Household Words, No. 15, July 6, 1850
Author: Unknown
Date: 2026-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

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Title: Household Words, No. 15, July 6, 1850

A weekly journal

Editor: Charles Dickens

Release date: March 11, 2026 [eBook #78179]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Bradbury & Evans, 1850

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78179

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOUSEHOLD WORDS, NO. 15, JULY 6, 1850 ***

Transcriber’s Note:

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

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

HOUSEHOLD WORDS.
A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.

No. 15.]      SATURDAY, JULY 6, 1850.      [Price 2d.

THE OLD LADY IN THREADNEEDLE STREET.

Perhaps there is no Old Lady who has attained to such great distinction in the world, as this highly respectable female. Even the Old Lady who lived on a hill, and who, if she’s not gone, lives there still; or that other Old Lady who lived in a shoe, and had so many children she didn’t know what to do—are unknown to fame, compared with the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street. In all parts of the civilised earth the imaginations of men, women, and children figure this tremendous Old Lady of Threadneedle Street in some rich shape or other. Throughout the length and breadth of England, old ladies dote upon her; young ladies smile upon her; old gentlemen make much of her, young gentlemen woo her; everybody courts the smiles, and dreads the coldness, of the powerful Old Lady in Threadneedle Street. Even prelates have been said to be fond of her; and Ministers of State to have been unable to resist her attractions. She is next to omnipotent in the three great events of human life. In spite of the old saw, far fewer marriages are made in Heaven, than with an eye to Threadneedle Street. To be born in the good graces of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, is to be born to fortune: to die in her good books, is to leave a far better inheritance, as the world goes, than “the grinning honour that Sir Walter hath,” in Westminster Abbey. And there she is, for ever in Threadneedle Street, another name for wealth and thrift, threading her golden-eyed needle all the year round.

This Old Lady, when she first set up, carried on business in Grocers’ Hall, Poultry; but in 1732 she quarrelled with her landlords about a renewal of her lease, and built a mansion of her own in Threadneedle Street. She reared her new abode on the site of the house and garden of a former director of her affairs, Sir John Houblon. This was a modest structure, somewhat dignified by having a statue of William the Third placed before it; but not the more imposing from being at the end of an arched court, densely surrounded with habitations, and abutting on the churchyard of St. Christopher le Stocks.

But now, behold her, a prosperous gentlewoman in the hundred and fifty-seventh year of her age; “the oldest inhabitant” of Threadneedle Street! There never was such an insatiable Old Lady for business. She has gradually enlarged her premises, until she has spread them over four acres; confiscating to her own use not only the parish church of St. Christopher, but the greater part of the parish itself.

We count it among the great events of our young existence, that we had, some days since, the honour of visiting the Old Lady. It was not without an emotion of awe that we passed her Porter’s Lodge. The porter himself, blazoned in royal scarlet, and massively embellished with gold lace, is an adumbration of her dignity and wealth. His cocked hat advertises her stable antiquity as plainly as if she had written up, in imitation of some of her lesser neighbours, “established in 1694.” This foreshadowing became reality when we passed through the Hall—the tellers’ hall. A sensation of unbounded riches permeated every sense, except, alas! that of touch. The music of golden thousands clattered in the ear, as they jingled on counters until its last echoes were strangled in the puckers of tightened money-bags, or died under the clasps of purses. Wherever the eye turned, it rested on money; money of every possible variety; money in all shapes; money of all colours. There was yellow money, white money, brown money; gold money, silver money, copper money; paper money, pen and ink money. Money was wheeled about in trucks; money was carried about in bags; money was scavengered about with shovels. Thousands of sovereigns were jerked hither and thither from hand to hand—grave games of pitch and toss were played with staid solemnity; piles of bank notes—competent to buy whole German dukedoms and Italian principalities—hustled to and fro with as much indifference as if they were (as they had been) old rags.

This Hall of the Old Lady’s overpowered us with a sense of wealth; oppressed us with a golden dream of Riches. From this vision an instinctive appeal to our own pockets, and a few miserable shillings, awakened us to Reality. When thus aroused we were in one of the Old Lady’s snug, elegant, waiting-rooms, which is luxuriously Turkey-carpeted and adorned with two excellent portraits of two ancient cashiers; regarding one of whom the public were warned:—

“Sham Abraham you may,

I’ve often heard say:

But you mustn’t sham ‘Abraham Newland.’”

There are several conference-rooms for gentlemen who require a little private conversation with the Old Lady—perhaps on the subject of discounts.

It is no light thing to send in one’s card to the Foster-Mother of British commerce; the Soul of the State; “the Sun,” according to Sir Francis Baring, around which the agriculture, trade, and finance of this country revolves; the mighty heart of active capital, through whose arteries and veins flows the entire circulating medium of this great country. It was not, therefore, without agitation that we were ushered from the waiting-room, into that celebrated private apartment of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street—the Parlour—the Bank Parlour, the inmost mystery—the cella of the great Temple of Riches.

The ordinary associations called up by the notion of an old lady’s comfortable parlour, were not fulfilled by this visit. There is no domestic snugness, no easy chair, no cat, no parrot, no japanned bellows, no portrait of the Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold in the Royal Box at Drury Lane Theatre; no kettle-holder, no worsted rug for the urn, no brass footman for the buttered toast, in the parlour in Threadneedle Street. On the contrary, the room is extensive—supported by pillars; is of grand and true proportions; and embellished with architectural ornaments in the best taste. It has a long table for the confidential managers of the Old Lady’s affairs (she calls these gentlemen her Directors) to sit at; and usually, a side table fittingly supplied with a ready-laid lunch.

The Old Lady’s “Drawing” Room is as unlike—but then she is such a peculiar Old Lady!—any ordinary Drawing-room as need be. It has hardly any furniture, but desks, stools, and books. It is of immense proportions, and has no carpet. The vast amount of visitors the Old Lady receives between nine and four every day, would make lattice-work in one forenoon of the stoutest carpet ever manufactured. Everybody who comes into the Old Lady’s Drawing-room delivers his credentials to her gentlemen-ushers, who are quick in examining the same, and exact in the observance of all points of form. So highly-prized, however, is a presentation (on any grand scale) to the Old Lady’s Drawing-room, notwithstanding its plainness, that there is no instance of a Drawing-room at Court being more sought after. Indeed, it has become a kind of proverb that the way to Court often lies through the Old Lady’s apartments, and some suppose that the Court Sticks are of gold and silver in compliment to her.

As to the individual appearance of the Old Lady herself, we are authorised to state that the portrait of a Lady (accompanied by eleven balls on a sprig, and a beehive) which appears in the upper left-hand corner of all the Bank of England Notes, is NOT the portrait of the Lady. She invariably wears a cap of silver paper, with her yellow hair gathered carefully underneath. When she carries any defensive or offensive weapon, it is not a lance, but a pen; and her modesty would on no account permit her to appear in such loose drapery as is worn by the party in question—who we understand is depicted as a warning to the youthful merchants of this country to avoid the fate of George Barnwell.

In truth, like the Delphian mystery, She of Threadneedle Street is invisible, and delivers her oracles through her high priests: and, as Herodotus got his information from the priests in Egypt, so did we learn all we know about the Bank from the great officers of the Myth of Threadneedle Street. All of them are remarkable for great intelligence and good humour, particularly one Mr. Matthew Marshall; for whom the Old Lady is supposed to have a sneaking kindness, as she is continually promising to pay him the most stupendous amounts of money. From what these gentlemen told us, we are prepared unhesitatingly to affirm in the teeth of the assertions of Plutarch, and Pliny, and Justin, that although Crœsus might have been well enough to do in the world in his day, he was but a pettifogger compared with the Great Lady of St. Christopher le Stocks. The Lydian king never employed nine hundred clerks, or accommodated eight hundred of them under one roof; and if he could have done either, he would have been utterly unable to muster one hundred and thirty thousand pounds a year to pay them. He never had bullion in his cellars, at any one time, to the value of sixteen millions and a half sterling, as our Old Lady has lately averaged; nor “other securities”—much more marketable than the precious stones Crœsus showed to Solon—to the amount of thirty millions. Besides, all his capital was “dead weight;” that in Threadneedle Street is active, and is represented by an average paper currency of twenty millions per annum.

After this statement of facts, we trust that modern poets when they want a hyperbole for wealth will cease to cite Crœsus, and draw their future inspirations from the shrine and cellars of the Temple opposite the Auction Mart; or, as the late Mr. George Robins designated it when professionally occupied, “The Great House over the way.”

When we withdrew from the inmost fane of this Temple, we were ushered by the priest, who superintends the manufacture of the mysterious Deity’s oracles, into those recesses of her Temple in which these are made. Here we perceived, that, besides carrying on the ordinary operations of banking, the Old Lady is an extensive printer, engraver, bookbinder, and publisher. She maintains a steam-engine to drive letter-press and copper-plate printing machines, besides the other machinery which is employed in various operations, from making thousand pound notes to weighing single sovereigns. It is not until you see three steam-printing machines—such as we use for this publication—and hear that they are constantly revolving, to produce, at so many thousand sheets per hour, the printed forms necessary for the accurate account-keeping of this great Central Establishment and its twelve provincial branches, that you are fully impressed with the magnitude of the Old Lady’s transactions. In this one department no fewer than three hundred account-books are printed, ruled, bound, and used every week. During that short time they are filled with MS. by the eight hundred subordinates and their chiefs. By way of contrast we saw the single ledger which sufficed to post up the daily transactions of the Old Lady on her first establishment in business. It is no bigger than that of a small tradesman’s, and served to contain a record of the year’s accounts. Until within the last few years, visitors to the Bullion Office were shown the old box into which the books of the Bank were put every night for safety during the Old Lady’s early career. This receptacle is no bigger than a seaman’s chest. A spacious fire-proof room is now nightly filled with each day’s accounts, and they descend to it by means of a great hydraulic trap in the Drawing Office; the mountain of calculation when collected being too huge to be moved by human agency.

These works are, of course, only produced for private reference; but the Old Lady’s publishing business is as extensive as it is profitable and peculiar. Although her works are the reverse of heavy or erudite—being “flimsy” to a proverb—yet the eagerness with which they are sought by the public, surpasses that displayed for the productions of the greatest geniuses who ever enlightened the world: she is, therefore, called upon to print enormous numbers of each edition,—generally one hundred thousand copies; and reprints of equally large impressions are demanded, six or seven times a year. She is protected by a stringent copyright; in virtue of which, piracy is felony, and was, until 1831, punished with death. The very paper is copyright, and to imitate even that entails transportation. Indeed its merits entitle it to every protection, for it is a very superior article. It is so thin that each sheet, before it is sized, weighs only eighteen grains; and so strong, that, when sized and doubled, a single sheet is capable of suspending a weight of fifty-six pounds.

The literature of these popular prints is concise to terseness. A certain individual, duly accredited by the Old Lady, whose autograph appears in one corner, promises to pay to the before-mentioned Mr. Matthew Marshall, or bearer on demand, a certain sum, for the Governor and Company of the Bank of England. There is a date and a number; for the Old Lady’s sheets are published in Numbers; but, unlike other periodicals, no two copies of hers are alike. Each has a set of numerals, shown on no other.—It must not be supposed from the utter absence of rhetoric in this Great Woman’s literature, that it is devoid of ornament. On the contrary, it is illustrated by eminent artists: the illustrations consisting of the waves of a watermark made in the paper; a large black blot, with the statement in white letters of the sum which is promised to be paid; and the portrait referred to in a former part of this account of the Wonderful Old Lady.

She makes it a practice to print thirty thousand copies of these works daily. Everything possible is done by machinery,—engraving, printing, numbering; but we refrain from entering into further details of this portion of the Old Lady’s Household here, as we are preparing a review of her valuable works, which shall shortly appear, in the form of a History of a Bank note. The publication department is so admirably conducted, that a record of each individual piece of paper launched on the ocean of public favour is kept, and its history traced till its return; for another peculiarity of the Old Lady’s establishment is, that every impression put forth comes back—with few exceptions—in process of time to her shelves; where it is kept for ten years, and then burnt. This great house is, therefore, a huge circulating library. The daily average number of notes brought back into the Old Lady’s lap—examined to detect forgeries; defaced; entered upon the record made when they were issued; and so stored away that they can be reproduced at any given half-hour for ten years to come,—is twenty-five thousands. On the day of our visit, there came in twenty-eight thousand and seventy-four of her picturesque pieces of paper, representing one million, one thousand, two hundred and seventy pounds sterling, to be dealt with as above, preparatory to their decennial slumber on her library shelves.

The apartment in which the notes are kept previous to issue, is the Old Lady’s Store-room. There is no jam, there are no pickles, no preserves, no gallipots, no stoneware jars, no spices, no anything of that sort, in the Store-room of the Wonderful Old Lady. You might die of hunger in it. Your sweet tooth would decay and tumble out, before it could find the least gratification in the Old Lady’s Store-room. There was a mouse found there once, but it was dead, and nothing but skin and bone. It is a grim room, fitted up all round with great iron-safes. They look as if they might be the Old Lady’s ovens, never heated. But they are very warm in the City sense; for when the Old Lady’s two store-keepers have, each with his own key, unlocked his own one of the double locks attached to each, and opened the door, Mr. Matthew Marshall gives you to hold a little bundle of paper, value two millions sterling; and, clutching it with a strange tingling, you feel disposed to knock Mr. Matthew Marshall down, and, like a patriotic Frenchman, to descend into the streets.

No tyro need be told that these notes are representatives of weightier value, and were invented partly to supersede the necessity of carrying about ponderous parcels of precious metal. Hence—to treat of it soberly—four paper parcels taken out, and placed in our hands—consisting of four reams of Bank notes ready for issue, and not much more bulky than a thick octavo volume—though they represent gold of the weight of two tons, and of the value of two millions of pounds sterling, yet weigh not quite one pound avoirdupois each, or nearly four pounds together. The value in gold of what we could convey away in a couple of side pockets (if simply permitted by the dear Old Lady in Threadneedle Street, without proceeding to extremities upon the person of the Chief Cashier) would have required, but for her admirable publications, two of Barclay and Perkins’s strongest horses to draw.[1]

1. One thousand sovereigns weigh twenty-one pounds, and five hundred and twelve Bank-notes weigh exactly one pound.

We have already made mention of the Old Lady’s Lodge, Hall, Parlour, Store-room, and Drawing-room. Her Cellars are not less curious. In these she keeps neither wine, nor beer, nor wood, nor coal. They are devoted solely to the reception of the precious metals. They are like the caves of Treasures in the Arabian Nights; the common Lamp that shows them becomes a Wonderful Lamp in Mr. Marshall’s hands, and Mr. Marshall becomes a Genie. Yet only by the power of association; for they are very respectable arched cellars that would make dry skittle-grounds, and have nothing rare about them but their glittering contents. One vault is full of what might be barrels of oysters—if it were not the Russian Loan. Another is rich here and there with piles of gold bars, set cross-wise, like sandwiches at supper, or rich biscuits in a confectioner’s shop. Another has a moonlight air from the presence of so much silver. Dusky avenues branch off, where gold and silver amicably bide their time in cool retreats, not looking at all mischievous here, or anxious to play the Devil with our souls. Oh for such cellars at home! “Look out for your young master half a dozen bars of the ten bin.” “Let me have a wedge of the old crusted.” “Another Million before we part—only one Million more, to finish with!” The Temperance Cause would make but slow way, as to such cellars, we have a shrewd suspicion!

Beauty of colour is here associated with worth. One of these brilliant bars of gold weighs sixteen pounds troy, and its value is eight hundred pounds sterling. A pile of these, lying in a dark corner—like neglected cheese, or bars of yellow soap—and which might be contained in an ordinary tea-chest, is worth two hundred and ten thousand pounds. Fortune herself transmuted into metal seems to repose at our feet. Yet this is only an eightieth part of the wealth contained in the Old Lady’s cellars.

The future history of this metal is explained in three sentences; it is coined at the Mint, distributed to the public, worn by friction (or “sweated” by Jews) till it becomes light. What happens to it then we shall see.

By a seldom failing law of monetary attraction nearly every species of cash, “hard” or soft, metallic or paper, finds its way some time or other back to the extraordinary Old Lady of Threadneedle Street. All the sovereigns returned from the banking-houses are consigned to a secluded cellar; and, when you enter it, you will possibly fancy yourself on the premises of a clock-maker who works by steam. Your attention is speedily concentrated to a small brass box not larger than an eight-day pendule, the works of which are impelled by steam. This is a self-acting weighing machine, which with unerring precision tells which sovereigns are of standard weight, and which are light, and of its own accord separates the one from the other. Imagine a long trough or spout—half a tube that has been split into two sections—of such a semi-circumference as holds sovereigns edgeways, and of sufficient length to allow of two hundred of them to rest in that position one against another. This trough thus charged is fixed slopingly upon the machine over a little table as big as that of an ordinary sovereigns-balance. The coin nearest to the Lilliputian platform drops upon it, being pushed forward by the weight of those behind. Its own weight presses the table down; but how far down? Upon that hangs the whole merit and discriminating power of the machine. At the back, and on each side of this small table, two little hammers move by steam backwards and forwards at different elevations. If the sovereign be full weight, down sinks the table too low for the higher hammer to hit it; but the lower one strikes the edge, and off the sovereign tumbles into a receiver to the left. The table pops up again, receives, perhaps, a light sovereign, and the higher hammer having always first strike, knocks it into a receiver to the right, time enough to escape its colleague, which, when it comes forward, has nothing to hit, and returns to allow the table to be elevated again. In this way the reputation of thirty-three sovereigns is established or destroyed every minute. The light weights are taken to a clipping machine, slit at the rate of two hundred a minute, weighed in a lump, the balance of deficiency charged to the banker from whom they were received, and sent to the Mint to be re-coined. Those which have passed muster are re-issued to the public. The inventor of this beautiful little detector was Mr. Cotton, a former governor. The comparatively few sovereigns brought in by the general public are weighed in ordinary scales by the tellers. The average loss upon each light coin, on an average of thirty-five thousands taken in 1843, was twopence three farthings.

The business of the “Great House” is divided into two branches; the issue and the banking department. The latter has increased so rapidly of late years, that the last addition the Old Lady was constrained to make to her house was the immense Drawing-room aforesaid, for her customers and their payees to draw cash on checks and to make deposits. Under this noble apartment is the Strong Room, containing private property, supposed to be of enormous value. It is placed there for safety by the constituents of the Bank, and is concealed in tin boxes, on which the owners’ names are legibly painted. The descent into this stronghold—by means of the hydraulic trap we have spoken of—is so eminently theatrical, that we believe the Head of the Department, on going down with the books, is invariably required to strike an attitude, and to laugh in three sepulchral syllables; while the various clerks above express surprise and consternation.

Besides private customers, everybody knows that our Old Lady does all the banking business for the British Government. She pays the interest to each Stock-holder in the National Debt, receives certain portions of the revenue, &c. A separate set of offices is necessary, to keep all such accounts, and these Stock Offices contain the most varied and extensive collection of autographs extant. Those whom Fortune entitles to dividends, must, by themselves or by their agents, sign the Stock books. The last signature of Handel, the composer, and that upon which Henry Fauntleroy was condemned and executed, are among the foremost of these lions. Here, standing in a great long building of divers stories, looking dimly upward through iron gratings, and dimly downward through iron gratings, and into musty chambers diverging into the walls on either hand, you may muse upon the National Debt. All the sheep that ever came out of Northamptonshire, seem to have yielded up their skins to furnish the registers in which its accounts are kept. Sweating and wasting in this vast silent library, like manuscripts in a mouldy old convent, are the records of the Dividends that are, and have been, and of the Dividends unclaimed. Some men would sell their fathers into slavery, to have the rummaging of these old volumes. Some, who would let the Tree of Knowledge wither while they lay contemptuously at its feet, would bestir themselves to pluck at these leaves, like shipwrecked mariners. These are the books to profit by. This is the place for X. Y. Z. to hear of something to his advantage in. This is the land of Mr. Joseph Ady’s dreams. This is the dusty fountain whence those wondrous paragraphs occasionally flow into the papers, disclosing how a labouring thatcher has come into a hundred thousand pounds—a long, long way to come—and gone out of his wits—not half so far to go. Oh, wonderful Old Lady! threading the needle with the golden eye all through the labyrinth of the National Debt, and hiding it in such dry hay-stacks as are rotting here!

With all her wealth, and all her power, and all her business, and all her responsibilities, she is not a purse-proud Old Lady; but a dear, kind, liberal, benevolent Old Lady; so particularly considerate to her servants, that the meanest of them never speaks of her otherwise than with affection. Though her domestic rules are uncommonly strict; though she is very severe upon “mistakes,” be they ever so unintentional; though till lately she made her in-door servants keep good hours, and would not allow a lock to be turned or a bolt to be drawn after eleven at night, even to admit her dearly beloved Matthew Marshall himself—yet she exercises a truly tender and maternal care over her family of eight hundred strong. To benefit the junior branches, she has recently set aside a spacious room, and the sum of five hundred pounds, to form a library. With this handsome capital at starting, and eight shillings a year subscribed by the youngsters, an excellent collection of books will soon be formed. Here, from three till eight o’clock every lawful day, the subscribers can assemble for recreation or study; or, if they prefer it, they can take books to their homes. A member of the Committee of Management attends in turn during the specified hours—a self-imposed duty, in the highest degree creditable to, but no more than is to be expected from, the stewards of a Good Mistress; who, when any of her servants become superannuated, soothes declining age with a pension. The last published return states the number of pensioners at one hundred and ninety three; each of whom received on an average 161l., or an aggregate of upwards of 31,000l. per annum.

Her kindness is not unrequited. Whenever anything ails her, the assiduous attention of her people is only equalled by her own bounty to them. When dangerously ill of the Panic in 1825, and the outflow of her circulating medium was so violent that she was in danger of bleeding to death, some of her upper servants never left her for a fortnight. At the crisis of her disorder, on a memorable Saturday night (December the seventeenth) her Deputy-Governor—who even then had not seen his own children for a week—reached Downing Street “reeling with fatigue,” and was just able to call out to the King’s Ministers—then anxiously deliberating on the dear Old Lady’s case—that she was out of danger! Another of her managing men lost his life in his anxiety for her safety, during the burning of the Royal Exchange, in January, 1838. When the fire broke out, the cold was intense; and although he had but just recovered from an attack of the gout, he rushed to the rescue of his beloved Old Mistress, saw everything done that could be done for her safety, and died from his exertions. Although the Old Lady is now more hale and hearty than ever, two of the Senior Clerks sit up in turn every night, to watch over her; in which duty they are assisted by a company of Foot Guards.

The kind Old Lady of Threadneedle Street has, in short, managed to attach her dependants to her by the strongest of ties—that of love. So pleased are some with her service, that when even temporarily resting from it, they feel miserable. A late Chief Cashier never solicited but one holiday, and that for only a fortnight. In three days he returned expressing his extreme disgust with every sort of recreation but that afforded him by the Old Lady’s business. The last words of another old servant when on his death-bed, were, “Oh, that I could only die on the Bank steps!”

THE SERF OF POBEREZE.

The materials for the following tale were furnished to the writer while travelling last year near the spot on which the events it narrates took place. It is intended to convey a notion of some of the phases of Polish, or rather Russian serfdom (for, as truly explained by one of the characters in a succeeding page, it is Russian), and of the catastrophes it has occasioned, not only in Catherine’s time, but occasionally at the present. The Polish nobles—themselves in slavery—earnestly desire the emancipation of their serfs, which Russian domination forbids.

The small town of Pobereze stands at the foot of a stony mountain, watered by numerous springs in the district of Podolia, in Poland. It consists of a mass of miserable cabins, with a Catholic chapel and two Greek churches in the midst, the latter distinguished by their gilded towers. On one side of the marketplace stands the only inn, and on the opposite side are several shops, from whose doors and windows look out several dirtily dressed Jews. At a little distance, on a hill covered with vines and fruit-trees, stands the Palace, which does not, perhaps, exactly merit such an appellation, but who would dare to call otherwise the dwelling of the lord of the domain?

On the morning when our tale opens, there had issued from this palace the common enough command to the superintendent of the estate, to furnish the master with a couple of strong boys, for service in the stables, and a young girl, to be employed in the wardrobe. Accordingly, a number of the best-looking young peasants of Olgogrod assembled in the broad avenue leading to the palace. Some were accompanied by their sorrowful and weeping parents, in all of whose hearts, however, rose the faint and whispered hope, “Perhaps it will not be my child they will choose!”

Being brought into the court-yard of the palace, the Count Roszynski, with the several members of his family, had come out to pass in review his growing subjects. He was a small and insignificant-looking man, about fifty years of age, with deep-set eyes and overhanging brows. His wife, who was nearly of the same age, was immensely stout, with a vulgar face and a loud disagreeable voice. She made herself ridiculous in endeavouring to imitate the manners and bearing of the aristocracy, into whose sphere she and her husband were determined to force themselves, in spite of the humbleness of their origin. The father of the “Right Honourable” Count Roszynski was a valet, who, having been a great favourite with his master, amassed sufficient money to enable his son, who inherited it, to purchase the extensive estate of Olgogrod, and with it the sole proprietorship of 1600 human beings. Over them he had complete control; and, when maddened by oppression, if they dared resent, woe unto them! They could be thrust into a noisome dungeon, and chained by one hand from the light of day for years, until their very existence was forgotten by all except the jailer who brought daily their pitcher of water and morsel of dry bread.

Some of the old peasants say that Sava, father of the young peasant girl, who stands by the side of an old woman, at the head of her companions in the court-yard, is immured in one of these subterranean jails. Sava was always about the Count, who, it was said, had brought him from some distant land, with his little motherless child. Sava placed her under the care of an old man and woman, who had the charge of the bees in a forest near the palace, where he came occasionally to visit her. But once, six long months passed, and he did not come! In vain Anielka wept, in vain she cried, “Where is my father?”—No father appeared. At last it was said that Sava had been sent to a long distance with a large sum of money, and had been killed by robbers. In the ninth year of one’s life the most poignant grief is quickly effaced, and after six months Anielka ceased to grieve. The old people were very kind to her, and loved her as if she were their own child. That Anielka might be chosen to serve in the palace never entered their head, for who would be so barbarous as to take the child away from an old woman of seventy and her aged husband?

To-day was the first time in her life that she had been so far from home. She looked curiously on all she saw,—particularly on a young lady about her own age, beautifully dressed, and a youth of eighteen, who had apparently just returned from a ride on horseback, as he held a whip in his hand, whilst walking up and down examining the boys who were placed in a row before him. He chose two amongst them, and the boys were led away to the stables.

“And I choose this young girl,” said Constantia Roszynski, indicating Anielka; “she is the prettiest of them all. I do not like ugly faces about me.”

When Constantia returned to the drawing-room, she gave orders for Anielka to be taken to her apartments, and placed under the tutelage of Mademoiselle Dufour, a French maid, recently arrived from the first milliner’s shop in Odessa. Poor girl! when they separated her from her adopted mother, and began leading her towards the palace, she rushed, with a shriek of agony, from them, and grasped her old protectress tightly in her arms! They were torn violently asunder, and the Count Roszynski quietly asked, “Is it her daughter, or her grand-daughter?”

“Neither, my lord,—only an adopted child.”

“But who will lead the old woman home, as she is blind?”

“I will, my lord,” replied one of his servants, bowing to the ground; “I will let her walk by the side of my horse, and when she is in her cabin she will have her old husband,—they must take care of each other.”

So saying, he moved away with the rest of the peasants and domestics. But the poor old woman had to be dragged along by two men; for in the midst of her shrieks and tears she had fallen to the ground, almost without life.

And Anielka? They did not allow her to weep long. She had now to sit all day in the corner of a room to sew. She was expected to do everything well from the first; and if she did not, she was kept without food or cruelly punished. Morning and evening she had to help Mdlle. Dufour to dress and undress her mistress. But Constantia, although she looked with hauteur on everybody beneath her, and expected to be slavishly obeyed, was tolerably kind to the poor orphan. Her true torment began, when, on leaving her young lady’s room, she had to assist Mdlle. Dufour. Notwithstanding that she tried sincerely to do her best, she was never able to satisfy her, or to draw from her aught but harsh reproaches.

Thus two months passed.

One day Mdlle. Dufour went very early to confession, and Anielka was seized with an eager longing to gaze once more in peace and freedom on the beautiful blue sky and green trees, as she used to do when the first rays of the rising sun streamed in at the window of the little forest cabin. She ran into the garden. Enchanted by the sight of so many beautiful flowers, she went farther and farther along the smooth and winding walks, till she entered the forest. She who had been so long away from her beloved trees, roamed where they were thickest. Here she gazes boldly around. She sees no one! She is alone! A little farther on she meets with a rivulet which flows through the forest. Here she remembers that she has not yet prayed. She kneels down, and with hands clasped and eyes upturned she begins to sing in a sweet voice the Hymn to the Virgin.

As she went on she sang louder and with increased fervour. Her breast heaved with emotion, her eyes shone with unusual brilliancy; but when the hymn was finished she lowered her head, tears began to fall over her cheeks, until at last she sobbed aloud. She might have remained long in this condition, had not some one come behind her, saying, “Do not cry, my poor girl; it is better to sing than to weep.” The intruder raised her head, wiped her eyes with his handkerchief, and kissed her on the forehead.

It was the Count’s son, Leon!

“You must not cry,” he continued; “be calm, and when the filipony (pedlars) come, buy yourself a pretty handkerchief.” He then gave her a rouble and walked away. Anielka, after concealing the coin in her corset, ran quickly back to the palace.

Fortunately, Mdlle. Dufour had not yet returned, and Anielka seated herself in her accustomed corner. She often took out the rouble to gaze fondly upon it, and set to work to make a little purse, which, having fastened to a ribbon, she hung round her neck. She did not dream of spending it, for it would have deeply grieved her to part with the gift of the only person in the whole house who had looked kindly on her.

From this time Anielka remained always in her young mistress’s room; she was better dressed, and Mdlle. Dufour ceased to persecute her. To what did she owe this sudden change? Perhaps to a remonstrance from Leon. Constantia ordered Anielka to sit beside her whilst taking her lessons from her music-masters, and on her going to the drawing-room, she was left in her apartments alone. Being thus more kindly treated, Anielka lost by degrees her timidity; and when her young mistress, whilst occupied over some embroidery, would tell her to sing, she did so boldly and with a steady voice. A greater favour awaited her. Constantia, when unoccupied, began teaching Anielka to read in Polish; and Mdlle. Dufour thought it politic to follow the example of her mistress, and began to teach her French.

Meanwhile, a new kind of torment commenced. Having easily learnt the two languages, Anielka acquired an irresistible passion for reading. Books had for her the charm of the forbidden fruit, for she could only read by stealth at night, or when her mistress went visiting in the neighbourhood. The kindness hitherto shown her, for a time, began to relax. Leon had set off on a tour, accompanied by his old tutor, and a bosom friend as young, as gay, and as thoughtless as himself.

So passed the two years of Leon’s absence. When he returned, Anielka was seventeen, and had become tall and handsome. No one who had not seen her during this time, would have recognised her. Of this number was Leon. In the midst of perpetual gaiety and change, it was not possible he could have remembered a poor peasant girl; but in Anielka’s memory he had remained as a superior being, as her benefactor, as the only one who had spoken kindly to her, when poor, neglected, forlorn! When in some French romance she met with a young man of twenty, of a noble character and handsome appearance, she bestowed on him the name of Leon. The recollection of the kiss he had given her ever brought a burning blush to her cheek, and made her sigh deeply.

One day Leon came to his sister’s room. Anielka was there, seated in a corner at work. Leon himself had considerably changed; from a boy he had grown into a man. “I suppose Constantia,” he said, “you have been told what a good boy I am, and with what docility I shall submit myself to the matrimonial yoke, which the Count and Countess have provided for me?” and he began whistling, and danced some steps of the Mazurka.

“Perhaps you will be refused,” said Constantia coldly.

“Refused! Oh, no. The old Prince has already given his consent, and as for his daughter, she is desperately in love with me. Look at these moustachios, could anything be more irresistible?” and he glanced in the glass and twirled them round his fingers; then continuing in a graver tone, he said, “To tell the sober truth, I cannot say that I reciprocate. My intended is not at all to my taste. She is nearly thirty, and so thin that whenever I look at her, I am reminded of my old tutor’s anatomical sketches. But, thanks to her Parisian dress-maker, she makes up a tolerably good figure, and looks well in a Cachemere. Of all things, you know, I wished for a wife with an imposing appearance, and I don’t care about love. I find it’s not fashionable, and only exists in the exalted imagination of poets.”

“Surely people are in love with one another sometimes,” said the sister.

“Sometimes,” repeated Anielka, inaudibly. The dialogue had painfully affected her, and she knew not why. Her heart beat quickly, and her face was flushed, and made her look more lovely than ever.

“Perhaps. Of course we profess to adore every pretty woman,” Leon added abruptly. “But, my dear sister, what a charming ladies’ maid you have!” He approached the corner where Anielka sat, and bent on her a coarse familiar smile. Anielka, although a serf, was displeased, and returned it with a glance full of dignity. But when her eyes rested on the youth’s handsome face, a feeling, which had been gradually and silently growing in her young and inexperienced heart, predominated over her pride and displeasure. She wished ardently to recal herself to Leon’s memory, and half unconsciously raised her hand to the little purse which always hung round her neck. She took from it the rouble he had given her.

“See!” shouted Leon, “what a droll girl; how proud she is of her riches! Why, girl, you are a woman of fortune, mistress of a whole rouble!”

“I hope she came by it honestly,” said the old Countess, who at this moment entered.

At this insinuation, shame and indignation kept Anielka, for a time, silent. She replaced the money quickly in its purse, with the bitter thought that the few happy moments which had been so indelibly stamped upon her memory, had been utterly forgotten by Leon. To clear herself, she at last stammered out, seeing they all looked at her enquiringly, “Do you not remember, M. Leon, that you gave me this coin two years ago in the garden?”

“How odd!” exclaimed Leon, laughing, “do you expect me to remember all the pretty girls to whom I have given money? But I suppose you are right, or you would not have treasured up this unfortunate rouble as if it were a holy relic. You should not be a miser, child; money is made to be spent.”

“Pray, put an end to these jokes,” said Constantia impatiently; “I like this girl, and I will not have her teased. She understands my ways better than any one, and often puts me in good humour with her beautiful voice.”

“Sing something for me, pretty damsel,” said Leon, “and I will give you another rouble, a new and shining one.”

“Sing instantly,” said Constantia imperiously.

At this command Anielka could no longer stifle her grief; she covered her face with her hands, and wept violently.

“Why do you cry?” asked her mistress impatiently; “I cannot bear it; I desire you to do as you are bid.”

It might have been from the constant habit of slavish obedience, or a strong feeling of pride, but Anielka instantly ceased weeping. There was a moment’s pause, during which the old Countess went grumbling out of the room. Anielka chose the Hymn to the Virgin she had warbled in the garden, and as she sung, she prayed fervently;—she prayed for peace, for deliverance from the acute emotions which had been aroused within her. Her earnestness gave an intensity of expression to the melody, which affected her listeners. They were silent for some moments after its conclusion. Leon walked up and down with his arms folded on his breast. Was it agitated with pity for the accomplished young slave? or by any other tender emotion? What followed will show.

“My dear Constantia,” he said, suddenly stopping before his sister and kissing her hand, “will you do me a favour?”

Constantia looked enquiringly in her brother’s face without speaking.

“Give me this girl.”

“Impossible!”

“I am quite in earnest,” continued Leon, “I wish to offer her to my future wife. In the Prince her father’s private chapel they are much in want of a solo soprano.”

“I shall not give her to you,” said Constantia.

“Not as a free gift, but in exchange. I will give you instead a charming young negro—so black. The women in St. Petersburg and in Paris raved about him: but I was inexorable; I half-refused him to my princess.”

“No, no,” replied Constantia; “I shall be lonely without this girl, I am so used to her.”

“Nonsense! you can get peasant girls by the dozen; but a black page, with teeth whiter than ivory, and purer than pearls; a perfect original in his way; you surely cannot withstand. You will kill half the province with envy. A negro servant is the most fashionable thing going, and yours will be the first imported into the province.”

This argument was irresistible. “Well,” replied Constantia, “when do you think of taking her?”

“Immediately; to-day at five o’clock,” said Leon; and he went merrily out of the room. This then was the result of his cogitation—of Anielka’s Hymn to the Virgin. Constantia ordered Anielka to prepare herself for the journey, with as little emotion as if she had exchanged away a lap-dog, or parted with a parrot.

She obeyed in silence. Her heart was full. She went into the garden that she might relieve herself by weeping unseen. With one hand supporting her burning head, and the other pressed tightly against her heart, to stifle her sobs, she wandered on mechanically till she found herself by the side of the river. She felt quickly for her purse, intending to throw the rouble into the water, but as quickly thrust it back again, for she could not bear to part with the treasure. She felt as if without it she would be still more an orphan. Weeping bitterly, she leaned against the tree which had once before witnessed her tears.

By degrees the stormy passion within her gave place to calm reflection. This day she was to go away; she was to dwell beneath another roof, to serve another mistress. Humiliation! always humiliation! But at least it would be some change in her life. As she thought of this, she returned hastily to the palace that she might not, on the last day of her servitude, incur the anger of her young mistress.

Scarcely was Anielka attired in her prettiest dress, when Constantia came to her with a little box, from which she took several gay-coloured ribbons, and decked her in them herself, that the serf might do her credit in the new family. And when Anielka, bending down to her feet, thanked her, Constantia, with marvellous condescension, kissed her on her forehead. Even Leon cast an admiring glance upon her. His servant soon after came to conduct her to the carriage, and showing her where to seat herself, they rolled off quickly towards Radapol.

For the first time in her life Anielka rode in a carriage. Her head turned quite giddy, she could not look at the trees and fields as they flew past her; but by degrees she became more accustomed to it, and the fresh air enlivening her spirits, she performed the rest of the journey in a tolerably happy state of mind. At last they arrived in the spacious court-yard before the Palace of Radapol, the dwelling of a once rich and powerful Polish family, now partly in ruin. It was evident, even to Anielka, that the marriage was one for money on the one side, and for rank on the other.

Among other renovations at the castle, occasioned by the approaching marriage, the owner of it, Prince Pelazia, had obtained singers for the chapel, and had engaged Signor Justiniani, an Italian, as chapel-master. Immediately on Leon’s arrival, Anielka was presented to him. He made her sing a scale, and pronounced her voice to be excellent.

Anielka found that, in Radapol, she was treated with a little more consideration than at Olgogrod, although she had often to submit to the caprices of her new mistress, and she found less time to read. But to console herself, she gave all her attention to singing, which she practised several hours a day. Her naturally great capacity, under the guidance of the Italian, began to develope itself steadily. Besides sacred, he taught her operatic music. On one occasion Anielka sung an aria in so impassioned and masterly a style, that the enraptured Justiniani clapped his hands for joy, skipped about the room, and not finding words enough to praise her, exclaimed several times, “Prima Donna! Prima Donna!”

But the lessons were interrupted. The Princess’s wedding-day was fixed upon, after which event she and Leon were to go to Florence, and Anielka was to accompany them. Alas! feelings which gave her poignant misery still clung to her. She despised herself for her weakness; but she loved Leon. The sentiment was too deeply implanted in her bosom to be eradicated; too strong to be resisted. It was the first love of a young and guileless heart, and had grown in silence and despair.

Anielka was most anxious to know something of her adopted parents. Once, after the old prince had heard her singing, he asked her with great kindness about her home. She replied, that she was an orphan, and had been taken by force from those who had so kindly supplied the place of parents. Her apparent attachment to the old bee-keeper and his wife so pleased the prince, that he said, “You are a good child, Anielka, and to-morrow I will send you to visit them. You shall take them some presents.”

Anielka, overpowered with gratitude, threw herself at the feet of the prince. She dreamed all night of the happiness that was in store for her, and the joy of the poor, forsaken, old people; and when the next morning she set off she could scarcely restrain her impatience. At last they approached the cabin; she saw the forest, with its tall trees, and the meadows covered with flowers. She leaped from the carriage, that she might be nearer these trees and flowers, every one of which she seemed to recognise. The weather was beautiful. She breathed with avidity the pure air which, in imagination, brought to her the kisses and caresses of her poor father! Her foster-father was, doubtless, occupied with his bees; but his wife?

Anielka opened the door of the cabin; all was silent and deserted. The arm-chair on which the poor old woman used to sit, was overturned in a corner. Anielka was chilled by a fearful presentiment. She went with a slow step towards the bee-hives; there she saw a little boy tending the bees, whilst the old man was stretched on the ground beside him. The rays of the sun, falling on his pale and sickly face, showed that he was very ill. Anielka stooped down over him, and said, “It is I, it is Anielka, your own Anielka, who always loves you.”

The old man raised his head, gazed upon her with a ghastly smile, and took off his cap.

“And my good old mother, where is she?” Anielka asked.

“She is dead!” answered the old man, and falling back he began laughing idiotically. Anielka wept. She gazed earnestly on the worn frame, the pale and wrinkled cheeks, in which scarcely a sign of life could be perceived; it seemed to her that he had suddenly fallen asleep, and not wishing to disturb him, she went to the carriage for the presents. When she returned, she took his hand. It was cold. The poor old bee-keeper had breathed his last!

Anielka was carried almost senseless back to the carriage, which quickly returned with her to the castle. There she revived a little; but the recollection that she was now quite alone in the world, almost drove her to despair.

Her master’s wedding and the journey to Florence were a dream to her. Though the strange sights of a strange city slowly restored her perceptions, they did not her cheerfulness. She felt as if she could no longer endure the misery of her life; she prayed to die.

“Why are you so unhappy?” said the Count Leon kindly to her, one day.

To have explained the cause of her wretchedness would have been death indeed.

“I am going to give you a treat,” continued Leon. “A celebrated singer is to appear to-night in the theatre. I will send you to hear her, and afterwards you shall sing to me what you remember of her performances.”

Anielka went. It was a new era in her existence. Herself, by this time, an artist, she could forget her griefs, and enter with her whole soul into the beauties of the art she now heard practised in perfection for the first time. To music a chord responded in her breast which vibrated powerfully. During the performances she was at one moment pale and trembling, tears rushing into her eyes; at another, she was ready to throw herself at the feet of the cantatrice, in an ecstacy of admiration. “Prima donna,”—by that name the public called on her to receive their applause, and it was the same, thought Anielka, that Justiniani had bestowed upon her. Could she also be a prima donna? What a glorious destiny! To be able to communicate one’s own emotions to masses of entranced listeners; to awaken in them, by the power of the voice, grief, love, terror.

Strange thoughts continued to haunt her on her return home. She was unable to sleep. She formed desperate plans. At last she resolved to throw off the yoke of servitude, and the still more painful slavery of feelings which her pride disdained. Having learnt the address of the prima donna, she went early one morning to her house.

On entering she said, in French, almost incoherently, so great was her agitation—“Madam, I am a poor serf belonging to a Polish family who have lately arrived in Florence. I have escaped from them; protect, shelter me. They say I can sing.”

The Signora Teresina, a warm-hearted, passionate Italian, was interested by her artless earnestness. She said, “Poor child! you must have suffered much,”—she took Anielka’s hand in hers. “You say you can sing; let me hear you.” Anielka seated herself on an ottoman. She clasped her hands over her knees, and tears fell into her lap. With plaintive pathos, and perfect truth of intonation, she prayed in song. The Hymn to the Virgin seemed to Teresina to be offered up by inspiration.

The Signora was astonished. “Where,” she asked, in wonder, “were you taught?”

Anielka narrated her history, and when she had finished, the prima donna spoke so kindly to her that she felt as if she had known her for years. Anielka was Teresina’s guest that day and the next. After the Opera, on the third day, the prima donna made her sit beside her, and said:—

“I think you are a very good girl, and you shall stay with me always.”

The girl was almost beside herself with joy.

“We will never part. Do you consent, Anielka?”

“Do not call me Anielka. Give me instead some Italian name.”

“Well, then, be Giovanna. The dearest friend I ever had—but whom I have lost—was named Giovanna,” said the prima donna.

“Then, I will be another Giovanna to you.”

Teresina then said, “I hesitated to receive you at first, for your sake as well as mine; but you are safe now. I learn that your master and mistress, after searching vainly for you, have returned to Poland.”

From this time Anielka commenced an entirely new life. She took lessons in singing every day from the Signora, and got an engagement to appear in inferior characters at the theatre. She had now her own income, and her own servant—she, who had till then been obliged to serve herself. She acquired the Italian language rapidly, and soon passed for a native of the country.

So passed three years. New and varied impressions failed, however, to blot out the old ones. Anielka arrived at great perfection in her singing, and even began to surpass the prima donna, who was losing her voice from weakness of the chest. This sad discovery changed the cheerful temper of Teresina. She ceased to sing in public; for she could not endure to excite pity, where she had formerly commanded admiration.

She determined to retire. “You,” she said to Anielka, “shall now assert your claim to the first rank in the vocal art. You will maintain it. You surpass me. Often, on hearing you sing, I have scarcely been able to stifle a feeling of jealousy.”

Anielka placed her hand on Teresina’s shoulder, and kissed her.

“Yes,” continued Teresina, regardless of everything but the bright future she was shaping for her friend. “We will go to Vienna—there you will be understood and appreciated. You shall sing at the Italian Opera, and I will be by your side—unknown, no longer sought, worshipped—but will glory in your triumphs. They will be a repetition of my own; for have I not taught you? Will they not be the result of my work?”

Though Anielka’s ambition was fired, her heart was softened, and she wept violently.

Five months had scarcely elapsed, when a furore was created in Vienna by the first appearance, at the Italian Opera, of the Signora Giovanna. Her enormous salary at once afforded her the means of even extravagant expenditure. Her haughty treatment of male admirers only attracted new ones; but in the midst of her triumphs she thought often of the time when the poor orphan of Pobereze was cared for by nobody. This remembrance made her receive the flatteries of the crowd with an ironical smile; their fine speeches fell coldly on her ear, their eloquent looks made no impression on her heart: that, no change could alter, no temptation win.

In the flood of unexpected success a new misfortune overwhelmed her. Since their arrival at Vienna, Teresina’s health rapidly declined, and in the sixth months of Anielka’s operatic reign she expired, leaving all her wealth, which was considerable, to her friend.

Once more Anielka was alone in the world. Despite all the honours and blandishments of her position, the old feeling of desolateness came upon her. The new shock destroyed her health. She was unable to appear on the stage. To sing was a painful effort; she grew indifferent to what passed around her. Her greatest consolation was in succouring the poor and friendless, and her generosity was most conspicuous to all young orphan girls without fortune. She had never ceased to love her native land, and seldom appeared in society, unless it was to meet her countrymen. If ever she sang, it was in Polish.

A year had elapsed since the death of the Signora Teresina when the Count Selka, a rich noble of Volkynia, at that time in Vienna, solicited her presence at a party. It was impossible to refuse the Count and his lady, from whom she had received great kindness. She went. When in their saloons, filled with all the fashion and aristocracy in Vienna, the name of Giovanna was announced, a general murmur was heard. She entered, pale and languid, and proceeded between the two rows made for her by the admiring assembly, to the seat of honour beside the mistress of the house.

Shortly after, the Count Selka led her to the piano. She sat down before it, and thinking what she should sing, glanced round upon the assembly. She could not help feeling that the admiration which beamed from the faces around her was the work of her own merit, for had she neglected the great gift of nature—her voice, she could not have excited it. With a blushing cheek, and eyes sparkling with honest pride, she struck the piano with a firm hand, and from her seemingly weak and delicate chest poured forth a touching Polish melody, with a voice pure, sonorous, and plaintive. Tears were in many eyes, and the beating of every heart was quickened.

The song was finished, but the wondering silence was unbroken. Giovanna leaned exhausted on the arm of the chair, and cast down her eyes. On again raising them, she perceived a gentleman who gazed fixedly at her, as if he still listened to echoes which had not yet died within him. The master of the house, to dissipate his thoughtfulness, led him towards Giovanna. “Let me present to you, Signora,” he said, “a countryman, the Count Leon Roszynski.”

The lady trembled; she silently bowed, fixed her eyes on the ground, and dared not raise them. Pleading indisposition, which was fully justified by her pallid features, she soon after withdrew.

When on the following day Giovanna’s servant announced the Counts Selka and Roszynski, a peculiar smile played on her lips; and when they entered, she received the latter with the cold and formal politeness of a stranger. Controlling the feelings of her heart, she schooled her features to an expression of indifference. It was manifest from Leon’s manner, that without the remotest recognition, an indefinable presentiment regarding her possessed him. The Counts had called to know if Giovanna had recovered from her indisposition. Leon begged to be permitted to call again.

Where was his wife? why did he never mention her? Giovanna continually asked herself these questions when they had departed.

A few nights after, the Count Leon arrived sad and thoughtful. He prevailed on Giovanna to sing one of her Polish melodies; which she told him had been taught, when a child, by her muse. Roszynski, unable to restrain the expression of an intense admiration he had long felt, frantically seized her hand, and exclaimed, “I love you!”

She withdrew it from his grasp, remained silent for a few minutes, and then said slowly, distinctly, and ironically, “but I do not love you, Count Roszynski.”

Leon rose from his seat. He pressed his hands to his brow, and was silent. Giovanna remained calm and tranquil. “It is a penalty from Heaven,” continued Leon, as if speaking to himself, “for not having fulfilled my duty as a husband towards one whom I chose voluntarily, but without reflection. I wronged her, and am punished.”

Giovanna turned her eyes upon him. Leon continued, “Young, and with a heart untouched, I married a princess about ten years older than myself, of eccentric habits and bad temper. She treated me as an inferior. She dissipated the fortune hoarded up with so much care by my parents, and yet was ashamed on account of my origin to be called by my name. Happily for me, she was fond of visiting and amusements. Otherwise, to escape from her, I might have become a gambler, or worse; but, to avoid meeting her, I remained at home—for there she seldom was. At first from ennui, but afterwards from real delight in the occupation, I gave myself up to study. Reading formed my mind and heart. I became a changed being. Some months ago my father died, my sister went to Lithuania, whilst my mother, in her old age, and with her ideas, was quite incapable of understanding my sorrow. So when my wife went to the baths for the benefit of her ruined health, I came here in the hope of meeting with some of my former friends—I saw you—”

Giovanna blushed like one detected; but speedily recovering herself, asked with calm pleasantry, “Surely you do not number me among your former friends?”

“I know not. I have been bewildered. It is strange; but from the moment I saw you at Count Selka’s, a powerful instinct of love overcame me; not a new feeling; but as if some latent, long-hid, undeveloped sentiment had suddenly burst forth into an uncontrollable passion. I love, I adore you. I——”

The Prima Donna interrupted him—not with speech, but with a look which awed, which chilled him. Pride, scorn, irony sat in her smile. Satire darted from her eyes. After a pause, she repeated slowly and pointedly, “Love me, Count Roszynski?”

“Such is my destiny,” he replied. “Nor, despite your scorn, will I struggle against it. I feel it is my fate ever to love you; I fear it is my fate never to be loved by you. It is dreadful.”

Giovanna witnessed the Count’s emotion with sadness. “To have,” she said mournfully, “one’s first pure, ardent, passionate affection unrequited, scorned, made a jest of, is indeed a bitterness, almost equal to that of death.”

She made a strong effort to conceal her emotion. Indeed she controlled it so well as to speak the rest with a sort of gaiety.

“You have at least been candid, Count Roszynski; I will imitate you by telling a little history that occurred in your country. There was a poor girl born and bred a serf to her wealthy lord and master. When scarcely fifteen years old, she was torn from a state of happy rustic freedom—the freedom of humility and content—to be one of the courtly slaves of the Palace. Those who did not laugh at her, scolded her. One kind word was vouchsafed to her, and that came from the lord’s son. She nursed it and treasured it; till, from long concealing and restraining her feelings, she at last found that gratitude had changed into a sincere affection. But what does a man of the world care for the love of a serf? It does not even flatter his vanity. The young nobleman did not understand the source of her tears and her grief, and he made a present of her, as he would have done of some animal to his betrothed.”

Leon, agitated and somewhat enlightened, would have interrupted her; but Giovanna said, “Allow me to finish my tale. Providence did not abandon this poor orphan, but permitted her to rise to distinction by the talent with which she was endowed by nature. The wretched serf of Pobereze became a celebrated Italian cantatrice. Then her former lord meeting her in society, and seeing her admired and courted by all the world, without knowing who she really was, was afflicted, as if by the dictates of Heaven, with a love for this same girl,—with a guilty love”—

And Giovanna rose, as she said this, to remove herself further from her admirer.

“No, no!” he replied earnestly; “with a pure and holy passion.”

“Impossible!” returned Giovanna. “Are you not married?”

Roszynski vehemently tore a letter from his vest, and handed it to Giovanna. It was sealed with black, for it announced the death of his wife at the baths. It had only arrived that morning.

“You have lost no time,” said the cantatrice, endeavouring to conceal her feelings under an iron mask of reproach.

There was a pause. Each dared not speak. The Count knew—but without actually and practically believing what seemed incredible—that Anielka and Giovanna were the same person—his slave. That terrible relationship checked him. Anielka, too, had played her part to the end of endurance. The long-cherished tenderness—the faithful love of her life could not longer be wholly mastered. Hitherto they had spoken in Italian. She now said in Polish,

“You have a right, my Lord Roszynski, to that poor Anielka who escaped from the service of your wife in Florence; you can force her back to your palace, to its meanest work; but”—

“Have mercy on me!” cried Leon.

“But,” continued the serf of Pobereze, firmly, “you cannot force me to love you.”

“Do not mock—do not torture me more; you are sufficiently revenged. I will not offend you by importunity. You must indeed hate me! But remember that we Poles wished to give freedom to our serfs; and for that very reason our country was invaded and dismembered by despotic powers. We must therefore continue to suffer slavery as it exists in Russia; but, soul and body, we are averse to it: and when our country once more becomes free, be assured no shadow of slavery will remain in the land. Curse then our enemies, and pity us that we stand in such a desperate position between Russian bayonets and Siberia, and the hatred of our serfs.”

So saying, and without waiting for a reply, Leon rushed from the room. The door was closed. Giovanna listened to the sounds of his rapid footsteps till they died in the street. She would have followed, but dared not. She ran to the window. Roszynski’s carriage was rolling rapidly away, and she exclaimed vainly, “I love you, Leon; I loved you always!”

Her tortures were unendurable. To relieve them she hastened to her desk, and wrote these words:—

“Dearest Leon, forgive me; let the past be for ever forgotten. Return to your Anielka. She always has been, ever will be, yours!”

She despatched the missive. Was it too late? or would it bring him back? In the latter hope she retired to her chamber, to execute a little project.

Leon was in despair. He saw he had been premature in so soon declaring his passion after the news of his wife’s death, and vowed he would not see Anielka again for several months. To calm his agitation, he had ridden some miles into the country. When he returned to his hotel after some hours, he found her note. With the wild delight it had darted into his soul, he flew back to her.

On regaining her saloon a new and terrible vicissitude seemed to sport with his passion:—she was nowhere to be seen. Had the Italian cantatrice fled? Again he was in despair; stupified with disappointment. As he stood uncertain how to act in the midst of the floor, he heard, as from a distance, an Ave Maria poured forth in tones he half-recognised. The sounds brought back to him a host of recollections; a weeping serf, the garden of his own palace. In a state of new rapture he followed the voice. He traced it to an inner chamber, and he there beheld the lovely singer kneeling, in the costume of a Polish serf. She rose, greeted Leon with a touching smile, and stepped forward with serious bashfulness. Leon extended his arms; she sank into them; and in that fond embrace all past wrongs and sorrows were forgotten! Anielka drew from her bosom a little purse, and took from it a piece of silver. It was the rouble. Now, Leon did not smile at it. He comprehended the sacredness of this little gift; and some tears of repentance fell upon Anielka’s hand.

A few months after, Leon wrote to the steward of Olgogrod to prepare everything splendidly for the reception of his second wife. He concluded his letter with these words:—“I understand that in the dungeon beneath my palace there are some unfortunate men, who were imprisoned during my father’s lifetime. Let them be instantly liberated. This is my first act of gratitude to God, who has so infinitely blessed me!”

Anielka longed ardently to behold her native land. They left Vienna immediately after the wedding, although it was in the middle of January.

It was already quite dark when the carriage, with its four horses, stopped in front of the portico of the Palace of Olgogrod. Whilst the footman was opening the door on one side, a beggar soliciting alms appeared at the other, where Anielka was seated. Happy to perform a good action, as she crossed the threshold of her new home, she gave him some money; but the man, instead of thanking her, returned her bounty with a savage laugh, at the same time scowling at her in the fiercest manner from beneath his thick and shaggy brows. The strangeness of this circumstance sensibly affected Anielka, and clouded her happiness. Leon soothed and re-assured her. In the arms of her beloved husband, she forgot all but the happiness of being the idol of his affections.

Fatigue and excitement made the night most welcome. All was dark and silent around the palace, and some hours of the night had passed, when suddenly flames burst forth from several parts of the building at once. The palace was enveloped in fire; it raged furiously. The flames mounted higher and higher; the windows cracked with a fearful sound, and the smoke penetrated into the most remote apartments.

A single figure of a man was seen stealing over the snow, which lay like a winding-sheet on the solitary waste; his cautious steps were heard on the frozen snow as it crisped beneath his tread. It was the beggar who had accosted Anielka. On a rising ground, he turned to gaze on the terrible scene. “No more unfortunate wretches will now be doomed to pass their lives in your dungeons,” he exclaimed. “What was my crime? Reminding my master of the lowness of his birth. For this they tore me from my only child—my darling little Anielka; they had no pity even for her orphan state; let them perish all!”

Suddenly a young and beautiful creature rushes wildly to one of the principal windows: she makes a violent effort to escape. For a moment her lovely form, clothed in white, shines in terrible relief against the background of blazing curtains and walls of fire, and as instantly sinks back into the blazing element. Behind her is another figure, vainly endeavouring to aid her,—he perishes also; neither are ever seen again!

This appalling tragedy horrified even the perpetrator of the crime. He rushed from the place; and as he heard the crash of the falling walls, he closed his ears with his hands, and darted on faster and faster.

The next day some peasants discovered the body of a man frozen to death, lying on a heap of snow,—it was that of the wretched incendiary. Providence, mindful of his long, of his cruel imprisonment and sufferings, spared him the anguish of knowing that the mistress of the palace he had destroyed, and who perished in the flames, was his own beloved daughter—the Serf of Pobreze!

A STROLL BY STARLIGHT.

We left the Village. On the beaten road
Our steps and voices were the only sound.
The lady Moon was not yet come abroad,—
Our coyly-veiled companion. We found
A footway through the corn; upon the ground
The crake among the holms was occupied;
Rapid of movement, from all points around
Came his rough note whose music is supplied

By iteration while all sounds are hushed beside.

The stars were out, the sky was full of them,

Dotted with worlds. The land was all asleep.

And, like its gentle breath, from stem to stem

Through the dry corn a murmur there would creep,

Murmur of music: as when in the deep
Of the sun-pierced Ægean, with turned ear,
The Nereids might have heard its waters leap

And kiss the dimpled islands, thus, less near,

Fainter, more like a thought, did to our hearts appear,

The midnight melody. Our way then led

Where myriad blades of grass were drinking dew;

Thirsty, to God they looked, by God were fed,

Whose cloudless heaven could their life renew.

A copse beside us on the starry blue

Cut its hard outline. Through the leaves a fire

Shone with enlarging brilliance; red of hue

The large moon rose,—did to a throne aspire

Of dizzy height, and paled in winning her desire.

A change of level, and another scene;

Life, light, and noise. The roaring furnace-blast,

Flame-pointed cones and fields of blighted green!

The vivid fires, dreaming they have surpassed

The stars in brightness, furiously cast

Upward their wild strength to possess the sky;

Break into evanescent stars at last,—

Glitter and fall as fountains. Thus men try,

And thus men try in vain, false gods to deify.

The roar and flame diminish. Busy light

Streams from the casting-house. The liquid ore

Through arch and lancet window, dazzling Night,

Flows in rich rills upon the sanded floor.
Steropes, Arges, Brontes, from the shore
Of Acheron returned, seem glowing here;
Such form the phantom of Hephæstus wore,
Illumined by his forge. Each feature clear,

Men glorified by fire seem demon-births of fear.

But the ray reddens, and the light grows dim.
The cooling iron, counterpaned with sand
By those night servitors, no longer grim
In unaccustomed glow, from the green land
And yonder sky, now ceases to command
Our thoughts to wander. As we backward gaze,
The blast renews; with aspiration grand
The flames again soar upward: but we raise

Our glances to God’s Lamp, which overawes their blaze.

So forward through the stillness we proceed.

Winding around a hill, the white road leaves

Life, light, and noise behind. We, gladly freed

From human interruption, we, mute thieves,

Pass onward through Night’s treasure; each receives

From her rich store his bosom full of wealth,
For secret hoarding. Now an oak-wood weaves
A cloister way to sanctify the stealth

Practised in loving guise, and for the spirit’s health.

We climb into the moonlight once again.
A broken rail beside the way doth keep
Neglectful guard above the Vale’s domain.
The Vale is in the silence laid asleep,
Not far below. Among her beauties peep
The wakeful stars, and from above her bed
The grey night-veil, wherein to rest so deep

She sank, the Moon hath lifted; yet the thread

Of slumber holds, the dream hath from her face not fled.

Yon meadow track leads by the church; it saves

Ten minutes if we follow it. We laugh
To see our saving lost among the graves.
Deciphering a moonlit Epitaph
We linger, laugh and sigh. All mirth is half
Made up of melancholy. There is pure
Humour in woe. Man’s grief is oft the staff
On which his happy thoughts can lean secure;

And he who most enjoys, he too can most endure.

We leave the tombstones, death-like, white, and still,

Fixed in the dim light,—awful, unbeheld.
A squalid village, straggling up a hill
We pass. In passing, one among us yelled,
And from no gallinaceous throat expelled
A crow sonorous. From the near church tower,

Through the cold, voiceless air of night there knell’d

The passing bell of a departed hour:

What sign of budding day? How will the morning flower?

CHIPS.

There is a saying that a good workman is known by his chips. Such a prodigious accumulation of chips takes place in our Manufactory, that we infer we must have some first-rate workmen about us.

There is also a figure of speech, concerning a chip of the old block. The chips with which our old block (aged fifteen weeks) is overwhelmed every week, would make some five-and-twenty blocks of similar dimensions.

There is a popular simile—an awkward one in this connexion—founded on the dryness of a chip. This has almost deterred us from our intention of bundling a few chips together now and then. But, reflection on the natural lightness of the article has re-assured us; and we here present a few to our readers,—and shall continue to do so from time to time.

DESTRUCTION OF PARISH REGISTERS.

As the poorest man cannot foresee to what inheritance he may succeed, through the instrumentality of Parochial Registers, so in their preservation every member of the community is more or less interested; but the Parish Register returns of 1833 show that a general feeling seemed to exist in favour of their destruction. Scarcely one of them pronounced the Registers in a satisfactory state. The following sentences abound in the Blue Book: “leaves cut out,” “torn out,” “injured by damp,” “mutilated,” “in fragments,” “destroyed by fire,” “much torn,” “illegible,” “tattered,” “imperfect,” “early registers lost.”

Thanks to the General Registry Act of William the Fourth, all such records made since 1835 are now properly cared for; but those prior to that date are still in parochial keeping, to be torn, lost, burnt, interpolated, stolen, defaced, or rendered illegible at the good pleasure of every wilful or heedless individual of a destructive organisation. Some time ago Mr. Walbran, of Ripon, found part of a Parish Register among a quantity of wastepaper in a cheesemonger’s shop. The same gentleman has rescued the small but very interesting register of the chapelry of Denton, in the county of Durham, from the fate which once had nearly befallen it, by causing several literatim copies to be printed and deposited in public libraries. Among other instances of negligent custody, Mr. Downing Bruce, the barrister, relates, in a recently published pamphlet, that the Registers of South Otterington, containing several entries of the great families of Talbot, Herbert, and Fauconberg, were formerly kept in the cottage of the parish-clerk, who used all those preceding the eighteenth century for waste paper; a considerable portion having been taken to “singe a goose!”

Abstraction, loss, and careless custody of registers is constantly going on. Mr. Bruce mentions, that in 1845 he made some copious extracts from the dilapidated books at Andover, “but on recently visiting that place for the purpose of a supplementary search,” he says, “I found that these books were no longer in existence, and that those which remained were kept in the rectory-house, in a damp place under the staircase, and in a shameful state of dilapidation.” The second case occurred at Kirkby Malzeard, near Ripon, where the earliest register mentioned in the parliamentary return was reported to be lost. “Having occasion to believe that the statement was not correct,” Mr. Bruce states, “I persevered in my inquiries, and at length fortunately discovered the book, in a tattered state, behind some old drawers in the curate’s back kitchen. Again, at Farlington, near Sheriff Hutton, the earliest registers were believed and represented to be lost, until I found their scattered leaves at the bottom of an old parish chest which I observed in the church.”

Even as we write, an enquiry appears in the newspapers from the parish officers of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, addressed to “collectors” and others, after their own Registers; two among the most historically important and interesting years of the seventeenth century are nowhere to be found.

The avidity and dishonesty of many of these “collectors,” or archæological cockchafers, are shocking to think of. They seem to have passed for their own behoof a universal statute of limitations; and when a book, an autograph, or a record is a certain number of years old, they think it is no felony to steal it. Recently we were interested in searching the Register for the birth of Joseph Addison; and at the altar of the pretty little church of Milston, in Wilts, we were told that a deceased rector had cut out the leaf which contained it, to satisfy the earnest longings of a particular friend, “a collector”—a poet, too, who ought to have been ashamed to instigate the larceny. It is hoped that his executors—his name has been inserted in a burial register since—will think fit to restore it to its proper place at their early convenience.

Mr. Bruce recommends that the whole of the Registers now deposited in parish churches, in rectors’ coal-cellars, churchwardens’ outhouses, curates’ back-kitchens, and goose-eating parish clerks’ cottages, should be collected into one central fire-proof building in London.

Innocent Mr. Bruce! While the great historical records of this land are “preserved” over tons of gunpowder in the White Tower of the Tower in London; while the Chancery records are feeding a fine, fat, historical, and uncommonly numerous breed of rats in the cellars of the Rolls Chapel; while some of the most important muniments existing (including William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book) are being dried up in the Chapter-House of Westminster Abbey, by the united heats of a contiguous brew-house and an adjacent wash-house; and while heaps of monastic charters and their surrenders to Henry the Eighth, with piles of inestimable historical treasures, are huddled together upon scaffolds in the interior of the dilapidated Riding-School in Carlton Ride—can Mr. Bruce or any other man of common sense, suppose that any attention whatever will be paid by any person in power to his very modest suggestion?

FROM MR. T. OLDCASTLE CONCERNING THE COAL EXCHANGE.

“Sir,      Blue Dragon Arms, South Shields.

“I have just read in your ‘Household Words’ a pleasant enough account of the ‘Coal Exchange of London,’ in which my name is mentioned. I suppose I ought—and therefore I do—consider it a great honour; and what Captain of a collier-brig would not? So, no more about that, except to thank you. Same time, mayhap, there may be a trifle or two in the paper to which I don’t quite subscribe; and, as I seem to be towed astern of the writer as he works his way on, it seems only fair that I should overhaul his log in such matters as I don’t agree to, whether so be in respect of his remarks or reckoning.

“In the first place, the writer says the Coal Exchange is painted as bright as a coffee-garden or dancing-place on the continent. Well—belike it is. And what o’ that? Did he wish it to be painted in coal-tar? as if we didn’t see enough of this at home—whether collier-men or coal-merchants! I make no doubt he wanted to see all the inside just of the same colour as your London buildings are on th’ outside—walls, and towers, and spires, like so many great smoke-jacks. Then as to his taste in female beauty, he seems more disposed to the pale faces of novel-writers’ young ladies than such sort of brown and ruddy skins as some of us think more mettlesome. I confess I do; and so he may rig me out on this matter as he pleases. Howsomever, I must say that I believe most people will prefer both the bright ladies, and the bright adornment of the building, to any mixture of soot and blacking, which has, hitherto, characterised the taste of my old friends the Londoners. And it is my advice to the artist, Mr. Sang, just to snap his fingers at the opposite taste of your writer, which is exactly what I do myself, for his comparing my ‘hard weather-beaten face’ to the wooden figure of a ship’s head.

“I remain, respected Sir,
“Yours to command,
“Thomas Oldcastle.”

“P.S. What the writer of these coal-papers says I told him about Buddle of Wallsend, is all true enough; but why did he tell me, in return, that his name was ‘Gulliver?’”

NEW SHOES.

The following “Chip” is from the chisel of a blacksmith—a certain Peter Muller of Istra, son of the person to whom it refers. It was gathered from his forge by M. Stæhlin, who inserted it in his original anecdotes of Peter the Great, collected from the conversation of several persons of distinction at St. Petersburg and Moscow.

Among all the workmen at Muller’s forge, near Istra, about ninety versts from Moscow, there was one who had examined everything connected with the work with the most minute attention, and who worked harder than the rest. He was at his post every day, and appeared quite indifferent to the severity of the labour. The last day on which he was employed, he forged eighteen poods of iron—the pood is equal to forty pounds—but though he was so good a workman, he had other matters to mind besides the forging of iron; for he had the affairs of the State to attend to, and all who have heard of Peter the Great, know that those were not neglected.

It happened that he spent a month in the neighbourhood of Istra, for the benefit of the chalybeate waters; and wherever he was, he always made himself thoroughly acquainted with whatever works were carried on. He determined not only to inspect Muller’s forge accurately, but to become a good blacksmith. He made the noblemen who were in attendance on him accompany him every morning, and take part in the labour. Some he appointed to blow the bellows, and others to carry coals, and perform all the offices of journeymen blacksmiths. A few days after his return to Moscow, he called on Muller, and told him that he had been to see his establishment, with which he had been much gratified.

“Tell me,” said he, “how much you allow per pood for iron in bar, furnished by a master blacksmith.”

“Three copecks or an altin,” answered Muller.

“Well, then,” said the Czar, “I have earned eighteen altins, and am come to be paid.”

Muller went to his bureau, and took from it eighteen ducats, which he reckoned before the Emperor. “I would not think of offering less to a royal workman, please your Majesty.”

“Put up your ducats again,” interrupted the Czar, “I will not take more than I have earned, and that you would pay to any other blacksmith. Give me my due. It will be sufficient to pay for a pair of shoes, of which you may see,” added he, as he raised his foot, and displayed a shoe somewhat the worse for the wear, “I am very much in need.”

Muller reckoned out the eighteen altins, with which the Czar hurried off to a shop, and purchased a pair of shoes. He put them on with the greatest delight; he thought he never had worn such a pair of shoes; he showed them with a triumphant air to those about him, and said, “See them; look how well they fit; I have earned them well—by the sweat of my brow, with hammer and anvil.”

One of these bars of iron, forged by Peter the Great, and bearing his mark, was kept as a precious relic in the forge at Istra, and exhibited with no little pride to all who entered. Another bar which was forged by his hand is shown in the Cabinet of the Academy of Sciences at Petersburg.

THE MODERN “OFFICER’S” PROGRESS.

III.—THE CATASTROPHE.

What the Psalmist said in sorrow, those who witnessed the career of the Honourable Ensign Spoonbill and his companions might have said, not in sorrow only but in anger: “One day told another, and one night certified another.”

When duty was to be performed—(for even under the command of such an officer as Colonel Tulip the routine of duty existed)—it was slurred over as hastily as possible, or got through as it best might be. When, on the other hand, pleasure was the order of the day,—and this was sought hourly,—no resource was left untried, no expedient unattempted; and strange things, in the shape of pleasure, were often the result.

The nominal duties were multifarious, and, had they been properly observed, would have left but a comparatively narrow margin for recreation,—for there was much in the old forms which took up time, without conveying any great amount of real military instruction.

The orderly officer for the day—we speak of the subaltern—was supposed to go through a great deal. His duty it was to assist at inspections, superintend drills, examine the soldiers’ provisions, see their breakfasts and dinners served, and attend to any complaints, visit the regimental guards by day and night, be present at all parades and musters, and, finally, deliver in a written report of the proceedings of the four-and-twenty hours.

To go through this routine, required—as it received in some regiments—a few days’ training; but in the Hundredth there was none at all. Every officer in that distinguished corps was supposed to be “a Heaven-born genius,” and acquired his military education as pigeons pick up peas. The Hon. Ensign Spoonbill looked at his men after a fashion; could swear at them if they were excessively dirty, and perhaps awe them into silence by a portentous scowl, or an exaggerated loudness of voice; but with regard to the real purpose of inspection, he knew as little, and cared as much, as the valet who aired his noble father’s morning newspaper. His eye wandered over the men’s kits as they were exposed to his view; but to his mind they only conveyed the idea of a kaleidoscopic rag-fair, not that of an assortment of necessaries for the comfort and well-being of the soldier. He saw large masses of beef, exhibited in a raw state by the quartermaster, as the daily allowance for the men; but if any one had asked him if the meat was good, and of proper weight, how could he have answered, whose head was turned away in disgust, with his face buried in a scented cambric handkerchief, and his delicate nature loathing the whole scene? In the same spirit he saw the men’s breakfasts and dinners served; fortifying his opinion, at the first, that coffee could only be made in France, and wondering, at the second, what sort of potage it could be that contrived to smell so disagreeably. These things might be special affectations in the Hon. Ensign, and depended, probably, on his own peculiar organisation; but if the rest of the officers of the Hundredth did not manifest as intense a dislike to this part of their duties, they were members of much too “crack” a regiment to give themselves any trouble about the matter. The drums beat, the messes were served, there was a hasty gallop through the barrack-rooms, scarcely looking right or left, and the orderly officer was only too happy to make his escape without being stopped by any impertinent complaint.

The “turning out” of the barrack guard was a thing to make an impression on a bystander. A loud shout, a sharp clatter of arms, a scurry of figures, a hasty formation, a brief enquiry if all was right, and a terse rejoinder that all was remarkably so, constituted the details of a visit to the body of men on whom devolved the task of extreme watchfulness, and the preservation of order. If the serjeant had replied “All wrong,” it would have equally enlightened Ensign Spoonbill, who went towards the guardhouse because his instructions told him to do so; but why he went there, and for what purpose he turned out the guard, never entered into his comprehension. Not even did a sense of responsibility awaken in him when, with much difficulty, he penned the report which gave, in a narrative form, the summary of the duties he had performed in so exemplary a manner. Performed, do we say? Yes, once or twice wholly, but for the most part with many gaps in the schedule. Sometimes the dinners were forgotten, now and then the taptoo, generally the afternoon parade, and not unfrequently the whole affair. For the latter omission, there was occasionally a nominal “wigging” administered, not by the commanding officer himself, but through the adjutant; and as that functionary was only looked upon by the youngsters in the light of a bore, without the slightest reverence for his office, his words—like those of Cassius—passed like the idle wind which none regarded. When Ensign Spoonbill “mounted guard” himself, his vigilance on his new post equalled the assiduity we have seen him exhibit in barracks. After the formality of trooping, marching down, and relieving, was over, the Honourable Ensign generally amused himself by a lounge in the vicinity of the guardhouse, until the field-officer’s “rounds” had been made; and that visitation at an end for the day, a neighbouring billiard-room, with Captain Cushion for his antagonist or “a jolly pool” occupied him until dinner-time. It was the custom in the garrison where the Hundredth were quartered, as it was, indeed, in many others, for the officers on guard to dine with their mess, a couple of hours or so being granted for this indulgence. This relaxation was made up for, by their keeping close for the rest of the evening; but as there were generally two or three off duty sufficiently at leisure to find cigars and brandy-and-water attractive, even when consumed in a guard-room, the hardship of Ensign Spoonbill’s official imprisonment was not very great. With these friends, and these creature-comforts to solace, the time wore easily away till night fell, when the field-officer, if he was “a good fellow,” came early, and Ensign Spoonbill, having given his friends their congé, was at liberty to “turn in” for the night, the onerous duty of visiting sentries and inspecting the reliefs every two hours, devolving upon the serjeant.

It may be inferred from these two examples of Ensign Spoonbill’s ideas of discipline and the service, what was the course he generally adopted when on duty, without our being under the necessity of going into further details. What he did when off duty helped him on still more effectually.

Lord Pelican’s outfit having “mounted” the young gentleman, and the credit he obtained on the strength of being Lord Pelican’s son, keeping his stud in order, he was enabled to vie with the crackest of the crack Hundredth; subject, however, to all the accidents which horseflesh is heir to—especially when allied to a judgment of which green was the prevailing colour. A “swap” to a disadvantage; an indiscreet purchase; a mistake as to the soundness of an animal; and such other errors of opinion, entailed certain losses, which might, after all, have been borne, without rendering the applications for money at home, more frequent than agreeable; but when under the influence of a natural obstinacy, or the advice of some very “knowing ones,” Ensign Spoonbill proceeded to back his opinion in private matches, handicaps, and steeple-chases, the privy purse of Lady Pelican collapsed in a most unmistakeable manner. Nor was this description of amusement the only rock-a-head in the course of the Honourable Ensign. The art or science of betting embraces the widest field, and the odds, given or taken, are equally fatal, whether the subject that elicits them be a match at billiards or a horse-race. Nor are the stakes at blind-hookey or unlimited loo less harmless, when you hav’n’t got luck and have such opponents as Captain Cushion.

In spite of the belief in his own powers, which Ensign Spoonbill encouraged, he could not shut his eyes to the fact that he was every day a loser; but wiser gamblers than he—if any there be—place reliance on a “turn of luck,” and all he wanted to enable him to take advantage of it, was a command of cash; for even one’s best friends prefer the coin of the realm to the most unimpeachable I. O. U.

The want of money is a common dilemma,—not the less disagreeable, however, because it is common—but in certain situations this want is more apparent than real. The Hon. Ensign Spoonbill was in the predicament of impecuniosity; but there were—as a celebrated statesman is in the habit of saying—three courses open to him. He might leave off play, and do without the money; he might “throw himself” on Lord Pelican’s paternal feelings; or he might somehow contrive to raise a supply on his own account. To leave off just at the moment when he was sure to win back all he had lost, would have been ridiculous; besides, every man of spirit in the regiment would have cut him. To throw himself upon the generosity of his sire, was a good poetical idea; but, practically, it would have been of no value: for, in the first place, Lord Pelican had no money to give—in the next, there was an elder brother, whose wants were more imperative than his own; and lastly, he had already tried the experiment, and failed in the most signal manner. There remained, therefore, only the last expedient; and being advised, moreover, to have recourse to it, he went into the project tête baissée. The “advice” was tendered in this form.

“Well, Spooney, my boy, how are you, this morning?” kindly enquired Captain Cushion, one day on his return from parade, from which the Honourable Ensign had been absent on the plea of indisposition.

“Deuced queer,” was the reply; “that Roman punch always gives me the splittingest headaches!”

“Ah! you’re not used to it. I’m as fresh as a four-year old. Well, what did you do last night, Spooney?”

“Do! why, I lost, of course; you ought to know that.”

“I—my dear fellow! Give you my honour I got up a loser!”

“Not to me, though,” grumbled the Ensign.

“Can’t say as to that,” replied the Captain; “all I know is, that I am devilishly minus.”

“Who won, then?” enquired Spoonbill.

“Oh!” returned the Captain, after a slight pause, “I suspect—Chowser—he has somebody’s luck and his own too!”

“I think he must have mine,” said the Ensign, with a faint smile, as the alternations of the last night’s Blind Hookey came more vividly to his remembrance. “What did I lose to you, Cushion?” he continued, in the hope that his memory had deceived him.

The Captain’s pocket-book was out in an instant.

“Sixty-five, my dear fellow; that was all. By-the-bye, Spooney, I’m regularly hard up; can you let me have the tin? I wouldn’t trouble you, upon my soul, if I could possibly do without it, but I’ve got a heavy bill coming due to-morrow, and I can’t renew.”

The Honourable Ensign sank back on his pillow, and groaned impotently. Rallying, however, from this momentary weakness, he raised his head, and, after apostrophising the spirit of darkness as his best friend, exclaimed, “I’ll tell you what it is, Cushion, I’m thoroughly cleaned out. I haven’t got a dump!”

“Then you must fly a kite,” observed the Captain, coolly. “No difficulty about that.”

This was merely the repetition of counsel of the same friendly nature previously urged. The shock was not greater, therefore, than the young man’s nerves could bear.

“How is it to be done?” asked the neophyte.

“Oh, I think I can manage that for you. Yes,” pursued the Captain, musing, “Lazarus would let you have as much as you want, I dare say. His terms are rather high, to be sure; but then the cash is the thing. He’ll take your acceptance at once. Who will you get to draw the bill?”

“Draw!” said the Ensign, in a state of some bewilderment. “I don’t understand these things—couldn’t you do it?”

“Why,” replied the Captain, with an air of intense sincerity, “I’d do it for you with pleasure—nothing would delight me more; but I promised my grandmother, when first I entered the service, that I never would draw a bill as long as I lived; and as a man of honour, you know, and a soldier, I can’t break my word.”

“But I thought you said you had a bill of your own coming due to-morrow,” observed the astute Spoonbill.

“So I did,” said the Captain, taken rather aback in the midst of his protestations, “but then it isn’t—exactly—a thing of this sort; it’s a kind of a—bond—as it were—old family matters—the estate down in Lincolnshire—that I’m clearing off. Besides,” he added, hurriedly, “there are plenty of fellows who’ll do it for you. There’s young Brittles—the Manchester man, who joined just after you. I never saw anybody screw into baulk better than he does, except yourself—he’s the one. Lazarus, I know, always prefers a young customer to an old one; knowing chaps, these Jews, arn’t they?”

Captain Cushion’s last remark was, no doubt, a just one—but he might have applied the term to himself with little dread of disparagement; and the end of the conversation was, that it was agreed a bill should be drawn as proposed, “say for three hundred pounds,” the Captain undertaking to get the affair arranged, and relieving Spoonbill of all trouble, save that of “merely” writing his name across a bit of stamped paper. These points being settled, the Captain left him, and the unprotected subaltern called for brandy and soda-water, by the aid of which stimulus he was enabled to rise and perform his toilette.

Messrs. Lazarus and Sons were merchants who perfectly understood their business, and, though they started difficulties, were only too happy to get fresh birds into their net. They knew to a certainty that the sum they were asked to advance would not be repaid at the end of the prescribed three months: it would scarcely have been worth their while to enter into the matter if it had; the profit on the hundred pounds’ worth of jewellery, which Ensign Spoonbill was required to take as part of the amount, would not have remunerated them sufficiently. Guessing pretty accurately which way the money would go, they foresaw renewed applications, and a long perspective of accumulating acceptances. Lord Pelican might be a needy nobleman; but he was Lord Pelican, and the Honourable George Spoonbill was his son; and if the latter did not succeed to the title and family estates, which was by no means improbable, there was Lady Pelican’s settlement for division amongst the younger children. So they advanced the money; that is to say, they produced a hundred and eighty pounds in cash, twenty they took for the accommodation (half of which found its way into the pocket of—never mind, we won’t say anything about Captain Cushion’s private affairs), and the value of the remaining hundred was made up with a series of pins and rings of the most stunning magnificence.

This was the Honourable Ensign Spoonbill’s first bill-transaction, but, the ice once broken, the second and third soon followed. He found it the pleasantest way in the world of raising money, and in a short time his affairs took a turn so decidedly commercial, that he applied the system to all his mercantile transactions. He paid his tailors after this fashion, satisfied Messrs. Mildew and his upholsterers with negotiable paper, and did “bits of stiff” with Galloper, the horse-dealer, to a very considerable figure. He even became facetious, not to say inspired, by this great discovery; for, amongst his papers, when they were afterwards overhauled by the official assignee—or some such fiscal dignitary,—a bacchanalian song in manuscript was found, supposed to have been written about this period, the refrain of which ran as follows:—

“When creditors clamour, and cash fails the till,

There is nothing so easy as giving a bill.”

It needs no ghost to rise from the grave to prophesy the sequel to this mode of “raising the wind.” It is recorded twenty times a month in the daily papers,—now in the Bankruptcy Court, now in that for the Relief of Insolvent Debtors. Ensign Spoonbill’s career lasted about eighteen months, at the end of which period—not having prospered by means of gaming to the extent he anticipated—he found himself under the necessity of selling out and retiring to a continental residence, leaving behind him debts, which were eventually paid, to the tune of seven thousand, two hundred and fourteen pounds, seventeen shillings, and tenpence three farthings, the vulgar fractions having their origin in the hair-splitting occasioned by reduplication of interest. He chose for his abode the pleasant town of Boulogne-sur-Mer, where he cultivated his moustaches, acquired a smattering of French, and an insight into the mystery of pigeon-shooting. For one or other of these qualifications—we cannot exactly say which—he was subsequently appointed attaché to a foreign embassy, and at the present moment, we believe, is considered one of those promising young men whose diplomatic skill will probably declare itself one of these days, by some stroke of finesse, which shall set all Europe by the ears.

With respect to Colonel Tulip’s “crack” regiment, it went, as the saying is, “to the Devil.” The exposure caused by the affair of Ensign Spoonbill—the smash of Ensign Brittles, which shortly followed—the duel between Lieutenant Wadding and Captain Cushion, the result of which was a ball (neither “spot” nor “plain,” but a bullet) through the head of the last-named gentleman, and a few other trifles of a similar description, at length attracted the “serious notice” of his Grace the Commander-in-Chief. It was significantly hinted to Colonel Tulip that it would be for the benefit of the service in general, and that of the Hundredth in particular, if he exchanged to half-pay, as the regiment required re-modelling. A smart Lieutenant-Colonel who had learnt something, not only of drill, but of discipline, under the hero of “Young Egypt,” in which country he had shared that general’s laurels, was sent down from the Horse Guards. “Weeding” to a considerable extent took place; the Majors and the Adjutant were replaced by more efficient men, and, to sum up all, the Duke’s “Circular” came out, laying down a principle of practical military education, while on service, which, if acted up to,—and there seems every reason to hope it will now be,—bids fair to make good officers of those who heretofore were merely idlers. It will also diminish the opportunities for gambling, drinking, and bill-discounting, and substitute, for the written words on the Queen’s Commission, the real character of a soldier and a gentleman.

HOW TO SPEND A SUMMER HOLIDAY.

If the walls of London—the bill-stickers’ chosen haunt—could suddenly find a voice to tell their own history, we might have a few curious illustrations of the manners and customs—the fashions, fancies, and popular idols—of the English during the last half century,—from the days when a three feet blue bill was thought large enough to tell where Bonaparte’s victories might be read about, to the advent acres of flaring paper and print which announce a Bal Masque or a new Haymarket Comedy. One of the most startling contrasts of such a confession would refer to the announcements about means of locomotion. It is not very long ago that “The Highflyer,” “The Tally-ho,” the Brighton “Age,” and the Shrewsbury “Wonder” boasted, in all the glory of red letters, their wonder-feat speed of ten miles an hour,—“York in one day;” “Manchester in twenty-four hours;” and so on. The same wall now tells the passer-by a different tale, for we have Excursion Trains to all sorts of pleasant places at all sorts of low fares. “Twelve Hours to Paris” is the burden of one placard, whilst another shows how “Cologne on the Rhine” may be reached in twenty-four.

Nor is this marvellous change in speed—this real economy of life—the only variation from old modes; for the cost in money of a journey has diminished with its cost of time. The cash which a few years ago was required to go to York, will now take the tourist to Cologne. The Minster of the one city is now, therefore, rivalled as a point for sight-seers by the Dom-Kirche of the other. When the South Eastern Railway Company offers to take the traveller, who will pay them about three pounds at London Bridge one night, and place him by the next evening on the banks of the Rhine,—the excellent tendency is, that the summer holiday folks will extend their notions of an excursion beyond the Channel.

Steam, that makes the trip from London to Cologne so rapid and so cheap, does not stop there, but is ready now to bear the traveller by railway to Brunswick, Hanover, Berlin, Dresden, Vienna,—nay, with one short gap, he may go all the way to Trieste, on the Adriatic, by the iron road. Steam is ready also on the Rhine to carry him at small charge up that stream towards Switzerland. Indeed, afloat by steamer and ashore by railway, the tourist who leaves London Bridge on a Monday night may well reach Basle by Thursday or Friday, seeing many things on his way, including the best scenery of the Rhine. The beautiful portion of the banks of that river forms but a small part of its entire length; indeed, on reaching Cologne, the traveller is disappointed to find so little that is remarkable in what he beholds on the banks of the famous stream. It is not till he ascends many miles higher that he feels repaid for his journey. The scenery lies between Coblenz and Bingen, and in extent bears some such proportion to the whole length of the river as would the banks of the Thames from Chelsea to Richmond to the entire course of our great river, from its rise in Gloucestershire to its junction with the sea. In addition to the part just named, there are some few other points where the Rhine is worth seeing,—such as the fall at Schaffhausen,—but Switzerland may claim this as one of its attractions. It is a fine river from Basle, even down through the Dutch rushes and flats to the sea; but, with all its reputation, there is only a morsel of the Rhine worth going to look at, and that lies, as we have just said, between its junction with the picturesque Moselle at Coblenz and the small town of Bingen. Between those points it passes through hills and near mountains, whose sides and summits boast the castles and ruins so often painted and often sung; and these spots are now within the reach of the three pounds first-class railway ticket, now-a-days announced by placard on the walls and hoardings of London.

Once on a Rhine steamer, and Switzerland is within easy reach.

On our table, as we write, lies the second edition of a volume[2] written by the physician to the Queen’s Household, Dr. Forbes, showing how a month may be employed in Switzerland. He adopted the South Eastern Railway plan, and, starting by a mail train at half-past eight in the evening of the 3rd of August, found himself and companions on the next evening looking from the window of an hotel on the Rhine. Steam and a week placed him in Switzerland. Here railways must be no longer reckoned on, and the tourist, if he be in search of health, may try what pedestrian exercise will do for him. This the Doctor strongly recommends; and, following his own prescription, we find him—though a sexagenarian—making capital way; now as a pedestrian, anon on horseback, and then again on foot, only adopting a carriage when there was good reason for such assistance. He describes the country, as all do who have been through it, as a land of large and good inns, well stored with luxurious edibles and drinkables. Against a too free use of them, he doctor-like gives a medical hint or two, and goes somewhat out of his way, perhaps, to show how much better the waters of the mountains may be than the wine. Indeed the butter, the honey, the milk, the cheese, and the melted snows of Switzerland win his warmest praises. The bread is less fortunate; but its inferiority, and many other small discomforts, are overlooked and almost forgotten in his enjoying admiration of what he found good on his way amidst the mountain valleys and breezy passes of his route. The bracing air, the brilliant sky, the animating scenes, the society of emulous and cheerful companions, and, above all, the increased corporeal exercise soon produce a change in the mind and the body, in the spirits and the stomach of the tourist.

2. “The Physician’s Holiday.”

What a marvellous change it is for a smoke-dried man who for months, perhaps years, has been “in populous cities pent,” to escape from his thraldom, and find himself far away from his drudgeries and routines up amongst the mountains and the lakes, and surrounded by the most magnificent scenes in nature; where he sees in all its glory that which a townsman seldom gets a glimpse of—a sunrise in its greatest beauty; and where sunsets throw a light over the earth, which makes its beauties emulate those of the heavens! Day by day, during summer in Switzerland, such enjoyments are at hand. One traveller may choose one route, and another another; for there are many and admirable changes to be rung upon the roads to be taken. Dr. Forbes, for instance, went from Basle to Schaffhausen, thence to Zurich, and, steaming over a part of the lake, made for Zug, and thence to the Rigi. He returned to the Zurich-See, and then went to Wallenstadt, Chur, and the Via Mala. Had he to shorten his trip without great loss of the notable scenes, he might, having first reached Lucerne, have left that place for Meyringen, and then pursued his subsequent way by the line of the lakes, visiting the various glorious points in their neighbourhood that challenged his attention—Grindelwald, Schreckhorn, Lauterbrunnen, Unterseen, and so on to Thun; then by the pass of the Gemmi to Leuk, and, from there, to what is described by our author as the gem of his whole Swiss experience—the Riffelberg, and the view at Monte Rosa:—

“Sitting there, up in mid-heaven, as it were, on the smooth, warm ledge of our rock; in one of the sunniest noons of a summer day; amid air cooled by the elevation and the perfect exposure to the most delicious temperature; under a sky of the richest blue, and either cloudless, or only here and there gemmed with those aerial and sun-bright cloudlets which but enhance its depth; with the old field of vision, from the valley at our feet to the horizon, filled with majestic shapes of every variety of form, and of a purity and brilliancy of whiteness which left all common whiteness dull;—we seemed to feel as if there could be no other mental mood but that of an exquisite yet cheerful serenity—a sort of delicious abstraction, or absorption of our powers, in one grand, vague, yet most luxurious perception of Beauty and Loveliness.

“At another time—it would almost seem at the same time, so rapid was the alternation from mood to mood—the immeasurable vastness and majesty of the scene, the gigantic bulk of the individual mountains, the peaks towering so far beyond the level of our daily earth, as to seem more belonging to the sky than to it, our own elevated and isolated station hemmed in on every side by untrodden wastes and impassable walls of snow, and, above all, the utter silence, and the absence of every indication of life and living things—suggesting the thought that the foot of man had never trodden, and never would tread there: these and other analogous ideas would excite a tone of mind entirely different—solemn, awful, melancholy....

“I said at the time, and I still feel disposed to believe, that the whole earth has but few scenes that can excel it in grandeur, in beauty, and in wonderfulness of every kind. I thought then, and I here repeat my opinion in cool blood, that had I been brought hither blindfolded from London, had had my eyes opened but for a single hour on this astonishing panorama, and had been led back in darkness as I came, I should have considered the journey, with all its privations, well repaid by what I saw.”

Having seen this crowning glory of mountain scenery, the tourist intent only upon a short trip might adopt one of many variations for his return to Basle. If on going out he had missed any bright spot, he should see it on his way back. He must remember:

Interlachen, one of the sweetest spots in all Switzerland, which, though only about four miles in extent, affords a perfect specimen of a Swiss valley in its best form.

The Lake of Thun, inferior to that of Wallenstadt in grandeur, and to that of Lucerne in beauty, but superior to the Lake of Zurich in both; and in respect to the view from it, beyond all these; none of them having any near or distant prospect comparable to that looking back, where the snowy giants of the Oberland, with the Jungfrau, and her silver horns, are seen over the tops of the nearer mountains.

The “show glacier” of the Rosenlaui, which is so easy of access.

The view from the Hotel of the Jungfrau on the Wengern Alp.

The lake scenery near Alpnach.

All these points should be made either out or home. They are not likely to be forgotten by the tourist when once seen. On the pilgrimage to these wonders of nature, the other peculiarities of the country and its people will be observed, and amongst them the frequency of showers and the popularity of umbrellas; the great division of landed property; the greater number of beggars in the Romanist as compared with the Protestant Cantons, and the better cultivation of the latter; the numerous spots of historical interest, as Morgarten, Sempach, Naefels; where the Swiss have fought for the liberty they enjoy (to say nothing of the dramatic William Tell, and his defeat of the cruel Gesler); the fruitfulness and number of Swiss orchards (which give us our grocers’ “French plums”), the excellent flavor of Alpine strawberries and cream; the scarcity of birds; and the characteristic sounds of the Swiss horn, the Ranz des Vaches, and the night chaunts of the watchmen.

On the map attached to Dr. Forbes’s volume are the dates, jotted down, when our traveller entered Switzerland, at Basle, and when he left it on his return to smoke and duty in London. He reached the land of mountains and lakes on the 11th of August; he quitted it on the 12th of September; four days afterwards he was being bothered at the Custom-House at Blackwall. The last words of his book are these:—“In accordance with a principle kept constantly in view while writing out the particulars of the Holiday now concluded, viz. to give to those who may follow the same or a similar track, such economical and financial details as may be useful to them, I may here state that the total expenses of the tour—from the moment of departure to that of return—was, as near as may be, One Guinea per diem to each of the travellers.”

The thousands of young gentlemen with some leisure and small means, who are in the habit of getting rid of both in unhealthy amusements, need hardly be told that a winter’s abstinence from certain modes and places of entertainment would be more than rewarded by a single summer holiday spent after the manner of Dr. Forbes and his younger companions. No very heroic self-denial is necessary; and the compensation—in health, higher and more intense enjoyment, and the best sort of mental improvement—is incalculable.

What we have here described is an expensive proceeding compared with the cheap contract trips which are constantly diverging from the Metropolis, to every part of England, Ireland, Scotland, and to all attainable places on the Continent. These, so far as we are able to learn, have hitherto been well conducted; and although the charges for every possible want—from the platform of the London Terminus back again to the same spot, are marvellously moderate—the speculations, from their frequent repetition, appear to have been remunerative to the projectors.

CHRISTOPHER SHRIMBLE ON THE “DECLINE OF ENGLAND.”

To Mr. Ledru Rollin.

Sir,

I generally believe everything that is going to happen; and as it is a remarkable fact that everything that is going to happen is of a depressing nature, I undergo a good deal of anxiety. I am very careful of myself (taking a variety of patent medicines, and paying particular attention to the weather), but I am not strong. I think my weakness is principally on my nerves, which have been a good deal shaken in the course of my profession as a practising attorney; in which I have met with a good deal to shock them; but from which, I beg leave most cheerfully to acquaint you, I have retired.

Sir, I am certain you are a very remarkable public gentleman, though you have the misfortune to be French. I am convinced you know what is going to happen, because you describe it in your book on “The Decline of England,” in such an alarming manner. I have read your book and, Sir, I am sincerely obliged to you for what you have made me suffer; I am very miserable and very grateful.

You have not only opened up a particularly dismal future, but you have shown me in what a miserable condition we, here, (I mean in Tooting, my place of abode, and the surrounding portion of the British Empire) are at this present time; though really I was not aware of it.

I suppose that your chapter on the law of this land is the result of a profound study of the statutes at large and the “Reports of Cases argued,” &c.; for students of your nation do not take long for that sort of thing, and you have been amongst us at least three months. In the course of your “reading up” you must doubtless have perused the posthumous reports of J. Miller, Q. C. (Queen’s Comedian). There you doubtless found the cause of Hammer v. Tongs, which was an action of tort tried before Gogg, C. J. Flamfacer (Serjeant)—according to the immortal reporter of good things—stated his case on behalf of the plaintiff so powerfully, that before he could get to the peroration, said plaintiff’s hair stood on end, tears rolled down his cheeks in horror and pity at his own wrongs, and he exclaimed, while wringing his pocket-handkerchief, “Good gracious! That villain Tongs! What a terrific box on my ear it must have been! To think that a man may be almost murdered without knowing it!”

I am Hammer, and you, Mr. Rollin, are Tongs. Your book made my ears to tingle quite as sharply as if you had actually boxed them. I must, however, in justice to the little hair that Time has left me, positively state that, even while I was perusing your most powerful passages, it showed no propensity for the perpendicular. I felt very nervous for all that; for still—although I could hardly believe that a French gentleman residing for a few months in the neighbourhood of Leicester Square, London, could possibly obtain a thorough knowledge, either from study or personal observation, of the political, legislative, agricultural, agrarian, prelatical, judicial, colonial, commercial, manufacturing, social, and educational systems and condition of this empire—yet, from the unqualified manner in which you deliver yourself upon all these branches, I cannot choose but think that your pages must, like certain fictions, be at least founded on some fact; that to have concocted your volume—of smoke—there must be some fire somewhere. Or is it only the smell of it?

For, Sir, even an alarm of fire is unpleasant; and, to an elderly gentleman with a very small stake in the country (prudently inserted in the three per cent. consols), reading of the dreadful things which you say are to happen to one’s own native land is exceedingly uncomfortable, especially at night; when “in silence and in gloom” one broods over one’s miseries, personal and national; when, in fact, your or any one else’s bête noire is apt to get polished off with a few extra touches of blacking. Bless me! when I put my candle out the other night, and thought of your portrait of Britannia, I quite shook; and when I lay down I could almost fancy her shadow on the wall. Even now I see her looking uncommonly sickly, in spite of the invigorating properties of the waves she so constantly “rules;” the trident and shield—her “supporters” for ages—can hardly keep her up. Grief, and forebodings of the famine which you promise, has made her dwindle down from Great to Little Britain. The British Lion at her feet is in the last stage of consumption; in such a shocking state of collapse, that he will soon be in a condition to jump out of his skin; but you do not point out the Ass who is to jump into it.

Fortunately for my peace I found, on reading a little further, that this is not Britannia as she is, but Britannia seen by you, “as in a glass darkly”—as she is to be—when some more of her blood has been sucked by a phlebotomising Oligarchy and State-pensionary; by an ogreish Cotton lordocracy; by a sanguinary East India Company, whose “atrocious greediness caused ten millions of Indians to perish in a month;” by the servile Parsonocracy, who “read their sermons, in order that the priest may be able to place his discourse before the magistrate, if he should be suspected of having preached anything contrary to law;” by the Landlords, whose oppressions cause labourers to kill one another “to get a premium upon death;” and by a variety of other national leeches, which your imagination presents to our view with the distinctness of the monsters in a drop of Thames water seen through a solar microscope.

But, Sir, as Mr. Hammer said, “to think that a man may be almost murdered without knowing it!” and so, I say, (one trial of your book will prove the fact) may a whole parish—such as Tooting—or an entire country—such as England. If it had not been for your book I should not have had the remotest notion that “English society is about to fall with a fearful crash.” Society at large, so far as I can observe it (at Tooting, and elsewhere), seems to be quite innocent of its impending fate; and if one may judge from appearances (but then you say, we may not),—we are rather better off than usual just now: indeed, when you paint Britannia as she is at the present writing, she makes a rather fat and jolly portrait than otherwise. In your “Exposition” (for 1850) you say: “The problem is not to discover whether England is great, but whether her greatness can endure.” In admitting, in the handsomest manner possible, that England is great, you go on to say, that “Great Britain, which is only two hundred leagues long, and whose soil is far from equal to that of Aragon or Lombardy, draws every year from its agriculture, by a skilful cultivation and the breeding of animals, a revenue which amounts to more than three billions six hundred millions francs, and this revenue of the mother-country is almost doubled by the value of similar produce in its colonies and dependencies. Her industry, her commerce, and her manufactures, create a property superior to the primal land-productions, and all owing to her inexhaustible mines, her natural wealth, and her admirable system of circulation by fourscore and six canals, and seventy lines of railway. The total revenue of England then amounts to upwards of twelve billion francs. Her power amongst the nations is manifest by the number and greatness of her fleets and of her domains. In Europe she possesses, besides her neighbour-islets, Heligoland, Gibraltar, Malta, and the Ionian Islands; in Asia, she holds British Hindostan with its tributaries, Ceylon, and her compulsory allies of the Punjab and of Scinde—that is to say, almost a world; in Africa she claims Sierra Leone with its dependencies, the Isle of France, Seychelles, Fernandez Po, the Cape of Good Hope and Saint Helena; in America, she possesses Upper and Lower Canada, Cape Breton, the Lesser Antilles, the Bermudas, Newfoundland, Lucays, Jamaica, Dominica, Guiana, the Bay of Honduras, and Prince Edward’s Island; lastly, in Oceania, she has Van Dieman’s Land, Norfolk Island, Nova Scotia, Southern Australia; and these hundred nations make up for her more that one hundred and fifty millions of subjects, including the twenty-seven to twenty-eight millions of the three mother kingdoms. As to her mercantile marine, two details will suffice to make it known; she has about thirty thousand sailing-vessels and steamers, without counting her eight thousand colonial ships; and in one year she exports six or seven hundred millions of cotton stuffs, which makes for a single detail an account beyond the sum total of all the manufacturing exportation of France.”

But now for the plague spot! All this territory, and power, and commercial activity is, you say, our ruin; all this wealth is precisely our pauperism; all this happiness is our misery. What Montesquieu says, and you Mr. Ledru Rollin indorse with your unerring imprimatur, must be true:—“The fortune of maritime empires cannot be long, for they only reign by the oppression of the nations, and while they extend themselves abroad, they are undermining themselves within.”

Upon my word, Mr. Rollin, this looks very likely: and when you see your neighbours gaily promenading Regent Street; when you hear of the “Lion of Waterloo” (at whom you are so obliging as to say in your Preface, you have no wish “to fire a spent ball”) giving his usual anniversary dinner to the usual number of guests, and with his usual activity stepping off afterwards to a ball; when you are told that a hundred thousand Londoners can afford to enjoy themselves at Epsom Races; and that throughout the country there is just now more enjoyment and less grumbling than there has been for years, I can quite understand that your horror at the innocent disregard thus evinced at the tremendous “blow up” that is coming, must be infinitely more real than that of Serjeant Flamfacer. “Alas!” you exclaim with that “profound emotion” with which your countrymen are so often afflicted; “Government returns inform me that during the past year English pauperism has decreased eleven per cent., and that the present demand for labour in the manufacturing districts nearly equals the supply? The culminating point is reached; destruction must follow!”

Heavens! Mr. Rollin, I tremble with you. The plethora of prosperity increases, and will burst the sooner! We, eating, drinking, contented, trafficking, stupid, revolution-hating, spiritless, English people, “are undermining ourselves within.” We are gorging ourselves with National prosperity to bring on a National dyspepsia, and will soon fall asleep under the influence of a national nightmare! Horrible! the more so because

“Alas! unconscious of their fate,

The little victims play.”

Now, Sir, I wish to ask you calmly and candidly, if there is any fire at the bottom of your volumes of smoke? or have you read our records, and seen our country through a flaming pair of Red Spectacles, that has converted everything within their range into Raw-Head-and-Bloody-Bones?

Indeed I hope it is so; for though I am very much obliged to you for putting us on our guard, you have made me very miserable. This is the worst shock of all. With my belief in “what is going to happen,” I have led but a dog-life of it, ever since I retired from that cat-and-dog life, the Law. First, the Reform Bill was to ruin us out of hand; then, the farmers threatened us with what was going to happen in consequence of Free Trade; and that was bad enough, for it was starvation—no less. What was going to happen if the Navigation Laws were repealed, I dare not recall. Now we are to be swept off the face of the earth if we allow letters to be sorted on a Sunday. But these are comparative trifles to what you, Mr. R., assert is going to happen, whatever we do or don’t do. However, I am resolved on one thing—I won’t be in at the death, or rather with the death. I shall pull up my little stake in Capel Court, and retire to some quiet corner of the world, such as the Faubourg St. Antoine, the foot of Mount Vesuvius, or Chinese Tartary.

Yours truly,

Christopher Shrimble.

Paradise Row, Tooting.

Monthly Supplement of ‘HOUSEHOLD WORDS,’
Conducted by Charles Dickens.
Price 2d., Stamped 3d.,
THE HOUSEHOLD NARRATIVE
OF
CURRENT EVENTS.

The Number, containing a history of the past month, was issued with the Magazines.

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. 15, JULY 6, 1850 ***

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Table of Contents

- HOUSEHOLD WORDS. A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

- THE OLD LADY IN THREADNEEDLE STREET.

- THE SERF OF POBEREZE.

- A STROLL BY STARLIGHT.

- CHIPS.

- DESTRUCTION OF PARISH REGISTERS.

- FROM MR. T. OLDCASTLE CONCERNING THE COAL EXCHANGE.

- NEW SHOES.

- THE MODERN “OFFICER’S” PROGRESS.

- III.—THE CATASTROPHE.

- HOW TO SPEND A SUMMER HOLIDAY.

- CHRISTOPHER SHRIMBLE ON THE “DECLINE OF ENGLAND.”

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE