occupiers,” is, that wishing to controvert the views of Mr. Horner, the Factory Inspector, she mentioned her desire to obtain the facts on both sides of the question “to a member of your Association, who visited me soon after;” and we cannot help feeling, that for the facts on both sides, which are so clearly only the statements on one side, and (we hope for her sake) for the temper too, the writer is indebted to her faith in the opinions of her friend. She thinks also, that the notes of a barrister who edited the Factory Act show “that it was high time the passionate advocates of meddling legislation should be met by opponents of such legislation who are, by position, likely to be at once dispassionate and disinterested.” To ensure this desirable result, a pamphlet written in a passion, is sent to be published and circulated by the Association directly engaged in maintaining one side of the matter, and composed of the persons most distinctly interested in its issue.

Vexed at the blindness of the barrister-at-law, who is as blind as ourselves, Miss Martineau goes on to say, in her prefatory letter, “What can instigate any lawyer, who cannot be supposed an interested party, to write such a preface as Mr. Tapping’s, it is difficult to imagine. On opening it, my eye falls at once on a false statement, which ought to destroy all the authority of the rest.” What is the “false statement” of Mr. Tapping? Mr. Tapping wrote that the manufacturers have instituted the National Association of Factory Occupiers, for the special purpose of raising a fund for defraying thereout all fines for not fencing, which may be inflicted upon members.... “This statement,” adds Miss Martineau, “is dated October second, eighteen hundred and fifty-five; whereas the Special Report of your Association, dated July, expressly declares that the Association will pay no penalties awarded under Factory Acts.” Miss Martineau’s difficulty would have vanished had she known the truth; which is this:—It was announced distinctly, by the founders of the Association, so long ago as the March previous, that they would raise money to pay penalties; and it was only when they were made conscious of the danger of the ground so taken, that they forestalled the period of an annual report, and printed the so-called Special Report, in which they took pains to fence themselves off against legal accident. This report was their own stroke of policy, printed for themselves, and to be had only from their office. It was not advertised nor published; it was sent to members—it was there to use. As soon as it came into our hands, through a private source, we made our comments on it; but the date of its being written, though it has July on the cover, is the seventh of August. After it was written, it had to be printed, and it could then only have been by some unlikely chance that any tidings of it could have reached a barrister in London by the second of October. The public reports of the proceedings connected with the formation of the Association had informed him that there was a proposition to pay penalties incurred by occupiers who refused to fence. There was no other source of information open to him.

This point is of importance to us, and we for the second time place it beyond question that, before the appearance of the Special Report, the Association did combine to pay penalties, in obedience to the recommendation of a body of mill-owners who had gone to London with the hope of getting the Factory Act into discredit with the government. The recommendation was read at the meeting[B] in these distinct terms: “The deputation are of opinion, that a fund of not less than five thousand pounds should be immediately raised; and they suggest that all cases of prosecution which the committee of management are of opinion can be legitimately dealt with by the Association, shall be defended by, and the penalties or damages paid out of, the funds of the Association.” Whereupon it was moved, seconded, and unanimously resolved:

“That the recommendation in the report, to raise immediately a sum of not less than £5,000 be immediately carried into execution, and that an additional contribution of one shilling per nominal horse-power from each mill-occupier (making a total of two shillings) be at once called for, to enable the committee to carry out the recommendation to defend, at the cost of the Association, all cases of prosecution which they may consider fairly to come within the sphere of the Association.”[C]

We have only to add, that the report including these resolutions, besides receiving a wide notoriety through the newspapers, was printed and circulated by the Association itself, and that a copy of it was obtained by us before we wrote upon the subject. There can be no doubt, then, under what impressions the first members of the Association joined it, and of the accusation under which it justly lay until it thought best publicly to withdraw from a dangerous position.

On this same point, Miss Martineau is of opinion that “Mr. Dickens had better consider, for the sake of his own peace of mind, as well as the good of his neighbours, how to qualify himself for his enterprise before he takes up his next task of reform. If he must give the first place to his idealism and sensibilities, let him confine himself to fiction; and if he will put himself forward as a social reformer, let him do the only honest thing,—study both sides of the question he takes up. How far he is from having done this in the present case, a short, but not unimportant statement may show. He says, by his own pen, or his contributor’s [let us say, then, his contributor’s] ‘But the factory inspectors will proceed for penalties? Certainly they will; and then, if these gentlemen be members of the National Association of Factory Occupiers, they will have their case defended for them and their fine immediately paid.’ Yet while the writer declares his information to be drawn from the papers of the Association, he ignores the following conspicuous passages from their First Report”—the retractation then being quoted.

Now, setting aside the likelihood or unlikelihood of Mr. Dickens, to secure his peace of mind, taking ghostly advice from Miss Martineau, there is no doubt that in the said First Report the retractation was conspicuous, and that moreover, it was meant to be conspicuous; but we can hardly think it so conspicuous as to have been visible, not merely before it was visible, but, as we firmly believe, even before it was so much as conceived. On the same line with the page 605 of this journal, upon which we are lectured, are inscribed the words “Household Words, July 28, 1855.” The number dated on that day was, in the usual manner, published three days previously, and issued in Manchester on the twenty-sixth of July, but the report which we failed to do the honest thing by citing was not written—as we find by the date against the chairman’s signature—until the seventh of August! When it reached us in September we at once (in our two hundred and eighty-fifth number) made public its purport; but we did not say what we may now say, namely, that there came with it a remark which we believe to be true, and which dates certainly go far to justify: that the Special Report—a thing not contemplated in the rules—was actually suggested by our comments,—that our journal, containing a wide publication of the illegal position of the recusant mill-owners, having reached Manchester on the twenty-sixth of July, was considered by the committee of the Association to necessitate retreat to safer ground by means of a Special Report, and that by the seventh of August, the report was completed and signed; after which, it has been further suggested to us, that July was put upon the cover, not without a hope that somebody might be misled into believing that it had really been produced several weeks sooner than it was. Be that as it may, we should not have supposed that the Association, for the sake of passing a so easily detected deception on the public, would have imperilled the reputation of an honourable lady by leaving uncorrected in her pamphlet a flagrant error, of which it could by no conceivable chance have been ignorant, and by suffering it to go forth, headed in small capitals, Mis-statements in Household Words.

We turn with sorrow to the other contents of the pamphlet. As the pamphlet of the Association we are bound to show why it can only damage the cause of the Association with the government and with the public; we would have wholly spared the writer our present exposure of her mistake, if we could.

The pamphlet begins with some calm wise words about the war, by which the reader is prepared to expect a very different treatment of the immediate topic in hand than that which it is destined to receive. No sooner is the subject touched than the false keynote is struck, and of all persons in the world, it is Miss Martineau whom we find echoing the exaggerated lamentations of an injured interest. “The issue,” we are told, “to which the controversy is now brought, is that of the supersession of either the textile manufactures, or the existing factory law. The two cannot longer co-exist.” This is one of those remarkable predictions of which we are beginning, by a very long national experience, to understand the value. If the cry be not ridiculous enough in the form just quoted, how does it look thus—for we have it repeated afterwards in this more piquant way,—“It seems to be agreed by the common sense of all concerned who have any common sense, that our manufactures must cease, or the factory law, as expounded by Mr. Horner must give way.” We believe it was Mr. Bounderby who was always going to throw his property into the Atlantic, and we have heard of Miss Martineau’s clients being indignant against Mr. Bounderby as a caricature. And yet this looks very like him!

The pamphlet then adopts the precise tone of the mill-owners in speaking of the accidents as chiefly “of so slight a nature that they would not be noticed anywhere but in a special registration like that provided by the Factory Act. For instance, seven hundred are cases of cut fingers. Any worker who rubs off a bit of skin from finger or thumb, or sustains the slightest cut which interferes with the spinning process for a single day, has the injury registered under the act.” In the next place the yearly deaths by preventable accidents from machinery, which number about forty, are reduced to eleven, by excluding all machinery except the actual shafts, and throughout the pamphlet afterwards the number eleven, so obtained, is used—once in a way that has astonished us, as it will certainly surprise our readers. Even lower down on the same page the writer slips into the statement, that there are only twelve deaths a-year by “mill-accidents from all kinds of factory machinery.” We wish it were so; but in the last report, published before we made our comments, there were twenty-one slain in six months; one hundred and fifty had, in six months, lost parts of their right hands; one hundred and thirty, parts of their left hands; twenty-eight lost arms or legs; two hundred and fifty had bones broken; a hundred had suffered fracture or serious damage to the head and face.

In the report for the half-year next following, the deaths by machinery in factories were eighteen; one hundred and sixty-one lost the right hand, or, more generally, parts of it; one hundred and eighteen the left hand, or parts of it; two hundred and twenty had bones broken. Thirty-nine, therefore, was the number of deaths in the year last reported (a fresh half-yearly report is at present due), and there was no lack of accidents more serious than the “rubbing off a bit of skin.” Of the factory accidents, we are also told, not five per cent. are owing to machinery. If so, great indeed must be the number of the whole! But it is solely of the accidents arising from machinery that we from the first have spoken, since upon them only the law is founded which we wish to see maintained.

So far as we can understand the figures of the pamphlet, they arise from the ingenuity of some friend, who has eliminated from the rest those accidents arising out of actual contact with a shaft, and then put this part for the whole. But the law says, “That every fly-wheel directly connected with the steam-engine or water-wheel, or other mechanical power, whether in the engine-house or not, and every part of a steam-engine and water-wheel, and every hoist or teagle, near to which children or young persons are liable to pass or be employed, and all parts of the mill-gearing in a factory shall be securely fenced.” The whole controversy is about obedience to this law, and the consequences of resistance to it. The most horrible and fatal accidents are those connected most immediately with the shafts; the unfenced shafts are the essential type of the whole question, and the fencing of them implies necessarily the general consent to obey the law. For this reason we have, no doubt, in common with other people, frequently represented by such a phrase as unfenced shafts, the whole fact of resistance to the law, without any suspicion of the ingenious turn that might be given to the question on this ground, by an Association not ashamed to employ sleight of hand in argument.

And now that we discuss the figures of the pamphlet, we turn to another of the strange pages, headed Mis-statements in Household Words. We make, it is said, the extraordinary statement, that these deadly shafts “mangle or murder, every year, two thousand human creatures; and considering,” the writer adds, “the magnitude of this exaggeration (our readers will remember that the average of deaths by factory shafts is twelve per year) it is no wonder that he finds fault with figures when used in reply to charges so monstrous. When the manufacturers produce facts in answer to romance,” we proceed, it is said, “to beg the question as usual; in this passage: ‘As for ourselves, we admit freely, that it never did occur to us that it was possible to justify, by arithmetic, a thing unjustifiable by any code of morals, civilised or savage.’”

By that admission we abide—and by our figures we abide. This specimen of our mis-statements, of our “begging the question as usual,” is a yet more curious example of a question begged by the accusers, than that other proof of dishonesty which consisted in our not having read a document several weeks before it came into existence. We said, in the passage above cited, that the deadly shafts “mangled or murdered” so many persons a-year; that by the machinery left unfenced in defiance of the law, two thousand persons were mutilated or killed. The writer of the pamphlet has been led to beg wholly the addition of the mutilated on our side, and to set against it, on her side, only the killed, and not all those: only a selection from them of the persons actually killed on shafts; advantage being taken of the use of the phrase, deadly shafts, to represent machinery in unfenced mills. And that it is really meant, in the writer’s own phrase to “ignore” the fact that we counted the killed, is evident from a succeeding sentence. “If Mr. Dickens, or his contributor, assigns his number of two thousand a-year, his opponents may surely cite theirs—of three-and-a-half per cent. or twelve in a-year.” Our number, certainly, was wrong; but it erred only by under-statement. We might have said nearly four thousand, without falsehood. The number of deaths and mutilations together arising from machinery in factories, has been two thousand, not in a year, but half a year. Because we did not wish to urge the slight cuts, and the few scarcely avoidable mishaps which did not belong fairly to the case as we were stating it, we struck off some two thousand from the number that we might have given.

Our readers may now form some estimate of the strange weakness and unreasonableness of the pamphlet, issued by the Factory Association to refute us. There is not one strong point in it that affects the question; there is only one that seems strong, and to that the writer had in her own hands a most conclusive answer. Mr. Fairbairn, in December 1853, reported against the practicability or safety of fencing horizontal shafts. The answer to this is repeatedly contained in the Inspector’s reports for the half-year ending on the thirtieth of April last, cited at the head of Miss Martineau’s pamphlet. Their joint report states, “that a considerable amount of horizontal shafting under seven feet from the floor has been securely cased over in various parts of the country, and that strap-hooks and other contrivances for the prevention of accidents from horizontal shafts above seven feet from the floor, have been and are now being extensively employed in all our districts, excepting in that of Lancashire, and in places mainly influenced by that example.” And Mr. Howell is to be found reporting that in the west of England much new fencing had been done, and that the experiment had “been tried on a sufficiently large scale, and for a sufficiently long period to prove the fallacy of the apprehensions that were expressed, as to the practicability and success of fencing securely horizontal shafts. It has proved also that the doing so is unaccompanied by danger.” He gives illustration of this from the west of England, adding, however, that “in many instances, and more especially in the cotton factories in that part of my district which is situate in Cheshire and on the borders of Lancashire, little or nothing has yet been done, with some few conspicuous and honourable exceptions, to satisfy the requirements of the law in this respect.”

The pamphlet adds the Manchester cry of Fire! and quotes the agent of a fire-office, who gave it as his opinion, that if mills had boxed machinery they ought to pay increased insurance, because “away they would go without any possibility of salvation.” The agent of a fire-office, as we all know, may be the butcher, the baker, or the candlestick-maker, sage or not sage; and to judge by his language in this particular case, not sage. Now, however, when a very large number of mills out of Lancashire are habitually working fenced machinery, will the National Association be so candid as to tell us—not what some local agent has said, but what the fire-offices do?

Mr. Fairbairn’s authority against rectangular hooks is quoted in the pamphlet. He says they will increase the danger—would pull all about the peoples’ ears. But do they? In the last report which the writer represents as having been consulted for the other side of the question, the inspectors jointly state that “in none of our districts has any accident come to our knowledge from the coiling of a strap round a horizontal shaft where strap-hooks have been put up in the manner recommended.” And Mr. Redgrave reports thus from Yorkshire: “With respect to one of the precautions which is considered of great value in Yorkshire and other parts of my district—I mean the strap-hook, for preventing the lapping of the strap upon the revolving shaft; the fact that not an accident has been reported to me during the last six months as having been caused by the lapping of a strap upon a shaft, nor by one of the many thousand strap-hooks which have been fixed up in a very large number of factories, more or less in the different departments of fifteen hundred out of two thousand factories which constitute my district, in a large proportion of which, moreover, they have existed for many years, may be taken as conclusive evidence that the strap-hook does obviate the lapping of the strap, thereby preventing accidents, and does not increase the danger of the shaft and its liability to cause accidents.”

Our evidence does not end here, but we must have regard to space. We pass rapidly over the statements in the pamphlet that the men who die, die by their own indiscretion, or, as Miss Martineau expresses it, “climb up to the death which is carefully removed out of their natural reach.” This climbing up to death will occur to any sane man or woman, perhaps, as being excessively probable, but it is not true; very few deaths are the result of gross and active carelessness: some arise from a momentary inadvertence; but the reports of inquests constantly sent to us show that at least half who die, can in no fair sense be said to deserve any blame. The pamphlet itself quotes inadvertently the statement of an engineer, that “there should be a ready means of putting on the strap when the mill is in motion;” doing this is a common cause of death. Again, one man is seized by a loose end of his neckcloth, another dragged to his death out of a cart, because a cloth in it is accidentally blown by the wind against machinery.

Need we do more than allude to such arguments as, that if law compels the fencing of machinery (which while in motion thus can seize the passive stander-by) it ought to compel windows to be barred, because people can throw themselves out of them, and trees to be fenced, because boys can climb up and tumble down? If we take thought for the operative, working in the midst of dangerous machinery, are we, it is asked, to legislate “for every drunken vagabond who lies down in the track—every deaf old man who chooses the railway for his walk?” Need we answer such preposterous inquiries?

We have maintained that it is strictly within the province of the law to protect life, and to prohibit any arrangements by which it is shown that the lives of people in pursuit of their lawful and useful work, are without necessity endangered. Preventable accidents of every kind we have always declared it to be the duty of the legislature to prevent. We are told that Common Law suffices for all cases. It is hardly worth while to spend time in showing that it does not, and cannot provide for these cases. Common Law is the law as established for a given and considerable length of time, and it arose out of the fusion of much special legislation. It knew nothing of steam-engines, and it is impossible that it should have foreseen such cases as arise out of the new systems of railway and factory. Common Law will not make factories safe working places for the operative; special consideration must be given to the subject. When we learn, as Sir John Kincaid reports from Scotland, that a sufficient fencing of three hundred and fifty feet of horizontal shafting cost one factory only six pounds; that the casing of two hundred and fifty-one feet of shafting above seven feet from the floor—more precaution than was absolutely needed—cost another factory only eight pounds four; that a Paisley factory cased three hundred and twenty-four feet of such shafting most efficiently with block iron casing, for no more than sixteen pounds four, we refuse to listen to the cry of Mills on Fire—Ruinous Expense—Manufactures must cease—Fatal Principles—Property going to be pitched into the Atlantic—and simply wait until the recusant Lancashire Mill-owners have done calling names and litigating, and have learnt that if they will not voluntarily take the necessary steps to prevent the more horrible sort of accidents in their mills, they must take them by compulsion.

Miss Martineau suggests the impropriety of any discussion until doubt has been removed by the settlement of a point raised before the Court of Queen’s Bench. The whole matter is to remain in abeyance—things are to go on as they are, and there are to be no convictions—while the point mainly at issue is awaiting the decision of the higher courts. Let us see what this means. The point at issue, as the pamphlet rightly states, is the interpretation of the words “securely fenced;” and it was agreed some time ago that in the case of a certain prosecution for unfenced machinery, the question should go before the Queen’s Bench to determine whether machinery could be said to be otherwise than securely fenced when no accident could be shown to have been caused by it; whether the fact that such machinery had led to deaths and mutilations in other mills proved it, or did not prove it, to be insecure in a mill where, as yet, no blood had been shed. The question so raised is an obvious quibble, and even the known uncertainty of the law could scarcely throw a doubt over the issue of a reference to its supreme courts. Meanwhile the issue was raised. The great purpose and business of the Association seemed to be to raise it. One, at least, of the inspectors stood aside from the disputed class of prosecutions till the doubt so raised should be definitively settled. We ourselves now fall under reproof for not solemnly and silently awaiting the decision of the question, whether securely fenced means so fenced as that an accident shall not have happened, or so fenced that an accident shall not arise. We now learn upon inquiry, that while we have been waiting, and the Association has been claiming a twice-pending judicial decision, we find—what do our readers suppose?—that no case whatever awaits the opinion of the Judges!

We believe that we have now answered all the accusations laid against ourselves in Miss Martineau’s pamphlet. There is one citation of “actual resolutions of the Association,” side by side with our summary of their purport, presented as a “conviction of the humanity-monger,” of which we need say nothing, because it cannot fail to suggest to any person only moderately prejudiced, that our summary is very close and accurate indeed.

We will pursue the pamphlet no further, having set ourselves right. There is not an argument, or statement, or allusion in it that is not open to rebuke. It fails even in such small details as when a professor of Literature with a becoming sense of its uses, and that Professor the authoress of Forest and Game Law Tales, and of many volumes of Stories on Political Economy, should gracefully and becomingly think it as against Mr. Dickens, “pity, as a matter of taste, that a writer of fiction should choose topics in which political philosophy and morality were involved.” It fails when accusing us of “burlesque” and “irony,” because we put plain things “in the palpable way which a just-minded writer would scrupulously avoid,” and have, God knows, with a heart how full of earnestness, tried to make the suffering perceived that must have been involved in all these accidents. It fails even when against this “philo-operative cant,” its writer must needs quote Sydney Smith. “We miss Sydney Smith, it is said, in times like these—in every time when a contagious folly, and especially a folly of cant and selfish sensibility, is in question. This very case, in a former phase came under his eye”—and then we have two notes of what he said against the Ten Hours’ Bill: sayings with which, it happens, that the writer of these papers perfectly agrees. When a case really parallel to this, affecting, not the laws of labour, but the carrying on of trade in a way leading sometimes to cruel deaths came under his eye, we did not miss Sydney Smith indeed! The author of the paper upon climbing boys was the last person for Miss Martineau to quote. “We come now,” begins one of his paragraphs, “to burning little chimney-sweepers;” and the same paragraph ends by asking, “What is a toasted child, compared to the agonies of the mistress of the house with a deranged dinner?” Palpably put, and with a bitter irony, we fear!

We have done. We hope we have not been induced to exceed the bounds of temperate and moderate remonstrance, or to prostitute our part in Literature to Old Bailey pleading and passionate scolding. We thoroughly forgive Miss Martineau for having strayed into such unworthy paths under the guidance of her anonymous friend, and we blot her pamphlet out of our remembrance.

COMING SOUTH A CENTURY AGO.

Many amusing books (and many dull ones) come into existence through the clubs which have been following the fashion of the Bannatyne in Edinburgh, the Maitland in Glasgow, and the Camden and Grainger in England. The northern clubs have indulged the most in what the French call luxurious editions. They have benefited by the notion that each subscriber will, in addition to his very moderate subscription, sooner or later print a book for them at his own charge. And when a duke presents to one of these societies the Chartulary of Melrose at the cost of a thousand guineas, and an earl having paid as much for the printing of the Chartulary of Paisley goes on to produce four or five quartos of the Analecta of Woodrow, the example of liberality is set upon no trifling scale. As gifts, though not to be refused, are not always well chosen, volumes that are scarcely worth the pains of reading do occasionally appear. This by the way. We have been reading without any sense of pain one of the publications of the Maitland club—a piece of history relating to a family at present extinct in the male line, the Stewarts of Coltness, in Lanarkshire. Authorship ran in their blood. One of their family wrote a domestic narrative in the year sixteen hundred, which was the main source of a genealogical history of the race drawn up by a Sir Archibald one hundred and seventy-three years later. There were cavalier Coltnesses, and there was a Gospel Coltness; but the Coltness to whom we mean to pay attention in this place is a lady—a literary Coltness, married unto Mr. Calderwood of Polton, in Mid-Lothian. This clever dame descended into England, exactly one hundred years ago, and passed over Holland, on a journey to her brother, a political exile at Aix-la-Chapelle. She wrote a journal, and regarding England through a Scotch mist of her own, took notes in a shrewd way; sometimes canny, and sometimes (as regards the relative merits of the north and south), of a not wholly unquestionable kind. This lady had been bred up in the family of a distinguished crown lawyer; was accustomed to the best society in Scotland; was in her own family commander-in-chief over an amiable husband; and, if we may venture to state so much, forty years of age, when she, for the first time in her life, came south.

Mrs. Calderwood and her husband travelled from Edinburgh to London in their own post-chaise, attended by a serving-man on horseback with pistols in his holsters and a broadsword in his belt. There was a case of pistols in the carriage, more fit, perhaps, for the use of the lady than of the good-natured laird; who, being a man of accomplishments, took with him a pocket Horace to beguile the hours of wayfaring. They set out on the third of June; and, being on the road each day for twelve or fourteen hours, arrived in London on the evening of the tenth.

On the road of course, one day, the lady dined at Durham, “and I went,” she adds, “to see the cathedral; it is a prodigious bulky building.” The day happening to be Sunday, Mrs. Calderwood was much shocked at the behaviour of little boys, who played at ball in what she termed the piazzas, and supposed that the woman who was showing her the place considered her a heathen,—“in particular she stared when I asked what the things were they kneeled upon, as they appeared to me to be so many Cheshire cheeses.” Mrs. Calderwood had travelled far into England before she met with any sensible inhabitant; and then the first intelligent native is recorded, and proves to have been a chamber-maid.

“At Barnet we stopped; and while we changed horses, I asked some questions at the maid who stood at the door, which she answered and went in. In a little time out comes a squinting, smart-like, black girl, and spoke to me, as I thought, in Irish; upon which I said, ‘Are you a Highlander?’ ‘No,’ said she, ‘I am Welch. Are not you Welch?’ ‘No,’ said I, ‘but I am Scots, and the Scots and Welch are near relations, and much better born than the English.’ She took me by the hand, and looked so kindly, that I suppose she thought me her relation because I was not English; which makes me think the English are a people one may perhaps esteem or admire, but they do not draw the affections of strangers, neither in their country nor out of it.”

The general appearance of the southern country is thus pleasantly

O’erlaid with black, staid wisdom’s hue:

“The villages to north of Trent are but indifferent, and the churches very thin sown; and, indeed, for a long time one would think the country of no religion at all, there being hardly either Christian church or heathen temple to be seen. The fields on both hands were mostly grass; and the greatest variety and plenty of fine cattle, all of various colours. I admired the cattle much more than the people; for they seem to have the least of what we call smartness of any folks I ever saw, and totally void of all sort of curiosity—which, perhaps, some may think a good quality.... As for the inclosing in England, it is of all the different methods, both good and bad, that can be imagined; and that such insufficient inclosures, as some are, keep in the cattle (which is so hard with us in Scotland) is entirely owing to the levelness of the grounds; so that an English cow does not see another spot than where she feeds, and has as little intelligence as the people.” Surely the cows are to be pitied, born incapable of taking comprehensive views of things in this flat and unprofitable land. If ever there arose a chance of wider views for the fair traveller, England rose not in her esteem on that account. “Sometimes,” she owns, “we had an extensive prospect, but not the least variety, so that we could say there was too much of it. No water, no distinction between a gentleman’s seat and his tenant’s house, but that he was a little more smothered up with trees.” The lady, when she reached London, found the same reason for contempt of Hyde Park as a place of resort; it was naught, because it was quite smothered with trees. She also surprised the crowded Londoners that she thought England on the whole less populous than Scotland, and there is a good deal of right observation in the sketch she gives of England extra-metropolitan a hundred years ago.

“In the first place, look from the road on each hand, and you see very few houses; towns there are, but at the distance of eight or ten miles. Then, who is it that lives in them? There are no manufactories carried on in them; they live by the travellers and the country about; that is, there are tradesmen of all kinds, perhaps two or three of each—smiths, wrights, shoemakers, &c.; and here is a squire of a small estate in the country near by; and here are Mrs. This, or That, old maids, and so many widow ladies with a parsonage house, a flourishing house. All the houses, built of brick, and very slight, and even some of timber, and two stories high, make them have a greater appearance than there is reality for; for I shall suppose you took out the squire and set him in his country house, and the old maids and widow ladies and place them with their relations, if they have any, in the country, or in a greater town, and take a stone house with a thatch roof of one storey instead of a brick one of two, and there are few country villages in Scotland where I will not muster out as many inhabitants as are in any of these post towns. Then I observed there were few folks to be met with on the road, and many times we could post an hour, which is seven miles, and not see as many houses and people put together on the road! Then on Sunday, we travelled from eight o’clock till we came to Newcastle, where the church was just going in; so that I may say we travelled fifteen miles to Newcastle; and the few people we met going to church upon the road surprised me much. The same as we went all day long; it had no appearance of the swarms of people we always see in Scotland going about on Sunday, even far from any considerable town. Then,” adds the Scotch lady, “the high price of labour is an evidence of the scarcity of people. I went into what we call a cottage, and there was a young woman with her child, sitting; it was very clean, and laid with coarse flags on the floor, but built with timber stoops, and what we call cat and clay walls. She took me into what she called her parlour, for the magnificent names they give things makes very fine till we see them; this parlour was just like to the other. I asked her what her husband was. She said, a labouring man, and got his shilling a day; that she did nothing but took care of her children, and now and then wrought a little plain work. So I found that, except it was in the manufacturing counties, the women do nothing; and if there were as many men in the country as one might suppose there would be, a man could be got for less wages than a shilling per day. Then the high wages at London shows the country cannot provide it with servants. It drains the country, and none return again who ever goes as chairmen, porters, hackney coachmen, or footmen; if they come to old age, seldom spend it in the country, but often in an almshouse, and often leave no posterity. Then the export they make of their victual is a presumption they have not inhabitants to consume it in the country, for, by the common calculation, there are seven millions and one half in England, and the ground in the kingdom is twenty-eight millions of acres, which is four acres to each person. Take into this the immense quantity of horses which are kept for no real use all over the kingdom, and it will be found, I think, that England could maintain many more people than are in it. Besides, let every nation pick out its own native subjects who are but in the first generation, the Irish, the Scots, the French, &c., and I am afraid the native English would appear much fewer than they imagine. On the other hand, Scotland must appear to be more populous for its extent and produce; first, by its bearing as many evacuations in proportion, both to the plantations, the fleet, and army, besides the numbers who go to England, and, indeed, breeding inhabitants to every country under the sun; and if, instead of following the wrong policy of supplying their deficiency of grain by importing it, they would cultivate their waste lands, it would do more than maintain all its inhabitants in plenty.” The lady presently becomes severe: “I do not think the soil near London is naturally rich, and neither the corns nor grass are extraordinary. I thought their crops of hay all very light, and but of an indifferent quality; they call it meadow hay, but we could call it tending pretty nearly to bog hay.”

Her admiration of things English seems indeed to have been confined pretty closely to its immense number of fine horses. “As for London, the first sight of it did not strike me with anything grand or magnificent.... Many authors and correspondents take up much time and pains to little purpose on descriptions. I never could understand anybody’s descriptions, and I suppose nobody will understand mine; so will only say London is a very large and extensive city. But I had time to see very little of it, and every street is so like another that, seeing part, you may easily suppose the whole.”

Then for the heads of London, your ill-meaning, politician lords, the lady Samson pulls their temple down over their heads. “You will think it very odd that I was a fortnight in London, and saw none of the royal family; but I got no clothes made till the day before I left, though I gave them to the making the day after I came. I cannot say my curiosity was great. I found, as I approached the court and the grandees, they sunk so miserably, and came so far short of the ideas I had conceived, that I was loth to lose the grand ideas I had of kings, princes, ministers of state, senators, &c., which, I suppose, I had gathered from romance in my youth. We used to laugh at the English for being so soon afraid when there was any danger in state affairs; but now I do excuse them. For we, at a distance, think the wisdom of our governors will prevent all those things; but those who know and see our ministers every day, see there is no wisdom in them, and that they are a parcel of old, ignorant, senseless bodies, who mind nothing but eating and drinking, and rolling about in their carriages in Hyde Park, and know no more of the country, or the situation of it, nor of the numbers, strength, and circumstances of it, than they never had been in it. And how should they, when London and twenty miles round it is the extent ever they saw of it?”

There were here some remarks not very inappropriate, considering that they were written when the Duke of Newcastle was fighting on his stumps, and the ferment concerning Admiral Byng was at its height.

There seems to have been some connection between the Calderwoods and Mr. George Stone Scott, sub-preceptor to the Prince of Wales, afterwards George the Third. Mrs. Calderwood says—“I had frequent opportunities of seeing George Scott, and asked him many questions about the Prince of Wales. He says he is a lad of very good principles, good-natured, extremely honest, has no heroic strain, but loves peace, and has no turn for extravagance; modest, and has no tendency to vice, and has as yet very virtuous principles; has the greatest temptations to gallant with the ladies, who lay themselves out in the most shameful manner to draw him in, but to no purpose. He says, if he were not what he is they would not mind him. Prince Edward is of a more amorous complexion; but no court is paid to him, because he has so little chance to be king.” Mrs. C.! Mrs. C.! how sweet a dish of scandal! We will next meet with her setting out in gracious humour, and will not be startled should a ripple come over the current of her thoughts.

“Any of the English folks I got acquainted with I liked very well. They seemed to be good-natured and humane; but still there is a sort of ignorance about them with regard to the rest of the world, and their conversation runs in a very narrow channel. They speak with a great relish of their public places, and say, with a sort of flutter, that they shall go to Vauxhall and Ranelagh, but do not seem to enjoy it when there. As for Vauxhall and Ranelagh, I wrote my opinion of them before. The first I think but a vulgar sort of entertainment, and could not think myself in genteel company whiles I heard a man calling ‘Take care of your watches and pockets!’ I saw the Countess of Coventry at Ranelagh. I think she is a pert, stinking-like hussy, going about with her face up to the sky, that she might see from under her hat, which she had pulled quite over nose, that nobody might see her face. She was in deshabille, and very shabby drest, but was painted over her very jawbones. I saw only three English peers, and I think you could not make a tolerable one out of them.... I saw very few, either men or women, tolerably handsome.”

But her woman’s heart could not resist the men in regimentals; she was determined, too, to have a good look at them, as her journal tells.

“I went one morning to the park, in hopes to see the Duke review a troop of the Horse Guards, but he was not there; but the Guards were very pretty. Sall Blackwood and Miss Buller were with me; they were afraid to push near for the crowd, but I was resolved to get forward, so pushed in. They were very surly, and one of them asked me where I would be,—would I have my toes trod off? ‘Is your toes trode off?’ said I. ‘No,’ said he. ‘Then give me your place, and I’ll take care of my toes.’ ‘But they are going to fire,’ said he. ‘Then it’s time for you to march off,’ said I, ‘for I can stand fire. I wish your troops may do as well.’ On which he sneaked off, and gave me his place.”

A few other sketches we give for the sake of their succinctness. Greenwich Hospital “is a ridiculous fine thing.” The view from the hill, there, “is very pretty, which you see just as well in a raree-show glass. No wonder the English are transported with a place they can see about them in.”

We give also as a curiosity, because we wonder how the lady ventured to present to us,—King George the Second in his bedroom at Kensington.

“There are a small bed with silk curtains, two satin quilts, and no blanket; a hair mattress; a plain wicker basket stands on a table, with a silk night-gown and night-cap in it; a candle with an extinguisher; some billets of wood on each side of the fire. He goes to bed alone, rises, lights his fire, and tends it himself, and nobody knows when he rises, which is very early, and he is up several hours before he calls anybody. He dines in a small room adjoining, in which there is nothing but very common things. He sometimes, they say, sups with his daughters and their company, and is very merry, and sings French songs; but at present he is in low spirits.”

Finally, let us show how Mrs. Calderwood brings her acutely haggis-loving mind to bear upon the English ignorance of what is good for dinner.

“As for their victuals, they make such a work about, I cannot enter into the tastes of them, or rather, I think they have no taste to enter into. The meat is juicy enough, but has so little taste that if you shut your eyes, you will not know, by either taste or smell, what you are eating. The lamb and veal look as if they had been blanched in water. The smell of dinner will never intimate that it is on the table. No such effluvia as beef and cabbage was ever found in London! The fish, I think, have the same fault.”

At the want of a sufficiently high smell to the fish eaten by the English, we are very well content to stop, and stop accordingly.

THE ROVING ENGLISHMAN.

THE SHOW OFFICER.

We go stumbling along the unpaved streets of Galatz by the dim light of a lantern carried before us by a servant. The town, although the chief commercial city of the Danubian Principalities, and numbering its inhabitants by tens of thousands, is of course unlighted. The outward civilisation of these countries showy as it appears, has unhappily gone no further, up to the present time, than jewellery and patent-leather boots. Light, air, and cleanliness are at least two generations a-head of it.

Our hotel, the best in the town, is not better than a Spanish inn on the Moorish frontier. The doors do not shut, the windows do not open. There is a bed, but it is an enemy rather than a friend to repose. The bed-clothes are of a dark smoke-colour, stained in many places with iron-moulds, and burned into little black holes by the ashes of defunct cigars. The bed, bedstead, and bed-clothes are alive with vermin. They crawl down the damp mouldy walls, and swarm on the filthy floor, untouched by the broom of a single housemaid since its planks were laid down. Battalions move in little dark specks over the pillow-case; they creep in and out of the rents and folds of the abominable blanket. On a crazy wooden chair—of which one of the legs is broken—stands a small red pipkin, with a glass of dingy water in the centre. A smoky rag, torn and unhemmed, is laid awry beside it. They are designed for the purposes of ablution.

The walls of the room are very thin; and there is a farewell supper of ladies and gentlemen going on in the next room. I saw the guests mustering as we came in. They were so ringed and chained that they would have excited envy and admiration even at a Jewish wedding. They are all talking together at the top of their voices against the Austrian occupation. The odour of their hot meats and the fine smoke of their cigarettes, come creeping through the many chinks and crannies of the slender partition which divides us. Twice I have heard a scuffling behind my door, and I have felt that an inquisitive eye was applied to a key-hole, from which the lock has long since been wrenched in some midnight freak. Derisive whispering, followed by loud laughter, has also given me the agreeable assurance that my movements are watched with a lively and speculative interest. They appear to add considerably to the entertainment of the company. I am abashed by feeling myself the cause of so much hilarity, and stealthily put out the light. Then I wrap myself up resolutely in a roquelaure, take the bed by assault, and shut my eyes desperately to the consequences; doing drowsy battle with the foe, as I feel them crawling from time to time beneath a moustache or under an eyelid. I am ignominiously routed, however, at last, and rise from that loathsome bed blistered and fevered. The screaming and shouting in the next room has by this time grown demoniacal. My friends are evidently making a night of it: so I begin to wonder whether the talisman of a ducat will not induce a waiter and a lantern to go with me to the steam-boat. I may pace the deck till morning, if I cannot sleep; for the Galatz hotel-keepers have I know protested against passengers being allowed berths on board the vessels when in port.

The silver spell succeeds. A sooty little fellow, like a chimney-sweep, agrees to accompany me, and we go scuffling among rat-holes, open sewers, sleeping vagabonds, and scampering cats down to the quagmire by the water-side; and scrambling over bales of goods, and a confused labyrinth of chains and cordage, gain the deck of the good ship Ferdinand. A cigar, a joke, and a dollar, overcomes the steward’s scruples about a berth, and I wake next morning to the rattling sound of the paddle-wheels.

The boat is very full. It is as difficult to get at the washhand-basins as to fight one’s way to the belle of a ball-room. I pounce on one at last, however, by an adroit flank movement, and prepare for a thoroughly British souse, when a young Wallachian—in full dress, and diamond ear-rings; who has just been putting an amazing quantity of unguents on his hair—comes up and coolly commences cleaning his teeth beside me. He looks round with a bright good-natured smile when he has finished, and is plainly at a loss to understand the melancholy astonishment depicted in my countenance.

The deck is crowded with a strange company. There are the carousing party who broke my rest last night. They glitter from head to foot with baubles and gewgaws; but the gentlemen are unwashed and unshorn, and it is well for the ladies that their rich silk and velvet dresses do not easily show the ravages of time and smoke. They are dressed in the last fashions of Holborn or the Palais Royal, and one of the dames, I learn, is a princess, with more ducats and peasants than she can count. She spends a great part of the day adorning herself in her cabin—the centre of an admiring crowd of tinselled gallants, who assist at her toilette, with compliments and with suggestions of a naïveté quite surprising.

Then there is a fat old Moldavian lady of the old school. She wears a black great-coat lined with a pale fur, and Wellington boots. Her head is swathed and bound up in many bandages. She wears thumb rings, and smokes continually. Our passengers are indeed of the most motley character, for we have quitted the excellent boats of the Danube Company, and are now on board a vessel belonging to the Austrian Lloyd’s, very inferior in size and accommodation, although built for going to sea. The first and second class passengers mingle together indiscriminately, and the whole deck is encumbered with a shouting, screaming, laughing, wrangling mass of parti-coloured humanity. There are Gallician Jew girls, going under the escort of some rascally old speculator to Constantinople, and dressed like our poor mountebank lasses, who go about on stilts at country fairs. They are a bright-eyed kindly race of gipsies and good-natured termagants, with a smile and a saucy word for everybody. Watching them, with great contempt, is a German professor, who has indiscreetly shaved the small hairs from the point of his nose till he has quite a beard on it. There is a long Austrian officer in a short cavalry cloak, who looks not unlike a stork; and there is a small Austrian officer, in a long infantry great-coat, who domineers over him, and is evidently his superior. They are an odd pair, and pace the deck together with a military dignity and precision quite comical. There is a brace of gipsies, hereditary serfs, with dark fiery eyes, rich complexions, and red handkerchiefs tied picturesquely with the striking grace in costume, which distinguished that outcast race in all countries. Then there are Greek and Armenian traders engaged in all sorts of rascally speculations connected with the war and the corn markets—sly, sharp-nosed men who have scraped together large fortunes by inconceivable dodges and scoundrel tricks; who have their correspondents and branch-houses at Marseilles, Trieste, Vienna, Paris, London, and New York; who would overreach a Jew of Petticoat Lane, and snap their fingers at him; who have all the rank vices and keen wit of a race oppressed for centuries, newly-emancipated. All power, wealth, and dominion in the Levant is passing into their hands. Long after I who write these lines shall sketch and scribble no more, the chivalry of the West will have a fearful struggle with them. May Heaven make it victorious! Our party is completed by two bandy beggars, with grey beards and bald heads; a crowd of the common-place men of the Levant, loud, important, patronising, presuming, vile, ignorant, worthless, astounding for their impudence; the captain, a brusque, talkative, self-confident Italian, and his wife, a lady from Ragusa, silent and watchful, with a sweet smile and a meaning eye.

We get under weigh betimes in the morning; for, below Galatz, ships are only allowed to navigate the Danube between daylight and dark, so that in these shortening days they must make the most of it. The noble river is crowded with vessels; and, now and then we meet a valuable raft of timber for ships’ masts floating downwards. This will be stopped by the Russians, to the cruel injury of trade. I learn from an Armenian merchant on board, that a mast such as would sell for fifty pounds at Constantinople may be here bought for five pounds or less; so that there will be some grand speculations in timber whenever peace is declared.

At Tschedal, just below Ismail, we come to anchor; and, after a short delay, a trim little boat shoots smartly out from the Bessarabian shore towards us. It is pulled by six rowers, in the peculiar grey great-coats and black leather cross-belts which distinguish Russian soldiers. At the helm is a seventh soldier decorated with a brass badge and some medal of merit; at the prow stands an eighth; in the seat of honour sits the officer empowered to examine our passports, and to ascertain that our ship carries no military stores or contraband of war. At the bottom of the boat is a pile of muskets, and from the stern flutters the Russian war flag—a blue cross on a white ground.

The trim little boat is soon hooked on to our side, and the officer steps lightly and gracefully on deck. He is a Pole; and, though but twenty-five or twenty-six years old, is already a major of marines. I cannot help thinking also that he is a show-officer. He is dressed within an inch of his life. His uniform would turn half the heads at Almack’s; for it is really charming in its elegant propriety and good taste. It is a dark rifle-green uniform, with plain round gilt buttons, and not made tawdry by embroidery. Two heavy epaulettes of bullion, with glittering silver stars, which announce the rank of the wearer, are its only ornament. His boots might have been drawn through a ring, and look quite like kid gloves on his dainty little feet. His well-shaped helmet is of varnished leather, with the Russian eagle in copper gilt upon it; and this eagle and the bright hilt of his sword flash back the rays of the sun quite dazzlingly. We, poor dingy, travel-stained passengers appear like slaves in the presence of a king before him.

He speaks French perfectly. He is excruciatingly polite, and is evidently a man of the world, conscious of being entrusted with a delicate duty; but rather overdoing it. He would be handsome, but for small cunning, or rather roguish eyes, when roguish is used in an undefined sense, and may mean smartness good or bad; but it is difficult to take his measure. He has evidently seen service. His hair is of the light rusty brown of nature and exposure. His face is shorn, except a sweeping moustache peculiarly well trimmed. There are some lines about his face which tell the old story of suffering and privation.

He is, as I have said, courteous—more than courteous. He does not even examine the Greek and Moldo-Wallachian passports; but he pauses over the French and English to see if the visas are correct. Mine he examined more narrowly, and then returned it with a gay débonnaire bow, a polite smile, and a backward step. A Greek keeps up a conversation with him the whole time he remains on board. I fancy there is more in it than meets the ear. In speaking to this fellow the major takes a short, sharp, abrupt, hasty tone of command, like a man in authority pressed for time. The major does not examine the hold of the vessel, nor interrogate any of the Austrian officers. There is evidently a shyness and ill-will between them.

When we have each filed past him in turn, the Pole draws his elegant figure up to its full slim height, tightens his belt, and marches with a light gallant step from one end of the vessel to the other. Then he halts at the gangway, faces about, casts a hawk’s eye round the ship, and descends the companion-ladder. The trim little bark is hooked closer on; then the grapnels are loosened, and she spreads her light sail to the wind. The rowers shelve their oars, and the next moment she is dashing the spray from her bows, and flying towards the shore with the speed of a sea-gull. At the stern sits the Pole upright as a dart, the sunbeams toying with his helmet—a picture to muse on.

Nothing could have been in better taste than the whole thing. It might have served for a scene of an opera, or a chapter in a delightfully romantic peace novel. I confess I cannot help feeling something like a pitying tenderness for the smart cavalier; who may, a few days hence, be called away to the war, and return to his true love never—be mashed by a cannon shot, or blown into small pieces by a mine—his life’s errand all unaccomplished, his bright life suddenly marred. I think, too, how strange and sad is the destiny which can make such a Pole take part in a cause which, if successful, will rivet the chains of his countrymen for ever; and how he would meet his patriot countrymen who have joined the hostile ranks in hundreds for only one faint hope of freedom.

Below Ismail the Danube was a perfect forest of masts, and we had some difficulty in steering our way through the maze of ships. The river is very narrow in many places. A child could easily throw a stone across it. The Turkish and Russian labourers in the fields on the Bulgarian and Bessarabian shores are within hail of each other. And every breeze blows waifs and strays across the narrow boundary. Turkish and Russian wild-fowl, wiser than men, chat amicably together about their prospects for the winter, and call blithely to each other from shore to shore among the reeds. The character of the country on both sides of the river is very much the same—flat and uninteresting. Now and then, however, a charming little valley opens among woods and waters in the distance, and here and there rises a solitary guard-house, or a few fishermen burrow among rocks and caverns. Thirty hours after our departure from Galatz we steam into the crowded port of Sulina, where one thousand sail are wind-bound.

On Saturday, January 19th, will be Published, Price
Five Shillings and Sixpence, cloth boards,

THE TWELFTH VOLUME
OF
HOUSEHOLD WORDS,

Containing from No. 280 to No. 303 (both inclusive),
and the extra Christmas Number.

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.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] Numbers 264, 268, 274, and 279.

[B] Reported in the Manchester Guardian of March 28, 1855.

[C] Reported in the Manchester Guardian of March 28, 1855.

Transcriber’s note

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

In the original on page 15, the footnote is referenced in two places in the text. In this version a duplicate footnote was added.

Spelling has been retained as originally published except for the corrections below.

Page 1: | “a man in Paris have an” | “a man in Paris has an”
Page 3: | “and disagreable company” | “and disagreeable company”
Page 9: | “Madame Rosa's bourdoir” | “Madame Rosa's boudoir”
Page 9: | “lived where Michael Angelo” | “lived where Michelangelo”
Page 13: | “yielded the pas” | “yielded the past”
Page 15: | “members of the Asociation” | “members of the Association”
Page 22: | “mends it himself” | “tends it himself”

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOUSEHOLD WORDS, NO. 304, JANUARY 19, 1856 ***

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