Household words, No. 4, April 20, 1850
Author: Unknown
Date: 2026-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

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Title: Household words, No. 4, April 20, 1850

Editor: Charles Dickens

Release date: March 10, 2026 [eBook #78167]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Bradbury & Evans, 1850

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOUSEHOLD WORDS, NO. 4, APRIL 20, 1850 ***

Transcriber’s Note:

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

HOUSEHOLD WORDS.
A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.

No. 4.]      SATURDAY, APRIL 20, 1850.      [Price 2d.

SOME ACCOUNT OF AN EXTRAORDINARY TRAVELLER.

No longer ago than this Easter time last past, we became acquainted with the subject of the present notice. Our knowledge of him is not by any means an intimate one, and is only of a public nature. We have never interchanged any conversation with him, except on one occasion when he asked us to have the goodness to take off our hat, to which we replied ‘Certainly.’

Mr. Booley was born (we believe) in Rood Lane, in the City of London. He is now a gentleman advanced in life, and has for some years resided in the neighbourhood of Islington. His father was a wholesale grocer (perhaps), and he was (possibly) in the same way of business; or he may, at an early age, have become a clerk in the Bank of England, or in a private bank, or in the India House. It will be observed that we make no pretence of having any information in reference to the private history of this remarkable man, and that our account of it must be received as rather speculative than authentic.

In person Mr. Booley is below the middle size, and corpulent. His countenance is florid, he is perfectly bald, and soon hot; and there is a composure in his gait and manner, calculated to impress a stranger with the idea of his being, on the whole, an unwieldy man. It is only in his eye that the adventurous character of Mr. Booley is seen to shine. It is a moist, bright eye, of a cheerful expression, and indicative of keen and eager curiosity.

It was not until late in life that Mr. Booley conceived the idea of entering on the extraordinary amount of travel he has since accomplished. He had attained the age of sixty-five, before he left England for the first time. In all the immense journies he has since performed, he has never laid aside the English dress, nor departed in the slightest degree from English customs. Neither does he speak a word of any language but his own.

Mr. Booley’s powers of endurance are wonderful. All climates are alike to him. Nothing exhausts him; no alternations of heat and cold appear to have the least effect upon his hardy frame. His capacity of travelling, day and night, for thousands of miles, has never been approached by any traveller of whom we have any knowledge through the help of books. An intelligent Englishman may have occasionally pointed out to him objects and scenes of interest; but otherwise he has travelled alone, and unattended. Though remarkable for personal cleanliness, he has carried no luggage; and his diet has been of the simplest kind. He has often found a biscuit, or a bun, sufficient for his support over a vast tract of country. Frequently, he has travelled hundreds of miles, fasting, without the least abatement of his natural spirits. It says much for the Total Abstinence cause, that Mr. Booley has never had recourse to the artificial stimulus of alcohol, to sustain him under his fatigues.

His first departure from the sedentary and monotonous life he had hitherto led, strikingly exemplifies, we think, the energetic character, long suppressed by that unchanging routine. Without any communication with any member of his family—Mr. Booley has never been married, but has many relations—without announcing his intention to his solicitor, or banker, or any person entrusted with the management of his affairs, he closed the door of his house behind him at one o’clock in the afternoon of a certain day, and immediately proceeded to New Orleans, in the United States of America.

His intention was to ascend the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, to the base of the Rocky Mountains. Taking his passage in a steamboat without loss of time, he was soon upon the bosom of the Father of Waters, as the Indians call the mighty stream which, night and day, is always carrying huge instalments of the vast continent of the New World, down into the sea.

Mr. Booley found it singularly interesting to observe the various stages of civilisation obtaining on the banks of these mighty rivers. Leaving the luxury and brightness of New Orleans—a somewhat feverish luxury and brightness, he observed, as if the swampy soil were too much enriched in the hot sun with the bodies of dead slaves—and passing various towns in every stage of progress, it was very curious to observe the changes of civilisation and of vegetation too. Here, where the doomed Negro race were working in the plantations, while the republican overseer looked on, whip in hand, tropical trees were growing, beautiful flowers in bloom; the alligator, with his horribly sly face, and his jaws like two great saws, was basking on the mud; and the strange moss of the country was hanging in wreaths and garlands on the trees, like votive offerings. A little farther towards the west, and the trees and flowers were changed, the moss was gone, younger infant towns were rising, forests were slowly disappearing, and the trees, obliged to aid in the destruction of their kind, fed the heavily-breathing monster that came clanking up those solitudes, laden with the pioneers of the advancing human army. The river itself, that moving highway, showed him every kind of floating contrivance, from the lumbering flat-bottomed boat, and the raft of logs, upward to the steamboat, and downward to the poor Indian’s frail canoe. A winding thread through the enormous range of country, unrolling itself before the wanderer like the magic skein in the story, he saw it tracked by wanderers of every kind, roaming from the more settled world, to those first nests of men. The floating theatre, dwelling-house, hotel, museum, shop; the floating mechanism for screwing the trunks of mighty trees out of the mud, like antediluvian teeth; the rapidly-flowing river, and the blazing woods; he left them all behind—town, city, and log-cabin, too; and floated up into the prairies and savannahs, among the deserted lodges of tribes of savages, and among their dead, lying alone on little wooden stages with their stark faces upward towards the sky. Among the blazing grass, and herds of buffaloes and wild horses, and among the wigwams of the fast-declining Indians, he began to consider how, in the eternal current of progress setting across this globe in one unchangeable direction, like the unseen agency that points the needle to the pole, the Chiefs who only dance the dances of their fathers, and will never have a new figure for a new tune, and the Medicine-men who know no Medicine but what was Medicine a hundred years ago, must be surely and inevitably swept from the earth, whether they be Choctawas, Mandans, Britons, Austrians, or Chinese.

He was struck, too, by the reflection that savage nature was not by any means such a fine and noble spectacle as some delight to represent it. He found it a poor, greasy, paint-plastered, miserable thing enough; but a very little way above the beasts in most respects; in many customs a long way below them. It occurred to him that the ‘Big Bird,’ or the ‘Blue Fish,’ or any of the other Braves, was but a troublesome braggart after all; making a mighty whooping and holloaing about nothing particular, doing very little for science, not much more than the monkeys for art, scarcely anything worth mentioning for letters, and not often making the world greatly better than he found it. Civilisation, Mr. Booley concluded, was, on the whole, with all its blemishes, a more imposing sight, and a far better thing to stand by.

Mr. Booley’s observations of the celestial bodies, on this voyage, were principally confined to the discovery of the alarming fact, that light had altogether departed from the moon; which presented the appearance of a white dinner-plate. The clouds, too, conducted themselves in an extraordinary manner, and assumed the most eccentric forms, while the sun rose and set in a very reckless way. On his return to his native country, however, he had the satisfaction of finding all these things as usual.

It might have been expected that at his advanced age, retired from the active duties of life, blest with a competency, and happy in the affections of his numerous relations, Mr. Booley would now have settled himself down, to muse, for the remainder of his days, over the new stock of experience thus acquired. But travel had whetted, not satisfied, his appetite; and remembering that he had not seen the Ohio river, except at the point of its junction with the Mississippi, he returned to the United States, after a short interval of repose, and appearing suddenly at Cincinnati, the queen City of the West, traversed the clear waters of the Ohio to its Falls. In this expedition he had the pleasure of encountering a party of intelligent workmen from Birmingham who were making the same tour. Also his nephew Septimus, aged only thirteen. This intrepid boy had started from Peckham, in the old country, with two and sixpence sterling in his pocket; and had, when he encountered his uncle at a point of the Ohio River, called Snaggy Bar, still one shilling of that sum remaining!

Again at home, Mr. Booley was so pressed by his appetite for knowledge as to remain at home only one day. At the expiration of that short period, he actually started for New Zealand.

It is almost incredible that a man in Mr. Booley’s station of life, however adventurous his nature, and however few his artificial wants, should cast himself on a voyage of thirteen thousand miles from Great Britain with no other outfit than his watch and purse, and no arms but his walking-stick. We are, however, assured on the best authority, that thus he made the passage out, and thus appeared, in the act of wiping his smoking head with his pocket-handkerchief, at the entrance to Port Nicholson in Cook’s Straits: with the very spot within his range of vision, where his illustrious predecessor, Captain Cook, so unhappily slain at Otaheite, once anchored.

After contemplating the swarms of cattle maintained on the hills in this neighbourhood, and always to be found by the stockmen when they are wanted, though nobody takes any care of them—which Mr. Booley considered the more remarkable, as their natural objection to be killed might be supposed to be augmented by the beauty of the climate—Mr. Booley proceeded to the town of Wellington. Having minutely examined it in every point, and made himself perfect master of the whole natural history and process of manufacture of the flax-plant, with its splendid yellow blossoms, he repaired to a Native Pa, which, unlike the Native Pa to which he was accustomed, he found to be a town, and not a parent. Here he observed a Chief with a long spear, making every demonstration of spitting a visitor, but really giving him the Maori or welcome—a word Mr. Booley is inclined to derive from the known hospitality of our English Mayors—and here also he observed some Europeans rubbing noses, by way of shaking hands, with the aboriginal inhabitants. After participating in an affray between the natives and the English soldiery, in which the former were defeated with great loss, he plunged into the Bush, and there camped out for some months, until he had made a survey of the whole country.

While leading this wild life, encamped by night near a stream for the convenience of water, in a Ware, or hut, built open in the front, with a roof sloping backward to the ground, and made of poles, covered and enclosed with bark or fern, it was Mr. Booley’s singular fortune to encounter Miss Creeble, of The Misses Creebles’ Boarding and Day Establishment for Young Ladies, Kennington Oval, who, accompanied by three of her young ladies in search of information, had achieved this marvellous journey, and was then also in the Bush. Miss Creeble having very unsettled opinions on the subject of gunpowder, was afraid that it entered into the composition of the fire before the tent, and that something would presently blow up or go off. Mr. Booley, as a more experienced traveller, assuring her that there was no danger; and calming the fears of the young ladies, an acquaintance commenced between them. They accomplished the rest of their travels in New Zealand together, and the best understanding prevailed among the little party. They took notice of the trees, as the Kaikatea, the Kauri, the Ruta, the Pukatea, the Hinau, and the Tanakaka—names which Miss Creeble had a bland relish in pronouncing. They admired the beautiful, arborescent, palm-like fern, abounding everywhere, and frequently exceeding thirty feet in height. They wondered at the curious owl, who is supposed to demand ‘More Pork!’ wherever he flies, and whom Miss Creeble termed ‘an admonition of Nature’s against greediness!’ And they contemplated some very rampant natives, of cannibal propensities. After many pleasing and instructive vicissitudes, they returned to England in company, where the ladies were safely put into a hackney cabriolet by Mr. Booley, in Leicester Square, London.

And now, indeed, it might have been imagined that that roving spirit, tired of rambling about the world, would have settled down at home in peace and honor. Not so. After repairing to the tubular bridge across the Menai Straits, and accompanying Her Majesty on her visit to Ireland (which he characterised as ‘a magnificent Exhibition’), Mr. Booley, with his usual absence of preparation, departed for Australia.

Here again, he lived out in the Bush, passing his time chiefly among the working-gangs of convicts who were carrying timber. He was much impressed by the ferocious mastiffs chained to barrels, who assist the sentries in keeping guard over those misdoers. But he observed that the atmosphere in this part of the world, unlike the descriptions he had read of it, was extremely thick, and that objects were misty, and difficult to be discerned. From a certain unsteadiness and trembling, too, which he frequently remarked on the face of Nature, he was led to conclude that this part of the globe was subject to convulsive heavings and earthquakes. This caused him to return, with some precipitation.

Again at home, and probably reflecting that the countries he had hitherto visited were new in the history of man, this extraordinary traveller resolved to proceed up the Nile to the second cataract. At the next performance of the great ceremony of ‘opening the Nile,’ at Cairo, Mr. Booley was present.

Along that wonderful river, associated with such stupendous fables, and with a history more prodigious than any fancy of man, in its vast and gorgeous facts; among temples, palaces, pyramids, colossal statues, crocodiles, tombs, obelisks, mummies, sand and ruin; he proceeded, like an opium-eater in a mighty dream. Thebes rose before him. An avenue of two hundred sphinxes, with not a head among them,—one of six or eight, or ten such avenues, all leading to a common centre,—conducted to the Temple of Carnak: its walls, eighty feet high and twenty-five feet thick, a mile and three-quarters in circumference; the interior of its tremendous hall, occupying an area of forty-seven thousand square feet, large enough to hold four great Christian churches, and yet not more than one-seventh part of the entire ruin. Obelisks he saw, thousands of years of age, as sharp as if the chisel had cut their edges yesterday; colossal statues fifty-two feet high, with ‘little’ fingers five feet and a half long; a very world of ruins, that were marvellous old ruins in the days of Herodotus; tombs cut high up in the rock, where European travellers live solitary, as in stony crows’ nests, burning mummied Thebans, gentle and simple,—of the dried blood-royal maybe,—for their daily fuel, and making articles of furniture of their dusty coffins. Upon the walls of temples, in colors fresh and bright as those of yesterday, he read the conquests of great Egyptian monarchs; upon the tombs of humbler people in the same blooming symbols, he saw their ancient way of working at their trades, of riding, driving, feasting, playing games; of marrying and burying, and performing on instruments, and singing songs, and healing by the power of animal magnetism, and performing all the occupations of life. He visited the quarries of Silsileh, whence nearly all the red stone used by the ancient Egyptian architects and sculptors came; and there beheld enormous single-stoned colossal figures nearly finished—redly snowed up, as it were, and trying hard to break out—waiting for the finishing touches, never to be given by the mummied hands of thousands of years ago. In front of the temple of Abou Simbel, he saw gigantic figures sixty feet in height and twenty-one across the shoulders, dwarfing live men on camels down to pigmies. Elsewhere he beheld complacent monsters tumbled down like ill-used Dolls of a Titanic make, and staring with stupid benignity at the arid earth whereon their huge faces rested. His last look of that amazing land was at the Great Sphinx, buried in the sand—sand in its eyes, sand in its ears, sand drifted on its broken nose, sand lodging, feet deep, in the ledges of its head—struggling out of a wide sea of sand, as if to look hopelessly forth for the ancient glories once surrounding it.

In this expedition, Mr. Booley acquired some curious information in reference to the language of hieroglyphics. He encountered the Simoom in the Desert, and lay down, with the rest of his caravan, until it had passed over. He also beheld on the horizon some of those stalking pillars of sand, apparently reaching from earth to heaven, which, with the red sun shining through them, so terrified the Arabs attendant on Bruce, that they fell prostrate, crying that the Day of Judgment was come. More Copts, Turks, Arabs, Fellahs, Bedouins, Mosques, Mamelukes, and Moosulmen he saw, than we have space to tell. His days were all Arabian Nights, and he saw wonders without end.

This might have satiated any ordinary man, for a time at least. But Mr. Booley, being no ordinary man, within twenty-four hours of his arrival at home was making The Overland Journey to India.

He has emphatically described this, as ‘a beautiful piece of scenery,’ and ‘a perfect picture.’ The appearance of Malta and Gibraltar he can never sufficiently commend. In crossing the Desert from Grand Cairo to Suez, he was particularly struck by the undulations of the Sandscape (he preferred that word to Landscape, as more expressive of the region), and by the incident of beholding a caravan upon its line of march; a spectacle which in the remembrance always affords him the utmost pleasure. Of the stations on the Desert, and the cinnamon gardens of Ceylon, he likewise entertains a lively recollection. Calcutta he praises also; though he has been heard to observe that the British military at that seat of Government were not as well proportioned as he could desire the soldiers of his country to be; and that the breed of horses there in use was susceptible of some improvement.

Once more in his native land, with the vigor of his constitution unimpaired by the many toils and fatigues he had encountered, what had Mr. Booley now to do, but, full of years and honor, to recline upon the grateful appreciation of his Queen and country, always eager to distinguish peaceful merit? What had he now to do, but to receive the decoration ever ready to be bestowed, in England, on men deservedly distinguished, and to take his place among the best? He had this to do. He had yet to achieve the most astonishing enterprise for which he was reserved. In all the countries he had yet visited, he had seen no frost and snow. He resolved to make a voyage to the ice-bound Arctic Regions.

In pursuance of this surprising determination, Mr. Booley accompanied the Expedition under Sir James Ross, consisting of Her Majesty’s ships, the Enterprise and Investigator, which sailed from the river Thames on the 12th of May, 1848, and which, on the 11th of September, entered Port Leopold Harbor.

In this inhospitable region, surrounded by eternal ice, cheered by no glimpse of the sun, shrouded in gloom and darkness, Mr. Booley passed the entire winter. The ships were covered in, and fortified all round with walls of ice and snow; the masts were frozen up; hoar frost settled on the yards, tops, shrouds, stays, and rigging; around, in every direction, lay an interminable waste, on which only the bright stars, the yellow moon, and the vivid Aurora Borealis looked, by night or day.

And yet the desolate sublimity of this astounding spectacle was broken in a pleasant and surprising manner. In the remote solitude to which he had penetrated, Mr. Booley (who saw no Esquimaux during his stay, though he looked for them in every direction) had the happiness of encountering two Scotch gardeners; several English compositors, accompanied by their wives; three brass founders from the neighbourhood of Long Acre, London; two coach painters, a gold-beater and his only daughter, by trade a stay-maker; and several other working-people from sundry parts of Great Britain who had conceived the extraordinary idea of ‘holiday-making’ in the frozen wilderness. Hither too, had Miss Creeble and her three young ladies penetrated: the latter attired in braided peacoats of a comparatively light material; and Miss Creeble defended from the inclemency of a Polar Winter by no other outer garment than a wadded Polka-jacket. He found this courageous lady in the act of explaining, to the youthful sharers of her toils, the various phases of nature by which they were surrounded. Her explanations were principally wrong, but her intentions always admirable.

Cheered by the society of these fellow-adventurers, Mr. Booley slowly glided on into the summer season. And now, at midnight, all was bright and shining. Mountains of ice, wedged and broken into the strangest forms—jagged points, spires, pinnacles, pyramids, turrets, columns in endless succession and in infinite variety, flashing and sparkling with ten thousand hues, as though the treasures of the earth were frozen up in all that water—appeared on every side. Masses of ice, floating and driving hither and thither, menaced the hardy voyagers with destruction; and threatened to crush their strong ships, like nutshells. But, below those ships was clear sea-water, now; the fortifying walls were gone; the yards, tops, shrouds and rigging, free from that hoary rust of long inaction, showed like themselves again; and the sails, bursting from the masts, like foliage which the welcome sun at length developed, spread themselves to the wind, and wafted the travellers away.

In the short interval that has elapsed since his safe return to the land of his birth, Mr. Booley has decided on no new expedition; but he feels that he will yet be called upon to undertake one, perhaps of greater magnitude than any he has achieved, and frequently remarks, in his own easy way, that he wonders where the deuce he will be taken to next! Possessed of good health and good spirits, with powers unimpaired by all he has gone through, and with an increase of appetite still growing with what it feeds on, what may not be expected yet from this extraordinary man!

It was only at the close of Easter week that, sitting in an arm chair, at a private Club called the Social Oysters, assembling at Highbury Barn, where he is much respected, this indefatigable traveller expressed himself in the following terms:

‘It is very gratifying to me,’ said he, ‘to have seen so much at my time of life, and to have acquired a knowledge of the countries I have visited, which I could not have derived from books alone. When I was a boy, such travelling would have been impossible, as the gigantic-moving panorama or diorama mode of conveyance, which I have principally adopted (all my modes of conveyance have been pictorial), had then not been attempted. It is a delightful characteristic of these times, that new and cheap means are continually being devised, for conveying the results of actual experience, to those who are unable to obtain such experiences for themselves; and to bring them within the reach of the people—emphatically of the people; for it is they at large who are addressed in these endeavours, and not exclusive audiences. Hence,’ said Mr. Booley, ‘even if I see a run on an idea, like the panorama one, it awakens no ill-humour within me, but gives me pleasant thoughts. Some of the best results of actual travel are suggested by such means to those whose lot it is to stay at home. New worlds open out to them, beyond their little worlds, and widen their range of reflection, information, sympathy, and interest. The more man knows of man, the better for the common brotherhood among us all. I shall, therefore,’ said Mr. Booley, ‘now propose to the Social Oysters the healths of Mr. Banvard, Mr. Brees, Mr. Phillips, Mr. Allen, Mr. Prout, Messrs. Bonomi, Fahey, and Warren, Mr. Thomas Grieve, and Mr. Burford. Long life to them all, and more power to their pencils!’

The Social Oysters having drunk this toast with acclamation, Mr. Booley proceeded to entertain them with anecdotes of his travels. This he is in the habit of doing after they have feasted together, according to the manner of Sinbad the Sailor—except that he does not bestow upon the Social Oysters the munificent reward of one hundred sequins per night, for listening.

LOADED DICE.

Several years ago I made a tour through some of the Southern Counties of England with a friend. We travelled in an open carriage, stopping for a few hours a day, or a week, as it might be, wherever there was any thing to be seen: and we generally got through one stage before breakfast, because it gave our horses rest, and ourselves the chance of enjoying the brown bread, new milk, and fresh eggs of those country roadside inns, which are fast becoming subjects for archæological investigation.

One evening my friend said, ‘To-morrow, we will breakfast at T——. I want to inquire about a family named Lovell, who used to live there. I met the husband and wife and two lovely children, one summer at Exmouth. We became very intimate, and I thought them particularly interesting people, but I have never seen them since.’

The next morning’s sun shone as brightly as heart could desire, and after a delightful drive, we reached the outskirts of the town about nine o’clock.

‘Oh, what a pretty inn!’ said I, as we approached a small white house, with a sign swinging in front of it, and a flower-garden on one side.

‘Stop, John,’ cried my friend, ‘we shall get a much cleaner breakfast here than in the town, I dare say; and if there is anything to be seen there, we can walk to it;’ so we alighted, and were shown into a neat little parlour, with white curtains, where an unexceptionable rural breakfast was soon placed before us.

‘Pray do you happen to know anything of a family called Lovell?’ inquired my friend, whose name, by the way, was Markham. ‘Mr. Lovell was a clergyman.’

‘Yes, Ma’am,’ answered the girl who attended us, apparently the landlord’s daughter, ‘Mr. Lovell is the vicar of our parish.’

‘Indeed! and does he live near here?’

‘Yes, Ma’am, he lives at the vicarage. It’s just down that lane opposite, about a quarter of a mile from here; or you can go across the fields, if you please, to where you see that tower; it’s close by there.’

‘And which is the pleasantest road?’ inquired Mrs. Markham.

‘Well, Ma’am, I think by the fields is the pleasantest, if you don’t mind a stile or two; and, besides, you get the best view of the Abbey by going that way.’

‘Is that tower we see part of the Abbey?’

‘Yes, Ma’am,’ answered the girl, ‘and the vicarage is just the other side of it.’

Armed with these instructions, as soon as we had finished our breakfast we started across the fields, and after a pleasant walk of twenty minutes we found ourselves in an old churchyard, amongst a cluster of the most picturesque ruins we had ever seen. With the exception of the grey tower, which we had espied from the inn, and which had doubtless been the belfry, the remains were not considerable. There was the outer wall of the chancel, and the broken step that had led to the high altar, and there were sections of aisles, and part of a cloister, all gracefully festooned with mosses and ivy; whilst mingled with the grass-grown graves of the prosaic dead, there were the massive tombs of the Dame Margerys and the Sir Hildebrands of more romantic periods. All was ruin and decay; but such poetic ruin! such picturesque decay! And just beyond the tall grey tower, there was the loveliest, smiling, little garden, and the prettiest cottage, that imagination could picture. The day was so bright, the grass so green, the flowers so gay, the air so balmy with their sweet perfumes, the birds sang so cheerily in the apple and cherry trees, that all nature seemed rejoicing.

‘Well,’ said my friend, as she seated herself on the fragment of a pillar, and looked around her, ‘now that I see this place, I understand the sort of people the Lovells were.’

‘What sort of people were they?’ said I.

‘Why, as I said before, interesting people. In the first place, they were both extremely handsome.’

‘But the locality had nothing to do with their good looks, I presume,’ said I.

‘I am not sure of that,’ she answered; ‘when there is the least foundation of taste or intellect to set out with, the beauty of external nature, and the picturesque accidents that harmonise with it, do, I am persuaded, by their gentle and elevating influences on the mind, make the handsome handsomer, and the ugly less ugly. But it was not alone the good looks of the Lovells that struck me, but their air of refinement and high breeding, and I should say high birth—though I know nothing about their extraction—combined with their undisguised poverty and as evident contentment. Now, I can understand such people finding here an appropriate home, and being satisfied with their small share of this world’s goods; because here the dreams of romance writers about Love in a Cottage might be somewhat realised; poverty might be graceful and poetical here; and then, you know, they have no rent to pay.’

‘Very true,’ said I; ‘but suppose they had sixteen daughters, like a half-pay officer I once met on board a steam-packet?’

‘That would spoil it certainly,’ said Mrs. Markham; ‘but let us hope they have not. When I knew them they had only two children, a boy and a girl, called Charles and Emily; two of the prettiest creatures I ever beheld!’

As my friend thought it yet rather early for a visit, we had remained chattering in this way for more than an hour, sometimes seated on a tombstone, or a fallen column; sometimes peering amongst the carved fragments that were scattered about the ground, and sometimes looking over the hedge into the little garden, the wicket of which was immediately behind the tower. The weather being warm, most of the windows of the vicarage were open and the blinds were all down; we had not yet seen a soul stirring, and were just wondering whether we might venture to present ourselves at the door, when a strain of distant music struck upon our ears. ‘Hark!’ I said, ‘how exquisite! It was the only thing wanting to complete the charm.’

‘It’s a military band, I think,’ said Mrs. Markham, ‘you know we passed some barracks before we reached the Inn.’

Nearer and nearer drew the sound, solemn and slow; the band was evidently approaching by the green lane that skirted the fields we had come by. ‘Hush,’ said I, laying my hand on my friend’s arm, with a strange sinking of the heart; ‘they are playing the Dead March in Saul! Don’t you hear the muffled drums? It’s a funeral, but where’s the grave?’

‘There!’ said she, pointing to a spot close under the hedge where some earth had been thrown up; but the aperture was covered with a plank, probably to prevent accidents.

There are few ceremonies in life at once so touching, so impressive, so sad, and yet so beautiful, as a soldier’s funeral! Ordinary funerals with their unwieldy hearses and feathers, and the absurd looking mutes, and the ‘inky cloaks’ and weepers, of hired mourners, always seem to me like a mockery of the dead; the appointments border so closely on the grotesque; they are so little in keeping with the true, the only view of death that can render life endurable! There is such a tone of exaggerated——forced, heavy, over-acted gravity about the whole thing, that one had need to have a deep personal interest involved in the scene, to be able to shut one’s eyes to the burlesque side of it. But a military funeral, how different! There you see death in life and life in death! There is nothing over-strained, nothing overdone. At once simple and solemn, decent and decorous, consoling, yet sad. The chief mourners, at best, are generally true mourners, for they have lost a brother with whom ‘they sat but yesterday at meat;’ and whilst they are comparing memories, recalling how merry they had many a day been together, and the solemn tones of that sublime music float upon the air, we can imagine the freed and satisfied soul wafted on those harmonious breathings to its Heavenly home; and our hearts are melted, our imaginations exalted, our faith invigorated, and we come away the better for what we have seen.

I believe some such reflections as these were passing through our minds, for we both remained silent and listening, till the swinging-to of the little wicket, which communicated with the garden, aroused us; but nobody appeared, and the tower being at the moment betwixt us and it, we could not see who had entered. Almost at the same moment, a man came in from a gate on the opposite side, and advancing to where the earth was thrown up, lifted the plank and discovered the newly made grave. He was soon followed by some boys, and several respectable-looking persons came into the enclosure, whilst nearer and nearer drew the sound of the muffled drums, and now we descried the firing party and their officer, who led the procession with their arms reversed, each man wearing above the elbow a piece of black crape and a small bow of white satin ribbon; the band still playing that solemn strain. Then came the coffin, borne by six soldiers. Six officers bore up the pall, all quite young men; and on the coffin lay the shako, sword, side-belt, and white gloves of the deceased. A long train of mourners marched two and two, in open file, the privates first, the officers last. Sorrow was imprinted on every face; there was no unseemly chattering, no wandering eyes; if a word was exchanged, it was in a whisper, and the sad shake of the head showed of whom they were discoursing. All this we observed as they marched through the lane that skirted one side of the churchyard. As they neared the gate the band ceased to play.

‘See there,’ said Mrs. Markham, directing my attention to the cottage, ‘there comes Mr. Lovell. Oh, how he is changed!’ and whilst she spoke, the clergyman entering by the wicket, advanced to meet the procession at the gate, where he commenced reading the funeral service as he moved backwards towards the grave, round which the firing party, leaning on their firelocks, now formed. Then came those awful words, ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’ the hollow sound of the earth upon the coffin, and three volleys fired over the grave, finished the solemn ceremony.

When the procession entered the churchyard, we had retired behind the broken wall of the chancel, whence, without being observed, we had watched the whole scene with intense interest. Just as the words ‘Ashes to ashes! dust to dust!’ were pronounced, I happened to raise my eyes towards the grey tower, and then, peering through one of the narrow slits, I saw the face of a man—such a face! Never to my latest day can I forget the expression of those features! If ever there was despair and anguish written on a human countenance, it was there! And yet so young! so beautiful! A cold chill ran through my veins as I pressed Mrs. Markham’s arm. ‘Look up at the tower!’ I whispered.

‘My God! What can it be?’ she answered, turning quite pale! ‘And Mr. Lovell, did you observe how his voice shook? at first, I thought it was illness; but he seems bowed down with grief. Every face looks awestruck! There must be some tragedy here—something more than the death of an individual!’ and fearing, under this impression, that our visit might prove untimely, we resolved to return to the inn, and endeavour to discover if anything unusual had really occurred. Before we moved, I looked up at the narrow slit—the face was no longer there; but as we passed round to the other side of the tower, we saw a tall, slender figure, attired in a loose coat, pass slowly through the wicket, cross the garden, and enter the house. We only caught a glimpse of the profile; the head hung down upon the breast; the eyes were bent upon the ground; but we knew it was the same face we had seen above.

We went back to the inn, where our inquiries elicited some information, which made us wish to know more: but it was not till we went into the town that we obtained the following details of this mournful drama, of which we had thus accidentally witnessed one impressive scene.

Mr. Lovell, as Mrs. Markham had conjectured, was a man of good family, but no fortune; he might have had a large one, could he have made up his mind to marry Lady Elizabeth Wentworth, the bride selected for him by a wealthy uncle who proposed to make him his heir; but preferring poverty with Emily Dering, he was disinherited. He never repented his choice, although he remained vicar of a small parish, and a poor man all his life. The two children whom Mrs. Markham had seen, were the only ones they had, and through the excellent management of Mrs. Lovell, and the moderation of her husband’s desires, they had enjoyed an unusual degree of happiness in this sort of graceful poverty, till the young Charles and Emily were grown up, and it was time to think what was to be done with them. The son had been prepared for Oxford by the father, and the daughter, under the tuition of her mother, was remarkably well educated and accomplished; but it became necessary to consider the future: Charles must be sent to college, since the only chance of finding a provision for him was in the Church, although the expense of maintaining him there could be ill afforded; so, in order in some degree to balance the outlay, it was, after much deliberation, agreed that Emily should accept a situation as governess in London. The proposal was made by herself, and the rather consented to, that, in case of the death of her parents, she would almost inevitably have had to seek some such means of subsistence. These partings were the first sorrows that had reached the Lovells.

At first, all went well; Charles was not wanting in ability nor in a moderate degree of application; and Emily wrote cheerily of her new life. She was kindly received, well treated, and associated with the family on the footing of a friend. Neither did further experience seem to diminish her satisfaction. She saw a great many gay people—some of whom she named; and, amongst the rest, there not unfrequently appeared the name of Herbert. Mr. Herbert was in the army, and being a distant connexion of the family with whom she resided, was a frequent visitor at their house. ‘She was sure papa and mamma would like him.’ Once the mother smiled, and said she hoped Emily was not falling in love; but no more was thought of it. In the meantime Charles had found out that there was time for many things at Oxford, besides study. He was naturally fond of society, and had a remarkable capacity for excelling in all kinds of games. He was agreeable, lively, exceedingly handsome, and sang charmingly, having been trained in part-singing by his mother. No young man at Oxford was more fêté; but alas! he was very poor, and poverty poisoned all his enjoyments. For some time he resisted temptation; but after a terrible struggle—for he adored his family—he gave way, and ran in debt, and although the imprudence only augmented his misery, he had not resolution to retrace his steps, but advanced further and further on this broad road to ruin, so that he had come home for the vacation shortly before our visit to T——, threatened with all manner of annoyances if he did not carry back a sufficient sum to satisfy his most clamorous creditors. He had assured them he would do so, but where was he to get the money? Certainly not from his parents; he well knew they had it not; nor had he a friend in the world from whom he could hope assistance in such an emergency. In his despair he often thought of running away—going to Australia, America, New Zealand, anywhere; but he had not even the means to do this. He suffered indescribable tortures, and saw no hope of relief.

It was just at this period that Herbert’s regiment happened to be quartered at T——. Charles had occasionally seen his name in his sister’s letters, and heard that there was a Herbert now in the barracks, but he was ignorant whether or not it was the same person; and when he accidentally fell into the society of some of the junior officers, and was invited by Herbert himself to dine at the mess, pride prevented his ascertaining the fact. He did not wish to betray that his sister was a governess. Herbert, however, knew full well that their visitor was the brother of Emily Lovell, but partly for reasons of his own, and partly because he penetrated the weakness of the other, he abstained from mentioning her name.

Now, this town of T—— was, and probably is, about the dullest quarter in all England! The officers hated it, there was no flirting, no dancing, no hunting, no anything. Not a man of them knew what to do with himself. The old ones wandered about and played at whist, the young ones took to hazard and three-card-loo, playing at first for moderate stakes, but soon getting on to high ones. Two or three civilians of the neighbourhood joined the party, Charles Lovell amongst the rest. Had they begun with playing high, he would have been excluded for want of funds; but whilst they played low, he won, so that when they increased the stakes, trusting to a continuance of his good fortune, he was eager to go on with them. Neither did his luck altogether desert him; on the whole, he rather won than lost; but he foresaw that one bad night would break him, and he should be obliged to retire, forfeiting his amusement and mortifying his pride. It was just at this crisis, that, one night, an accident, which caused him to win a considerable sum, set him upon the notion of turning chance into certainty. Whilst shuffling the cards, he dropped the ace of spades into his lap, caught it up, replaced it in the pack, and dealt it to himself. No one else had seen the card, no observation was made, and a terrible thought came into his head!

Whether loo or hazard was played, Charles Lovell had, night after night, a most extraordinary run of luck. He won large sums, and saw before him the early prospect of paying his debts and clearing all his difficulties.

Amongst the young men who played at the table, some had plenty of money and cared little for their losses; but others were not so well off, and one of these was Edward Herbert. He, too, was the son of poor parents who had straitened themselves to put him in the army, and it was with infinite difficulty and privation that his widowed mother had amassed the needful sum to purchase for him a company, which was now becoming vacant. The retiring officer’s papers were already sent in, and Herbert’s money was lodged at Cox and Greenwood’s; but before the answer from the Horse-Guards arrived, he had lost every sixpence. Nearly the whole sum had become the property of Charles Lovell.

Herbert was a fine young man, honourable, generous, impetuous, and endowed with an acute sense of shame. He determined instantly to pay the debts, but he knew that his own prospects were ruined for life; he wrote to the agents to send him the money and withdraw his name from the list of purchasers. But how was he to support his mother’s grief? How meet the eye of the girl he loved? She, who he knew adored him, and whose hand it was agreed between them he should ask of her parents as soon as he was gazetted a captain! The anguish of mind he suffered then threw him into a fever, and he lay for several days betwixt life and death, and happily unconscious of his misery.

Meantime, another scene was being enacted elsewhere. The officers, who night after night found themselves losers, had not for some time entertained the least idea of foul play, but at length, one of them observing something suspicious, began to watch, and satisfied himself, by a peculiar method adopted by Lovell in ‘throwing his mains,’ that he was the culprit. His suspicions were whispered from one to another, till they nearly all entertained them, with the exception of Herbert, who, being looked upon as Lovell’s most especial friend, was not told. So unwilling were these young men to blast, for ever, the character of the visitor whom they had so much liked, and to strike a fatal blow at the happiness and respectability of his family, that they were hesitating how to proceed, whether to openly accuse him or privately reprove and expel him, when Herbert’s heavy loss decided the question.

Herbert himself, overwhelmed with despair, had quitted the room, the rest were still seated around the table, when having given each other a signal, one of them, called Frank Houston, arose and said: ‘Gentlemen, it gives me great pain to have to call your attention to a very strange—a very distressing circumstance. For some time past there has been an extraordinary run of luck in one direction—we have all observed it—all remarked on it. Mr. Herbert has at this moment retired a heavy loser. There is, indeed, as far as I know, but one winner amongst us—but one, and he a winner to a very considerable amount; the rest all losers. God forbid, that I should rashly accuse any man! Lightly blast any man’s character! But I am bound to say, that I fear the money we have lost has not been fairly won. There has been foul play! I forbear to name the party—the facts sufficiently indicate him.’

Who would not have pitied Lovell, when, livid with horror and conscious guilt, he vainly tried to say something? ‘Indeed—I assure you—I never’—but words would not come; he faltered and rushed out of the room in a transport of agony. They did pity him; and when he was gone, agreed amongst themselves to hush up the affair: but unfortunately, the civilians of the party, who had not been let into the secret, took up his defence. They not only believed the accusation unfounded, but felt it as an affront offered to their townsman; they blustered about it a good deal, and there was nothing left for it but to appoint a committee of investigation. Alas! the evidence was overwhelming! It turned out that the dice and cards had been supplied by Lovell. The former, still on the table, were found on examination to be loaded. In fact, he had had a pair as a curiosity long in his possession, and had obtained others from a disreputable character at Oxford. No doubt remained of his guilt.

All this while Herbert had been too ill to be addressed on the subject; but symptoms of recovery were now beginning to appear; and as nobody was aware that he had any particular interest in the Lovell family, the affair was communicated to him. At first he refused to believe in his friend’s guilt, and became violently irritated. His informants assured him they would be too happy to find they were mistaken, but that since the inquiry no hope of such an issue remained, and he sank into a gloomy silence.

On the following morning, when his servant came to his room door, he found it locked. When, at the desire of the surgeon, it was broken open, Herbert was found a corpse, and a discharged pistol lying beside him. An inquest sat upon the body, and the verdict brought in was Temporary Insanity. There never was one more just.

Preparations were now made for the funeral—that funeral which we had witnessed; but before the day appointed for it arrived, another chapter of this sad story was unfolded.

When Charles left the barracks on that fatal night, instead of going home, he passed the dark hours in wandering wildly about the country; but when morning dawned, fearing the eye of man, he returned to the vicarage, and slunk unobserved to his chamber. When he did not appear at breakfast, his mother sought him in his room, where she found him in bed. He said he was very ill—and so indeed he was—and begged to be left alone; but as he was no better on the following day, she insisted on sending for medical advice. The doctor found him with all those physical symptoms that are apt to supervene from great anxiety of mind; and saying he could get no sleep, Charles requested to have some laudanum; but the physician was on his guard, for although the parties concerned wished to keep the thing private, some rumours had got abroad that awakened his caution.

The parents, meanwhile, had not the slightest anticipation of the thunderbolt that was about to fall upon them. They lived a very retired life, were acquainted with none of the officers—and they were even ignorant of the amount of their son’s intimacy with the regiment. Thus, when news of Herbert’s lamentable death reached them, the mother said to her son: ‘Charles, did you know a young man in the barracks called Herbert; a lieutenant, I believe? By the bye, I hope it’s not Emily’s Mr. Herbert.’

‘Did I know him?’ said Charles, turning suddenly towards her, for, under pretence that the light annoyed him, he always lay with his face to the wall. ‘Why do you ask, mother?’

‘Because he’s dead. He had a fever, and—’

‘Herbert dead!’ cried Charles, suddenly sitting up in the bed.

‘Yes, he had a fever, and it is supposed he was delirious, for he blew out his brains; there is a report that he had been playing high, and lost a great deal of money. What’s the matter, dear? Oh, Charles, I shouldn’t have told you! I was not aware that you knew him!’

‘Fetch my father here, and, Mother, you come back with him!’ said Charles, speaking with a strange sternness of tone, and wildly motioning her out of the room.

When the parents came, he bade them sit down beside him; and then, with a degree of remorse and anguish that no words could portray, he told them all; whilst they, with blanched cheeks and fainting hearts, listened to the dire confession.

‘And here I am,’ he exclaimed, as he ended, ‘a cowardly scoundrel that has not dared to die! Oh, Herbert! happy, happy, Herbert! Would I were with you!’

At that moment the door opened, and a beautiful, bright, smiling, joyous face peeped in. It was Emily Lovell, the beloved daughter, the adored sister, arrived from London in compliance with a letter received a few days previously from Herbert, wherein he had told her that by the time she received it, he would be a captain. She had come to introduce him to her parents as her affianced husband. She feared no refusal; well she knew how rejoiced they would be to see her the wife of so kind and honourable a man. But they were ignorant of all this, and in the fulness of their agony, the cup of woe ran over and she drank of the draught! They told her all before she had been five minutes in the room. How else could they account for their tears, their confusion, their bewilderment, their despair!

Before Herbert’s funeral took place, Emily Lovell was lying betwixt life and death in a brain fever. Under the influence of a feeling easily to be comprehended, thirsting for a self-imposed torture, that by its very poignancy should relieve the dead weight of wretchedness that lay upon his breast, Charles crept from his bed, and slipping on a loose coat that hung in his room, he stole across the garden to the tower, whence, through the arrow-slit, he witnessed the burial of his sister’s lover, whom he had hastened to the grave.

Here terminates our sad story. We left T—— on the following morning, and it was two or three years before any further intelligence of the Lovell family reached us. All we then heard was, that Charles had gone, a self-condemned exile, to Australia; and that Emily had insisted on accompanying him thither.

DREAM WITHIN DREAM; OR, EVIL MINIMISED.

What evil would be, could it be, the Blest

Are sometimes fain to know. They sink to rest,

Dream, for one moment’s space, of care and strife,

Wake, stare, and smile; and this is Human Life.

THE SCHOOLMASTER AT HOME AND ABROAD.

The lamentable deficiency of the commonest rudiments of education, which still exists among the humbler classes of this nation, is never so darkly apparent as when we compare their condition with that of people of similar rank in other countries. When we do so, we find that England stands the lowest in the scale of what truly must be looked upon as Civilisation; for she provides fewer means for promoting it than any of her neighbours. With us, education is a commodity to be trafficked in: abroad, it is a duty. Here, schoolmasters are perfectly irresponsible except to their paymasters: in other countries, teachers are appointed by the state, and a rigid supervision is maintained over the trainers of youth, both as regards competency and moral conduct. In England, whoever is too poor to buy the article education, can get none of it for himself or his offspring: in other parts of Europe, either the government (as in Germany), or public opinion (as in America), enforces it upon the youthful population.

What are the consequences? One is revealed by a comparison between the proportion of scholars in elementary schools to the entire population of other countries, and that in our own. Taking the whole of northern Europe—including Scotland—and France and Belgium (where education is at a low ebb), we find that to every 2¼ of the population, there is one child acquiring the rudiments of knowledge; while in England there is only one such pupil to every fourteen inhabitants.

It has been calculated that there are, at the present day in England and Wales, nearly 8,000,000 persons who can neither read nor write—that is to say, nearly one quarter of the population. Also, that of all the children between five and fourteen, more than one half attend no place of instruction. These statements—compiled by Mr. Kay, from official and other authentic sources, for his work on the Social Condition and Education of the Poor in England and Europe, would be hard to believe, if we had not to encounter in our every-day life degrees of illiteracy which would be startling, if we were not thoroughly used to it. Wherever we turn, ignorance, not always allied to poverty, stares us in the face. If we look in the Gazette, at the list of partnerships dissolved, not a month passes but some unhappy man, rolling perhaps in wealth, but wallowing in ignorance, is put to the experimentum crucis of ‘his mark.’ The number of petty jurors—in rural districts especially—who can only sign with a cross is enormous. It is not unusual to see parish documents of great local importance defaced with the same humiliating symbol by persons whose office shows them to be not only ‘men of mark,’ but men of substance. We have printed already specimens of the partial ignorance which passes under the ken of the Post Office authorities, and we may venture to assert, that such specimens of penmanship and orthography are not to be matched in any other country in Europe. A housewife in humble life need only turn to the file of her tradesmen’s bills to discover hieroglyphics which render them so many arithmetical puzzles. In short, the practical evidences of the low ebb to which the plainest rudiments of education in this country has fallen, are too common to bear repetition. We cannot pass through the streets, we cannot enter a place of public assembly, or ramble in the fields, without the gloomy shadow of Ignorance sweeping over us. The rural population is indeed in a worse plight than the other classes. We quote—with the attestation of our own experience—the following passage from one of a series of articles which have recently appeared in a morning newspaper:—‘Taking the adult class of agricultural labourers, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the ignorance in which they live and move and have their being. As they work in the fields, the external world has some hold upon them through the medium of their senses; but to all the higher exercises of intellect, they are perfect strangers. You cannot address one of them without being at once painfully struck with the intellectual darkness which enshrouds him. There is in general neither speculation in his eyes, nor intelligence in his countenance. The whole expression is more that of an animal than of a man. He is wanting, too, in the erect and independent bearing of a man. When you accost him, if he is not insolent—which he seldom is—he is timid and shrinking, his whole manner showing that he feels himself at a distance from you, greater than should separate any two classes of men. He is often doubtful when you address, and suspicious when you question him; he is seemingly oppressed with the interview, while it lasts, and obviously relieved when it is over. These are the traits which I can affirm them to possess as a class, after having come in contact with many hundreds of farm labourers. They belong to a generation for whose intellectual culture little or nothing was done. As a class, they have no amusements beyond the indulgence of sense. In nine cases out of ten, recreation is associated in their minds with nothing higher than sensuality. I have frequently asked clergymen and others, if they often find the adult peasant reading for his own or others’ amusement? The invariable answer is, that such a sight is seldom or never witnessed. In the first place, the great bulk of them cannot read. In the next, a large proportion of those who can, do so with too much difficulty to admit of the exercise being an amusement to them. Again, few of those who can read with comparative ease, have the taste for doing so. It is but justice to them to say, that many of those who cannot read, have bitterly regretted, in my hearing, their inability to do so. I shall never forget the tone in which an old woman in Cornwall intimated to me what a comfort it would now be to her, could she only read her Bible in her lonely hours.’

We now turn to the high lights of the picture as presented abroad, and which, from their very brightness, throw our own intellectual gloom into deeper shade. Mr. Kay observes in the work we have already cited—

‘It is a great fact, however much we may be inclined to doubt it, that throughout Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, Bohemia, Wirtemberg, Baden, Hesse Darmstadt, Hesse Cassel, Gotha, Nassau, Hanover, Denmark, Switzerland, Norway, and the Austrian Empire, all the children are actually at this present time attending school, and are receiving a careful, religious, moral, and intellectual education, from highly educated and efficient teachers. Over the vast tract of country which I have mentioned, as well as in Holland, and the greater part of France, all the children above six years of age are daily acquiring useful knowledge and good habits under the influence of moral, religious, and learned teachers. All the youth of the greater part of these countries, below the age of twenty-one years, can read, write, and cypher, and know the Bible History, and the history of their own country. No children are left idle and dirty in the streets of the towns—there is no class of children to be compared in any respect to the children who frequent our “ragged schools”——all the children, even of the poorest parents, are, in a great part of these countries, in dress, appearance, cleanliness, and manners, as polished and civilised as the children of our middle classes; the children of the poor in Germany are so civilised that the rich often send their children to the schools intended for the poor; and, lastly, in a great part of Germany and Switzerland, the children of the poor are receiving a better education than that given in England to the children of the greater part of our middle classes.’

‘I remember one day,’ says Mr. Kay in another page, ‘when walking near Berlin in the company of Herr Hintz, a professor in Dr. Diesterweg’s Normal College, and of another teacher, we saw a poor woman cutting up, in the road, logs of wood for winter use. My companions pointed her out to me and said, “Perhaps you will scarcely believe it, but in the neighbourhood of Berlin, poor women, like that one, read translations of Sir Walter Scott’s Novels, and many of the interesting works of your language, besides those of the principal writers of Germany.” This account was afterwards confirmed by the testimony of several other persons. Often and often have I seen the poor cab-drivers of Berlin, while waiting for a fare, amusing themselves by reading German books, which they had brought with them in the morning, expressly for the purpose of supplying amusement and occupation for their leisure hours. In many parts of these countries, the peasants and the workmen of the towns attend regular weekly lectures or weekly classes, where they practise singing or chanting, or learn mechanical drawing, history, or science. The intelligence of the poorer classes of these countries is shown by their manners. The whole appearance of a German peasant who has been brought up under this system, i. e. of any of the poor who have not attained the age of thirty-five years, is very different to that of our own peasantry. The German, Swiss, or Dutch peasant, who has grown up to manhood under the new system, and since the old feudal system was overthrown, is not nearly so often, as with us, distinguished by an uncouth dialect. On the contrary, they speak as their teachers speak, clearly, without hesitation, and grammatically. They answer questions politely, readily, and with the ease which shows they have been accustomed to mingle with men of greater wealth and of better education than themselves. They do not appear embarrassed, still less do they appear gawkish or stupid, when addressed. If, in asking a peasant a question, a stranger, according to the polite custom of the country, raises his hat, the first words of reply are the quietly uttered ones, “I pray you, Sir, be covered.” A Prussian peasant is always polite and respectful to a stranger, but quite as much at his ease as when speaking to one of his own fellows.’

Surely the contrast presented between the efforts of the schoolmaster abroad and his inactivity at home—refuting, as it does, our hourly boastings of ‘intellectual progress,’—should arouse us, energetically and practically, to the work of Educational extension.

THE LADY ALICE.

I.

What doth the Lady Alice so late on the turret-stair,

Without a lamp to light her but the diamond in her hair;

When every arching passage overflows with shallow gloom,

And dreams float through the castle, into every silent room?

She trembles at her footsteps, although their fall is light;

For through the turret-loopholes she sees the murky night,—

Black, broken vapours streaming across the stormy skies,—

Along the empty corridors the moaning tempest cries.

She steals along a gallery, she pauses by a door;

And fast her tears are dropping down upon the oaken floor;

And thrice she seems returning,—but thrice she turns again;—

Now heavy lie the cloud of sleep on that old father’s brain!

Oh, well it were that never thou should’st waken from thy sleep!

For wherefore should they waken who waken but to weep?

No more, no more beside thy bed may Peace her vigil keep;

Thy sorrow, like a lion, waits[1] upon its prey to leap.

II.

An afternoon in April. No sun appears on high;

A moist and yellow lustre fills the deepness of the sky;

And through the castle gateway, with slow and solemn tread,

Along the leafless avenue they bear the honoured dead.

They stop. The long line closes up, like some gigantic worm;

A shape is standing in the path; a wan and ghostlike form;

Which gazes fixedly, nor moves; nor utters any sound;

Then, like a statue built of snow, falls lifeless to the ground.

And though her clothes are ragged, and though her feet are bare;

And though all wild and tangled, falls her heavy silk-brown hair;

Though from her eyes the brightness, from her cheeks the bloom, has fled;

They know their Lady Alice, the Darling of the Dead.

With silence, in her own old room the fainting form they lay;

Where all things stand unaltered since the night she fled away;

But who shall bring to life again her father from the clay?

But who shall give her back again her heart of that old day?

1. The lion was said to ‘prey on nothing that doth seem as dead.’

ILLUSTRATIONS OF CHEAPNESS.
A GLOBE.

One of the most remarkable of self-educated men, James Ferguson, when a poor agricultural labourer, constructed a globe. A friend had made him a present of ‘Gordon’s Geographical Grammar,’ which, he says, ‘at that time was to me a great treasure. There is no figure of a globe in it, although it contains a tolerable description of the globes, and their use. From this description I made a globe in three weeks, at my father’s, having turned the ball thereof out of a piece of wood; which ball I covered with paper, and delineated a map of the world upon it, made the meridian ring and horizon of wood, covered them with paper, and graduated them; and was happy to find that by my globe (which was the first I ever saw) I could solve the problems.’

‘But,’ he adds, ‘this was not likely to afford me bread.’

In a few years this ingenious man discovered the conditions upon which he could earn his bread, by a skill which did not suffer under the competition of united labour. He had made also a wooden clock. He carried about his globe and his clock, and ‘began to pick up some money about the country’ by cleaning clocks. He became a skilled clock-cleaner. For six-and-twenty years afterwards he earned his bread as an artist. He then became a scientific lecturer, and in connection with his pursuits, was also a globe maker. His name may be seen upon old globes, associated with that of Senex. The demand for globes must have been then very small, but Ferguson had learned that cheapness is produced by labour-saving contrivances. A pretty instrument for graduating lines upon the meridian ring, once belonging to Ferguson, is in use at this hour in the manufactory of Messrs. Malby and Son. The poor lad ‘who made a globe in three weeks’ finally won the honours and riches that were due to his genius and industry. But he would never have earned a living in the continuance of his first attempt to turn a ball out of a piece of wood, cover it with paper, and draw a map of the world upon it. The nicest application of his individual skill, and the most careful employment of his scientific knowledge, would have been wasted upon those portions of the work in which the continued application of common routine labour is the most efficient instrument of production.

Let us contrast the successive steps of Ferguson’s first experiment in globe-making with the processes of a globe manufactory.

A globe is not made of ‘a ball turned out of a piece of wood.’ If a solid ball of large dimensions were so turned, it would be too heavy for ordinary use. Erasmus said of one of the books of Thomas Aquinas, ‘No man can carry it about, much less get it into his head;’ and so would it be said of a solid globe. If it were made of hollow wood, it would warp and split at the junction of its parts. A globe is made of paper and plaster. It is a beautiful combination of solidity and lightness. It is perfectly balanced upon its axis. It retains its form under every variety of temperature. Time affects it less than most other works of art. It is as durable as a Scagliola column.

A globe may not, at first sight, appear a cheap production. It is not, of necessity, a low-priced production, and yet it is essentially cheap; for nearly all the principles of manufacture that are conditions of cheapness are exhibited in the various stages of its construction. There are only four globe-makers in England and one in Scotland. The annual sale of globes is only about a thousand pair. The price of a pair of globes varies from six shillings to fifty pounds. But from the smallest 2-inch, to the largest 36-inch globe, a systematic process is carried on at every step of its formation. We select this Illustration of Cheapness as a contrast, in relation to price and extent of demand, to the Lucifer Match. But it is, at the same time, a parallel in principle. If a globe were not made upon a principle involving the scientific combination of skilled labour, it would be a mere article of luxury from its excessive costliness. It is now a most useful instrument in education. For educational purposes the most inexpensive globe is as valuable as that of the highest price. All that properly belongs to the excellence of the instrument is found in combination with the commonest stained wood frame, as perfectly as with the most highly-finished frame of rose-wood or mahogany.

The mould, if we may so express it, of a globe is turned out of a piece of wood. This sphere need not be mathematically accurate. It is for rough work, and flaws and cracks are of little consequence. This wooden ball has an axis, a piece of iron wire at each pole. And here we may remark, that, at every stage of the process, the revolution of a sphere upon its axis, under the hands of the workman, is the one great principle which renders every operation one of comparative ease and simplicity. The labour would be enormously multiplied if the same class of operations had to be performed upon a cube. The solid mould, then, of the embryo globe is placed on its axis in a wooden frame. In a very short time a boy will form a pasteboard globe upon its surface. He first covers it entirely with strips of strong paper, thoroughly wet, which are in a tub of water at his side. The slight inequalities produced by the over-lapping of the strips are immaterial. The saturated paper is not suffered to dry; but is immediately covered over with a layer of pasted paper, also cut in long narrow slips. A third layer of similarly pasted paper—brown paper and white being used alternately—is applied; and then, a fourth, a fifth and a sixth. Here the pasting process ends for globes of moderate size. For the large ones it is carried farther. This wet pasteboard ball has now to be dried,—placed upon its axis in a rack. If we were determined to follow the progress of this individual ball through all its stages, we should have to wait a fortnight before it advanced another step. But as the large factory of Messrs. Malby and Son has many scores of globes all rolling onward to perfection, we shall be quite satisfied to witness the next operation performed upon a pasteboard sphere that began to exist some weeks earlier, and is now hard to the core.

The wooden ball, with its solid paper covering, is placed on its axis. A sharp cutting instrument, fixed on a bench, is brought into contact with the surface of the sphere, which is made to revolve. In less time than we write, the pasteboard ball is cut in half. There is no adhesion to the wooden mould, for the first coating of paper was simply wetted. Two bowls of thick card now lie before us, with a small hole in each, made by the axis of the wooden ball. But a junction is very soon effected. Within every globe there is a piece of wood—we may liken it to a round ruler—of the exact length of the inner surface of the sphere from pole to pole. A thick wire runs through this wood, and originally projected some two or three inches at each end. This stick is placed upright in a vice. The semi-globe is nailed to one end of the stick, upon which it rests, when the wire is passed through its centre. It is now reversed, and the edges of the card rapidly covered with glue. The edges of the other semi-globe are instantly brought into contact, the other end of the wire passing through its centre in the same way, and a similar nailing to the stick taking place. We have now a paper globe, with its own axis, which will be its companion for the whole term of its existence.

The paper globe is next placed on its axis in a frame, of which one side is a semi-circular piece of metal;—the horizon of a globe cut in half would show its form. A tub of white composition,—a compound of whiting, glue, and oil is on the bench. The workman dips his hand into this ‘gruel thick and slab,’ and rapidly applies it to the paper sphere with tolerable evenness: but as it revolves, the semi-circle of metal clears off the superfluous portions. The ball of paper is now a ball of plaster externally. Time again enters largely into the manufacture. The first coating must thoroughly dry before the next is applied; and so again till the process has been repeated four or five times. Thus, when we visit a globe workshop, we are at first surprised at the number of white balls, from three inches diameter to three feet, which occupy a large space. They are all steadily advancing towards completion. They cannot be hurriedly dried. The duration of their quiescent state must depend upon the degrees of the thermometer in the ordinary atmosphere. They cost little. They consume nothing beyond a small amount of rent. As they advance to the dignity of perfect spheres, increased pains are taken in the application of the plaster. At last they are polished. Their surface is as hard and as fine as ivory. But, beautiful as they are, they may, like many other beautiful things, want a due equipoise. They must be perfectly balanced. They must move upon their poles with the utmost exactness. A few shot, let in here and there, correct all irregularities. And now the paper and plaster sphere is to be endued with intelligence.

What may be called the artistical portion of globe-making here commences. In the manufactory we are describing there are two skilled workers, who may take rank as artists, but whose skill is limited, and at the same time perfected, by the uniformity of their operations. One of these artists, a young woman, who has been familiar with the business from her earliest years, takes the polished globe in her lap, for the purpose of marking it with lines of direction for covering it with engraved strips, which will ultimately form a perfect map. The inspection of a finished globe will show that the larger divisions of longitude are expressed by lines drawn from pole to pole, and those of latitude by a series of concentric rings. The polished plaster has to be covered with similar lines. These lines are struck with great rapidity, and with mathematical truth, by an instrument called a ‘beam compass,’ in the use of which this workwoman is most expert. The sphere is now ready for receiving the map, which is engraved in fourteen distinct pieces. The arctic and antarctic poles form two circular pieces, from which the lines of longitude radiate. These having been fitted and pasted, one of the remaining twelve pieces, containing 30 degrees, is also pasted on the sphere, in the precise space where the lines of longitude have been previously marked, its lines of latitude corresponding in a similar manner. The paper upon which these portions of the earth’s surface are engraved is thin and extremely tough. It is rubbed down with the greatest care, through all the stages of this pasting process. We have at length a globe covered with a plain map, so perfectly joined that every line and every letter fit together as if they had been engraved in one piece,—which, of course, would be absolutely impossible for the purpose of covering a ball.

The artist who thus covers the globe, called a paster, is also a colourer. This is, of necessity, a work which cannot be carried on with any division of labour. It is not so with the colouring of an atlas. A map passes under many hands in the colouring. A series of children, each using one colour, produce in combination a map coloured in all its parts, with the rapidity and precision of a machine. But a globe must be coloured by one hand. It is curious to observe the colourer working without a pattern. By long experience the artist knows how the various boundaries are to be defined, with pink continents, and blue islands, and the green oceans, connecting the most distant regions. To a contemplative mind, how many thoughts must go along with the mark, as he covers Europe with indications of popular cities, and has little to do with Africa and Australia but to mark the coast lines;—as year after year he has to make some variation in the features of the great American continent, which indicates the march of the human family over once trackless deserts, whilst the memorable places of the ancient world undergo few changes but those of name. And then, as he is finishing a globe for the cabin of some ‘great ammirall,’ may he not think that, in some frozen nook of the Arctic Sea, the friendly Esquimaux may come to gaze upon his work, and seeing how pretty a spot England is upon the ball, wonder what illimitable riches nature spontaneously produces in that favoured region, some of which is periodically scattered by her ships through those dreary climes in the search for some unknown road amidst everlasting icebergs, while he would gladly find a short track to the sunny south. And then, perhaps, higher thoughts may come into his mind; and as this toy of a world grows under his fingers, and as he twists it around upon its material axis, he may think of the great artificer of the universe, having the feeling, if not knowing, the words of the poet:—

‘In ambient air this ponderous ball He hung.’

Contemplative, or not, the colourer steadily pursues his uniform labour, and the sphere is at length fully coloured.

The globe has now to be varnished with a preparation technically known as ‘white hard,’ to which some softening matter is added to prevent the varnish cracking. This is a secret which globe-makers preserve. Four coats of varnish complete the work.

And next the ball has to be mounted. We have already mentioned an instrument by which the brass meridian ring is accurately graduated; that is, marked with lines representing 360 degrees, with corresponding numerals. Of whatever size the ring is, an index-hand, connected with the graduating instrument, shows the exact spot where the degree is to be marked with a graver. The operation is comparatively rapid; but for the largest globes it involves considerable expense. After great trouble, the ingenious men whose manufactory we are describing have succeeded in producing cast-iron rings, with the degrees and figures perfectly distinct; and these applied to 36-inch globes, instead of the engraved meridians, make a difference of ten guineas in their price. For furniture they are not so beautiful; for use they are quite as valuable. There is only one other process which requires great nicety. The axis of the globe revolves on the meridian ring, and of course it is absolutely necessary that the poles should be exactly parallel. This is effected by a little machine which drills each extremity at one and the same instant; and the operation is termed poling the meridian.

The mounting of the globe,—the completion of a pair of globes,—is now handed over to the cabinet-maker. The cost of the material and the elaboration of the workmanship determine the price.

Before we conclude, we would say a few words as to the limited nature of the demand for globes.

Our imperfect description of this manufacture will have shown that experience, and constant application of ingenuity, have succeeded in reducing to the lowest amount the labour employed in the production of globes. The whole population of English globe-makers does not exceed thirty or forty men, women, and boys. Globes are thus produced at the lowest rate of cheapness, as regards the number of labourers, and with very moderate profits to the manufacturer, on account of the smallness of his returns. The durability of globes is one great cause of the limitation of the demand. Changes of fashion, or caprices of taste, as to the mounting—new geographical discoveries, and modern information as to the position and nomenclature of the stars—may displace a few old globes annually, which then find their way from brokers’ shops into a class somewhat below that of their original purchasers. But the pair of globes generally maintain for years their original position in the school-room or the library. They are rarely injured, and suffer very slight decay. The new purchasers represent that portion of society which is seeking after knowledge, or desires to manifest some pretension to intellectual tastes. The number of globes annually sold represents to a certain extent the advance of Education. But if the labour-saving expedients did not exist in the manufacture the cost would be much higher, and the purchasers greatly reduced in number. The contrivances by which comparative cheapness is produced arise out of the necessity of contending against the durability of the article by encouraging a new demand. If these did not exist, the supply would outrun the demand;—the price of the article would less and less repay the labour expended in its production; the manufacture of globes would cease till the old globes were worn out, and the few rich and scientific purchasers had again raised up a market.

THE GHOST OF THE LATE MR. JAMES BARBER.
A YARN ASHORE.

‘“Luck!” nonsense. There is no such thing. Life is not a game of chance any more than chess is. If you lose, you have no one but yourself to blame.’

This was said by a young lieutenant in the Royal Navy, to a middle-aged midshipman, his elder brother.

‘Do you mean to say that luck had nothing to do with Fine Gentleman Bobbin passing for lieutenant, and my being turned back?’ was the rejoinder.

‘Bobbin, though a dandy, is a good seaman, and—and——.’ The speaker looked another way, and hesitated.

‘I am not, you would add—if you had courage. But I say I am, and a better seaman than Bobbin.’

‘Practically, perhaps, for you are ten years older in the service. But it was in the theoretical part of seamanship—which is equally important—that you broke down before the examiners,’ continued the younger officer, in tones of earnest but sorrowful reproach. ‘You never would study.’

‘I’ll tell you what it is, master Ferdinand,’ said the elderly middy, not without a show of displeasure. ‘I don’t think this is the correct sort of conversation to be going on between two brothers after a five years’ separation.’

The young lieutenant laid his hand soothingly on his brother’s arm, and entreated him to take what he said in good part.

‘Well, well!’ rejoined the middy, with a laugh half-forced. ‘Take care what you are about, or, by Jove, I’ll inform against you.’

‘What for?’

‘Why, for preaching without a license.—Besides, you were once as bad as you pretend I am.’

‘I own it with sorrow; but I was warned in time by the wretched end of poor James Barber——’

‘Of whom?’ asked the elder brother, starting back as he pushed his glass along the table. ‘You don’t mean Jovial Jemmy, as we used to call him; once my messmate in the brig “Rollock.”’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘What! dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why, it was one of our great delights, when in harbour and on shore, to “go the rounds,”—as he called it—with Jovial Jemmy. He understood life from stem to stern—from truck to keel. He knew everybody, from the First Lord downwards. I have seen him recognised by the Duke one minute, and the next pick up with a strolling player, and familiarly treat him at a tavern. He once took me to a quadrille party at the Duchess of Durrington’s, where he seemed to know and be known to everybody present, and then adjourned to the Cider Cellars, where he was equally intimate with all sorts of queer characters. Though a favourite among the aristocracy, he was equally welcome in less exclusive societies. He was “Brother,” “Past Master,” “Warden,” “Noble Grand,” or “President” of all sorts of Lodges and Fraternities. Uncommonly knowing was Jemmy in all sorts of club and fashionable gossip. He knew who gave the best dinners, and was always invited to the best balls. He was a capital judge of champagne, and when he betted upon a horse-race everybody backed him. He could hum all the fashionable songs, and was the fourth man who could dance the polka when it was first imported. Then he was as profound in bottled stout, Welsh rabbits, Burton ale, devilled kidneys, and bowls of Bishop, as he was in Roman punch, French cookery, and Italian singers. Afloat, he was the soul of fun:—he got up all our private theatricals, told all the best stories, and sung comic songs that made even the Purser laugh.’

‘An extent and variety of knowledge and accomplishments,’ said Lieutenant Fid, ‘which had the precise effect of blasting his prospects in life. He was, as you remember, at last dismissed the service for intemperance and incompetence.’

‘When did you see him last?’

‘What, alive?’ inquired Ferdinand Fid, changing countenance.

‘Of course! Surely you do not mean to insinuate that you have seen his ghost!’

The lieutenant was silent; and the midshipman took a deep draught of his favourite mixture—equal portions of rum and water—and hinted to his younger brother, the lieutenant, the expediency of immediately confiding the story to the Marines; for he declined to credit it. He then ventured another recommendation, which was, that Ferdinand should throw the impotent temperance tipple he was then imbibing ‘over the side of the Ship’—which meant the tavern of that name in Greenwich, at the open bow-window of which they were then sitting—and clear his intellects by something stronger.

‘I can afford to be laughed at,’ said the younger Fid, ‘because I have gained immeasurably by the delusion, if it be one; but if ever there was a ghost, I have seen the ghost of James Barber. I, like yourself and he, was nearly ruined by love of amusement and intemperance, when he—or whatever else it might have been—came to my aid.’

‘Let us hear. I see I am “in” for a ghost story.’

‘Well; it was eighteen forty-one when I came home in the “Arrow” with despatches from the coast of Africa: you were lying in the Tagus in the “Bobstay.” Ours, you know, was rather a thirsty station; a man inclined for it comes home from the Slaving Coasts with a determination to make up his lee way. I did mine with a vengeance. As usual, I looked up “Jovial Jemmy.”’

‘’Twas easy to find him if you knew where to go.’

‘I did know, and went. He had by that time got tired of his more aristocratic friends. Respectability was too “slow” for him, so I found him presiding over the “Philanthropic Raspers,” at the “Union Jack.” He received me with open arms, and took me, as you say, the “rounds.” I can’t recal that week’s dissipation without a shudder. We rushed about from ball to tavern, from theatre to supper-room, from club to gin-palace, as if our lives depended on losing not a moment. We had not time to walk, so we galloped about in cabs. On the fourth night, when I was beginning to feel knocked up, and tired of the same songs, the same quadrilles, the bad whiskey, the suffocating tobacco smoke, and the morning’s certain and desperate penalties, I remarked to Jemmy, that it was a miracle how he had managed to weather it for so many years. “What a hardship you would deem it,” I added, “if you were obliged to go the same weary round from one year’s end to another.”’

‘What did he say to that?’ asked Philip.

‘Why, I never saw him so taken aback. He looked quite fiercely at me, and replied, “I am obliged!”’

‘How did he make that out?’

‘Why, he had tippled and dissipated his constitution into such a state that use had become second nature. Excitement was his natural condition, and he dared not become quite sober for fear of a total collapse—or dropping down like a shot in the water.’

The midshipman had his glass in his hand, but forebore to taste it.—‘Well, what then?’

‘The “rounds” lasted two nights longer. I was fairly beaten. Cast-iron could not have stood it. I was prostrated in bed with fever—and worse.’ Ferdinand was agitated, and took a large draught of his lemonade.

‘Well, well, you need not enlarge upon that,’ replied Phil Fid, raising his glass towards his lips, but again thinking better of it; ‘I heard how bad you were from Seton, who shaved your head.’

‘I had scarcely recovered when the “Arrow” was ordered back, and I made a vow.’

‘Took the pledge, perhaps!’ interjected the mid, with a slight curl of his lip.

‘No! I determined to work more and play less. We had a capital naval instructor aboard, and our commander was as good an officer as ever trod the deck. I studied—a little too hard perhaps, for I was laid up again. The “Arrow” was, as usual, as good as her name, and we shot across to Jamaica in five weeks. One evening as we were lying in Kingston harbour, Seton, who had come over to join the Commodore as full surgeon, told me what he had never ventured to divulge before.’

‘What was that?’

‘Why, that, on the very day I left London, James Barber died of a frightful attack of delirium tremens!’

‘Poor Jemmy!’ said the elder Fid sorrowfully, taking a long pull of consolation from his rummer. ‘Little did I think, while singing some of your best songs off Belem Castle, that I had seen you for the last time!’

‘I hadn’t seen him for the last time,’ returned the lieutenant, with awful significance.

Philip assumed a careless air, and said, ‘Go on.’

‘We were ordered home in eighteen forty-five, and paid off in January. I went to Portsmouth; was examined, and passed as lieutenant.’

This allusion to his brother’s better condition made poor Philip look rather blank.

‘On being confirmed at the Admiralty,’ continued Ferdinand, ‘I had to give a dinner to the “Arrows;” which I did at the Salopian, Charing Cross. In the excess of my joy at promotion, my determination of temperance and avoidance of what is called “society” was swamped. I kept it up once more; I went the “rounds,” and accepted all the dinner, supper, and ball invitations I could get, invariably ending each morning in one of the old haunts of dissipation. Old associations with James Barber returned, and like causes produced similar effects. One morning while maundering home, I began to feel the same wild confusion as had previously commenced my dreadful malady.’

‘Ah! a little touched in the top-hamper.’

‘It was just daylight. Thinking to cool myself, I jumped into a wherry to get pulled down here to Greenwich.’

‘Of course you were not quite sober.’

‘Don’t ask! I do not like even to allude to my sensations, for fear of recalling them. My brain seemed in a flame. The boat appeared to be going at the rate of twenty miles an hour. Fast as we were cleaving the current, I heard my name distinctly called out. I reconnoitred, but could see nobody. I looked over on one side of the gunwale, and, while doing so, felt something touch me from the other; I felt a chill; I turned round and saw——’

‘Whom?’ asked the midshipman, holding his breath.

‘What seemed to be James Barber.’

‘Was he wet?’

‘As dry as you are.’

‘I summoned courage to speak. “Hallo! some mistake!” I exclaimed.

‘“Not at all,” was the reply. “I’m James Barber. Don’t be frightened, I’m harmless.”

‘“But——”

‘“I know what you are going to say,” interrupted the intruder. “Seton did not deceive you—I am only an occasional visitor up here.”

‘This brought me up with a round turn, and I had sense enough to wish my friend would vanish as he came. “Where shall we land you?” I asked.

‘“Oh, any where—it don’t matter. I have got to be out every night and all night; and the nights are plaguy long just now.”

‘I could not muster a word.

‘“Ferd Fid,” continued the voice, which now seemed about fifty fathoms deep; and fast as we were dropping down the stream, the boat gave a heel to starboard, as if she had been broadsided by a tremendous wave—“Ferd Fid, you recollect how I used to kill time; how I sang, drank, danced, and supped all night long, and then slept and soda-watered it all day? You remember what a happy fellow I seemed. Fools like yourself thought I was so; but I say again, I wasn’t,” growled the voice, letting itself down a few fathoms deeper. “Often and often I would have given the world to have been a market-gardener or a dealer in chick-weed while roaring ‘He is a jolly good fellow,’ and ‘We won’t go home till morning!’ as I emerged with a group from some tavern into Covent Garden market. But I’m punished fearfully for my sins now. What do you think I have got to do every night of my—never mind—what do you think is now marked out as my dreadful punishment?”

‘“Well, to walk the earth, I suppose,” said I.

‘“No.”

‘“To paddle about in the Thames from sunset to sun-rise?”

‘“Worse. Ha! ha!” (his laugh sounded like the booming of a gong). “I only wish my doom was merely to be a mud-lark. No, no, I’m condemned to rush about from one evening party and public house to another. At the former I am bound for a certain term on each night to dance all the quadrilles, and a few of the polkas and waltzes with clumsy partners; and then I have to eat stale pastry and tough poultry before I am let off from that place. After, I am bound to go to some cellar or singing place to listen to ‘Hail, smiling morn,’ ‘Mynheer Van Dunk,’ ‘The monks of old,’ ‘Happy land,’ imitations of the London actors, and to hear a whole canto of dreary extempore verses. I must also smoke a dozen of cigars, knowing—as in my present condition I must know,—what they are made of. The whole to end on each night with unlimited brandy (British) and water, and eternal intoxication. Oh, F. F., be warned! be warned! Take my advice; keep up your resolution, and don’t do it again. When afloat, drink nothing stronger than purser’s tea. When on shore be temperate in your pleasures; don’t turn night into day; don’t exchange wholesome amusements for rabid debauchery, robust health for disease and—well, I won’t mention it. When afloat, study your profession and don’t get cashiered and cold-shouldered as I was. Promise me—nay, you must swear!”

‘At this word I thought I heard a gurgling sound in the water.

‘“If I can get six solemn pledges before the season’s over, I’m only to go these horrid rounds during the meeting of Parliament.”

‘“Will you swear?” again urged the voice, with persuasive agony.

‘I was just able to comply.

‘“Ten thousand thanks!” were the next words I heard; “I’m off, for there is an awful pint of pale ale, a chop, and a glass of brandy and water overdue yet, and I must devour them at the Shades.” (We were then close to London Bridge.) “Don’t let the waterman pull to shore; I can get there without troubling him.”

‘I remember no more. When sensation returned, I was in bed, in this very house, a shade worse than I had been from the previous attack.’

‘That,’ said Philip, who had left his tumbler untasted, ‘must have been when you had your head shaved for the second time.’

‘Exactly so.’

‘And you really believe it was Jovial James’s ghost,’ inquired Fid, earnestly.

‘Would it be rational to doubt it?’

Philip rose and paced the room in deep thought for several minutes. He cast two or three earnest looks at his brother, and a few longing ones at his glass. In the course of his cogitation, he groaned out more than once an apostrophe to poor ‘James Barber.’ At length he declared his mind was made up.

‘Ferd!’ he said, ‘I told you awhile ago to throw your lemonade over the side of the Ship. Don’t. Souse out my grog instead.’

The lieutenant did as he was bid.

‘And now,’ said Fid the elder, ‘ring for soda water; for one must drink something.’

Last year it was my own good fortune to sail with Mr. Philip Fid in the ‘Bombottle’ (74). He is not exactly a tee-totaller: but he never drinks spirits, and will not touch wine unmixed with water, for fear of its interfering with his studies, at which he is, with the assistance of the naval instructor (who is also our chaplain), assiduous. He is our first mate, and the smartest officer in the ship. Seton is our surgeon.

One day, after a cheerful ward-room dinner (of which Fid was a guest), while we were at anchor in the bay of Cadiz, the conversation happened to turn upon Jovial Jemmy’s apparition, which had become the best authenticated ghost story in Her Majesty’s Naval service. On that occasion Seton undertook to explain the mystery upon medical principles.

‘The fact is,’ he said, ‘what the commander of the “Arrow” saw (Ferdinand had by this time got commissioned in his old ship) was a spectrum, produced by that morbid condition of the brain, which is brought on by the immoderate use of stimulants, and by dissipation; we call it Transient Monomania. I could show you dozens of such ghosts in the books, if you only had patience while I turned them up.’

Everybody declared that was unnecessary. We would take the doctor’s word for it; though I feel convinced not a soul besides the chaplain and myself had one iota of his faith shaken in the real presence of Jovial Jemmy’s post-mortem appearance to Fid the younger.

Ghost or no ghost, however, the story had had the effect of converting Philip Fid from one of the most intemperate and inattentive to one of the soberest and best of Her Majesty’s officers. May his promotion be speedy!

P. Clay, Lieut. R.M.

H.M.S. ‘Bombottle.’

20th March, 1850.

THE TRUE STORY OF A COAL FIRE.

IN THREE CHAPTERS.—CHAPTER THE LAST.

The air blew freshly over the bright waving grass of a broad sloping field, on which the morning dews were sparkling and glancing in the sun. The clouds moved quickly over head, in clear grey and golden tints on their upper edges and foamy crests, with dark billows beneath, and their shadows chased each other down the green slopes of the field in rapid succession. Swiftly following them—now in the midst of them—now seeming to lead them on, a fine bay horse with flying mane, wild outspreading tail, and dilated nostrils, dashed onward exulting in his liberty, his strength, his speed, and all the early associations and influences of nature around him! He was a coal-mine horse, and had been just brought up the shaft for a holiday.

All this Flashley saw very distinctly, having been hastily landed at the top of the shaft, lifted into a tram-cart, and trundled off, he knew not by what enginery, till he was suddenly shot out on the top of a green embankment, and rolling down to the bottom, found himself lying in a fresh green field. He enjoyed the action, the spirit, and every motion of the horse. It was the exact embodiment in activity of his strongest present feelings and impulses. He jumped up to run after the horse, and mount him if he could, or if not, scamper about the field with him in the same fashion. But while he sought to advance, he felt as if he were retreating—in fact, he was sure of it;—the grass ran by him, instead of his running over it—the hedges ran through him, instead of his passing along them—the trees sped away before him into the distance, as he was carried backwards. He lost his legs—he sank upon the air—he was still carried backwards—all the landscape faded, and with a loud splash he fell into the sea!

Down he sank, and fancied he saw green watery fields rolling on all sides, and over him; and presently he heard a voice hoarsely calling as if from some bank above. He certainly had heard the voice before, and recognised it with considerable awe, though the words it uttered were homely and unromantic enough. It shouted out ‘Nancy, of Sunderland!—boat ahoy!’

By some inexplicable process—though he clearly distinguished a boat-hook in the performance—Flashley was picked up from beneath the waves, and lifted into a boat. It was a little, dirty, black, thick-gunnelled jollyboat, rowed by two men in short black over-shirts and smutty canvas trowsers. In the stern sat the captain with his arms folded. A broad-brimmed tarpaulin hat shaded his face. They pulled alongside a ship as black as death, but very lively; and a rope being lowered from the side, it was passed under Flashley’s arms in a noose, and the next moment he was hoisted on deck, and told to attend to his duty.

‘My duty!’ ejaculated Flashley, ‘Attend to my duty! Oh, what is my duty?’ His eyes wandered round. Nothing but hard black planks and timbers, and masts with reefed sails, and rigging all covered with coal-dust, met his gaze. The sky, however, was visible above him—that was a great comfort.

‘Scrape these carrots and parsnips,’ said the Captain solemnly, ‘very clean, d’ye mind!—and take them to the cook in the galley, who’ll let you know what’s next. When he has done with you, clean my sea-boots, and grease them with candle-ends; dry my peajacket, pilot-coat, and dreadnoughts; clean my pipe, and fill it—light, and take three whiffs to start it; mix me a glass of grog, and bring it with the lighted pipe; then, go and lend a hand in tarring the weather-rigging, and stand by, to go aloft and ease down the fore-top-gallant mast when the mate wants her on deck.’

‘Oh, heavens!’ thought Flashley, ‘are these then my duties! This hideous black ship must be a collier—and I am the cabinboy!’

A mixed impulse of equal curiosity and apprehension (it certainly was from no anxiety to commence his miscellaneous duties) caused him to ‘inquire his way’ to the cook’s galley. He was presently taken to a square enclosure, not unlike a great black rabbit-hutch, open at both sides, in which he was received by a man of large proportions, who was seated on an inverted iron saucepan, smoking. The black visage gave a grim smile and familiar wink. It could not be the miner who had acted as his guide and companion underground! And yet—

Flashley stepped back hastily, and cast an anxious look towards the after-part of the deck. There stood the Captain. A short yet very heavily-built figure,—a kind of stunted giant. He was not an Indian, nor a Mulatto, nor an African,—and yet his face was as black as a coal, in which several large veins rose prominently, and had a dull yellow tinge, as if they had been run with gold, or some metallic substance of that colour. Who could he be? Some demon incog.? No, not that—but some one whom Flashley held in equal awe.

How long poor Flashley continued to perform his multifarious duties on board the ‘Nancy’ he had no idea, but they appeared at times very onerous, and he had to undergo many hardships. This was especially the case in the North Sea during the winter months, which are often of the severest kind on the coast between Sunderland and the mouth of the Thames. The rigging was all frozen, so that to lay hold of a rope seemed to take the skin off his hand; the cold went to the bone, and he hardly knew if his hands were struck through with frost, or by a hot iron. The decks were all slippery with ice, so were the ladders down to the cabins, and the cook’s galley was garnished all round with large icicles, from six inches to a foot and a half in length, which kept up a continual drip, drip, on all sides, by way of complimentary acknowledgment of the caboose-fire inside. Sometimes the wind burst the side-doors open—blew the fire clean out of the caboose, and scattered the live and dead coals all over the deck, or whirled them into the sea. One night the galley itself, with all its black and smutty paraphernalia, was torn up and blown overboard. It danced about on the tops of the waves—made deep curtseys—swept up the side of a long billow—was struck by a cross-wave, and disappeared in a hundred black planks and splinters. That same night Flashley was called up from his berth to go aloft and lend a hand to close-reef the main-topsail. The sail was all frozen, and so stiff that he could not raise it; but as he hauled on one of the points, the point broke, and something happened to him,—he did not know what, but he thought he fell backwards, and the wind flew away with him.

The next thing he remembered was that of lying in his berth with a bandage round one arm, and a large patch on one side of his head, while the cook sat on a sea-chest by his side reading to him.

A deep splashing plunge was now heard, followed by the rapid rumbling of an iron chain along the deck overhead. The collier had arrived off Rotherhithe, and cast anchor.

‘Up, Flashley!’ cried the cook; ‘on deck, my lad! to receive the whippers who are coming alongside.’

‘What for?’ exclaimed Flashley; ‘why am I to be whipped?’

‘It is not you,’ said the cook, laughing gruffly, as he ran up the ladder, ‘but the coal-baskets that are to be whipped up, and discharged into the lighter.’

The deck being cleared, and the main hatchway opened, a small iron wheel (called gin) was rigged out on a rope passing over the top of a spar (called derrick) at some 18 or 20 feet above the deck. Over this wheel a rope was passed, to which four other ropes were attached lower down. These were for the four whippers. At the other end of the wheel-rope was slung a basket. A second basket stood upon the coals, where four men also stood with shovels—two to fill each basket, one being always up and one down. The whippers had a stage raised above the deck, made of five rails, which they ascended for the pull, higher and higher as the coals got lower in the hold. The two baskets-full were the complement for one measure. The ‘measure’ was a black angular wooden box with its front placed close to the vessel’s side, just above a broad trough that slanted towards the lighter. Beside the measure stood the ‘meter,’ (an elderly personage with his head and jaws bound up in a bundle-handkerchief, to protect him from the draughts,) who had a piece of chalk in one hand, while with the other he was ready to raise a latch, and let all the coals burst out of the measure into the trough, by the fall of the front part of the box. The measure was suspended to one end of a balance, a weight being attached to the other, so that the weighing and measuring were performed by one process under the experienced, though rheumatic, eye of the meter.

The whippers continued at their laborious work all day; and as the coals were taken out of the hold, (the basket descending lower and lower as the depth increased,) the ‘whippers’ who hauled up, gave their weight to the pull, and all swung down from their ricketty rails with a leap upon the deck, as the basket ran up; ascending again to their position while the basket was being emptied into the trough.

The lighter had five compartments, called ‘rooms,’ each holding seven tons of coals; and when these were filled, the men sometimes heaped coals all over them from one end of the craft to the other, as high up as the combings, or side-ridges, would afford protection for the heap. By these means a lighter could carry forty-two tons, and upwards; and some of the craft having no separate ‘rooms,’ but an open hold, fore and aft, could carry between fifty and fifty-five tons.

A canal barge or monkey-boat (so called we presume from being very narrow in the loins) now came alongside, and having taken in her load of coals, the friendly cook of the ‘Nancy’ expressed an anxiety that Flashley should lose no opportunity of gaining all possible experience on the subject of coals, and the coal-trade generally, and therefore proposed to him a canal trip, having already spoken with the ‘captain of the barge’ on the subject. Before Flashley had time to object, or utter a demur, he was handed over the side, and pitched neatly on his legs on the after-part of the barge, close to a little crooked iron chimney, sticking blackly out of the deck, and sending forth a dense cloud of the dirtiest and most unsavoury smoke. The captain was standing on the ladder of the cabin, leaning on his great arms and elbows over the deck, and completely filling up the small square hatchway, so that all things being black alike, it seemed as if this brawny object were some live excrescence of the barge, or huge black mandrake whose roots were spread about beneath, and, perhaps, here and there, sending a speculative straggler through a chink into the water.

The mandrake’s eyes smiled, and he showed a very irregular set of large white and yellow teeth, as he scrunched down through the small square hole to enable the young passenger and tourist to descend.

Flashley, with a forlorn look up at the sky, and taking a good breath of fresh air to fortify him for what his nose already warned him he would have to encounter, managed to get down the four upright bars nailed close to the bulk-head, and called the ‘ladder.’

He found himself in a small aperture of no definite shape, and in which there was only room for one person to ‘turn’ at a time. Yet five living creatures were already there, and apparently enjoying themselves. There was the captain, and there was his wife, and there was a child in the wife’s right arm, and another of five years old packed against her left side, and there was the ‘crew’ of the barge, which consisted, for the present, of one boy of sixteen, of very stunted growth, and with one eye turning inwards to such a degree that sometimes the sight literally darted out, seeming to shoot beneath the bridge of his nose. They were all sitting, or rather hunched up, at ‘tea.’ The place had an overwhelming odour of coal-smoke, and tobacco smoke, and brown sugar, and onions, to say nothing of general ‘closeness,’ and the steam of a wet blanket-coat, which was lying in a heap to dry before the little iron stove. The door of this was open, and the fire shone brightly, and seemed to ‘wink’ at Flashley as he looked that way.

‘Here we are!’ said a strange voice.

Flashley looked earnestly into the stove. He thought the voice came from the fire. The coals certainly looked very glowing, and shot out what a German or other imaginative author would call significant sparks.

‘Here we are!’ said the voice from another part of the cabin, and, turning in that direction, Flashley found that it proceeded from the ‘crew,’ who had contrived to stand up, and was endeavouring to give a close imitation of the ‘clown,’ on his first appearance after transformation. This, by the help of his odd eye, was very significant indeed.

And here they were, no doubt, and here they lived from day to day, and from night to night; and a pretty wretched, dirty, monotonous life it was. Having once got into a canal, with the horse at his long tug, the tediousness of the time was not easily to be surpassed. From canal to river, and from river to canal, there was scarcely any variety, except in the passage through the locks, the management of the rope in passing another barge-horse on the tow-path, and the means to be employed in taking the horse over a bridge. The duty of driving the horse along the tow-path, as may be conjectured, fell to the lot of our young tourist. Once or twice, ‘concealed by the murky shades of night,’ as a certain novelist would express it, he had ventured to mount the horse’s back; but the animal, not relishing this addition to his work, always took care, when they passed under a bridge, or near a wall, or hard embankment, to scrape his rider’s leg along the side, so that very little good was got in that way. And once, when Flashley had a ‘holiday,’ and was allowed to walk up and down the full length of the barge upon the top of the coals, a sudden bend in the river brought them close upon a very low wooden bridge, just when he was at the wrong end of the barge for making a dive to save his head. Flashley ran along the top as fast as he could, but the rascally horse seemed to quicken his pace, under the captain’s mischievous lash, so that finding the shadow of the bridge running at him before he could make his leap from the top of the coals, he was obliged to save himself from being violently knocked off, by jumping hastily into the canal, to the infinite amusement and delight of the captain, his wife, and the ‘crew.’ The horse being stopped, the captain came back and lugged him out of the bulrushes just as he had got thoroughly entangled, and immersed to the chin; knee-deep in mud, and with frogs and eels skeeling and striking out in all directions around him.

After a week or ten days passed in this delightful manner, Flashley found the barge was again on the Thames, no longer towed by a horse and rope, but by a little dirty steam-tug. They stopped on meeting a lighter on its way up with the tide, and Flashley being told to step on board, was received by his grim but good-natured companion and instructor, the cook of the ‘Nancy,’ now going up with a load to Bankside, and performing the feat of managing two black oars of enormous length and magnitude. They were worked in large grooves in each side of the lighter, one oar first receiving all the strength of this stupendous lighterman (late cook) with his feet firmly planted on a cross-beam in front, so as to add to the mighty pull of his arms, all the strength of his legs, as well as all the weight of his body. Having made this broad sweep and deep, he left the oar lying along the groove, and went to the one on the other side, with which he performed a similar sweep.

‘Here’s a brig with all sails set, close upon us!’ cried Flashley.

‘She’d best take care of herself;’ said our lighterman, as he went on deliberately to complete his long pull and strong.

Bump came the brig’s starboard bow against the lighter; and instantly heeling over with a lift and a lurch, the former reeled away to leeward, a row of alarmed but more enraged faces instantly appearing over the bulwarks—those ‘aft’ with eyes flashing on the lighterman, and those ‘for’ard,’ anxiously looking over to see if the bows had been stove in. A volley of anathemas followed our lighterman; who, however, continued slowly to rise and sink backward with his prodigious pull, apparently not hearing a word, or even aware of what had happened.

In this way they went up the river among sailing-vessels of all kinds, and between the merchants’ ‘forest of masts,’ like some huge antediluvian water-reptile deliberately winding its way up a broad river between the woods of a region unknown to man.

‘But here’s a steamer!’ shouted Flashley.—‘We shall be run down, or she’ll go slap over us!’

The man at the wheel, however, knew better. He had dealt with lightermen before to-day. He therefore turned off the sharp nose of the steamer, so as not merely to clear it, but dexterously to send the ‘swell’ in a long rolling swath up against the lighter, over which it completely ran, leaving the performer at the oars drenched up to the hips, and carrying Flashley clean overboard. He was swept away in the rolling wave, and might have been drowned, had not a coalheaver at one of the wharfs put off a skiff to his rescue.

So now behold Flashley at work among the wharfingers of Bankside.

Before the coals are put into the sack, they undergo a process called ‘screening.’ This consists in throwing them up against a slanting sieve of iron wire, through which the fine coal and coal-dust runs: all that falls on the outer side of the screen is then sacked. But many having found that the coals are often broken still more by this process, to their loss, (as few people will buy the small coal and dust, except at breweries and waterworks), they have adopted the plan of a round sieve held in the hand, and filled by a shovel. The delightful and lucrative appointment of holding the sieve was, of course, conferred upon Flashley. His shoulders and arms ached as though they would drop off long before his day’s work was done; but what he gained in especial, was the fine coal-dust which the wind carried into his face—often at one gust, filling his eyes, mouth, nostrils, and the windward ear.

In the condition to which this post soon brought his ‘personal appearance,’ Flashley was one morning called up at five to go with a waggon-load of coals a few miles into the country, in company with two coalheavers and a carman. Up he got. And off they went.

Flashley, having worked hard all the previous day, was in no sprightly condition on his early rising; so, by the time the waggon had got beyond the outskirts of London, and begun to labour slowly up hill with its heavy load, he was fain to ask in a humble voice of the head coalheaver, permission to lay hold of a rope which dangled behind, in order to help himself onwards. This being granted with a smile, the good-nature of which (and how seldom do we meet with a coalheaver who is not a good-natured fellow) shone even through his dust-begrimed visage, Flashley continued to follow the waggon till he had several times nearly gone to sleep; and was only reminded of the fact by a stumble which brought him with his nose very near the ground. The head coalheaver, observing this, took compassion on him; and being a gigantic man, laid hold of Flashley’s trowsers, and with one lift of his arm deposited the young man upon the top of the second tier of coal-sacks. There he at once resigned himself to a delicious repose.

The waggon meanwhile pursued its heavy journey, with an occasional pause for a slight moistening of the mouth of men and horses. At length the removal of one or two of the upper tier of sacks caused Flashley to raise his drowsy head, and look round him.

The waggon had pulled up close to a garden-gate, on the other side of which were a crowd of apple-trees. The ripe fruit loaded the branches till they hung in a vista, beneath which the sacks of coals had to be carried. All the horses had their nose-bags on, and were very busy. It was a bright autumn day; the sun was fast setting; a rich beam of crimson and gold cast its splendours over the garden, and lighted up the ripe apples to a most romantic degree.

The garden gates were thrown open; the passage of coal-sacks beneath the hanging boughs commenced.

Not an apple was knocked down, even by the tall figure of the leading coalheaver. Stooping and dodging, and gently humouring a special difficulty, he performed his walk of thirty yards, and more, till he turned the shrubbery corner, and thence made his way into the coal-cellar. His companion followed him, in turn, imitating his great example; and, if we make exception of three lemon-pippins and a codlin, with equal success. But where these accidental apples fell, there they remained; none were promoted to mouth or pocket.

It was now half-past four, and ‘the milk’ arriving at the gate, was deposited in its little tin can on a strawberry bed just beyond the gate-post. The head coalheaver’s turn with his load being next, he observed the milk as he approached, and bending his long legs, by judicious gradations, till he reached the little can with the fingers of his left hand, balancing the sack of coals at the same time, so that not a fragment tumbled out of the open mouth, he slowly rose again to his right position, holding out the can at arm’s length to prevent any coal-dust finding its way to the delicate surface within. In this fashion, with tenfold care bestowed on the ounce and a half in his left hand, to that which he gave to the two hundred weight of coals on his back (not reckoning the sack, which, being an old and patched one, weighed fifteen pounds more) the coalheaver made his way, stooping and sideling beneath the apple-boughs as before, all of which he passed without knocking a single apple down, and deposited the little can in the hands of an admiring maidservant, as he passed the kitchen window on his way to the coal-cellar.

After the sacks had all been shot in the cellar, and the hats of each man filled with apples by the applauding master of the house, the counting of the empty sacks commenced. Having been thrice exhorted to be present at this ceremony by a wise neighbour, who stood looking on anxiously, from the next garden, with his nostrils resting on the top of the wall, the owner of the apple garden went forth to the gate, and with a grave countenance beheld the sacks counted. Orders for beer being then given on the nearest country alehouse, the coalheavers carefully gathered up all the odd coals which had fallen here and there, then swept the paths, and with hot and smiling visages took their departure, slowly lounging after the waggon and stretching their brawny arms and backs after their herculean work.

As the men thus proceeded down the winding lane, crunching apples, and thinking of beer to follow, the carman was the first to speak.

‘How cute the chap was arter they sacks!’ said he with a grin, and half turning round to look back.

‘There’s a gennelman,’ said the head coalheaver, ‘as don’t ought to be wronged out of the vally of that!’ the amount in question being a pinch of coal-dust which the speaker took up from one side of the waggon, and sprinkled in the air.

‘He allus gives a ticket for beer,’ said the second coalheaver, ‘but last time the apples warn’t ripe.’

‘He counted the sacks nation sharp, howsever,’ pursued the carman with a very knowing look.

At this both the coalheavers laughed loudly.

‘Ah!’ said the second coalheaver; ‘people think that makes all sure. They don’t think of the ease of bringing an empty sack with us, after dropping a full one by the way. Not they. Nobody yet was ever wise enough to count the full sacks when they first come.’

On hearing this, the carman’s face presented a confounded and perplexed look of irritated stupidity, marked in such very hard lines, that the coalheavers laughed for the next five minutes with the recollection of it.

Towards dusk the waggon returned to the wharf, and next day Flashley resumed his usual duties.

One morning, after several hours’ work with the sieve in ‘screening,’ when his face and hands were, if possible, more hopelessly black than they had ever been before, Flashley was called to take a note to a merchant at the Coal Exchange. This merchant’s name seemed rather an unusual one to meet with in England—being no less a person than Haji Ali Camaralzaman and Co.

The merchant was a short, solid-built figure, and stood with a heavy immobility that gave the effect of a metallic image rather than a man. He was a Moor, though nearly black, and with very sparkling eyes. He was dressed in a long dark blouse, open at the breast, and displaying a black satin waistcoat, embroidered with golden sprigs and tendrils. It seemed to Flashley that he spoke a foreign language; and yet he understood him, though without having any idea what language it was. Something passed between them in a very earnest tone, almost a whisper, about Sinbad the Sailor, and a sort of confused discussion as to the geographical position of the Valley of Black Diamonds; also, if coals were ever burnt in the east; then a confused voice from within the hall called out loudly, ‘The North Star!’ to which a chorus of coal-merchants responded in a low chant, ‘What money does he owe the divan?’

‘Yes,’ said the great Camaralzaman, ‘and what lost time does he owe to nature and to knowledge? Let the North Star look to it.’

‘It does, great Sir!’ responded the chorus of coal-merchants, in the same low chant. ‘It shines directly over the shaft of the William Pitt mine.’

‘Enough,’ said Camaralzaman.

At this all the merchants fell softly into a heap of white ashes.

Then the Moor, turning to Flashley, said, ‘You must reflect a little on all these things. Coals are more valuable to the world than the riches of other mines—more important than gold and silver, and diamonds of the first water, because they are the means of advancing and extending the comforts and refinements of life—the industrial arts, the trades, the ornamental arts. Are not these great things? Behold, there are greater yet which are indebted to the coal-fires. For, may I not name Science, Agriculture (in the making of iron, and the steam-ploughs which are forthcoming), Commerce and Navigation. Moreover, do they not tend, by the generation of steam, to annihilate space and time, and are they not rapidly carrying knowledge and civilisation to the remotest corners of the habitable globe? By myriads of jets, in countless forms, they turn the dark night into the brightness of day. Their history commences from the infancy of the earth; they proceed through gradations of wonders; are no less wonderful in the varieties and magnitude of their utility, and do not cease to be of use to man, even when the bright fire is utterly extinguished, and its materials can no more be re-illumined, but are claimed for the garden and the brickfield, not by the dinging and tolling of the bell-man of your grandsires, but by the long-drawn wail of the queer-kneed dusky figure in the flap-hat, who wanders down your streets yowling ‘’Sto—e! o—e!’

‘And is it then all over? Verily, it doth appear when the coal fire is fairly burnt out to cinders and ashes, that it hath performed its complete circle, and is for ever ended. It is not so. The antediluvian forests absorbed the gases of the atmosphere; much of these have been drawn off; and appropriated, but some portions have remained locked up and hidden in the depths of the earth ever since. Lo! the coal fire is lighted!—flames, for the first time, ascend from it. Then, also for the first time, are liberated gases which are of the date of those primæval forests; they ascend into the atmosphere, and once more form a portion of those elements which are again to assist in the growth of forests. The Coal-Spirit has then performed his grand cycle—and recommences his journey through future cycles of formation.’

A great blaze of light now smote across the hall, in which everything vanished. Then passed a rushing panorama through Flashley’s brain, wherein he saw whirling by, the stage of a saloon theatre, with a lighted cigar and two tankards dancing a ridiculous reel, till the whole scene changed to a melancholy swamp, out of which arose, to solemn music, an antediluvian forest. The Elfin of the Coal-mine came and stood in the midst, and some one held an iron umbrella over Flashley’s head, which instantly caused him to sink deep through the earth, and he soon found himself crawling in a dark trench terminating in a chasm looking out upon the sea. He was immediately whisked across by a black eagle, and dropped in a bright-green field, where he met a tall dusky figure carrying a sack of coals and a ‘ha’p’orth’ of milk; but just as he was about to speak to him, a voice called out ‘Nancy!’ and all was darkness, while through the horrid gloom he saw the glaring eye-ball of a horse. ‘Camaralzaman!’ cried the voice again: ‘Have you been sleeping here all night in the arm chair?’ Then a vivid flame shot over Flashley’s eyelids—there was a great fire blazing before him, in the midst of which he saw the head of the Elfin, who gave him a nod full of meaning, and also like bidding farewell, and disappeared in the fire,—while at his side stood Margery with the carpet-broom.

It was six in the morning, and she had just lighted the parlour fire. Without replying to any of her interrogations of surprise, Flashley slowly rose, and went out to take a few turns round the garden; where he fell into a train of thought which, in all probability, will have a salutary influence on his future life.

SUPPOSING!

Supposing, we were to change the Property and Income Tax a little, and make it somewhat heavier on realised property, and somewhat lighter on mere income, fixed and uncertain, I wonder whether we should be committing any violent injustice!

Supposing, we were to be more Christian and less mystical, agreeing more about the spirit and fighting less about the letter, I wonder whether we should present a very irreligious and indecent spectacle to the mass of mankind!

Supposing, the Honorable Member for White troubled his head a little less about the Honorable Member for Black, and vice versâ, and that both applied themselves a little more in earnest to the real business of the honorable people and the honorable country, I wonder whether it would be unparliamentary!

Supposing, that, when there was a surplus in the Public Treasury, we laid aside our own particular whims, and all agreed that there were four elements necessary to the existence of our fellow creatures, to wit, earth, air, fire, and water, and that these were the first grand necessaries to be uncooped and untaxed, I wonder whether it would be unreasonable!

Supposing, we had at this day a Baron Jenner, or a Viscount Watt, or an Earl Stephenson, or a Marquess of Brunel, or a dormant Shakespeare peerage, or a Hogarth baronetcy, I wonder whether it would be cruelly disgraceful to our old nobility!

Supposing, we were all of us to come off our pedestals and mix a little more with those below us, with no fear but that genius, rank, and wealth, would always sufficiently assert their own superiority, I wonder whether we should lower ourselves beyond retrieval!

Supposing, we were to have less botheration and more real education, I wonder whether we should have less or more compulsory colonisation, and Cape of Good Hope very natural indignation!

Supposing, we were materially to simplify the laws, and to abrogate the absurd fiction that everybody is supposed to be acquainted with them, when we know very well that such acquaintance is the study of a life in which some fifty men may have been proficient perhaps in five times fifty years, I wonder whether laws would be respected less?

Supposing, we maintained too many of such fictions altogether, and found their stabling come exceedingly expensive!

Supposing, we looked about us, and seeing a cattle-market originally established in an open place, standing in the midst of a great city because of the unforeseen growth of that great city all about it, and, hearing it asserted that the market was still adapted to the requirements and conveniences of the great city, made up our minds to say that this was stark-mad nonsense and we wouldn’t bear it, I wonder whether we should be revolutionary!

Supposing, we were to harbour a small suspicion that there was too much doing in the diplomatic line of business, and that the world would get on better with that shop shut up three days a week, I wonder whether it would be a huge impiety!

Supposing, Governments were to consider public questions less with reference to their own time, and more with reference to all time, I wonder how we should get on then!

Supposing, the wisdom of our ancestors should turn out to be a mere phrase, and that if there were any sense in it, it should follow that we ought to be believers in the worship of the Druids at this hour, I wonder whether any people would have talked mere moonshine all their lives!

Supposing, we were clearly to perceive that we cannot keep some men out of their share in the administration of affairs, and were to say to them, ‘Come, brothers, let us take counsel together, and see how we can best manage this; and don’t expect too much from what you get; and let us all in our degree put our shoulders to the wheel, and strive; and let us all improve ourselves and all abandon something of our extreme opinions for the general harmony,’ I wonder whether we should want so many special constables on any future tenth of April, or should talk so much about it any more!

I wonder whether people who are quite easy about anything, usually do talk quite so much about it!

Mr. Lane, the traveller, tells us of a superstition the Egyptians have, that the mischievous Genii are driven away by iron, of which they have an instinctive dread. Supposing, this should foreshadow the disappearance of the evil spirits and ignorances besetting this earth, before the iron steam-engines and roads, I wonder whether we could expedite their flight at all by iron energy!

Supposing, we were just to try two or three of these experiments!

Published at the Office, No. 16, Wellington Street North, Strand. Printed by Bradbury & Evans, Whitefriars, London.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

- Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.

- Renumbered footnotes.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOUSEHOLD WORDS, NO. 4, APRIL 20, 1850 ***

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Table of Contents

- HOUSEHOLD WORDS. A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

- SOME ACCOUNT OF AN EXTRAORDINARY TRAVELLER.

- LOADED DICE.

- DREAM WITHIN DREAM; OR, EVIL MINIMISED.

- THE SCHOOLMASTER AT HOME AND ABROAD.

- THE LADY ALICE.

- ILLUSTRATIONS OF CHEAPNESS. A GLOBE.

- THE GHOST OF THE LATE MR. JAMES BARBER. A YARN ASHORE.

- THE TRUE STORY OF A COAL FIRE.

- SUPPOSING!

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE