The Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays of Travel, by Robert Louis Stevenson
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Title: Essays of Travel

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

Release Date: August, 1996  [EBook #627]
[This file was first posted on July 3, 1996]
[Most recently updated: September 2, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, ESSAYS OF TRAVEL ***




Transcribed from the 1905 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk




ESSAYS OF TRAVEL




Contents

THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT:  FROM THE CLYDE TO SANDY HOOK
   THE SECOND CABIN
   EARLY IMPRESSION
   STEERAGE IMPRESSIONS
   STEERAGE TYPES
   THE SICK MAN
   THE STOWAWAYS
   PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND REVIEW
   NEW YORK
COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK
   COCKERMOUTH
   AN EVANGELIST
   ANOTHER
   LAST OF SMETHURST
AN AUTUMN EFFECT
A WINTER'S WALK IN CARRICK AND GALLOWAY
FOREST NOTES -
   ON THE PLAINS
   IN THE SEASON
   IDLE HOURS
   A PLEASURE-PARTY
   THE WOODS IN SPRING
   MORALITY
A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE
RANDOM MEMORIES:  ROSA QUO LOCORUM
THE IDEAL HOUSE
DAVOS IN WINTER
HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS
ALPINE DIVERSION
THE STUMULATION OF THE ALPS
ROADS
ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES



CHAPTER I--THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT



THE SECOND CABIN


I first encountered my fellow-passengers on the Broomielaw in
Glasgow.  Thence we descended the Clyde in no familiar spirit, but
looking askance on each other as on possible enemies.  A few
Scandinavians, who had already grown acquainted on the North Sea,
were friendly and voluble over their long pipes; but among English
speakers distance and suspicion reigned supreme.  The sun was soon
overclouded, the wind freshened and grew sharp as we continued to
descend the widening estuary; and with the falling temperature the
gloom among the passengers increased.  Two of the women wept.  Any
one who had come aboard might have supposed we were all absconding
from the law.  There was scarce a word interchanged, and no common
sentiment but that of cold united us, until at length, having
touched at Greenock, a pointing arm and a rush to the starboard now
announced that our ocean steamer was in sight.  There she lay in
mid-river, at the Tail of the Bank, her sea-signal flying:  a wall
of bulwark, a street of white deck-houses, an aspiring forest of
spars, larger than a church, and soon to be as populous as many an
incorporated town in the land to which she was to bear us.

I was not, in truth, a steerage passenger.  Although anxious to see
the worst of emigrant life, I had some work to finish on the
voyage, and was advised to go by the second cabin, where at least I
should have a table at command.  The advice was excellent; but to
understand the choice, and what I gained, some outline of the
internal disposition of the ship will first be necessary.  In her
very nose is Steerage No. 1, down two pair of stairs.  A little
abaft, another companion, labelled Steerage No. 2 and 3, gives
admission to three galleries, two running forward towards Steerage
No. 1, and the third aft towards the engines.  The starboard
forward gallery is the second cabin.  Away abaft the engines and
below the officers' cabins, to complete our survey of the vessel,
there is yet a third nest of steerages, labelled 4 and 5.  The
second cabin, to return, is thus a modified oasis in the very heart
of the steerages.  Through the thin partition you can hear the
steerage passengers being sick, the rattle of tin dishes as they
sit at meals, the varied accents in which they converse, the crying
of their children terrified by this new experience, or the clean
flat smack of the parental hand in chastisement.

There are, however, many advantages for the inhabitant of this
strip.  He does not require to bring his own bedding or dishes, but
finds berths and a table completely if somewhat roughly furnished.
He enjoys a distinct superiority in diet; but this, strange to say,
differs not only on different ships, but on the same ship according
as her head is to the east or west.  In my own experience, the
principal difference between our table and that of the true
steerage passenger was the table itself, and the crockery plates
from which we ate.  But lest I should show myself ungrateful, let
me recapitulate every advantage.  At breakfast we had a choice
between tea and coffee for beverage; a choice not easy to make, the
two were so surprisingly alike.  I found that I could sleep after
the coffee and lay awake after the tea, which is proof conclusive
of some chemical disparity; and even by the palate I could
distinguish a smack of snuff in the former from a flavour of
boiling and dish-cloths in the second.  As a matter of fact, I have
seen passengers, after many sips, still doubting which had been
supplied them.  In the way of eatables at the same meal we were
gloriously favoured; for in addition to porridge, which was common
to all, we had Irish stew, sometimes a bit of fish, and sometimes
rissoles.  The dinner of soup, roast fresh beef, boiled salt junk,
and potatoes, was, I believe, exactly common to the steerage and
the second cabin; only I have heard it rumoured that our potatoes
were of a superior brand; and twice a week, on pudding-days,
instead of duff, we had a saddle-bag filled with currants under the
name of a plum-pudding.  At tea we were served with some broken
meat from the saloon; sometimes in the comparatively elegant form
of spare patties or rissoles; but as a general thing mere chicken-
bones and flakes of fish, neither hot nor cold.  If these were not
the scrapings of plates their looks belied them sorely; yet we were
all too hungry to be proud, and fell to these leavings greedily.
These, the bread, which was excellent, and the soup and porridge
which were both good, formed my whole diet throughout the voyage;
so that except for the broken meat and the convenience of a table I
might as well have been in the steerage outright.  Had they given
me porridge again in the evening, I should have been perfectly
contented with the fare.  As it was, with a few biscuits and some
whisky and water before turning in, I kept my body going and my
spirits up to the mark.

The last particular in which the second cabin passenger remarkably
stands ahead of his brother of the steerage is one altogether of
sentiment.  In the steerage there are males and females; in the
second cabin ladies and gentlemen.  For some time after I came
aboard I thought I was only a male; but in the course of a voyage
of discovery between decks, I came on a brass plate, and learned
that I was still a gentleman.  Nobody knew it, of course.  I was
lost in the crowd of males and females, and rigorously confined to
the same quarter of the deck.  Who could tell whether I housed on
the port or starboard side of steerage No. 2 and 3?  And it was
only there that my superiority became practical; everywhere else I
was incognito, moving among my inferiors with simplicity, not so
much as a swagger to indicate that I was a gentleman after all, and
had broken meat to tea.  Still, I was like one with a patent of
nobility in a drawer at home; and when I felt out of spirits I
could go down and refresh myself with a look of that brass plate.

For all these advantages I paid but two guineas.  Six guineas is
the steerage fare; eight that by the second cabin; and when you
remember that the steerage passenger must supply bedding and
dishes, and, in five cases out of ten, either brings some dainties
with him, or privately pays the steward for extra rations, the
difference in price becomes almost nominal.  Air comparatively fit
to breathe, food comparatively varied, and the satisfaction of
being still privately a gentleman, may thus be had almost for the
asking.  Two of my fellow-passengers in the second cabin had
already made the passage by the cheaper fare, and declared it was
an experiment not to be repeated.  As I go on to tell about my
steerage friends, the reader will perceive that they were not alone
in their opinion.  Out of ten with whom I was more or less
intimate, I am sure not fewer than five vowed, if they returned, to
travel second cabin; and all who had left their wives behind them
assured me they would go without the comfort of their presence
until they could afford to bring them by saloon.

Our party in the second cabin was not perhaps the most interesting
on board.  Perhaps even in the saloon there was as much good-will
and character.  Yet it had some elements of curiosity.  There was a
mixed group of Swedes, Danes, and Norsemen, one of whom, generally
known by the name of 'Johnny,' in spite of his own protests,
greatly diverted us by his clever, cross-country efforts to speak
English, and became on the strength of that an universal favourite-
-it takes so little in this world of shipboard to create a
popularity.  There was, besides, a Scots mason, known from his
favourite dish as 'Irish Stew,' three or four nondescript Scots, a
fine young Irishman, O'Reilly, and a pair of young men who deserve
a special word of condemnation.  One of them was Scots; the other
claimed to be American; admitted, after some fencing, that he was
born in England; and ultimately proved to be an Irishman born and
nurtured, but ashamed to own his country.  He had a sister on
board, whom he faithfully neglected throughout the voyage, though
she was not only sick, but much his senior, and had nursed and
cared for him in childhood.  In appearance he was like an imbecile
Henry the Third of France.  The Scotsman, though perhaps as big an
ass, was not so dead of heart; and I have only bracketed them
together because they were fast friends, and disgraced themselves
equally by their conduct at the table.

Next, to turn to topics more agreeable, we had a newly-married
couple, devoted to each other, with a pleasant story of how they
had first seen each other years ago at a preparatory school, and
that very afternoon he had carried her books home for her.  I do
not know if this story will be plain to southern readers; but to me
it recalls many a school idyll, with wrathful swains of eight and
nine confronting each other stride-legs, flushed with jealousy; for
to carry home a young lady's books was both a delicate attention
and a privilege.

Then there was an old lady, or indeed I am not sure that she was as
much old as antiquated and strangely out of place, who had left her
husband, and was travelling all the way to Kansas by herself.  We
had to take her own word that she was married; for it was sorely
contradicted by the testimony of her appearance.  Nature seemed to
have sanctified her for the single state; even the colour of her
hair was incompatible with matrimony, and her husband, I thought,
should be a man of saintly spirit and phantasmal bodily presence.
She was ill, poor thing; her soul turned from the viands; the dirty
tablecloth shocked her like an impropriety; and the whole strength
of her endeavour was bent upon keeping her watch true to Glasgow
time till she should reach New York.  They had heard reports, her
husband and she, of some unwarrantable disparity of hours between
these two cities; and with a spirit commendably scientific, had
seized on this occasion to put them to the proof.  It was a good
thing for the old lady; for she passed much leisure time in
studying the watch.  Once, when prostrated by sickness, she let it
run down.  It was inscribed on her harmless mind in letters of
adamant that the hands of a watch must never be turned backwards;
and so it behoved her to lie in wait for the exact moment ere she
started it again.  When she imagined this was about due, she sought
out one of the young second-cabin Scotsmen, who was embarked on the
same experiment as herself and had hitherto been less neglectful.
She was in quest of two o'clock; and when she learned it was
already seven on the shores of Clyde, she lifted up her voice and
cried 'Gravy!'  I had not heard this innocent expletive since I was
a young child; and I suppose it must have been the same with the
other Scotsmen present, for we all laughed our fill.

Last but not least, I come to my excellent friend Mr. Jones.  It
would be difficult to say whether I was his right-hand man, or he
mine, during the voyage.  Thus at table I carved, while he only
scooped gravy; but at our concerts, of which more anon, he was the
president who called up performers to sing, and I but his messenger
who ran his errands and pleaded privately with the over-modest.  I
knew I liked Mr. Jones from the moment I saw him.  I thought him by
his face to be Scottish; nor could his accent undeceive me.  For as
there is a lingua franca of many tongues on the moles and in the
feluccas of the Mediterranean, so there is a free or common accent
among English-speaking men who follow the sea.  They catch a twang
in a New England Port; from a cockney skipper, even a Scotsman
sometimes learns to drop an h; a word of a dialect is picked up
from another band in the forecastle; until often the result is
undecipherable, and you have to ask for the man's place of birth.
So it was with Mr. Jones.  I thought him a Scotsman who had been
long to sea; and yet he was from Wales, and had been most of his
life a blacksmith at an inland forge; a few years in America and
half a score of ocean voyages having sufficed to modify his speech
into the common pattern.  By his own account he was both strong and
skilful in his trade.  A few years back, he had been married and
after a fashion a rich man; now the wife was dead and the money
gone.  But his was the nature that looks forward, and goes on from
one year to another and through all the extremities of fortune
undismayed; and if the sky were to fall to-morrow, I should look to
see Jones, the day following, perched on a step-ladder and getting
things to rights.  He was always hovering round inventions like a
bee over a flower, and lived in a dream of patents.  He had with
him a patent medicine, for instance, the composition of which he
had bought years ago for five dollars from an American pedlar, and
sold the other day for a hundred pounds (I think it was) to an
English apothecary.  It was called Golden Oil, cured all maladies
without exception; and I am bound to say that I partook of it
myself with good results.  It is a character of the man that he was
not only perpetually dosing himself with Golden Oil, but wherever
there was a head aching or a finger cut, there would be Jones with
his bottle.

If he had one taste more strongly than another, it was to study
character.  Many an hour have we two walked upon the deck
dissecting our neighbours in a spirit that was too purely
scientific to be called unkind; whenever a quaint or human trait
slipped out in conversation, you might have seen Jones and me
exchanging glances; and we could hardly go to bed in comfort till
we had exchanged notes and discussed the day's experience.  We were
then like a couple of anglers comparing a day's kill.  But the fish
we angled for were of a metaphysical species, and we angled as
often as not in one another's baskets.  Once, in the midst of a
serious talk, each found there was a scrutinising eye upon himself;
I own I paused in embarrassment at this double detection; but
Jones, with a better civility, broke into a peal of unaffected
laughter, and declared, what was the truth, that there was a pair
of us indeed.


EARLY IMPRESSIONS


We steamed out of the Clyde on Thursday night, and early on the
Friday forenoon we took in our last batch of emigrants at Lough
Foyle, in Ireland, and said farewell to Europe.  The company was
now complete, and began to draw together, by inscrutable
magnetisms, upon the decks.  There were Scots and Irish in plenty,
a few English, a few Americans, a good handful of Scandinavians, a
German or two, and one Russian; all now belonging for ten days to
one small iron country on the deep.

As I walked the deck and looked round upon my fellow-passengers,
thus curiously assorted from all northern Europe, I began for the
first time to understand the nature of emigration.  Day by day
throughout the passage, and thenceforward across all the States,
and on to the shores of the Pacific, this knowledge grew more clear
and melancholy.  Emigration, from a word of the most cheerful
import, came to sound most dismally in my ear.  There is nothing
more agreeable to picture and nothing more pathetic to behold.  The
abstract idea, as conceived at home, is hopeful and adventurous.  A
young man, you fancy, scorning restraints and helpers, issues forth
into life, that great battle, to fight for his own hand.  The most
pleasant stories of ambition, of difficulties overcome, and of
ultimate success, are but as episodes to this great epic of self-
help.  The epic is composed of individual heroisms; it stands to
them as the victorious war which subdued an empire stands to the
personal act of bravery which spiked a single cannon and was
adequately rewarded with a medal.  For in emigration the young men
enter direct and by the shipload on their heritage of work; empty
continents swarm, as at the bo's'un's whistle, with industrious
hands, and whole new empires are domesticated to the service of
man.

This is the closet picture, and is found, on trial, to consist
mostly of embellishments.  The more I saw of my fellow-passengers,
the less I was tempted to the lyric note.  Comparatively few of the
men were below thirty; many were married, and encumbered with
families; not a few were already up in years; and this itself was
out of tune with my imaginations, for the ideal emigrant should
certainly be young.  Again, I thought he should offer to the eye
some bold type of humanity, with bluff or hawk-like features, and
the stamp of an eager and pushing disposition.  Now those around me
were for the most part quiet, orderly, obedient citizens, family
men broken by adversity, elderly youths who had failed to place
themselves in life, and people who had seen better days.  Mildness
was the prevailing character; mild mirth and mild endurance.  In a
word, I was not taking part in an impetuous and conquering sally,
such as swept over Mexico or Siberia, but found myself, like
Marmion, 'in the lost battle, borne down by the flying.'

Labouring mankind had in the last years, and throughout Great
Britain, sustained a prolonged and crushing series of defeats.  I
had heard vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses
standing deserted by the Tyne, the cellar-doors broken and removed
for firewood; of homeless men loitering at the street-corners of
Glasgow with their chests beside them; of closed factories, useless
strikes, and starving girls.  But I had never taken them home to me
or represented these distresses livingly to my imagination.

A turn of the market may be a calamity as disastrous as the French
retreat from Moscow; but it hardly lends itself to lively
treatment, and makes a trifling figure in the morning papers.  We
may struggle as we please, we are not born economists.  The
individual is more affecting than the mass.  It is by the scenic
accidents, and the appeal to the carnal eye, that for the most part
we grasp the significance of tragedies.  Thus it was only now, when
I found myself involved in the rout, that I began to appreciate how
sharp had been the battle.  We were a company of the rejected; the
drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had been
unable to prevail against circumstances in the one land, were now
fleeing pitifully to another; and though one or two might still
succeed, all had already failed.  We were a shipful of failures,
the broken men of England.  Yet it must not be supposed that these
people exhibited depression.  The scene, on the contrary, was
cheerful.  Not a tear was shed on board the vessel.  All were full
of hope for the future, and showed an inclination to innocent
gaiety.  Some were heard to sing, and all began to scrape
acquaintance with small jests and ready laughter.

The children found each other out like dogs, and ran about the
decks scraping acquaintance after their fashion also.  'What do you
call your mither?' I heard one ask.  'Mawmaw,' was the reply,
indicating, I fancy, a shade of difference in the social scale.
When people pass each other on the high seas of life at so early an
age, the contact is but slight, and the relation more like what we
may imagine to be the friendship of flies than that of men; it is
so quickly joined, so easily dissolved, so open in its
communications and so devoid of deeper human qualities.  The
children, I observed, were all in a band, and as thick as thieves
at a fair, while their elders were still ceremoniously manoeuvring
on the outskirts of acquaintance.  The sea, the ship, and the
seamen were soon as familiar as home to these half-conscious little
ones.  It was odd to hear them, throughout the voyage, employ shore
words to designate portions of the vessel.  'Go 'way doon to yon
dyke,' I heard one say, probably meaning the bulwark.  I often had
my heart in my mouth, watching them climb into the shrouds or on
the rails, while the ship went swinging through the waves; and I
admired and envied the courage of their mothers, who sat by in the
sun and looked on with composure at these perilous feats.  'He'll
maybe be a sailor,' I heard one remark; 'now's the time to learn.'
I had been on the point of running forward to interfere, but stood
back at that, reproved.  Very few in the more delicate classes have
the nerve to look upon the peril of one dear to them; but the life
of poorer folk, where necessity is so much more immediate and
imperious, braces even a mother to this extreme of endurance.  And
perhaps, after all, it is better that the lad should break his neck
than that you should break his spirit.

And since I am here on the chapter of the children, I must mention
one little fellow, whose family belonged to Steerage No. 4 and 5,
and who, wherever he went, was like a strain of music round the
ship.  He was an ugly, merry, unbreeched child of three, his lint-
white hair in a tangle, his face smeared with suet and treacle; but
he ran to and fro with so natural a step, and fell and picked
himself up again with such grace and good-humour, that he might
fairly be called beautiful when he was in motion.  To meet him,
crowing with laughter and beating an accompaniment to his own mirth
with a tin spoon upon a tin cup, was to meet a little triumph of
the human species.  Even when his mother and the rest of his family
lay sick and prostrate around him, he sat upright in their midst
and sang aloud in the pleasant heartlessness of infancy.

Throughout the Friday, intimacy among us men made but a few
advances.  We discussed the probable duration of the voyage, we
exchanged pieces of information, naming our trades, what we hoped
to find in the new world, or what we were fleeing from in the old;
and, above all, we condoled together over the food and the vileness
of the steerage.  One or two had been so near famine that you may
say they had run into the ship with the devil at their heels; and
to these all seemed for the best in the best of possible steamers.
But the majority were hugely contented.  Coming as they did from a
country in so low a state as Great Britain, many of them from
Glasgow, which commercially speaking was as good as dead, and many
having long been out of work, I was surprised to find them so
dainty in their notions.  I myself lived almost exclusively on
bread, porridge, and soup, precisely as it was supplied to them,
and found it, if not luxurious, at least sufficient.  But these
working men were loud in their outcries.  It was not 'food for
human beings,' it was 'only fit for pigs,' it was 'a disgrace.'
Many of them lived almost entirely upon biscuit, others on their
own private supplies, and some paid extra for better rations from
the ship.  This marvellously changed my notion of the degree of
luxury habitual to the artisan.  I was prepared to hear him
grumble, for grumbling is the traveller's pastime; but I was not
prepared to find him turn away from a diet which was palatable to
myself.  Words I should have disregarded, or taken with a liberal
allowance; but when a man prefers dry biscuit there can be no
question of the sincerity of his disgust.

With one of their complaints I could most heartily sympathise.  A
single night of the steerage had filled them with horror.  I had
myself suffered, even in my decent-second-cabin berth, from the
lack of air; and as the night promised to be fine and quiet, I
determined to sleep on deck, and advised all who complained of
their quarters to follow my example.  I dare say a dozen of others
agreed to do so, and I thought we should have been quite a party.
Yet, when I brought up my rug about seven bells, there was no one
to be seen but the watch.  That chimerical terror of good night-
air, which makes men close their windows, list their doors, and
seal themselves up with their own poisonous exhalations, had sent
all these healthy workmen down below.  One would think we had been
brought up in a fever country; yet in England the most malarious
districts are in the bedchambers.

I felt saddened at this defection, and yet half-pleased to have the
night so quietly to myself.  The wind had hauled a little ahead on
the starboard bow, and was dry but chilly.  I found a shelter near
the fire-hole, and made myself snug for the night.

The ship moved over the uneven sea with a gentle and cradling
movement.  The ponderous, organic labours of the engine in her
bowels occupied the mind, and prepared it for slumber.  From time
to time a heavier lurch would disturb me as I lay, and recall me to
the obscure borders of consciousness; or I heard, as it were
through a veil, the clear note of the clapper on the brass and the
beautiful sea-cry, 'All's well!'  I know nothing, whether for
poetry or music, that can surpass the effect of these two syllables
in the darkness of a night at sea.

The day dawned fairly enough, and during the early part we had some
pleasant hours to improve acquaintance in the open air; but towards
nightfall the wind freshened, the rain began to fall, and the sea
rose so high that it was difficult to keep ones footing on the
deck.  I have spoken of our concerts.  We were indeed a musical
ship's company, and cheered our way into exile with the fiddle, the
accordion, and the songs of all nations.  Good, bad, or
indifferent--Scottish, English, Irish, Russian, German or Norse,--
the songs were received with generous applause.  Once or twice, a
recitation, very spiritedly rendered in a powerful Scottish accent,
varied the proceedings; and once we sought in vain to dance a
quadrille, eight men of us together, to the music of the violin.
The performers were all humorous, frisky fellows, who loved to cut
capers in private life; but as soon as they were arranged for the
dance, they conducted themselves like so many mutes at a funeral.
I have never seen decorum pushed so far; and as this was not
expected, the quadrille was soon whistled down, and the dancers
departed under a cloud.  Eight Frenchmen, even eight Englishmen
from another rank of society, would have dared to make some fun for
themselves and the spectators; but the working man, when sober,
takes an extreme and even melancholy view of personal deportment.
A fifth-form schoolboy is not more careful of dignity.  He dares
not be comical; his fun must escape from him unprepared, and above
all, it must be unaccompanied by any physical demonstration.  I
like his society under most circumstances, but let me never again
join with him in public gambols.

But the impulse to sing was strong, and triumphed over modesty and
even the inclemencies of sea and sky.  On this rough Saturday
night, we got together by the main deck-house, in a place sheltered
from the wind and rain.  Some clinging to a ladder which led to the
hurricane deck, and the rest knitting arms or taking hands, we made
a ring to support the women in the violent lurching of the ship;
and when we were thus disposed, sang to our hearts' content.  Some
of the songs were appropriate to the scene; others strikingly the
reverse.  Bastard doggrel of the music-hall, such as, 'Around her
splendid form, I weaved the magic circle,' sounded bald, bleak, and
pitifully silly.  'We don't want to fight, but, by Jingo, if we
do,' was in some measure saved by the vigour and unanimity with
which the chorus was thrown forth into the night.  I observed a
Platt-Deutsch mason, entirely innocent of English, adding heartily
to the general effect.  And perhaps the German mason is but a fair
example of the sincerity with which the song was rendered; for
nearly all with whom I conversed upon the subject were bitterly
opposed to war, and attributed their own misfortunes, and
frequently their own taste for whisky, to the campaigns in Zululand
and Afghanistan.

Every now and again, however, some song that touched the pathos of
our situation was given forth; and you could hear by the voices
that took up the burden how the sentiment came home to each, 'The
Anchor's Weighed' was true for us.  We were indeed 'Rocked on the
bosom of the stormy deep.'  How many of us could say with the
singer, 'I'm lonely to-night, love, without you,' or, 'Go, some
one, and tell them from me, to write me a letter from home'!  And
when was there a more appropriate moment for 'Auld Lang Syne' than
now, when the land, the friends, and the affections of that mingled
but beloved time were fading and fleeing behind us in the vessel's
wake?  It pointed forward to the hour when these labours should be
overpast, to the return voyage, and to many a meeting in the sanded
inn, when those who had parted in the spring of youth should again
drink a cup of kindness in their age.  Had not Burns contemplated
emigration, I scarce believe he would have found that note.

All Sunday the weather remained wild and cloudy; many were
prostrated by sickness; only five sat down to tea in the second
cabin, and two of these departed abruptly ere the meal was at an
end.  The Sabbath was observed strictly by the majority of the
emigrants.  I heard an old woman express her surprise that 'the
ship didna gae doon,' as she saw some one pass her with a chess-
board on the holy day.  Some sang Scottish psalms.  Many went to
service, and in true Scottish fashion came back ill pleased with
their divine.  'I didna think he was an experienced preacher,' said
one girl to me.

Is was a bleak, uncomfortable day; but at night, by six bells,
although the wind had not yet moderated, the clouds were all
wrecked and blown away behind the rim of the horizon, and the stars
came out thickly overhead.  I saw Venus burning as steadily and
sweetly across this hurly-burly of the winds and waters as ever at
home upon the summer woods.  The engine pounded, the screw tossed
out of the water with a roar, and shook the ship from end to end;
the bows battled with loud reports against the billows:  and as I
stood in the lee-scuppers and looked up to where the funnel leaned
out, over my head, vomiting smoke, and the black and monstrous top-
sails blotted, at each lurch, a different crop of stars, it seemed
as if all this trouble were a thing of small account, and that just
above the mast reigned peace unbroken and eternal.


STEERAGE SCENES


Our companion (Steerage No. 2 and 3) was a favourite resort.  Down
one flight of stairs there was a comparatively large open space,
the centre occupied by a hatchway, which made a convenient seat for
about twenty persons, while barrels, coils of rope, and the
carpenter's bench afforded perches for perhaps as many more.  The
canteen, or steerage bar, was on one side of the stair; on the
other, a no less attractive spot, the cabin of the indefatigable
interpreter.

I have seen people packed into this space like herrings in a
barrel, and many merry evenings prolonged there until five bells,
when the lights were ruthlessly extinguished and all must go to
roost.

It had been rumoured since Friday that there was a fiddler aboard,
who lay sick and unmelodious in Steerage No. 1; and on the Monday
forenoon, as I came down the companion, I was saluted by something
in Strathspey time.  A white-faced Orpheus was cheerily playing to
an audience of white-faced women.  It was as much as he could do to
play, and some of his hearers were scarce able to sit; yet they had
crawled from their bunks at the first experimental flourish, and
found better than medicine in the music.  Some of the heaviest
heads began to nod in time, and a degree of animation looked from
some of the palest eyes.  Humanly speaking, it is a more important
matter to play the fiddle, even badly, than to write huge works
upon recondite subjects.  What could Mr. Darwin have done for these
sick women?  But this fellow scraped away; and the world was
positively a better place for all who heard him.  We have yet to
understand the economical value of these mere accomplishments.  I
told the fiddler he was a happy man, carrying happiness about with
him in his fiddle-case, and he seemed alive to the fact.

'It is a privilege,' I said.  He thought a while upon the word,
turning it over in his Scots head, and then answered with
conviction, 'Yes, a privilege.'

That night I was summoned by 'Merrily danced the Quake's wife' into
the companion of Steerage No. 4 and 5.  This was, properly
speaking, but a strip across a deck-house, lit by a sickly lantern
which swung to and fro with the motion of the ship.  Through the
open slide-door we had a glimpse of a grey night sea, with patches
of phosphorescent foam flying, swift as birds, into the wake, and
the horizon rising and falling as the vessel rolled to the wind.
In the centre the companion ladder plunged down sheerly like an
open pit.  Below, on the first landing, and lighted by another
lamp, lads and lasses danced, not more than three at a time for
lack of space, in jigs and reels and hornpipes.  Above, on either
side, there was a recess railed with iron, perhaps two feet wide
and four long, which stood for orchestra and seats of honour.  In
the one balcony, five slatternly Irish lasses sat woven in a comely
group.  In the other was posted Orpheus, his body, which was
convulsively in motion, forming an odd contrast to his somnolent,
imperturbable Scots face.  His brother, a dark man with a vehement,
interested countenance, who made a god of the fiddler, sat by with
open mouth, drinking in the general admiration and throwing out
remarks to kindle it.

'That's a bonny hornpipe now,' he would say, 'it's a great
favourite with performers; they dance the sand dance to it.'  And
he expounded the sand dance.  Then suddenly, it would be a long,
'Hush!' with uplifted finger and glowing, supplicating eyes, 'he's
going to play "Auld Robin Gray" on one string!'  And throughout
this excruciating movement,--'On one string, that's on one string!'
he kept crying.  I would have given something myself that it had
been on none; but the hearers were much awed.  I called for a tune
or two, and thus introduced myself to the notice of the brother,
who directed his talk to me for some little while, keeping, I need
hardly mention, true to his topic, like the seamen to the star.
'He's grand of it,' he said confidentially.  'His master was a
music-hall man.'  Indeed the music-hall man had left his mark, for
our fiddler was ignorant of many of our best old airs; 'Logie o'
Buchan,' for instance, he only knew as a quick, jigging figure in a
set of quadrilles, and had never heard it called by name.  Perhaps,
after all, the brother was the more interesting performer of the
two.  I have spoken with him afterwards repeatedly, and found him
always the same quick, fiery bit of a man, not without brains; but
he never showed to such advantage as when he was thus squiring the
fiddler into public note.  There is nothing more becoming than a
genuine admiration; and it shares this with love, that it does not
become contemptible although misplaced.

The dancing was but feebly carried on.  The space was almost
impracticably small; and the Irish wenches combined the extreme of
bashfulness about this innocent display with a surprising impudence
and roughness of address.  Most often, either the fiddle lifted up
its voice unheeded, or only a couple of lads would be footing it
and snapping fingers on the landing.  And such was the eagerness of
the brother to display all the acquirements of his idol, and such
the sleepy indifference of the performer, that the tune would as
often as not be changed, and the hornpipe expire into a ballad
before the dancers had cut half a dozen shuffles.

In the meantime, however, the audience had been growing more and
more numerous every moment; there was hardly standing-room round
the top of the companion; and the strange instinct of the race
moved some of the newcomers to close both the doors, so that the
atmosphere grew insupportable.  It was a good place, as the saying
is, to leave.

The wind hauled ahead with a head sea.  By ten at night heavy
sprays were flying and drumming over the forecastle; the companion
of Steerage No. 1 had to be closed, and the door of communication
through the second cabin thrown open.  Either from the convenience
of the opportunity, or because we had already a number of
acquaintances in that part of the ship, Mr. Jones and I paid it a
late visit.  Steerage No. 1 is shaped like an isosceles triangle,
the sides opposite the equal angles bulging outward with the
contour of the ship.  It is lined with eight pens of sixteen bunks
apiece, four bunks below and four above on either side.  At night
the place is lit with two lanterns, one to each table.  As the
steamer beat on her way among the rough billows, the light passed
through violent phases of change, and was thrown to and fro and up
and down with startling swiftness.  You were tempted to wonder, as
you looked, how so thin a glimmer could control and disperse such
solid blackness.  When Jones and I entered we found a little
company of our acquaintances seated together at the triangular
foremost table.  A more forlorn party, in more dismal
circumstances, it would be hard to imagine.  The motion here in the
ship's nose was very violent; the uproar of the sea often
overpoweringly loud.  The yellow flicker of the lantern spun round
and round and tossed the shadows in masses.  The air was hot, but
it struck a chill from its foetor.

From all round in the dark bunks, the scarcely human noises of the
sick joined into a kind of farmyard chorus.  In the midst, these
five friends of mine were keeping up what heart they could in
company.  Singing was their refuge from discomfortable thoughts and
sensations.  One piped, in feeble tones, 'Oh why left I my hame?'
which seemed a pertinent question in the circumstances.  Another,
from the invisible horrors of a pen where he lay dog-sick upon the
upper-shelf, found courage, in a blink of his sufferings, to give
us several verses of the 'Death of Nelson'; and it was odd and
eerie to hear the chorus breathe feebly from all sorts of dark
corners, and 'this day has done his dooty' rise and fall and be
taken up again in this dim inferno, to an accompaniment of
plunging, hollow-sounding bows and the rattling spray-showers
overhead.

All seemed unfit for conversation; a certain dizziness had
interrupted the activity of their minds; and except to sing they
were tongue-tied.  There was present, however, one tall, powerful
fellow of doubtful nationality, being neither quite Scotsman nor
altogether Irish, but of surprising clearness of conviction on the
highest problems.  He had gone nearly beside himself on the Sunday,
because of a general backwardness to indorse his definition of mind
as 'a living, thinking substance which cannot be felt, heard, or
seen'--nor, I presume, although he failed to mention it, smelt.
Now he came forward in a pause with another contribution to our
culture.

'Just by way of change,' said he, 'I'll ask you a Scripture riddle.
There's profit in them too,' he added ungrammatically.

This was the riddle-

C and P
Did agree
To cut down C;
But C and P
Could not agree
Without the leave of G;
All the people cried to see
The crueltie
Of C and P.

Harsh are the words of Mercury after the songs of Apollo!  We were
a long while over the problem, shaking our heads and gloomily
wondering how a man could be such a fool; but at length he put us
out of suspense and divulged the fact that C and P stood for
Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate.

I think it must have been the riddle that settled us; but the
motion and the close air likewise hurried our departure.  We had
not been gone long, we heard next morning, ere two or even three
out of the five fell sick.  We thought it little wonder on the
whole, for the sea kept contrary all night.  I now made my bed upon
the second cabin floor, where, although I ran the risk of being
stepped upon, I had a free current of air, more or less vitiated
indeed, and running only from steerage to steerage, but at least
not stagnant; and from this couch, as well as the usual sounds of a
rough night at sea, the hateful coughing and retching of the sick
and the sobs of children, I heard a man run wild with terror
beseeching his friend for encouragement.  'The ship 's going down!'
he cried with a thrill of agony.  'The ship's going down!' he
repeated, now in a blank whisper, now with his voice rising towards
a sob; and his friend might reassure him, reason with him, joke at
him--all was in vain, and the old cry came back, 'The ship's going
down!'  There was something panicky and catching in the emotion of
his tones; and I saw in a clear flash what an involved and hideous
tragedy was a disaster to an emigrant ship.  If this whole
parishful of people came no more to land, into how many houses
would the newspaper carry woe, and what a great part of the web of
our corporate human life would be rent across for ever!

The next morning when I came on deck I found a new world indeed.
The wind was fair; the sun mounted into a cloudless heaven; through
great dark blue seas the ship cut a swath of curded foam.  The
horizon was dotted all day with companionable sails, and the sun
shone pleasantly on the long, heaving deck.

We had many fine-weather diversions to beguile the time.  There was
a single chess-board and a single pack of cards.  Sometimes as many
as twenty of us would be playing dominoes for love.  Feats of
dexterity, puzzles for the intelligence, some arithmetical, some of
the same order as the old problem of the fox and goose and cabbage,
were always welcome; and the latter, I observed, more popular as
well as more conspicuously well done than the former.  We had a
regular daily competition to guess the vessel's progress; and
twelve o'clock, when the result was published in the wheel-house,
came to be a moment of considerable interest.  But the interest was
unmixed.  Not a bet was laid upon our guesses.  From the Clyde to
Sandy Hook I never heard a wager offered or taken.  We had,
besides, romps in plenty.  Puss in the Corner, which we had
rebaptized, in more manly style, Devil and four Corners, was my own
favourite game; but there were many who preferred another, the
humour of which was to box a person's ears until he found out who
had cuffed him.

This Tuesday morning we were all delighted with the change of
weather, and in the highest possible spirits.  We got in a cluster
like bees, sitting between each other's feet under lee of the deck-
houses.  Stories and laughter went around.  The children climbed
about the shrouds.  White faces appeared for the first time, and
began to take on colour from the wind.  I was kept hard at work
making cigarettes for one amateur after another, and my less than
moderate skill was heartily admired.  Lastly, down sat the fiddler
in our midst and began to discourse his reels, and jigs, and
ballads, with now and then a voice or two to take up the air and
throw in the interest of human speech.

Through this merry and good-hearted scene there came three cabin
passengers, a gentleman and two young ladies, picking their way
with little gracious titters of indulgence, and a Lady-Bountiful
air about nothing, which galled me to the quick.  I have little of
the radical in social questions, and have always nourished an idea
that one person was as good as another.  But I began to be troubled
by this episode.  It was astonishing what insults these people
managed to convey by their presence.  They seemed to throw their
clothes in our faces.  Their eyes searched us all over for tatters
and incongruities.  A laugh was ready at their lips; but they were
too well-mannered to indulge it in our hearing.  Wait a bit, till
they were all back in the saloon, and then hear how wittily they
would depict the manners of the steerage.  We were in truth very
innocently, cheerfully, and sensibly engaged, and there was no
shadow of excuse for the swaying elegant superiority with which
these damsels passed among us, or for the stiff and waggish glances
of their squire.  Not a word was said; only when they were gone
Mackay sullenly damned their impudence under his breath; but we
were all conscious of an icy influence and a dead break in the
course of our enjoyment.


STEERAGE TYPES


We had a fellow on board, an Irish-American, for all the world like
a beggar in a print by Callot; one-eyed, with great, splay crow's-
feet round the sockets; a knotty squab nose coming down over his
moustache; a miraculous hat; a shirt that had been white, ay, ages
long ago; an alpaca coat in its last sleeves; and, without
hyperbole, no buttons to his trousers.  Even in these rags and
tatters, the man twinkled all over with impudence like a piece of
sham jewellery; and I have heard him offer a situation to one of
his fellow-passengers with the air of a lord.  Nothing could
overlie such a fellow; a kind of base success was written on his
brow.  He was then in his ill days; but I can imagine him in
Congress with his mouth full of bombast and sawder.  As we moved in
the same circle, I was brought necessarily into his society.  I do
not think I ever heard him say anything that was true, kind, or
interesting; but there was entertainment in the man's demeanour.
You might call him a half-educated Irish Tigg.

Our Russian made a remarkable contrast to this impossible fellow.
Rumours and legends were current in the steerages about his
antecedents.  Some said he was a Nihilist escaping; others set him
down for a harmless spendthrift, who had squandered fifty thousand
roubles, and whose father had now despatched him to America by way
of penance.  Either tale might flourish in security; there was no
contradiction to be feared, for the hero spoke not one word of
English.  I got on with him lumberingly enough in broken German,
and learned from his own lips that he had been an apothecary.  He
carried the photograph of his betrothed in a pocket-book, and
remarked that it did not do her justice.  The cut of his head stood
out from among the passengers with an air of startling strangeness.
The first natural instinct was to take him for a desperado; but
although the features, to our Western eyes, had a barbaric and
unhomely cast, the eye both reassured and touched.  It was large
and very dark and soft, with an expression of dumb endurance, as if
it had often looked on desperate circumstances and never looked on
them without resolution.

He cried out when I used the word. 'No, no,' he said, 'not
resolution.'

'The resolution to endure,' I explained.

And then he shrugged his shoulders, and said, 'Ach, ja,' with
gusto, like a man who has been flattered in his favourite
pretensions.  Indeed, he was always hinting at some secret sorrow;
and his life, he said, had been one of unusual trouble and anxiety;
so the legends of the steerage may have represented at least some
shadow of the truth.  Once, and once only, he sang a song at our
concerts; standing forth without embarrassment, his great stature
somewhat humped, his long arms frequently extended, his Kalmuck
head thrown backward.  It was a suitable piece of music, as deep as
a cow's bellow and wild like the White Sea.  He was struck and
charmed by the freedom and sociality of our manners.  At home, he
said, no one on a journey would speak to him, but those with whom
he would not care to speak; thus unconsciously involving himself in
the condemnation of his countrymen.  But Russia was soon to be
changed; the ice of the Neva was softening under the sun of
civilisation; the new ideas, 'wie eine feine Violine,' were audible
among the big empty drum notes of Imperial diplomacy; and he looked
to see a great revival, though with a somewhat indistinct and
childish hope.

We had a father and son who made a pair of Jacks-of-all-trades.  It
was the son who sang the 'Death of Nelson' under such contrarious
circumstances.  He was by trade a shearer of ship plates; but he
could touch the organ, and led two choirs, and played the flute and
piccolo in a professional string band.  His repertory of songs was,
besides, inexhaustible, and ranged impartially from the very best
to the very worst within his reach.  Nor did he seem to make the
least distinction between these extremes, but would cheerily follow
up 'Tom Bowling' with 'Around her splendid form.'

The father, an old, cheery, small piece of man-hood, could do
everything connected with tinwork from one end of the process to
the other, use almost every carpenter's tool, and make picture
frames to boot.  'I sat down with silver plate every Sunday,' said
he, 'and pictures on the wall.  I have made enough money to be
rolling in my carriage.  But, sir,' looking at me unsteadily with
his bright rheumy eyes, 'I was troubled with a drunken wife.'  He
took a hostile view of matrimony in consequence.  'It's an old
saying,' he remarked:  'God made 'em, and the devil he mixed 'em.'

I think he was justified by his experience.  It was a dreary story.
He would bring home three pounds on Saturday, and on Monday all the
clothes would be in pawn.  Sick of the useless struggle, he gave up
a paying contract, and contented himself with small and ill-paid
jobs.  'A bad job was as good as a good job for me,' he said; 'it
all went the same way.'  Once the wife showed signs of amendment;
she kept steady for weeks on end; it was again worth while to
labour and to do one's best.  The husband found a good situation
some distance from home, and, to make a little upon every hand,
started the wife in a cook-shop; the children were here and there,
busy as mice; savings began to grow together in the bank, and the
golden age of hope had returned again to that unhappy family.  But
one week my old acquaintance, getting earlier through with his
work, came home on the Friday instead of the Saturday, and there
was his wife to receive him reeling drunk.  He 'took and gave her a
pair o' black eyes,' for which I pardon him, nailed up the cook-
shop door, gave up his situation, and resigned himself to a life of
poverty, with the workhouse at the end.  As the children came to
their full age they fled the house, and established themselves in
other countries; some did well, some not so well; but the father
remained at home alone with his drunken wife, all his sound-hearted
pluck and varied accomplishments depressed and negatived.

Was she dead now? or, after all these years, had he broken the
chain, and run from home like a schoolboy?  I could not discover
which; but here at least he was out on the adventure, and still one
of the bravest and most youthful men on board.

'Now, I suppose, I must put my old bones to work again,' said he;
'but I can do a turn yet.'

And the son to whom he was going, I asked, was he not able to
support him?

'Oh yes,' he replied.  'But I'm never happy without a job on hand.
And I'm stout; I can eat a'most anything.  You see no craze about
me.'

This tale of a drunken wife was paralleled on board by another of a
drunken father.  He was a capable man, with a good chance in life;
but he had drunk up two thriving businesses like a bottle of
sherry, and involved his sons along with him in ruin.  Now they
were on board with us, fleeing his disastrous neighbourhood.

Total abstinence, like all ascetical conclusions, is unfriendly to
the most generous, cheerful, and human parts of man; but it could
have adduced many instances and arguments from among our ship's
company.  I was, one day conversing with a kind and happy Scotsman,
running to fat and perspiration in the physical, but with a taste
for poetry and a genial sense of fun.  I had asked him his hopes in
emigrating.  They were like those of so many others, vague and
unfounded; times were bad at home; they were said to have a turn
for the better in the States; a man could get on anywhere, he
thought.  That was precisely the weak point of his position; for if
he could get on in America, why could he not do the same in
Scotland?  But I never had the courage to use that argument, though
it was often on the tip of my tongue, and instead I agreed with him
heartily adding, with reckless originality, 'If the man stuck to
his work, and kept away from drink.'

'Ah!' said he slowly, 'the drink!  You see, that's just my
trouble.'

He spoke with a simplicity that was touching, looking at me at the
same time with something strange and timid in his eye, half-
ashamed, half-sorry, like a good child who knows he should be
beaten.  You would have said he recognised a destiny to which he
was born, and accepted the consequences mildly.  Like the merchant
Abudah, he was at the same time fleeing from his destiny and
carrying it along with him, the whole at an expense of six guineas.

As far as I saw, drink, idleness, and incompetency were the three
great causes of emigration, and for all of them, and drink first
and foremost, this trick of getting transported overseas appears to
me the silliest means of cure.  You cannot run away from a
weakness; you must some time fight it out or perish; and if that be
so, why not now, and where you stand?  Coelum non animam.  Change
Glenlivet for Bourbon, and it is still whisky, only not so good.  A
sea-voyage will not give a man the nerve to put aside cheap
pleasure; emigration has to be done before we climb the vessel; an
aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding; and it is not to
be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself.

Speaking generally, there is no vice of this kind more contemptible
than another; for each is but a result and outward sign of a soul
tragically ship-wrecked.  In the majority of cases, cheap pleasure
is resorted to by way of anodyne.  The pleasure-seeker sets forth
upon life with high and difficult ambitions; he meant to be nobly
good and nobly happy, though at as little pains as possible to
himself; and it is because all has failed in his celestial
enterprise that you now behold him rolling in the garbage.  Hence
the comparative success of the teetotal pledge; because to a man
who had nothing it sets at least a negative aim in life.  Somewhat
as prisoners beguile their days by taming a spider, the reformed
drunkard makes an interest out of abstaining from intoxicating
drinks, and may live for that negation.  There is something, at
least, NOT TO BE DONE each day; and a cold triumph awaits him every
evening.

We had one on board with us, whom I have already referred to under
the name Mackay, who seemed to me not only a good instance of this
failure in life of which we have been speaking, but a good type of
the intelligence which here surrounded me.  Physically he was a
small Scotsman, standing a little back as though he were already
carrying the elements of a corporation, and his looks somewhat
marred by the smallness of his eyes.  Mentally, he was endowed
above the average.  There were but few subjects on which he could
not converse with understanding and a dash of wit; delivering
himself slowly and with gusto like a man who enjoyed his own
sententiousness.  He was a dry, quick, pertinent debater, speaking
with a small voice, and swinging on his heels to launch and
emphasise an argument.  When he began a discussion, he could not
bear to leave it off, but would pick the subject to the bone,
without once relinquishing a point.  An engineer by trade, Mackay
believed in the unlimited perfectibility of all machines except the
human machine.  The latter he gave up with ridicule for a compound
of carrion and perverse gases.  He had an appetite for disconnected
facts which I can only compare to the savage taste for beads.  What
is called information was indeed a passion with the man, and he not
only delighted to receive it, but could pay you back in kind.

With all these capabilities, here was Mackay, already no longer
young, on his way to a new country, with no prospects, no money,
and but little hope.  He was almost tedious in the cynical
disclosures of his despair.  'The ship may go down for me,' he
would say, 'now or to-morrow.  I have nothing to lose and nothing
to hope.'  And again:  'I am sick of the whole damned performance.'
He was, like the kind little man, already quoted, another so-called
victim of the bottle.  But Mackay was miles from publishing his
weakness to the world; laid the blame of his failure on corrupt
masters and a corrupt State policy; and after he had been one night
overtaken and had played the buffoon in his cups, sternly, though
not without tact, suppressed all reference to his escapade.  It was
a treat to see him manage this:  the various jesters withered under
his gaze, and you were forced to recognise in him a certain steely
force, and a gift of command which might have ruled a senate.

In truth it was not whisky that had ruined him; he was ruined long
before for all good human purposes but conversation.  His eyes were
sealed by a cheap, school-book materialism.  He could see nothing
in the world but money and steam-engines.  He did not know what you
meant by the word happiness.  He had forgotten the simple emotions
of childhood, and perhaps never encountered the delights of youth.
He believed in production, that useful figment of economy, as if it
had been real like laughter; and production, without prejudice to
liquor, was his god and guide.  One day he took me to task--novel
cry to me--upon the over-payment of literature.  Literary men, he
said, were more highly paid than artisans; yet the artisan made
threshing-machines and butter-churns, and the man of letters,
except in the way of a few useful handbooks, made nothing worth the
while.  He produced a mere fancy article.  Mackay's notion of a
book was Hoppus's Measurer.  Now in my time I have possessed and
even studied that work; but if I were to be left to-morrow on Juan
Fernandez, Hoppus's is not the book that I should choose for my
companion volume.

I tried to fight the point with Mackay.  I made him own that he had
taken pleasure in reading books otherwise, to his view,
insignificant; but he was too wary to advance a step beyond the
admission.  It was in vain for me to argue that here was pleasure
ready-made and running from the spring, whereas his ploughs and
butter-churns were but means and mechanisms to give men the
necessary food and leisure before they start upon the search for
pleasure; he jibbed and ran away from such conclusions.  The thing
was different, he declared, and nothing was serviceable but what
had to do with food.  'Eat, eat, eat!' he cried; 'that's the bottom
and the top.'  By an odd irony of circumstance, he grew so much
interested in this discussion that he let the hour slip by
unnoticed and had to go without his tea.  He had enough sense and
humour, indeed he had no lack of either, to have chuckled over this
himself in private; and even to me he referred to it with the
shadow of a smile.

Mackay was a hot bigot.  He would not hear of religion.  I have
seen him waste hours of time in argument with all sorts of poor
human creatures who understood neither him nor themselves, and he
had had the boyishness to dissect and criticise even so small a
matter as the riddler's definition of mind.  He snorted aloud with
zealotry and the lust for intellectual battle.  Anything, whatever
it was, that seemed to him likely to discourage the continued
passionate production of corn and steam-engines he resented like a
conspiracy against the people.  Thus, when I put in the plea for
literature, that it was only in good books, or in the society of
the good, that a man could get help in his conduct, he declared I
was in a different world from him.  'Damn my conduct!' said he.  'I
have given it up for a bad job.  My question is, "Can I drive a
nail?"' And he plainly looked upon me as one who was insidiously
seeking to reduce the people's annual bellyful of corn and steam-
engines.

It may be argued that these opinions spring from the defect of
culture; that a narrow and pinching way of life not only
exaggerates to a man the importance of material conditions, but
indirectly, by denying him the necessary books and leisure, keeps
his mind ignorant of larger thoughts; and that hence springs this
overwhelming concern about diet, and hence the bald view of
existence professed by Mackay.  Had this been an English peasant
the conclusion would be tenable.  But Mackay had most of the
elements of a liberal education.  He had skirted metaphysical and
mathematical studies.  He had a thoughtful hold of what he knew,
which would be exceptional among bankers.  He had been brought up
in the midst of hot-house piety, and told, with incongruous pride,
the story of his own brother's deathbed ecstasies.  Yet he had
somehow failed to fulfil himself, and was adrift like a dead thing
among external circumstances, without hope or lively preference or
shaping aim.  And further, there seemed a tendency among many of
his fellows to fall into the same blank and unlovely opinions.  One
thing, indeed, is not to be learned in Scotland, and that is the
way to be happy.  Yet that is the whole of culture, and perhaps
two-thirds of morality.  Can it be that the Puritan school, by
divorcing a man from nature, by thinning out his instincts, and
setting a stamp of its disapproval on whole fields of human
activity and interest, leads at last directly to material greed?

Nature is a good guide through life, and the love of simple
pleasures next, if not superior, to virtue; and we had on board an
Irishman who based his claim to the widest and most affectionate
popularity precisely upon these two qualities, that he was natural
and happy.  He boasted a fresh colour, a tight little figure,
unquenchable gaiety, and indefatigable goodwill.  His clothes
puzzled the diagnostic mind, until you heard he had been once a
private coachman, when they became eloquent and seemed a part of
his biography.  His face contained the rest, and, I fear, a
prophecy of the future; the hawk's nose above accorded so ill with
the pink baby's mouth below.  His spirit and his pride belonged,
you might say, to the nose; while it was the general shiftlessness
expressed by the other that had thrown him from situation to
situation, and at length on board the emigrant ship.  Barney ate,
so to speak, nothing from the galley; his own tea, butter, and eggs
supported him throughout the voyage; and about mealtime you might
often find him up to the elbows in amateur cookery.  His was the
first voice heard singing among all the passengers; he was the
first who fell to dancing.  From Loch Foyle to Sandy Hook, there
was not a piece of fun undertaken but there was Barney in the
midst.

You ought to have seen him when he stood up to sing at our
concerts--his tight little figure stepping to and fro, and his feet
shuffling to the air, his eyes seeking and bestowing encouragement-
-and to have enjoyed the bow, so nicely calculated between jest and
earnest, between grace and clumsiness, with which he brought each
song to a conclusion.  He was not only a great favourite among
ourselves, but his songs attracted the lords of the saloon, who
often leaned to hear him over the rails of the hurricane-deck.  He
was somewhat pleased, but not at all abashed, by this attention;
and one night, in the midst of his famous performance of 'Billy
Keogh,' I saw him spin half round in a pirouette and throw an
audacious wink to an old gentleman above.

This was the more characteristic, as, for all his daffing, he was a
modest and very polite little fellow among ourselves.

He would not have hurt the feelings of a fly, nor throughout the
passage did he give a shadow of offence; yet he was always, by his
innocent freedoms and love of fun, brought upon that narrow margin
where politeness must be natural to walk without a fall.  He was
once seriously angry, and that in a grave, quiet manner, because
they supplied no fish on Friday; for Barney was a conscientious
Catholic.  He had likewise strict notions of refinement; and when,
late one evening, after the women had retired, a young Scotsman
struck up an indecent song, Barney's drab clothes were immediately
missing from the group.  His taste was for the society of
gentlemen, of whom, with the reader's permission, there was no lack
in our five steerages and second cabin; and he avoided the rough
and positive with a girlish shrinking.  Mackay, partly from his
superior powers of mind, which rendered him incomprehensible,
partly from his extreme opinions, was especially distasteful to the
Irishman.  I have seen him slink off with backward looks of terror
and offended delicacy, while the other, in his witty, ugly way, had
been professing hostility to God, and an extreme theatrical
readiness to be shipwrecked on the spot.  These utterances hurt the
little coachman's modesty like a bad word.


THE SICK MAN


One night Jones, the young O'Reilly, and myself were walking arm-
in-arm and briskly up and down the deck.  Six bells had rung; a
head-wind blew chill and fitful, the fog was closing in with a
sprinkle of rain, and the fog-whistle had been turned on, and now
divided time with its unwelcome outcries, loud like a bull,
thrilling and intense like a mosquito.  Even the watch lay
somewhere snugly out of sight.

For some time we observed something lying black and huddled in the
scuppers, which at last heaved a little and moaned aloud.  We ran
to the rails.  An elderly man, but whether passenger or seaman it
was impossible in the darkness to determine, lay grovelling on his
belly in the wet scuppers, and kicking feebly with his outspread
toes.  We asked him what was amiss, and he replied incoherently,
with a strange accent and in a voice unmanned by terror, that he
had cramp in the stomach, that he had been ailing all day, had seen
the doctor twice, and had walked the deck against fatigue till he
was overmastered and had fallen where we found him.

Jones remained by his side, while O'Reilly and I hurried off to
seek the doctor.  We knocked in vain at the doctor's cabin; there
came no reply; nor could we find any one to guide us.  It was no
time for delicacy; so we ran once more forward; and I, whipping up
a ladder and touching my hat to the officer of the watch, addressed
him as politely as I could -

'I beg your pardon, sir; but there is a man lying bad with cramp in
the lee scuppers; and I can't find the doctor.'

He looked at me peeringly in the darkness; and then, somewhat
harshly, 'Well, _I_ can't leave the bridge, my man,' said he.

'No, sir; but you can tell me what to do,' I returned.

'Is it one of the crew?' he asked.

'I believe him to be a fireman,' I replied.

I dare say officers are much annoyed by complaints and alarmist
information from their freight of human creatures; but certainly,
whether it was the idea that the sick man was one of the crew, or
from something conciliatory in my address, the officer in question
was immediately relieved and mollified; and speaking in a voice
much freer from constraint, advised me to find a steward and
despatch him in quest of the doctor, who would now be in the
smoking-room over his pipe.

One of the stewards was often enough to be found about this hour
down our companion, Steerage No. 2 and 3; that was his smoking-room
of a night.  Let me call him Blackwood.  O'Reilly and I rattled
down the companion, breathing hurry; and in his shirt-sleeves and
perched across the carpenters bench upon one thigh, found
Blackwood; a neat, bright, dapper, Glasgow-looking man, with a bead
of an eye and a rank twang in his speech.  I forget who was with
him, but the pair were enjoying a deliberate talk over their pipes.
I dare say he was tired with his day's work, and eminently
comfortable at that moment; and the truth is, I did not stop to
consider his feelings, but told my story in a breath.

'Steward,' said I, 'there's a man lying bad with cramp, and I can't
find the doctor.'

He turned upon me as pert as a sparrow, but with a black look that
is the prerogative of man; and taking his pipe out of his mouth -

'That's none of my business,' said he.  'I don't care.'

I could have strangled the little ruffian where he sat.  The
thought of his cabin civility and cabin tips filled me with
indignation.  I glanced at O'Reilly; he was pale and quivering, and
looked like assault and battery, every inch of him.  But we had a
better card than violence.

'You will have to make it your business,' said I, 'for I am sent to
you by the officer on the bridge.'

Blackwood was fairly tripped.  He made no answer, but put out his
pipe, gave me one murderous look, and set off upon his errand
strolling.  From that day forward, I should say, he improved to me
in courtesy, as though he had repented his evil speech and were
anxious to leave a better impression.

When we got on deck again, Jones was still beside the sick man; and
two or three late stragglers had gathered round, and were offering
suggestions.  One proposed to give the patient water, which was
promptly negatived.  Another bade us hold him up; he himself prayed
to be let lie; but as it was at least as well to keep him off the
streaming decks, O'Reilly and I supported him between us.  It was
only by main force that we did so, and neither an easy nor an
agreeable duty; for he fought in his paroxysms like a frightened
child, and moaned miserably when he resigned himself to our
control.

'O let me lie!' he pleaded.  'I'll no' get better anyway.'  And
then, with a moan that went to my heart, 'O why did I come upon
this miserable journey?'

I was reminded of the song which I had heard a little while before
in the close, tossing steerage:  'O why left I my hame?'

Meantime Jones, relieved of his immediate charge, had gone off to
the galley, where we could see a light.  There he found a belated
cook scouring pans by the radiance of two lanterns, and one of
these he sought to borrow.  The scullion was backward.  'Was it one
of the crew?' he asked.  And when Jones, smitten with my theory,
had assured him that it was a fireman, he reluctantly left his
scouring and came towards us at an easy pace, with one of the
lanterns swinging from his finger.  The light, as it reached the
spot, showed us an elderly man, thick-set, and grizzled with years;
but the shifting and coarse shadows concealed from us the
expression and even the design of his face.

So soon as the cook set eyes on him he gave a sort of whistle.

'IT'S ONLY A PASSENGER!' said he; and turning about, made, lantern
and all, for the galley.

'He's a man anyway,' cried Jones in indignation.

'Nobody said he was a woman,' said a gruff voice, which I
recognised for that of the bo's'un.

All this while there was no word of Blackwood or the doctor; and
now the officer came to our side of the ship and asked, over the
hurricane-deck rails, if the doctor were not yet come.  We told him
not.

'No?' he repeated with a breathing of anger; and we saw him hurry
aft in person.

Ten minutes after the doctor made his appearance deliberately
enough and examined our patient with the lantern.  He made little
of the case, had the man brought aft to the dispensary, dosed him,
and sent him forward to his bunk.  Two of his neighbours in the
steerage had now come to our assistance, expressing loud sorrow
that such 'a fine cheery body' should be sick; and these, claiming
a sort of possession, took him entirely under their own care.  The
drug had probably relieved him, for he struggled no more, and was
led along plaintive and patient, but protesting.  His heart
recoiled at the thought of the steerage.  'O let me lie down upon
the bieldy side,' he cried; 'O dinna take me down!'  And again:  'O
why did ever I come upon this miserable voyage?'  And yet once
more, with a gasp and a wailing prolongation of the fourth word:
'I had no CALL to come.'  But there he was; and by the doctor's
orders and the kind force of his two shipmates disappeared down the
companion of Steerage No.1 into the den allotted him.

At the foot of our own companion, just where I found Blackwood,
Jones and the bo's'un were now engaged in talk.  This last was a
gruff, cruel-looking seaman, who must have passed near half a
century upon the seas; square-headed, goat-bearded, with heavy
blond eyebrows, and an eye without radiance, but inflexibly steady
and hard.  I had not forgotten his rough speech; but I remembered
also that he had helped us about the lantern; and now seeing him in
conversation with Jones, and being choked with indignation, I
proceeded to blow off my steam.

'Well,' said I, 'I make you my compliments upon your steward,' and
furiously narrated what had happened.

'I've nothing to do with him,' replied the bo's'un.  'They're all
alike.  They wouldn't mind if they saw you all lying dead one upon
the top of another.'

This was enough.  A very little humanity went a long way with me
after the experience of the evening.  A sympathy grew up at once
between the bo's'un and myself; and that night, and during the next
few days, I learned to appreciate him better.  He was a remarkable
type, and not at all the kind of man you find in books.  He had
been at Sebastopol under English colours; and again in a States
ship, 'after the Alabama, and praying God we shouldn't find her.'
He was a high Tory and a high Englishman.  No manufacturer could
have held opinions more hostile to the working man and his strikes.
'The workmen,' he said, 'think nothing of their country.  They
think of nothing but themselves.  They're damned greedy, selfish
fellows.'  He would not hear of the decadence of England.  'They
say they send us beef from America,' he argued; 'but who pays for
it?  All the money in the world's in England.'  The Royal Navy was
the best of possible services, according to him.  'Anyway the
officers are gentlemen,' said he; 'and you can't get hazed to death
by a damned non-commissioned--as you can in the army.'  Among
nations, England was the first; then came France.  He respected the
French navy and liked the French people; and if he were forced to
make a new choice in life, 'by God, he would try Frenchmen!'  For
all his looks and rough, cold manners, I observed that children
were never frightened by him; they divined him at once to be a
friend; and one night when he had chalked his hand and clothes, it
was incongruous to hear this formidable old salt chuckling over his
boyish monkey trick.

In the morning, my first thought was of the sick man.  I was afraid
I should not recognise him, baffling had been the light of the
lantern; and found myself unable to decide if he were Scots,
English, or Irish.  He had certainly employed north-country words
and elisions; but the accent and the pronunciation seemed
unfamiliar and incongruous in my ear.

To descend on an empty stomach into Steerage No. 1, was an
adventure that required some nerve.  The stench was atrocious; each
respiration tasted in the throat like some horrible kind of cheese;
and the squalid aspect of the place was aggravated by so many
people worming themselves into their clothes in twilight of the
bunks.  You may guess if I was pleased, not only for him, but for
myself also, when I heard that the sick man was better and had gone
on deck.

The morning was raw and foggy, though the sun suffused the fog with
pink and amber; the fog-horn still blew, stertorous and
intermittent; and to add to the discomfort, the seamen were just
beginning to wash down the decks.  But for a sick man this was
heaven compared to the steerage.  I found him standing on the hot-
water pipe, just forward of the saloon deck house.  He was smaller
than I had fancied, and plain-looking; but his face was
distinguished by strange and fascinating eyes, limpid grey from a
distance, but, when looked into, full of changing colours and
grains of gold.  His manners were mild and uncompromisingly plain;
and I soon saw that, when once started, he delighted to talk.  His
accent and language had been formed in the most natural way, since
he was born in Ireland, had lived a quarter of a century on the
banks of Tyne, and was married to a Scots wife.  A fisherman in the
season, he had fished the east coast from Fisherrow to Whitby.
When the season was over, and the great boats, which required extra
hands, were once drawn up on shore till the next spring, he worked
as a labourer about chemical furnaces, or along the wharves
unloading vessels.  In this comparatively humble way of life he had
gathered a competence, and could speak of his comfortable house,
his hayfield, and his garden.  On this ship, where so many
accomplished artisans were fleeing from starvation, he was present
on a pleasure trip to visit a brother in New York.

Ere he started, he informed me, he had been warned against the
steerage and the steerage fare, and recommended to bring with him a
ham and tea and a spice loaf.  But he laughed to scorn such
counsels.  'I'm not afraid,' he had told his adviser; 'I'll get on
for ten days.  I've not been a fisherman for nothing.'  For it is
no light matter, as he reminded me, to be in an open boat, perhaps
waist-deep with herrings, day breaking with a scowl, and for miles
on every hand lee-shores, unbroken, iron-bound, surf-beat, with
only here and there an anchorage where you dare not lie, or a
harbour impossible to enter with the wind that blows.  The life of
a North Sea fisher is one long chapter of exposure and hard work
and insufficient fare; and even if he makes land at some bleak
fisher port, perhaps the season is bad or his boat has been unlucky
and after fifty hours' unsleeping vigilance and toil, not a shop
will give him credit for a loaf of bread.  Yet the steerage of the
emigrant ship had been too vile for the endurance of a man thus
rudely trained.  He had scarce eaten since he came on board, until
the day before, when his appetite was tempted by some excellent
pea-soup.  We were all much of the same mind on board, and
beginning with myself, had dined upon pea-soup not wisely but too
well; only with him the excess had been punished, perhaps because
he was weakened by former abstinence, and his first meal had
resulted in a cramp.  He had determined to live henceforth on
biscuit; and when, two months later, he should return to England,
to make the passage by saloon.  The second cabin, after due
inquiry, he scouted as another edition of the steerage.

He spoke apologetically of his emotion when ill.  'Ye see, I had no
call to be here,' said he; 'and I thought it was by with me last
night.  I've a good house at home, and plenty to nurse me, and I
had no real call to leave them.'  Speaking of the attentions he had
received from his shipmates generally, 'they were all so kind,' he
said, 'that there's none to mention.'  And except in so far as I
might share in this, he troubled me with no reference to my
services.

But what affected me in the most lively manner was the wealth of
this day-labourer, paying a two months' pleasure visit to the
States, and preparing to return in the saloon, and the new
testimony rendered by his story, not so much to the horrors of the
steerage as to the habitual comfort of the working classes.  One
foggy, frosty December evening, I encountered on Liberton Hill,
near Edinburgh, an Irish labourer trudging homeward from the
fields.  Our roads lay together, and it was natural that we should
fall into talk.  He was covered with mud; an inoffensive, ignorant
creature, who thought the Atlantic Cable was a secret contrivance
of the masters the better to oppress labouring mankind; and I
confess I was astonished to learn that he had nearly three hundred
pounds in the bank.  But this man had travelled over most of the
world, and enjoyed wonderful opportunities on some American
railroad, with two dollars a shift and double pay on Sunday and at
night; whereas my fellow-passenger had never quitted Tyneside, and
had made all that he possessed in that same accursed, down-falling
England, whence skilled mechanics, engineers, millwrights, and
carpenters were fleeing as from the native country of starvation.

Fitly enough, we slid off on the subject of strikes and wages and
hard times.  Being from the Tyne, and a man who had gained and lost
in his own pocket by these fluctuations, he had much to say, and
held strong opinions on the subject.  He spoke sharply of the
masters, and, when I led him on, of the men also.  The masters had
been selfish and obstructive, the men selfish, silly, and light-
headed.  He rehearsed to me the course of a meeting at which he had
been present, and the somewhat long discourse which he had there
pronounced, calling into question the wisdom and even the good
faith of the Union delegates; and although he had escaped himself
through flush times and starvation times with a handsomely provided
purse, he had so little faith in either man or master, and so
profound a terror for the unerring Nemesis of mercantile affairs,
that he could think of no hope for our country outside of a sudden
and complete political subversion.  Down must go Lords and Church
and Army; and capital, by some happy direction, must change hands
from worse to better, or England stood condemned.  Such principles,
he said, were growing 'like a seed.'

From this mild, soft, domestic man, these words sounded unusually
ominous and grave.  I had heard enough revolutionary talk among my
workmen fellow-passengers; but most of it was hot and turgid, and
fell discredited from the lips of unsuccessful men.  This man was
calm; he had attained prosperity and ease; he disapproved the
policy which had been pursued by labour in the past; and yet this
was his panacea,--to rend the old country from end to end, and from
top to bottom, and in clamour and civil discord remodel it with the
hand of violence.


THE STOWAWAYS


On the Sunday, among a party of men who were talking in our
companion, Steerage No. 2 and 3, we remarked a new figure.  He wore
tweed clothes, well enough made if not very fresh, and a plain
smoking-cap.  His face was pale, with pale eyes, and spiritedly
enough designed; but though not yet thirty, a sort of blackguardly
degeneration had already overtaken his features.  The fine nose had
grown fleshy towards the point, the pale eyes were sunk in fat.
His hands were strong and elegant; his experience of life evidently
varied; his speech full of pith and verve; his manners forward, but
perfectly presentable.  The lad who helped in the second cabin told
me, in answer to a question, that he did not know who he was, but
thought, 'by his way of speaking, and because he was so polite,
that he was some one from the saloon.'

I was not so sure, for to me there was something equivocal in his
air and bearing.  He might have been, I thought, the son of some
good family who had fallen early into dissipation and run from
home.  But, making every allowance, how admirable was his talk!  I
wish you could have heard hin, tell his own stories.  They were so
swingingly set forth, in such dramatic language, and illustrated
here and there by such luminous bits of acting, that they could
only lose in any reproduction.  There were tales of the P. and O.
Company, where he had been an officer; of the East Indies, where in
former years he had lived lavishly; of the Royal Engineers, where
he had served for a period; and of a dozen other sides of life,
each introducing some vigorous thumb-nail portrait.  He had the
talk to himself that night, we were all so glad to listen.  The
best talkers usually address themselves to some particular society;
there they are kings, elsewhere camp-followers, as a man may know
Russian and yet be ignorant of Spanish; but this fellow had a
frank, headlong power of style, and a broad, human choice of
subject, that would have turned any circle in the world into a
circle of hearers.  He was a Homeric talker, plain, strong, and
cheerful; and the things and the people of which he spoke became
readily and clearly present to the minds of those who heard him.
This, with a certain added colouring of rhetoric and rodomontade,
must have been the style of Burns, who equally charmed the ears of
duchesses and hostlers.

Yet freely and personally as he spoke, many points remained obscure
in his narration.  The Engineers, for instance, was a service which
he praised highly; it is true there would be trouble with the
sergeants; but then the officers were gentlemen, and his own, in
particular, one among ten thousand.  It sounded so far exactly like
an episode in the rakish, topsy-turvy life of such an one as I had
imagined.  But then there came incidents more doubtful, which
showed an almost impudent greed after gratuities, and a truly
impudent disregard for truth.  And then there was the tale of his
departure.  He had wearied, it seems, of Woolwich, and one fine
day, with a companion, slipped up to London for a spree.  I have a
suspicion that spree was meant to be a long one; but God disposes
all things; and one morning, near Westminster Bridge, whom should
he come across but the very sergeant who had recruited him at
first!  What followed?  He himself indicated cavalierly that he had
then resigned.  Let us put it so.  But these resignations are
sometimes very trying.

At length, after having delighted us for hours, he took himself
away from the companion; and I could ask Mackay who and what he
was.  'That?' said Mackay.  'Why, that's one of the stowaways.'

'No man,' said the same authority, 'who has had anything to do with
the sea, would ever think of paying for a passage.'  I give the
statement as Mackay's, without endorsement; yet I am tempted to
believe that it contains a grain of truth; and if you add that the
man shall be impudent and thievish, or else dead-broke, it may even
pass for a fair representation of the facts.  We gentlemen of
England who live at home at ease have, I suspect, very insufficient
ideas on the subject.  All the world over, people are stowing away
in coal-holes and dark corners, and when ships are once out to sea,
appearing again, begrimed and bashful, upon deck.  The career of
these sea-tramps partakes largely of the adventurous.  They may be
poisoned by coal-gas, or die by starvation in their place of
concealment; or when found they may be clapped at once and
ignominiously into irons, thus to be carried to their promised
land, the port of destination, and alas! brought back in the same
way to that from which they started, and there delivered over to
the magistrates and the seclusion of a county jail.  Since I
crossed the Atlantic, one miserable stowaway was found in a dying
state among the fuel, uttered but a word or two, and departed for a
farther country than America.

When the stowaway appears on deck, he has but one thing to pray
for:  that he be set to work, which is the price and sign of his
forgiveness.  After half an hour with a swab or a bucket, he feels
himself as secure as if he had paid for his passage.  It is not
altogether a bad thing for the company, who get more or less
efficient hands for nothing but a few plates of junk and duff; and
every now and again find themselves better paid than by a whole
family of cabin passengers.  Not long ago, for instance, a packet
was saved from nearly certain loss by the skill and courage of a
stowaway engineer.  As was no more than just, a handsome
subscription rewarded him for his success:  but even without such
exceptional good fortune, as things stand in England and America,
the stowaway will often make a good profit out of his adventure.
Four engineers stowed away last summer on the same ship, the
Circassia; and before two days after their arrival each of the four
had found a comfortable berth.  This was the most hopeful tale of
emigration that I heard from first to last; and as you see, the
luck was for stowaways.

My curiosity was much inflamed by what I heard; and the next
morning, as I was making the round of the ship, I was delighted to
find the ex-Royal Engineer engaged in washing down the white paint
of a deck house.  There was another fellow at work beside him, a
lad not more than twenty, in the most miraculous tatters, his
handsome face sown with grains of beauty and lighted up by
expressive eyes.  Four stowaways had been found aboard our ship
before she left the Clyde, but these two had alone escaped the
ignominy of being put ashore.  Alick, my acquaintance of last
night, was Scots by birth, and by trade a practical engineer; the
other was from Devonshire, and had been to sea before the mast.
Two people more unlike by training, character, and habits it would
be hard to imagine; yet here they were together, scrubbing paint.

Alick had held all sorts of good situations, and wasted many
opportunities in life.  I have heard him end a story with these
words:  'That was in my golden days, when I used finger-glasses.'
Situation after situation failed him; then followed the depression
of trade, and for months he had hung round with other idlers,
playing marbles all day in the West Park, and going home at night
to tell his landlady how he had been seeking for a job.  I believe
this kind of existence was not unpleasant to Alick himself, and he
might have long continued to enjoy idleness and a life on tick; but
he had a comrade, let us call him Brown, who grew restive.  This
fellow was continually threatening to slip his cable for the
States, and at last, one Wednesday, Glasgow was left widowed of her
Brown.  Some months afterwards, Alick met another old chum in
Sauchiehall Street.

'By the bye, Alick,' said he, 'I met a gentleman in New York who
was asking for you.'

'Who was that?' asked Alick.

'The new second engineer on board the So-and-so,' was the reply.

'Well, and who is he?'

'Brown, to be sure.'

For Brown had been one of the fortunate quartette aboard the
Circassia.  If that was the way of it in the States, Alick thought
it was high time to follow Brown's example.  He spent his last day,
as he put it, 'reviewing the yeomanry,' and the next morning says
he to his landlady, 'Mrs. X., I'll not take porridge to-day,
please; I'll take some eggs.'

'Why, have you found a job?' she asked, delighted.

'Well, yes,' returned the perfidious Alick; 'I think I'll start to-
day.'

And so, well lined with eggs, start he did, but for America.  I am
afraid that landlady has seen the last of him.

It was easy enough to get on board in the confusion that attends a
vessel's departure; and in one of the dark corners of Steerage No.
1, flat in a bunk and with an empty stomach, Alick made the voyage
from the Broomielaw to Greenock.  That night, the ship's yeoman
pulled him out by the heels and had him before the mate.  Two other
stowaways had already been found and sent ashore; but by this time
darkness had fallen, they were out in the middle of the estuary,
and the last steamer had left them till the morning.

'Take him to the forecastle and give him a meal,' said the mate,
'and see and pack him off the first thing to-morrow.'

In the forecastle he had supper, a good night's rest, and
breakfast; and was sitting placidly with a pipe, fancying all was
over and the game up for good with that ship, when one of the
sailors grumbled out an oath at him, with a 'What are you doing
there?' and 'Do you call that hiding, anyway?'  There was need of
no more; Alick was in another bunk before the day was older.
Shortly before the passengers arrived, the ship was cursorily
inspected.  He heard the round come down the companion and look
into one pen after another, until they came within two of the one
in which he lay concealed.  Into these last two they did not enter,
but merely glanced from without; and Alick had no doubt that he was
personally favoured in this escape.  It was the character of the
man to attribute nothing to luck and but little to kindness;
whatever happened to him he had earned in his own right amply;
favours came to him from his singular attraction and adroitness,
and misfortunes he had always accepted with his eyes open.  Half an
hour after the searchers had departed, the steerage began to fill
with legitimate passengers, and the worst of Alick's troubles was
at an end.  He was soon making himself popular, smoking other
people's tobacco, and politely sharing their private stock
delicacies, and when night came he retired to his bunk beside the
others with composure.

Next day by afternoon, Lough Foyle being already far behind, and
only the rough north-western hills of Ireland within view, Alick
appeared on deck to court inquiry and decide his fate.  As a matter
of fact, he was known to several on board, and even intimate with
one of the engineers; but it was plainly not the etiquette of such
occasions for the authorities to avow their information.  Every one
professed surprise and anger on his appearance, and he was led
prison before the captain.

'What have you got to say for yourself?' inquired the captain.

'Not much,' said Alick; 'but when a man has been a long time out of
a job, he will do things he would not under other circumstances.'

'Are you willing to work?'

Alick swore he was burning to be useful.

'And what can you do?' asked the captain.

He replied composedly that he was a brass-fitter by trade.

'I think you will be better at engineering?' suggested the officer,
with a shrewd look.

'No, sir,' says Alick simply.--'There's few can beat me at a lie,'
was his engaging commentary to me as he recounted the affair.

'Have you been to sea?' again asked the captain.

'I've had a trip on a Clyde steamboat, sir, but no more,' replied
the unabashed Alick.

'Well, we must try and find some work for you,' concluded the
officer.

And hence we behold Alick, clear of the hot engine-room, lazily
scraping paint and now and then taking a pull upon a sheet.  'You
leave me alone,' was his deduction.  'When I get talking to a man,
I can get round him.'

The other stowaway, whom I will call the Devonian--it was
noticeable that neither of them told his name--had both been
brought up and seen the world in a much smaller way.  His father, a
confectioner, died and was closely followed by his mother.  His
sisters had taken, I think, to dressmaking.  He himself had
returned from sea about a year ago and gone to live with his
brother, who kept the 'George Hotel'--'it was not quite a real
hotel,' added the candid fellow--'and had a hired man to mind the
horses.'  At first the Devonian was very welcome; but as time went
on his brother not unnaturally grew cool towards him, and he began
to find himself one too many at the 'George Hotel.'  'I don't think
brothers care much for you,' he said, as a general reflection upon
life.  Hurt at this change, nearly penniless, and too proud to ask
for more, he set off on foot and walked eighty miles to Weymouth,
living on the journey as he could.  He would have enlisted, but he
was too small for the army and too old for the navy; and thought
himself fortunate at last to find a berth on board a trading dandy.
Somewhere in the Bristol Channel the dandy sprung a leak and went
down; and though the crew were picked up and brought ashore by
fishermen, they found themselves with nothing but the clothes upon
their back.  His next engagement was scarcely better starred; for
the ship proved so leaky, and frightened them all so heartily
during a short passage through the Irish Sea, that the entire crew
deserted and remained behind upon the quays of Belfast.

Evil days were now coming thick on the Devonian.  He could find no
berth in Belfast, and had to work a passage to Glasgow on a
steamer.  She reached the Broomielaw on a Wednesday:  the Devonian
had a bellyful that morning, laying in breakfast manfully to
provide against the future, and set off along the quays to seek
employment.  But he was now not only penniless, his clothes had
begun to fall in tatters; he had begun to have the look of a street
Arab; and captains will have nothing to say to a ragamuffin; for in
that trade, as in all others, it is the coat that depicts the man.
You may hand, reef, and steer like an angel, but if you have a hole
in your trousers, it is like a millstone round your neck.  The
Devonian lost heart at so many refusals.  He had not the impudence
to beg; although, as he said, 'when I had money of my own, I always
gave it.'  It was only on Saturday morning, after three whole days
of starvation, that he asked a scone from a milkwoman, who added of
her own accord a glass of milk.  He had now made up his mind to
stow away, not from any desire to see America, but merely to obtain
the comfort of a place in the forecastle and a supply of familiar
sea-fare.  He lived by begging, always from milkwomen, and always
scones and milk, and was not once refused.  It was vile wet
weather, and he could never have been dry.  By night he walked the
streets, and by day slept upon Glasgow Green, and heard, in the
intervals of his dozing, the famous theologians of the spot clear
up intricate points of doctrine and appraise the merits of the
clergy.  He had not much instruction; he could 'read bills on the
street,' but was 'main bad at writing'; yet these theologians seem
to have impressed him with a genuine sense of amusement.  Why he
did not go to the Sailors' House I know not; I presume there is in
Glasgow one of these institutions, which are by far the happiest
and the wisest effort of contemporaneous charity; but I must stand
to my author, as they say in old books, and relate the story as I
heard it.  In the meantime, he had tried four times to stow away in
different vessels, and four times had been discovered and handed
back to starvation.  The fifth time was lucky; and you may judge if
he were pleased to be aboard ship again, at his old work, and with
duff twice a week.  He was, said Alick, 'a devil for the duff.'  Or
if devil was not the word, it was one if anything stronger.

The difference in the conduct of the two was remarkable.  The
Devonian was as willing as any paid hand, swarmed aloft among the
first, pulled his natural weight and firmly upon a rope, and found
work for himself when there was none to show him.  Alick, on the
other hand, was not only a skulker in the brain, but took a
humorous and fine gentlemanly view of the transaction.  He would
speak to me by the hour in ostentatious idleness; and only if the
bo's'un or a mate came by, fell-to languidly for just the necessary
time till they were out of sight. 'I'm not breaking my heart with
it,' he remarked.

Once there was a hatch to be opened near where he was stationed; he
watched the preparations for a second or so suspiciously, and then,
'Hullo,' said he,  'here's some real work coming--I'm off,' and he
was gone that moment.  Again, calculating the six guinea passage-
money, and the probable duration of the passage, he remarked
pleasantly that he was getting six shillings a day for this job,
'and it's pretty dear to the company at that.'  'They are making
nothing by me,' was another of his observations; 'they're making
something by that fellow.'  And he pointed to the Devonian, who was
just then busy to the eyes.

The more you saw of Alick, the more, it must be owned, you learned
to despise him.  His natural talents were of no use either to
himself or others; for his character had degenerated like his face,
and become pulpy and pretentious.  Even his power of persuasion,
which was certainly very surprising, stood in some danger of being
lost or neutralised by over-confidence.  He lied in an aggressive,
brazen manner, like a pert criminal in the dock; and he was so vain
of his own cleverness that he could not refrain from boasting, ten
minutes after, of the very trick by which he had deceived you.
'Why, now I have more money than when I came on board,' he said one
night, exhibiting a sixpence, 'and yet I stood myself a bottle of
beer before I went to bed yesterday.  And as for tobacco, I have
fifteen sticks of it.'  That was fairly successful indeed; yet a
man of his superiority, and with a less obtrusive policy, might,
who knows? have got the length of half a crown.  A man who prides
himself upon persuasion should learn the persuasive faculty of
silence, above all as to his own misdeeds.  It is only in the farce
and for dramatic purposes that Scapin enlarges on his peculiar
talents to the world at large.

Scapin is perhaps a good name for this clever, unfortunate Alick;
for at the bottom of all his misconduct there was a guiding sense
of humour that moved you to forgive him.  It was more than half a
jest that he conducted his existence.  'Oh, man,' he said to me
once with unusual emotion, like a man thinking of his mistress, 'I
would give up anything for a lark.'

It was in relation to his fellow-stowaway that Alick showed the
best, or perhaps I should say the only good, points of his nature.
'Mind you,' he said suddenly, changing his tone, 'mind you that's a
good boy.  He wouldn't tell you a lie.  A lot of them think he is a
scamp because his clothes are ragged, but he isn't; he's as good as
gold.'  To hear him, you become aware that Alick himself had a
taste for virtue.  He thought his own idleness and the other's
industry equally becoming.  He was no more anxious to insure his
own reputation as a liar than to uphold the truthfulness of his
companion; and he seemed unaware of what was incongruous in his
attitude, and was plainly sincere in both characters.

It was not surprising that he should take an interest in the
Devonian, for the lad worshipped and served him in love and wonder.
Busy as he was, he would find time to warn Alick of an approaching
officer, or even to tell him that the coast was clear, and he might
slip off and smoke a pipe in safety.  'Tom,' he once said to him,
for that was the name which Alick ordered him to use, 'if you don't
like going to the galley, I'll go for you.  You ain't used to this
kind of thing, you ain't.  But I'm a sailor; and I can understand
the feelings of any fellow, I can.'  Again, he was hard up, and
casting about for some tobacco, for he was not so liberally used in
this respect as others perhaps less worthy, when Alick offered him
the half of one of his fifteen sticks.  I think, for my part, he
might have increased the offer to a whole one, or perhaps a pair of
them, and not lived to regret his liberality.  But the Devonian
refused.  'No,' he said, 'you're a stowaway like me; I won't take
it from you, I'll take it from some one who's not down on his
luck.'

It was notable in this generous lad that he was strongly under the
influence of sex.  If a woman passed near where he was working, his
eyes lit up, his hand paused, and his mind wandered instantly to
other thoughts.  It was natural that he should exercise a
fascination proportionally strong upon women.  He begged, you will
remember, from women only, and was never refused.  Without wishing
to explain away the charity of those who helped him, I cannot but
fancy he may have owed a little to his handsome face, and to that
quick, responsive nature, formed for love, which speaks eloquently
through all disguises, and can stamp an impression in ten minutes'
talk or an exchange of glances.  He was the more dangerous in that
he was far from bold, but seemed to woo in spite of himself, and
with a soft and pleading eye.  Ragged as he was, and many a
scarecrow is in that respect more comfortably furnished, even on
board he was not without some curious admirers.

There was a girl among the passengers, a tall, blonde, handsome,
strapping Irishwoman, with a wild, accommodating eye, whom Alick
had dubbed Tommy, with that transcendental appropriateness that
defies analysis.  One day the Devonian was lying for warmth in the
upper stoke-hole, which stands open on the deck, when Irish Tommy
came past, very neatly attired, as was her custom.

'Poor fellow,' she said, stopping, 'you haven't a vest.'

'No,' he said; 'I wish I 'ad.'

Then she stood and gazed on him in silence, until, in his
embarrassment, for he knew not how to look under this scrutiny, he
pulled out his pipe and began to fill it with tobacco.

'Do you want a match?' she asked.  And before he had time to reply,
she ran off and presently returned with more than one.

That was the beginning and the end, as far as our passage is
concerned, of what I will make bold to call this love-affair.
There are many relations which go on to marriage and last during a
lifetime, in which less human feeling is engaged than in this scene
of five minutes at the stoke-hole.

Rigidly speaking, this would end the chapter of the stowaways; but
in a larger sense of the word I have yet more to add.  Jones had
discovered and pointed out to me a young woman who was remarkable
among her fellows for a pleasing and interesting air.  She was
poorly clad, to the verge, if not over the line, of
disrespectability, with a ragged old jacket and a bit of a sealskin
cap no bigger than your fist; but her eyes, her whole expression,
and her manner, even in ordinary moments, told of a true womanly
nature, capable of love, anger, and devotion.  She had a look, too,
of refinement, like one who might have been a better lady than
most, had she been allowed the opportunity.  When alone she seemed
preoccupied and sad; but she was not often alone; there was usually
by her side a heavy, dull, gross man in rough clothes, chary of
speech and gesture--not from caution, but poverty of disposition; a
man like a ditcher, unlovely and uninteresting; whom she petted and
tended and waited on with her eyes as if he had been Amadis of
Gaul.  It was strange to see this hulking fellow dog-sick, and this
delicate, sad woman caring for him.  He seemed, from first to last,
insensible of her caresses and attentions, and she seemed
unconscious of his insensibility.  The Irish husband, who sang his
wife to sleep, and this Scottish girl serving her Orson, were the
two bits of human nature that most appealed to me throughout the
voyage.

On the Thursday before we arrived, the tickets were collected; and
soon a rumour began to go round the vessel; and this girl, with her
bit of sealskin cap, became the centre of whispering and pointed
fingers.  She also, it was said, was a stowaway of a sort; for she
was on board with neither ticket nor money; and the man with whom
she travelled was the father of a family, who had left wife and
children to be hers.  The ship's officers discouraged the story,
which may therefore have been a story and no more; but it was
believed in the steerage, and the poor girl had to encounter many
curious eyes from that day forth.


PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND REVIEW


Travel is of two kinds; and this voyage of mine across the ocean
combined both.  'Out of my country and myself I go,' sings the old
poet:  and I was not only travelling out of my country in latitude
and longitude, but out of myself in diet, associates, and
consideration.  Part of the interest and a great deal of the
amusement flowed, at least to me, from this novel situation in the
world.

I found that I had what they call fallen in life with absolute
success and verisimilitude.  I was taken for a steerage passenger;
no one seemed surprised that I should be so; and there was nothing
but the brass plate between decks to remind me that I had once been
a gentleman.  In a former book, describing a former journey, I
expressed some wonder that I could be readily and naturally taken
for a pedlar, and explained the accident by the difference of
language and manners between England and France.  I must now take a
humbler view; for here I was among my own countrymen, somewhat
roughly clad to be sure, but with every advantage of speech and
manner; and I am bound to confess that I passed for nearly anything
you please except an educated gentleman.  The sailors called me
'mate,' the officers addressed me as 'my man,' my comrades accepted
me without hesitation for a person of their own character and
experience, but with some curious information.  One, a mason
himself, believed I was a mason; several, and among these at least
one of the seaman, judged me to be a petty officer in the American
navy; and I was so often set down for a practical engineer that at
last I had not the heart to deny it.  From all these guesses I drew
one conclusion, which told against the insight of my companions.
They might be close observers in their own way, and read the
manners in the face; but it was plain that they did not extend
their observation to the hands.

To the saloon passengers also I sustained my part without a hitch.
It is true I came little in their way; but when we did encounter,
there was no recognition in their eye, although I confess I
sometimes courted it in silence.  All these, my inferiors and
equals, took me, like the transformed monarch in the story, for a
mere common, human man.  They gave me a hard, dead look, with the
flesh about the eye kept unrelaxed.

With the women this surprised me less, as I had already
experimented on the sex by going abroad through a suburban part of
London simply attired in a sleeve-waistcoat.  The result was
curious.  I then learned for the first time, and by the exhaustive
process, how much attention ladies are accustomed to bestow on all
male creatures of their own station; for, in my humble rig, each
one who went by me caused me a certain shock of surprise and a
sense of something wanting.  In my normal circumstances, it
appeared every young lady must have paid me some tribute of a
glance; and though I had often not detected it when it was given, I
was well aware of its absence when it was withheld.  My height
seemed to decrease with every woman who passed me, for she passed
me like a dog.  This is one of my grounds for supposing that what
are called the upper classes may sometimes produce a disagreeable
impression in what are called the lower; and I wish some one would
continue my experiment, and find out exactly at what stage of
toilette a man becomes invisible to the well-regulated female eye.

Here on shipboard the matter was put to a more complete test; for,
even with the addition of speech and manner, I passed among the
ladies for precisely the average man of the steerage.  It was one
afternoon that I saw this demonstrated.  A very plainly dressed
woman was taken ill on deck.  I think I had the luck to be present
at every sudden seizure during all the passage; and on this
occasion found myself in the place of importance, supporting the
sufferer.  There was not only a large crowd immediately around us,
but a considerable knot of saloon passengers leaning over our heads
from the hurricane-deck.  One of these, an elderly managing woman,
hailed me with counsels.  Of course I had to reply; and as the talk
went on, I began to discover that the whole group took me for the
husband.  I looked upon my new wife, poor creature, with mingled
feelings; and I must own she had not even the appearance of the
poorest class of city servant-maids, but looked more like a country
wench who should have been employed at a roadside inn.  Now was the
time for me to go and study the brass plate.

To such of the officers as knew about me--the doctor, the purser,
and the stewards--I appeared in the light of a broad joke.  The
fact that I spent the better part of my day in writing had gone
abroad over the ship and tickled them all prodigiously.  Whenever
they met me they referred to my absurd occupation with familiarity
and breadth of humorous intention.  Their manner was well
calculated to remind me of my fallen fortunes.  You may be
sincerely amused by the amateur literary efforts of a gentleman,
but you scarce publish the feeling to his face. 'Well!' they would
say:  'still writing?'  And the smile would widen into a laugh.
The purser came one day into the cabin, and, touched to the heart
by my misguided industry, offered me some other kind of writing,
'for which,' he added pointedly, 'you will be paid.'  This was
nothing else than to copy out the list of passengers.

Another trick of mine which told against my reputation was my
choice of roosting-place in an active draught upon the cabin floor.
I was openly jeered and flouted for this eccentricity; and a
considerable knot would sometimes gather at the door to see my last
dispositions for the night.  This was embarrassing, but I learned
to support the trial with equanimity.

Indeed I may say that, upon the whole, my new position sat lightly
and naturally upon my spirits.  I accepted the consequences with
readiness, and found them far from difficult to bear.  The steerage
conquered me; I conformed more and more to the type of the place,
not only in manner but at heart, growing hostile to the officers
and cabin passengers who looked down upon me, and day by day
greedier for small delicacies.  Such was the result, as I fancy, of
a diet of bread and butter, soup and porridge.  We think we have no
sweet tooth as long as we are full to the brim of molasses; but a
man must have sojourned in the workhouse before he boasts himself
indifferent to dainties.  Every evening, for instance, I was more
and more preoccupied about our doubtful fare at tea.  If it was
delicate my heart was much lightened; if it was but broken fish I
was proportionally downcast.  The offer of a little jelly from a
fellow-passenger more provident than myself caused a marked
elevation in my spirits.  And I would have gone to the ship's end
and back again for an oyster or a chipped fruit.

In other ways I was content with my position.  It seemed no
disgrace to be confounded with my company; for I may as well
declare at once I found their manners as gentle and becoming as
those of any other class.  I do not mean that my friends could have
sat down without embarrassment and laughable disaster at the table
of a duke.  That does not imply an inferiority of breeding, but a
difference of usage.  Thus I flatter myself that I conducted myself
well among my fellow-passengers; yet my most ambitious hope is not
to have avoided faults, but to have committed as few as possible.
I know too well that my tact is not the same as their tact, and
that my habit of a different society constituted, not only no
qualification, but a positive disability to move easily and
becomingly in this.  When Jones complimented me--because I 'managed
to behave very pleasantly' to my fellow-passengers, was how he put
it--I could follow the thought in his mind, and knew his compliment
to be such as we pay foreigners on their proficiency in English.  I
dare say this praise was given me immediately on the back of some
unpardonable solecism, which had led him to review my conduct as a
whole.  We are all ready to laugh at the ploughman among lords; we
should consider also the case of a lord among the ploughmen.  I
have seen a lawyer in the house of a Hebridean fisherman; and I
know, but nothing will induce me to disclose, which of these two
was the better gentleman.  Some of our finest behaviour, though it
looks well enough from the boxes, may seem even brutal to the
gallery.  We boast too often manners that are parochial rather than
universal; that, like a country wine, will not bear transportation
for a hundred miles, nor from the parlour to the kitchen.  To be a
gentleman is to be one all the world over, and in every relation
and grade of society.  It is a high calling, to which a man must
first be born, and then devote himself for life.  And, unhappily,
the manners of a certain so-called upper grade have a kind of
currency, and meet with a certain external acceptation throughout
all the others, and this tends to keep us well satisfied with
slight acquirements and the amateurish accomplishments of a clique.
But manners, like art, should be human and central.

Some of my fellow-passengers, as I now moved among them in a
relation of equality, seemed to me excellent gentlemen.  They were
not rough, nor hasty, nor disputatious; debated pleasantly,
differed kindly; were helpful, gentle, patient, and placid.  The
type of manners was plain, and even heavy; there was little to
please the eye, but nothing to shock; and I thought gentleness lay
more nearly at the spring of behaviour than in many more ornate and
delicate societies.  I say delicate, where I cannot say refined; a
thing may be fine, like ironwork, without being delicate, like
lace.  There was here less delicacy; the skin supported more
callously the natural surface of events, the mind received more
bravely the crude facts of human existence; but I do not think that
there was less effective refinement, less consideration for others,
less polite suppression of self.  I speak of the best among my
fellow-passengers; for in the steerage, as well as in the saloon,
there is a mixture.  Those, then, with whom I found myself in
sympathy, and of whom I may therefore hope to write with a greater
measure of truth, were not only as good in their manners, but
endowed with very much the same natural capacities, and about as
wise in deduction, as the bankers and barristers of what is called
society.  One and all were too much interested in disconnected
facts, and loved information for its own sake with too rash a
devotion; but people in all classes display the same appetite as
they gorge themselves daily with the miscellaneous gossip of the
newspaper.  Newspaper-reading, as far as I can make out, is often
rather a sort of brown study than an act of culture.  I have myself
palmed off yesterday's issue on a friend, and seen him re-peruse it
for a continuance of minutes with an air at once refreshed and
solemn.  Workmen, perhaps, pay more attention; but though they may
be eager listeners, they have rarely seemed to me either willing or
careful thinkers.  Culture is not measured by the greatness of the
field which is covered by our knowledge, but by the nicety with
which we can perceive relations in that field, whether great or
small.  Workmen, certainly those who were on board with me, I found
wanting in this quality or habit of the mind.  They did not
perceive relations, but leaped to a so-called cause, and thought
the problem settled.  Thus the cause of everything in England was
the form of government, and the cure for all evils was, by
consequence, a revolution.  It is surprising how many of them said
this, and that none should have had a definite thought in his head
as he said it.  Some hated the Church because they disagreed with
it; some hated Lord Beaconsfield because of war and taxes; all
hated the masters, possibly with reason.  But these failings were
not at the root of the matter; the true reasoning of their souls
ran thus--I have not got on; I ought to have got on; if there was a
revolution I should get on.  How?  They had no idea.  Why?
Because--because--well, look at America!

To be politically blind is no distinction; we are all so, if you
come to that.  At bottom, as it seems to me, there is but one
question in modern home politics, though it appears in many shapes,
and that is the question of money; and but one political remedy,
that the people should grow wiser and better.  My workmen fellow-
passengers were as impatient and dull of hearing on the second of
these points as any member of Parliament; but they had some
glimmerings of the first.  They would not hear of improvement on
their part, but wished the world made over again in a crack, so
that they might remain improvident and idle and debauched, and yet
enjoy the comfort and respect that should accompany the opposite
virtues; and it was in this expectation, as far as I could see,
that many of them were now on their way to America.  But on the
point of money they saw clearly enough that inland politics, so far
as they were concerned, were reducible to the question of annual
income; a question which should long ago have been settled by a
revolution, they did not know how, and which they were now about to
settle for themselves, once more they knew not how, by crossing the
Atlantic in a steamship of considerable tonnage.

And yet it has been amply shown them that the second or income
question is in itself nothing, and may as well be left undecided,
if there be no wisdom and virtue to profit by the change.  It is
not by a man's purse, but by his character that he is rich or poor.
Barney will be poor, Alick will be poor, Mackay will be poor; let
them go where they will, and wreck all the governments under
heaven, they will be poor until they die.

Nothing is perhaps more notable in the average workman than his
surprising idleness, and the candour with which he confesses to the
failing.  It has to me been always something of a relief to find
the poor, as a general rule, so little oppressed with work.  I can
in consequence enjoy my own more fortunate beginning with a better
grace.  The other day I was living with a farmer in America, an old
frontiersman, who had worked and fought, hunted and farmed, from
his childhood up.  He excused himself for his defective education
on the ground that he had been overworked from first to last.  Even
now, he said, anxious as he was, he had never the time to take up a
book.  In consequence of this, I observed him closely; he was
occupied for four or, at the extreme outside, for five hours out of
the twenty-four, and then principally in walking; and the remainder
of the day he passed in born idleness, either eating fruit or
standing with his back against a door.  I have known men do hard
literary work all morning, and then undergo quite as much physical
fatigue by way of relief as satisfied this powerful frontiersman
for the day.  He, at least, like all the educated class, did so
much homage to industry as to persuade himself he was industrious.
But the average mechanic recognises his idleness with effrontery;
he has even, as I am told, organised it.

I give the story as it was told me, and it was told me for a fact.
A man fell from a housetop in the city of Aberdeen, and was brought
into hospital with broken bones.  He was asked what was his trade,
and replied that he was a TAPPER.  No one had ever heard of such a
thing before; the officials were filled with curiosity; they
besought an explanation.  It appeared that when a party of slaters
were engaged upon a roof, they would now and then be taken with a
fancy for the public-house.  Now a seamstress, for example, might
slip away from her work and no one be the wiser; but if these
fellows adjourned, the tapping of the mallets would cease, and thus
the neighbourhood be advertised of their defection.  Hence the
career of the tapper.  He has to do the tapping and keep up an
industrious bustle on the housetop during the absence of the
slaters.  When he taps for only one or two the thing is child's-
play, but when he has to represent a whole troop, it is then that
he earns his money in the sweat of his brow.  Then must he bound
from spot to spot, reduplicate, triplicate, sexduplicate his single
personality, and swell and hasten his blows., until he produce a
perfect illusion for the ear, and you would swear that a crowd of
emulous masons were continuing merrily to roof the house.  It must
be a strange sight from an upper window.

I heard nothing on board of the tapper; but I was astonished at the
stories told by my companions.  Skulking, shirking, malingering,
were all established tactics, it appeared.  They could see no
dishonesty where a man who is paid for an bones work gives half an
hour's consistent idling in its place.  Thus the tapper would
refuse to watch for the police during a burglary, and call himself
a honest man.  It is not sufficiently recognised that our race
detests to work.  If I thought that I should have to work every day
of my life as hard as I am working now, I should be tempted to give
up the struggle.  And the workman early begins on his career of
toil.  He has never had his fill of holidays in the past, and his
prospect of holidays in the future is both distant and uncertain.
In the circumstances, it would require a high degree of virtue not
to snatch alleviations for the moment.

There were many good talkers on the ship; and I believe good
talking of a certain sort is a common accomplishment among working
men.  Where books are comparatively scarce, a greater amount of
information will be given and received by word of mouth; and this
tends to produce good talkers, and, what is no less needful for
conversation, good listeners.  They could all tell a story with
effect.  I am sometimes tempted to think that the less literary
class show always better in narration; they have so much more
patience with detail, are so much less hurried to reach the points,
and preserve so much juster a proportion among the facts.  At the
same time their talk is dry; they pursue a topic ploddingly, have
not an agile fancy, do not throw sudden lights from unexpected
quarters, and when the talk is over they often leave the matter
where it was.  They mark time instead of marching.  They think only
to argue, not to reach new conclusions, and use their reason rather
as a weapon of offense than as a tool for self-improvement.  Hence
the talk of some of the cleverest was unprofitable in result,
because there was no give and take; they would grant you as little
as possible for premise, and begin to dispute under an oath to
conquer or to die.

But the talk of a workman is apt to be more interesting than that
of a wealthy merchant, because the thoughts, hopes, and fears of
which the workman's life is built lie nearer to necessity and
nature.  They are more immediate to human life.  An income
calculated by the week is a far more human thing than one
calculated by the year, and a small income, simply from its
smallness, than a large one.  I never wearied listening to the
details of a workman's economy, because every item stood for some
real pleasure.  If he could afford pudding twice a week, you know
that twice a week the man ate with genuine gusto and was physically
happy; while if you learn that a rich man has seven courses a day,
ten to one the half of them remain untasted, and the whole is but
misspent money and a weariness to the flesh.

The difference between England and America to a working man was
thus most humanly put to me by a fellow-passenger:  'In America,'
said he, 'you get pies and puddings.'  I do not hear enough, in
economy books, of pies and pudding.  A man lives in and for the
delicacies, adornments, and accidental attributes of life, such as
pudding to eat and pleasant books and theatres to occupy his
leisure.  The bare terms of existence would be rejected with
contempt by all.  If a man feeds on bread and butter, soup and
porridge, his appetite grows wolfish after dainties.  And the
workman dwells in a borderland, and is always within sight of those
cheerless regions where life is more difficult to sustain than
worth sustaining.  Every detail of our existence, where it is worth
while to cross the ocean after pie and pudding, is made alive and
enthralling by the presence of genuine desire; but it is all one to
me whether Croesus has a hundred or a thousand thousands in the
bank.  There is more adventure in the life of the working man who
descends as a common solder into the battle of life, than in that
of the millionaire who sits apart in an office, like Von Moltke,
and only directs the manoeuvres by telegraph.  Give me to hear
about the career of him who is in the thick of business; to whom
one change of market means empty belly, and another a copious and
savoury meal.  This is not the philosophical, but the human side of
economics; it interests like a story; and the life all who are thus
situated partakes in a small way the charm of Robinson Crusoe; for
every step is critical and human life is presented to you naked and
verging to its lowest terms.


NEW YORK


As we drew near to New York I was at first amused, and then
somewhat staggered, by the cautious and the grisly tales that went
the round.  You would have thought we were to land upon a cannibal
island.  You must speak to no one in the streets, as they would not
leave you till you were rooked and beaten.  You must enter a hotel
with military precautions; for the least you had to apprehend was
to awake next morning without money or baggage, or necessary
raiment, a lone forked radish in a bed; and if the worst befell,
you would instantly and mysteriously disappear from the ranks of
mankind.

I have usually found such stories correspond to the least modicum
of fact.  Thus I was warned, I remember, against the roadside inns
of the Cevennes, and that by a learned professor; and when I
reached Pradelles the warning was explained--it was but the far-
away rumour and reduplication of a single terrifying story already
half a century old, and half forgotten in the theatre of the
events.  So I was tempted to make light of these reports against
America.  But we had on board with us a man whose evidence it would
not do to put aside.  He had come near these perils in the body; he
had visited a robber inn.  The public has an old and well-grounded
favour for this class of incident, and shall be gratified to the
best of my power.

My fellow-passenger, whom we shall call M'Naughten, had come from
New York to Boston with a comrade, seeking work.  They were a pair
of rattling blades; and, leaving their baggage at the station,
passed the day in beer saloons, and with congenial spirits, until
midnight struck.  Then they applied themselves to find a lodging,
and walked the streets till two, knocking at houses of
entertainment and being refused admittance, or themselves declining
the terms.  By two the inspiration of their liquor had begun to
wear off; they were weary and humble, and after a great circuit
found themselves in the same street where they had begun their
search, and in front of a French hotel where they had already
sought accommodation.  Seeing the house still open, they returned
to the charge.  A man in a white cap sat in an office by the door.
He seemed to welcome them more warmly than when they had first
presented themselves, and the charge for the night had somewhat
unaccountably fallen from a dollar to a quarter.  They thought him
ill-looking, but paid their quarter apiece, and were shown upstairs
to the top of the house.  There, in a small room, the man in the
white cap wished them pleasant slumbers.

It was furnished with a bed, a chair, and some conveniences.  The
door did not lock on the inside; and the only sign of adornment was
a couple of framed pictures, one close above the head of the bed,
and the other opposite the foot, and both curtained, as we may
sometimes see valuable water-colours, or the portraits of the dead,
or works of art more than usually skittish in the subject.  It was
perhaps in the hope of finding something of this last description
that M'Naughten's comrade pulled aside the curtain of the first.
He was startlingly disappointed.  There was no picture.  The frame
surrounded, and the curtain was designed to hide, an oblong
aperture in the partition, through which they looked forth into the
dark corridor.  A person standing without could easily take a purse
from under the pillow, or even strangle a sleeper as he lay abed.
M'Naughten and his comrade stared at each other like Vasco's
seamen, 'with a wild surmise'; and then the latter, catching up the
lamp, ran to the other frame and roughly raised the curtain.  There
he stood, petrified; and M'Naughten, who had followed, grasped him
by the wrist in terror.  They could see into another room, larger
in size than that which they occupied, where three men sat
crouching and silent in the dark.  For a second or so these five
persons looked each other in the eyes, then the curtain was
dropped, and M'Naughten and his friend made but one bolt of it out
of the room and downstairs.  The man in the white cap said nothing
as they passed him; and they were so pleased to be once more in the
open night that they gave up all notion of a bed, and walked the
streets of Boston till the morning.

No one seemed much cast down by these stories, but all inquired
after the address of a respectable hotel; and I, for my part, put
myself under the conduct of Mr. Jones.  Before noon of the second
Sunday we sighted the low shores outside of New York harbour; the
steerage passengers must remain on board to pass through Castle
Garden on the following morning; but we of the second cabin made
our escape along with the lords of the saloon; and by six o'clock
Jones and I issued into West Street, sitting on some straw in the
bottom of an open baggage-wagon.  It rained miraculously; and from
that moment till on the following night I left New York, there was
scarce a lull, and no cessation of the downpour.  The roadways were
flooded; a loud strident noise of falling water filled the air; the
restaurants smelt heavily of wet people and wet clothing.

It took us but a few minutes, though it cost us a good deal of
money, to be rattled along West Street to our destination:
'Reunion House, No. 10 West Street, one minutes walk from Castle
Garden; convenient to Castle Garden, the Steamboat Landings,
California Steamers and Liverpool Ships; Board and Lodging per day
1 dollar, single meals 25 cents, lodging per night 25 cents;
private rooms for families; no charge for storage or baggage;
satisfaction guaranteed to all persons; Michael Mitchell,
Proprietor.'  Reunion House was, I may go the length of saying, a
humble hostelry.  You entered through a long bar-room, thence
passed into a little dining-room, and thence into a still smaller
kitchen.  The furniture was of the plainest; but the bar was hung
in the American taste, with encouraging and hospitable mottoes.

Jones was well known; we were received warmly; and two minutes
afterwards I had refused a drink from the proprietor, and was going
on, in my plain European fashion, to refuse a cigar, when Mr.
Mitchell sternly interposed, and explained the situation.  He was
offering to treat me, it appeared, whenever an American bar-keeper
proposes anything, it must be borne in mind that he is offering to
treat; and if I did not want a drink, I must at least take the
cigar.  I took it bashfully, feeling I had begun my American career
on the wrong foot.  I did not enjoy that cigar; but this may have
been from a variety of reasons, even the best cigar often failing
to please if you smoke three-quarters of it in a drenching rain.

For many years America was to me a sort of promised land; 'westward
the march of empire holds its way'; the race is for the moment to
the young; what has been and what is we imperfectly and obscurely
know; what is to be yet lies beyond the flight of our imaginations.
Greece, Rome, and Judaea are gone by forever, leaving to
generations the legacy of their accomplished work; China still
endures, an old-inhabited house in the brand-new city of nations;
England has already declined, since she has lost the States; and to
these States, therefore, yet undeveloped, full of dark
possibilities, and grown, like another Eve, from one rib out of the
side of their own old land, the minds of young men in England turn
naturally at a certain hopeful period of their age.  It will be
hard for an American to understand the spirit.  But let him imagine
a young man, who shall have grown up in an old and rigid circle,
following bygone fashions and taught to distrust his own fresh
instincts, and who now suddenly hears of a family of cousins, all
about his own age, who keep house together by themselves and live
far from restraint and tradition; let him imagine this, and he will
have some imperfect notion of the sentiment with which spirited
English youths turn to the thought of the American Republic.  It
seems to them as if, out west, the war of life was still conducted
in the open air, and on free barbaric terms; as if it had not yet
been narrowed into parlours, nor begun to be conducted, like some
unjust and dreary arbitration, by compromise, costume forms of
procedure, and sad, senseless self-denial.  Which of these two he
prefers, a man with any youth still left in him will decide rightly
for himself.  He would rather be houseless than denied a pass-key;
rather go without food than partake of stalled ox in stiff,
respectable society; rather be shot out of hand than direct his
life according to the dictates of the world.

He knows or thinks nothing of the Maine Laws, the Puritan sourness,
the fierce, sordid appetite for dollars, or the dreary existence of
country towns.  A few wild story-books which delighted his
childhood form the imaginative basis of his picture of America.  In
course of time, there is added to this a great crowd of stimulating
details--vast cities that grow up as by enchantment; the birds,
that have gone south in autumn, returning with the spring to find
thousands camped upon their marshes, and the lamps burning far and
near along populous streets; forests that disappear like snow;
countries larger than Britain that are cleared and settled, one man
running forth with his household gods before another, while the
bear and the Indian are yet scarce aware of their approach; oil
that gushes from the earth; gold that is washed or quarried in the
brooks or glens of the Sierras; and all that bustle, courage,
action, and constant kaleidoscopic change that Walt Whitman has
seized and set forth in his vigorous, cheerful, and loquacious
verses.

Here I was at last in America, and was soon out upon New York
streets, spying for things foreign.  The place had to me an air of
Liverpool; but such was the rain that not Paradise itself would
have looked inviting.  We were a party of four, under two
umbrellas; Jones and I and two Scots lads, recent immigrants, and
not indisposed to welcome a compatriot.  They had been six weeks in
New York, and neither of them had yet found a single job or earned
a single halfpenny.  Up to the present they were exactly out of
pocket by the amount of the fare.

The lads soon left us.  Now I had sworn by all my gods to have such
a dinner as would rouse the dead; there was scarce any expense at
which I should have hesitated; the devil was in it, but Jones and I
should dine like heathen emperors.  I set to work, asking after a
restaurant; and I chose the wealthiest and most gastronomical-
looking passers-by to ask from.  Yet, although I had told them I
was willing to pay anything in reason, one and all sent me off to
cheap, fixed-price houses, where I would not have eaten that night
for the cost of twenty dinners.  I do not know if this were
characteristic of New York, or whether it was only Jones and I who
looked un-dinerly and discouraged enterprising suggestions.  But at
length, by our own sagacity, we found a French restaurant, where
there was a French waiter, some fair French cooking, some so-called
French wine, and French coffee to conclude the whole.  I never
entered into the feelings of Jack on land so completely as when I
tasted that coffee.

I suppose we had one of the 'private rooms for families' at Reunion
House.  It was very small, furnished with a bed, a chair, and some
clothes-pegs; and it derived all that was necessary for the life of
the human animal through two borrowed lights; one looking into the
passage, and the second opening, without sash, into another
apartment, where three men fitfully snored, or in intervals of
wakefulness, drearily mumbled to each other all night long.  It
will be observed that this was almost exactly the disposition of
the room in M'Naughten's story.  Jones had the bed; I pitched my
camp upon the floor; he did not sleep until near morning, and I,
for my part, never closed an eye.

At sunrise I heard a cannon fired; and shortly afterwards the men
in the next room gave over snoring for good, and began to rustle
over their toilettes.  The sound of their voices as they talked was
low and like that of people watching by the sick.  Jones, who had
at last begun to doze, tumbled and murmured, and every now and then
opened unconscious eyes upon me where I lay.  I found myself
growing eerier and eerier, for I dare say I was a little fevered by
my restless night, and hurried to dress and get downstairs.

You had to pass through the rain, which still fell thick and
resonant, to reach a lavatory on the other side of the court.
There were three basin-stands, and a few crumpled towels and pieces
of wet soap, white and slippery like fish; nor should I forget a
looking-glass and a pair of questionable combs.  Another Scots lad
was here, scrubbing his face with a good will.  He had been three
months in New York and had not yet found a single job nor earned a
single halfpenny.  Up to the present, he also was exactly out of
pocket by the amount of the fare.  I began to grow sick at heart
for my fellow-emigrants.

Of my nightmare wanderings in New York I spare to tell.  I had a
thousand and one things to do; only the day to do them in, and a
journey across the continent before me in the evening.  It rained
with patient fury; every now and then I had to get under cover for
a while in order, so to speak, to give my mackintosh a rest; for
under this continued drenching it began to grow damp on the inside.
I went to banks, post-offices, railway-offices, restaurants,
publishers, booksellers, money-changers, and wherever I went a pool
would gather about my feet, and those who were careful of their
floors would look on with an unfriendly eye.  Wherever I went, too,
the same traits struck me:  the people were all surprisingly rude
and surprisingly kind.  The money-changer cross-questioned me like
a French commissary, asking my age, my business, my average income,
and my destination, beating down my attempts at evasion, and
receiving my answers in silence; and yet when all was over, he
shook hands with me up to the elbows, and sent his lad nearly a
quarter of a mile in the rain to get me books at a reduction.
Again, in a very large publishing and bookselling establishment, a
man, who seemed to be the manager, received me as I had certainly
never before been received in any human shop, indicated squarely
that he put no faith in my honesty, and refused to look up the
names of books or give me the slightest help or information, on the
ground, like the steward, that it was none of his business.  I lost
my temper at last, said I was a stranger in America and not learned
in their etiquette; but I would assure him, if he went to any
bookseller in England, of more handsome usage.  The boast was
perhaps exaggerated; but like many a long shot, it struck the gold.
The manager passed at once from one extreme to the other; I may say
that from that moment he loaded me with kindness; he gave me all
sorts of good advice, wrote me down addresses, and came bareheaded
into the rain to point me out a restaurant, where I might lunch,
nor even then did he seem to think that he had done enough.  These
are (it is as well to be bold in statement) the manners of America.
It is this same opposition that has most struck me in people of
almost all classes and from east to west.  By the time a man had
about strung me up to be the death of him by his insulting
behaviour, he himself would be just upon the point of melting into
confidence and serviceable attentions.  Yet I suspect, although I
have met with the like in so many parts, that this must be the
character of some particular state or group of states, for in
America, and this again in all classes, you will find some of the
softest-mannered gentlemen in the world.

I was so wet when I got back to Mitchell's toward the evening, that
I had simply to divest myself of my shoes, socks, and trousers, and
leave them behind for the benefit of New York city.  No fire could
have dried them ere I had to start; and to pack them in their
present condition was to spread ruin among my other possessions.
With a heavy heart I said farewell to them as they lay a pulp in
the middle of a pool upon the floor of Mitchell's kitchen.  I
wonder if they are dry by now.  Mitchell hired a man to carry my
baggage to the station, which was hard by, accompanied me thither
himself, and recommended me to the particular attention of the
officials.  No one could have been kinder.  Those who are out of
pocket may go safely to Reunion House, where they will get decent
meals and find an honest and obliging landlord.  I owed him this
word of thanks, before I enter fairly on the second {1} and far
less agreeable chapter of my emigrant experience.



CHAPTER II--COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK--A FRAGMENT--1871



Very much as a painter half closes his eyes so that some salient
unity may disengage itself from among the crowd of details, and
what he sees may thus form itself into a whole; very much on the
same principle, I may say, I allow a considerable lapse of time to
intervene between any of my little journeyings and the attempt to
chronicle them.  I cannot describe a thing that is before me at the
moment, or that has been before me only a very little while before;
I must allow my recollections to get thoroughly strained free from
all chaff till nothing be except the pure gold; allow my memory to
choose out what is truly memorable by a process of natural
selection; and I piously believe that in this way I ensure the
Survival of the Fittest.  If I make notes for future use, or if I
am obliged to write letters during the course of my little
excursion, I so interfere with the process that I can never again
find out what is worthy of being preserved, or what should be given
in full length, what in torso, or what merely in profile.  This
process of incubation may be unreasonably prolonged; and I am
somewhat afraid that I have made this mistake with the present
journey.  Like a bad daguerreotype, great part of it has been
entirely lost; I can tell you nothing about the beginning and
nothing about the end; but the doings of some fifty or sixty hours
about the middle remain quite distinct and definite, like a little
patch of sunshine on a long, shadowy plain, or the one spot on an
old picture that has been restored by the dexterous hand of the
cleaner.  I remember a tale of an old Scots minister called upon
suddenly to preach, who had hastily snatched an old sermon out of
his study and found himself in the pulpit before he noticed that
the rats had been making free with his manuscript and eaten the
first two or three pages away; he gravely explained to the
congregation how he found himself situated:  'And now,' said he,
'let us just begin where the rats have left off.'  I must follow
the divine's example, and take up the thread of my discourse where
it first distinctly issues from the limbo of forgetfulness.


COCKERMOUTH


I was lighting my pipe as I stepped out of the inn at Cockermouth,
and did not raise my head until I was fairly in the street.  When I
did so, it flashed upon me that I was in England; the evening
sunlight lit up English houses, English faces, an English
conformation of street,--as it were, an English atmosphere blew
against my face.  There is nothing perhaps more puzzling (if one
thing in sociology can ever really be more unaccountable than
another) than the great gulf that is set between England and
Scotland--a gulf so easy in appearance, in reality so difficult to
traverse.  Here are two people almost identical in blood; pent up
together on one small island, so that their intercourse (one would
have thought) must be as close as that of prisoners who shared one
cell of the Bastille; the same in language and religion; and yet a
few years of quarrelsome isolation--a mere forenoon's tiff, as one
may call it, in comparison with the great historical cycles--has so
separated their thoughts and ways that not unions, not mutual
dangers, nor steamers, nor railways, nor all the king's horses and
all the king's men, seem able to obliterate the broad distinction.
In the trituration of another century or so the corners may
disappear; but in the meantime, in the year of grace 1871, I was as
much in a new country as if I had been walking out of the Hotel St.
Antoine at Antwerp.

I felt a little thrill of pleasure at my heart as I realised the
change, and strolled away up the street with my hands behind my
back, noting in a dull, sensual way how foreign, and yet how
friendly, were the slopes of the gables and the colour of the
tiles, and even the demeanour and voices of the gossips round about
me.

Wandering in this aimless humour, I turned up a lane and found
myself following the course of the bright little river.  I passed
first one and then another, then a third, several couples out love-
making in the spring evening; and a consequent feeling of
loneliness was beginning to grow upon me, when I came to a dam
across the river, and a mill--a great, gaunt promontory of
building,--half on dry ground and half arched over the stream.  The
road here drew in its shoulders and crept through between the
landward extremity of the mill and a little garden enclosure, with
a small house and a large signboard within its privet hedge.  I was
pleased to fancy this an inn, and drew little etchings in fancy of
a sanded parlour, and three-cornered spittoons, and a society of
parochial gossips seated within over their churchwardens; but as I
drew near, the board displayed its superscription, and I could read
the name of Smethurst, and the designation of 'Canadian Felt Hat
Manufacturers.'  There was no more hope of evening fellowship, and
I could only stroll on by the river-side, under the trees.  The
water was dappled with slanting sunshine, and dusted all over with
a little mist of flying insects.  There were some amorous ducks,
also, whose lovemaking reminded me of what I had seen a little
farther down.  But the road grew sad, and I grew weary; and as I
was perpetually haunted with the terror of a return of the tie that
had been playing such ruin in my head a week ago, I turned and went
back to the inn, and supper, and my bed.

The next morning, at breakfast, I communicated to the smart
waitress my intention of continuing down the coast and through
Whitehaven to Furness, and, as I might have expected, I was
instantly confronted by that last and most worrying form of
interference, that chooses to introduce tradition and authority
into the choice of a man's own pleasures.  I can excuse a person
combating my religious or philosophical heresies, because them I
have deliberately accepted, and am ready to justify by present
argument.  But I do not seek to justify my pleasures.  If I prefer
tame scenery to grand, a little hot sunshine over lowland parks and
woodlands to the war of the elements round the summit of Mont
Blanc; or if I prefer a pipe of mild tobacco, and the company of
one or two chosen companions, to a ball where I feel myself very
hot, awkward, and weary, I merely state these preferences as facts,
and do not seek to establish them as principles.  This is not the
general rule, however, and accordingly the waitress was shocked, as
one might be at a heresy, to hear the route that I had sketched out
for myself.  Everybody who came to Cockermouth for pleasure, it
appeared, went on to Keswick.  It was in vain that I put up a
little plea for the liberty of the subject; it was in vain that I
said I should prefer to go to Whitehaven.  I was told that there
was 'nothing to see there'--that weary, hackneyed, old falsehood;
and at last, as the handmaiden began to look really concerned, I
gave way, as men always do in such circumstances, and agreed that I
was to leave for Keswick by a train in the early evening.


AN EVANGELIST


Cockermouth itself, on the same authority, was a Place with
'nothing to see'; nevertheless I saw a good deal, and retain a
pleasant, vague picture of the town and all its surroundings.  I
might have dodged happily enough all day about the main street and
up to the castle and in and out of byways, but the curious
attraction that leads a person in a strange place to follow, day
after day, the same round, and to make set habits for himself in a
week or ten days, led me half unconsciously up the same, road that
I had gone the evening before.  When I came up to the hat
manufactory, Smethurst himself was standing in the garden gate.  He
was brushing one Canadian felt hat, and several others had been put
to await their turn one above the other on his own head, so that he
looked something like the typical Jew old-clothes man.  As I drew
near, he came sidling out of the doorway to accost me, with so
curious an expression on his face that I instinctively prepared
myself to apologise for some unwitting trespass.  His first
question rather confirmed me in this belief, for it was whether or
not he had seen me going up this way last night; and after having
answered in the affirmative, I waited in some alarm for the rest of
my indictment.  But the good man's heart was full of peace; and he
stood there brushing his hats and prattling on about fishing, and
walking, and the pleasures of convalescence, in a bright shallow
stream that kept me pleased and interested, I could scarcely say
how.  As he went on, he warmed to his subject, and laid his hats
aside to go along the water-side and show me where the large trout
commonly lay, underneath an overhanging bank; and he was much
disappointed, for my sake, that there were none visible just then.
Then he wandered off on to another tack, and stood a great while
out in the middle of a meadow in the hot sunshine, trying to make
out that he had known me before, or, if not me, some friend of
mine, merely, I believe, out of a desire that we should feel more
friendly and at our ease with one another.  At last he made a
little speech to me, of which I wish I could recollect the very
words, for they were so simple and unaffected that they put all the
best writing and speaking to the blush; as it is, I can recall only
the sense, and that perhaps imperfectly.  He began by saying that
he had little things in his past life that it gave him especial
pleasure to recall; and that the faculty of receiving such sharp
impressions had now died out in himself, but must at my age be
still quite lively and active.  Then he told me that he had a
little raft afloat on the river above the dam which he was going to
lend me, in order that I might be able to look back, in after
years, upon having done so, and get great pleasure from the
recollection.  Now, I have a friend of my own who will forgo
present enjoyments and suffer much present inconvenience for the
sake of manufacturing 'a reminiscence' for himself; but there was
something singularly refined in this pleasure that the hatmaker
found in making reminiscences for others; surely no more simple or
unselfish luxury can be imagined.  After he had unmoored his little
embarkation, and seen me safely shoved off into midstream, he ran
away back to his hats with the air of a man who had only just
recollected that he had anything to do.

I did not stay very long on the raft.  It ought to have been very
nice punting about there in the cool shade of the trees, or sitting
moored to an over-hanging root; but perhaps the very notion that I
was bound in gratitude specially to enjoy my little cruise, and
cherish its recollection, turned the whole thing from a pleasure
into a duty.  Be that as it may, there is no doubt that I soon
wearied and came ashore again, and that it gives me more pleasure
to recall the man himself and his simple, happy conversation, so
full of gusto and sympathy, than anything possibly connected with
his crank, insecure embarkation.  In order to avoid seeing him, for
I was not a little ashamed of myself for having failed to enjoy his
treat sufficiently, I determined to continue up the river, and, at
all prices, to find some other way back into the town in time for
dinner.  As I went, I was thinking of Smethurst with admiration; a
look into that man's mind was like a retrospect over the smiling
champaign of his past life, and very different from the Sinai-
gorges up which one looks for a terrified moment into the dark
souls of many good, many wise, and many prudent men.  I cannot be
very grateful to such men for their excellence, and wisdom, and
prudence.  I find myself facing as stoutly as I can a hard,
combative existence, full of doubt, difficulties, defeats,
disappointments, and dangers, quite a hard enough life without
their dark countenances at my elbow, so that what I want is a
happy-minded Smethurst placed here and there at ugly corners of my
life's wayside, preaching his gospel of quiet and contentment.


ANOTHER


I was shortly to meet with an evangelist of another stamp.  After I
had forced my way through a gentleman's grounds, I came out on the
high road, and sat down to rest myself on a heap of stones at the
top of a long hill, with Cockermouth lying snugly at the bottom.
An Irish beggar-woman, with a beautiful little girl by her side,
came up to ask for alms, and gradually fell to telling me the
little tragedy of her life.  Her own sister, she told me, had
seduced her husband from her after many years of married life, and
the pair had fled, leaving her destitute, with the little girl upon
her hands.  She seemed quite hopeful and cheery, and, though she
was unaffectedly sorry for the loss of her husband's earnings, she
made no pretence of despair at the loss of his affection; some day
she would meet the fugitives, and the law would see her duly
righted, and in the meantime the smallest contribution was
gratefully received.  While she was telling all this in the most
matter-of-fact way, I had been noticing the approach of a tall man,
with a high white hat and darkish clothes.  He came up the hill at
a rapid pace, and joined our little group with a sort of half-
salutation.  Turning at once to the woman, he asked her in a
business-like way whether she had anything to do, whether she were
a Catholic or a Protestant, whether she could read, and so forth;
and then, after a few kind words and some sweeties to the child, he
despatched the mother with some tracts about Biddy and the Priest,
and the Orangeman's Bible.  I was a little amused at his abrupt
manner, for he was still a young man, and had somewhat the air of a
navy officer; but he tackled me with great solemnity.  I could make
fun of what he said, for I do not think it was very wise; but the
subject does not appear to me just now in a jesting light, so I
shall only say that he related to me his own conversion, which had
been effected (as is very often the case) through the agency of a
gig accident, and that, after having examined me and diagnosed my
case, he selected some suitable tracts from his repertory, gave
them to me, and, bidding me God-speed, went on his way.


LAST OF SMETHURST


That evening I got into a third-class carriage on my way for
Keswick, and was followed almost immediately by a burly man in
brown clothes.  This fellow-passenger was seemingly ill at ease,
and kept continually putting his head out of the window, and asking
the bystanders if they saw HIM coming.  At last, when the train was
already in motion, there was a commotion on the platform, and a way
was left clear to our carriage door.  HE had arrived.  In the hurry
I could just see Smethurst, red and panting, thrust a couple of
clay pipes into my companion's outstretched band, and hear him
crying his farewells after us as we slipped out of the station at
an ever accelerating pace.  I said something about it being a close
run, and the broad man, already engaged in filling one of the
pipes, assented, and went on to tell me of his own stupidity in
forgetting a necessary, and of how his friend had good-naturedly
gone down town at the last moment to supply the omission.  I
mentioned that I had seen Mr. Smethurst already, and that he had
been very polite to me; and we fell into a discussion of the
hatter's merits that lasted some time and left us quite good
friends at its conclusion.  The topic was productive of goodwill.
We exchanged tobacco and talked about the season, and agreed at
last that we should go to the same hotel at Keswick and sup in
company.  As he had some business in the town which would occupy
him some hour or so, on our arrival I was to improve the time and
go down to the lake, that I might see a glimpse of the promised
wonders.

The night had fallen already when I reached the water-side, at a
place where many pleasure-boats are moored and ready for hire; and
as I went along a stony path, between wood and water, a strong wind
blew in gusts from the far end of the lake.  The sky was covered
with flying scud; and, as this was ragged, there was quite a wild
chase of shadow and moon-glimpse over the surface of the shuddering
water.  I had to hold my hat on, and was growing rather tired, and
inclined to go back in disgust, when a little incident occurred to
break the tedium.  A sudden and violent squall of wind sundered the
low underwood, and at the same time there came one of those brief
discharges of moonlight, which leaped into the opening thus made,
and showed me three girls in the prettiest flutter and disorder.
It was as though they had sprung out of the ground.  I accosted
them very politely in my capacity of stranger, and requested to be
told the names of all manner of hills and woods and places that I
did not wish to know, and we stood together for a while and had an
amusing little talk.  The wind, too, made himself of the party,
brought the colour into their faces, and gave them enough to do to
repress their drapery; and one of them, amid much giggling, had to
pirouette round and round upon her toes (as girls do) when some
specially strong gust had got the advantage over her.  They were
just high enough up in the social order not to be afraid to speak
to a gentleman; and just low enough to feel a little tremor, a
nervous consciousness of wrong-doing--of stolen waters, that gave a
considerable zest to our most innocent interview.  They were as
much discomposed and fluttered, indeed, as if I had been a wicked
baron proposing to elope with the whole trio; but they showed no
inclination to go away, and I had managed to get them off hills and
waterfalls and on to more promising subjects, when a young man was
descried coming along the path from the direction of Keswick.  Now
whether he was the young man of one of my friends, or the brother
of one of them, or indeed the brother of all, I do not know; but
they incontinently said that they must be going, and went away up
the path with friendly salutations.  I need not say that I found
the lake and the moonlight rather dull after their departure, and
speedily found my way back to potted herrings and whisky-and-water
in the commercial room with my late fellow-traveller.  In the
smoking-room there was a tall dark man with a moustache, in an
ulster coat, who had got the best place and was monopolising most
of the talk; and, as I came in, a whisper came round to me from
both sides, that this was the manager of a London theatre.  The
presence of such a man was a great event for Keswick, and I must
own that the manager showed himself equal to his position.  He had
a large fat pocket-book, from which he produced poem after poem,
written on the backs of letters or hotel-bills; and nothing could
be more humorous than his recitation of these elegant extracts,
except perhaps the anecdotes with which he varied the
entertainment.  Seeing, I suppose, something less countrified in my
appearance than in most of the company, he singled me out to
corroborate some statements as to the depravity and vice of the
aristocracy, and when he went on to describe some gilded saloon
experiences, I am proud to say that he honoured my sagacity with
one little covert wink before a second time appealing to me for
confirmation.  The wink was not thrown away; I went in up to the
elbows with the manager, until I think that some of the glory of
that great man settled by reflection upon me, and that I was as
noticeably the second person in the smoking-room as he was the
first.  For a young man, this was a position of some distinction, I
think you will admit. . . .



CHAPTER III--AN AUTUMN EFFECT--1875



'Nous ne decrivons jamais mieux la nature que lorsque nous nous
efforcons d'exprimer sobrement et simplement l'impression que nous
en avons recue.'--M. ANDRE THEURIET, 'L'Automne dans les Bois,'
Revue des Deux Mondes, 1st Oct. 1874, p.562. {2}


A country rapidly passed through under favourable auspices may
leave upon us a unity of impression that would only be disturbed
and dissipated if we stayed longer.  Clear vision goes with the
quick foot.  Things fall for us into a sort of natural perspective
when we see them for a moment in going by; we generalise boldly and
simply, and are gone before the sun is overcast, before the rain
falls, before the season can steal like a dial-hand from his
figure, before the lights and shadows, shifting round towards
nightfall, can show us the other side of things, and belie what
they showed us in the morning.  We expose our mind to the landscape
(as we would expose the prepared plate in the camera) for the
moment only during which the effect endures; and we are away before
the effect can change.  Hence we shall have in our memories a long
scroll of continuous wayside pictures, all imbued already with the
prevailing sentiment of the season, the weather and the landscape,
and certain to be unified more and more, as time goes on, by the
unconscious processes of thought.  So that we who have only looked
at a country over our shoulder, so to speak, as we went by, will
have a conception of it far more memorable and articulate than a
man who has lived there all his life from a child upwards, and had
his impression of to-day modified by that of to-morrow, and belied
by that of the day after, till at length the stable characteristics
of the country are all blotted out from him behind the confusion of
variable effect.

I begin my little pilgrimage in the most enviable of all humours:
that in which a person, with a sufficiency of money and a knapsack,
turns his back on a town and walks forward into a country of which
he knows only by the vague report of others.  Such an one has not
surrendered his will and contracted for the next hundred miles,
like a man on a railway.  He may change his mind at every finger-
post, and, where ways meet, follow vague preferences freely and go
the low road or the high, choose the shadow or the sun-shine,
suffer himself to be tempted by the lane that turns immediately
into the woods, or the broad road that lies open before him into
the distance, and shows him the far-off spires of some city, or a
range of mountain-tops, or a rim of sea, perhaps, along a low
horizon.  In short, he may gratify his every whim and fancy,
without a pang of reproving conscience, or the least jostle to his
self-respect.  It is true, however, that most men do not possess
the faculty of free action, the priceless gift of being able to
live for the moment only; and as they begin to go forward on their
journey, they will find that they have made for themselves new
fetters.  Slight projects they may have entertained for a moment,
half in jest, become iron laws to them, they know not why.  They
will be led by the nose by these vague reports of which I spoke
above; and the mere fact that their informant mentioned one village
and not another will compel their footsteps with inexplicable
power.  And yet a little while, yet a few days of this fictitious
liberty, and they will begin to hear imperious voices calling on
them to return; and some passion, some duty, some worthy or
unworthy expectation, will set its hand upon their shoulder and
lead them back into the old paths.  Once and again we have all made
the experiment.  We know the end of it right well.  And yet if we
make it for the hundredth time to-morrow:  it will have the same
charm as ever; our heart will beat and our eyes will be bright, as
we leave the town behind us, and we shall feel once again (as we
have felt so often before) that we are cutting ourselves loose for
ever from our whole past life, with all its sins and follies and
circumscriptions, and go forward as a new creature into a new
world.

It was well, perhaps, that I had this first enthusiasm to encourage
me up the long hill above High Wycombe; for the day was a bad day
for walking at best, and now began to draw towards afternoon, dull,
heavy, and lifeless.  A pall of grey cloud covered the sky, and its
colour reacted on the colour of the landscape.  Near at hand,
indeed, the hedgerow trees were still fairly green, shot through
with bright autumnal yellows, bright as sunshine.  But a little way
off, the solid bricks of woodland that lay squarely on slope and
hill-top were not green, but russet and grey, and ever less russet
and more grey as they drew off into the distance.  As they drew off
into the distance, also, the woods seemed to mass themselves
together, and lie thin and straight, like clouds, upon the limit of
one's view.  Not that this massing was complete, or gave the idea
of any extent of forest, for every here and there the trees would
break up and go down into a valley in open order, or stand in long
Indian file along the horizon, tree after tree relieved, foolishly
enough, against the sky.  I say foolishly enough, although I have
seen the effect employed cleverly in art, and such long line of
single trees thrown out against the customary sunset of a Japanese
picture with a certain fantastic effect that was not to be
despised; but this was over water and level land, where it did not
jar, as here, with the soft contour of hills and valleys.  The
whole scene had an indefinable look of being painted, the colour
was so abstract and correct, and there was something so sketchy and
merely impressional about these distant single trees on the horizon
that one was forced to think of it all as of a clever French
landscape.  For it is rather in nature that we see resemblance to
art, than in art to nature; and we say a hundred times, 'How like a
picture!' for once that we say, 'How like the truth!'  The forms in
which we learn to think of landscape are forms that we have got
from painted canvas.  Any man can see and understand a picture; it
is reserved for the few to separate anything out of the confusion
of nature, and see that distinctly and with intelligence.

The sun came out before I had been long on my way; and as I had got
by that time to the top of the ascent, and was now treading a
labyrinth of confined by-roads, my whole view brightened
considerably in colour, for it was the distance only that was grey
and cold, and the distance I could see no longer.  Overhead there
was a wonderful carolling of larks which seemed to follow me as I
went.  Indeed, during all the time I was in that country the larks
did not desert me.  The air was alive with them from High Wycombe
to Tring; and as, day after day, their 'shrill delight' fell upon
me out of the vacant sky, they began to take such a prominence over
other conditions, and form so integral a part of my conception of
the country, that I could have baptized it 'The Country of Larks.'
This, of course, might just as well have been in early spring; but
everything else was deeply imbued with the sentiment of the later
year.  There was no stir of insects in the grass.  The sunshine was
more golden, and gave less heat than summer sunshine; and the
shadows under the hedge were somewhat blue and misty.  It was only
in autumn that you could have seen the mingled green and yellow of
the elm foliage, and the fallen leaves that lay about the road, and
covered the surface of wayside pools so thickly that the sun was
reflected only here and there from little joints and pinholes in
that brown coat of proof; or that your ear would have been
troubled, as you went forward, by the occasional report of fowling-
pieces from all directions and all degrees of distance.

For a long time this dropping fire was the one sign of human
activity that came to disturb me as I walked.  The lanes were
profoundly still.  They would have been sad but for the sunshine
and the singing of the larks.  And as it was, there came over me at
times a feeling of isolation that was not disagreeable, and yet was
enough to make me quicken my steps eagerly when I saw some one
before me on the road.  This fellow-voyager proved to be no less a
person than the parish constable.  It had occurred to me that in a
district which was so little populous and so well wooded, a
criminal of any intelligence might play hide-and-seek with the
authorities for months; and this idea was strengthened by the
aspect of the portly constable as he walked by my side with
deliberate dignity and turned-out toes.  But a few minutes'
converse set my heart at rest.  These rural criminals are very tame
birds, it appeared.  If my informant did not immediately lay his
hand on an offender, he was content to wait; some evening after
nightfall there would come a tap at his door, and the outlaw, weary
of outlawry, would give himself quietly up to undergo sentence, and
resume his position in the life of the country-side.  Married men
caused him no disquietude whatever; he had them fast by the foot.
Sooner or later they would come back to see their wives, a peeping
neighbour would pass the word, and my portly constable would walk
quietly over and take the bird sitting.  And if there were a few
who had no particular ties in the neighbourhood, and preferred to
shift into another county when they fell into trouble, their
departure moved the placid constable in no degree.  He was of
Dogberry's opinion; and if a man would not stand in the Prince's
name, he took no note of him, but let him go, and thanked God he
was rid of a knave.  And surely the crime and the law were in
admirable keeping; rustic constable was well met with rustic
offender.  The officer sitting at home over a bit of fire until the
criminal came to visit him, and the criminal coming--it was a fair
match.  One felt as if this must have been the order in that
delightful seaboard Bohemia where Florizel and Perdita courted in
such sweet accents, and the Puritan sang Psalms to hornpipes, and
the four-and-twenty shearers danced with nosegays in their bosoms,
and chanted their three songs apiece at the old shepherd's
festival; and one could not help picturing to oneself what havoc
among good peoples purses, and tribulation for benignant
constables, might be worked here by the arrival, over stile and
footpath, of a new Autolycus.

Bidding good-morning to my fellow-traveller, I left the road and
struck across country.  It was rather a revelation to pass from
between the hedgerows and find quite a bustle on the other side, a
great coming and going of school-children upon by-paths, and, in
every second field, lusty horses and stout country-folk a-
ploughing.  The way I followed took me through many fields thus
occupied, and through many strips of plantation, and then over a
little space of smooth turf, very pleasant to the feet, set with
tall fir-trees and clamorous with rooks making ready for the
winter, and so back again into the quiet road.  I was now not far
from the end of my day's journey.  A few hundred yards farther,
and, passing through a gap in the hedge, I began to go down hill
through a pretty extensive tract of young beeches.  I was soon in
shadow myself, but the afternoon sun still coloured the upmost
boughs of the wood, and made a fire over my head in the autumnal
foliage.  A little faint vapour lay among the slim tree-stems in
the bottom of the hollow; and from farther up I heard from time to
time an outburst of gross laughter, as though clowns were making
merry in the bush.  There was something about the atmosphere that
brought all sights and sounds home to one with a singular purity,
so that I felt as if my senses had been washed with water.  After I
had crossed the little zone of mist, the path began to remount the
hill; and just as I, mounting along with it, had got back again,
from the head downwards, into the thin golden sunshine, I saw in
front of me a donkey tied to a tree.  Now, I have a certain liking
for donkeys, principally, I believe, because of the delightful
things that Sterne has written of them.  But this was not after the
pattern of the ass at Lyons.  He was of a white colour, that seemed
to fit him rather for rare festal occasions than for constant
drudgery.  Besides, he was very small, and of the daintiest
portions you can imagine in a donkey.  And so, sure enough, you had
only to look at him to see he had never worked.  There was
something too roguish and wanton in his face, a look too like that
of a schoolboy or a street Arab, to have survived much cudgelling.
It was plain that these feet had kicked off sportive children
oftener than they had plodded with a freight through miry lanes.
He was altogether a fine-weather, holiday sort of donkey; and
though he was just then somewhat solemnised and rueful, he still
gave proof of the levity of his disposition by impudently wagging
his ears at me as I drew near.  I say he was somewhat solemnised
just then; for, with the admirable instinct of all men and animals
under restraint, he had so wound and wound the halter about the
tree that he could go neither back nor forwards, nor so much as put
down his head to browse.  There he stood, poor rogue, part puzzled,
part angry, part, I believe, amused.  He had not given up hope, and
dully revolved the problem in his head, giving ever and again
another jerk at the few inches of free rope that still remained
unwound.  A humorous sort of sympathy for the creature took hold
upon me.  I went up, and, not without some trouble on my part, and
much distrust and resistance on the part of Neddy, got him forced
backwards until the whole length of the halter was set loose, and
he was once more as free a donkey as I dared to make him.  I was
pleased (as people are) with this friendly action to a fellow-
creature in tribulation, and glanced back over my shoulder to see
how he was profiting by his freedom.  The brute was looking after
me; and no sooner did he catch my eye than he put up his long white
face into the air, pulled an impudent mouth at me, and began to
bray derisively.  If ever any one person made a grimace at another,
that donkey made a grimace at me.  The hardened ingratitude of his
behaviour, and the impertinence that inspired his whole face as he
curled up his lip, and showed his teeth, and began to bray, so
tickled me, and was so much in keeping with what I had imagined to
myself about his character, that I could not find it in my heart to
be angry, and burst into a peal of hearty laughter.  This seemed to
strike the ass as a repartee, so he brayed at me again by way of
rejoinder; and we went on for a while, braying and laughing, until
I began to grow aweary of it, and, shouting a derisive farewell,
turned to pursue my way.  In so doing--it was like going suddenly
into cold water--I found myself face to face with a prim little old
maid.  She was all in a flutter, the poor old dear!  She had
concluded beyond question that this must be a lunatic who stood
laughing aloud at a white donkey in the placid beech-woods.  I was
sure, by her face, that she had already recommended her spirit most
religiously to Heaven, and prepared herself for the worst.  And so,
to reassure her, I uncovered and besought her, after a very staid
fashion, to put me on my way to Great Missenden.  Her voice
trembled a little, to be sure, but I think her mind was set at
rest; and she told me, very explicitly, to follow the path until I
came to the end of the wood, and then I should see the village
below me in the bottom of the valley.  And, with mutual courtesies,
the little old maid and I went on our respective ways.

Nor had she misled me.  Great Missenden was close at hand, as she
had said, in the trough of a gentle valley, with many great elms
about it.  The smoke from its chimneys went up pleasantly in the
afternoon sunshine.  The sleepy hum of a threshing-machine filled
the neighbouring fields and hung about the quaint street corners.
A little above, the church sits well back on its haunches against
the hillside--an attitude for a church, you know, that makes it
look as if it could be ever so much higher if it liked; and the
trees grew about it thickly, so as to make a density of shade in
the churchyard.  A very quiet place it looks; and yet I saw many
boards and posters about threatening dire punishment against those
who broke the church windows or defaced the precinct, and offering
rewards for the apprehension of those who had done the like
already.  It was fair day in Great Missenden.  There were three
stalls set up, sub jove, for the sale of pastry and cheap toys; and
a great number of holiday children thronged about the stalls and
noisily invaded every corner of the straggling village.  They came
round me by coveys, blowing simultaneously upon penny trumpets as
though they imagined I should fall to pieces like the battlements
of Jericho.  I noticed one among them who could make a wheel of
himself like a London boy, and seemingly enjoyed a grave pre-
eminence upon the strength of the accomplishment.  By and by,
however, the trumpets began to weary me, and I went indoors,
leaving the fair, I fancy, at its height.

Night had fallen before I ventured forth again.  It was pitch-dark
in the village street, and the darkness seemed only the greater for
a light here and there in an uncurtained window or from an open
door.  Into one such window I was rude enough to peep, and saw
within a charming genre picture.  In a room, all white wainscot and
crimson wall-paper, a perfect gem of colour after the black, empty
darkness in which I had been groping, a pretty girl was telling a
story, as well as I could make out, to an attentive child upon her
knee, while an old woman sat placidly dozing over the fire.  You
may be sure I was not behindhand with a story for myself--a good
old story after the manner of G. P. R. James and the village
melodramas, with a wicked squire, and poachers, and an attorney,
and a virtuous young man with a genius for mechanics, who should
love, and protect, and ultimately marry the girl in the crimson
room.  Baudelaire has a few dainty sentences on the fancies that we
are inspired with when we look through a window into other people's
lives; and I think Dickens has somewhere enlarged on the same text.
The subject, at least, is one that I am seldom weary of
entertaining.  I remember, night after night, at Brussels, watching
a good family sup together, make merry, and retire to rest; and
night after night I waited to see the candles lit, and the salad
made, and the last salutations dutifully exchanged, without any
abatement of interest.  Night after night I found the scene rivet
my attention and keep me awake in bed with all manner of quaint
imaginations.  Much of the pleasure of the Arabian Nights hinges
upon this Asmodean interest; and we are not weary of lifting other
people's roofs, and going about behind the scenes of life with the
Caliph and the serviceable Giaffar.  It is a salutary exercise,
besides; it is salutary to get out of ourselves and see people
living together in perfect unconsciousness of our existence, as
they will live when we are gone.  If to-morrow the blow falls, and
the worst of our ill fears is realised, the girl will none the less
tell stories to the child on her lap in the cottage at Great
Missenden, nor the good Belgians light their candle, and mix their
salad, and go orderly to bed.

The next morning was sunny overhead and damp underfoot, with a
thrill in the air like a reminiscence of frost.  I went up into the
sloping garden behind the inn and smoked a pipe pleasantly enough,
to the tune of my landlady's lamentations over sundry cabbages and
cauliflowers that had been spoiled by caterpillars.  She had been
so much pleased in the summer-time, she said, to see the garden all
hovered over by white butterflies.  And now, look at the end of it!
She could nowise reconcile this with her moral sense.  And, indeed,
unless these butterflies are created with a side-look to the
composition of improving apologues, it is not altogether easy, even
for people who have read Hegel and Dr. M'Cosh, to decide
intelligibly upon the issue raised.  Then I fell into a long and
abstruse calculation with my landlord; having for object to compare
the distance driven by him during eight years' service on the box
of the Wendover coach with the girth of the round world itself.  We
tackled the question most conscientiously, made all necessary
allowance for Sundays and leap-years, and were just coming to a
triumphant conclusion of our labours when we were stayed by a small
lacuna in my information.  I did not know the circumference of the
earth.  The landlord knew it, to be sure--plainly he had made the
same calculation twice and once before,--but he wanted confidence
in his own figures, and from the moment I showed myself so poor a
second seemed to lose all interest in the result.

Wendover (which was my next stage) lies in the same valley with
Great Missenden, but at the foot of it, where the hills trend off
on either hand like a coast-line, and a great hemisphere of plain
lies, like a sea, before one, I went up a chalky road, until I had
a good outlook over the place.  The vale, as it opened out into the
plain, was shallow, and a little bare, perhaps, but full of
graceful convolutions.  From the level to which I have now attained
the fields were exposed before me like a map, and I could see all
that bustle of autumn field-work which had been hid from me
yesterday behind the hedgerows, or shown to me only for a moment as
I followed the footpath.  Wendover lay well down in the midst, with
mountains of foliage about it.  The great plain stretched away to
the northward, variegated near at hand with the quaint pattern of
the fields, but growing ever more and more indistinct, until it
became a mere hurly-burly of trees and bright crescents of river,
and snatches of slanting road, and finally melted into the
ambiguous cloud-land over the horizon.  The sky was an opal-grey,
touched here and there with blue, and with certain faint russets
that looked as if they were reflections of the colour of the
autumnal woods below.  I could hear the ploughmen shouting to their
horses, the uninterrupted carol of larks innumerable overhead, and,
from a field where the shepherd was marshalling his flock, a sweet
tumultuous tinkle of sheep-bells.  All these noises came to me very
thin and distinct in the clear air.  There was a wonderful
sentiment of distance and atmosphere about the day and the place.

I mounted the hill yet farther by a rough staircase of chalky
footholds cut in the turf.  The hills about Wendover and, as far as
I could see, all the hills in Buckinghamshire, wear a sort of hood
of beech plantation; but in this particular case the hood had been
suffered to extend itself into something more like a cloak, and
hung down about the shoulders of the hill in wide folds, instead of
lying flatly along the summit.  The trees grew so close, and their
boughs were so matted together, that the whole wood looked as dense
as a bush of heather.  The prevailing colour was a dull,
smouldering red, touched here and there with vivid yellow.  But the
autumn had scarce advanced beyond the outworks; it was still almost
summer in the heart of the wood; and as soon as I had scrambled
through the hedge, I found myself in a dim green forest atmosphere
under eaves of virgin foliage.  In places where the wood had itself
for a background and the trees were massed together thickly, the
colour became intensified and almost gem-like:  a perfect fire
green, that seemed none the less green for a few specks of autumn
gold.  None of the trees were of any considerable age or stature;
but they grew well together, I have said; and as the road turned
and wound among them, they fell into pleasant groupings and broke
the light up pleasantly.  Sometimes there would be a colonnade of
slim, straight tree-stems with the light running down them as down
the shafts of pillars, that looked as if it ought to lead to
something, and led only to a corner of sombre and intricate jungle.
Sometimes a spray of delicate foliage would be thrown out flat, the
light lying flatly along the top of it, so that against a dark
background it seemed almost luminous.  There was a great bush over
the thicket (for, indeed, it was more of a thicket than a wood);
and the vague rumours that went among the tree-tops, and the
occasional rustling of big birds or hares among the undergrowth,
had in them a note of almost treacherous stealthiness, that put the
imagination on its guard and made me walk warily on the russet
carpeting of last year's leaves.  The spirit of the place seemed to
be all attention; the wood listened as I went, and held its breath
to number my footfalls.  One could not help feeling that there
ought to be some reason for this stillness; whether, as the bright
old legend goes, Pan lay somewhere near in siesta, or whether,
perhaps, the heaven was meditating rain, and the first drops would
soon come pattering through the leaves.  It was not unpleasant, in
such an humour, to catch sight, ever and anon, of large spaces of
the open plain.  This happened only where the path lay much upon
the slope, and there was a flaw in the solid leafy thatch of the
wood at some distance below the level at which I chanced myself to
be walking; then, indeed, little scraps of foreshortened distance,
miniature fields, and Lilliputian houses and hedgerow trees would
appear for a moment in the aperture, and grow larger and smaller,
and change and melt one into another, as I continued to go forward,
and so shift my point of view.

For ten minutes, perhaps, I had heard from somewhere before me in
the wood a strange, continuous noise, as of clucking, cooing, and
gobbling, now and again interrupted by a harsh scream.  As I
advanced towards this noise, it began to grow lighter about me, and
I caught sight, through the trees, of sundry gables and enclosure
walls, and something like the tops of a rickyard.  And sure enough,
a rickyard it proved to be, and a neat little farm-steading, with
the beech-woods growing almost to the door of it.  Just before me,
however, as I came upon the path, the trees drew back and let in a
wide flood of daylight on to a circular lawn.  It was here that the
noises had their origin.  More than a score of peacocks (there are
altogether thirty at the farm), a proper contingent of peahens, and
a great multitude that I could not number of more ordinary barn-
door fowls, were all feeding together on this little open lawn
among the beeches.  They fed in a dense crowd, which swayed to and
fro, and came hither and thither as by a sort of tide, and of which
the surface was agitated like the surface of a sea as each bird
guzzled his head along the ground after the scattered corn.  The
clucking, cooing noise that had led me thither was formed by the
blending together of countless expressions of individual
contentment into one collective expression of contentment, or
general grace during meat.  Every now and again a big peacock would
separate himself from the mob and take a stately turn or two about
the lawn, or perhaps mount for a moment upon the rail, and there
shrilly publish to the world his satisfaction with himself and what
he had to eat.  It happened, for my sins, that none of these
admirable birds had anything beyond the merest rudiment of a tail.
Tails, it seemed, were out of season just then.  But they had their
necks for all that; and by their necks alone they do as much
surpass all the other birds of our grey climate as they fall in
quality of song below the blackbird or the lark.  Surely the
peacock, with its incomparable parade of glorious colour and the
scannel voice of it issuing forth, as in mockery, from its painted
throat, must, like my landlady's butterflies at Great Missenden,
have been invented by some skilful fabulist for the consolation and
support of homely virtue:  or rather, perhaps, by a fabulist not
quite so skilful, who made points for the moment without having a
studious enough eye to the complete effect; for I thought these
melting greens and blues so beautiful that afternoon, that I would
have given them my vote just then before the sweetest pipe in all
the spring woods.  For indeed there is no piece of colour of the
same extent in nature, that will so flatter and satisfy the lust of
a man's eyes; and to come upon so many of them, after these acres
of stone-coloured heavens and russet woods, and grey-brown
ploughlands and white roads, was like going three whole days'
journey to the southward, or a month back into the summer.

I was sorry to leave Peacock Farm--for so the place is called,
after the name of its splendid pensioners--and go forwards again in
the quiet woods.  It began to grow both damp and dusk under the
beeches; and as the day declined the colour faded out of the
foliage; and shadow, without form and void, took the place of all
the fine tracery of leaves and delicate gradations of living green
that had before accompanied my walk.  I had been sorry to leave
Peacock Farm, but I was not sorry to find myself once more in the
open road, under a pale and somewhat troubled-looking evening sky,
and put my best foot foremost for the inn at Wendover.

Wendover, in itself, is a straggling, purposeless sort of place.
Everybody seems to have had his own opinion as to how the street
should go; or rather, every now and then a man seems to have arisen
with a new idea on the subject, and led away a little sect of
neighbours to join in his heresy.  It would have somewhat the look
of an abortive watering-place, such as we may now see them here and
there along the coast, but for the age of the houses, the comely
quiet design of some of them, and the look of long habitation, of a
life that is settled and rooted, and makes it worth while to train
flowers about the windows, and otherwise shape the dwelling to the
humour of the inhabitant.  The church, which might perhaps have
served as rallying-point for these loose houses, and pulled the
township into something like intelligible unity, stands some
distance off among great trees; but the inn (to take the public
buildings in order of importance) is in what I understand to be the
principal street:  a pleasant old house, with bay-windows, and
three peaked gables, and many swallows' nests plastered about the
eaves.

The interior of the inn was answerable to the outside:  indeed, I
never saw any room much more to be admired than the low wainscoted
parlour in which I spent the remainder of the evening.  It was a
short oblong in shape, save that the fireplace was built across one
of the angles so as to cut it partially off, and the opposite angle
was similarly truncated by a corner cupboard.  The wainscot was
white, and there was a Turkey carpet on the floor, so old that it
might have been imported by Walter Shandy before he retired, worn
almost through in some places, but in others making a good show of
blues and oranges, none the less harmonious for being somewhat
faded.  The corner cupboard was agreeable in design; and there were
just the right things upon the shelves--decanters and tumblers, and
blue plates, and one red rose in a glass of water.  The furniture
was old-fashioned and stiff.  Everything was in keeping, down to
the ponderous leaden inkstand on the round table.  And you may
fancy how pleasant it looked, all flushed and flickered over by the
light of a brisk companionable fire, and seen, in a strange, tilted
sort of perspective, in the three compartments of the old mirror
above the chimney.  As I sat reading in the great armchair, I kept
looking round with the tail of my eye at the quaint, bright picture
that was about me, and could not help some pleasure and a certain
childish pride in forming part of it.  The book I read was about
Italy in the early Renaissance, the pageantries and the light loves
of princes, the passion of men for learning, and poetry, and art;
but it was written, by good luck, after a solid, prosaic fashion,
that suited the room infinitely more nearly than the matter; and
the result was that I thought less, perhaps, of Lippo Lippi, or
Lorenzo, or Politian, than of the good Englishman who had written
in that volume what he knew of them, and taken so much pleasure in
his solemn polysyllables.

I was not left without society.  My landlord had a very pretty
little daughter, whom we shall call Lizzie.  If I had made any
notes at the time, I might be able to tell you something definite
of her appearance.  But faces have a trick of growing more and more
spiritualised and abstract in the memory, until nothing remains of
them but a look, a haunting expression; just that secret quality in
a face that is apt to slip out somehow under the cunningest
painter's touch, and leave the portrait dead for the lack of it.
And if it is hard to catch with the finest of camel's-hair pencils,
you may think how hopeless it must be to pursue after it with
clumsy words.  If I say, for instance, that this look, which I
remember as Lizzie, was something wistful that seemed partly to
come of slyness and in part of simplicity, and that I am inclined
to imagine it had something to do with the daintiest suspicion of a
cast in one of her large eyes, I shall have said all that I can,
and the reader will not be much advanced towards comprehension.  I
had struck up an acquaintance with this little damsel in the
morning, and professed much interest in her dolls, and an impatient
desire to see the large one which was kept locked away for great
occasions.  And so I had not been very long in the parlour before
the door opened, and in came Miss Lizzie with two dolls tucked
clumsily under her arm.  She was followed by her brother John, a
year or so younger than herself, not simply to play propriety at
our interview, but to show his own two whips in emulation of his
sister's dolls.  I did my best to make myself agreeable to my
visitors, showing much admiration for the dolls and dolls' dresses,
and, with a very serious demeanour, asking many questions about
their age and character.  I do not think that Lizzie distrusted my
sincerity, but it was evident that she was both bewildered and a
little contemptuous.  Although she was ready herself to treat her
dolls as if they were alive, she seemed to think rather poorly of
any grown person who could fall heartily into the spirit of the
fiction.  Sometimes she would look at me with gravity and a sort of
disquietude, as though she really feared I must be out of my wits.
Sometimes, as when I inquired too particularly into the question of
their names, she laughed at me so long and heartily that I began to
feel almost embarrassed.  But when, in an evil moment, I asked to
be allowed to kiss one of them, she could keep herself no longer to
herself.  Clambering down from the chair on which she sat perched
to show me, Cornelia-like, her jewels, she ran straight out of the
room and into the bar--it was just across the passage,--and I could
hear her telling her mother in loud tones, but apparently more in
sorrow than in merriment, that THE GENTLEMAN IN THE PARLOUR WANTED
TO KISS DOLLY.  I fancy she was determined to save me from this
humiliating action, even in spite of myself, for she never gave me
the desired permission.  She reminded me of an old dog I once knew,
who would never suffer the master of the house to dance, out of an
exaggerated sense of the dignity of that master's place and
carriage.

After the young people were gone there was but one more incident
ere I went to bed.  I heard a party of children go up and down the
dark street for a while, singing together sweetly.  And the mystery
of this little incident was so pleasant to me that I purposely
refrained from asking who they were, and wherefore they went
singing at so late an hour.  One can rarely be in a pleasant place
without meeting with some pleasant accident.  I have a conviction
that these children would not have gone singing before the inn
unless the inn-parlour had been the delightful place it was.  At
least, if I had been in the customary public room of the modern
hotel, with all its disproportions and discomforts, my ears would
have been dull, and there would have been some ugly temper or other
uppermost in my spirit, and so they would have wasted their songs
upon an unworthy hearer.

Next morning I went along to visit the church.  It is a long-backed
red-and-white building, very much restored, and stands in a
pleasant graveyard among those great trees of which I have spoken
already.  The sky was drowned in a mist.  Now and again pulses of
cold wind went about the enclosure, and set the branches busy
overhead, and the dead leaves scurrying into the angles of the
church buttresses.  Now and again, also, I could hear the dull
sudden fall of a chestnut among the grass--the dog would bark
before the rectory door--or there would come a clinking of pails
from the stable-yard behind.  But in spite of these occasional
interruptions--in spite, also, of the continuous autumn twittering
that filled the trees--the chief impression somehow was one as of
utter silence, insomuch that the little greenish bell that peeped
out of a window in the tower disquieted me with a sense of some
possible and more inharmonious disturbance.  The grass was wet, as
if with a hoar frost that had just been melted.  I do not know that
ever I saw a morning more autumnal.  As I went to and fro among the
graves, I saw some flowers set reverently before a recently erected
tomb, and drawing near, was almost startled to find they lay on the
grave a man seventy-two years old when he died.  We are accustomed
to strew flowers only over the young, where love has been cut short
untimely, and great possibilities have been restrained by death.
We strew them there in token, that these possibilities, in some
deeper sense, shall yet be realised, and the touch of our dead
loves remain with us and guide us to the end.  And yet there was
more significance, perhaps, and perhaps a greater consolation, in
this little nosegay on the grave of one who had died old.  We are
apt to make so much of the tragedy of death, and think so little of
the enduring tragedy of some men's lives, that we see more to
lament for in a life cut off in the midst of usefulness and love,
than in one that miserably survives all love and usefulness, and
goes about the world the phantom of itself, without hope, or joy,
or any consolation.  These flowers seemed not so much the token of
love that survived death, as of something yet more beautiful--of
love that had lived a man's life out to an end with him, and been
faithful and companionable, and not weary of loving, throughout all
these years.

The morning cleared a little, and the sky was once more the old
stone-coloured vault over the sallow meadows and the russet woods,
as I set forth on a dog-cart from Wendover to Tring.  The road lay
for a good distance along the side of the hills, with the great
plain below on one hand, and the beech-woods above on the other.
The fields were busy with people ploughing and sowing; every here
and there a jug of ale stood in the angle of the hedge, and I could
see many a team wait smoking in the furrow as ploughman or sower
stepped aside for a moment to take a draught.  Over all the brown
ploughlands, and under all the leafless hedgerows, there was a
stout piece of labour abroad, and, as it were, a spirit of picnic.
The horses smoked and the men laboured and shouted and drank in the
sharp autumn morning; so that one had a strong effect of large,
open-air existence.  The fellow who drove me was something of a
humourist; and his conversation was all in praise of an
agricultural labourer's way of life.  It was he who called my
attention to these jugs of ale by the hedgerow; he could not
sufficiently express the liberality of these men's wages; he told
me how sharp an appetite was given by breaking up the earth in the
morning air, whether with plough or spade, and cordially admired
this provision of nature.  He sang O fortunatos agricolas! indeed,
in every possible key, and with many cunning inflections, till I
began to wonder what was the use of such people as Mr. Arch, and to
sing the same air myself in a more diffident manner.

Tring was reached, and then Tring railway-station; for the two are
not very near, the good people of Tring having held the railway, of
old days, in extreme apprehension, lest some day it should break
loose in the town and work mischief.  I had a last walk, among
russet beeches as usual, and the air filled, as usual, with the
carolling of larks; I heard shots fired in the distance, and saw,
as a new sign of the fulfilled autumn, two horsemen exercising a
pack of fox-hounds.  And then the train came and carried me back to
London.



CHAPTER IV--A WINTER'S WALK IN CARRICK AND GALLOWAY--A FRAGMENT--
1876



At the famous bridge of Doon, Kyle, the central district of the
shire of Ayr, marches with Carrick, the most southerly.  On the
Carrick side of the river rises a hill of somewhat gentle
conformation, cleft with shallow dells, and sown here and there
with farms and tufts of wood.  Inland, it loses itself, joining, I
suppose, the great herd of similar hills that occupies the centre
of the Lowlands.  Towards the sea it swells out the coast-line into
a protuberance, like a bay-window in a plan, and is fortified
against the surf behind bold crags.  This hill is known as the
Brown Hill of Carrick, or, more shortly, Brown Carrick.

It had snowed overnight.  The fields were all sheeted up; they were
tucked in among the snow, and their shape was modelled through the
pliant counterpane, like children tucked in by a fond mother.  The
wind had made ripples and folds upon the surface, like what the
sea, in quiet weather, leaves upon the sand.  There was a frosty
stifle in the air.  An effusion of coppery light on the summit of
Brown Carrick showed where the sun was trying to look through; but
along the horizon clouds of cold fog had settled down, so that
there was no distinction of sky and sea.  Over the white shoulders
of the headlands, or in the opening of bays, there was nothing but
a great vacancy and blackness; and the road as it drew near the
edge of the cliff seemed to skirt the shores of creation and void
space.

The snow crunched under foot, and at farms all the dogs broke out
barking as they smelt a passer-by upon the road.  I met a fine old
fellow, who might have sat as the father in 'The Cottar's Saturday
Night,' and who swore most heathenishly at a cow he was driving.
And a little after I scraped acquaintance with a poor body tramping
out to gather cockles.  His face was wrinkled by exposure; it was
broken up into flakes and channels, like mud beginning to dry, and
weathered in two colours, an incongruous pink and grey.  He had a
faint air of being surprised--which, God knows, he might well be--
that life had gone so ill with him.  The shape of his trousers was
in itself a jest, so strangely were they bagged and ravelled about
his knees; and his coat was all bedaubed with clay as tough he had
lain in a rain-dub during the New Year's festivity.  I will own I
was not sorry to think he had had a merry New Year, and been young
again for an evening; but I was sorry to see the mark still there.
One could not expect such an old gentleman to be much of a dandy or
a great student of respectability in dress; but there might have
been a wife at home, who had brushed out similar stains after fifty
New Years, now become old, or a round-armed daughter, who would
wish to have him neat, were it only out of self-respect and for the
ploughman sweetheart when he looks round at night.  Plainly, there
was nothing of this in his life, and years and loneliness hung
heavily on his old arms.  He was seventy-six, he told me; and
nobody would give a day's work to a man that age:  they would think
he couldn't do it.  'And, 'deed,' he went on, with a sad little
chuckle, ''deed, I doubt if I could.'  He said goodbye to me at a
footpath, and crippled wearily off to his work.  It will make your
heart ache if you think of his old fingers groping in the snow.

He told me I was to turn down beside the school-house for Dunure.
And so, when I found a lone house among the snow, and heard a
babble of childish voices from within, I struck off into a steep
road leading downwards to the sea.  Dunure lies close under the
steep hill:  a haven among the rocks, a breakwater in consummate
disrepair, much apparatus for drying nets, and a score or so of
fishers' houses.  Hard by, a few shards of ruined castle overhang
the sea, a few vaults, and one tall gable honeycombed with windows.
The snow lay on the beach to the tidemark.  It was daubed on to the
sills of the ruin:  it roosted in the crannies of the rock like
white sea-birds; even on outlying reefs there would be a little
cock of snow, like a toy lighthouse.  Everything was grey and white
in a cold and dolorous sort of shepherd's plaid.  In the profound
silence, broken only by the noise of oars at sea, a horn was
sounded twice; and I saw the postman, girt with two bags, pause a
moment at the end of the clachan for letters.

It is, perhaps, characteristic of Dunure that none were brought
him.

The people at the public-house did not seem well pleased to see me,
and though I would fain have stayed by the kitchen fire, sent me
'ben the hoose' into the guest-room.  This guest-room at Dunure was
painted in quite aesthetic fashion.  There are rooms in the same
taste not a hundred miles from London, where persons of an extreme
sensibility meet together without embarrassment.  It was all in a
fine dull bottle-green and black; a grave harmonious piece of
colouring, with nothing, so far as coarser folk can judge, to hurt
the better feelings of the most exquisite purist.  A cherry-red
half window-blind kept up an imaginary warmth in the cold room, and
threw quite a glow on the floor.  Twelve cockle-shells and a half-
penny china figure were ranged solemnly along the mantel-shelf.
Even the spittoon was an original note, and instead of sawdust
contained sea-shells.  And as for the hearthrug, it would merit an
article to itself, and a coloured diagram to help the text.  It was
patchwork, but the patchwork of the poor; no glowing shreds of old
brocade and Chinese silk, shaken together in the kaleidoscope of
some tasteful housewife's fancy; but a work of art in its own way,
and plainly a labour of love.  The patches came exclusively from
people's raiment.  There was no colour more brilliant than a
heather mixture; 'My Johnny's grey breeks,' well polished over the
oar on the boat's thwart, entered largely into its composition.
And the spoils of an old black cloth coat, that had been many a
Sunday to church, added something (save the mark!) of preciousness
to the material.

While I was at luncheon four carters came in--long-limbed, muscular
Ayrshire Scots, with lean, intelligent faces.  Four quarts of stout
were ordered; they kept filling the tumbler with the other hand as
they drank; and in less time than it takes me to write these words
the four quarts were finished--another round was proposed,
discussed, and negatived--and they were creaking out of the village
with their carts.

The ruins drew you towards them.  You never saw any place more
desolate from a distance, nor one that less belied its promise near
at hand.  Some crows and gulls flew away croaking as I scrambled
in.  The snow had drifted into the vaults.  The clachan dabbled
with snow, the white hills, the black sky, the sea marked in the
coves with faint circular wrinkles, the whole world, as it looked
from a loop-hole in Dunure, was cold, wretched, and out-at-elbows.
If you had been a wicked baron and compelled to stay there all the
afternoon, you would have had a rare fit of remorse.  How you would
have heaped up the fire and gnawed your fingers!  I think it would
have come to homicide before the evening--if it were only for the
pleasure of seeing something red!  And the masters of Dunure, it is
to be noticed, were remarkable of old for inhumanity.  One of these
vaults where the snow had drifted was that 'black route' where 'Mr.
Alane Stewart, Commendatour of Crossraguel,' endured his fiery
trials.  On the 1st and 7th of September 1570 (ill dates for Mr.
Alan!), Gilbert, Earl of Cassilis, his chaplain, his baker, his
cook, his pantryman, and another servant, bound the Poor
Commendator 'betwix an iron chimlay and a fire,' and there cruelly
roasted him until he signed away his abbacy. it is one of the
ugliest stories of an ugly period, but not, somehow, without such a
flavour of the ridiculous as makes it hard to sympathise quite
seriously with the victim.  And it is consoling to remember that he
got away at last, and kept his abbacy, and, over and above, had a
pension from the Earl until he died.

Some way beyond Dunure a wide bay, of somewhat less unkindly
aspect, opened out.  Colzean plantations lay all along the steep
shore, and there was a wooded hill towards the centre, where the
trees made a sort of shadowy etching over the snow.  The road went
down and up, and past a blacksmith's cottage that made fine music
in the valley.  Three compatriots of Burns drove up to me in a
cart.  They were all drunk, and asked me jeeringly if this was the
way to Dunure.  I told them it was; and my answer was received with
unfeigned merriment.  One gentleman was so much tickled he nearly
fell out of the cart; indeed, he was only saved by a companion, who
either had not so fine a sense of humour or had drunken less.

'The toune of Mayboll,' says the inimitable Abercrummie, {3}
'stands upon an ascending ground from east to west, and lyes open
to the south.  It hath one principals street, with houses upon both
sides, built of freestone; and it is beautifyed with the situation
of two castles, one at each end of this street.  That on the east
belongs to the Erle of Cassilis.  On the west end is a castle,
which belonged sometime to the laird of Blairquan, which is now the
tolbuith, and is adorned with a pyremide [conical roof], and a row
of ballesters round it raised from the top of the staircase, into
which they have mounted a fyne clock.  There be four lanes which
pass from the principall street; one is called the Black Vennel,
which is steep, declining to the south-west, and leads to a lower
street, which is far larger than the high chiefe street, and it
runs from the Kirkland to the Well Trees, in which there have been
many pretty buildings, belonging to the severall gentry of the
countrey, who were wont to resort thither in winter, and divert
themselves in converse together at their owne houses.  It was once
the principall street of the town; but many of these houses of the
gentry having been decayed and ruined, it has lost much of its
ancient beautie.  Just opposite to this vennel, there is another
that leads north-west, from the chiefe street to the green, which
is a pleasant plott of ground, enclosed round with an earthen wall,
wherein they were wont to play football, but now at the Gowff and
byasse-bowls.  The houses of this towne, on both sides of the
street, have their several gardens belonging to them; and in the
lower street there be some pretty orchards, that yield store of
good fruit.'  As Patterson says, this description is near enough
even to-day, and is mighty nicely written to boot.  I am bound to
add, of my own experience, that Maybole is tumbledown and dreary.
Prosperous enough in reality, it has an air of decay; and though
the population has increased, a roofless house every here and there
seems to protest the contrary.  The women are more than well-
favoured, and the men fine tall fellows; but they look slipshod and
dissipated.  As they slouched at street corners, or stood about
gossiping in the snow, it seemed they would have been more at home
in the slums of a large city than here in a country place betwixt a
village and a town.  I heard a great deal about drinking, and a
great deal about religious revivals:  two things in which the
Scottish character is emphatic and most unlovely.  In particular, I
heard of clergymen who were employing their time in explaining to a
delighted audience the physics of the Second Coming.  It is not
very likely any of us will be asked to help. if we were, it is
likely we should receive instructions for the occasion, and that on
more reliable authority.  And so I can only figure to myself a
congregation truly curious in such flights of theological fancy, as
one of veteran and accomplished saints, who have fought the good
fight to an end and outlived all worldly passion, and are to be
regarded rather as a part of the Church Triumphant than the poor,
imperfect company on earth.  And yet I saw some young fellows about
the smoking-room who seemed, in the eyes of one who cannot count
himself strait-laced, in need of some more practical sort of
teaching.  They seemed only eager to get drunk, and to do so
speedily.  It was not much more than a week after the New Year; and
to hear them return on their past bouts with a gusto unspeakable
was not altogether pleasing.  Here is one snatch of talk, for the
accuracy of which I can vouch-

'Ye had a spree here last Tuesday?'

'We had that!'

'I wasna able to be oot o' my bed.  Man, I was awful bad on
Wednesday.'

'Ay, ye were gey bad.'

And you should have seen the bright eyes, and heard the sensual
accents!  They recalled their doings with devout gusto and a sort
of rational pride.  Schoolboys, after their first drunkenness, are
not more boastful; a cock does not plume himself with a more
unmingled satisfaction as he paces forth among his harem; and yet
these were grown men, and by no means short of wit.  It was hard to
suppose they were very eager about the Second Coming:  it seemed as
if some elementary notions of temperance for the men and seemliness
for the women would have gone nearer the mark.  And yet, as it
seemed to me typical of much that is evil in Scotland, Maybole is
also typical of much that is best.  Some of the factories, which
have taken the place of weaving in the town's economy, were
originally founded and are still possessed by self-made men of the
sterling, stout old breed--fellows who made some little bit of an
invention, borrowed some little pocketful of capital, and then,
step by step, in courage, thrift and industry, fought their way
upwards to an assured position.

Abercrummie has told you enough of the Tolbooth; but, as a bit of
spelling, this inscription on the Tolbooth bell seems too delicious
to withhold:  'This bell is founded at Maiboll Bi Danel Geli, a
Frenchman, the 6th November, 1696, Bi appointment of the heritors
of the parish of Maiyboll.'  The Castle deserves more notice.  It
is a large and shapely tower, plain from the ground upwards, but
with a zone of ornamentation running about the top.  In a general
way this adornment is perched on the very summit of the chimney-
stacks; but there is one corner more elaborate than the rest.  A
very heavy string-course runs round the upper story, and just above
this, facing up the street, the tower carries a small oriel window,
fluted and corbelled and carved about with stone heads.  It is so
ornate it has somewhat the air of a shrine.  And it was, indeed,
the casket of a very precious jewel, for in the room to which it
gives light lay, for long years, the heroine of the sweet old
ballad of 'Johnnie Faa'--she who, at the call of the gipsies'
songs, 'came tripping down the stair, and all her maids before
her.'  Some people say the ballad has no basis in fact, and have
written, I believe, unanswerable papers to the proof.  But in the
face of all that, the very look of that high oriel window convinces
the imagination, and we enter into all the sorrows of the
imprisoned dame.  We conceive the burthen of the long, lack-lustre
days, when she leaned her sick head against the mullions, and saw
the burghers loafing in Maybole High Street, and the children at
play, and ruffling gallants riding by from hunt or foray.  We
conceive the passion of odd moments, when the wind threw up to her
some snatch of song, and her heart grew hot within her, and her
eyes overflowed at the memory of the past.  And even if the tale be
not true of this or that lady, or this or that old tower, it is
true in the essence of all men and women:  for all of us, some time
or other, hear the gipsies singing; over all of us is the glamour
cast.  Some resist and sit resolutely by the fire.  Most go and are
brought back again, like Lady Cassilis.  A few, of the tribe of
Waring, go and are seen no more; only now and again, at springtime,
when the gipsies' song is afloat in the amethyst evening, we can
catch their voices in the glee.

By night it was clearer, and Maybole more visible than during the
day.  Clouds coursed over the sky in great masses; the full moon
battled the other way, and lit up the snow with gleams of flying
silver; the town came down the hill in a cascade of brown gables,
bestridden by smooth white roofs, and sprangled here and there with
lighted windows.  At either end the snow stood high up in the
darkness, on the peak of the Tolbooth and among the chimneys of the
Castle.  As the moon flashed a bull's-eye glitter across the town
between the racing clouds, the white roofs leaped into relief over
the gables and the chimney-stacks, and their shadows over the white
roofs.  In the town itself the lit face of the clock peered down
the street; an hour was hammered out on Mr. Geli's bell, and from
behind the red curtains of a public-house some one trolled out--a
compatriot of Burns, again!--'The saut tear blin's my e'e.'

Next morning there was sun and a flapping wind.  From the street
corners of Maybole I could catch breezy glimpses of green fields.
The road underfoot was wet and heavy--part ice, part snow, part
water, and any one I met greeted me, by way of salutation, with 'A
fine thowe' (thaw).  My way lay among rather bleak bills, and past
bleak ponds and dilapidated castles and monasteries, to the
Highland-looking village of Kirkoswald.  It has little claim to
notice, save that Burns came there to study surveying in the summer
of 1777, and there also, in the kirkyard, the original of Tam o'
Shanter sleeps his last sleep.  It is worth noticing, however, that
this was the first place I thought 'Highland-looking.'  Over the
bill from Kirkoswald a farm-road leads to the coast.  As I came
down above Turnberry, the sea view was indeed strangely different
from the day before.  The cold fogs were all blown away; and there
was Ailsa Craig, like a refraction, magnified and deformed, of the
Bass Rock; and there were the chiselled mountain-tops of Arran,
veined and tipped with snow; and behind, and fainter, the low, blue
land of Cantyre.  Cottony clouds stood in a great castle over the
top of Arran, and blew out in long streamers to the south.  The sea
was bitten all over with white; little ships, tacking up and down
the Firth, lay over at different angles in the wind.  On Shanter
they were ploughing lea; a cart foal, all in a field by himself,
capered and whinnied as if the spring were in him.

The road from Turnberry to Girvan lies along the shore, among sand-
hills and by wildernesses of tumbled bent.  Every here and there a
few cottages stood together beside a bridge.  They had one odd
feature, not easy to describe in words:  a triangular porch
projected from above the door, supported at the apex by a single
upright post; a secondary door was hinged to the post, and could be
hasped on either cheek of the real entrance; so, whether the wind
was north or south, the cotter could make himself a triangular
bight of shelter where to set his chair and finish a pipe with
comfort.  There is one objection to this device; for, as the post
stands in the middle of the fairway, any one precipitately issuing
from the cottage must run his chance of a broken head.  So far as I
am aware, it is peculiar to the little corner of country about
Girvan.  And that corner is noticeable for more reasons:  it is
certainly one of the most characteristic districts in Scotland, It
has this movable porch by way of architecture; it has, as we shall
see, a sort of remnant of provincial costume, and it has the
handsomest population in the Lowlands. . . .



CHAPTER V--FOREST NOTES 1875-6



ON THE PLAIN


Perhaps the reader knows already the aspect of the great levels of
the Gatinais, where they border with the wooded hills of
Fontainebleau.  Here and there a few grey rocks creep out of the
forest as if to sun themselves.  Here and there a few apple-trees
stand together on a knoll.  The quaint, undignified tartan of a
myriad small fields dies out into the distance; the strips blend
and disappear; and the dead flat lies forth open and empty, with no
accident save perhaps a thin line of trees or faint church spire
against the sky.  Solemn and vast at all times, in spite of
pettiness in the near details, the impression becomes more solemn
and vast towards evening.  The sun goes down, a swollen orange, as
it were into the sea.  A blue-clad peasant rides home, with a
harrow smoking behind him among the dry clods.  Another still works
with his wife in their little strip.  An immense shadow fills the
plain; these people stand in it up to their shoulders; and their
heads, as they stoop over their work and rise again, are relieved
from time to time against the golden sky.

These peasant farmers are well off nowadays, and not by any means
overworked; but somehow you always see in them the historical
representative of the serf of yore, and think not so much of
present times, which may be prosperous enough, as of the old days
when the peasant was taxed beyond possibility of payment, and
lived, in Michelet's image, like a hare between two furrows.  These
very people now weeding their patch under the broad sunset, that
very man and his wife, it seems to us, have suffered all the wrongs
of France.  It is they who have been their country's scapegoat for
long ages; they who, generation after generation, have sowed and
not reaped, reaped and another has garnered; and who have now
entered into their reward, and enjoy their good things in their
turn.  For the days are gone by when the Seigneur ruled and
profited.  'Le Seigneur,' says the old formula, 'enferme ses
manants comme sous porte et gonds, du ciel a la terre.  Tout est a
lui, foret chenue, oiseau dans l'air, poisson dans l'eau, bete an
buisson, l'onde qui coule, la cloche dont le son au loin roule.'
Such was his old state of sovereignty, a local god rather than a
mere king.  And now you may ask yourself where he is, and look
round for vestiges of my late lord, and in all the country-side
there is no trace of him but his forlorn and fallen mansion.  At
the end of a long avenue, now sown with grain, in the midst of a
close full of cypresses and lilacs, ducks and crowing chanticleers
and droning bees, the old chateau lifts its red chimneys and peaked
roofs and turning vanes into the wind and sun.  There is a glad
spring bustle in the air, perhaps, and the lilacs are all in
flower, and the creepers green about the broken balustrade:  but no
spring shall revive the honour of the place.  Old women of the
people, little, children of the people, saunter and gambol in the
walled court or feed the ducks in the neglected moat.  Plough-
horses, mighty of limb, browse in the long stables.  The dial-hand
on the clock waits for some better hour.  Out on the plain, where
hot sweat trickles into men's eyes, and the spade goes in deep and
comes up slowly, perhaps the peasant may feel a movement of joy at
his heart when he thinks that these spacious chimneys are now cold,
which have so often blazed and flickered upon gay folk at supper,
while he and his hollow-eyed children watched through the night
with empty bellies and cold feet.  And perhaps, as he raises his
head and sees the forest lying like a coast-line of low hills along
the sea-level of the plain, perhaps forest and chateau hold no
unsimilar place in his affections.

If the chateau was my lord's, the forest was my lord the king's;
neither of them for this poor Jacques.  If he thought to eke out
his meagre way of life by some petty theft of wood for the fire, or
for a new roof-tree, he found himself face to face with a whole
department, from the Grand Master of the Woods and Waters, who was
a high-born lord, down to the common sergeant, who was a peasant
like himself, and wore stripes or a bandoleer by way of uniform.
For the first offence, by the Salic law, there was a fine of
fifteen sols; and should a man be taken more than once in fault, or
circumstances aggravate the colour of his guilt, he might be
whipped, branded, or hanged.  There was a hangman over at Melun,
and, I doubt not, a fine tall gibbet hard by the town gate, where
Jacques might see his fellows dangle against the sky as he went to
market.

And then, if he lived near to a cover, there would be the more
hares and rabbits to eat out his harvest, and the more hunters to
trample it down.  My lord has a new horn from England.  He has laid
out seven francs in decorating it with silver and gold, and fitting
it with a silken leash to hang about his shoulder.  The hounds have
been on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Mesmer, or Saint Hubert
in the Ardennes, or some other holy intercessor who has made a
speciality of the health of hunting-dogs.  In the grey dawn the
game was turned and the branch broken by our best piqueur.  A rare
day's hunting lies before us.  Wind a jolly flourish, sound the
bien-aller with all your lungs.  Jacques must stand by, hat in
hand, while the quarry and hound and huntsman sweep across his
field, and a year's sparing and labouring is as though it had not
been.  If he can see the ruin with a good enough grace, who knows
but he may fall in favour with my lord; who knows but his son may
become the last and least among the servants at his lordship's
kennel--one of the two poor varlets who get no wages and sleep at
night among the hounds? {4}

For all that, the forest has been of use to Jacques, not only
warming him with fallen wood, but giving him shelter in days of
sore trouble, when my lord of the chateau, with all his troopers
and trumpets, had been beaten from field after field into some
ultimate fastness, or lay over-seas in an English prison.  In these
dark days, when the watch on the church steeple saw the smoke of
burning villages on the sky-line, or a clump of spears and
fluttering pensions drawing nigh across the plain, these good folk
gat them up, with all their household gods, into the wood, whence,
from some high spur, their timid scouts might overlook the coming
and going of the marauders, and see the harvest ridden down, and
church and cottage go up to heaven all night in flame.  It was but
an unhomely refuge that the woods afforded, where they must abide
all change of weather and keep house with wolves and vipers.  Often
there was none left alive, when they returned, to show the old
divisions of field from field.  And yet, as times went, when the
wolves entered at night into depopulated Paris, and perhaps De Retz
was passing by with a company of demons like himself, even in these
caves and thickets there were glad hearts and grateful prayers.

Once or twice, as I say, in the course of the ages, the forest may
have served the peasant well, but at heart it is a royal forest,
and noble by old associations.  These woods have rung to the horns
of all the kings of France, from Philip Augustus downwards.  They
have seen Saint Louis exercise the dogs he brought with him from
Egypt; Francis I. go a-hunting with ten thousand horses in his
train; and Peter of Russia following his first stag.  And so they
are still haunted for the imagination by royal hunts and
progresses, and peopled with the faces of memorable men of yore.
And this distinction is not only in virtue of the pastime of dead
monarchs.

Great events, great revolutions, great cycles in the affairs of
men, have here left their note, here taken shape in some
significant and dramatic situation.  It was hence that Gruise and
his leaguers led Charles the Ninth a prisoner to Paris.  Here,
booted and spurred, and with all his dogs about him, Napoleon met
the Pope beside a woodland cross.  Here, on his way to Elba not so
long after, he kissed the eagle of the Old Guard, and spoke words
of passionate farewell to his soldiers.  And here, after Waterloo,
rather than yield its ensign to the new power, one of his faithful
regiments burned that memorial of so much toil and glory on the
Grand Master's table, and drank its dust in brandy, as a devout
priest consumes the remnants of the Host.


IN THE SEASON


Close into the edge of the forest, so close that the trees of the
bornage stand pleasantly about the last houses, sits a certain
small and very quiet village.  There is but one street, and that,
not long ago, was a green lane, where the cattle browsed between
the doorsteps.  As you go up this street, drawing ever nearer the
beginning of the wood, you will arrive at last before an inn where
artists lodge.  To the door (for I imagine it to be six o'clock on
some fine summer's even), half a dozen, or maybe half a score, of
people have brought out chairs, and now sit sunning themselves, and
waiting the omnibus from Melun.  If you go on into the court you
will find as many more, some in billiard-room over absinthe and a
match of corks some without over a last cigar and a vermouth.  The
doves coo and flutter from the dovecot; Hortense is drawing water
from the well; and as all the rooms open into the court, you can
see the white-capped cook over the furnace in the kitchen, and some
idle painter, who has stored his canvases and washed his brushes,
jangling a waltz on the crazy, tongue-tied piano in the salle-a-
manger.  'Edmond, encore un vermouth,' cries a man in velveteen,
adding in a tone of apologetic afterthought, 'un double, s'il vous
plait.'  'Where are you working?' asks one in pure white linen from
top to toe.  'At the Carrefour de l'Epine,' returns the other in
corduroy (they are all gaitered, by the way).  'I couldn't do a
thing to it.  I ran out of white.  Where were you?'  'I wasn't
working.  I was looking for motives.'  Here is an outbreak of
jubilation, and a lot of men clustering together about some new-
comer with outstretched hands; perhaps the 'correspondence' has
come in and brought So-and-so from Paris, or perhaps it is only So-
and-so who has walked over from Chailly to dinner.

'A table, Messieurs!' cries M. Siron, bearing through the court the
first tureen of soup.  And immediately the company begins to settle
down about the long tables in the dining-room, framed all round
with sketches of all degrees of merit and demerit.  There's the big
picture of the huntsman winding a horn with a dead boar between his
legs, and his legs--well, his legs in stockings.  And here is the
little picture of a raw mutton-chop, in which Such-a-one knocked a
hole last summer with no worse a missile than a plum from the
dessert.  And under all these works of art so much eating goes
forward, so much drinking, so much jabbering in French and English,
that it would do your heart good merely to peep and listen at the
door.  One man is telling how they all went last year to the fete
at Fleury, and another how well so-and-so would sing of an evening:
and here are a third and fourth making plans for the whole future
of their lives; and there is a fifth imitating a conjurer and
making faces on his clenched fist, surely of all arts the most
difficult and admirable!  A sixth has eaten his fill, lights a
cigarette, and resigns himself to digestion.  A seventh has just
dropped in, and calls for soup.  Number eight, meanwhile, has left
the table, and is once more trampling the poor piano under powerful
and uncertain fingers.

Dinner over, people drop outside to smoke and chat.  Perhaps we go
along to visit our friends at the other end of the village, where
there is always a good welcome and a good talk, and perhaps some
pickled oysters and white wine to close the evening.  Or a dance is
organised in the dining-room, and the piano exhibits all its paces
under manful jockeying, to the light of three or four candles and a
lamp or two, while the waltzers move to and fro upon the wooden
floor, and sober men, who are not given to such light pleasures,
get up on the table or the sideboard, and sit there looking on
approvingly over a pipe and a tumbler of wine.  Or sometimes--
suppose my lady moon looks forth, and the court from out the half-
lit dining-room seems nearly as bright as by day, and the light
picks out the window-panes, and makes a clear shadow under every
vine-leaf on the wall--sometimes a picnic is proposed, and a basket
made ready, and a good procession formed in front of the hotel.
The two trumpeters in honour go before; and as we file down the
long alley, and up through devious footpaths among rocks and pine-
trees, with every here and there a dark passage of shadow, and
every here and there a spacious outlook over moonlit woods, these
two precede us and sound many a jolly flourish as they walk.  We
gather ferns and dry boughs into the cavern, and soon a good blaze
flutters the shadows of the old bandits' haunt, and shows shapely
beards and comely faces and toilettes ranged about the wall.  The
bowl is lit, and the punch is burnt and sent round in scalding
thimblefuls.  So a good hour or two may pass with song and jest.
And then we go home in the moonlit morning, straggling a good deal
among the birch tufts and the boulders, but ever called together
again, as one of our leaders winds his horn.  Perhaps some one of
the party will not heed the summons, but chooses out some by-way of
his own.  As he follows the winding sandy road, he hears the
flourishes grow fainter and fainter in the distance, and die
finally out, and still walks on in the strange coolness and silence
and between the crisp lights and shadows of the moonlit woods,
until suddenly the bell rings out the hour from far-away Chailly,
and he starts to find himself alone.  No surf-bell on forlorn and
perilous shores, no passing knell over the busy market-place, can
speak with a more heavy and disconsolate tongue to human ears.
Each stroke calls up a host of ghostly reverberations in his mind.
And as he stands rooted, it has grown once more so utterly silent
that it seems to him he might hear the church bells ring the hour
out all the world over, not at Chailly only, but in Paris, and away
in outlandish cities, and in the village on the river, where his
childhood passed between the sun and flowers.


IDLE HOURS


The woods by night, in all their uncanny effect, are not rightly to
be understood until you can compare them with the woods by day.
The stillness of the medium, the floor of glittering sand, these
trees that go streaming up like monstrous sea-weeds and waver in
the moving winds like the weeds in submarine currents, all these
set the mind working on the thought of what you may have seen off a
foreland or over the side of a boat, and make you feel like a
diver, down in the quiet water, fathoms below the tumbling,
transitory surface of the sea.  And yet in itself, as I say, the
strangeness of these nocturnal solitudes is not to be felt fully
without the sense of contrast.  You must have risen in the morning
and seen the woods as they are by day, kindled and coloured in the
sun's light; you must have felt the odour of innumerable trees at
even, the unsparing heat along the forest roads, and the coolness
of the groves.

And on the first morning you will doubtless rise betimes.  If you
have not been wakened before by the visit of some adventurous
pigeon, you will be wakened as soon as the sun can reach your
window--for there are no blind or shutters to keep him out--and the
room, with its bare wood floor and bare whitewashed walls, shines
all round you in a sort of glory of reflected lights.  You may doze
a while longer by snatches, or lie awake to study the charcoal men
and dogs and horses with which former occupants have defiled the
partitions:  Thiers, with wily profile; local celebrities, pipe in
hand; or, maybe, a romantic landscape splashed in oil.  Meanwhile
artist after artist drops into the salle-a-manger for coffee, and
then shoulders easel, sunshade, stool, and paint-box, bound into a
fagot, and sets of for what he calls his 'motive.'  And artist
after artist, as he goes out of the village, carries with him a
little following of dogs.  For the dogs, who belong only nominally
to any special master, hang about the gate of the forest all day
long, and whenever any one goes by who hits their fancy, profit by
his escort, and go forth with him to play an hour or two at
hunting.  They would like to be under the trees all day.  But they
cannot go alone.  They require a pretext.  And so they take the
passing artist as an excuse to go into the woods, as they might
take a walking-stick as an excuse to bathe.  With quick ears, long
spines, and bandy legs, or perhaps as tall as a greyhound and with
a bulldog's head, this company of mongrels will trot by your side
all day and come home with you at night, still showing white teeth
and wagging stunted tail.  Their good humour is not to be
exhausted.  You may pelt them with stones if you please, and all
they will do is to give you a wider berth.  If once they come out
with you, to you they will remain faithful, and with you return;
although if you meet them next morning in the street, it is as like
as not they will cut you with a countenance of brass.

The forest--a strange thing for an Englishman--is very destitute of
birds.  This is no country where every patch of wood among the
meadows gibes up an increase of song, and every valley wandered
through by a streamlet rings and reverberates from side to with a
profusion of clear notes.  And this rarity of birds is not to be
regretted on its own account only.  For the insects prosper in
their absence, and become as one of the plagues of Egypt.  Ants
swarm in the hot sand; mosquitos drone their nasal drone; wherever
the sun finds a hole in the roof of the forest, you see a myriad
transparent creatures coming and going in the shaft of light; and
even between-whiles, even where there is no incursion of sun-rays
into the dark arcade of the wood, you are conscious of a continual
drift of insects, an ebb and flow of infinitesimal living things
between the trees.  Nor are insects the only evil creatures that
haunt the forest.  For you may plump into a cave among the rocks,
and find yourself face to face with a wild boar, or see a crooked
viper slither across the road.

Perhaps you may set yourself down in the bay between two spreading
beech-roots with a book on your lap, and be awakened all of a
sudden by a friend:  'I say, just keep where you are, will you?
You make the jolliest motive.'  And you reply:  'Well, I don't
mind, if I may smoke.'  And thereafter the hours go idly by.  Your
friend at the easel labours doggedly a little way off, in the wide
shadow of the tree; and yet farther, across a strait of glaring
sunshine, you see another painter, encamped in the shadow of
another tree, and up to his waist in the fern.  You cannot watch
your own effigy growing out of the white trunk, and the trunk
beginning to stand forth from the rest of the wood, and the whole
picture getting dappled over with the flecks of sun that slip
through the leaves overhead, and, as a wind goes by and sets the
trees a-talking, flicker hither and thither like butterflies of
light.  But you know it is going forward; and, out of emulation
with the painter, get ready your own palette, and lay out the
colour for a woodland scene in words.

Your tree stands in a hollow paved with fern and heather, set in a
basin of low hills, and scattered over with rocks and junipers.
All the open is steeped in pitiless sunlight.  Everything stands
out as though it were cut in cardboard, every colour is strained
into its highest key.  The boulders are some of them upright and
dead like monolithic castles, some of them prone like sleeping
cattle.  The junipers--looking, in their soiled and ragged
mourning, like some funeral procession that has gone seeking the
place of sepulchre three hundred years and more in wind and rain--
are daubed in forcibly against the glowing ferns and heather.
Every tassel of their rusty foliage is defined with pre-Raphaelite
minuteness.  And a sorry figure they make out there in the sun,
like misbegotten yew-trees!  The scene is all pitched in a key of
colour so peculiar, and lit up with such a discharge of violent
sunlight, as a man might live fifty years in England and not see.

Meanwhile at your elbow some one tunes up a song, words of Ronsard
to a pathetic tremulous air, of how the poet loved his mistress
long ago, and pressed on her the flight of time, and told her how
white and quiet the dead lay under the stones, and how the boat
dipped and pitched as the shades embarked for the passionless land.
Yet a little while, sang the poet, and there shall be no more love;
only to sit and remember loves that might have been.  There is a
falling flourish in the air that remains in the memory and comes
back in incongruous places, on the seat of hansoms or in the warm
bed at night, with something of a forest savour.

'You can get up now,' says the painter; 'I'm at the background.'

And so up you get, stretching yourself, and go your way into the
wood, the daylight becoming richer and more golden, and the shadows
stretching farther into the open.  A cool air comes along the
highways, and the scents awaken.  The fir-trees breathe abroad
their ozone.  Out of unknown thickets comes forth the soft, secret,
aromatic odour of the woods, not like a smell of the free heaven,
but as though court ladies, who had known these paths in ages long
gone by, still walked in the summer evenings, and shed from their
brocades a breath of musk or bergamot upon the woodland winds.  One
side of the long avenues is still kindled with the sun, the other
is plunged in transparent shadow.  Over the trees the west begins
to burn like a furnace; and the painters gather up their chattels,
and go down, by avenue or footpath, to the plain.


A PLEASURE-PARTY


As this excursion is a matter of some length, and, moreover, we go
in force, we have set aside our usual vehicle, the pony-cart, and
ordered a large wagonette from Lejosne's.  It has been waiting for
near an hour, while one went to pack a knapsack, and t'other
hurried over his toilette and coffee; but now it is filled from end
to end with merry folk in summer attire, the coachman cracks his
whip, and amid much applause from round the inn door off we rattle
at a spanking trot.  The way lies through the forest, up hill and
down dale, and by beech and pine wood, in the cheerful morning
sunshine.  The English get down at all the ascents and walk on
ahead for exercise; the French are mightily entertained at this,
and keep coyly underneath the tilt.  As we go we carry with us a
pleasant noise of laughter and light speech, and some one will be
always breaking out into a bar or two of opera bouffe.  Before we
get to the Route Ronde here comes Desprez, the colourman from
Fontainebleau, trudging across on his weekly peddle with a case of
merchandise; and it is 'Desprez, leave me some malachite green';
'Desprez, leave me so much canvas'; 'Desprez, leave me this, or
leave me that'; M. Desprez standing the while in the sunlight with
grave face and many salutations.  The next interruption is more
important.  For some time back we have had the sound of cannon in
our ears; and now, a little past Franchard, we find a mounted
trooper holding a led horse, who brings the wagonette to a stand.
The artillery is practising in the Quadrilateral, it appears;
passage along the Route Ronde formally interdicted for the moment.
There is nothing for it but to draw up at the glaring cross-roads
and get down to make fun with the notorious Cocardon, the most
ungainly and ill-bred dog of all the ungainly and ill-bred dogs of
Barbizon, or clamber about the sandy banks.  And meanwhile the
doctor, with sun umbrella, wide Panama, and patriarchal beard, is
busy wheedling and (for aught the rest of us know) bribing the too
facile sentry.  His speech is smooth and dulcet, his manner
dignified and insinuating.  It is not for nothing that the Doctor
has voyaged all the world over, and speaks all languages from
French to Patagonian.  He has not come borne from perilous journeys
to be thwarted by a corporal of horse.  And so we soon see the
soldier's mouth relax, and his shoulders imitate a relenting heart.
'En voiture, Messieurs, Mesdames,' sings the Doctor; and on we go
again at a good round pace, for black care follows hard after us,
and discretion prevails not a little over valour in some timorous
spirits of the party.  At any moment we may meet the sergeant, who
will send us back.  At any moment we may encounter a flying shell,
which will send us somewhere farther off than Grez.

Grez--for that is our destination--has been highly recommended for
its beauty.  'Il y a de l'eau,' people have said, with an emphasis,
as if that settled the question, which, for a French mind, I am
rather led to think it does.  And Grez, when we get there, is
indeed a place worthy of some praise.  It lies out of the forest, a
cluster of houses, with an old bridge, an old castle in ruin, and a
quaint old church.  The inn garden descends in terraces to the
river; stable-yard, kailyard, orchard, and a space of lawn, fringed
with rushes and embellished with a green arbour.  On the opposite
bank there is a reach of English-looking plain, set thickly with
willows and poplars.  And between the two lies the river, clear and
deep, and full of reeds and floating lilies.  Water-plants cluster
about the starlings of the long low bridge, and stand half-way up
upon the piers in green luxuriance.  They catch the dipped oar with
long antennae, and chequer the slimy bottom with the shadow of
their leaves.  And the river wanders and thither hither among the
islets, and is smothered and broken up by the reeds, like an old
building in the lithe, hardy arms of the climbing ivy.  You may
watch the box where the good man of the inn keeps fish alive for
his kitchen, one oily ripple following another over the top of the
yellow deal.  And you can hear a splashing and a prattle of voices
from the shed under the old kirk, where the village women wash and
wash all day among the fish and water-lilies.  It seems as if linen
washed there should be specially cool and sweet.

We have come here for the river.  And no sooner have we all bathed
than we board the two shallops and push off gaily, and go gliding
under the trees and gathering a great treasure of water-lilies.
Some one sings; some trail their hands in the cool water; some lean
over the gunwale to see the image of the tall poplars far below,
and the shadow of the boat, with the balanced oars and their own
head protruded, glide smoothly over the yellow floor of the stream.
At last, the day declining--all silent and happy, and up to the
knees in the wet lilies--we punt slowly back again to the landing-
place beside the bridge.  There is a wish for solitude on all.  One
hides himself in the arbour with a cigarette; another goes a walk
in the country with Cocardon; a third inspects the church.  And it
is not till dinner is on the table, and the inn's best wine goes
round from glass to glass, that we begin to throw off the restraint
and fuse once more into a jolly fellowship.

Half the party are to return to-night with the wagonette; and some
of the others, loath to break up company, will go with them a bit
of the way and drink a stirrup-cup at Marlotte.  It is dark in the
wagonette, and not so merry as it might have been.  The coachman
loses the road.  So-and-so tries to light fireworks with the most
indifferent success.  Some sing, but the rest are too weary to
applaud; and it seems as if the festival were fairly at an end -

'Nous avons fait la noce,
Rentrons a nos foyers!'

And such is the burthen, even after we have come to Marlotte and
taken our places in the court at Mother Antonine's.  There is punch
on the long table out in the open air, where the guests dine in
summer weather.  The candles flare in the night wind, and the faces
round the punch are lit up, with shifting emphasis, against a
background of complete and solid darkness.  It is all picturesque
enough; but the fact is, we are aweary.  We yawn; we are out of the
vein; we have made the wedding, as the song says, and now, for
pleasure's sake, let's make an end on't.  When here comes striding
into the court, booted to mid-thigh, spurred and splashed, in a
jacket of green cord, the great, famous, and redoubtable Blank; and
in a moment the fire kindles again, and the night is witness of our
laughter as he imitates Spaniards, Germans, Englishmen, picture-
dealers, all eccentric ways of speaking and thinking, with a
possession, a fury, a strain of mind and voice, that would rather
suggest a nervous crisis than a desire to please.  We are as merry
as ever when the trap sets forth again, and say farewell noisily to
all the good folk going farther.  Then, as we are far enough from
thoughts of sleep, we visit Blank in his quaint house, and sit an
hour or so in a great tapestried chamber, laid with furs, littered
with sleeping hounds, and lit up, in fantastic shadow and shine, by
a wood fire in a mediaeval chimney.  And then we plod back through
the darkness to the inn beside the river.

How quick bright things come to confusion!  When we arise next
morning, the grey showers fall steadily, the trees hang limp, and
the face of the stream is spoiled with dimpling raindrops.
Yesterday's lilies encumber the garden walk, or begin, dismally
enough, their voyage towards the Seine and the salt sea.  A sickly
shimmer lies upon the dripping house-roofs, and all the colour is
washed out of the green and golden landscape of last night, as
though an envious man had taken a water-colour sketch and blotted
it together with a sponge.  We go out a-walking in the wet roads.
But the roads about Grez have a trick of their own.  They go on for
a while among clumps of willows and patches of vine, and then,
suddenly and without any warning, cease and determine in some miry
hollow or upon some bald knowe; and you have a short period of
hope, then right-about face, and back the way you came!  So we draw
about the kitchen fire and play a round game of cards for ha'pence,
or go to the billiard-room, for a match at corks and by one consent
a messenger is sent over for the wagonette--Grez shall be left to-
morrow.

To-morrow dawns so fair that two of the party agree to walk back
for exercise, and let their kidnap-sacks follow by the trap.  I
need hardly say they are neither of them French; for, of all
English phrases, the phrase 'for exercise' is the least
comprehensible across the Straits of Dover.  All goes well for a
while with the pedestrians.  The wet woods are full of scents in
the noontide.  At a certain cross, where there is a guardhouse,
they make a halt, for the forester's wife is the daughter of their
good host at Barbizon.  And so there they are hospitably received
by the comely woman, with one child in her arms and another
prattling and tottering at her gown, and drink some syrup of quince
in the back parlour, with a map of the forest on the wall, and some
prints of love-affairs and the great Napoleon hunting.  As they
draw near the Quadrilateral, and hear once more the report of the
big guns, they take a by-road to avoid the sentries, and go on a
while somewhat vaguely, with the sound of the cannon in their ears
and the rain beginning to fall.  The ways grow wider and sandier;
here and there there are real sand-hills, as though by the sea-
shore; the fir-wood is open and grows in clumps upon the hillocks,
and the race of sign-posts is no more.  One begins to look at the
other doubtfully.  'I am sure we should keep more to the right,'
says one; and the other is just as certain they should hold to the
left.  And now, suddenly, the heavens open, and the rain falls
'sheer and strong and loud,' as out of a shower-bath.  In a moment
they are as wet as shipwrecked sailors.  They cannot see out of
their eyes for the drift, and the water churns and gurgles in their
boots.  They leave the track and try across country with a
gambler's desperatin, for it seems as if it were impossible to make
the situation worse; and, for the next hour, go scrambling from
boulder to boulder, or plod along paths that are now no more than
rivulets, and across waste clearings where the scattered shells and
broken fir-trees tell all too plainly of the cannon in the
distance.  And meantime the cannon grumble out responses to the
grumbling thunder.  There is such a mixture of melodrama and sheer
discomfort about all this, it is at once so grey and so lurid, that
it is far more agreeable to read and write about by the chimney-
corner than to suffer in the person.  At last they chance on the
right path, and make Franchard in the early evening, the sorriest
pair of wanderers that ever welcomed English ale.  Thence, by the
Bois d'Hyver, the Ventes-Alexandre, and the Pins Brules, to the
clean hostelry, dry clothes, and dinner.


THE WOODS IN SPRING


I think you will like the forest best in the sharp early
springtime, when it is just beginning to reawaken, and innumerable
violets peep from among the fallen leaves; when two or three people
at most sit down to dinner, and, at table, you will do well to keep
a rug about your knees, for the nights are chill, and the salle-a-
manger opens on the court.  There is less to distract the
attention, for one thing, and the forest is more itself.  It is not
bedotted with artists' sunshades as with unknown mushrooms, nor
bestrewn with the remains of English picnics.  The hunting still
goes on, and at any moment your heart may be brought into your
mouth as you hear far-away horns; or you may be told by an agitated
peasant that the Vicomte has gone up the avenue, not ten minutes
since, 'a fond de train, monsieur, et avec douze pipuers.'

If you go up to some coign of vantage in the system of low hills
that permeates the forest, you will see many different tracts of
country, each of its own cold and melancholy neutral tint, and all
mixed together and mingled the one into the other at the seams.
You will see tracts of leafless beeches of a faint yellowish grey,
and leafless oaks a little ruddier in the hue.  Then zones of pine
of a solemn green; and, dotted among the pines, or standing by
themselves in rocky clearings, the delicate, snow-white trunks of
birches, spreading out into snow-white branches yet more delicate,
and crowned and canopied with a purple haze of twigs.  And then a
long, bare ridge of tumbled boulders, with bright sand-breaks
between them, and wavering sandy roads among the bracken and brown
heather.  It is all rather cold and unhomely.  It has not the
perfect beauty, nor the gem-like colouring, of the wood in the
later year, when it is no more than one vast colonnade of verdant
shadow, tremulous with insects, intersected here and there by lanes
of sunlight set in purple heather.  The loveliness of the woods in
March is not, assuredly, of this blowzy rustic type.  It is made
sharp with a grain of salt, with a touch of ugliness.  It has a
sting like the sting of bitter ale; you acquire the love of it as
men acquire a taste for olives.  And the wonderful clear, pure air
wells into your lungs the while by voluptuous inhalations, and
makes the eyes bright, and sets the heart tinkling to a new tune--
or, rather, to an old tune; for you remember in your boyhood
something akin to this spirit of adventure, this thirst for
exploration, that now takes you masterfully by the hand, plunges
you into many a deep grove, and drags you over many a stony crest.
it is as if the whole wood were full of friendly voice, calling you
farther in, and you turn from one side to another, like Buridan's
donkey, in a maze of pleasure.

Comely beeches send up their white, straight, clustered branches,
barred with green moss, like so many fingers from a half-clenched
hand.  Mighty oaks stand to the ankles in a fine tracery of
underwood; thence the tall shaft climbs upwards, and the great
forest of stalwart boughs spreads out into the golden evening sky,
where the rooks are flying and calling.  On the sward of the Bois
d'Hyver the firs stand well asunder with outspread arms, like
fencers saluting; and the air smells of resin all around, and the
sound of the axe is rarely still.  But strangest of all, and in
appearance oldest of all, are the dim and wizard upland districts
of young wood.  The ground is carpeted with fir-tassel, and strewn
with fir-apples and flakes of fallen bark.  Rocks lie crouching in
the thicket, guttered with rain, tufted with lichen, white with
years and the rigours of the changeful seasons.  Brown and yellow
butterflies are sown and carried away again by the light air--like
thistledown.  The loneliness of these coverts is so excessive, that
there are moments when pleasure draws to the verge of fear.  You
listen and listen for some noise to break the silence, till you
grow half mesmerised by the intensity of the strain; your sense of
your own identity is troubled; your brain reels, like that of some
gymnosophist poring on his own nose in Asiatic jungles; and should
you see your own outspread feet, you see them, not as anything of
yours, but as a feature of the scene around you.

Still the forest is always, but the stillness is not always
unbroken.  You can hear the wind pass in the distance over the
tree-tops; sometimes briefly, like the noise of a train; sometimes
with a long steady rush, like the breaking of waves.  And
sometimes, close at band, the branches move, a moan goes through
the thicket, and the wood thrills to its heart.  Perhaps you may
hear a carriage on the road to Fontainebleau, a bird gives a dry
continual chirp, the dead leaves rustle underfoot, or you may time
your steps to the steady recurrent strokes of the woodman's axe.
From time to time, over the low grounds, a flight of rooks goes by;
and from time to time the cooing of wild doves falls upon the ear,
not sweet and rich and near at hand as in England, but a sort of
voice of the woods, thin and far away, as fits these solemn places.
Or you hear suddenly the hollow, eager, violent barking of dogs;
scared deer flit past you through the fringes of the wood; then a
man or two running, in green blouse, with gun and game-bag on a
bandoleer; and then, out of the thick of the trees, comes the jar
of rifle-shots.  Or perhaps the hounds are out, and horns are
blown, and scarlet-coated huntsmen flash through the clearings, and
the solid noise of horses galloping passes below you, where you sit
perched among the rocks and heather.  The boar is afoot, and all
over the forest, and in all neighbouring villages, there is a vague
excitement and a vague hope; for who knows whither the chase may
lead? and even to have seen a single piqueur, or spoken to a single
sportsman, is to be a man of consequence for the night.

Besides men who shoot and men who ride with the hounds, there are
few people in the forest, in the early spring, save woodcutters
plying their axes steadily, and old women and children gathering
wood for the fire.  You may meet such a party coming home in the
twilight:  the old woman laden with a fagot of chips, and the
little ones hauling a long branch behind them in her wake.  That is
the worst of what there is to encounter; and if I tell you of what
once happened to a friend of mine, it is by no means to tantalise
you with false hopes; for the adventure was unique.  It was on a
very cold, still, sunless morning, with a flat grey sky and a
frosty tingle in the air, that this friend (who shall here be
nameless) heard the notes of a key-bugle played with much
hesitation, and saw the smoke of a fire spread out along the green
pine-tops, in a remote uncanny glen, hard by a hill of naked
boulders.  He drew near warily, and beheld a picnic party seated
under a tree in an open.  The old father knitted a sock, the mother
sat staring at the fire.  The eldest son, in the uniform of a
private of dragoons, was choosing out notes on a key-bugle.  Two or
three daughters lay in the neighbourhood picking violets.  And the
whole party as grave and silent as the woods around them!  My
friend watched for a long time, he says; but all held their peace;
not one spoke or smiled; only the dragoon kept choosing out single
notes upon the bugle, and the father knitted away at his work and
made strange movements the while with his flexible eyebrows.  They
took no notice whatever of my friend's presence, which was
disquieting in itself, and increased the resemblance of the whole
party to mechanical waxworks.  Certainly, he affirms, a wax figure
might have played the bugle with more spirit than that strange
dragoon.  And as this hypothesis of his became more certain, the
awful insolubility of why they should be left out there in the
woods with nobody to wind them up again when they ran down, and a
growing disquietude as to what might happen next, became too much
for his courage, and he turned tail, and fairly took to his heels.
It might have been a singing in his ears, but he fancies he was
followed as he ran by a peal of Titanic laughter.  Nothing has ever
transpired to clear up the mystery; it may be they were automata;
or it may be (and this is the theory to which I lean myself) that
this is all another chapter of Heine's 'Gods in Exile'; that the
upright old man with the eyebrows was no other than Father Jove,
and the young dragoon with the taste for music either Apollo or
Mars.


MORALITY


Strange indeed is the attraction of the forest for the minds of
men.  Not one or two only, but a great chorus of grateful voices
have arisen to spread abroad its fame.  Half the famous writers of
modern France have had their word to say about Fontainebleau.
Chateaubriand, Michelet, Beranger, George Sand, de Senancour,
Flaubert, Murger, the brothers Goncourt, Theodore de Banville, each
of these has done something to the eternal praise and memory of
these woods.  Even at the very worst of times, even when the
picturesque was anathema in the eyes of all Persons of Taste, the
forest still preserved a certain reputation for beauty.  It was in
1730 that the Abbe Guilbert published his Historical Description of
the Palace, Town, and Forest of Fontainebleau.  And very droll it
is to see him, as he tries to set forth his admiration in terms of
what was then permissible.  The monstrous rocks, etc., says the
Abbe 'sont admirees avec surprise des voyageurs qui s'ecrient
aussitot avec Horace:  Ut mihi devio rupee et vacuum nemus mirari
libet.'  The good man is not exactly lyrical in his praise; and you
see how he sets his back against Horace as against a trusty oak.
Horace, at any rate, was classical.  For the rest, however, the
Abbe likes places where many alleys meet; or which, like the Belle-
Etoile, are kept up 'by a special gardener,' and admires at the
Table du Roi the labours of the Grand Master of Woods and Waters,
the Sieur de la Falure, 'qui a fait faire ce magnifique endroit.'

But indeed, it is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes
a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that
quality of the air, that emanation from the old trees, that so
wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.  Disappointed men,
sick Francis Firsts and vanquished Grand Monarchs, time out of mind
have come here for consolation.  Hither perplexed folk have retired
out of the press of life, as into a deep bay-window on some night
of masquerade, and here found quiet and silence, and rest, the
mother of wisdom.  It is the great moral spa; this forest without a
fountain is itself the great fountain of Juventius.  It is the best
place in the world to bring an old sorrow that has been a long
while your friend and enemy; and if, like Beranger's your gaiety
has run away from home and left open the door for sorrow to come
in, of all covers in Europe, it is here you may expect to find the
truant hid.  With every hour you change.  The air penetrates
through your clothes, and nestles to your living body.  You love
exercise and slumber, long fasting and full meals.  You forget all
your scruples and live a while in peace and freedom, and for the
moment only.  For here, all is absent that can stimulate to moral
feeling.  Such people as you see may be old, or toil-worn, or
sorry; but you see them framed in the forest, like figures on a
painted canvas; and for you, they are not people in any living and
kindly sense.  You forget the grim contrariety of interests.  You
forget the narrow lane where all men jostle together in
unchivalrous contention, and the kennel, deep and unclean, that
gapes on either hand for the defeated.  Life is simple enough, it
seems, and the very idea of sacrifice becomes like a mad fancy out
of a last night's dream.

Your ideal is not perhaps high, but it is plain and possible.  You
become enamoured of a life of change and movement and the open air,
where the muscles shall be more exercised than the affections.
When you have had your will of the forest, you may visit the whole
round world.  You may buckle on your knapsack and take the road on
foot.  You may bestride a good nag, and ride forth, with a pair of
saddle-bags, into the enchanted East.  You may cross the Black
Forest, and see Germany wide-spread before you, like a map, dotted
with old cities, walled and spired, that dream all day on their own
reflections in the Rhine or Danube.  You may pass the spinal cord
of Europe and go down from Alpine glaciers to where Italy extends
her marble moles and glasses her marble palaces in the midland sea.
You may sleep in flying trains or wayside taverns.  You may be
awakened at dawn by the scream of the express or the small pipe of
the robin in the hedge.  For you the rain should allay the dust of
the beaten road; the wind dry your clothes upon you as you walked.
Autumn should hang out russet pears and purple grapes along the
lane; inn after inn proffer you their cups of raw wine; river by
river receive your body in the sultry noon.  Wherever you went warm
valleys and high trees and pleasant villages should compass you
about; and light fellowships should take you by the arm, and walk
with you an hour upon your way.  You may see from afar off what it
will come to in the end--the weather-beaten red-nosed vagabond,
consumed by a fever of the feet, cut off from all near touch of
human sympathy, a waif, an Ishmael, and an outcast.  And yet it
will seem well--and yet, in the air of the forest, this will seem
the best--to break all the network bound about your feet by birth
and old companionship and loyal love, and bear your shovelful of
phosphates to and fro, in town country, until the hour of the great
dissolvent.

Or, perhaps, you will keep to the cover.  For the forest is by
itself, and forest life owns small kinship with life in the dismal
land of labour.  Men are so far sophisticated that they cannot take
the world as it is given to them by the sight of their eyes.  Not
only what they see and hear, but what they know to be behind, enter
into their notion of a place.  If the sea, for instance, lie just
across the hills, sea-thoughts will come to them at intervals, and
the tenor of their dreams from time to time will suffer a sea-
change.  And so here, in this forest, a knowledge of its greatness
is for much in the effect produced.  You reckon up the miles that
lie between you and intrusion.  You may walk before you all day
long, and not fear to touch the barrier of your Eden, or stumble
out of fairyland into the land of gin and steam-hammers.  And there
is an old tale enhances for the imagination the grandeur of the
woods of France, and secures you in the thought of your seclusion.
When Charles VI. hunted in the time of his wild boyhood near
Senlis, there was captured an old stag, having a collar of bronze
about his neck, and these words engraved on the collar:  'Caesar
mihi hoc donavit.'  It is no wonder if the minds of men were moved
at this occurrence and they stood aghast to find themselves thus
touching hands with forgotten ages, and following an antiquity with
hound and horn.  And even for you, it is scarcely in an idle
curiosity that you ponder how many centuries this stag had carried
its free antlers through the wood, and how many summers and winters
had shone and snowed on the imperial badge.  If the extent of
solemn wood could thus safeguard a tall stag from the hunter's
hounds and houses, might not you also play hide-and-seek, in these
groves, with all the pangs and trepidations of man's life, and
elude Death, the mighty hunter, for more than the span of human
years?  Here, also, crash his arrows; here, in the farthest glade,
sounds the gallop of the pale horse.  But he does not hunt this
cover with all his hounds, for the game is thin and small:  and if
you were but alert and wary, if you lodged ever in the deepest
thickets, you too might live on into later generations and astonish
men by your stalwart age and the trophies of an immemorial success.

For the forest takes away from you all excuse to die.  There is
nothing here to cabin or thwart your free desires.  Here all the
impudencies of the brawling world reach you no more.  You may count
your hours, like Endymion, by the strokes of the lone woodcutter,
or by the progression of the lights and shadows and the sun
wheeling his wide circuit through the naked heavens.  Here shall
you see no enemies but winter and rough weather.  And if a pang
comes to you at all, it will be a pang of healthful hunger.  All
the puling sorrows, all the carking repentance, all this talk of
duty that is no duty, in the great peace, in the pure daylight of
these woods, fall away from you like a garment.  And if perchance
you come forth upon an eminence, where the wind blows upon you
large and fresh, and the pines knock their long stems together,
like an ungainly sort of puppets, and see far away over the plain a
factory chimney defined against the pale horizon--it is for you, as
for the staid and simple peasant when, with his plough, he upturns
old arms and harness from the furrow of the glebe.  Ay, sure
enough, there was a battle there in the old times; and, sure
enough, there is a world out yonder where men strive together with
a noise of oaths and weeping and clamorous dispute.  So much you
apprehend by an athletic act of the imagination.  A faint far-off
rumour as of Merovingian wars; a legend as of some dead religion.



CHAPTER VI--A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE {5} A FRAGMENT 1879
Originally intended to serve as the opening chapter of 'Travels
with a Donkey in the Cevennes.'



Le Monastier is the chief place of a hilly canton in Haute Loire,
the ancient Velay.  As the name betokens, the town is of monastic
origin; and it still contains a towered bulk of monastery and a
church of some architectural pretensions, the seat of an arch-
priest and several vicars.  It stands on the side of hill above the
river Gazeille, about fifteen miles from Le Puy, up a steep road
where the wolves sometime pursue the diligence in winter.  The
road, which is bound for Vivarais, passes through the town from end
to end in a single narrow street; there you may see the fountain
where women fill their pitchers; there also some old houses with
carved doors and pediment and ornamental work in iron.  For
Monastier, like Maybole in Ayrshire, was a sort of country capital,
where the local aristocracy had their town mansions for the winter;
and there is a certain baron still alive and, I am told, extremely
penitent, who found means to ruin himself by high living in this
village on the hills.  He certainly has claims to be considered the
most remarkable spendthrift on record.  How he set about it, in a
place where there are no luxuries for sale, and where the board at
the best inn comes to little more than a shilling a day, is a
problem for the wise.  His son, ruined as the family was, went as
far as Paris to sow his wild oats; and so the cases of father and
son mark an epoch in the history of centralisation in France.  Not
until the latter had got into the train was the work of Richelieu
complete.

It is a people of lace-makers.  The women sit in the streets by
groups of five or six; and the noise of the bobbins is audible from
one group to another.  Now and then you will hear one woman
clattering off prayers for the edification of the others at their
work.  They wear gaudy shawls, white caps with a gay ribbon about
the head, and sometimes a black felt brigand hat above the cap; and
so they give the street colour and brightness and a foreign air.  A
while ago, when England largely supplied herself from this district
with the lace called torchon, it was not unusual to earn five
francs a day; and five francs in Monastier is worth a pound in
London.  Now, from a change in the market, it takes a clever and
industrious work-woman to earn from three to four in the week, or
less than an eighth of what she made easily a few years ago.  The
tide of prosperity came and went, as with our northern pitmen, and
left nobody the richer.  The women bravely squandered their gains,
kept the men in idleness, and gave themselves up, as I was told, to
sweethearting and a merry life.  From week's end to week's end it
was one continuous gala in Monastier; people spent the day in the
wine-shops, and the drum or the bagpipes led on the bourrees up to
ten at night.  Now these dancing days are over.  'Il n'y a plus de
jeunesse,' said Victor the garcon.  I hear of no great advance in
what are thought the essentials of morality; but the bourree, with
its rambling, sweet, interminable music, and alert and rustic
figures, has fallen into disuse, and is mostly remembered as a
custom of the past.  Only on the occasion of the fair shall you
hear a drum discreetly in a wine-shop or perhaps one of the company
singing the measure while the others dance.  I am sorry at the
change, and marvel once more at the complicated scheme of things
upon this earth, and how a turn of fashion in England can silence
so much mountain merriment in France.  The lace-makers themselves
have not entirely forgiven our country-women; and I think they take
a special pleasure in the legend of the northern quarter of the
town, called L'Anglade, because there the English free-lances were
arrested and driven back by the potency of a little Virgin Mary on
the wall.

From time to time a market is held, and the town has a season of
revival; cattle and pigs are stabled in the streets; and
pickpockets have been known to come all the way from Lyons for the
occasion.  Every Sunday the country folk throng in with daylight to
buy apples, to attend mass, and to visit one of the wine-shops, of
which there are no fewer than fifty in this little town.  Sunday
wear for the men is a green tailcoat of some coarse sort of
drugget, and usually a complete suit to match.  I have never set
eyes on such degrading raiment.  Here it clings, there bulges; and
the human body, with its agreeable and lively lines, is turned into
a mockery and laughing-stock.  Another piece of Sunday business
with the peasants is to take their ailments to the chemist for
advice.  It is as much a matter for Sunday as church-going.  I have
seen a woman who had been unable to speak since the Monday before,
wheezing, catching her breath, endlessly and painfully coughing;
and yet she had waited upwards of a hundred hours before coming to
seek help, and had the week been twice as long, she would have
waited still.  There was a canonical day for consultation; such was
the ancestral habit, to which a respectable lady must study to
conform.

Two conveyances go daily to Le Puy, but they rival each other in
polite concessions rather than in speed.  Each will wait an hour or
two hours cheerfully while an old lady does her marketing or a
gentleman finishes the papers in a cafe.  The Courrier (such is the
name of one) should leave Le Puy by two in the afternoon and arrive
at Monastier in good on the return voyage, and arrive at Monastier
in good time for a six-o'clock dinner.  But the driver dares not
disoblige his customers.  He will postpone his departure again and
again, hour after hour; and I have known the sun to go down on his
delay.  These purely personal favours, this consideration of men's
fancies, rather than the hands of a mechanical clock, as marking
the advance of the abstraction, time, makes a more humorous
business of stage-coaching than we are used to see it.

As far as the eye can reach, one swelling line of hill top rises
and falls behind another; and if you climb an eminence, it is only
to see new and father ranges behind these.  Many little rivers run
from all sides in cliffy valleys; and one of them, a few miles from
Monastier, bears the great name of Loire.  The mean level of the
country is a little more than three thousand feet above the sea,
which makes the atmosphere proportionally brisk and wholesome.
There is little timber except pines, and the greater part of the
country lies in moorland pasture.  The country is wild and tumbled
rather than commanding; an upland rather than a mountain district;
and the most striking as well as the most agreeable scenery lies
low beside the rivers.  There, indeed, you will find many corners
that take the fancy; such as made the English noble choose his
grave by a Swiss streamlet, where nature is at her freshest, and
looks as young as on the seventh morning.  Such a place is the
course of the Gazeille, where it waters the common of Monastier and
thence downwards till it joins the Loire; a place to hear birds
singing; a place for lovers to frequent.  The name of the river was
perhaps suggested by the sound of its passage over the stones; for
it is a great warbler, and at night, after I was in bed at
Monastier, I could hear it go singing down the valley till I fell
asleep.

On the whole, this is a Scottish landscape, although not so noble
as the best in Scotland; and by an odd coincidence, the population
is, in its way, as Scottish as the country.  They have abrupt,
uncouth, Fifeshire manners, and accost you, as if you were
trespassing, an 'Ou'st-ce que vous allez?' only translatable into
the Lowland 'Whaur ye gaun?'  They keep the Scottish Sabbath.
There is no labour done on that day but to drive in and out the
various pigs and sheep and cattle that make so pleasant a tinkling
in the meadows.  The lace-makers have disappeared from the street.
Not to attend mass would involve social degradation; and you may
find people reading Sunday books, in particular a sort of Catholic
Monthly Visitor on the doings of Our Lady of Lourdes.  I remember
one Sunday, when I was walking in the country, that I fell on a
hamlet and found all the inhabitants, from the patriarch to the
baby, gathered in the shadow of a gable at prayer.  One strapping
lass stood with her back to the wall and did the solo part, the
rest chiming in devoutly.  Not far off, a lad lay flat on his face
asleep among some straw, to represent the worldly element.

Again, this people is eager to proselytise; and the postmaster's
daughter used to argue with me by the half-hour about my heresy,
until she grew quite flushed.  I have heard the reverse process
going on between a Scotswoman and a French girl; and the arguments
in the two cases were identical.  Each apostle based her claim on
the superior virtue and attainments of her clergy, and clenched the
business with a threat of hell-fire.  'Pas bong pretres ici,' said
the Presbyterian, 'bong pretres en Ecosse.'  And the postmaster's
daughter, taking up the same weapon, plied me, so to speak, with
the butt of it instead of the bayonet.  We are a hopeful race, it
seems, and easily persuaded for our good.  One cheerful
circumstance I note in these guerilla missions, that each side
relies on hell, and Protestant and Catholic alike address
themselves to a supposed misgiving in their adversary's heart.  And
I call it cheerful, for faith is a more supporting quality than
imagination.

Here, as in Scotland, many peasant families boast a son in holy
orders.  And here also, the young men have a tendency to emigrate.
It is certainly not poverty that drives them to the great cities or
across the seas, for many peasant families, I was told, have a
fortune of at least 40,000 francs.  The lads go forth pricked with
the spirit of adventure and the desire to rise in life, and leave
their homespun elders grumbling and wondering over the event.
Once, at a village called Laussonne, I met one of these
disappointed parents:  a drake who had fathered a wild swan and
seen it take wing and disappear.  The wild swan in question was now
an apothecary in Brazil.  He had flown by way of Bordeaux, and
first landed in America, bareheaded and barefoot, and with a single
halfpenny in his pocket.  And now he was an apothecary!  Such a
wonderful thing is an adventurous life!  I thought he might as well
have stayed at home; but you never can tell wherein a man's life
consists, nor in what he sets his pleasure:  one to drink, another
to marry, a third to write scurrilous articles and be repeatedly
caned in public, and now this fourth, perhaps, to be an apothecary
in Brazil.  As for his old father, he could conceive no reason for
the lad's behaviour.  'I had always bread for him,' he said; 'he
ran away to annoy me.  He loved to annoy me.  He had no gratitude.'
But at heart he was swelling with pride over his travelled
offspring, and he produced a letter out of his pocket, where, as he
said, it was rotting, a mere lump of paper rags, and waved it
gloriously in the air.  'This comes from America,' he cried, 'six
thousand leagues away!'  And the wine-shop audience looked upon it
with a certain thrill.

I soon became a popular figure, and was known for miles in the
country.  Ou'st que vous allez? was changed for me into Quoi, vous
rentrez au Monastier and in the town itself every urchin seemed to
know my name, although no living creature could pronounce it.
There was one particular group of lace-makers who brought out a
chair for me whenever I went by, and detained me from my walk to
gossip.  They were filled with curiosity about England, its
language, its religion, the dress of the women, and were never
weary of seeing the Queen's head on English postage-stamps, or
seeking for French words in English Journals.  The language, in
particular, filled them with surprise.

'Do they speak patois in England?'  I was once asked; and when I
told them not, 'Ah, then, French?' said they.

'No, no,' I said, 'not French.'

'Then,' they concluded, 'they speak patois.'

You must obviously either speak French or patios.  Talk of the
force of logic--here it was in all its weakness.  I gave up the
point, but proceeding to give illustrations of my native jargon, I
was met with a new mortification.  Of all patios they declared that
mine was the most preposterous and the most jocose in sound.  At
each new word there was a new explosion of laughter, and some of
the younger ones were glad to rise from their chairs and stamp
about the street in ecstasy; and I looked on upon their mirth in a
faint and slightly disagreeable bewilderment.  'Bread,' which
sounds a commonplace, plain-sailing monosyllable in England, was
the word that most delighted these good ladies of Monastier; it
seemed to them frolicsome and racy, like a page of Pickwick; and
they all got it carefully by heart, as a stand-by, I presume, for
winter evenings.  I have tried it since then with every sort of
accent and inflection, but I seem to lack the sense of humour.

They were of all ages:  children at their first web of lace, a
stripling girl with a bashful but encouraging play of eyes, solid
married women, and grandmothers, some on the top of their age and
some falling towards decrepitude.  One and all were pleasant and
natural, ready to laugh and ready with a certain quiet solemnity
when that was called for by the subject of our talk.  Life, since
the fall in wages, had begun to appear to them with a more serious
air.  The stripling girl would sometimes laugh at me in a
provocative and not unadmiring manner, if I judge aright; and one
of the grandmothers, who was my great friend of the party, gave me
many a sharp word of judgment on my sketches, my heresy, or even my
arguments, and gave them with a wry mouth and a humorous twinkle in
her eye that were eminently Scottish.  But the rest used me with a
certain reverence, as something come from afar and not entirely
human.  Nothing would put them at their ease but the irresistible
gaiety of my native tongue.  Between the old lady and myself I
think there was a real attachment.  She was never weary of sitting
to me for her portrait, in her best cap and brigand hat, and with
all her wrinkles tidily composed, and though she never failed to
repudiate the result, she would always insist upon another trial.
It was as good as a play to see her sitting in judgment over the
last.  'No, no,' she would say, 'that is not it.  I am old, to be
sure, but I am better-looking than that.  We must try again.'  When
I was about to leave she bade me good-bye for this life in a
somewhat touching manner.  We should not meet again, she said; it
was a long farewell, and she was sorry.  But life is so full of
crooks, old lady, that who knows?  I have said good-bye to people
for greater distances and times, and, please God, I mean to see
them yet again.

One thing was notable about these women, from the youngest to the
oldest, and with hardly an exception.  In spite of their piety,
they could twang off an oath with Sir Toby Belch in person.  There
was nothing so high or so low, in heaven or earth or in the human
body, but a woman of this neighbourhood would whip out the name of
it, fair and square, by way of conversational adornment.  My
landlady, who was pretty and young, dressed like a lady and avoided
patois like a weakness, commonly addressed her child in the
language of a drunken bully.  And of all the swearers that I ever
heard, commend me to an old lady in Gondet, a village of the Loire.
I was making a sketch, and her curse was not yet ended when I had
finished it and took my departure.  It is true she had a right to
be angry; for here was her son, a hulking fellow, visibly the worse
for drink before the day was well begun.  But it was strange to
hear her unwearying flow of oaths and obscenities, endless like a
river, and now and then rising to a passionate shrillness, in the
clear and silent air of the morning.  In city slums, the thing
might have passed unnoticed; but in a country valley, and from a
plain and honest countrywoman, this beastliness of speech surprised
the ear.

The Conductor, as he is called, of Roads and Bridges was my
principal companion.  He was generally intelligent, and could have
spoken more or less falsetto on any of the trite topics; but it was
his specially to have a generous taste in eating.  This was what
was most indigenous in the man; it was here he was an artist; and I
found in his company what I had long suspected, that enthusiasm and
special knowledge are the great social qualities, and what they are
about, whether white sauce or Shakespeare's plays, an altogether
secondary question.

I used to accompany the Conductor on his professional rounds, and
grew to believe myself an expert in the business.  I thought I
could make an entry in a stone-breaker's time-book, or order manure
off the wayside with any living engineer in France.  Gondet was one
of the places we visited together; and Laussonne, where I met the
apothecary's father, was another.  There, at Laussonne, George Sand
spent a day while she was gathering materials for the Marquis de
Villemer; and I have spoken with an old man, who was then a child
running about the inn kitchen, and who still remembers her with a
sort of reverence.  It appears that he spoke French imperfectly;
for this reason George Sand chose him for companion, and whenever
he let slip a broad and picturesque phrase in patois, she would
make him repeat it again and again till it was graven in her
memory.  The word for a frog particularly pleased her fancy; and it
would be curious to know if she afterwards employed it in her
works.  The peasants, who knew nothing of betters and had never so
much as heard of local colour, could not explain her chattering
with this backward child; and to them she seemed a very homely lady
and far from beautiful:  the most famous man-killer of the age
appealed so little to Velaisian swine-herds!

On my first engineering excursion, which lay up by Crouzials
towards Mount Mezenc and the borders of Ardeche, I began an
improving acquaintance with the foreman road-mender.  He was in
great glee at having me with him, passed me off among his
subalterns as the supervising engineer, and insisted on what he
called 'the gallantry' of paying for my breakfast in a roadside
wine-shop.  On the whole, he was a man of great weather-wisdom,
some spirits, and a social temper.  But I am afraid he was
superstitious.  When he was nine years old, he had seen one night a
company of bourgeois et dames qui faisaient la manege avec des
chaises, and concluded that he was in the presence of a witches'
Sabbath.  I suppose, but venture with timidity on the suggestion,
that this may have been a romantic and nocturnal picnic party.
Again, coming from Pradelles with his brother, they saw a great
empty cart drawn by six enormous horses before them on the road.
The driver cried aloud and filled the mountains with the cracking
of his whip.  He never seemed to go faster than a walk, yet it was
impossible to overtake him; and at length, at the comer of a hill,
the whole equipage disappeared bodily into the night.  At the time,
people said it was the devil qui s'amusait a faire ca.

I suggested there was nothing more likely, as he must have some
amusement.

The foreman said it was odd, but there was less of that sort of
thing than formerly.  'C'est difficile,' he added, 'a expliquer.'

When we were well up on the moors and the Conductor was trying some
road-metal with the gauge -

'Hark!' said the foreman, 'do you hear nothing?'

We listened, and the wind, which was blowing chilly out of the
east, brought a faint, tangled jangling to our ears.

'It is the flocks of Vivarais,' said he.

For every summer, the flocks out of all Ardeche are brought up to
pasture on these grassy plateaux.

Here and there a little private flock was being tended by a girl,
one spinning with a distaff, another seated on a wall and intently
making lace.  This last, when we addressed her, leaped up in a
panic and put out her arms, like a person swimming, to keep us at a
distance, and it was some seconds before we could persuade her of
the honesty of our intentions.

The Conductor told me of another herdswoman from whom he had once
asked his road while he was yet new to the country, and who fled
from him, driving her beasts before her, until he had given up the
information in despair.  A tale of old lawlessness may yet be read
in these uncouth timidities.

The winter in these uplands is a dangerous and melancholy time.
Houses are snowed up, and way-farers lost in a flurry within hail
of their own fireside.  No man ventures abroad without meat and a
bottle of wine, which he replenishes at every wine-shop; and even
thus equipped he takes the road with terror.  All day the family
sits about the fire in a foul and airless hovel, and equally
without work or diversion.  The father may carve a rude piece of
furniture, but that is all that will be done until the spring sets
in again, and along with it the labours of the field.  It is not
for nothing that you find a clock in the meanest of these mountain
habitations.  A clock and an almanac, you would fancy, were
indispensable in such a life . . .



CHAPTER VII--RANDOM MEMORIES:  ROSA QUO LOCORUM



Through what little channels, by what hints and premonitions, the
consciousness of the man's art dawns first upon the child, it
should be not only interesting but instructive to inquire.  A
matter of curiosity to-day, it will become the ground of science
to-morrow.  From the mind of childhood there is more history and
more philosophy to be fished up than from all the printed volumes
in a library.  The child is conscious of an interest, not in
literature but in life.  A taste for the precise, the adroit, or
the comely in the use of words, comes late; but long before that he
has enjoyed in books a delightful dress rehearsal of experience.
He is first conscious of this material--I had almost said this
practical--pre-occupation; it does not follow that it really came
the first.  I have some old fogged negatives in my collection that
would seem to imply a prior stage 'The Lord is gone up with a
shout, and God with the sound of a trumpet'--memorial version, I
know not where to find the text--rings still in my ear from my
first childhood, and perhaps with something of my nurses accent.
There was possibly some sort of image written in my mind by these
loud words, but I believe the words themselves were what I
cherished.  I had about the same time, and under the same
influence--that of my dear nurse--a favourite author:  it is
possible the reader has not heard of him--the Rev. Robert Murray
M'Cheyne.  My nurse and I admired his name exceedingly, so that I
must have been taught the love of beautiful sounds before I was
breeched; and I remember two specimens of his muse until this day:-

'Behind the hills of Naphtali
The sun went slowly down,
Leaving on mountain, tower, and tree,
A tinge of golden brown.'

There is imagery here, and I set it on one side.  The other--it is
but a verse--not only contains no image, but is quite
unintelligible even to my comparatively instructed mind, and I know
not even how to spell the outlandish vocable that charmed me in my
childhood:

'Jehovah Tschidkenu is nothing to her'; {6} -

I may say, without flippancy, that he was nothing to me either,
since I had no ray of a guess of what he was about; yet the verse,
from then to now, a longer interval than the life of a generation,
has continued to haunt me.

I have said that I should set a passage distinguished by obvious
and pleasing imagery, however faint; for the child thinks much in
images, words are very live to him, phrases that imply a picture
eloquent beyond their value.  Rummaging in the dusty pigeon-holes
of memory, I came once upon a graphic version of the famous Psalm,
'The Lord is my shepherd':  and from the places employed in its
illustration, which are all in the immediate neighbourhood of a
house then occupied by my father, I am able, to date it before the
seventh year of my age, although it was probably earlier in fact.
The 'pastures green' were represented by a certain suburban
stubble-field, where I had once walked with my nurse, under an
autumnal sunset, on the banks of the Water of Leith:  the place is
long ago built up; no pastures now, no stubble-fields; only a maze
of little streets and smoking chimneys and shrill children.  Here,
in the fleecy person of a sheep, I seemed to myself to follow
something unseen, unrealised, and yet benignant; and close by the
sheep in which I was incarnated--as if for greater security--
rustled the skirt, of my nurse.  'Death's dark vale' was a certain
archway in the Warriston Cemetery:  a formidable yet beloved spot,
for children love to be afraid,--in measure as they love all
experience of vitality.  Here I beheld myself some paces ahead
(seeing myself, I mean, from behind) utterly alone in that uncanny
passage; on the one side of me a rude, knobby, shepherd's staff,
such as cheers the heart of the cockney tourist, on the other a rod
like a billiard cue, appeared to accompany my progress; the stiff
sturdily upright, the billiard cue inclined confidentially, like
one whispering, towards my ear.  I was aware--I will never tell you
how--that the presence of these articles afforded me encouragement.
The third and last of my pictures illustrated words:-

 'My table Thou hast furnished
 In presence of my foes:
My head Thou dost with oil anoint,
And my cup overflows':

and this was perhaps the most interesting of the series.  I saw
myself seated in a kind of open stone summer-house at table; over
my shoulder a hairy, bearded, and robed presence anointed me from
an authentic shoe-horn; the summer-house was part of the green
court of a ruin, and from the far side of the court black and white
imps discharged against me ineffectual arrows.  The picture appears
arbitrary, but I can trace every detail to its source, as Mr. Brock
analysed the dream of Alan Armadale.  The summer-house and court
were muddled together out of Billings' Antiquities of Scotland; the
imps conveyed from Bagster's Pilgrim's Progress; the bearded and
robed figure from any one of the thousand Bible pictures; and the
shoe-horn was plagiarised from an old illustrated Bible, where it
figured in the hand of Samuel anointing Saul, and had been pointed
out to me as a jest by my father.  It was shown me for a jest,
remark; but the serious spirit of infancy adopted it in earnest.
Children are all classics; a bottle would have seemed an
intermediary too trivial--that divine refreshment of whose meaning
I had no guess; and I seized on the idea of that mystic shoe-horn
with delight, even as, a little later, I should have written
flagon, chalice, hanaper, beaker, or any word that might have
appealed to me at the moment as least contaminate with mean
associations.  In this string of pictures I believe the gist of the
psalm to have consisted; I believe it had no more to say to me; and
the result was consolatory.  I would go to sleep dwelling with
restfulness upon these images; they passed before me, besides, to
an appropriate music; for I had already singled out from that rude
psalm the one lovely verse which dwells in the minds of all, not
growing old, not disgraced by its association with long Sunday
tasks, a scarce conscious joy in childhood, in age a companion
thought:-

'In pastures green Thou leadest me,
The quiet waters by.'

The remainder of my childish recollections are all of the matter of
what was read to me, and not of any manner in the words.  If these
pleased me it was unconsciously; I listened for news of the great
vacant world upon whose edge I stood; I listened for delightful
plots that I might re-enact in play, and romantic scenes and
circumstances that I might call up before me, with closed eyes,
when I was tired of Scotland, and home, and that weary prison of
the sick-chamber in which I lay so long in durance.  Robinson
Crusoe; some of the books of that cheerful, ingenious, romantic
soul, Mayne Reid; and a work rather gruesome and bloody for a
child, but very picturesque, called Paul Blake; these are the three
strongest impressions I remember:  The Swiss Family Robinson came
next, longo intervallo.  At these I played, conjured up their
scenes, and delighted to hear them rehearsed unto seventy times
seven.  I am not sure but what Paul Blake came after I could read.
It seems connected with a visit to the country, and an experience
unforgettable.  The day had been warm; H--- and I had played
together charmingly all day in a sandy wilderness across the road;
then came the evening with a great flash of colour and a heavenly
sweetness in the air.  Somehow my play-mate had vanished, or is out
of the story, as the sages say, but I was sent into the village on
an errand; and, taking a book of fairy tales, went down alone
through a fir-wood, reading as I walked.  How often since then has
it befallen me to be happy even so; but that was the first time:
the shock of that pleasure I have never since forgot, and if my
mind serves me to the last, I never shall, for it was then that I
knew I loved reading.


II


To pass from hearing literature to reading it is to take a great
and dangerous step.  With not a few, I think a large proportion of
their pleasure then comes to an end; 'the malady of not marking'
overtakes them; they read thenceforward by the eye alone and hear
never again the chime of fair words or the march of the stately
period.  Non ragioniam of these.  But to all the step is dangerous;
it involves coming of age; it is even a kind of second weaning.  In
the past all was at the choice of others; they chose, they
digested, they read aloud for us and sang to their own tune the
books of childhood.  In the future we are to approach the silent,
inexpressive type alone, like pioneers; and the choice of what we
are to read is in our own hands thenceforward.  For instance, in
the passages already adduced, I detect and applaud the ear of my
old nurse; they were of her choice, and she imposed them on my
infancy, reading the works of others as a poet would scarce dare to
read his own; gloating on the rhythm, dwelling with delight on
assonances and alliterations.  I know very well my mother must have
been all the while trying to educate my taste upon more secular
authors; but the vigour and the continual opportunities of my nurse
triumphed, and after a long search, I can find in these earliest
volumes of my autobiography no mention of anything but nursery
rhymes, the Bible, and Mr. M'Cheyne.

I suppose all children agree in looking back with delight on their
school Readers.  We might not now find so much pathos in 'Bingen on
the Rhine,' 'A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers,' or in
'The Soldier's Funeral,' in the declamation of which I was held to
have surpassed myself.  'Robert's voice,' said the master on this
memorable occasion, 'is not strong, but impressive':  an opinion
which I was fool enough to carry home to my father; who roasted me
for years in consequence.  I am sure one should not be so
deliciously tickled by the humorous pieces:-

'What, crusty? cries Will in a taking,
Who would not be crusty with half a year's baking?'

I think this quip would leave us cold.  The 'Isles of Greece' seem
rather tawdry too; but on the 'Address to the Ocean,' or on 'The
Dying Gladiator,' 'time has writ no wrinkle.'

'Tis the morn, but dim and dark,
Whither flies the silent lark?' -

does the reader recall the moment when his eye first fell upon
these lines in the Fourth Reader; and 'surprised with joy,
impatient as the wind,' he plunged into the sequel?  And there was
another piece, this time in prose, which none can have forgotten;
many like me must have searched Dickens with zeal to find it again,
and in its proper context, and have perhaps been conscious of some
inconsiderable measure of disappointment, that it was only Tom
Pinch who drove, in such a pomp of poetry, to London.

But in the Reader we are still under guides.  What a boy turns out
for himself, as he rummages the bookshelves, is the real test and
pleasure.  My father's library was a spot of some austerity; the
proceedings of learned societies, some Latin divinity,
cyclopaedias, physical science, and, above all, optics, held the
chief place upon the shelves, and it was only in holes and corners
that anything really legible existed as by accident.  The Parent's
Assistant, Rob Roy, Waverley, and Guy Mannering, the Voyages of
Captain Woods Rogers, Fuller's and Bunyan's Holy Wars, The
Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, The Female Bluebeard, G. Sand's
Mare au Diable--(how came it in that grave assembly!), Ainsworth's
Tower of London, and four old volumes of Punch--these were the
chief exceptions.  In these latter, which made for years the chief
of my diet, I very early fell in love (almost as soon as I could
spell) with the Snob Papers.  I knew them almost by heart,
particularly the visit to the Pontos; and I remember my surprise
when I found, long afterwards, that they were famous, and signed
with a famous name; to me, as I read and admired them, they were
the works of Mr. Punch.  Time and again I tried to read Rob Roy,
with whom of course I was acquainted from the Tales of a
Grandfather; time and again the early part, with Rashleigh and
(think of it!) the adorable Diana, choked me off; and I shall never
forget the pleasure and surprise with which, lying on the floor one
summer evening, I struck of a sudden into the first scene with
Andrew Fairservice.  'The worthy Dr. Lightfoot'--'mistrysted with a
bogle'--'a wheen green trash'--'Jenny, lass, I think I ha'e her':
from that day to this the phrases have been unforgotten.  I read
on, I need scarce say; I came to Glasgow, I bided tryst on Glasgow
Bridge, I met Rob Roy and the Bailie in the Tolbooth, all with
transporting pleasure; and then the clouds gathered once more about
my path; and I dozed and skipped until I stumbled half-asleep into
the clachan of Aberfoyle, and the voices of Iverach and Galbraith
recalled me to myself.  With that scene and the defeat of Captain
Thornton the book concluded; Helen and her sons shocked even the
little schoolboy of nine or ten with their unreality; I read no
more, or I did not grasp what I was reading; and years elapsed
before I consciously met Diana and her father among the hills, or
saw Rashleigh dying in the chair.  When I think of that novel and
that evening, I am impatient with all others; they seem but shadows
and impostors; they cannot satisfy the appetite which this
awakened; and I dare be known to think it the best of Sir Walter's
by nearly as much as Sir Walter is the best of novelists.  Perhaps
Mr. Lang is right, and our first friends in the land of fiction are
always the most real.  And yet I had read before this Guy
Mannering, and some of Waverley, with no such delighted sense of
truth and humour, and I read immediately after the greater part of
the Waverley Novels, and was never moved again in the same way or
to the same degree.  One circumstance is suspicious:  my critical
estimate of the Waverley Novels has scarce changed at all since I
was ten.  Rob Roy, Guy Mannering, and Redgauntlet first; then, a
little lower; The Fortunes of Nigel; then, after a huge gulf,
Ivanhoe and Anne of Geierstein:  the rest nowhere; such was the
verdict of the boy.  Since then The Antiquary, St. Ronan's Well,
Kenilworth, and The Heart of Midlothian have gone up in the scale;
perhaps Ivanhoe and Anne of Geierstein have gone a trifle down;
Diana Vernon has been added to my admirations in that enchanted
world of Rob Roy; I think more of the letters in Redgauntlet, and
Peter Peebles, that dreadful piece of realism, I can now read about
with equanimity, interest, and I had almost said pleasure, while to
the childish critic he often caused unmixed distress.  But the rest
is the same; I could not finish The Pirate when I was a child, I
have never finished it yet; Peveril of the Peak dropped half way
through from my schoolboy hands, and though I have since waded to
an end in a kind of wager with myself, the exercise was quite
without enjoyment.  There is something disquieting in these
considerations.  I still think the visit to Ponto's the best part
of the Book of Snobs:  does that mean that I was right when I was a
child, or does it mean that I have never grown since then, that the
child is not the man's father, but the man? and that I came into
the world with all my faculties complete, and have only learned
sinsyne to be more tolerant of boredom? . . .



CHAPTER VIII--THE IDEAL HOUSE



Two things are necessary in any neighbourhood where we propose to
spend a life:  a desert and some living water.

There are many parts of the earth's face which offer the necessary
combination of a certain wildness with a kindly variety.  A great
prospect is desirable, but the want may be otherwise supplied; even
greatness can be found on the small scale; for the mind and the eye
measure differently.  Bold rocks near hand are more inspiriting
than distant Alps, and the thick fern upon a Surrey heath makes a
fine forest for the imagination, and the dotted yew trees noble
mountains.  A Scottish moor with birches and firs grouped here and
there upon a knoll, or one of those rocky seaside deserts of
Provence overgrown with rosemary and thyme and smoking with aroma,
are places where the mind is never weary.  Forests, being more
enclosed, are not at first sight so attractive, but they exercise a
spell; they must, however, be diversified with either heath or
rock, and are hardly to be considered perfect without conifers.
Even sand-hills, with their intricate plan, and their gulls and
rabbits, will stand well for the necessary desert.

The house must be within hail of either a little river or the sea.
A great river is more fit for poetry than to adorn a neighbourhood;
its sweep of waters increases the scale of the scenery and the
distance of one notable object from another; and a lively burn
gives us, in the space of a few yards, a greater variety of
promontory and islet, of cascade, shallow goil, and boiling pool,
with answerable changes both of song and colour, than a navigable
stream in many hundred miles.  The fish, too, make a more
considerable feature of the brookside, and the trout plumping in
the shadow takes the ear.  A stream should, besides, be narrow
enough to cross, or the burn hard by a bridge, or we are at once
shut out of Eden.  The quantity of water need be of no concern, for
the mind sets the scale, and can enjoy a Niagara Fall of thirty
inches.  Let us approve the singer of

'Shallow rivers, by whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.'

If the sea is to be our ornamental water, choose an open seaboard
with a heavy beat of surf; one much broken in outline, with small
havens and dwarf headlands; if possible a few islets; and as a
first necessity, rocks reaching out into deep water.  Such a rock
on a calm day is a better station than the top of Teneriffe or
Chimborazo.  In short, both for the desert and the water, the
conjunction of many near and bold details is bold scenery for the
imagination and keeps the mind alive.

Given these two prime luxuries, the nature of the country where we
are to live is, I had almost said, indifferent; after that inside
the garden, we can construct a country of our own.  Several old
trees, a considerable variety of level, several well-grown hedges
to divide our garden into provinces, a good extent of old well-set
turf, and thickets of shrubs and ever-greens to be cut into and
cleared at the new owner's pleasure, are the qualities to be sought
for in your chosen land.  Nothing is more delightful than a
succession of small lawns, opening one out of the other through
tall hedges; these have all the charm of the old bowling-green
repeated, do not require the labour of many trimmers, and afford a
series of changes.  You must have much lawn against the early
summer, so as to have a great field of daisies, the year's morning
frost; as you must have a wood of lilacs, to enjoy to the full the
period of their blossoming.  Hawthorn is another of the Spring's
ingredients; but it is even best to have a rough public lane at one
side of your enclosure which, at the right season, shall become an
avenue of bloom and odour.  The old flowers are the best and should
grow carelessly in corners.  Indeed, the ideal fortune is to find
an old garden, once very richly cared for, since sunk into neglect,
and to tend, not repair, that neglect; it will thus have a smack of
nature and wildness which skilful dispositions cannot overtake.
The gardener should be an idler, and have a gross partiality to the
kitchen plots:  an eager or toilful gardener misbecomes the garden
landscape; a tasteful gardener will be ever meddling, will keep the
borders raw, and take the bloom off nature.  Close adjoining, if
you are in the south, an olive-yard, if in the north, a swarded
apple-orchard reaching to the stream, completes your miniature
domain; but this is perhaps best entered through a door in the high
fruit-wall; so that you close the door behind you on your sunny
plots, your hedges and evergreen jungle, when you go down to watch
the apples falling in the pool.  It is a golden maxim to cultivate
the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.
Nor must the ear be forgotten:  without birds a garden is a prison-
yard.  There is a garden near Marseilles on a steep hill-side,
walking by which, upon a sunny morning, your ear will suddenly be
ravished with a burst of small and very cheerful singing:  some
score of cages being set out there to sun their occupants.  This is
a heavenly surprise to any passer-by; but the price paid, to keep
so many ardent and winged creatures from their liberty, will make
the luxury too dear for any thoughtful pleasure-lover.  There is
only one sort of bird that I can tolerate caged, though even then I
think it hard, and that is what is called in France the Bec-
d'Argent.  I once had two of these pigmies in captivity; and in the
quiet, hire house upon a silent street where I was then living,
their song, which was not much louder than a bee's, but airily
musical, kept me in a perpetual good humour.  I put the cage upon
my table when I worked, carried it with me when I went for meals,
and kept it by my head at night:  the first thing in the morning,
these maestrini would pipe up.  But these, even if you can pardon
their imprisonment, are for the house.  In the garden the wild
birds must plant a colony, a chorus of the lesser warblers that
should be almost deafening, a blackbird in the lilacs, a
nightingale down the lane, so that you must stroll to hear it, and
yet a little farther, tree-tops populous with rooks.

Your house should not command much outlook; it should be set deep
and green, though upon rising ground, or, if possible, crowning a
knoll, for the sake of drainage.  Yet it must be open to the east,
or you will miss the sunrise; sunset occurring so much later, you
can go up a few steps and look the other way.  A house of more than
two stories is a mere barrack; indeed the ideal is of one story,
raised upon cellars.  If the rooms are large, the house may be
small:  a single room, lofty, spacious, and lightsome, is more
palatial than a castleful of cabinets and cupboards.  Yet size in a
house, and some extent and intricacy of corridor, is certainly
delightful to the flesh.  The reception room should be, if
possible, a place of many recesses, which are 'petty retiring
places for conference'; but it must have one long wall with a
divan:  for a day spent upon a divan, among a world of cushions, is
as full of diversion as to travel.  The eating-room, in the French
mode, should be ad hoc:  unfurnished, but with a buffet, the table,
necessary chairs, one or two of Canaletto's etchings, and a tile
fire-place for the winter.  In neither of these public places
should there be anything beyond a shelf or two of books; but the
passages may be one library from end to end, and the stair, if
there be one, lined with volumes in old leather, very brightly
carpeted, and leading half-way up, and by way of landing, to a
windowed recess with a fire-place; this window, almost alone in the
house, should command a handsome prospect.  Husband and wife must
each possess a studio; on the woman's sanctuary I hesitate to
dwell, and turn to the man's.  The walls are shelved waist-high for
books, and the top thus forms a continuous table running round the
wall.  Above are prints, a large map of the neighbourhood, a Corot
and a Claude or two.  The room is very spacious, and the five
tables and two chairs are but as islands.  One table is for actual
work, one close by for references in use; one, very large, for MSS.
or proofs that wait their turn; one kept clear for an occasion; and
the fifth is the map table, groaning under a collection of large-
scale maps and charts.  Of all books these are the least wearisome
to read and the richest in matter; the course of roads and rivers,
the contour lines and the forests in the maps--the reefs,
soundings, anchors, sailing marks and little pilot-pictures in the
charts--and, in both, the bead-roll of names, make them of all
printed matter the most fit to stimulate and satisfy the fancy.
The chair in which you write is very low and easy, and backed into
a corner; at one elbow the fire twinkles; close at the other, if
you are a little inhumane, your cage of silver-bills are twittering
into song.

Joined along by a passage, you may reach the great, sunny, glass-
roofed, and tiled gymnasium, at the far end of which, lined with
bright marble, is your plunge and swimming bath, fitted with a
capacious boiler.

The whole loft of the house from end to end makes one undivided
chamber; here are set forth tables on which to model imaginary or
actual countries in putty or plaster, with tools and hardy
pigments; a carpenter's bench; and a spared corner for photography,
while at the far end a space is kept clear for playing soldiers.
Two boxes contain the two armies of some five hundred horse and
foot; two others the ammunition of each side, and a fifth the foot-
rules and the three colours of chalk, with which you lay down, or,
after a day's play, refresh the outlines of the country; red or
white for the two kinds of road (according as they are suitable or
not for the passage of ordnance), and blue for the course of the
obstructing rivers.  Here I foresee that you may pass much happy
time; against a good adversary a game may well continue for a
month; for with armies so considerable three moves will occupy an
hour.  It will be found to set an excellent edge on this diversion
if one of the players shall, every day or so, write a report of the
operations in the character of army correspondent.

I have left to the last the little room for winter evenings.  This
should be furnished in warm positive colours, and sofas and floor
thick with rich furs.  The hearth, where you burn wood of aromatic
quality on silver dogs, tiled round about with Bible pictures; the
seats deep and easy; a single Titian in a gold frame; a white bust
or so upon a bracket; a rack for the journals of the week; a table
for the books of the year; and close in a corner the three shelves
full of eternal books that never weary:  Shakespeare, Moliere,
Montaigne, Lamb, Sterne, De Musset's comedies (the one volume open
at Carmosine and the other at Fantasio); the Arabian Nights, and
kindred stories, in Weber's solemn volumes; Borrow's Bible in
Spain, the Pilgrim's Progress, Guy Mannering and Rob Roy, Monte
Cristo and the Vicomte de Bragelonne, immortal Boswell sole among
biographers, Chaucer, Herrick, and the State Trials.

The bedrooms are large, airy, with almost no furniture, floors of
varnished wood, and at the bed-head, in case of insomnia, one shelf
of books of a particular and dippable order, such as Pepys, the
Paston Letters, Burt's Letters from the Highlands, or the Newgate
Calendar. . . .



CHAPTER IX--DAVOS IN WINTER



A mountain valley has, at the best, a certain prison-like effect on
the imagination, but a mountain valley, an Alpine winter, and an
invalid's weakness make up among them a prison of the most
effective kind.  The roads indeed are cleared, and at least one
footpath dodging up the hill; but to these the health-seeker is
rigidly confined.  There are for him no cross-cuts over the field,
no following of streams, no unguided rambles in the wood.  His
walks are cut and dry.  In five or six different directions he can
push as far, and no farther, than his strength permits; never
deviating from the line laid down for him and beholding at each
repetition the same field of wood and snow from the same corner of
the road.  This, of itself, would be a little trying to the
patience in the course of months; but to this is added, by the
heaped mantle of the snow, an almost utter absence of detail and an
almost unbroken identity of colour.  Snow, it is true, is not
merely white.  The sun touches it with roseate and golden lights.
Its own crushed infinity of crystals, its own richness of tiny
sculpture, fills it, when regarded near at hand, with wonderful
depths of coloured shadow, and, though wintrily transformed, it is
still water, and has watery tones of blue.  But, when all is said,
these fields of white and blots of crude black forest are but a
trite and staring substitute for the infinite variety and
pleasantness of the earth's face.  Even a boulder, whose front is
too precipitous to have retained the snow, seems, if you come upon
it in your walk, a perfect gem of colour, reminds you almost
painfully of other places, and brings into your head the delights
of more Arcadian days--the path across the meadow, the hazel dell,
the lilies on the stream, and the scents, the colours, and the
whisper of the woods.  And scents here are as rare as colours.
Unless you get a gust of kitchen in passing some hotel, you shall
smell nothing all day long but the faint and choking odour of
frost.  Sounds, too, are absent:  not a bird pipes, not a bough
waves, in the dead, windless atmosphere.  If a sleigh goes by, the
sleigh-bells ring, and that is all; you work all winter through to
no other accompaniment but the crunching of your steps upon the
frozen snow.

It is the curse of the Alpine valleys to be each one village from
one end to the other.  Go where you please, houses will still be in
sight, before and behind you, and to the right and left.  Climb as
high as an invalid is able, and it is only to spy new habitations
nested in the wood.  Nor is that all; for about the health resort
the walks are besieged by single people walking rapidly with plaids
about their shoulders, by sudden troops of German boys trying to
learn to jodel, and by German couples silently and, as you venture
to fancy, not quite happily, pursuing love's young dream.  You may
perhaps be an invalid who likes to make bad verses as he walks
about.  Alas! no muse will suffer this imminence of interruption--
and at the second stampede of jodellers you find your modest
inspiration fled.  Or you may only have a taste for solitude; it
may try your nerves to have some one always in front whom you are
visibly overtaking, and some one always behind who is audibly
overtaking you, to say nothing of a score or so who brush past you
in an opposite direction.  It may annoy you to take your walks and
seats in public view.  Alas! there is no help for it among the
Alps.  There are no recesses, as in Gorbio Valley by the oil-mill;
no sacred solitude of olive gardens on the Roccabruna-road; no nook
upon Saint Martin's Cape, haunted by the voice of breakers, and
fragrant with the threefold sweetness of the rosemary and the sea-
pines and the sea.

For this publicity there is no cure, and no alleviation; but the
storms of which you will complain so bitterly while they endure,
chequer and by their contrast brighten the sameness of the fair-
weather scenes.  When sun and storm contend together--when the
thick clouds are broken up and pierced by arrows of golden
daylight--there will be startling rearrangements and
transfigurations of the mountain summits.  A sun-dazzling spire of
alp hangs suspended in mid-sky among awful glooms and blackness; or
perhaps the edge of some great mountain shoulder will be designed
in living gold, and appear for the duration of a glance bright like
a constellation, and alone 'in the unapparent.'  You may think you
know the figure of these hills; but when they are thus revealed,
they belong no longer to the things of earth--meteors we should
rather call them, appearances of sun and air that endure but for a
moment and return no more.  Other variations are more lasting, as
when, for instance, heavy and wet snow has fallen through some
windless hours, and the thin, spiry, mountain pine trees stand each
stock-still and loaded with a shining burthen.  You may drive
through a forest so disguised, the tongue-tied torrent struggling
silently in the cleft of the ravine, and all still except the
jingle of the sleigh bells, and you shall fancy yourself in some
untrodden northern territory--Lapland, Labrador, or Alaska.

Or, possibly, you arise very early in the morning; totter down
stairs in a state of somnambulism; take the simulacrum of a meal by
the glimmer of one lamp in the deserted coffee-room; and find
yourself by seven o'clock outside in a belated moonlight and a
freezing chill.  The mail sleigh takes you up and carries you on,
and you reach the top of the ascent in the first hour of the day.
To trace the fires of the sunrise as they pass from peak to peak,
to see the unlit tree-tops stand out soberly against the lighted
sky, to be for twenty minutes in a wonderland of clear, fading
shadows, disappearing vapours, solemn blooms of dawn, hills half
glorified already with the day and still half confounded with the
greyness of the western heaven--these will seem to repay you for
the discomforts of that early start; but as the hour proceeds, and
these enchantments vanish, you will find yourself upon the farther
side in yet another Alpine valley, snow white and coal black, with
such another long-drawn congeries of hamlets and such another
senseless watercourse bickering along the foot.  You have had your
moment; but you have not changed the scene.  The mountains are
about you like a trap; you cannot foot it up a hillside and behold
the sea as a great plain, but live in holes and corners, and can
change only one for another.



CHAPTER X--HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS



There has come a change in medical opinion, and a change has
followed in the lives of sick folk.  A year or two ago and the
wounded soldiery of mankind were all shut up together in some
basking angle of the Riviera, walking a dusty promenade or sitting
in dusty olive-yards within earshot of the interminable and
unchanging surf--idle among spiritless idlers; not perhaps dying,
yet hardly living either, and aspiring, sometimes fiercely, after
livelier weather and some vivifying change.  These were certainly
beautiful places to live in, and the climate was wooing in its
softness.  Yet there was a later shiver in the sunshine; you were
not certain whether you were being wooed; and these mild shores
would sometimes seem to you to be the shores of death.  There was a
lack of a manly element; the air was not reactive; you might write
bits of poetry and practise resignation, but you did not feel that
here was a good spot to repair your tissue or regain your nerve.
And it appears, after all, that there was something just in these
appreciations.  The invalid is now asked to lodge on wintry Alps; a
ruder air shall medicine him; the demon of cold is no longer to be
fled from, but bearded in his den.  For even Winter has his  'dear
domestic cave,' and in those places where he may be said to dwell
for ever tempers his austerities.

Any one who has travelled westward by the great transcontinental
railroad of America must remember the joy with which he perceived,
after the tedious prairies of Nebraska and across the vast and
dismal moorlands of Wyoming, a few snowy mountain summits alone,
the southern sky.  It is among these mountains in the new State of
Colorado that the sick man may find, not merely an alleviation of
his ailments, but the possibility of an active life and an honest
livelihood.  There, no longer as a lounger in a plaid, but as a
working farmer, sweating at his work, he may prolong and begin anew
his life.  Instead of the bath-chair, the spade; instead of the
regulated walk, rough journeys in the forest, and the pure, rare
air of the open mountains for the miasma of the sick-room--these
are the changes offered him, with what promise of pleasure and of
self-respect, with what a revolution in all his hopes and terrors,
none but an invalid can know.  Resignation, the cowardice that apes
a kind of courage and that lives in the very air of health resorts,
is cast aside at a breath of such a prospect.  The man can open the
door; he can be up and doing; he can be a kind of a man after all
and not merely an invalid.

But it is a far cry to the Rocky Mountains.  We cannot all of us go
farming in Colorado; and there is yet a middle term, which combines
the medical benefits of the new system with the moral drawbacks of
the old.  Again the invalid has to lie aside from life and its
wholesome duties; again he has to be an idler among idlers; but
this time at a great altitude, far among the mountains, with the
snow piled before his door and the frost flowers every morning on
his window.  The mere fact is tonic to his nerves.  His choice of a
place of wintering has somehow to his own eyes the air of an act of
bold contract; and, since he has wilfully sought low temperatures,
he is not so apt to shudder at a touch of chill.  He came for that,
he looked for it, and he throws it from him with the thought.

A long straight reach of valley, wall-like mountains upon either
hand that rise higher and higher and shoot up new summits the
higher you climb; a few noble peaks seen even from the valley; a
village of hotels; a world of black and white--black pine-woods,
clinging to the sides of the valley, and white snow flouring it,
and papering it between the pine-woods, and covering all the
mountains with a dazzling curd; add a few score invalids marching
to and fro upon the snowy road, or skating on the ice-rinks,
possibly to music, or sitting under sunshades by the door of the
hotel--and you have the larger features of a mountain sanatorium.
A certain furious river runs curving down the valley; its pace
never varies, it has not a pool for as far as you can follow it;
and its unchanging, senseless hurry is strangely tedious to
witness.  It is a river that a man could grow to hate.  Day after
day breaks with the rarest gold upon the mountain spires, and
creeps, growing and glowing, down into the valley.  From end to end
the snow reverberates the sunshine; from end to end the air tingles
with the light, clear and dry like crystal.  Only along the course
of the river, but high above it, there hangs far into the noon, one
waving scarf of vapour.  It were hard to fancy a more engaging
feature in a landscape; perhaps it is harder to believe that
delicate, long-lasting phantom of the atmosphere, a creature of the
incontinent stream whose course it follows.  By noon the sky is
arrayed in an unrivalled pomp of colour--mild and pale and melting
in the north, but towards the zenith, dark with an intensity of
purple blue.  What with this darkness of heaven and the intolerable
lustre of the snow, space is reduced again to chaos.  An English
painter, coming to France late in life, declared with natural anger
that 'the values were all wrong.'  Had he got among the Alps on a
bright day he might have lost his reason.  And even to any one who
has looked at landscape with any care, and in any way through the
spectacles of representative art, the scene has a character of
insanity.  The distant shining mountain peak is here beside your
eye; the neighbouring dull-coloured house in comparison is miles
away; the summit, which is all of splendid snow, is close at hand;
the nigh slopes, which are black with pine trees, bear it no
relation, and might be in another sphere.  Here there are none of
those delicate gradations, those intimate, misty joinings-on and
spreadings-out into the distance, nothing of that art of air and
light by which the face of nature explains and veils itself in
climes which we may be allowed to think more lovely.  A glaring
piece of crudity, where everything that is not white is a solecism
and defies the judgment of the eyesight; a scene of blinding
definition; a parade of daylight, almost scenically vulgar, more
than scenically trying, and yet hearty and healthy, making the
nerves to tighten and the mouth to smile:  such is the winter
daytime in the Alps.

With the approach of evening all is changed.  A mountain will
suddenly intercept the sun; a shadow fall upon the valley; in ten
minutes the thermometer will drop as many degrees; the peaks that
are no longer shone upon dwindle into ghosts; and meanwhile,
overhead, if the weather be rightly characteristic of the place,
the sky fades towards night through a surprising key of colours.
The latest gold leaps from the last mountain.  Soon, perhaps, the
moon shall rise, and in her gentler light the valley shall be
mellowed and misted, and here and there a wisp of silver cloud upon
a hilltop, and here and there a warmly glowing window in a house,
between fire and starlight, kind and homely in the fields of snow.

But the valley is not seated so high among the clouds to be
eternally exempt from changes.  The clouds gather, black as ink;
the wind bursts rudely in; day after day the mists drive overhead,
the snow-flakes flutter down in blinding disarray; daily the mail
comes in later from the top of the pass; people peer through their
windows and foresee no end but an entire seclusion from Europe, and
death by gradual dry-rot, each in his indifferent inn; and when at
last the storm goes, and the sun comes again, behold a world of
unpolluted snow, glossy like fur, bright like daylight, a joy to
wallowing dogs and cheerful to the souls of men.  Or perhaps from
across storied and malarious Italy, a wind cunningly winds about
the mountains and breaks, warm and unclean, upon our mountain
valley.  Every nerve is set ajar; the conscience recognises, at a
gust, a load of sins and negligences hitherto unknown; and the
whole invalid world huddles into its private chambers, and silently
recognises the empire of the Fohn.



CHAPTER XI--ALPINE DIVERSIONS



There will be no lack of diversion in an Alpine sanitarium.  The
place is half English, to be sure, the local sheet appearing in
double column, text and translation; but it still remains half
German; and hence we have a band which is able to play, and a
company of actors able, as you will be told, to act.  This last you
will take on trust, for the players, unlike the local sheet,
confine themselves to German and though at the beginning of winter
they come with their wig-boxes to each hotel in turn, long before
Christmas they will have given up the English for a bad job.  There
will follow, perhaps, a skirmish between the two races; the German
element seeking, in the interest of their actors, to raise a
mysterious item, the Kur-taxe, which figures heavily enough already
in the weekly bills, the English element stoutly resisting.
Meantime in the English hotels home-played farces, tableaux-
vivants, and even balls enliven the evenings; a charity bazaar
sheds genial consternation; Christmas and New Year are solemnised
with Pantagruelian dinners, and from time to time the young folks
carol and revolve untunefully enough through the figures of a
singing quadrille.

A magazine club supplies you with everything, from the Quarterly to
the Sunday at Home.  Grand tournaments are organised at chess,
draughts, billiards and whist.  Once and again wandering artists
drop into our mountain valley, coming you know not whence, going
you cannot imagine whither, and belonging to every degree in the
hierarchy of musical art, from the recognised performer who
announces a concert for the evening, to the comic German family or
solitary long-haired German baritone, who surprises the guests at
dinner-time with songs and a collection.  They are all of them good
to see; they, at least, are moving; they bring with them the
sentiment of the open road; yesterday, perhaps, they were in Tyrol,
and next week they will be far in Lombardy, while all we sick folk
still simmer in our mountain prison.  Some of them, too, are
welcome as the flowers in May for their own sake; some of them may
have a human voice; some may have that magic which transforms a
wooden box into a song-bird, and what we jeeringly call a fiddle
into what we mention with respect as a violin.  From that grinding
lilt, with which the blind man, seeking pence, accompanies the beat
of paddle wheels across the ferry, there is surely a difference
rather of kind than of degree to that unearthly voice of singing
that bewails and praises the destiny of man at the touch of the
true virtuoso.  Even that you may perhaps enjoy; and if you do so
you will own it impossible to enjoy it more keenly than here, im
Schnee der Alpen.  A hyacinth in a pot, a handful of primroses
packed in moss, or a piece of music by some one who knows the way
to the heart of a violin, are things that, in this invariable
sameness of the snows and frosty air, surprise you like an
adventure.  It is droll, moreover, to compare the respect with
which the invalids attend a concert, and the ready contempt with
which they greet the dinner-time performers.  Singing which they
would hear with real enthusiasm--possibly with tears--from a corner
of a drawing-room, is listened to with laughter when it is offered
by an unknown professional and no money has been taken at the door.

Of skating little need be said; in so snowy a climate the rinks
must be intelligently managed; their mismanagement will lead to
many days of vexation and some petty quarrelling, but when all goes
well, it is certainly curious, and perhaps rather unsafe, for the
invalid to skate under a burning sun, and walk back to his hotel in
a sweat, through long tracts of glare and passages of freezing
shadow.  But the peculiar outdoor sport of this district is
tobogganing.  A Scotchman may remember the low flat board, with the
front wheels on a pivot, which was called a hurlie; he may remember
this contrivance, laden with boys, as, laboriously started, it ran
rattling down the brae, and was, now successfully, now
unsuccessfully, steered round the corner at the foot; he may
remember scented summer evenings passed in this diversion, and many
a grazed skin, bloody cockscomb, and neglected lesson.  The
toboggan is to the hurlie what the sled is to the carriage; it is a
hurlie upon runners; and if for a grating road you substitute a
long declivity of beaten snow, you can imagine the giddy career of
the tobogganist.  The correct position is to sit; but the fantastic
will sometimes sit hind-foremost, or dare the descent upon their
belly or their back.  A few steer with a pair of pointed sticks,
but it is more classical to use the feet.  If the weight be heavy
and the track smooth, the toboggan takes the bit between its teeth;
and to steer a couple of full-sized friends in safety requires not
only judgment but desperate exertion.  On a very steep track, with
a keen evening frost, you may have moments almost too appalling to
be called enjoyment; the head goes, the world vanishes; your blind
steed bounds below your weight; you reach the foot, with all the
breath knocked out of your body, jarred and bewildered as though
you had just been subjected to a railway accident.  Another element
of joyful horror is added by the formation of a train; one toboggan
being tied to another, perhaps to the number of half a dozen, only
the first rider being allowed to steer, and all the rest pledged to
put up their feet and follow their leader, with heart in mouth,
down the mad descent.  This, particularly if the track begins with
a headlong plunge, is one of the most exhilarating follies in the
world, and the tobogganing invalid is early reconciled to
somersaults.

There is all manner of variety in the nature of the tracks, some
miles in length, others but a few yards, and yet like some short
rivers, furious in their brevity.  All degrees of skill and courage
and taste may be suited in your neighbourhood.  But perhaps the
true way to toboggan is alone and at night.  First comes the
tedious climb, dragging your instrument behind you.  Next a long
breathing-space, alone with snow and pinewoods, cold, silent and
solemn to the heart.  Then you push of; the toboggan fetches way;
she begins to feel the hill, to glide, to, swim, to gallop.  In a
breath you are out from under the pine trees, and a whole heavenful
of stars reels and flashes overhead.  Then comes a vicious effort;
for by this time your wooden steed is speeding like the wind, and
you are spinning round a corner, and the whole glittering valley
and all the lights in all the great hotels lie for a moment at your
feet; and the next you are racing once more in the shadow of the
night with close-shut teeth and beating heart.  Yet a little while
and you will be landed on the highroad by the door of your own
hotel.  This, in an atmosphere tingling with forty degrees of
frost, in a night made luminous with stars and snow, and girt with
strange white mountains, teaches the pulse an unaccustomed tune and
adds a new excitement to the life of man upon his planet.



CHAPTER XII--THE STIMULATION OF THE ALPS



To any one who should come from a southern sanitarium to the Alps,
the row of sun-burned faces round the table would present the first
surprise.  He would begin by looking for the invalids, and he would
lose his pains, for not one out of five of even the bad cases bears
the mark of sickness on his face.  The plump sunshine from above
and its strong reverberation from below colour the skin like an
Indian climate; the treatment, which consists mainly of the open
air, exposes even the sickliest to tan, and a tableful of invalids
comes, in a month or two, to resemble a tableful of hunters.  But
although he may be thus surprised at the first glance, his
astonishment will grow greater, as he experiences the effects of
the climate on himself.  In many ways it is a trying business to
reside upon the Alps:  the stomach is exercised, the appetite often
languishes; the liver may at times rebel; and because you have come
so far from metropolitan advantages, it does not follow that you
shall recover.  But one thing is undeniable--that in the rare air,
clear, cold, and blinding light of Alpine winters, a man takes a
certain troubled delight in his existence which can nowhere else be
paralleled.  He is perhaps no happier, but he is stingingly alive.
It does not, perhaps, come out of him in work or exercise, yet he
feels an enthusiasm of the blood unknown in more temperate
climates.  It may not be health, but it is fun.

There is nothing more difficult to communicate on paper than this
baseless ardour, this stimulation of the brain, this sterile
joyousness of spirits.  You wake every morning, see the gold upon
the snow-peaks, become filled with courage, and bless God for your
prolonged existence.  The valleys are but a stride to you; you cast
your shoe over the hilltops; your ears and your heart sing; in the
words of an unverified quotation from the Scotch psalms, you feel
yourself fit 'on the wings of all the winds' to 'come flying all
abroad.'  Europe and your mind are too narrow for that flood of
energy.  Yet it is notable that you are hard to root out of your
bed; that you start forth, singing, indeed, on your walk, yet are
unusually ready to turn home again; that the best of you is
volatile; and that although the restlessness remains till night,
the strength is early at an end.  With all these heady jollities,
you are half conscious of an underlying languor in the body; you
prove not to be so well as you had fancied; you weary before you
have well begun; and though you mount at morning with the lark,
that is not precisely a song-bird's heart that you bring back with
you when you return with aching limbs and peevish temper to your
inn.

It is hard to say wherein it lies, but this joy of Alpine winters
is its own reward.  Baseless, in a sense, it is more than worth
more permanent improvements.  The dream of health is perfect while
it lasts; and if, in trying to realise it, you speedily wear out
the dear hallucination, still every day, and many times a day, you
are conscious of a strength you scarce possess, and a delight in
living as merry as it proves to be transient.

The brightness--heaven and earth conspiring to be bright--the
levity and quiet of the air; the odd stirring silence--more
stirring than a tumult; the snow, the frost, the enchanted
landscape:  all have their part in the effect and on the memory,
'tous vous tapent sur la tete'; and yet when you have enumerated
all, you have gone no nearer to explain or even to qualify the
delicate exhilaration that you feel--delicate, you may say, and yet
excessive, greater than can be said in prose, almost greater than
an invalid can bear.  There is a certain wine of France known in
England in some gaseous disguise, but when drunk in the land of its
nativity still as a pool, clean as river water, and as heady as
verse.  It is more than probable that in its noble natural
condition this was the very wine of Anjou so beloved by Athos in
the 'Musketeers.'  Now, if the reader has ever washed down a
liberal second breakfast with the wine in question, and gone forth,
on the back of these dilutions, into a sultry, sparkling noontide,
he will have felt an influence almost as genial, although strangely
grosser, than this fairy titillation of the nerves among the snow
and sunshine of the Alps.  That also is a mode, we need not say of
intoxication, but of insobriety.  Thus also a man walks in a strong
sunshine of the mind, and follows smiling, insubstantial
meditations.  And whether he be really so clever or so strong as he
supposes, in either case he will enjoy his chimera while it lasts.

The influence of this giddy air displays itself in many secondary
ways.  A certain sort of laboured pleasantry has already been
recognised, and may perhaps have been remarked in these papers, as
a sort peculiar to that climate.  People utter their judgments with
a cannonade of syllables; a big word is as good as a meal to them;
and the turn of a phrase goes further than humour or wisdom.  By
the professional writer many sad vicissitudes have to be undergone.
At first he cannot write at all.  The heart, it appears, is unequal
to the pressure of business, and the brain, left without
nourishment, goes into a mild decline.  Next, some power of work
returns to him, accompanied by jumping headaches.  Last, the spring
is opened, and there pours at once from his pen a world of blatant,
hustling polysyllables, and talk so high as, in the old joke, to be
positively offensive in hot weather.  He writes it in good faith
and with a sense of inspiration; it is only when he comes to read
what he has written that surprise and disquiet seize upon his mind.
What is he to do, poor man?  All his little fishes talk like
whales.  This yeasty inflation, this stiff and strutting
architecture of the sentence has come upon him while he slept; and
it is not he, it is the Alps, who are to blame.  He is not,
perhaps, alone, which somewhat comforts him.  Nor is the ill
without a remedy.  Some day, when the spring returns, he shall go
down a little lower in this world, and remember quieter inflections
and more modest language.  But here, in the meantime, there seems
to swim up some outline of a new cerebral hygiene and a good time
coming, when experienced advisers shall send a man to the proper
measured level for the ode, the biography, or the religious tract;
and a nook may be found between the sea and Chimborazo, where Mr.
Swinburne shall be able to write more continently, and Mr. Browning
somewhat slower.

Is it a return of youth, or is it a congestion of the brain?  It is
a sort of congestion, perhaps, that leads the invalid, when all
goes well, to face the new day with such a bubbling cheerfulness.
It is certainly congestion that makes night hideous with visions,
all the chambers of a many-storeyed caravanserai, haunted with
vociferous nightmares, and many wakeful people come down late for
breakfast in the morning.  Upon that theory the cynic may explain
the whole affair--exhilaration, nightmares, pomp of tongue and all.
But, on the other hand, the peculiar blessedness of boyhood may
itself be but a symptom of the same complaint, for the two effects
are strangely similar; and the frame of mind of the invalid upon
the Alps is a sort of intermittent youth, with periods of
lassitude.  The fountain of Juventus does not play steadily in
these parts; but there it plays, and possibly nowhere else.



CHAPTER XIII--ROADS--1873



No amateur will deny that he can find more pleasure in a single
drawing, over which he can sit a whole quiet forenoon, and so
gradually study himself into humour with the artist, than he can
ever extract from the dazzle and accumulation of incongruous
impressions that send him, weary and stupefied, out of some famous
picture-gallery.  But what is thus admitted with regard to art is
not extended to the (so-called) natural beauties no amount of
excess in sublime mountain outline or the graces of cultivated
lowland can do anything, it is supposed, to weaken or degrade the
palate.  We are not at all sure, however, that moderation, and a
regimen tolerably austere, even in scenery, are not healthful and
strengthening to the taste; and that the best school for a lover of
nature is not to the found in one of those countries where there is
no stage effect--nothing salient or sudden,--but a quiet spirit of
orderly and harmonious beauty pervades all the details, so that we
can patiently attend to each of the little touches that strike in
us, all of them together, the subdued note of the landscape.  It is
in scenery such as this that we find ourselves in the right temper
to seek out small sequestered loveliness.  The constant recurrence
of similar combinations of colour and outline gradually forces upon
us a sense of how the harmony has been built up, and we become
familiar with something of nature's mannerism.  This is the true
pleasure of your 'rural voluptuary,'--not to remain awe-stricken
before a Mount Chimborazo; not to sit deafened over the big drum in
the orchestra, but day by day to teach himself some new beauty--to
experience some new vague and tranquil sensation that has before
evaded him.  It is not the people who 'have pined and hungered
after nature many a year, in the great city pent,' as Coleridge
said in the poem that made Charles Lamb so much ashamed of himself;
it is not those who make the greatest progress in this intimacy
with her, or who are most quick to see and have the greatest gusto
to enjoy.  In this, as in everything else, it is minute knowledge
and long-continued loving industry that make the true dilettante.
A man must have thought much over scenery before he begins fully to
enjoy it.  It is no youngling enthusiasm on hilltops that can
possess itself of the last essence of beauty.  Probably most
people's heads are growing bare before they can see all in a
landscape that they have the capability of seeing; and, even then,
it will be only for one little moment of consummation before the
faculties are again on the decline, and they that look out of the
windows begin to be darkened and restrained in sight.  Thus the
study of nature should be carried forward thoroughly and with
system.  Every gratification should be rolled long under the
tongue, and we should be always eager to analyse and compare, in
order that we may be able to give some plausible reason for our
admirations.  True, it is difficult to put even approximately into
words the kind of feelings thus called into play.  There is a
dangerous vice inherent in any such intellectual refining upon
vague sensation.  The analysis of such satisfactions lends itself
very readily to literary affectations; and we can all think of
instances where it has shown itself apt to exercise a morbid
influence, even upon an author's choice of language and the turn of
his sentences.  And yet there is much that makes the attempt
attractive; for any expression, however imperfect, once given to a
cherished feeling, seems a sort of legitimation of the pleasure we
take in it.  A common sentiment is one of those great goods that
make life palatable and ever new.  The knowledge that another has
felt as we have felt, and seen things, even if they are little
things, not much otherwise than we have seen them, will continue to
the end to be one of life's choicest pleasures.

Let the reader, then, betake himself in the spirit we have
recommended to some of the quieter kinds of English landscape.  In
those homely and placid agricultural districts, familiarity will
bring into relief many things worthy of notice, and urge them
pleasantly home to him by a sort of loving repetition; such as the
wonderful life-giving speed of windmill sails above the stationary
country; the occurrence and recurrence of the same church tower at
the end of one long vista after another:  and, conspicuous among
these sources of quiet pleasure, the character and variety of the
road itself, along which he takes his way.  Not only near at hand,
in the lithe contortions with which it adapts itself to the
interchanges of level and slope, but far away also, when he sees a
few hundred feet of it upheaved against a hill and shining in the
afternoon sun, he will find it an object so changeful and
enlivening that he can always pleasurably busy his mind about it.
He may leave the river-side, or fall out of the way of villages,
but the road he has always with him; and, in the true humour of
observation, will find in that sufficient company.  From its subtle
windings and changes of level there arises a keen and continuous
interest, that keeps the attention ever alert and cheerful.  Every
sensitive adjustment to the contour of the ground, every little dip
and swerve, seems instinct with life and an exquisite sense of
balance and beauty.  The road rolls upon the easy slopes of the
country, like a long ship in the hollows of the sea.  The very
margins of waste ground, as they trench a little farther on the
beaten way, or recede again to the shelter of the hedge, have
something of the same free delicacy of line--of the same swing and
wilfulness.  You might think for a whole summer's day (and not have
thought it any nearer an end by evening) what concourse and
succession of circumstances has produced the least of these
deflections; and it is, perhaps, just in this that we should look
for the secret of their interest.  A foot-path across a meadow--in
all its human waywardness and unaccountability, in all the grata
protervitas of its varying direction--will always be more to us
than a railroad well engineered through a difficult country. {7}
No reasoned sequence is thrust upon our attention:  we seem to have
slipped for one lawless little moment out of the iron rule of cause
and effect; and so we revert at once to some of the pleasant old
heresies of personification, always poetically orthodox, and
attribute a sort of free-will, an active and spontaneous life, to
the white riband of road that lengthens out, and bends, and
cunningly adapts itself to the inequalities of the land before our
eyes.  We remember, as we write, some miles of fine wide highway
laid out with conscious aesthetic artifice through a broken and
richly cultivated tract of country.  It is said that the engineer
had Hogarth's line of beauty in his mind as he laid them down.  And
the result is striking.  One splendid satisfying sweep passes with
easy transition into another, and there is nothing to trouble or
dislocate the strong continuousness of the main line of the road.
And yet there is something wanting.  There is here no saving
imperfection, none of those secondary curves and little
trepidations of direction that carry, in natural roads, our
curiosity actively along with them.  One feels at once that this
road has not has been laboriously grown like a natural road, but
made to pattern; and that, while a model may be academically
correct in outline, it will always be inanimate and cold.  The
traveller is also aware of a sympathy of mood between himself and
the road he travels.  We have all seen ways that have wandered into
heavy sand near the sea-coast, and trail wearily over the dunes
like a trodden serpent.  Here we too must plod forward at a dull,
laborious pace; and so a sympathy is preserved between our frame of
mind and the expression of the relaxed, heavy curves of the
roadway.  Such a phenomenon, indeed, our reason might perhaps
resolve with a little trouble.  We might reflect that the present
road had been developed out of a tract spontaneously followed by
generations of primitive wayfarers; and might see in its expression
a testimony that those generations had been affected at the same
ground, one after another, in the same manner as we are affected
to-day.  Or we might carry the reflection further, and remind
ourselves that where the air is invigorating and the ground firm
under the traveller's foot, his eye is quick to take advantage of
small undulations, and he will turn carelessly aside from the
direct way wherever there is anything beautiful to examine or some
promise of a wider view; so that even a bush of wild roses may
permanently bias and deform the straight path over the meadow;
whereas, where the soil is heavy, one is preoccupied with the
labour of mere progression, and goes with a bowed head heavily and
unobservantly forward.  Reason, however, will not carry us the
whole way; for the sentiment often recurs in situations where it is
very hard to imagine any possible explanation; and indeed, if we
drive briskly along a good, well-made road in an open vehicle, we
shall experience this sympathy almost at its fullest.  We feel the
sharp settle of the springs at some curiously twisted corner; after
a steep ascent, the fresh air dances in our faces as we rattle
precipitately down the other side, and we find it difficult to
avoid attributing something headlong, a sort of ABANDON, to the
road itself.

The mere winding of the path is enough to enliven a long day's walk
in even a commonplace or dreary country-side.  Something that we
have seen from miles back, upon an eminence, is so long hid from
us, as we wander through folded valleys or among woods, that our
expectation of seeing it again is sharpened into a violent
appetite, and as we draw nearer we impatiently quicken our steps
and turn every corner with a beating heart.  It is through these
prolongations of expectancy, this succession of one hope to
another, that we live out long seasons of pleasure in a few hours'
walk.  It is in following these capricious sinuosities that we
learn, only bit by bit and through one coquettish reticence after
another, much as we learn the heart of a friend, the whole
loveliness of the country.  This disposition always preserves
something new to be seen, and takes us, like a careful cicerone, to
many different points of distant view before it allows us finally
to approach the hoped-for destination.

In its connection with the traffic, and whole friendly intercourse
with the country, there is something very pleasant in that
succession of saunterers and brisk and business-like passers-by,
that peoples our ways and helps to build up what Walt Whitman calls
'the cheerful voice of the public road, the gay, fresh sentiment of
the road.'  But out of the great network of ways that binds all
life together from the hill-farm to the city, there is something
individual to most, and, on the whole, nearly as much choice on the
score of company as on the score of beauty or easy travel.  On some
we are never long without the sound of wheels, and folk pass us by
so thickly that we lose the sense of their number.  But on others,
about little-frequented districts, a meeting is an affair of
moment; we have the sight far off of some one coming towards us,
the growing definiteness of the person, and then the brief passage
and salutation, and the road left empty in front of us for perhaps
a great while to come.  Such encounters have a wistful interest
that can hardly be understood by the dweller in places more
populous.  We remember standing beside a countryman once, in the
mouth of a quiet by-street in a city that was more than ordinarily
crowded and bustling; he seemed stunned and bewildered by the
continual passage of different faces; and after a long pause,
during which he appeared to search for some suitable expression, he
said timidly that there seemed to be a GREAT DEAL OF MEETING
THEREABOUTS.  The phrase is significant.  It is the expression of
town-life in the language of the long, solitary country highways.
A meeting of one with one was what this man had been used to in the
pastoral uplands from which he came; and the concourse of the
streets was in his eyes only an extraordinary multiplication of
such 'meetings.'

And now we come to that last and most subtle quality of all, to
that sense of prospect, of outlook, that is brought so powerfully
to our minds by a road.  In real nature, as well as in old
landscapes, beneath that impartial daylight in which a whole
variegated plain is plunged and saturated, the line of the road
leads the eye forth with the vague sense of desire up to the green
limit of the horizon.  Travel is brought home to us, and we visit
in spirit every grove and hamlet that tempts us in the distance.
Sehnsucht--the passion for what is ever beyond--is livingly
expressed in that white riband of possible travel that severs the
uneven country; not a ploughman following his plough up the shining
furrow, not the blue smoke of any cottage in a hollow, but is
brought to us with a sense of nearness and attainability by this
wavering line of junction.  There is a passionate paragraph in
Werther that strikes the very key.  'When I came hither,' he
writes, 'how the beautiful valley invited me on every side, as I
gazed down into it from the hill-top!  There the wood--ah, that I
might mingle in its shadows! there the mountain summits--ah, that I
might look down from them over the broad country! the interlinked
hills! the secret valleys!  Oh to lose myself among their
mysteries!  I hurried into the midst, and came back without finding
aught I hoped for.  Alas! the distance is like the future.  A vast
whole lies in the twilight before our spirit; sight and feeling
alike plunge and lose themselves in the prospect, and we yearn to
surrender our whole being, and let it be filled full with all the
rapture of one single glorious sensation; and alas! when we hasten
to the fruition, when THERE is changed to HERE, all is afterwards
as it was before, and we stand in our indigent and cramped estate,
and our soul thirsts after a still ebbing elixir.'  It is to this
wandering and uneasy spirit of anticipation that roads minister.
Every little vista, every little glimpse that we have of what lies
before us, gives the impatient imagination rein, so that it can
outstrip the body and already plunge into the shadow of the woods,
and overlook from the hill-top the plain beyond it, and wander in
the windings of the valleys that are still far in front.  The road
is already there--we shall not be long behind.  It is as if we were
marching with the rear of a great army, and, from far before, heard
the acclamation of the people as the vanguard entered some friendly
and jubilant city.  Would not every man, through all the long miles
of march, feel as if he also were within the gates?



CHAPTER XIV--ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES--1874



It is a difficult matter to make the most of any given place, and
we have much in our own power.  Things looked at patiently from one
side after another generally end by showing a side that is
beautiful.  A few months ago some words were said in the Portfolio
as to an 'austere regimen in scenery'; and such a discipline was
then recommended as 'healthful and strengthening to the taste.'
That is the text, so to speak, of the present essay.  This
discipline in scenery, it must be understood, is something more
than a mere walk before breakfast to whet the appetite.  For when
we are put down in some unsightly neighbourhood, and especially if
we have come to be more or less dependent on what we see, we must
set ourselves to hunt out beautiful things with all the ardour and
patience of a botanist after a rye plant.  Day by day we perfect
ourselves in the art of seeing nature more favourably.  We learn to
live with her, as people learn to live with fretful or violent
spouses:  to dwell lovingly on what is good, and shut our eyes
against all that is bleak or inharmonious.  We learn, also, to come
to each place in the right spirit.  The traveller, as Brantome
quaintly tells us,  'fait des discours en soi pour soutenir en
chemin'; and into these discourses he weaves something out of all
that he sees and suffers by the way; they take their tone greatly
from the varying character of the scene; a sharp ascent brings
different thoughts from a level road; and the man's fancies grow
lighter as he comes out of the wood into a clearing.  Nor does the
scenery any more affect the thoughts than the thoughts affect the
scenery.  We see places through our humours as through differently
coloured glasses.  We are ourselves a term in the equation, a note
of the chord, and make discord or harmony almost at will.  There is
no fear for the result, if we can but surrender ourselves
sufficiently to the country that surrounds and follows us, so that
we are ever thinking suitable thoughts or telling ourselves some
suitable sort of story as we go.  We become thus, in some sense, a
centre of beauty; we are provocative of beauty, much as a gentle
and sincere character is provocative of sincerity and gentleness in
others.  And even where there is no harmony to be elicited by the
quickest and most obedient of spirits, we may still embellish a
place with some attraction of romance.  We may learn to go far
afield for associations, and handle them lightly when we have found
them.  Sometimes an old print comes to our aid; I have seen many a
spot lit up at once with picturesque imaginations, by a
reminiscence of Callot, or Sadeler, or Paul Brill.  Dick Turpin has
been my lay figure for many an English lane.  And I suppose the
Trossachs would hardly be the Trossachs for most tourists if a man
of admirable romantic instinct had not peopled it for them with
harmonious figures, and brought them thither with minds rightly
prepared for the impression.  There is half the battle in this
preparation.  For instance:  I have rarely been able to visit, in
the proper spirit, the wild and inhospitable places of our own
Highlands.  I am happier where it is tame and fertile, and not
readily pleased without trees.  I understand that there are some
phases of mental trouble that harmonise well with such
surroundings, and that some persons, by the dispensing power of the
imagination, can go back several centuries in spirit, and put
themselves into sympathy with the hunted, houseless, unsociable way
of life that was in its place upon these savage hills.  Now, when I
am sad, I like nature to charm me out of my sadness, like David
before Saul; and the thought of these past ages strikes nothing in
me but an unpleasant pity; so that I can never hit on the right
humour for this sort of landscape, and lose much pleasure in
consequence.  Still, even here, if I were only let alone, and time
enough were given, I should have all manner of pleasures, and take
many clear and beautiful images away with me when I left.  When we
cannot think ourselves into sympathy with the great features of a
country, we learn to ignore them, and put our head among the grass
for flowers, or pore, for long times together, over the changeful
current of a stream.  We come down to the sermon in stones, when we
are shut out from any poem in the spread landscape.  We begin to
peep and botanise, we take an interest in birds and insects, we
find many things beautiful in miniature.  The reader will recollect
the little summer scene in Wuthering Heights--the one warm scene,
perhaps, in all that powerful, miserable novel--and the great
feature that is made therein by grasses and flowers and a little
sunshine:  this is in the spirit of which I now speak.  And,
lastly, we can go indoors; interiors are sometimes as beautiful,
often more picturesque, than the shows of the open air, and they
have that quality of shelter of which I shall presently have more
to say.

With all this in mind, I have often been tempted to put forth the
paradox that any place is good enough to live a life in, while it
is only in a few, and those highly favoured, that we can pass a few
hours agreeably.  For, if we only stay long enough we become at
home in the neighbourhood.  Reminiscences spring up, like flowers,
about uninteresting corners.  We forget to some degree the superior
loveliness of other places, and fall into a tolerant and
sympathetic spirit which is its own reward and justification.
Looking back the other day on some recollections of my own, I was
astonished to find how much I owed to such a residence; six weeks
in one unpleasant country-side had done more, it seemed, to quicken
and educate my sensibilities than many years in places that jumped
more nearly with my inclination.

The country to which I refer was a level and tree-less plateau,
over which the winds cut like a whip.  For miles and miles it was
the same.  A river, indeed, fell into the sea near the town where I
resided; but the valley of the river was shallow and bald, for as
far up as ever I had the heart to follow it.  There were roads,
certainly, but roads that had no beauty or interest; for, as there
was no timber, and but little irregularity of surface, you saw your
whole walk exposed to you from the beginning:  there was nothing
left to fancy, nothing to expect, nothing to see by the wayside,
save here and there an unhomely-looking homestead, and here and
there a solitary, spectacled stone-breaker; and you were only
accompanied, as you went doggedly forward, by the gaunt telegraph-
posts and the hum of the resonant wires in the keen sea-wind.  To
one who had learned to know their song in warm pleasant places by
the Mediterranean, it seemed to taunt the country, and make it
still bleaker by suggested contrast.  Even the waste places by the
side of the road were not, as Hawthorne liked to put it, 'taken
back to Nature' by any decent covering of vegetation.  Wherever the
land had the chance, it seemed to lie fallow.  There is a certain
tawny nudity of the South, bare sunburnt plains, coloured like a
lion, and hills clothed only in the blue transparent air; but this
was of another description--this was the nakedness of the North;
the earth seemed to know that it was naked, and was ashamed and
cold.

It seemed to be always blowing on that coast.  Indeed, this had
passed into the speech of the inhabitants, and they saluted each
other when they met with 'Breezy, breezy,' instead of the customary
'Fine day' of farther south.  These continual winds were not like
the harvest breeze, that just keeps an equable pressure against
your face as you walk, and serves to set all the trees talking over
your head, or bring round you the smell of the wet surface of the
country after a shower.  They were of the bitter, hard, persistent
sort, that interferes with sight and respiration, and makes the
eyes sore.  Even such winds as these have their own merit in proper
time and place.  It is pleasant to see them brandish great masses
of shadow.  And what a power they have over the colour of the
world!  How they ruffle the solid woodlands in their passage, and
make them shudder and whiten like a single willow!  There is
nothing more vertiginous than a wind like this among the woods,
with all its sights and noises; and the effect gets between some
painters and their sober eyesight, so that, even when the rest of
their picture is calm, the foliage is coloured like foliage in a
gale.  There was nothing, however, of this sort to be noticed in a
country where there were no trees and hardly any shadows, save the
passive shadows of clouds or those of rigid houses and walls.  But
the wind was nevertheless an occasion of pleasure; for nowhere
could you taste more fully the pleasure of a sudden lull, or a
place of opportune shelter.  The reader knows what I mean; he must
remember how, when he has sat himself down behind a dyke on a
hillside, he delighted to hear the wind hiss vainly through the
crannies at his back; how his body tingled all over with warmth,
and it began to dawn upon him, with a sort of slow surprise, that
the country was beautiful, the heather purple, and the far-away
hills all marbled with sun and shadow.  Wordsworth, in a beautiful
passage of the 'Prelude,' has used this as a figure for the feeling
struck in us by the quiet by-streets of London after the uproar of
the great thoroughfares; and the comparison may be turned the other
way with as good effect:-

'Meanwhile the roar continues, till at length,
Escaped as from an enemy, we turn
Abruptly into some sequester'd nook,
Still as a shelter'd place when winds blow loud!'

I remember meeting a man once, in a train, who told me of what must
have been quite the most perfect instance of this pleasure of
escape.  He had gone up, one sunny, windy morning, to the top of a
great cathedral somewhere abroad; I think it was Cologne Cathedral,
the great unfinished marvel by the Rhine; and after a long while in
dark stairways, he issued at last into the sunshine, on a platform
high above the town.  At that elevation it was quite still and
warm; the gale was only in the lower strata of the air, and he had
forgotten it in the quiet interior of the church and during his
long ascent; and so you may judge of his surprise when, resting his
arms on the sunlit balustrade and looking over into the Place far
below him, he saw the good people holding on their hats and leaning
hard against the wind as they walked.  There is something, to my
fancy, quite perfect in this little experience of my fellow-
traveller's.  The ways of men seem always very trivial to us when
we find ourselves alone on a church-top, with the blue sky and a
few tall pinnacles, and see far below us the steep roofs and
foreshortened buttresses, and the silent activity of the city
streets; but how much more must they not have seemed so to him as
he stood, not only above other men's business, but above other
men's climate, in a golden zone like Apollo's!

This was the sort of pleasure I found in the country of which I
write.  The pleasure was to be out of the wind, and to keep it in
memory all the time, and hug oneself upon the shelter.  And it was
only by the sea that any such sheltered places were to be found.
Between the black worm-eaten head-lands there are little bights and
havens, well screened from the wind and the commotion of the
external sea, where the sand and weeds look up into the gazer's
face from a depth of tranquil water, and the sea-birds, screaming
and flickering from the ruined crags, alone disturb the silence and
the sunshine.  One such place has impressed itself on my memory
beyond all others.  On a rock by the water's edge, old fighting men
of the Norse breed had planted a double castle; the two stood wall
to wall like semi-detached villas; and yet feud had run so high
between their owners, that one, from out of a window, shot the
other as he stood in his own doorway.  There is something in the
juxtaposition of these two enemies full of tragic irony.  It is
grim to think of bearded men and bitter women taking hateful
counsel together about the two hall-fires at night, when the sea
boomed against the foundations and the wild winter wind was loose
over the battlements.  And in the study we may reconstruct for
ourselves some pale figure of what life then was.  Not so when we
are there; when we are there such thoughts come to us only to
intensify a contrary impression, and association is turned against
itself.  I remember walking thither three afternoons in succession,
my eyes weary with being set against the wind, and how, dropping
suddenly over the edge of the down, I found myself in a new world
of warmth and shelter.  The wind, from which I had escaped, 'as
from an enemy,' was seemingly quite local.  It carried no clouds
with it, and came from such a quarter that it did not trouble the
sea within view.  The two castles, black and ruinous as the rocks
about them, were still distinguishable from these by something more
insecure and fantastic in the outline, something that the last
storm had left imminent and the next would demolish entirely.  It
would be difficult to render in words the sense of peace that took
possession of me on these three afternoons.  It was helped out, as
I have said, by the contrast.  The shore was battered and bemauled
by previous tempests; I had the memory at heart of the insane
strife of the pigmies who had erected these two castles and lived
in them in mutual distrust and enmity, and knew I had only to put
my head out of this little cup of shelter to find the hard wind
blowing in my eyes; and yet there were the two great tracts of
motionless blue air and peaceful sea looking on, unconcerned and
apart, at the turmoil of the present moment and the memorials of
the precarious past.  There is ever something transitory and
fretful in the impression of a high wind under a cloudless sky; it
seems to have no root in the constitution of things; it must
speedily begin to faint and wither away like a cut flower.  And on
those days the thought of the wind and the thought of human life
came very near together in my mind.  Our noisy years did indeed
seem moments in the being of the eternal silence; and the wind, in
the face of that great field of stationary blue, was as the wind of
a butterfly's wing.  The placidity of the sea was a thing likewise
to be remembered.  Shelley speaks of the sea as 'hungering for
calm,' and in this place one learned to understand the phrase.
Looking down into these green waters from the broken edge of the
rock, or swimming leisurely in the sunshine, it seemed to me that
they were enjoying their own tranquillity; and when now and again
it was disturbed by a wind ripple on the surface, or the quick
black passage of a fish far below, they settled back again (one
could fancy) with relief.

On shore too, in the little nook of shelter, everything was so
subdued and still that the least particular struck in me a
pleasurable surprise.  The desultory crackling of the whin-pods in
the afternoon sun usurped the ear.  The hot, sweet breath of the
bank, that had been saturated all day long with sunshine, and now
exhaled it into my face, was like the breath of a fellow-creature.
I remember that I was haunted by two lines of French verse; in some
dumb way they seemed to fit my surroundings and give expression to
the contentment that was in me, and I kept repeating to myself -

'Mon coeur est un luth suspendu,
Sitot qu'on le touche, il resonne.'

I can give no reason why these lines came to me at this time; and
for that very cause I repeat them here.  For all I know, they may
serve to complete the impression in the mind of the reader, as they
were certainly a part of it for me.

And this happened to me in the place of all others where I liked
least to stay.  When I think of it I grow ashamed of my own
ingratitude.  'Out of the strong came forth sweetness.'  There, in
the bleak and gusty North, I received, perhaps, my strongest
impression of peace.  I saw the sea to be great and calm; and the
earth, in that little corner, was all alive and friendly to me.
So, wherever a man is, he will find something to please and pacify
him:  in the town he will meet pleasant faces of men and women, and
see beautiful flowers at a window, or hear a cage-bird singing at
the corner of the gloomiest street; and for the country, there is
no country without some amenity--let him only look for it in the
right spirit, and he will surely find.



Footnotes:

{1}  The Second Part here referred to is entitled 'ACROSS THE
PLAINS,' and is printed in the volume so entitled, together with
other Memories and Essays.

{2}  I had nearly finished the transcription of the following pages
when I saw on a friend's table the number containing the piece from
which this sentence is extracted, and, struck with a similarity of
title, took it home with me and read it with indescribable
satisfaction.  I do not know whether I more envy M. Theuriet the
pleasure of having written this delightful article, or the reader
the pleasure, which I hope he has still before him, of reading it
once and again, and lingering over the passages that please him
most.

{3}  William Abercrombie.  See Fasti Ecclesia Scoticanae, under
'Maybole' (Part iii.).

{4}  'Duex poures varlez qui n'ont nulz gages et qui gissoient la
nuit avec les chiens.'  See Champollion--Figeac's Louis et Charles
d'Orleans, i. 63, and for my lord's English horn, ibid. 96.

{5}  Reprinted by permission of John Lane.

{6}  'Jehovah Tsidkenu,' translated in the Authorised Version as
'The Lord our Righteousness' (Jeremiah xxiii. 6 and xxxiii. 16).

{7}  Compare Blake, in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
'Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads, without
improvement, are roads of Genius.'





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