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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson -
+Swanston Edition, by Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition
+       Vol. 1 (of 25)
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+Commentator: Andrew Lang
+
+Release Date: June 6, 2007 [EBook #21686]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORKS OF R.L. STEVENSON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Marcia Brooks and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WORKS OF
+
+ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+
+SWANSTON EDITION
+
+VOLUME I
+
+
+_Of this SWANSTON EDITION in Twenty-five
+Volumes of the Works of ROBERT LOUIS
+STEVENSON Two Thousand and Sixty Copies
+have been printed, of which only Two Thousand
+Copies are for sale._
+
+_This is No. 1678_
+
+[Illustration: AN INLAND VOYAGE TITLE-PAGE DESIGNED BY MR. WALTER CRANE]
+
+THE WORKS OF
+ROBERT LOUIS
+STEVENSON
+
+
+WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
+ANDREW LANG
+
+
+VOLUME ONE
+
+
+LONDON: PUBLISHED BY CHATTO AND
+WINDUS: IN ASSOCIATION WITH CASSELL
+AND COMPANY LIMITED: WILLIAM
+HEINEMANN: AND LONGMANS GREEN
+AND COMPANY MDCCCCXI
+
+ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                               PAGE
+INTRODUCTION TO THE SWANSTON EDITION             ix
+
+
+AN INLAND VOYAGE
+
+
+ANTWERP TO BOOM                                   7
+
+ON THE WILLEBROEK CANAL                          11
+
+THE ROYAL SPORT NAUTIQUE                         16
+
+AT MAUBEUGE                                      21
+
+ON THE SAMBRE CANALISED: TO QUARTES              26
+
+PONT-SUR-SAMBRE:
+  WE ARE PEDLARS                                 31
+  THE TRAVELLING MERCHANT                        36
+
+ON THE SAMBRE CANALISED: TO LANDRECIES           41
+
+AT LANDRECIES                                    46
+
+SAMBRE AND OISE CANAL: CANAL BOATS               50
+
+THE OISE IN FLOOD                                55
+
+ORIGNY SAINTE-BENOÎTE:
+  A BY-DAY                                       62
+  THE COMPANY AT TABLE                           68
+
+DOWN THE OISE: TO MOY                            74
+
+LA FÈRE OF CURSED MEMORY                         79
+
+DOWN THE OISE: THROUGH THE GOLDEN VALLEY         84
+
+NOYON CATHEDRAL                                  86
+
+DOWN THE OISE: TO COMPIÈGNE                      91
+
+AT COMPIÈGNE                                     94
+
+CHANGED TIMES                                    99
+
+DOWN THE OISE: CHURCH INTERIORS                 105
+
+PRÉCY AND THE MARIONNETTES                      111
+
+BACK TO THE WORLD                               120
+
+EPILOGUE                                        122
+
+
+
+
+TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY IN THE CEVENNES
+
+
+VELAY
+
+THE DONKEY, THE PACK, AND THE PACK-SADDLE       143
+
+THE GREEN DONKEY-DRIVER                         149
+
+I HAVE A GOAD                                   158
+
+
+UPPER  GÉVAUDAN
+
+A CAMP IN THE DARK                              167
+
+CHEYLARD AND LUC                                177
+
+
+OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS
+
+FATHER APOLLINARIS                              183
+
+THE MONKS                                       188
+
+THE BOARDERS                                    195
+
+
+UPPER  GÉVAUDAN  (_continued_)
+
+ACROSS THE GOULET                               203
+
+A NIGHT AMONG THE PINES                         206
+
+
+THE COUNTRY OF THE CAMISARDS
+
+ACROSS THE LOZÈRE                               213
+
+PONT DE MONTVERT                                218
+
+IN THE VALLEY OF THE TARN                       224
+
+FLORAC                                          234
+
+IN THE VALLEY OF THE MIMENTE                    237
+
+THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY                        241
+
+THE LAST DAY                                    248
+
+FAREWELL, MODESTINE!                            253
+
+
+
+
+A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE                       257
+
+
+EDINBURGH:
+
+CHAPTER
+
+   I. INTRODUCTORY                              271
+
+  II. OLD TOWN: THE LANDS                       278
+
+ III. THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE                      285
+
+  IV. LEGENDS                                   291
+
+   V. GREYFRIARS                                298
+
+  VI. NEW TOWN: TOWN AND COUNTRY                305
+
+ VII. THE VILLA QUARTERS                        311
+
+VIII. THE CALTON HILL                           314
+
+  IX. WINTER AND NEW YEAR                       320
+
+   X. TO THE PENTLAND HILLS                     327
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION TO THE SWANSTON EDITION
+
+
+So much has been written on R. L. Stevenson, as a boy, a man, and a man
+of letters, so much has been written both by himself and others, that I
+can hope to add nothing essential to the world's knowledge of his
+character and appreciation of his genius. What is essential has been
+said, once for all, by Sir Sidney Colvin in "Notes and Introductions" to
+R. L. S.'s "Letters to His Family and Friends." I can but contribute the
+personal views of one who knew, loved, and esteemed his junior that is
+already a classic; but who never was of the inner circle of his
+intimates. We shared, however, a common appreciation of his genius, for
+he was not so dull as to suppose, or so absurd as to pretend to suppose,
+that much of his work was not excellent. His tale "Thrawn Janet" "is
+good," he says in a letter, with less vigour than but with as much truth
+as Thackeray exclaiming "that's genius," when he describes Becky's
+admiration of Rawdon's treatment of Lord Steyne, in the affray in Curzon
+Street. About the work of other men and novelists, or poets, we were
+almost invariably of the same mind; we were of one mind about the great
+Charles Gordon. "He was filled," too, "with enthusiasm for Joan of Arc,"
+says his biographer, "a devotion, and also a cool headed admiration,
+which he never lost." In a letter he quotes Byron as having said that
+Jeanne "was a fanatical strumpet," and he cries shame on the noble
+poet. He projected an essay on the Blessed Maid, which is not in "the
+veniable part of things lost."
+
+Thus we were so much of the same sentiments, in so many ways, that I can
+hope to speak with sympathy, if not always with complete understanding,
+of Stevenson. Like a true Scot, he was interested in his ancestry, his
+heredity; regarding Robert Fergusson, the young Scottish poet, who died
+so young, in an asylum, as his spiritual forefather, and hoping to
+attach himself to a branch of the Royal Clan Alpine, the MacGregors, as
+the root of the Stevensons. Of Fergusson, he had, in early youth, the
+waywardness, the liking for taverns and tavern talk, the half-rueful
+appreciation of the old closes and wynds of Old Edinburgh, a touch of
+the recklessness and more than all the pictorial power which, in
+Fergusson, Burns so magnanimously admired.
+
+But genealogical research shows that Stevenson drew nothing from the
+dispossessed MacGregors, a clan greatly wronged, from Robert Bruce's
+day, and greatly given to wronging others. Alan Breck did not like "the
+Gregara," apart from their courage, and in Alan's day they were not
+consistent walkers.
+
+Stevenson, as far as one can learn, had no Celtic blood; none, at least,
+of traceable infusion: he was more purely Lowland than Sir Walter Scott.
+His paternal line could be traced back to a West Country Stevenson of
+1675; probably a tenant farmer, who was contemporary with the Whig
+rising at Bothwell Bridge, with the murder of Archbishop Sharp, with
+Claverhouse, and Sir George Mackenzie, called "the bluidy Advocate." An
+earnest student of Mr. Wodrow's "History of the Sufferings," Louis did
+not find "James Stevenson in Nether Carsewell" among the many martyrs
+who live in the _Libre d'Or_ of the Remnant. But he had "a Covenanting
+childhood;" his father, Mr. Thomas Stevenson, was loyal to the positions
+of John Knox (the theological positions); and, brought up in these,
+Louis had a taste, when the tenets of Calvin ceased to convince his
+reason, of what non-Covenanters endured at the hands of the godly in
+their day of power.
+
+Every little Presbyterian, fifty years ago, was compelled to be familiar
+with the Genevan creed, as expressed in "The Shorter Catechism," but
+most little Presbyterians regarded that document as a necessary but
+unintelligible evil--the sorrow that haunted the Sabbath. I knew it by
+rote, Effectual Calling and all, but did not perceive that it possessed
+either meaning or actuality. Nobody was so unkind as to interpret the
+significance of the questions and answers; but somebody did interpret
+them for Stevenson, or his early genius enabled him to discover what it
+is all about, as he told me once, and it seems that the tendency of the
+theology is terribly depressing. A happier though more or less
+theological influence on his childhood he found in the adventures and
+sufferings of the Covenanters. It is curious (and shows how much early
+education can do) that he never was a little Royalist: always his heart,
+like Lockhart's, which is no less strange, was with the true blue
+Remnant. I can remember no proof that he was fascinated by the greatness
+of Montrose.
+
+As is well known, at about the age of sixteen he perverted a romance of
+his own making, "Hackston of Rathillet" (a fanatic of Fife), into a
+treatise: "The Pentland Rising, a Page of History," published in 1866.
+One would rather have possessed the romance.
+
+Stevenson came from the Balfours of Pilrig, and was of gentle blood, on
+the spindle side. An ancestress of his mother was a granddaughter of Sir
+Gilbert Elliot (as a "law lord," or judge, Lord Minto), and so he could
+say: "I have shaken a spear in the debatable land, and shouted the
+slogan of the Elliots": perhaps "And wha dares meddle wi' me!" In "Weir
+of Hermiston" he returns to "the auld bauld Elliots" with zest. He was
+not, perhaps, aware that, through some remote ancestress on the spindle
+side, he "came of Harden's line," so that he and I had a common forebear
+with Sir Walter Scott, and were hundredth cousins of each other, if we
+reckon in the primitive manner by female descent. Of these Border
+ancestors, Louis inherited the courage; he was a fearless person, but
+one would not trace his genius to "The Bard of Rule," an Elliot named
+"Sweet Milk" who was slain in a duel by another minstrel, about 1627.
+
+Genius is untraceable; the granite intellect of Louis's great
+engineering forefathers, the Stevensons, was not, like his, tuneful:
+though his father was imaginative, diverting himself with daydreams; and
+his uncle, Alan Stevenson, the builder of Skerryvore, yielded to the
+fascinations of the religious Muse. A volume of verse was the pledge of
+this dalliance. His mother, who gave him her gay indifference to
+discomfort and readiness for travel, also read to him, in his childhood,
+much good literature; for not till he was eight years of age was he an
+unreluctant reader--which is strange. The whole record of his life, from
+his eighteenth month, is a chronicle of fever and ill-health, borne
+always with heroic fortitude. His dear nurse, Alison Cunningham, seems
+to have been a kind of festive Cameronian. Her recitation of hymns was,
+though she hated "the playhouse," "grand and dramatic." There is a hymn,
+"Jehovah Tsidkenu," in which he rejoiced; and no wonder, for the refrain
+"Jehovah Tsidkenu was nothing to me," moves with the galloping
+hoof-beats of
+
+    "'Tis up wi' the bonnets o' Bonny Dundee!"
+
+I have, however, ascertained that this theological piece is not sung to
+the tune, "The cavalry canter of Bonny Dundee." When the experiment is
+made, the results are unspeakably strange.
+
+It need not be said, Stevenson has told us in verse and prose, that in
+childhood "his whole vocation was endless imitation." He was the hunter
+and the pirate and the king--throwing his fancy very seriously into each
+of his _rôles_, though visualizing never passed with him, as with some
+children it does, into actual hallucination. He had none of the
+invisible playmates that, to some children, are visible and real. He was
+less successful than Shelley in seeing apparitions: but the dreams which
+he communicated to Mr. Frederic Myers were curious illustrations of his
+subconscious activities--his Brownies, as he called them. They told him
+stories of which he could not foresee the end; one led up to a love
+affair forbidden even by exogamous law (with male descent and the
+sub-class system), and thus a fine plot was ruined.
+
+Throughout life, he always played his part, as in childhood, with full
+conscious and picturesque effect, as did the great Montrose and the
+English Admirals, in whom he notes this dramatic trait. He was not a
+_poseur_; he was merely sensitively conscious of himself and of life as
+an art. As a little boy with curls and a velvet tunic, he read
+"Ministering Children," and yearned to be a ministering child. An
+opportunity seemed to present itself; the class of boys called "keelies"
+by the more comfortable boys in Edinburgh, used to play in the street
+under the windows of his father's house. One lame boy, a baker's son,
+could only look on. Here was a chance to minister! Louis, with a beating
+heart, walked out on his angelic mission.
+
+"Little boy, would you like to play with me?" he asked.
+
+"You go to ----!" was the answer of the independent son of the hardy
+baker.
+
+It is difficult to pass from the enchanted childhood of this eternal
+child, with its imaginative playing at everything, broken only by fevers
+whereof the dreams were the nightmares of unconscious genius. He has
+told of all this as only he could tell it.
+
+As a boy, despite his interrupted education, he laid the foundations of
+a knowledge of French and German, acquired Latin, and was not like that
+other boy who, _Euclide viso, cohorruit et evasit._ He was a
+mathematician! He never played cricket, I deeply regret to say, and his
+early love of football deserted him. He was no golfer, and a good day's
+trout-fishing, during which he neglected to kill each trout as it was
+taken, caused remorse, and made him abandon the contemplative boy's
+recreation. Boating, riding, and walking were his exercises. He read the
+good books that never lose their charm--Scott, Dumas, Shakespeare, "The
+Arabian Nights"; when very young he was delighted with "The Book of
+Snobs"; he also read Mayne Reid and "Ballantyne the Brave," and any
+story that contained _Skeltica_, cloaks, swords, wigs on the green,
+pirates and great adventures. He lived in literature, for Romance.
+
+His doings at Edinburgh University, and as a budding engineer, he has
+chronicled; he took part in snowball rows, in the debates of the
+Speculative Society, and in private dramatic performances, organized by
+his senior and friend, Professor Fleeming Jenkin. To "dress up" in old
+costumes always pleased him. He happened to praise the acting of a girl
+of fourteen, who, in her family circle, said, "Perhaps when I am old,
+like the lady in Ronsard, I will say 'R. L. Stevenson sang of me.'" His
+gambols "with the wild Prince and Poins" are not unrecorded. These were
+his Fergussonian years. Perhaps he might have expressed Burns's esteem
+for the "class of men called black-guards," as far as their
+unconventionality is concerned. He saw a great deal of life in many
+varieties; like Scott in Liddesdale, "he was making himsel' a' the
+time." With his cousin R. A. M. Stevenson, Walter Ferrier, Mr. Charles
+Baxter, and Sir Walter Simpson (a good golfer and not a bad bat), he
+performed "acts of Libbelism," and discussed all things in the universe.
+He was wildly gay, and profoundly serious, he had the earnestness of the
+Covenanter in forming speculations more or less unorthodox. It is
+needless to dwell on the strain caused by his theological ideals and
+those of a loving but sternly Calvinistic sire, to whom his love was
+ever loyal.
+
+These things bred melancholy, of necessity, and melancholy was purged by
+an almost unexampled interest, not in literature alone, but in the
+technique of style, and the construction of sentences and periods. Few
+of his confessions are better known than those on his apprenticeship in
+style to the great authors of the past. He gave himself up to the
+schools of Hazlitt, Lamb, Wordsworth, Sir Thomas Browne, Defoe,
+Hawthorne, Montaigne, Baudelaire, William Morris, and Obermann (De
+Senancour).
+
+This he did when he was aged about eighteen, when other lads are trying
+to write Latin prose like Cicero, or Livy, or Tacitus (Tacitus is the
+easiest to ape, in a way), and Latin verse like Ovid, or Horace, or
+Virgil. This they do because it is "part of the curricoolum," as the
+Scottish baronet said, of school and college. But I do not remember
+anecdotes of other boys with a genius for English prose who set
+themselves to acquire style before they deemed that they had anything in
+particular to say.
+
+In English essays at college a young fellow may be told by his tutor not
+to imitate Carlyle or Macaulay: the attempt to repeat the tones of
+Thackeray is most incident to youth. But to aim, like Stevenson while a
+student of Edinburgh University, at "the choice of the essential note
+and the right word," in exercises written for his own improvement, is a
+thing so original that it keeps me wondering. Like most of us, I have
+always thought, with Mr. Froude, when asked how he acquired his style,
+that a man sits down and says what he has to say, and there is an end of
+it. We must not write like Clarendon now, even if we could; our
+sentences must be brief. It would be affectation to write like Sir
+Thomas Browne, if we could; or like de Quincey; and nobody can write
+like Mr. Ruskin, when he is simple, or like the late Master of Balliol,
+Mr. Jowett.
+
+How far and how early Stevenson succeeded in the pursuit of style may be
+seen in his "Juvenilia": for example, in the essay on the Old Gardener.
+But one is inclined to think that he succeeded because he had a very
+keen natural perception of all things, was a most minute observer, knew
+what told in the matter of words, in fact, had a genius of his own; and
+that these graces came to him, though he says that they did not, by
+nature. He tells us how often he wrote and rewrote some of his
+chapters, some of his books. His _prima cura_ we have not seen; perhaps
+it was as good as his most polished copy. "Prince Otto" has even seemed
+to me, in places, over-written. He now and then ran near the rock of
+preciosity, though he very seldom piled up his barque on that reef. His
+style is, to the right reader, a perpetual feast, "a dreiping roast,"
+and his style cannot be parodied. I never saw a parody that came within
+a league of the jest it aimed at, save one burlesque of the deliberately
+stilted manner of his "New Arabian Nights." This triumph was achieved by
+Mr. Walter Pollock.
+
+Stevenson's manner was too appropriate to his matter for parody: for
+nobody could reproduce his matter and the vividness of his
+visualization. When his characters were Scots, Lowlanders or
+Highlanders, it seems to me that their style has no rival except in the
+talk of Sir Walter's countrymen. A minute student who knew Stevenson,
+has told me that he once suggested "chafts," where Louis had written
+"cheeks" or "jaws," and that the emendation was accepted, but his Scots
+always use "the right word," and never (in prose) say "tae" for "to," I
+think. Theirs is the good Scots.
+
+Perhaps I am biased in my doubt concerning the usefulness of his
+persistence in re-writing, by my regret that he destroyed so many of his
+romances, as not worthy of him. "King's chaff is better than other
+folk's corn" says our proverb. In his day, I bored him by pressing him
+to write more, and more rapidly; he never could have been commonplace,
+he never could have been less than excellent. But his conscience was
+adamant: no man was less of an improviser, as, fortunately, Scott was;
+had he _not_ been, there would not be so many Waverley Novels.
+
+Stevenson was hard on Scott, who wrote much as he himself did in
+boyhood. "I forgot to say," remarks the early Stevensonian hero, after
+describing a day full of adventures with Red Indians, "that I had made
+love to a beautiful girl." There is a faint resemblance to this
+over-sight in a long sentence of "Guy Mannering," which Stevenson
+criticized; but "Guy Mannering" was written in about six weeks, "to
+refresh the machine." Fastidious himself, conscientious almost to a
+fault in style, Stevenson's joy was in the romances of Xavier de
+Montépin and Fortuné du Boisgobey, names which suggest
+
+    "Old crusading knights austere,
+    That bore King Louis company."
+
+When Dumas and Scott, and perhaps Mrs. Radcliffe, had been read too
+recently, Louis went to Fortuné and Xavier, and, doubtless, to the
+father of them, Gaboriau. None of these benefactors of the race was a
+student of style, but they gave him what Thackeray liked, stories "hot,
+_with_," as he says, briefly but adequately.
+
+All of us are led, like that ancient people Israel, like all humanity,
+by a way we know not, and a path we do not understand. If some
+benevolent genie, who understood Stevenson's qualities and genius, could
+have directed his career, how would that spirit have educated him?
+
+For some reason not intelligible he was put on an allowance of five
+shillings weekly, for his _menus plaisirs_, till he was twenty-three
+years of age. He never was an expensive man (except in giving, wherein
+he knew no stint); his favourite velvet coats, his yellow shoes, his
+black shirts, with a necktie of a scrap of carpet, he said (I failed to
+guess its nature), were not extravagant. (The last occasion on which I
+saw him in the legendary velvet coat was also the only moment in which I
+viewed the author of his being. The circumstances were of the wildest
+comedy, but the tale can never be told; though in all respects it
+redounds to the credit of everybody concerned. Not one of us let a laugh
+out of himself.)
+
+But a young man in his position likes to do many harmless things which
+cannot be done on five shillings a week, and so he sought the haunts of
+"thieves and chimney sweeps!" he says, and wrote sonnets in those shy
+retreats, which are known, perhaps, in Scotland, as "shebeens." Why
+"shebeens"? Is the word Gaelic misspelled? Cases of "shebeening" are
+tried before the Edinburgh magistrates, and as "my circle was being
+continually changed by the action of the police magistrates" (he says)
+conceivably his was a shebeening circle.
+
+Another lad of his age, some eighty years earlier, was partial, like
+him, to taverns and old clothes. "They be good enough for drinking in,"
+said Walter Scott, when Erskine, or some other friend, ventured to
+remonstrate. Scott, like Stevenson, knew queer people, knew beggars--but
+had not one of them shaken hands with Prince Charles? Certainly, after
+Scott met Green Mantle, and sheltered her, as she came from church,
+under his umbrella (a piece of furniture which Stevenson can never have
+possessed), he left off his old clothes, and went into the best company.
+But R. L. S. did not delight in the good company of his native town; nor
+did he suffer gladly the conventional raiment of the evening hours.
+Green Mantle there was none, as far as we learn. He was not popular with
+the young Scots of his age, his biographer says so candidly; candidly
+have they said as much to me, yet they were good fellows.
+
+From childhood he had enjoyed all the indulgences of an only son, and an
+invalid; now he was "brought up short," and there were the religious
+disputes with a sire to whom he was devoted. The climate of his own
+romantic town (the worst in the world) was his foe; the wandering spirit
+in his blood called him to the south and the sun; he tells of months in
+which he had no mortal to whom he could speak freely, his cousin Bob
+being absent; he was unhappy; he was out of his _milieu_.
+
+What would the genie have done for him? Neither of the English
+Universities would have been to his taste; the rebel in him would have
+kicked at morning chapel, lectures, cap and gown, Proctors, the talk of
+"oars" and "bats"; manifestly Balliol was not the place for R. L. S.,
+though he might have been happy with his contemporary John Churton
+Collins. He, I remember--even to the velvet coat--was like Stevenson,
+and was a rebel. Grant Allen, too, would have been his contemporary--the
+only man in Oxford who took to Herbert Spencer, whom Stevenson also read
+with much edification.
+
+Yet it is clear that Stevenson should not have been domiciled in the
+paternal mansion of Heriot Row. The genie might have transported him to
+a German University, perhaps to Heidelberg.
+
+_Dis aliter visum_, and the result, for us, is his matchless book on
+Edinburgh. To see a copy thereof is to take it up, and read through it
+again; it is better at every reading.
+
+In 1871 he broke to his father the news that the profession of
+engineering was not for him. The Scottish Bar (1874-1875) was not more
+attractive, and in 1873 his meeting with Mr. (now Sir) Sidney Colvin
+(then Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge, and already well known
+as a critic), and with a lady, Mrs. Sitwell, to whom many of his most
+carefully written early letters are addressed, probably sealed Stevenson
+into the profession of literature.
+
+He has left this note on his prospects:
+
+     I think now, this 5th or 6th of April, 1873, that I can see my
+     future life. I think it will run stiller and stiller year by year; a
+     very quiet, desultorily studious existence. If God only gives me
+     tolerable health, I think now I shall be very happy; work and
+     science calm the mind and stop gnawing in the brain; and as I am
+     glad to say that I do now recognise that I shall never be a great
+     man, I may set myself peacefully on a smaller journey; not without
+     hope of coming to the inn before nightfall.
+
+
+                   O dass mein Leben
+        Nach diesem Ziel ein ewig Wandeln sey!
+
+              DESIDERATA
+
+          I. Good Health
+         II. 2 to 3 hundred a year
+        III. O du lieber Gott, _friends_!
+                  AMEN
+
+                     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+
+He wrote an article, this born wayfarer, on "Roads," which was accepted
+by P. G. Hamerton for the "Portfolio," but in November, 1873, "nervous
+exhaustion, with a threatening of phthisis," caused him to be "Ordered
+South" to Mentone--a lonely exile. Here he was joined by Mr. Colvin, and
+in Mr. Colvin's rooms, for I also was "ordered South," I first met this
+surprising figure. Our schooldays had just overlapped; he was a "gyte"
+(a child in the lowest form; "class" we called it), when I was in the
+highest, but I had never seen him, nor heard of him.
+
+In some rhymes of his later years, when Count Nerli was painting his
+portrait, Louis wrote:
+
+    "Oh, will he paint me the way I like, and as bonny as a girlie,
+    Or will he make me an ugly tyke; and be d---- to Mr. Nerli?"
+
+When first we met, he really was "as bonny as a girlie"; with his oval
+face, his flushed cheeks, his brown eyes, large and radiant, and his
+hair of a length more romantic than conventional. He wore a wide blue
+cloak, with a grace which hovered between that of an Italian poet and an
+early pirate.
+
+It was impossible not to discover, in a short conversation, that he was
+very clever, but, as a girl said once of her first meeting with another
+girl, "We looked at each other with horny eyes of disapproval." I
+thought that he was affecting the poet, and in me he found a donnish
+affectation of the British sportsman. He said later that I complained,
+concerning Monsieur Paul de St. Victor, that he was "no sportsman,"
+though his style was effulgent.
+
+We seldom met again, unhappily, for I was then with a family in whose
+company he would have been happy: all young, all kind, simple, and
+beautiful, and all doomed. Stevenson was then seriously ill, certainly a
+short walk fatigued him.
+
+The next news I had of him was in his essay, "Ordered South," concerning
+the emotions, apathies, and pleasures, on that then fairy coast, of a
+young man who thinks that his days are numbered. After reading this
+paper, I was absolutely convinced that, among the writers of our
+generation, Stevenson was first, like Eclipse, and the rest nowhere.
+There was nobody to be spoken of in his company as a writer. It was not
+his style alone--Pater's style had bewitched me in his first book--but
+it was the life that underlay the style of Stevenson.
+
+He came home, and found peace at home, and a less inadequate allowance,
+and he put up a brazen plate, "R. L. Stevenson, Advocate," on the door in
+Heriot Row. But his practice was a jest. Some senior men sought his
+society, his old friends were with him; his articles were welcomed by
+Mr. Leslie Stephen in "The Cornhill Magazine," and were eagerly expected
+by a few. Directed by Mr. Stephen, he found Mr. Henley in the Edinburgh
+Infirmary, and that friendship began which was of such considerable
+influence in his life and work.
+
+Mr. Henley's "maimed strength," his impeded vigour, even his blond
+upstanding hair and "beard all tangled," his uncomplaining fortitude
+under the most cruel trials, and the candid freshness of his
+conversation on men and books, won Stevenson's heart.
+
+In London, Stevenson appeared now and again at the Savile Club, then
+tenanting a rather gloomy little house in Savile Row. The members were
+mostly connected with science, literature, journalism, and the stage,
+and Stevenson became intimate with many of them, especially with the
+staff and the sub-editor (in those days) of "The Saturday Review," Mr.
+Walter Pollock; and with Mr. Saintsbury, Mr. Traill, Mr. Charles
+Brookfield, Sir Walter Besant; a little later with Mr. Edmund Gosse, who
+was by much his favourite in this little society. In addition to the
+chaff of the "Saturday" reviewers, he enjoyed the talk of Prof.
+Robertson Smith, Prof. W. H. Clifford, and Prof. Fleeming Jenkin.
+
+Stevenson never wrote, to my knowledge, in "The Saturday Review";
+journalism never "set his genius." For one reason among many, his manner
+was by far too personal in those days of unsigned contributions. He
+needed money, he wished to be financially independent, but, in the
+Press, his independence could not be all that he desired. He did not
+wield the ready, punctual pen of him whom Lockhart most invidiously
+calls "the bronzed and mother-naked gentleman of the Press."
+
+His conversation at luncheon, and after luncheon, in the Club was the
+delight of all, but, for various reasons, I was seldom present. I do
+remember an afternoon when I had him all to myself, but that was later.
+He poured out stories of his American wanderings, including a tale of a
+murderous lonely inn, kept by Scots, whose genius tended to
+assassination. He knew nothing of their exploits at home, but, then or
+afterwards, I heard of them from a boatman on Loch Awe. Their mother was
+a witch!
+
+At this period Stevenson was much in Paris, and alone, or with his
+cousin Bob dwelt at Barbizon and other forest haunts of painters. The
+chronicle of these merry days is written in the early chapters of "The
+Wrecker."
+
+In literature he was "finding himself," in his Essays, but the world did
+not find him easily or early.
+
+History much attracted him, as it did Thackeray, who said, "I like
+history, it is so gentlemanly." But it can only be written by gentlemen
+of independent means. Stevenson's favourite period was that of the
+France of the fifteenth century, and he studied later some aspects of
+that time in essays on Charles d'Orleans, in his admirable picture of
+Villon as a man and poet, and especially in "A Lodging for the Night,"
+and "The Sieur de Malétroit's Door," shut on a windy night in the month
+after the Maid failed at Paris (September, 1429).
+
+These unexcelled short stories really revealed Stevenson as the
+narrator, his path lay clear before him. But even his friends were then
+divided in opinion; some preferring his essays, and his two books of
+sentimental travel, "An Inland Voyage" (1878) and "Travels with a
+Donkey" (1879). These were, indeed, admirable in style, humour,
+description, and incident, but the creative imagination in the stories
+of Villon's night and of the Sieur de Malétroit's door, the painting of
+character, the romance, the vividness, were worth many such volumes.
+They were well received by the Press, these sketches of travel, but, as
+Monsieur Got says in his "Journal" (1857), "Les succès des délicats
+sont, même quand ils s'établissent, trop lents à s'établir. La foule
+s'est tellement démocratisée qu'il n'a pas de salut si l'on ne frappe
+brutalement." The needful brutality was not employed till Stevenson
+"knocked them" with "Jekyll and Hyde."
+
+"The world is so full of a number of things," that a few essays, two or
+three short stories in a magazine, a little book of sketches in prose,
+may be masterpieces in their three several ways, but they escape the
+notice of all but a few amateurs. Mr. Kipling's knock was much more
+insistent; he could not be unheard. It was not by essays on Burns and
+Knox, however independently done, that Stevenson could make his mark.
+
+Concerning these heroes, Scotland has a vision of her own, and no man
+must undo it; no man must tell, about Knox, facts ignored by Professors
+of Church History. Indeed, to study Knox afresh demands research for
+which Stevenson had not the opportunity. The Covenanting side of his
+nature appeared in his study of the moral aspect of Burns; his feet of
+clay. It is agreed that we must veil the feet of clay. As Lockhart says,
+Scott infuriated Mr. Alexander Peterkin by remarking that Burns "was not
+chivalrous." Stevenson went further, and annoyed the Peterkins of his
+day. His task required courage: it was not found wanting.
+
+In 1877, Stevenson had a new, if very narrow, opening. A friend of his
+at Edinburgh University, a young Mr. Caldwell Brown (so Stevenson named
+him to me; his real name seems to have been Glasgow Brown), came to the
+great metropolis to found a Conservative weekly journal. "London" was
+its name, but Edinburgh was its nature, and base, if a base it had. The
+editor was "in the air"; he knew nothing of his business and its
+difficulties; nothing of what the Conservative public, with sixpences to
+spend, was likely to want. He approached some of Stevenson's friends,
+and he gave the Conservative party scores of lively _ballades,
+villanelles_, and _rondeaux_. They were brilliant. Stevenson would not
+tell me the author's name; he proved to be Mr. Henley, who came to town,
+and, on the death of Mr. Brown, edited this unread periodical. There
+were "Society" notes, although Mr. Henley's haunts were not those of
+that kind of society, and one occasional contributor ventured to
+remonstrate about the chatter on the "professional beauties" of that
+distant day.
+
+The "New Arabian Nights," with all their humour, and horror, all their
+intellectual high spirits, and reckless absurdity, were poured by
+Stevenson into this outcast flutterer of a Tory paper, to the great joy
+of some of the very irregular contributors. (It was an honest
+flutterer--its contributors received their wages.)
+
+Then "London" died, and then seriousness enough came into the life of
+our Arabian author. In August, 1879, he disappeared; he went to America
+to marry the lady whom he had first met at Fontainebleau, whom he wedded
+at San Francisco (1880), and loved with all his heart.
+
+Reconciled to his father, he returned to Scotland. His health had been
+anew impaired by troubles and privations, and the rest of his life in
+the Old World was occupied by a series of maladies, vain roamings in
+search of climate, and hard work constantly interrupted.
+
+From his early childhood onwards, an army of maladies surrounded him,
+invested him, cut him off if, in an hour of health, he ventured on any
+sally; but they never overcame his invincible resolution. He was, as one
+of his favourite old authors says about I forget what emperor, "an
+entertainer of fortune by the day," making the most of every sunny hour,
+and the best of every hour passed under the shadow of imminent death. I
+remember that, soon after his marriage, he was staying in London at the
+house of a friend. Going to see him, I noted in him a somewhat anxious
+look, and I did not wonder at it! Mr. Henley was seated in a great
+chair, the whole of his face, from the eyes downwards, muffled in a huge
+crimson silk pocket handkerchief, of which the point covered his aureate
+beard.
+
+The room was a large room, and as Louis flitted about it, _more suo_, he
+managed to tell me privily that Henley had a very bad cold, and that he
+himself caught every cold which came within a limited radius. He _did_
+catch that cold, I heard, and when once such an invader entered his
+system, nobody knew what the end of it might be. His lungs usually
+suffered; hemorrhage was frequent and often alarming. In one of these
+accesses, unable to speak, he wrote, "Do not be frightened. If this is
+the end it is an easy one."
+
+Many scraps written by him in circumstances like these used to exist;
+some of them, though brief, were rich in the simple eloquence of
+indignation.
+
+Almost no climate did him any good: in 1880-1881, he chiefly suffered at
+Davos, and in the tempests of September, in Braemar. At Davos he had few
+consolations except the society of Mr. J. A. Symonds (the Opalstein of
+his essay on "Talk and Talkers") and his family. He was still attached
+to the indigent Muse of History: meditating a "History of the
+Highlands," and another book on that much trampled topic, the Union of
+1707. When one thinks of the commercial statistics necessary to the
+student of the Union--to take that grim aspect of it alone--_enfin_, "I
+have been there, and would not go." In the nature of things the History
+of the Union would have become a romance, with that impudent,
+entertaining rogue, Ker of Kersland, and his bewildered Cameronians, for
+the heroes: with Hamilton the waverer, and the dark, sardonic Lockhart
+of Carnwath, and Daniel Defoe as the English looker-on. The study of
+Highland history led to the reading of the Trial of James of the Glens,
+and the vain hunt for Alan Breck, and so to "Kidnapped."
+
+Stevenson felt and described the exhilaration of Alpine mornings, but
+his style was as sensitive as his bronchial apparatus, and he declares
+that when he tried to write, the style suffered from "yeasty inflation,"
+while his nights were haunted by the nightmares of his childhood.
+
+The next change carried him to a cottage near Pitlochry, whence he wrote
+that he was engaged in the composition of "crawlers." The first and best
+of these, "Thrawn Janet," was (with his "Tod Lapraik" in "Kidnapped")
+the only pendant to Scott's "Wandering Willie's Tale," in the northern
+vernacular. The tale has a limited circle; no Southern can appreciate
+all its merits, the thing is so absolutely and essentially Scots;
+especially the atmosphere. He said that it was "true for a hill parish
+in Scotland in old days, not true for mankind and the world." So it is
+fortunate to be a native of a hill parish in Scotland!
+
+"The Merry Men," as "a fantasia or vision of the sea," is excellent; the
+poor negro never was, to myself, "convincing." However, knowing
+Stevenson's taste in art, I designed for him, in Skeltic taste, an
+illustration (coloured) of the negro pursuing the wicked uncle (in the
+philabeg) over the crests of Ben Mor, Mull.
+
+Descending from these heights, Stevenson, like every bookish Scot,
+"ettled at" a professorial chair--that of "History and Constitutional
+Law," in the University of Edinburgh.
+
+The election was in the winter, the legist and historian occupied the
+autumn in composing the first half of "Treasure Island" (originally "The
+Sea Cook").
+
+Everyone knows the story: how, playing with his stepson, Stevenson drew
+a map of an island--an island like a _dragon seyant_; considered the
+caves and hills and streams, and thought of the place as a haunt of
+these serviceable pirates, who always dumped down their hard-earned swag
+on distant and on deadly shores, which they carefully abstained from
+revisiting. The legends of Captain Kidd's _caches_ have long haunted the
+imagination; the idea of Hidden Treasure has its eternal charm, and the
+story thereof was told, once for all, by Poe. Soon after "Treasure
+Island" appeared there was a real treasure hunt. The deposit, so I was
+informed, was "put down by a Fin," and Mr. Rider Haggard and I were
+actually paying (at least Mr. Haggard sent me a cheque) for shares in
+this alluring enterprise, when I learned that the Fin (or Finn? a native
+of Finland), had looted the church plate of some Spanish cathedral in
+America. Knowing this, I returned his cheque to Mr. Haggard; happily,
+for the isle was the playroom of young earthquakes, which had upset the
+soil and the landmarks to such a degree that the gentleman adventurer
+returned--_bredouille_! I hope Stevenson had nothing on.
+
+In the Highland cottage, during the rain eternal, he amused himself with
+writing his story, as Shelley, Byron, Polidori, and Mary Godwin had
+diverted themselves in Swiss wet weather, with their ghost stories,
+"Frankenstein," and Byron's good opening of a romance of a vampire.
+
+Visitors came--Mr. Colvin, Mr. Gosse, and Dr. Japp--they liked the tale
+as chapter by chapter was read aloud, and it was offered to a penny
+periodical for boys. A much better market might easily have been found;
+indeed, Stevenson "wasted his mercies." He was paid like the humblest of
+unknown scribblers; not even illustrations were given to the obscure
+romance running in dim inner pages of the periodical, and it appears
+that, as Théophile Gautier's editor said about one of _his_ narratives,
+"the _abonné_ was bored with the style."
+
+It was an audacious thing for a man of Louis's health, and intermittent
+inspiration, to send in half the "copy," meaning to send the rest later
+from Davos. He might not be able, physically, to write--the inspiration
+might vanish--and there was John Addington Symonds, eager for him to
+write on the "Characters" of Theophrastus! He might as well have
+written, or better, on the "Characters" of Sir Thomas Overbury, which
+are rather less remote from the ken of the British public than those of
+the Greek.
+
+If any young man or woman, not in possession of independent means, reads
+these lines of mine, let him or her take warning, and deserting history,
+morals, the essay, biography, and shunning anthropology as they would
+kippered sturgeon or the devil, cleave only to fiction!
+
+Biography also allured Stevenson--his literary tastes were nearly his
+ruin; he wanted, at Davos, to write a "Life of Hazlitt," and at
+Bournemouth a biography of Arthur, Duke of Wellington. But time and
+strength were lacking; nor have we R. L. S.'s mature opinion of the
+strategy and tactics of the victor of Assaye. The Muse of piratical
+enterprise returned, and "Treasure Island" reached its haven, with no
+applause, in the paper for boys.
+
+In the following May, Messrs. Cassell proposed to publish "Treasure
+Island" in book form, being spirited up, I suppose, by Mr. Henley, who
+was editing for them "The Magazine of Art," in which Stevenson wrote two
+or three articles. (I remember that a letter of my own to "The Editor,"
+as Mr. Henley had proudly signed himself, came automatically into the
+hands of the General Editor, a clergyman, if I do not err, and that my
+observations on the Art of Savages, lighting on the wrong sort of
+ground, sprang up and nearly choked Mr. Henley.) Stevenson was already
+the victim of the Yankee pirate, whose industry, at least, made his
+name, though wrongly spelled, known to the community which later paid
+him so well for his work, and displayed for him an enthusiasm of
+affectionate admiration.
+
+In 1884 he worked at the often rewritten "Prince Otto," and did a
+pot-boiler--"The Black Arrow"--which pleased the boy public of the paper
+much better than "Treasure Island." His time, from January, 1883, to
+May, 1884, was passed at Hyères. In the end of November, "Treasure
+Island" was published in book form, and was warmly welcomed by the Press
+and by such friends of the author as retained, at least in letters, any
+smack of youth. It was forced, as far as "You must read it, please,"
+even on the friends of the friends, and so on in successive waves, yet
+it did not reach a wide circle: five or six thousand copies were sold in
+the first year. That is failure in the eyes of many of our novelists
+whose style does not bore the unfastidious _abonné_. Stevenson, in
+writing an article for a magazine on his "First Book," chose "Treasure
+Island," for books other than novels do not count as books. He spoke of
+terror as the motive and interest of the tale; the dread for each and
+all of a mutiny headed by his ruthless favourite, John Silver. Indeed,
+terror, whether caused by the eccentric furies of Mr. William Bones,
+mariner, or of the awful blind Pew with his tapping staff, runs through
+the volume as the dominant motive. But there is so much else: the many
+landscapes, so various and so vivid; the humour of the Doctor and the
+Squire, the variety of the seamen's characters; the Man of the Island,
+with his craving for a piece of cheese; above all, John Silver. He is
+terrible, this coldly cruel, crafty, and masterful Odysseus of the
+Pacific. His creator liked him, but I could have seen Silver withering
+on the wuddie at Execution Dock, or suspended from a yardarm, without
+shedding the tears of sensibility. "A pirate is rather a beast than
+otherwise," says a young critic in "The Human Boy," and I cannot get
+over Silver gloating on the prospect of torturing Trelawny. At all
+events, he is an original creation, and a miraculous portent in a boy's
+book.
+
+Fiercer attacks of illness in various forms drove Stevenson to
+Bournemouth; he was engaged, when he had the strength, on those plays
+(in collaboration with Mr. Henley) which prove that he had not the
+mysterious gift of writing for the stage. "I hope Mr. Henley wrote most
+of it," said a lady, as she left the theatre where she had seen "Deacon
+Brodie" played. Had Deacon Brodie been Archdeacon Brodie, there would
+have been more piquancy in the contrast of his "double life."
+
+This idea of the double life of each man had long haunted Stevenson. He
+told me once that he meant to write a story "about a fellow who was two
+fellows," which did not, when thus stated, seem a fortunate idea.
+However, happily, he continued to think of Hyde and Jekyll, yet knew not
+how to manage them. One night, after eating bread and jam freely, he had
+a nightmare; he saw Hyde, pursued, take refuge in a closet, swallow "the
+mixture as before"--the mysterious powder or potion--and change horribly
+into Jekyll.
+
+He set to work at once, and in three feverish days completed the first
+draft of his parable. In this the Hyde aspect was only Jekyll's
+unassuming disguise, adopted at hours when he wished to be a little gay.
+Stevenson burned his first draft, and rewrote the whole in three days.
+
+He knew, it seems, that the magical powder was an error. One sees how
+the thing could be managed otherwise, with a slight strain on the
+resources of psychical research. But in no way could the story have
+attained "the probable impossible," which Aristotle preferred to "the
+improbable possible."
+
+Stevenson sent the manuscript to my friend Mr. Charles Longman, who, in
+turn, sent it to me. I began to read it one night, in the security of a
+modest London drawing-room, and, naturally, it fascinated me from the
+first page. Then I came to a certain page, which produced such an
+emotion that I threw the manuscript on a chair, and scuttled
+apprehensively to the safety of bed. Later, a kinsman, who seldom read a
+book, told me that, living alone in a great Highland house, he had
+thrown down the printed book at the same passage, and made the same
+inglorious retreat. Anyone who knows the book, knows what the passage
+is.
+
+The story was produced in a paper-covered volume costing a shilling, and
+was little heeded till a reviewer in _The Times_ "caught this great
+stupid public by the ear," as Thackeray said.
+
+The clergy of all denominations did the rest. As they had preached on
+"Pamela," a hundred and forty years earlier, so they called the
+attention of their flocks to Hyde and to Jekyll. "Who are Hyde and
+Jekyll, my brethren? _You_ are Hyde and Jekyll. _I_ am Jekyll and Hyde;
+each of us is Jekyll, and, alas, _each of us is Hyde_!"
+
+Stevenson had long ago "found himself"; now he was found by the public.
+The names of his two rascally heroes (Dr. Jekyll is even less of a
+gentleman than Hyde) became proverbial.
+
+The gruesome parable occupied an interval in the making of what I
+suppose is his masterpiece--"Kidnapped." The story centres on the Appin
+Murder of 1751, about which he had made inquiries in the neighbourhood
+of Rannoch, where Alan Breck skulked after the shooting of Campbell of
+Glenure in the hanging wood south of Ballachulish. Stevenson could not
+learn who "the other man" was--the real murderer in the romance. I know,
+but respect the Celtic secret. The fatal gun was found, very many years
+after the deed, by an old woman, in a hollow tree, and it was _not_ the
+gun of James Stewart.
+
+(I have a friend whose great-great-grandfather was standing beside James
+of the Glens, watching the digging of potatoes. A horse was heard
+approaching at such a pace that James said, "Whoever the rider is, the
+horse is not his own." As he galloped past, the rider shouted: "Glenure
+is shot!" "Who did it I don't know, but I am the man that will hang for
+it," said James, too truly.)
+
+Of "Kidnapped," Stevenson said (as Thackeray said of Henry Esmond and
+Lady Castlewood, as Scott says of Dugald Dalgetty) that, in this book
+alone of his, "the characters took the bit in their teeth," at a certain
+point. "It was they who spoke, it was they who wrote the remainder of
+the story."
+
+They are spontaneous, they are living. Balfour, in the _scenario_ of the
+tale, was to have been kidnapped and carried to the American
+plantations. But he and Alan "went their ain gait." At the end, you can
+see the pen drop from the weary fingers; they left half-told the story
+of Alan, to be continued in "Catriona."
+
+A love of Jacobite times, and of Alan Breck's country, Lochaber,
+Glencoe, Mamore, may bias me; but in "Kidnapped" Stevenson appears to me
+to reach the height of his genius in designing character and landscape;
+in humour, dialogue, and creative power. As in his preceding stories,
+there is hardly the flutter of a petticoat, but the tale, like Prince
+Charles at Holyrood, can point to a Highland man of the sword, and say,
+"These are my beauties." I remember that Mr. Matthew Arnold admired the
+story greatly, and _he_ had no Jacobite or local bias.
+
+In May, 1887, Stevenson lost his father, and paid his last visit to his
+native country.
+
+It was during this period, in 1886 probably, that I, for the first time,
+saw Stevenson confined to bed in one of his frequent illnesses, and
+then, also, I saw him for the last time. So emaciated was he (we need
+not dwell on what seemed that "last face of Hippocrates"), that we could
+not believe there remained for him some crowded years of life and
+comparatively healthy and joy-bestowing energy. If the ocean was
+henceforth to roll between us, at least he said that we were always best
+friends when furthest apart; though, indeed, we were never so intimate
+as to be otherwise than friendly. It was never the man that I knew best;
+but the genius that I delighted in, "on this side idolatry." Always, in
+verse or in prose, in Scots or in English, he made one reader happy; by
+a kind of pre-established harmony of taste which might not have
+prevailed in the intercourse of every day's life.
+
+In August, 1887, Stevenson left England for ever, arriving at New York
+as a lion, hunted by reporters, whom, no doubt, he received with the
+majestic courtesy of his own Prince of Bohemia. Two versions of Jekyll
+and Hyde were being acted; all this was very unlike the calm
+indifference of his native land. It seems that in Jekyll, as "Terryfled"
+(in Scott's phrase), there is a "love interest"; love is alien to Dr.
+Jekyll, as to the shepherd before he found that Love was a dweller on
+the rocks. The Terryfication was, at least, an advertisement. To
+advertise himself, in the modern way, Stevenson was not competent. He
+never was interviewed as a Celebrity at Home, as far as I am aware.
+Indeed, he loved not society papers, and lit a bonfire and danced a
+dance around it in his garden, when some editor of a journal of that
+sort was committed to prison. His name is not mentioned, but Stevenson
+and I had against him a grudge of very old standing.
+
+Dollars in sufficient profusion were offered for his works, and in the
+Adirondack Hills, beside a frozen river in the starlit night, he dreamed
+of "a story of many years and countries, of the sea and the land,
+savagery and civilization." He thought of that old Indian marvel, the
+suspended life of the buried fakir, over whose grave the corn is sown
+and grown. He thought of an evil genius on whom this method should be
+tried in frozen Canadian earth. Thus, what seems like the far-fetched
+idea of a wearied fancy in "The Master of Ballantrae" was, from the
+first, of the essence of that bitter romance. The new conception fitted
+in with a tale, already dreamed of on the Perthshire moors, about the
+dark adventurous years of the Jacobite eclipse. The Prince was hidden in
+a convent of Paris, or flashing for a moment in the Mall, or cruising, a
+dingy bearded wanderer, in Germany or the Netherlands; while his
+followers were serving under French colours, under Montcalm or
+Lally-Tolendal. Men who had charged side by side at Gledsmuir and
+Culloden, might meet as foes in Canada or Hindostan. There is matter
+enough, in 1750-1765, for scores of romances, but who now can write
+them? But the Master did not now begin his deeds of bale. Stevenson's
+stepson, Mr. Osbourne, then very young, himself wrote "The Finsbury
+Tontine; or The Game of Bluff," and I was informed at the time by
+Stevenson's devoted admirer, Mr. McClure, that the book was completed by
+Mr. Osbourne for the Press. Then Stevenson took up the manuscript, and,
+as Mr. Osbourne says, "forced the thing to live as it had never lived
+before." Indeed, the style of "The Wrong Box" throughout, is Louis's
+style in such romantic farces as "The New Arabian Nights," a manner of
+his own creation.
+
+I seem to remember that I saw the finished manuscript, or perhaps an
+early copy of the book, and I did not care for it. Mr. Kipling rather
+surprised me by finding it so very amusing. Mr. Osbourne says that the
+story "still retains (it seems to me) a sense of failure," and that the
+public does not relish it. For my own part, on later re-readings, the
+little farce has made me laugh hysterically at the sorrows of Mr.
+William Pitman, that mild drawing-master, caught up and whirled away
+into adventures worthy of the great Fortuné du Boisgobey. The scene in
+which he is described as the American Broadwood, a person inured to a
+simple patriarchal life, a being of violent passions; with the immortal
+John in the character of the Great Vance; and that joy for ever, Uncle
+Joseph, with his deathless thirst for popular information and
+instruction--these personages, this "educated insolence," never cease to
+amuse. Uncle Joseph is no caricature. But the world likes its
+sensational novels to be written with becoming seriousness; in short,
+"The Wrong Box" is aimed at a small but devoted circle of admirers.
+
+People constantly ask men who have collaborated how they do the
+business? As a rule, so some French collaborator says, "some one is the
+dupe, and he is the man of genius." This was not true, too notably, in
+the case of Alexandre Dumas, nor was it true in Stevenson's case. As a
+rule, one man does the work, and the other looks on, but, again, this
+was not the way in which Stevenson and Mr. Osbourne worked. They first
+talked over the book together, and ideas were struck out in the
+encounter of minds. This practice may, very probably, prove unfruitful,
+or even injurious, to many writers; they are confused rather than
+assisted. After or during the course of the conversations (when he had
+an ally), after reflection, when he had not, Stevenson used to write out
+a series of chapter headings. One, I remember, was "The Master of
+Ballantrae to the Rescue," an incident in a tale which he began about
+the obscure adventures of Prince Charles in 1749-1750. "Ballantrae to
+the Rescue"--the sound was promising, but I do not know who was to be
+obliged by the Master.
+
+After the list of chapters was completed, Mr. Osbourne used to write the
+first draft, "to break the ground," and then each wrote and rewrote, an
+indefinite number of times. The style, the general effect produced, are
+the style and the effect of Stevenson. "He liked the comradeship." More
+care was taken than on a novel of which I and another were greatly
+guilty. My partner represented Mr. Nicholas Wogan as rubbing his hands
+after a bullet at Fontenoy (as history and I made quite clear) had
+deprived Mr. Wogan of one of his arms. There is no such error in the
+"Iliad," despite the unnumbered multitude of collaborators detected by
+the Higher Criticism.
+
+In June, 1888, Stevenson sailed out on the Pacific in search of health,
+and followed the shining shadow through the isles and seas till he made
+his last home at Samoa. It was a three years' cruise among "summer isles
+of Eden." Perhaps no book of Stevenson's is less popular than his
+narrative of storm and calm, of beachcombers and brown Polynesian
+princes. The scenery is too exotic for the general taste. The joy and
+sorrow of Stevenson was to find a society "in much the same
+convulsionary and transitional state" as the Highlands and Islands after
+1745. He was always haunted, and in popularity retarded, by History. He
+wanted to know about details of savage custom and of superstitious
+belief, a taste very far from being universal even in the most highly
+cultivated circles, where Folklore is a name of fear. He found among the
+natives such fatal Polynesian fairy ladies as they of Glenfinlas, on
+whom Scott wrote the ballad. He found a medicine-man who hypnotized him
+from behind his back, which nobody at home had been able to do before
+his face. He exchanged stories with the clansmen--Scots for Polynesian;
+they were much the same in character and incident. He had found, in
+Polynesia, the way out of our own present. He met a Polynesian Queen--a
+Mary Stuart or a Helen of Troy grown old. "She had been passed from
+chief to chief; she had been fought for and taken in war"; a "Queen of
+Cannibals, tattooed from head to foot." Now she had reached the Elysian
+plain and a windless age, living in religion, as it were: "she passes
+all her days with the sisters."
+
+She was not a white woman: none of these people, so courteous and kind,
+were white, were up-to-date. In London and New York amateurs did not
+want to be told about them in Stevenson's "Letters from the South
+Seas." Stevenson "collected songs and legends": fortunately he also
+worked at "The Master of Ballantrae," in spite of frequent illnesses,
+and many perils of the sea. "The Master of Ballantrae" was finished at
+Honolulu; the closing chapters are the work of a weary pen.
+
+He had made tryst with an evil genius that was essential to the
+conception of the book, and with a hideous tale of fraternal hatred,
+told by a constitutional coward. Everything is under the shadow of
+thunder and lit by lightning. A glimpse of Allan Breck, and the
+babblings of the Chevalier Bourke, are the only relief. But the life is
+as clearly seen as life in Stevenson's books always is, for example when
+the guinea is thrown through the stained window pane, or the old
+serving-man holds the candle to light the duel of brothers who are born
+foes; or as in the final scenes of desperate wanderings in the company
+of murderers through Canadian snows. But the book, as Sir Henry Yule
+said, is "as grim as the road to Lucknow"--as it was intended to be.
+
+A fresh cruise, in the following year, bettered his health, and brought
+him the anecdote of a mystery of the sea which was the germ of "The
+Wrecker." He saw Samoa, and bought land there--Vailima--the last and
+best of his resting-places; and here he was joined, in 1891, by his
+intrepid mother. He was now a lord of land, a householder in his
+unpretentious Abbotsford, and "a great chief" among the natives,
+distracted as they were by a king _de facto_, and a king over the water,
+with the sonorous names of Malietoa and Mataafa. Samoan politics, the
+strifes of Germany, England, and the States, were labyrinthine: their
+chronicle is written in his "Footnote to History." My conjectures as to
+the romantic side of his dealings with the rightful king are vague and
+need not be recorded. "You can be in a new conspiracy every day," said
+an Irishman with zest, but conspiracies are better things in fiction
+than in real life; and Stevenson had no personal ambitions, and, withal,
+as much common sense as Shelley displayed in certain late events of his
+life. He turned to the half-finished "Wrecker" and completed it.
+
+When the story began to appear in "Scribner's Magazine" it seemed full
+of vivacity and promise. The opening scenes in the Pacific were like
+Paradise, as the author said, to dwellers in Brixton, or other purlieus
+of London. The financial school at which Loudon Dodd was educated in
+Stock Exchange flutters was rather less convincing than any dream of
+Paradise, but none the less amusing. At home in Edinburgh, with the old
+Scottish master of jerry-building and of "plinths," the atmosphere was
+truly Scots, tea-coseys and all, while the reminiscences of Paris and
+Fontainebleau, and the _grandeurs et misères_ of "the young
+Americo-Parisienne sculptor" were perfectly fresh to the world, though
+some of the anecdotes were known to Stevenson's intimates. Mr. James
+Pinkerton is a laudable creation, with his loyalty, his innocence, his
+total ignorance and complete lack of taste, and his scampers too near
+the wind of commercial probity. The spirit of hustle incarnate in a man
+otherwise so innocent, the ideals caught from heaven knows what American
+works for the young, and the inspired patriotism, the blundering
+enthusiastic affection, make the early Pinkerton a study as original as
+it is entertaining.
+
+The sale by auction of the wreck, which, by arrangement, is to be
+Pinkerton's prey, the mysterious opposition of the other bidder, so
+determined to win an object apparently so worthless, is no less
+thrilling than the sale of the fur coat in Boisgobey's "Crime de
+l'Opéra." But the reader knows why the fur coat is so much desired,
+whereas I remember being driven so wild by curiosity about the value of
+the wreck that I wrote to Louis, desiring to learn the secret. He would
+not divulge it, and when, after the voyage to the island and the
+excitement of knocking the wreck to pieces were over--when the secret
+came out, it was neither pleasant nor probable. That a mild British
+amateur of water-colour drawing should have taken part in a massacre of
+men, shot painfully with cheap revolvers, was an example of "the
+possible improbable," and much more of a tax on belief than the
+transformation of Dr. Jekyll. When I mildly urged this criticism, I
+learned, by return of post, from a correspondent usually as dilatory as
+Wordsworth, that I was a stay-at-home person ignorant of the world, and
+of life as it is lived by full-blooded men on the high seas. That was
+very true, but the amateur in water-colour was also a mild kind of good
+being. "What would I have done with the crew who were such compromising
+witnesses, and were butchered?" I would have marooned them.
+
+"The Beach of Falesá" is a revelation of unfamiliar life and character,
+and one is attached to the little brown heroine. There was to have been
+"a supernatural element," better, probably, than the device of the
+Æolian harps hung in the thicket. "I have got the smell and the look of
+the thing a good deal," he said, and he had got the style of his rough
+English narrator, who was, as he told the missionary, "what you call a
+sinner, what I call a sweep," but repented in time.
+
+A period of many projects followed; one, "The Young Chevalier," had a
+germ in "The Letter of Henry Goring" (1749-1750), with which I brought
+him acquainted, not knowing then that it was merely a romance by the
+prolific Eliza Heywood. It was in this tale that the Master of
+Ballantrae was to come to the rescue, and I think that a Scottish
+assassin (who lurks obscure in real history) and Mandrin, the famed
+French robber, were to appear, but only a chapter is published among
+other fragments. As it stands, Prince Charles's eyes are alternately
+blue and brown; brown was their actual colour--they were like
+Stevenson's own.
+
+Fortunately, the "Chevalier" was deserted for the continuation of
+"Kidnapped," a sequel which is as good as, or, thanks to the two
+heroines, Catriona and Barbara Grant, is even better than, the original.
+To think of it is to wish to take it from the shelf and read it again.
+It is all excellent, from the scenes where Alan is hiding under a
+haystack (suggested by an adventure of the Chevalier Johnstone after
+Culloden), and the first meeting with that good daughter of Clan Alpine
+and of James Mor, onwards.
+
+Stevenson excited a good deal of odium among fiery Celts by his
+scoundrel Master of Lovat. There is no reason, as far as I am aware, to
+suppose that Simon was a scoundrel, but, as a figure in fiction, he is
+very firmly drawn. The abortive duel of Balfour with the Highland
+Ensign, who conceives high esteem of "Palfour," is in the author's best
+manner, as are the days of prison in that "unco place, the Bass," and he
+was justly proud of the wizard tale of Tod Lapraik. The bristling
+demeanour of Alan Breck and James Mor (a very gallant but distinctly
+unfortunate son of Rob Roy), seems a correct picture. Indeed, James Mor
+was correctly divined, probably from letters of his published in Scott's
+"Rob Roy." It does not appear that Stevenson ever saw a number of
+James's letters in the character of a spy (a spy who appears to be
+carefully bamboozling his employers), which exist in the Newcastle MSS.
+in the British Museum. But the James of these letters is the James of
+"Catriona." The scenes with the advocates of James of the Glens, at
+Inveraray, read as if they had been recorded in shorthand, at the
+moment. David himself is, of course, the Lowland prig he is meant to be,
+but Catriona, at last, was a moving heroine, though Stevenson, justly,
+preferred to her the beautiful Miss Grant, and entirely overcame the
+difficulty of making us realise her beauty. The Princess, in "Prince
+Otto," is a fair shadow, compared to Miss Grant, and Stevenson at last
+convinced most readers that if he had omitted the interest of womanhood,
+it was not from incompetence--though it may have been from diffidence.
+
+At this time we used to receive letters from him not infrequently; he
+sent me the "Luck of Apemama," which he sacrilegiously purchased from
+its holder. This fetish, the palladium of the island, was in one point
+remarkable--a very ordinary shell in a perfectly new box of native make.
+Why it was thought "great medicine" and ignorantly worshipped, the
+pale-face student of magic and religion could not understand. However,
+it was the Luck of the island, and when it crossed the sea to Europe a
+pestilence of measles fell on the native population. There was no
+manifest connection of cause and effect.
+
+Stevenson's letters to me were merely such notes as he might have
+written had we both been living within the four-mile radius; usually
+notes about books which he needed, always brightened with a quip and
+some original application of slang. Occasionally there were rhymes. One
+was about a lady:
+
+    "Who beckled, beckled, beckled gaily."
+
+Another had the refrain:
+
+    "The dibs that take the islands
+    Are the dollars of Peru."
+
+One long and lively piece was on the Achaean hero of a fantastic romance
+by Mr. Rider Haggard and myself: the Ithacan, the Stormer of the City.
+Stevenson exclaimed:
+
+    "Ye wily auld blackguard,
+    How far ye hae staggered,
+    Frae Homer to Haggard
+    And Lang."
+
+How variously excellent he was as a letter-writer the readers of his
+correspondence know, and how vast, considering his labours and his
+health, that correspondence is! Often it is freakish, often it is
+serious, but except in some epistles of the period of his
+apprenticeship, it is never written as if he anticipated the publisher
+and the editor. Good examples are his letters to a reviewer, who,
+criticizing him without knowing him, wrote as if he were either an
+insensible athletic optimist, or a sufferer who was a _poseur_. "The
+fact is, consciously or not, you doubt my honesty.... _Any brave man may
+make out_ a life which shall be happy for himself, and, by so being,
+beneficent to those about him. And if he fail, why should I hear him
+weeping?" Why, indeed? Think of Mr. Carlyle! "Did I groan loud, or did I
+groan low, Wackford?" said Mr. Squeers. Mr. Carlyle groaned loud,
+sometimes with fair reason. Stevenson did not groan at all. If he
+posed, if his silence was a pose, it was heroic. But his intellectual
+high spirits were almost invincible. If he had a pen in his hand, the
+_follet_ of Molière rode it. Mr. Thomas Emmett, that famous Yorkshire
+cricketer, has spoken words of gold: "I was always happy as long as I
+was bowling." Stevenson, I think, was almost always happy when he was
+writing, when the instrument of his art was in his fingers.
+
+Consider the deliberate and self-conscious glumness; the willful making
+the worst of things (in themselves pretty bad, I admit), that mark the
+novels of eminent moderns who thrive on their inexpensive pessimism, and
+have a name as _Psychologues! Ohé, les Psychologues_! Does anyone
+suppose that Stevenson could not have dipped his pencil in squalor and
+gloom, and psychology, and "oppositions of science falsely so-called,"
+as St. Paul, in the spirit of prophecy, remarks? "Ugliness is only the
+prose of horror," he said. "It is when you are not able to write
+'Macbeth' that you write 'Thérèse Raquin' ... In any case, and under any
+fashion, the great man produces beauty, terror, and mirth, and the
+little man produces----" We know what he produces, and though his books
+may be praised as if the little man were a Sophocles up to date, he and
+his works are a weariness to think upon. In them is neither beauty,
+mirth, nor terror, except the terror of illimitable ennui.
+
+None the less, I believe that the little men of woe are happy; are
+enjoying themselves, while they are writing, while they are doing their
+best to make the public comfortably miserable. If these authors were as
+candid as Stevenson they would admit that they enjoy their "merry days
+of desolation," and that the world is not such a bad place for them,
+after all. But perhaps before this truth can be accepted and confessed
+by these eminent practitioners in pessimism, a gleam of humour must
+arise on their darkness--and that is past praying for. There is a burden
+of a Scots song which, perhaps, may have sung itself in the ear of
+Louis, when life was at its darkest:
+
+    _"And werena my heart licht I wad die!"_
+
+Having finished "Catriona," at about the age that Scott had when he
+wrote his first novel, "Waverley," Stevenson thought of "Weir of
+Hermiston," ("I thought of Mr. Pickwick," says Dickens with admirable
+simplicity), and fell to that work furiously, as was his wont when a
+great theme dawned on him. But soon, as usual, came the cold fit; his
+inspirations being intermittent for some untraced reason, physical or
+psychological. Possibly he foresaw the practical difficulty of his
+initial idea: that the Roman Father should sit on the bench of Scottish
+Themis and try his own son on a capital charge. This would not have been
+permitted to occur in Scotland, even when "the Fifteen" were first
+constituted into a Court. If humane emotions did not forbid, it must
+have been clear that no Scottish judge (they were not "kinless loons")
+would have permitted his son to be found guilty. Conceivably this
+damping circumstance occurred to Stevenson. He dropped, for a while, the
+hanging judge, and began "St. Ives" as a short story. It was now that,
+early in 1893, under an attack of hemorrhage, Stevenson dictated his
+tale to his stepdaughter, on his fingers, in the gesture alphabet of the
+dumb. Perhaps this feat is as marvelous as Scott's dictating "The Bride
+of Lammermoor," _in tormentis_, to Will Laidlaw.
+
+We see how his maladies hung on Stevenson's flank, even in Samoa, where
+his health had so remarkably improved, and permitted to him unwonted
+activities. After a visit to Sydney, he took up "The Ebb-Tide" in
+collaboration with Mr. Osbourne, whose draft of the first chapters he
+warmly applauded. It is not one of his central successes. His pencil was
+dipped in moral gloom, but even to the odious Cockney scoundrel, Huish,
+his Shakespearian tolerance accorded the virtue of indomitable courage.
+He could not help filling the book full with his abundant vitality and
+his keen observation of the islands and the beachcombers. The thing, to
+use an obsolete piece of slang, is _vécu_. There were other projects,
+many of them, which dawned rosily, and faded into the grey; and there
+was the rich and copious correspondence dated from Vailima. His friends,
+no doubt, hearing of his good health, now and then, hoped to see his
+face again; the grouse on the hills of home were calling their eternal
+_Come back! come back!_
+
+Stevenson, who himself could live contentedly on so little, was the most
+open-handed of men, the most liberal and cheerful of givers; and whether
+to Samoans in distressful times, or to others who sought his aid, his
+purse was never closed; while his hospitality was like Sir Walter's.
+Probably, in his hour of greatest success, he never was among "the best
+sellers." But any financial anxieties which may have beset him were
+assuaged, and his heart was greatly held up, by the success of the
+beautiful "Edinburgh Edition" of his works, conceived and carried out by
+the energy of his friend of old Edinburgh days, Mr. Charles Baxter.
+
+His latest work was "Weir of Hermiston"; the plenitude of his genius
+shines in every page. He himself thought that this was his best work;
+so far as we can judge by the considerable fragment that exists, he
+was in the right. There is nothing immature, nothing here of the boy;
+he is approaching, in his tale, a fateful point of passion and
+disaster; his characters, especially the elder woman, the nurse, are
+entirely human, with no touch of caprice; they all live their separate
+lives in our memories. Then the end came. One moment of bewildered
+consciousness--then unconsciousness and death. He had written to me,
+some months before, a letter full of apprehensions of the fate of
+Scott and Swift; whether warned by some monitory experience, or
+whether he had merely chanced to be thinking of the two great men who
+outlived themselves. To him death had come almost as a friend in the
+fullness of his powers; there was no touch of weakness or decay, and
+he was mourned like a king by his Samoans, by his family, by all who
+had known him, and by many thousands who had never seen his face.
+There was mourning at home in Scotland (where we hoped against hope
+that the news was untrue), in England, in Europe, in America, in
+Australia and the Isles. He who had been such "a friendly writer," who
+had created for us so many friends in his characters, had made more
+friends for himself, friends more and more various in age, race,
+tastes, character, and temper, than any British writer, perhaps, since
+Dickens. He was taken from us untimely; broken was our strong hope in
+the future gifts of his genius, and there was a pain that does not
+attend the peaceful passing, in the fullness of years and wisdom and
+honour, of an immortal like Tennyson.
+
+Any attempt by a contemporary to "place" Stevenson, to give him his
+"class" in English literature, would be a folly. The future must judge
+for itself, and, if we may estimate the taste of the future by that of
+the present, the reading public will not often look behind the most
+recent publications of its own day. But _les délicats_ will look back on
+Stevenson as they now look back on Fielding, who, to my simple thinking,
+remains unsurpassed as a novelist; and as they turn to Lamb and Hazlitt
+as essayists. The poet is, of course, at his best immortal--time cannot
+stale _Beowulf_, or the nameless lyrists of the fourteenth century, or
+Chaucer, or Spenser, and so with the rest, _la mort n'y mord_. But it is
+as a writer of prose that Stevenson must be remembered. If he is not the
+master British essayist of the later nineteenth century, I really cannot
+imagine who is to be preferred to him. His vivacity, vitality, his
+original reflections on life, his personal and fascinating style, claim
+for him the crown. Nobody, perhaps, places him beside Lamb, and he would
+not have dreamed of being equaled in renown with Hazlitt, while he is,
+I conceive, more generally sympathetic than Mr. Pater, whose place is
+apart, whose province is entirely his own. When we think of Stevenson as
+a novelist, there is this conspicuous drawback, that he never did write
+a novel on characters and conditions in the mid-stream of the life that
+was contemporary with himself. He does not compete, therefore, with
+Thackeray and Dickens, Mr. Hardy and Mr. Meredith, but Scott is also no
+competitor.
+
+"St. Ronan's Well" is Scott's only novel that deals with precisely
+contemporary life, and "St. Ronan's Well" is a kind of backwater; the
+story of a remote contemporary watering-place, of local squireens, and
+of a tragedy, mangled in deference to James Ballantyne. Scott did not
+often care to trust himself out of the last echoes of "the pipes that
+played for Charlie," and though his knowledge of contemporary life was
+infinitely wider than Stevenson's, we see many good reasons for his
+abstention from use of his knowledge. For example, it is obvious that he
+could not attempt a romance of the War in the Peninsula, and of life in
+London, let us say, while Wellington was holding Torres Vedras. Even
+among Stevenson's abandoned projects, there is not, I think, one which
+deals with English society in the 'eighties. His health and his fugitive
+life imposed on him those limitations against which his taste did not
+rebel, for his taste led him to the past, and to adventure in a present
+not English, but exotic. He is not in the same field, so to speak, as
+Richardson and Fielding, Dickens and Thackeray, Mr. Hardy and Mr.
+Meredith; and their field, the great living world of their time, is what
+the general reader wants the novelist to deal with as he best may.
+
+Shakespeare, to be sure, wrote no drama on Elizabethan times in England;
+we must go to Heywood and Ben Jonson for the drama of his contemporary
+world. Many circumstances caused Stevenson, when at his best, to be a
+historical novelist, and he is, since Scott and Thackeray, the best
+historical novelist whom we have.
+
+Add to all this his notable eminence in tales of shorter scope; in
+essays, whether on life or on literature, so various and original, so
+graceful and so strong; add the fantasies of his fables, and remember
+that almost all he did is good--and we must, I think, give to Stevenson
+a very high place in the literature of his century.
+
+Of his verse I have hitherto said nothing, and I do not think that if he
+had written verse alone, his place would have been highly distinguished.
+His "Child's Garden of Verse" is a little masterpiece in a _genre_ of
+his own invention. His verses in Scots are full of humour, and he had a
+complete mastery of the old Northern English of the Lowlands. His more
+serious poems often contain ideas and the expression of moods which he
+handled better, I think, in his prose. Even the story of "Ticonderoga" I
+would rather have received from him in prose than in his ballad measure.
+Possibly I am prejudiced a little by his willfulness in giving to a
+Cameron the part of the generous hero; true to his word, in spite of the
+desire to avenge a brother, and of the thrice-repeated monition of the
+dead. It is not that I grudge any glory to the children of Lochiel, a
+clan, in General Wolfe's opinion, the bravest where all were brave, a
+clan of constant and boundless loyalty. But in Stevenson's own note to
+his poem, the Cameron "swears by his sword and Ben Cruachan," and
+"Cruachan" is a slogan of the Campbells. The hero, as a matter of fact,
+was a Campbell of Inverawe. "Between the name of _Cameron_ and that of
+_Campbell_ the Muse will never hesitate," says Stevenson. One name means
+"Wry mouth," the other "Crooked nose"; so far, the Muse has a poor
+choice! But the tale is a tale of the Campbells, of Clan Diarmaid, and
+the Muse must adhere to the historic truth.
+
+This essay must not close on a difference of opinion concerning
+historical events--a jarring note.
+
+There are points enough in Stevenson's character and opinions which I
+have not touched; such as his religious views. He never mentioned the
+topic of religion in my hearing; it is to his printed words that the
+reader must turn, and he cannot but perceive that Stevenson's was a
+deeply religious nature. With his faith, whatever its tenets may have
+been, was implicated his uneasily active conscience; his sense of duty.
+This appears to have directed his life; and was practically the same
+thing as his sense of honour. Honour, I conceive, is, in a phrase of
+Aristotle's, duty "with a bloom on it."
+
+Readers of his Letters, and of his Biography by his cousin, Mr. Balfour;
+readers of his essays, and of his novels, must see that he was keenly
+interested in cases of conscience; in the right course to steer in an
+apparent conflict of duties. To say that his theory of the right course,
+in a hypothetical instance, was always the same as my own would be to
+abuse the confidence of the reader. As Preston-grange observes: "I would
+never charge myself with Mr. David's conscience; and if you could cast
+some part of it (as you went by) in a moss bog, you would find yourself
+to ride much easier without it"; and _not_, perhaps, always in the wrong
+direction. There is a case of conscience in "The Wrecker," something
+about opium-smuggling, and the conscience of Mr. Loudon Dodd (a truly
+Balfourian character), which I have studied, aided by other casuists,
+for a summer's day. We never could agree as to what the case really was,
+as to what was the moral issue.
+
+Casuistry may not be my strong point. I have found myself between no
+less authorities than a Chancellor of England and a learned Jesuit, both
+of whom, I thought, would certainly accept my view of a very unusual
+case of conduct. A certain cleric, in his ecclesiastical duties,
+happened to overhear an automatically uttered remark by another person;
+who never meant to speak or to be overheard. The cleric acted on this
+information, with results distressing to a pair of true lovers. I
+maintained that he did wrong. "There was no appeal," I said, "to the
+umpire. Nobody in the field asked 'How's that?'" But the Chancellor and
+the learned Jesuit backed the clergyman.
+
+Now, I never knew for certain how "Mr. David's conscience" would decide,
+but I think he would have been with me on this occasion, and with the
+Rules of the Game.
+
+There was a very pleasant trait in Stevenson's character which, perhaps,
+does not display itself in most of his writings; his great affection for
+children. In "A Child's Garden of Verse," delightful as it is, and not
+to be read without "a great inclination to cry," the child is himself,
+the child "that is gone." But, in an early letter, he writes: "Kids is
+what is the matter with me ... Children are too good to be true." He had
+a natural infatuation, so to say, for children as children, which many
+men of the pen overcome with no apparent difficulty. He could not
+overcome it; little boys and girls were his delight, and he was theirs.
+At Molokai, the Leper Island, he played croquet with the little girls;
+refusing to wear gloves, lest he should remind them of their condition.
+Sensitive and weak in body as he was, Nelson was not more fearless. It
+was equally characteristic of another quality of his, the open hand,
+that he gave a grand piano to these leper children.
+
+He says:
+
+    "But the nearest friends are the auldest friends,
+    And the grave's the place to seek them."
+
+Among the nearest and the oldest friends of his I never was, but to few
+friends, nearer and older, does my _desiderium_ go back so frequently;
+simply because almost every day brings something newly learned or known,
+which would have appealed most to his unequaled breadth of knowledge
+and interest and sympathy.
+
+ANDREW LANG.
+
+
+
+
+AN INLAND VOYAGE
+
+
+    "Thus sang they in the English boat."
+
+    MARVELL.
+
+
+
+_TO_
+
+_SIR WALTER GRINDLAY SIMPSON, BART._
+
+
+_My dear "Cigarette,"_
+
+_It was enough that you should have shared so liberally in the rains and
+portages of our voyage; that you should have had so hard a paddle to
+recover the derelict "Arethusa" on the flooded Oise: and that you should
+thenceforth have piloted a mere wreck of mankind to Origny
+Sainte-Benoîte and a supper so eagerly desired. It was perhaps more than
+enough, as you once somewhat piteously complained, that I should have
+set down all the strong language to you, and kept the appropriate
+reflections for myself. I could not in decency expose you to share the
+disgrace of another and more public shipwreck. But now that this voyage
+of ours is going into a cheap edition, that peril, we shall hope, is at
+an end, and I may put your name on the burgee._
+
+_But I cannot pause till I have lamented the fate of our two ships. That,
+sir, was not a fortunate day when we projected the possession of a canal
+barge; it was not a fortunate day when we shared our daydream with the
+most hopeful of daydreamers. For a while, indeed, the world looked
+smilingly. The barge was procured and christened, and as the "Eleven
+Thousand Virgins of Cologne," lay for some months, the admired of all
+admirers, in a pleasant river and under the walls of an ancient town. M.
+Mattras, the accomplished carpenter of Moret, had made her a centre of
+emulous labour; and you will not have forgotten the amount of sweet
+champagne consumed in the inn at the bridge end, to give zeal to the
+workmen and speed to the work. On the financial aspect I would_ _not
+willingly dwell. The "Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne" rotted in the
+stream where she was beautified. She felt not the impulse of the breeze;
+she was never harnessed to the patent track-horse. And when at length
+she was sold, by the indignant carpenter of Moret, there were sold along
+with her the "Arethusa" and the "Cigarette", she of cedar, she, as we
+knew so keenly on a portage, of solid-hearted English oak. Now these
+historic vessels fly the tricolour and are known by new and alien
+names._
+
+_R. L. S._
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
+
+
+To equip so small a book with a preface is, I am half afraid, to sin
+against proportion. But a preface is more than an author can resist, for
+it is the reward of his labours. When the foundation-stone is laid, the
+architect appears with his plans, and struts for an hour before the
+public eye. So with the writer in his preface: he may have never a word
+to say, but he must show himself for a moment in the portico, hat in
+hand, and with an urbane demeanour.
+
+It is best, in such circumstances, to represent a delicate shade of
+manner between humility and superiority: as if the book had been written
+by someone else, and you had merely run over it and inserted what was
+good. But for my part I have not yet learned the trick to that
+perfection; I am not yet able to dissemble the warmth of my sentiments
+towards a reader; and if I meet him on the threshold, it is to invite
+him in with country cordiality.
+
+To say truth, I had no sooner finished reading this little book in
+proof, than I was seized upon by a distressing apprehension. It occurred
+to me that I might not only be the first to read these pages, but the
+last as well; that I might have pioneered this very smiling tract of
+country all in vain, and find not a soul to follow in my steps. The more
+I thought, the more I disliked the notion; until the distaste grew into
+a sort of panic terror, and I rushed into this Preface, which is no more
+than an advertisement for readers.
+
+What am I to say for my book? Caleb and Joshua brought back from
+Palestine a formidable bunch of grapes; alas! my book produces naught so
+nourishing; and for the matter of that, we live in an age when people
+prefer a definition to any quantity of fruit.
+
+I wonder, would a negative be found enticing? for, from the negative
+point of view, I flatter myself this volume has a certain stamp.
+Although it runs to considerably upwards of two hundred pages, it
+contains not a single reference to the imbecility of God's universe, nor
+so much as a single hint that I could have made a better one myself.--I
+really do not know where my head can have been. I seem to have forgotten
+all that makes it glorious to be man.--'Tis an omission that renders the
+book philosophically unimportant; but I am in hopes the eccentricity may
+please in frivolous circles.
+
+To the friend who accompanied me I owe many thanks already, indeed I
+wish I owed him nothing else; but at this moment I feel towards him an
+almost exaggerated tenderness. He, at least, will become my reader:--if
+it were only to follow his own travels alongside of mine.
+
+R. L. S.
+
+
+
+
+AN INLAND VOYAGE
+
+ANTWERP TO BOOM
+
+
+We made a great stir in Antwerp Docks. A stevedore and a lot of dock
+porters took up the two canoes, and ran with them for the slip. A crowd
+of children followed cheering. The _Cigarette_ went off in a splash and
+a bubble of small breaking water. Next moment the _Arethusa_ was after
+her. A steamer was coming down, men on the paddle-box shouted hoarse
+warnings, the stevedore and his porters were bawling from the quay. But
+in a stroke or two the canoes were away out in the middle of the
+Scheldt, and all steamers, and stevedores, and other long-shore vanities
+were left behind.
+
+The sun shone brightly; the tide was making--four jolly miles an hour;
+the wind blew steadily, with occasional squalls. For my part, I had
+never been in a canoe under sail in my life; and my first experiment out
+in the middle of this big river was not made without some trepidation.
+What would happen when the wind first caught my little canvas? I suppose
+it was almost as trying a venture into the regions of the unknown as to
+publish a first book, or to marry. But my doubts were not of long
+duration; and in five minutes you will not be surprised to learn that I
+had tied my sheet.
+
+I own I was a little struck by this circumstance myself; of course, in
+company with the rest of my fellow-men, I had always tied the sheet in a
+sailing-boat; but in so little and crank a concern as a canoe, and with
+these charging squalls, I was not prepared to find myself follow the
+same principle; and it inspired me with some contemptuous views of our
+regard for life. It is certainly easier to smoke with the sheet
+fastened; but I had never before weighed a comfortable pipe of tobacco
+against an obvious risk, and gravely elected for the comfortable pipe.
+It is a commonplace, that we cannot answer for ourselves before we have
+been tried. But it is not so common a reflection, and surely more
+consoling, that we usually find ourselves a great deal braver and better
+than we thought. I believe this is every one's experience: but an
+apprehension that they may belie themselves in the future prevents
+mankind from trumpeting this cheerful sentiment abroad. I wish
+sincerely, for it would have saved me much trouble, there had been some
+one to put me in a good heart about life when I was younger; to tell me
+how dangers are most portentous on a distant sight; and how the good in
+a man's spirit will not suffer itself to be overlaid, and rarely or
+never deserts him in the hour of need. But we are all for tootling on
+the sentimental flute in literature; and not a man among us will go to
+the head of the march to sound the heady drums.
+
+It was agreeable upon the river. A barge or two went past laden with
+hay. Reeds and willows bordered the stream; and cattle and grey
+venerable horses came and hung their mild heads over the embankment.
+Here and there was a pleasant village among trees, with a noisy
+shipping-yard; here and there a villa in a lawn. The wind served us well
+up the Scheldt and thereafter up the Rupel, and we were running pretty
+free when we began to sight the brickyards of Boom, lying for a long way
+on the right bank of the river. The left bank was still green and
+pastoral, with alleys of trees along the embankment, and here and there
+a flight of steps to serve a ferry, where perhaps there sat a woman with
+her elbows on her knees, or an old gentleman with a staff and silver
+spectacles. But Boom and its brickyards grew smokier and shabbier with
+every minute; until a great church with a clock, and a wooden bridge
+over the river, indicated the central quarters of the town.
+
+Boom is not a nice place, and is only remarkable for one thing: that the
+majority of the inhabitants have a private opinion that they can speak
+English, which is not justified by fact. This gave a kind of haziness to
+our intercourse. As for the Hôtel de la Navigation, I think it is the
+worst feature of the place. It boasts of a sanded parlour, with a bar at
+one end, looking on the street; and another sanded parlour, darker and
+colder, with an empty bird-cage and a tricolor subscription box by way
+of sole adornment, where we made shift to dine in the company of three
+uncommunicative engineer apprentices and a silent bagman. The food, as
+usual in Belgium, was of a nondescript occasional character; indeed, I
+have never been able to detect anything in the nature of a meal among
+this pleasing people; they seem to peck and trifle with viands all day
+long in an amateur spirit: tentatively French, truly German, and somehow
+falling between the two.
+
+The empty bird-cage, swept and garnished, and with no trace of the old
+piping favourite, save where two wires had been pushed apart to hold its
+lump of sugar, carried with it a sort of graveyard cheer. The engineer
+apprentices would have nothing to say to us, nor indeed to the bagman;
+but talked low and sparingly to one another, or raked us in the gaslight
+with a gleam of spectacles. For though handsome lads, they were all (in
+the Scots phrase) barnacled.
+
+There was an English maid in the hotel, who had been long enough out of
+England to pick up all sorts of funny foreign idioms, and all sorts of
+curious foreign ways, which need not here be specified. She spoke to us
+very fluently in her jargon, asked us information as to the manners of
+the present day in England, and obligingly corrected us when we
+attempted to answer. But as we were dealing with a woman, perhaps our
+information was not so much thrown away as it appeared. The sex likes to
+pick up knowledge and yet preserve its superiority. It is good policy,
+and almost necessary in the circumstances. If a man finds a woman admire
+him, were it only for his acquaintance with geography, he will begin at
+once to build upon the admiration. It is only by unintermittent snubbing
+that the pretty ones can keep us in our place. Men, as Miss Howe or Miss
+Harlowe would have said, "are such _encroachers_." For my part, I am
+body and soul with the women; and after a well-married couple, there is
+nothing so beautiful in the world as the myth of the divine huntress. It
+is no use for a man to take to the woods; we know him; St. Anthony tried
+the same thing long ago, and had a pitiful time of it by all accounts.
+But there is this about some women, which overtops the best gymnosophist
+among men, that they suffice to themselves, and can walk in a high and
+cold zone without the countenance of any trousered being. I declare,
+although the reverse of a professed ascetic, I am more obliged to women
+for this ideal than I should be to the majority of them, or indeed to
+any but one, for a spontaneous kiss. There is nothing so encouraging as
+the spectacle of self-sufficiency. And when I think of the slim and
+lovely maidens, running the woods all night to the note of Diana's horn;
+moving among the old oaks, as fancy-free as they; things of the forest
+and the starlight, not touched by the commotion of man's hot and turbid
+life--although there are plenty other ideals that I should prefer--I
+find my heart beat at the thought of this one. 'Tis to fail in life, but
+to fail with what a grace! That is not lost which is not regretted. And
+where--here slips out the male--where would be much of the glory of
+inspiring love, if there were no contempt to overcome?
+
+
+
+
+ON THE WILLEBROEK CANAL
+
+
+Next morning, when we set forth on the Willebroek Canal, the rain began
+heavy and chill. The water of the canal stood at about the drinking
+temperature of tea; and under this cold aspersion the surface was
+covered with steam. The exhilaration of departure, and the easy motion
+of the boats under each stroke of the paddles, supported us through this
+misfortune while it lasted; and when the cloud passed and the sun came
+out again, our spirits went up above the range of stay-at-home humours.
+A good breeze rustled and shivered in the rows of trees that bordered
+the canal. The leaves flickered in and out of the light in tumultuous
+masses. It seemed sailing weather to eye and ear; but down between the
+banks, the wind reached us only in faint and desultory puffs. There was
+hardly enough to steer by. Progress was intermittent and unsatisfactory.
+A jocular person, of marine antecedents, hailed us from the tow-path
+with a "_C'est vite, mais c'est long_."
+
+The canal was busy enough. Every now and then we met or overtook a long
+string of boats, with great green tillers; high sterns with a window on
+either side of the rudder, and perhaps a jug or a flower-pot in one of
+the windows; a dinghy following behind; a woman busied about the day's
+dinner, and a handful of children. These barges were all tied one behind
+the other with tow ropes, to the number of twenty-five or thirty; and
+the line was headed and kept in motion by a steamer of strange
+construction. It had neither paddle-wheel nor screw; but by some gear
+not rightly comprehensible to the unmechanical mind, it fetched up over
+its bow a small bright chain which lay along the bottom of the canal,
+and paying it out again over the stern, dragged itself forward, link by
+link, with its whole retinue of loaded skows. Until one had found out
+the key to the enigma, there was something solemn and uncomfortable in
+the progress of one of these trains, as it moved gently along the water
+with nothing to mark its advance but an eddy alongside dying away into
+the wake.
+
+Of all the creatures of commercial enterprise, a canal barge is by far
+the most delightful to consider. It may spread its sails, and then you
+see it sailing high above the tree-tops and the windmill, sailing on the
+aqueduct, sailing through the green corn-lands: the most picturesque of
+things amphibious. Or the horse plods along at a foot-pace, as if there
+were no such thing as business in the world; and the man dreaming at the
+tiller sees the same spire on the horizon all day long. It is a mystery
+how things ever get to their destination at this rate; and to see the
+barges waiting their turn at a lock affords a fine lesson of how easily
+the world may be taken. There should be many contented spirits on board,
+for such a life is both to travel and to stay at home.
+
+The chimney smokes for dinner as you go along; the banks of the canal
+slowly unroll their scenery to contemplative eyes; the barge floats by
+great forests and through great cities with their public buildings and
+their lamps at night; and for the barge, in his floating home,
+"travelling abed," it is merely as if he were listening to another man's
+story or turning the leaves of a picture-book in which he had no
+concern. He may take his afternoon walk in some foreign country on the
+banks of the canal, and then come home to dinner at his own fireside.
+
+There is not enough exercise in such a life for any high measure of
+health; but a high measure of health is only necessary for unhealthy
+people. The slug of a fellow, who is never ill nor well, has a quiet
+time of it in life, and dies all the easier.
+
+I am sure I would rather be a barge than occupy any position under
+heaven that required attendance at an office. There are few callings, I
+should say, where a man gives up less of his liberty in return for
+regular meals. The barge is on shipboard--he is master in his own
+ship--he can land whenever he will--he can never be kept beating off a
+lee-shore a whole frosty night when the sheets are as hard as iron; and,
+so far as I can make out, time stands as nearly still with him as is
+compatible with the return of bed-time or the dinner-hour. It is not
+easy to see why a barge should ever die.
+
+Half-way between Willebroek and Villevorde, in a beautiful reach of
+canal like a squire's avenue, we went ashore to lunch. There were two
+eggs, a junk of bread, and a bottle of wine on board the _Arethusa_; and
+two eggs and an Etna cooking apparatus on board the _Cigarette_. The
+master of the latter boat smashed one of the eggs in the course of
+disembarkation; but observing pleasantly that it might still be cooked
+_à la papier_, he dropped it into the Etna, in its covering of Flemish
+newspaper. We landed in a blink of fine weather; but we had not been two
+minutes ashore before the wind freshened into half a gale, and the rain
+began to patter on our shoulders. We sat as close about the Etna as we
+could. The spirits burned with great ostentation; the grass caught flame
+every minute or two, and had to be trodden out; and before long, there
+were several burnt fingers of the party. But the solid quantity of
+cookery accomplished was out of proportion with so much display; and
+when we desisted, after two applications of the fire, the sound egg was
+little more than loo-warm; and as for _à la papier_, it was a cold and
+sordid _fricassée_ of printer's ink and broken egg-shell. We made shift
+to roast the other two, by putting them close to the burning spirits;
+and that with better success. And then we uncorked the bottle of wine,
+and sat down in a ditch with our canoe aprons over our knees. It rained
+smartly. Discomfort, when it is honestly uncomfortable and makes no
+nauseous pretensions to the contrary, is a vastly humorous business; and
+people well steeped and stupefied in the open air are in a good vein for
+laughter. From this point of view, even egg _à la papier_ offered by way
+of food may pass muster as a sort of accessory to the fun. But this
+manner of jest, although it may be taken in good part, does not invite
+repetition; and from that time forward, the Etna voyaged like a
+gentleman in the locker of the _Cigarette_.
+
+It is almost unnecessary to mention that when lunch was over and we got
+aboard again and made sail, the wind promptly died away. The rest of the
+journey to Villevorde, we still spread our canvas to the unfavouring
+air; and with now and then a puff, and now and then a spell of paddling,
+drifted along from lock to lock, between the orderly trees.
+
+It was a fine, green, fat landscape; or rather a mere green water-lane,
+going on from village to village. Things had a settled look, as in
+places long lived in. Crop-headed children spat upon us from the bridges
+as we went below, with a true conservative feeling. But even more
+conservative were the fishermen, intent upon their floats, who let us go
+by without one glance. They perched upon sterlings and buttresses and
+along the slope of the embankment, gently occupied. They were
+indifferent, like pieces of dead nature. They did not move any more than
+if they had been fishing in an old Dutch print. The leaves fluttered,
+the water lapped, but they continued in one stay like so many churches
+established by law. You might have trepanned every one of their innocent
+heads, and found no more than so much coiled fishing-line below their
+skulls. I do not care for your stalwart fellows in india-rubber
+stockings breasting up mountain torrents with a salmon rod; but I do
+dearly love the class of man who plies his unfruitful art, for ever and
+a day, by still and depopulated waters.
+
+At the last lock, just beyond Villevorde, there was a lock-mistress who
+spoke French comprehensibly, and told us we were still a couple of
+leagues from Brussels. At the same place the rain began again. It fell
+in straight, parallel lines; and the surface of the canal was thrown up
+into an infinity of little crystal fountains. There were no beds to be
+had in the neighbourhood. Nothing for it but to lay the sails aside and
+address ourselves to steady paddling in the rain.
+
+Beautiful country houses, with clocks and long lines of shuttered
+windows, and fine old trees standing in groves and avenues, gave a rich
+and sombre aspect in the rain and the deepening dusk to the shores of
+the canal. I seem to have seen something of the same effect in
+engravings: opulent landscapes, deserted and overhung with the passage
+of storm. And throughout we had the escort of a hooded cart, which
+trotted shabbily along the tow-path, and kept at an almost uniform
+distance in our wake.
+
+
+
+
+THE ROYAL SPORT NAUTIQUE
+
+
+The rain took off near Laeken. But the sun was already down; the air was
+chill; and we had scarcely a dry stitch between the pair of us. Nay, now
+we found ourselves near the end of the Allée Verte, and on the very
+threshold of Brussels, we were confronted by a serious difficulty. The
+shores were closely lined by canal boats waiting their turn at the lock.
+Nowhere was there any convenient landing-place; nowhere so much as a
+stable-yard to leave the canoes in for the night. We scrambled ashore
+and entered an _estaminet_ where some sorry fellows were drinking with
+the landlord. The landlord was pretty round with us; he knew of no
+coach-house or stable-yard, nothing of the sort; and seeing we had come
+with no mind to drink, he did not conceal his impatience to be rid of
+us. One of the sorry fellows came to the rescue. Somewhere in the corner
+of the basin there was a slip, he informed us, and something else
+besides, not very clearly defined by him, but hopefully construed by his
+hearers.
+
+Sure enough there was the slip in the corner of the basin, and at the
+top of it two nice-looking lads in boating clothes. The _Arethusa_
+addressed himself to these. One of them said there would be no
+difficulty about a night's lodging for our boats; and the other, taking
+a cigarette from his lips, inquired if they were made by Searle and Son.
+The name was quite an introduction. Half a dozen other young men came
+out of a boat-house bearing the superscription ROYAL SPORT NAUTIQUE, and
+joined in the talk. They were all very polite, voluble, and
+enthusiastic; and their discourse was interlarded with English boating
+terms, and the names of English boat-builders and English clubs. I do
+not know, to my shame, any spot in my native land where I should have
+been so warmly received by the same number of people. We were English
+boating-men, and the Belgian boating-men fell upon our necks. I wonder
+if French Huguenots were as cordially greeted by English Protestants
+when they came across the Channel out of great tribulation. But, after
+all, what religion knits people so closely as a common sport?
+
+The canoes were carried into the boat-house; they were washed down for
+us by the Club servants, the sails were hung out to dry, and everything
+made as snug and tidy as a picture. And in the meanwhile we were led
+upstairs by our new-found brethren, for so more than one of them stated
+the relationship, and made free of their lavatory. This one lent us
+soap, that one a towel, a third and fourth helped us to undo our bags.
+And all the time such questions, such assurances of respect and
+sympathy! I declare I never knew what glory was before.
+
+"Yes, yes; the _Royal Sport Nautique_ is the oldest club in Belgium."
+
+"We number two hundred."
+
+"We"--this is not a substantive speech, but an abstract of many
+speeches, the impression left upon my mind after a great deal of talk;
+and very youthful, pleasant, natural, and patriotic it seems to me to
+be--"We have gained all races, except those where we were cheated by the
+French."
+
+"You must leave all your wet things to be dried."
+
+"O! _entre frères!_ In any boat-house in England we should find the
+same." (I cordially hope they might.)
+
+"_En Angleterre, vous employez des sliding-seats, n'est-ce pas?_"
+
+"We are all employed in commerce during the day; but in the evening,
+_voyez-vous, nous sommes sèrieux_."
+
+These were the words. They were all employed over the frivolous
+mercantile concerns of Belgium during the day; but in the evening they
+found some hours for the serious concerns of life. I may have a wrong
+idea of wisdom, but I think that was a very wise remark. People
+connected with literature and philosophy are busy all their days in
+getting rid of second-hand notions and false standards. It is their
+profession, in the sweat of their brows, by dogged thinking, to recover
+their old fresh view of life, and distinguish what they really and
+originally like, from what they have only learned to tolerate perforce.
+And these Royal Nautical Sportsmen had the distinction still quite
+legible in their hearts. They had still those clean perceptions of what
+is nice and nasty, what is interesting and what is dull, which envious
+old gentlemen refer to as illusions. The nightmare illusion of middle
+age, the bear's hug of custom gradually squeezing the life out of a
+man's soul, had not yet begun for these happy-starred young Belgians.
+They still knew that the interest they took in their business was a
+trifling affair compared to their spontaneous, long-suffering affection
+for nautical sports. To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying
+Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept
+your soul alive. Such a man may be generous; he may be honest in
+something more than the commercial sense; he may love his friends with
+an elective, personal sympathy, and not accept them as an adjunct of the
+station to which he has been called. He may be a man, in short, acting
+on his own instincts, keeping in his own shape that God made him in; and
+not a mere crank in the social engine-house, welded on principles that
+he does not understand, and for purposes that he does not care for.
+
+For will any one dare to tell me that business is more entertaining than
+fooling among boats? He must have never seen a boat, or never seen an
+office, who says so. And for certain the one is a great deal better for
+the health. There should be nothing so much a man's business as his
+amusements. Nothing but money-grubbing can be put forward to the
+contrary; no one but
+
+    Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell
+    From Heaven,
+
+durst risk a word in answer. It is but a lying cant that would represent
+the merchant and the banker as people disinterestedly toiling for
+mankind, and then most useful when they are most absorbed in their
+transactions; for the man is more important than his services. And when
+my Royal Nautical Sportsman shall have so far fallen from his hopeful
+youth that he cannot pluck up an enthusiasm over anything but his
+ledger, I venture to doubt whether he will be near so nice a fellow, and
+whether he would welcome, with so good a grace, a couple of drenched
+Englishmen paddling into Brussels in the dusk.
+
+When we had changed our wet clothes and drunk a glass of pale ale to the
+Club's prosperity, one of their number escorted us to an hotel. He would
+not join us at our dinner, but he had no objection to a glass of wine.
+Enthusiasm is very wearing; and I begin to understand why prophets were
+unpopular in Judea, where they were best known. For three stricken
+hours did this excellent young man sit beside us to dilate on boats and
+boat-races; and before he left, he was kind enough to order our bedroom
+candles.
+
+We endeavoured now and again to change the subject; but the diversion
+did not last a moment: the Royal Nautical Sportsman bridled, shied,
+answered the question, and then breasted once more into the swelling
+tide of his subject. I call it his subject; but I think it was he who
+was subjected. The _Arethusa_, who holds all racing as a creature of the
+devil, found himself in a pitiful dilemma. He durst not own his
+ignorance, for the honour of Old England, and spoke away about English
+clubs and English oarsmen whose fame had never before come to his ears.
+Several times, and, once above all, on the question of sliding-seats,
+he was within an ace of exposure. As for the _Cigarette_, who has rowed
+races in the heat of his blood, but now disowns these slips of his
+wanton youth, his case was still more desperate; for the Royal Nautical
+proposed that he should take an oar in one of their eights on the
+morrow, to compare the English with the Belgian stroke. I could see my
+friend perspiring in his chair whenever that particular topic came up.
+And there was yet another proposal which had the same effect on both of
+us. It appeared that the champion canoeist of Europe (as well as most
+other champions) was a Royal Nautical Sportsman. And if we would only
+wait until the Sunday, this infernal paddler would be so condescending
+as to accompany us on our next stage. Neither of us had the least desire
+to drive the coursers of the sun against Apollo.
+
+When the young man was gone, we countermanded our candles, and ordered
+some brandy and water. The great billows had gone over our head. The
+Royal Nautical Sportsmen were as nice young fellows as a man would wish
+to see, but they were a trifle too young and a thought too nautical for
+us. We began to see that we were old and cynical; we liked ease and the
+agreeable rambling of the human mind about this and the other subject;
+we did not want to disgrace our native land by messing an eight, or
+toiling pitifully in the wake of the champion canoeist. In short, we had
+recourse to flight. It seemed ungrateful, but we tried to make that good
+on a card loaded with sincere compliments. And indeed it was no time for
+scruples; we seemed to feel the hot breath of the champion on our
+necks.
+
+
+
+
+AT MAUBEUGE
+
+
+Partly from the terror we had of our good friends the Royal Nauticals,
+partly from the fact that there were no fewer than fifty-five locks
+between Brussels and Charleroi, we concluded that we should travel by
+train across the frontier, boats and all. Fifty-five locks in a day's
+journey was pretty well tantamount to trudging the whole distance on
+foot, with the canoes upon our shoulders, an object of astonishment to
+the trees on the canal side, and of honest derision to all
+right-thinking children.
+
+To pass the frontier even in a train is a difficult matter for the
+_Arethusa_. He is somehow or other a marked man for the official eye.
+Wherever he journeys there are the officers gathered together. Treaties
+are solemnly signed, foreign ministers, ambassadors, and consuls sit
+throned in state from China to Peru, and the Union Jack flutters on all
+the winds of heaven. Under these safeguards, portly clergymen,
+schoolmistresses, gentlemen in grey tweed suits, and all the ruck and
+rabble of British touristry pour unhindered, "Murray" in hand, over the
+railways of the Continent, and yet the slim person of the _Arethusa_ is
+taken in the meshes, while these great fish go on their way rejoicing.
+If he travels without a passport, he is cast, without any figure about
+the matter, into noisome dungeons: if his papers are in order, he is
+suffered to go his way indeed, but not until he has been humiliated by a
+general incredulity. He is a born British subject, yet he has never
+succeeded in persuading a single official of his nationality. He
+flatters himself he is indifferent honest; yet he is rarely taken for
+anything better than a spy, and there is no absurd and disreputable
+means of livelihood but has been attributed to him in some heat of
+official or popular distrust....
+
+For the life of me I cannot understand it. I, too, have been knolled to
+church, and sat at good men's feasts; but I bear no mark of it. I am as
+strange as a Jack Indian to their official spectacles. I might come from
+any part of the globe, it seems, except from where I do. My ancestors
+have laboured in vain, and the glorious Constitution cannot protect me
+in my walks abroad. It is a great thing, believe me, to present a good
+normal type of the nation you belong to.
+
+Nobody else was asked for his papers on the way to Maubeuge; but I was,
+and although I clung to my rights, I had to choose at last between
+accepting the humiliation and being left behind by the train. I was
+sorry to give way; but I wanted to get to Maubeuge.
+
+Maubeuge is a fortified town, with a very good inn, the _Grand Cerf_. It
+seemed to be inhabited principally by soldiers and bagmen; at least,
+these were all that we saw, except the hotel servants. We had to stay
+there some time, for the canoes were in no hurry to follow us, and at
+last stuck hopelessly in the custom-house until we went back to liberate
+them. There was nothing to do, nothing to see. We had good meals, which
+was a great matter; but that was all.
+
+The _Cigarette_ was nearly taken up upon a charge of drawing the
+fortifications: a feat of which he was hopelessly incapable. And
+besides, as I suppose each belligerent nation has a plan of the other's
+fortified places already, these precautions are of the nature of
+shutting the stable door after the steed is away. But I have no doubt
+they help to keep up a good spirit at home. It is a great thing if you
+can persuade people that they are somehow or other partakers in a
+mystery. It makes them feel bigger. Even the Freemasons, who have been
+shown up to satiety, preserve a kind of pride; and not a grocer among
+them, however honest, harmless, and empty-headed he may feel himself to
+be at bottom, but comes home from one of their _coenacula_ with a
+portentous significance for himself.
+
+It is an odd thing, how happily two people, if there are two, can live
+in a place where they have no acquaintance. I think the spectacle of a
+whole life in which you have no part paralysis personal desire. You are
+content to become a mere spectator. The baker stands in his door; the
+colonel with his three medals goes by to the _café_ at night; the troops
+drum and trumpet and man the ramparts, as bold as so many lions. It
+would task language to say how placidly you behold all this. In a place
+where you have taken some root, you are provoked out of your
+indifference; you have a hand in the game; your friends are fighting
+with the army. But in a strange town, not small enough to grow too soon
+familiar, nor so large as to have laid itself out for travellers, you
+stand so far apart from the business that you positively forget it would
+be possible to go nearer; you have so little human interest around you,
+that you do not remember yourself to be a man. Perhaps, in a very short
+time, you would be one no longer. Gymnosophists go into a wood, with all
+nature seething around them, with romance on every side; it would be
+much more to the purpose if they took up their abode in a dull country
+town, where they should see just so much of humanity as to keep them
+from desiring more, and only the stale externals of man's life. These
+externals are as dead to us as so many formalities, and speak a dead
+language in our eyes and ears. They have no more meaning than an oath or
+a salutation. We are so much accustomed to see married couples going to
+church of a Sunday that we have clean forgotten what they represent; and
+novelists are driven to rehabilitate adultery, no less, when they wish
+to show us what a beautiful thing it is for a man and a woman to live
+for each other.
+
+One person in Maubeuge, however, showed me something more than his
+outside. That was the driver of the hotel omnibus: a mean enough looking
+little man, as well as I can remember; but with a spark of something
+human in his soul. He had heard of our little journey, and came to me at
+once in envious sympathy. How he longed to travel! he told me. How he
+longed to be somewhere else, and see the round world before he went into
+the grave! "Here I am," said he. "I drive to the station. Well. And then
+I drive back again to the hotel. And so on every day, and all the week
+round. My God, is that life?" I could not say I thought it was--for him.
+He pressed me to tell him where I had been, and where I hoped to go; and
+as he listened, I declare the fellow sighed. Might not this have been a
+brave African traveller, or gone to the Indies after Drake? But it is an
+evil age for the gypsily inclined among men. He who can sit squarest on
+a three-legged stool, he it is who has the wealth and glory.
+
+I wonder if my friend is still driving the omnibus for the _Grand Cerf_?
+Not very likely, I believe; for I think he was on the eve of mutiny when
+we passed through, and perhaps our passage determined him for good.
+Better a thousand times that he should be a tramp, and mend pots and
+pans by the wayside, and sleep under trees, and see the dawn and the
+sunset every day above a new horizon. I think I hear you say that it is
+a respectable position to drive an omnibus? Very well. What right has
+he, who likes it not, to keep those who would like it dearly out of this
+respectable position? Suppose a dish were not to my taste, and you told
+me that it was a favourite amongst the rest of the company, what should
+I conclude from that? Not to finish the dish against my stomach, I
+suppose.
+
+Respectability is a very good thing in its way, but it does not rise
+superior to all considerations. I would not for a moment venture to hint
+that it was a matter of taste; but I think I will go as far as this:
+that if a position is admittedly unkind, uncomfortable, unnecessary, and
+superfluously useless, although it were as respectable as the Church of
+England, the sooner a man is out of it, the better for himself, and all
+concerned.
+
+
+
+
+ON THE SAMBRE CANALISED
+
+TO QUARTES
+
+
+About three in the afternoon the whole establishment of the _Grand Cerf_
+accompanied us to the water's edge. The man of the omnibus was there
+with haggard eyes. Poor cage-bird! Do I not remember the time when I
+myself haunted the station, to watch train after train carry its
+complement of freemen into the night, and read the names of distant
+places on the time-bills with indescribable longings?
+
+We were not clear of the fortifications before the rain began. The wind
+was contrary, and blew in furious gusts; nor were the aspects of nature
+any more clement than the doings of the sky. For we passed through a
+stretch of blighted country, sparsely covered with brush, but handsomely
+enough diversified with factory chimneys. We landed in a soiled meadow
+among some pollards, and there smoked a pipe in a flaw of fair weather.
+But the wind blew so hard, we could get little else to smoke. There were
+no natural objects in the neighbourhood, but some sordid workshops. A
+group of children headed by a tall girl stood and watched us from a
+little distance all the time we stayed. I heartily wonder what they
+thought of us.
+
+At Hautmont, the lock was almost impassable; the landing-place being
+steep and high, and the launch at a long distance. Near a dozen grimy
+workmen lent us a hand. They refused any reward; and, what is much
+better, refused it handsomely, without conveying any sense of insult.
+"It is a way we have in our countryside," said they. And a very
+becoming way it is. In Scotland, where also you will get services for
+nothing, the good people reject your money as if you had been trying to
+corrupt a voter. When people take the trouble to do dignified acts, it
+is worth while to take a little more, and allow the dignity to be common
+to all concerned. But in our brave Saxon countries, where we plod
+threescore years and ten in the mud, and the wind keeps singing in our
+ears from birth to burial, we do our good and bad with a high hand, and
+almost offensively; and make even our alms a witness-bearing and an act
+of war against the wrong.
+
+After Hautmont, the sun came forth again and the wind went down; and a
+little paddling took us beyond the ironworks and through a delectable
+land. The river wound among low hills, so that sometimes the sun was at
+our backs, and sometimes it stood right ahead, and the river before us
+was one sheet of intolerable glory. On either hand, meadows and orchards
+bordered, with a margin of sedge and water flowers, upon the river. The
+hedges were of great height, woven about the trunks of hedgerow elms;
+and the fields, as they were often very small, looked like a series of
+bowers along the stream. There was never any prospect; sometimes a
+hill-top with its trees would look over the nearest hedgerow, just to
+make a middle distance for the sky; but that was all. The heaven was
+bare of clouds. The atmosphere, after the rain, was of enchanting
+purity. The river doubled among the hillocks, a shining strip of mirror
+glass; and the dip of the paddles set the flowers shaking along the
+brink.
+
+In the meadows wandered black and white cattle fantastically marked. One
+beast, with a white head and the rest of the body glossy black, came to
+the edge to drink, and stood gravely twitching his ears at me as I went
+by, like some sort of preposterous clergyman in a play. A moment after I
+heard a loud plunge, and, turning my head, saw the clergyman struggling
+to shore. The bank had given way under his feet.
+
+Besides the cattle, we saw no living things except a few birds and a
+great many fishermen. These sat along the edges of the meadows,
+sometimes with one rod, sometimes with as many as half a score. They
+seemed stupefied with contentment; and when we induced them to exchange
+a few words with us about the weather, their voices sounded quiet and
+far away. There was a strange diversity of opinion among them as to the
+kind of fish for which they set their lures; although they were all
+agreed in this, that the river was abundantly supplied. Where it was
+plain that no two of them had ever caught the same kind of fish, we
+could not help suspecting that perhaps not any one of them had ever
+caught a fish at all. I hope, since the afternoon was so lovely, that
+they were one and all rewarded; and that a silver booty went home in
+every basket for the pot. Some of my friends would cry shame on me for
+this; but I prefer a man, were he only an angler, to the bravest pair of
+gills in all God's waters. I do not affect fishes unless when cooked in
+sauce; whereas an angler is an important piece of river scenery, and
+hence deserves some recognition among canoeists. He can always tell you
+where you are after a mild fashion; and his quiet presence serves to
+accentuate the solitude and stillness, and remind you of the glittering
+citizens below your boat.
+
+The Sambre turned so industriously to and fro among his little hills,
+that it was past six before we drew near the lock at Quartes. There were
+some children on the tow-path, with whom the _Cigarette_ fell into a
+chaffing talk as they ran along beside us. It was in vain that I warned
+him. In vain I told him, in English, that boys were the most dangerous
+creatures; and if once you began with them, it was safe to end in a
+shower of stones. For my own part, whenever anything was addressed to
+me, I smiled gently and shook my head as though I were an inoffensive
+person inadequately acquainted with French. For indeed I have had such
+experience at home, that I would sooner meet many wild animals than a
+troop of healthy urchins.
+
+But I was doing injustice to these peaceable young Hainaulters. When the
+_Cigarette_ went off to make inquiries, I got out upon the bank to smoke
+a pipe and superintend the boats, and became at once the centre of much
+amiable curiosity. The children had been joined by this time by a young
+woman and a mild lad who had lost an arm; and this gave me more
+security. When I let slip my first word or so in French, a little girl
+nodded her head with a comical grown-up air. "Ah, you see," she said,
+"he understands well enough now; he was just making believe." And the
+little group laughed together very good-naturedly.
+
+They were much impressed when they heard we came from England; and the
+little girl proffered the information that England was an island "and a
+far way from here--_bien loin d'ici_."
+
+"Ay, you may say that,--a far way from here," said the lad with one arm.
+
+I was as nearly home-sick as ever I was in my life; they seemed to make
+it such an incalculable distance to the place where I first saw the day.
+
+They admired the canoes very much. And I observed one piece of delicacy
+in these children, which is worthy of record. They had been deafening us
+for the last hundred yards with petitions for a sail; ay, and they
+deafened us to the same tune next morning when we came to start; but
+then, when the canoes were lying empty, there was no word of any such
+petition. Delicacy? or perhaps a bit of fear for the water in so crank a
+vessel? I hate cynicism a great deal worse than I do the devil; unless
+perhaps the two were the same thing! And yet 'tis a good tonic; the cold
+tub and bath-towel of the sentiments; and positively necessary to life
+in cases of advanced sensibility.
+
+From the boats they turned to my costume. They could not make enough of
+my red sash; and my knife filled them with awe.
+
+"They make them like that in England," said the boy with one arm. I was
+glad he did not know how badly we make them in England nowadays. "They
+are for people who go away to sea," he added, "and to defend one's life
+against great fish."
+
+I felt I was becoming a more and more romantic figure to the little
+group at every word. And so I suppose I was. Even my pipe, although it
+was an ordinary French clay, pretty well "trousered," as they call it,
+would have a rarity in their eyes, as a thing coming from so far away.
+And if my feathers were not very fine in themselves, they were all from
+over seas. One thing in my outfit, however, tickled them out of all
+politeness; and that was the bemired condition of my canvas shoes. I
+suppose they were sure the mud at any rate was a home product. The
+little girl (who was the genius of the party) displayed her own sabots
+in competition; and I wish you could have seen how gracefully and
+merrily she did it.
+
+The young woman's milk-can, a great amphora of hammered brass, stood
+some way off upon the sward. I was glad of an opportunity to divert
+public attention from myself, and return some of the compliments I had
+received. So I admired it cordially both for form and colour, telling
+them, and very truly, that it was as beautiful as gold. They were not
+surprised. The things were plainly the boast of the countryside. And the
+children expatiated on the costliness of these amphorae, which sell
+sometimes as high as thirty francs apiece; told me how they were carried
+on donkeys, one on either side of the saddle, a brave caparison in
+themselves; and how they were to be seen all over the district, and at
+the larger farms in great number and of great size.
+
+
+
+
+PONT-SUR-SAMBRE
+
+WE ARE PEDLARS
+
+
+The _Cigarette_ returned with good news. There were beds to be had some
+ten minutes' walk from where we were, at a place called Pont. We stowed
+the canoes in a granary, and asked among the children for a guide. The
+circle at once widened round us, and our offers of reward were received
+in dispiriting silence. We were plainly a pair of Bluebeards to the
+children; they might speak to us in public places, and where they had
+the advantage of numbers; but it was another thing to venture off alone
+with two uncouth and legendary characters, who had dropped from the
+clouds upon their hamlet this quiet afternoon, sashed and be-knived, and
+with a flavour of great voyages. The owner of the granary came to our
+assistance, singled out one little fellow and threatened him with
+corporalities; or I suspect we should have had to find the way for
+ourselves. As it was, he was more frightened at the granary man than the
+strangers, having perhaps had some experience of the former. But I fancy
+his little heart must have been going at a fine rate; for he kept
+trotting at a respectful distance in front, and looking back at us with
+scared eyes. Not otherwise may the children of the young world have
+guided Jove or one of his Olympian compeers on an adventure.
+
+A miry lane led us up from Quartes with its church and bickering
+windmill. The hinds were trudging homewards from the fields. A brisk
+little woman passed us by. She was seated across a donkey between a pair
+of glittering milk-cans; and, as she went, she kicked jauntily with her
+heels upon the donkey's side, and scattered shrill remarks among the
+wayfarers. It was notable that none of the tired men took the trouble to
+reply. Our conductor soon led us out of the lane and across country. The
+sun had gone down, but the west in front of us was one lake of level
+gold. The path wandered a while in the open, and then passed under a
+trellis like a bower indefinitely prolonged. On either hand were shadowy
+orchards; cottages lay low among the leaves, and sent their smoke to
+heaven; every here and there, in an opening, appeared the great gold
+face of the west.
+
+I never saw the _Cigarette_ in such an idyllic frame of mind. He waxed
+positively lyrical in praise of country scenes. I was little less
+exhilarated myself; the mild air of the evening, the shadows, the rich
+lights and the silence, made a symphonious accompaniment about our walk;
+and we both determined to avoid towns for the future and sleep in
+hamlets.
+
+At last the path went between two houses, and turned the party out into
+a wide muddy high-road, bordered, as far as the eye could reach on
+either hand, by an unsightly village. The houses stood well back,
+leaving a ribbon of waste land on either side of the road, where there
+were stacks of firewood, carts, barrows, rubbish-heaps, and a little
+doubtful grass. Away on the left, a gaunt tower stood in the middle of
+the street. What it had been in past ages I know not: probably a hold in
+time of war; but nowadays it bore an illegible dial-plate in its upper
+parts, and near the bottom an iron letter-box.
+
+The inn to which we had been recommended at Quartes was full, or else
+the landlady did not like our looks. I ought to say, that with our long,
+damp india-rubber bags, we presented rather a doubtful type of
+civilization: like rag-and-bone men, the _Cigarette_ imagined. "These
+gentlemen are pedlars?--_Ces messieurs sont des marchands?_"--asked the
+landlady. And then, without waiting for an answer, which I suppose she
+thought superfluous in so plain a case, recommended us to a butcher who
+lived hard by the tower, and took in travellers to lodge.
+
+Thither went we. But the butcher was flitting, and all his beds were
+taken down. Or else he didn't like our look. As a parting shot, we had
+"These gentlemen are pedlars?"
+
+It began to grow dark in earnest. We could no longer distinguish the
+faces of the people who passed us by with an inarticulate good-evening.
+And the householders of Pont seemed very economical with their oil; for
+we saw not a single window lighted in all that long village. I believe
+it is the longest village in the world; but I daresay in our predicament
+every pace counted three times over. We were much cast down when we came
+to the last auberge; and looking in at the dark door, asked timidly if
+we could sleep there for the night. A female voice assented in no very
+friendly tones. We clapped the bags down and found our way to chairs.
+
+The place was in total darkness, save a red glow in the chinks and
+ventilators of the stove. But now the landlady lit a lamp to see her new
+guests; I suppose the darkness was what saved us another expulsion; for
+I cannot say she looked gratified at our appearance. We were in a large
+bare apartment, adorned with two allegorical prints of Music and
+Painting, and a copy of the law against public drunkenness. On one side,
+there was a bit of a bar, with some half-a-dozen bottles. Two labourers
+sat waiting supper, in attitudes of extreme weariness; a plain-looking
+lass bustled about with a sleepy child of two; and the landlady began to
+derange the pots upon the stove and set some beefsteak to grill.
+
+"These gentlemen are pedlars?" she asked sharply. And that was all the
+conversation forthcoming. We began to think we might be pedlars after
+all. I never knew a population with so narrow a range of conjecture as
+the innkeepers of Pont-sur-Sambre. But manners and bearing have not a
+wider currency than bank-notes. You have only to get far enough out of
+your beat, and all your accomplished airs will go for nothing. These
+Hainaulters could see no difference between us and the average pedlar.
+Indeed, we had some grounds for reflection while the steak was getting
+ready, to see how perfectly they accepted us at their own valuation, and
+how our best politeness and best efforts at entertainment seemed to fit
+quite suitably with the character of packmen. At least it seemed a good
+account of the profession in France, that even before such judges we
+could not beat them at our own weapons.
+
+At last we were called to table. The two hinds (and one of them looked
+sadly worn and white in the face, as though sick with over-work and
+under-feeding) supped off a single plate of some sort of bread-berry,
+some potatoes in their jackets, a small cup of coffee sweetened with
+sugar-candy, and one tumbler of swipes. The landlady, her son, and the
+lass aforesaid, took the same. Our meal was quite a banquet by
+comparison. We had some beefsteak, not so tender as it might have been,
+some of the potatoes, some cheese, an extra glass of the swipes, and
+white sugar in our coffee.
+
+You see what it is to be a gentleman--I beg your pardon, what it is to
+be a pedlar. It had not before occurred to me that a pedlar was a great
+man in a labourer's alehouse; but now that I had to enact the part for
+an evening I found that so it was. He has in his hedge quarters somewhat
+the same pre-eminency as the man who takes a private parlour in a hotel.
+The more you look into it, the more infinite are the class distinctions
+among men; and possibly, by a happy dispensation, there is no one at all
+at the bottom of the scale; no one but can find some superiority over
+somebody else, to keep up his pride withal.
+
+We were displeased enough with our fare. Particularly the _Cigarette_,
+for I tried to make believe that I was amused with the adventure, tough
+beefsteak and all. According to the Lucretian maxim, our steak should
+have been flavoured by the look of the other people's bread-berry. But
+we did not find it so in practice. You may have a head-knowledge that
+other people live more poorly than yourself, but it is not agreeable--I
+was going to say, it is against the etiquette of the universe--to sit at
+the same table and pick your own superior diet from among their crusts.
+I had not seen such a thing done since the greedy boy at school with his
+birthday cake. It was odious enough to witness, I could remember; and I
+had never thought to play the part myself. But there again you see what
+it is to be a pedlar.
+
+There is no doubt that the poorer classes in our country are much more
+charitably disposed than their superiors in wealth. And I fancy it must
+arise a great deal from the comparative indistinction of the easy and
+the not so easy in these ranks. A workman or a pedlar cannot shutter
+himself off from his less comfortable neighbours. If he treats himself
+to a luxury he must do it in the face of a dozen who cannot. And what
+should more directly lead to charitable thoughts?.... Thus the poor man,
+camping out in life, sees it as it is, and knows that every mouthful he
+puts in his belly has been wrenched out of the fingers of the hungry.
+
+But at a certain stage of prosperity, as in a balloon ascent, the
+fortunate person passes through a zone of clouds, and sublunary matters
+are thenceforward hidden from his view. He sees nothing but the heavenly
+bodies, all in admirable order, and positively as good as new. He finds
+himself surrounded in the most touching manner by the attentions of
+Providence, and compares himself involuntarily with the lilies and the
+skylarks. He does not precisely sing, of course; but then he looks so
+unassuming in his open landau! If all the world dined at one table, this
+philosophy would meet with some rude knocks.
+
+
+
+
+PONT-SUR-SAMBRE
+
+THE TRAVELLING MERCHANT
+
+
+Like the lackeys in Molière's farce, when the true nobleman broke in on
+their high life below stairs, we were destined to be confronted with a
+real pedlar. To make the lesson still more poignant for fallen gentlemen
+like us, he was a pedlar of infinitely more consideration than the sort
+of scurvy fellows we were taken for: like a lion among mice, or a ship
+of war bearing down upon two cock-boats. Indeed, he did not deserve the
+name of pedlar at all: he was a travelling merchant.
+
+I suppose it was about half-past eight when this worthy, Monsieur Hector
+Gilliard of Maubeuge, turned up at the alehouse door in a tilt cart
+drawn by a donkey, and cried cheerily on the inhabitants. He was a lean,
+nervous flibbertigibbet of a man, with something the look of an actor,
+and something the look of a horse-jockey. He had evidently prospered
+without any of the favours of education; for he adhered with stern
+simplicity to the masculine gender, and in the course of the evening
+passed off some fancy futures in a very florid style of architecture.
+With him came his wife, a comely young woman with her hair tied in a
+yellow kerchief, and their son, a little fellow of four, in a blouse and
+military _képi_. It was notable that the child was many degrees better
+dressed than either of the parents. We were informed he was already at a
+boarding-school; but the holidays having just commenced, he was off to
+spend them with his parents on a cruise. An enchanting holiday
+occupation, was it not, to travel all day with father and mother in the
+tilt cart full of countless treasures; the green country rattling by on
+either side, and the children in all the villages contemplating him with
+envy and wonder? It is better fun, during the holidays, to be the son of
+a travelling merchant than son and heir to the greatest cotton-spinner
+in creation. And as for being a reigning prince--indeed I never saw one
+if it was not Master Gilliard!
+
+While M. Hector and the son of the house were putting up the donkey, and
+getting all the valuables under lock and key, the landlady warmed up the
+remains of our beefsteak, and fried the cold potatoes in slices, and
+Madame Gilliard set herself to waken the boy, who had come far that day,
+and was peevish and dazzled by the light. He was no sooner awake than he
+began to prepare himself for supper by eating galette, unripe pears, and
+cold potatoes--with, so far as I could judge, positive benefit to his
+appetite.
+
+The landlady, fired with motherly emulation, awoke her own little girl;
+and the two children were confronted. Master Gilliard looked at her for
+a moment, very much as a dog looks at his own reflection in a mirror
+before he turns away. He was at that time absorbed in the galette. His
+mother seemed crestfallen that he should display so little inclination
+towards the other sex; and expressed her disappointment with some
+candour and a very proper reference to the influence of years.
+
+Sure enough a time will come when he will pay more attention to the
+girls, and think a great deal less of his mother: let us hope she will
+like it as well as she seemed to fancy. But it is odd enough: the very
+women who profess most contempt for mankind as a sex, seem to find even
+its ugliest particulars rather lively and high-minded in their own sons.
+
+The little girl looked longer and with more interest, probably because
+she was in her own house, while he was a traveller and accustomed to
+strange sights. And besides there was no galette in the case with her.
+
+All the time of supper, there was nothing spoken of but my young lord.
+The two parents were both absurdly fond of their child. Monsieur kept
+insisting on his sagacity: how he knew all the children at school by
+name; and when this utterly failed on trial, how he was cautious and
+exact to a strange degree, and, if asked anything, he would sit and
+think--and think, and if he did not know it, "my faith, he wouldn't tell
+you at all--_ma foi, il ne vous le dira pas_": which is certainly a very
+high degree of caution. At intervals, M. Hector would appeal to his
+wife, with his mouth full of beefsteak, as to the little fellow's age at
+such or such a time when he had said or done something memorable; and I
+noticed that Madame usually pooh-poohed these inquiries. She herself was
+not boastful in her vein, but she never had her fill of caressing the
+child; and she seemed to take a gentle pleasure in recalling all that
+was fortunate in his little existence. No schoolboy could have talked
+more of the holidays which were just beginning and less of the black
+school-time which must inevitably follow after. She showed, with a pride
+perhaps partly mercantile in origin, his pockets preposterously swollen
+with tops and whistles and string. When she called at a house in the way
+of business, it appeared he kept her company; and whenever a sale was
+made, received a sou out of the profit. Indeed they spoiled him vastly,
+these two good people. But they had an eye to his manners for all that,
+and reproved him for some little faults in breeding, which occurred from
+time to time during supper.
+
+On the whole, I was not much hurt at being taken for a pedlar. I might
+think that I ate with greater delicacy, or that my mistakes in French
+belonged to a different order; but it was plain that these distinctions
+would be thrown away upon the landlady and the two labourers. In all
+essential things we and the Gilliards cut very much the same figure in
+the alehouse kitchen. M. Hector was more at home, indeed, and took a
+higher tone with the world; but that was explicable on the ground of
+his driving a donkey-cart, while we poor bodies tramped afoot. I daresay
+the rest of the company thought us dying with envy, though in no ill
+sense, to be as far up in the profession as the new arrival.
+
+And of one thing I am sure: that every one thawed and became more
+humanized and conversible as soon as these innocent people appeared upon
+the scene. I would not very readily trust the travelling merchant with
+any extravagant sum of money; but I am sure his heart was in the right
+place. In this mixed world, if you can find one or two sensible places
+in a man--above all, if you should find a whole family living together
+on such pleasant terms,--you may surely be satisfied, and take the rest
+for granted; or, what is a great deal better, boldly make up your mind
+that you can do perfectly well without the rest, and that ten thousand
+bad traits cannot make a single good one any the less good.
+
+It was getting late. M. Hector lit a stable lantern and went off to his
+cart for some arrangements; and my young gentleman proceeded to divest
+himself of the better part of his raiment, and play gymnastics on his
+mother's lap, and thence on to the floor, with accompaniment of
+laughter.
+
+"Are you going to sleep alone?" asked the servant lass.
+
+"There's little fear of that," says Master Gilliard.
+
+"You sleep alone at school," objected his mother. "Come, come, you must
+be a man."
+
+But he protested that school was a different matter from the holidays;
+that there were dormitories at school; and silenced the discussion with
+kisses: his mother smiling, no one better pleased than she.
+
+There certainly was, as he phrased it, very little fear that he should
+sleep alone; for there was but one bed for the trio. We, on our part,
+had firmly protested against one man's accommodation for two; and we had
+a double-bedded pen in the loft of the house, furnished, beside the
+beds, with exactly three hat-pegs and one table. There was not so much
+as a glass of water. But the window would open, by good fortune.
+
+Some time before I fell asleep the loft was full of the sound of mighty
+snoring: the Gilliards, and the labourers, and the people of the inn,
+all at it, I suppose, with one consent. The young moon outside shone
+very clearly over Pont-sur-Sambre, and down upon the alehouse where all
+we pedlars were abed.
+
+
+
+
+ON THE SAMBRE CANALISED
+
+TO LANDRECIES
+
+
+In the morning, when we came downstairs, the landlady pointed out to us
+two pails of water behind the street-door. "_Voilà de l'eau pour vous
+débarbouiller_," says she. And so there we made a shift to wash
+ourselves, while Madame Gilliard brushed the family boots on the outer
+doorstep, and M. Hector, whistling cheerily, arranged some small goods
+for the day's campaign in a portable chest of drawers, which formed a
+part of his baggage. Meanwhile the child was letting off Waterloo
+crackers all over the floor.
+
+I wonder, by-the-bye, what they call Waterloo crackers in France;
+perhaps Austerlitz crackers. There is a great deal in the point of view.
+Do you remember the Frenchman who, travelling by way of Southampton, was
+put down in Waterloo Station, and had to drive across Waterloo Bridge?
+He had a mind to go home again, it seems.
+
+Pont itself is on the river, but whereas it is ten minutes' walk from
+Quartes by dry land, it is six weary kilometres by water. We left our
+bags at the inn, and walked to our canoes through the wet orchards
+unencumbered. Some of the children were there to see us off, but we were
+no longer the mysterious beings of the night before. A departure is much
+less romantic than an unexplained arrival in the golden evening.
+Although we might be greatly taken at a ghost's first appearance, we
+should behold him vanish with comparative equanimity.
+
+The good folk of the inn at Pont, when we called there for the bags,
+were overcome with marveling. At sight of these two dainty little
+boats, with a fluttering Union Jack on each, and all the varnish shining
+from the sponge, they began to perceive that they had entertained angels
+unawares. The landlady stood upon the bridge, probably lamenting she had
+charged so little; the son ran to and fro, and called out the neighbours
+to enjoy the sight; and we paddled away from quite a crowd of rapt
+observers. These gentlemen pedlars, indeed! Now you see their quality
+too late.
+
+The whole day was showery, with occasional drenching plumps. We were
+soaked to the skin, then partially dried in the sun, then soaked once
+more. But there were some calm intervals, and one notably, when we were
+skirting the forest of Mormal, a sinister name to the ear, but a place
+most gratifying to sight and smell. It looked solemn along the
+riverside, drooping its boughs into the water, and piling them up aloft
+into a wall of leaves. What is a forest but a city of nature's own, full
+of hardy and innocuous living things, where there is nothing dead and
+nothing made with the hands, but the citizens themselves are the houses
+and public monuments? There is nothing so much alive, and yet so quiet,
+as a woodland; and a pair of people, swinging past in canoes, feel very
+small and bustling by comparison.
+
+And surely of all smells in the world, the smell of many trees is the
+sweetest and most fortifying. The sea has a rude, pistolling sort of
+odour, that takes you in the nostrils like snuff, and carries with it a
+fine sentiment of open water and tall ships; but the smell of a forest,
+which comes nearest to this in tonic quality, surpasses it by many
+degrees in the quality of softness. Again, the smell of the sea has
+little variety, but the smell of a forest is infinitely changeful; it
+varies with the hour of the day, not in strength merely, but in
+character; and the different sorts of trees, as you go from one zone of
+the wood to another, seem to live among different kinds of atmosphere.
+Usually the resin of the fir predominates. But some woods are more
+coquettish in their habits; and the breath of the forest of Mormal, as
+it came aboard upon us that showery afternoon, was perfumed with nothing
+less delicate than sweetbrier.
+
+I wish our way had always lain among woods. Trees are the most civil
+society. An old oak that has been growing where he stands since before
+the Reformation, taller than many spires, more stately than the greater
+part of mountains, and yet a living thing, liable to sicknesses and
+death, like you and me: is not that in itself a speaking lesson in
+history? But acres on acres full of such patriarchs contiguously rooted,
+their green tops billowing in the wind, their stalwart younglings
+pushing up about their knees: a whole forest, healthy and beautiful,
+giving colour to the light, giving perfume to the air: what is this but
+the most imposing piece in nature's repertory? Heine wished to lie like
+Merlin under the oaks of Broceliande. I should not be satisfied with one
+tree; but if the wood grew together like a banyan grove, I would be
+buried under the tap-root of the whole; my parts should circulate from
+oak to oak; and my consciousness should be diffused abroad in all the
+forest, and give a common heart to that assembly of green spires, so
+that it also might rejoice in its own loveliness and dignity. I think I
+feel a thousand squirrels leaping from bough to bough in my vast
+mausoleum; and the birds and the winds merrily coursing over its uneven,
+leafy surface.
+
+Alas! the forest of Mormal is only a little bit of a wood, and it was
+but for a little way that we skirted by its boundaries. And the rest of
+the time the rain kept coming in squirts and the wind in squalls, until
+one's heart grew weary of such fitful, scolding weather. It was odd how
+the showers began when we had to carry the boats over a lock, and must
+expose our legs. They always did. This is a sort of thing that readily
+begets a personal feeling against nature. There seems no reason why the
+shower should not come five minutes before or five minutes after,
+unless you suppose an intention to affront you. The _Cigarette_ had a
+mackintosh which put him more or less above these contrarieties. But I
+had to bear the brunt uncovered. I began to remember that nature was a
+woman. My companion, in a rosier temper, listened with great
+satisfaction to my Jeremiads, and ironically concurred. He instanced, as
+a cognate matter, the action of the tides, "which," said he, "was
+altogether designed for the confusion of canoeists, except in so far as
+it was calculated to minister to a barren vanity on the part of the
+moon."
+
+At the last lock, some little way out of Landrecies, I refused to go any
+farther; and sat in a drift of rain by the side of the bank to have a
+reviving pipe. A vivacious old man, whom I take to have been the devil,
+drew near and questioned me about our journey. In the fullness of my
+heart I laid bare our plans before him. He said it was the silliest
+enterprise that ever he heard of. Why, did I not know, he asked me, that
+it was nothing but locks, locks, locks, the whole way? not to mention
+that, at this season of the year, we should find the Oise quite dry?
+"Get into a train, my little young man," said he, "and go you away home
+to your parents." I was so astounded at the man's malice that I could
+only stare at him in silence. A tree would never have spoken to me like
+this. At last I got out with some words. We had come from Antwerp
+already, I told him, which was a good long way; and we should do the
+rest in spite of him. Yes, I said, if there were no other reason, I
+would do it now, just because he had dared to say we could not. The
+pleasant old gentleman looked at me sneeringly, made an allusion to my
+canoe, and marched off, waggling his head.
+
+I was still inwardly fuming, when up came a pair of young fellows, who
+imagined I was the _Cigarette's_ servant, on a comparison, I suppose, of
+my bare jersey with the other's mackintosh, and asked me many questions
+about my place and my master's character. I said he was a good enough
+fellow, but had this absurd voyage on the head. "O no, no," said one,
+"you must not say that; it is not absurd; it is very courageous of him."
+I believe these were a couple of angels sent to give me heart again. It
+was truly fortifying to reproduce all the old man's insinuations, as if
+they were original to me in my character of a malcontent footman, and
+have them brushed away like so many flies by these admirable young men.
+
+When I recounted this affair to the _Cigarette_, "They must have a
+curious idea of how English servants behave," says he, dryly, "for you
+treated me like a brute beast at the lock."
+
+I was a good deal mortified; but my temper had suffered, it is a fact.
+
+
+
+
+AT LANDRECIES
+
+
+At Landrecies the rain still fell and the wind still blew; but we found
+a double-bedded room with plenty of furniture, real water-jugs with real
+water in them, and dinner: a real dinner, not innocent of real wine.
+After having been a pedlar for one night, and a butt for the elements
+during the whole of the next day, these comfortable circumstances fell
+on my heart like sunshine. There was an English fruiterer at dinner,
+travelling with a Belgian fruiterer; in the evening at the _café_ we
+watched our compatriot drop a good deal of money at corks, and I don't
+know why, but this pleased us.
+
+It turned out we were to see more of Landrecies than we expected; for
+the weather next day was simply bedlamite. It is not the place one would
+have chosen for a day's rest; for it consists almost entirely of
+fortifications. Within the ramparts a few blocks of houses, a long row
+of barracks, and a church, figure, with what countenance they may, as
+the town. There seems to be no trade; and a shopkeeper from whom I
+bought a sixpenny flint-and-steel was so much affected that he filled my
+pockets with spare flints into the bargain. The only public buildings
+that had any interest for us were the hotel and the _café_. But we
+visited the church. There lies Marshal Clarke. But as neither of us had
+ever heard of that military hero, we bore the associations of the spot
+with fortitude.
+
+In all garrison towns, guard-calls and _réveilles_, and such like, make
+a fine romantic interlude in civic business. Bugles, and drums, and
+fifes are of themselves most excellent things in nature; and when they
+carry the mind to marching armies, and the picturesque vicissitudes of
+war, they stir up something proud in the heart. But in a shadow of a
+town like Landrecies, with little else moving, these points of war made
+a proportionate commotion. Indeed, they were the only things to
+remember. It was just the place to hear the round going by at night in
+the darkness, with the solid tramp of men marching, and the startling
+reverberations of the drum. It reminded you that even this place was a
+point in the great warfaring system of Europe, and might on some future
+day be ringed about with cannon smoke and thunder, and make itself a
+name among strong towns.
+
+The drum, at any rate, from its martial voice and notable physiological
+effect--nay, even from its cumbrous and comical shape,--stands alone
+among the instruments of noise. And if it be true, as I have heard it
+said, that drums are covered with asses' skin, what a picturesque irony
+is there in that! As if this long-suffering animal's hide had not been
+sufficiently belaboured during life, now by Lyonnese costermongers, now
+by presumptuous Hebrew prophets, it must be stripped from his poor
+hinder quarters after death, stretched on a drum, and beaten night after
+night round the streets of every garrison town in Europe. And up the
+heights of Alma and Spicheren, and wherever death has his red flag
+a-flying, and sounds his own potent tuck upon the cannons, there also
+must the drummer-boy, hurrying with white face over fallen comrades,
+batter and bemaul this slip of skin from the loins of peaceable donkeys.
+
+Generally a man is never more uselessly employed than when he is at this
+trick of bastinadoing asses' hide. We know what effect it has in life,
+and how your dull ass will not mend his pace with beating. But in this
+state of mummy and melancholy survival of itself, when the hollow skin
+reverberates to the drummer's wrist, and each dub-a-dub goes direct to a
+man's heart, and puts madness there, and that disposition of the pulses
+which we, in our big way of talking nickname Heroism:--is there not
+something in the nature of a revenge upon the donkey's persecutors? Of
+old, he might say, you drubbed me up hill and down dale, and I must
+endure; but now that I am dead, those dull thwacks that were scarcely
+audible in country lanes have become stirring music in front of the
+brigade; and for every blow that you lay on my old great-coat you will
+see a comrade stumble and fall.
+
+Not long after the drums had passed the _café_ the _Cigarette_ and the
+_Arethusa_ began to grow sleepy, and set out for the hotel, which was
+only a door or two away. But although we had been somewhat indifferent
+to Landrecies, Landrecies had not been indifferent to us. All day, we
+learned, people had been running out between the squalls to visit our
+two boats. Hundreds of persons, so said report, although it fitted ill
+with our idea of the town--hundreds of persons had inspected them where
+they lay in a coal-shed. We were becoming lions in Landrecies, who had
+been only pedlars the night before in Pont.
+
+And now, when we left the _café_, we were pursued and overtaken at
+the hotel door by no less a person than the _Juge de Paix:_ a
+functionary, as far as I can make out, of the character of a Scots
+Sheriff-Substitute. He gave us his card and invited us to sup with
+him on the spot, very neatly, very gracefully, as Frenchmen can do
+these things. It was for the credit of Landrecies, said he; and
+although we knew very well how little credit we could do the place,
+we must have been churlish fellows to refuse an invitation so
+politely introduced.
+
+The house of the Judge was close by; it was a well-appointed bachelor's
+establishment, with a curious collection of old brass warming-pans upon
+the walls. Some of these were most elaborately carved. It seemed a
+picturesque idea for a collector. You could not help thinking how many
+nightcaps had wagged over these warming-pans in past generations; what
+jests may have been made and kisses taken, while they were in service;
+and how often they had been uselessly paraded in the bed of death. If
+they could only speak, at what absurd, indecorous, and tragical scenes
+had they not been present!
+
+The wine was excellent. When we made the Judge our compliments upon a
+bottle, "I do not give it you as my worst," said he. I wonder when
+Englishmen will learn these hospitable graces. They are worth learning;
+they set off life, and make ordinary moments ornamental.
+
+There were two other Landrecienses present. One was the collector of
+something or other, I forget what; the other, we were told, was the
+principal notary of the place. So it happened that we all five more or
+less followed the law. At this rate, the talk was pretty certain to
+become technical. The _Cigarette_ expounded the Poor Laws very
+magisterially. And a little later I found myself laying down the Scots
+Law of Illegitimacy, of which I am glad to say I know nothing. The
+collector and the notary, who were both married men, accused the Judge,
+who was a bachelor, of having started the subject. He deprecated the
+charge, with a conscious, pleased air, just like all the men I have ever
+seen, be they French or English. How strange that we should all, in our
+unguarded moments, rather like to be thought a bit of a rogue with the
+women!
+
+As the evening went on, the wine grew more to my taste; the spirits
+proved better than the wine; the company was genial. This was the
+highest water mark of popular favour on the whole cruise. After all,
+being in a Judge's house, was there not something semi-official in the
+tribute? And so, remembering what a great country France is, we did full
+justice to our entertainment. Landrecies had been a long while asleep
+before we returned to the hotel; and the sentries on the ramparts were
+already looking for daybreak.
+
+
+
+
+SAMBRE AND OISE CANAL
+
+CANAL BOATS
+
+
+Next day we made a late start in the rain. The Judge politely escorted
+us to the end of the lock under an umbrella. We had now brought
+ourselves to a pitch of humility in the matter of weather not often
+attained except in the Scottish Highlands. A rag of blue sky or a
+glimpse of sunshine set our hearts singing; and when the rain was not
+heavy, we counted the day almost fair.
+
+Long lines of barges lay one after another along the canal, many of them
+looking mighty spruce and ship-shape in their jerkin of Archangel tar
+picked out with white and green. Some carried gay iron railings, and
+quite a parterre of flower-pots. Children played on the decks, as
+heedless of the rain as if they had been brought up on Loch Carron side;
+men fished over the gunwale, some of them under umbrellas; women did
+their washing; and every barge boasted its mongrel cur by way of
+watch-dog. Each one barked furiously at the canoes, running alongside
+until he had got to the end of his own ship, and so passing on the word
+to the dog aboard the next. We must have seen something like a hundred
+of these embarkations in the course of that day's paddle, ranged one
+after another like the houses in a street; and from not one of them were
+we disappointed of this accompaniment. It was like visiting a menagerie,
+the _Cigarette_ remarked.
+
+These little cities by the canal side had a very odd effect upon the
+mind. They seemed, with their flower-pots and smoking chimneys, their
+washings and dinners, a rooted piece of nature in the scene; and yet if
+only the canal below were to open, one junk after another would hoist
+sail or harness horses and swim away into all parts of France; and the
+impromptu hamlet would separate, house by house, to the four winds. The
+children who played together to-day by the Sambre and Oise Canal, each
+at his own father's threshold, when and where might they next meet?
+
+For some time past the subject of barges had occupied a great deal of
+our talk, and we had projected an old age on the canals of Europe. It
+was to be the most leisurely of progresses, now on a swift river at the
+tail of a steam-boat, now waiting horses for days together on some
+inconsiderable junction. We should be seen pottering on deck in all the
+dignity of years, our white beards falling into our laps. We were ever
+to be busied among paint-pots; so that there should be no white fresher,
+and no green more emerald than ours, in all the navy of the canals.
+There should be books in the cabin, and tobacco-jars, and some old
+Burgundy as red as a November sunset and as odorous as a violet in
+April. There should be a flageolet, whence the _Cigarette_, with cunning
+touch, should draw melting music under the stars; or perhaps, laying
+that aside, upraise his voice--somewhat thinner than of yore, and with
+here and there a quaver, or call it a natural grace-note--in rich and
+solemn psalmody.
+
+All this, simmering in my mind, set me wishing to go aboard one of these
+ideal houses of lounging, I had plenty to choose from, as I coasted one
+after another, and the dogs bayed at me for a vagrant. At last I saw a
+nice old man and his wife looking at me with some interest, so I gave
+them good-day and pulled up alongside. I began with a remark upon their
+dog, which had somewhat the look of a pointer; thence I slid into a
+compliment on Madame's flowers, and thence into a word in praise of
+their way of life.
+
+If you ventured on such an experiment in England you would get a slap in
+the face at once. The life would be shown to be a vile one, not without
+a side shot at your better fortune. Now, what I like so much in France
+is the clear unflinching recognition by everybody of his own luck. They
+all know on which side their bread is buttered, and take a pleasure in
+showing it to others, which is surely the better part of religion. And
+they scorn to make a poor mouth over their poverty, which I take to be
+the better part of manliness. I have heard a woman, in quite a better
+position at home, with a good bit of money in hand, refer to her own
+child with a horrid whine as "a poor man's child." I would not say such
+a thing to the Duke of Westminster. And the French are full of this
+spirit of independence. Perhaps it is the result of republican
+institutions, as they call them. Much more likely it is because there
+are so few people really poor that the whiners are not enough to keep
+each other in countenance.
+
+The people on the barge were delighted to hear that I admired their
+state. They understood perfectly well, they told me, how Monsieur envied
+them. Without doubt Monsieur was rich; and in that case he might make a
+canal boat as pretty as a villa--_joli comme un château_. And with that
+they invited me on board their own water villa. They apologized for
+their cabin; they had not been rich enough to make it as it ought to be.
+
+"The fire should have been here, at this side," explained the husband.
+"Then one might have a writing-table in the middle--books--and"
+(comprehensively) "all. It would be quite coquettish--_ça serait
+tout-à-fait coquet_." And he looked about him as though the improvements
+were already made. It was plainly not the first time that he had thus
+beautified his cabin in imagination; and when next he makes a hit, I
+should expect to see the writing-table in the middle.
+
+Madame had three birds in a cage. They were no great thing, she
+explained. Fine birds were so dear. They had sought to get a
+_Hollandais_ last winter in Rouen (Rouen? thought I; and is this whole
+mansion, with its dogs and birds and smoking chimneys, so far a
+traveller as that? and as homely an object among the cliffs and orchards
+of the Seine as on the green plains of Sambre?)--they had sought to get
+a _Hollandais_ last winter in Rouen; but these cost fifteen francs
+apiece--picture it--fifteen francs!
+
+"_Pour un tout petit oiseau_--For quite a little bird," added the
+husband.
+
+As I continued to admire, the apologetics died away, and the good people
+began to brag of their barge, and their happy condition in life, as if
+they had been Emperor and Empress of the Indies. It was, in the Scots
+phrase, a good hearing, and put me in good humour with the world. If
+people knew what an inspiriting thing it is to hear a man boasting, so
+long as he boasts of what he really has, I believe they would do it more
+freely and with a better grace.
+
+They began to ask about our voyage. You should have seen how they
+sympathized. They seemed half ready to give up their barge and follow
+us. But these _canaletti_ are only gypsies semi-domesticated. The
+semi-domestication came out in rather a pretty form. Suddenly Madame's
+brow darkened. "_Cependant_," she began, and then stopped; and then
+began again by asking me if I were single.
+
+"Yes," said I.
+
+"And your friend who went by just now?"
+
+He also was unmarried.
+
+O then--all was well. She could not have wives left alone at home; but
+since there were no wives in the question, we were doing the best we
+could.
+
+"To see about one in the world," said the husband, "_il n'y a que
+ça_--there is nothing else worth while. A man, look you, who sticks in
+his own village like a bear," he went on, "--very well, he sees
+nothing. And then death is the end of all. And he has seen nothing."
+
+Madame reminded her husband of an Englishman who had come up this canal
+in a steamer.
+
+"Perhaps Mr. Moens in the _Ytene_," I suggested.
+
+"That's it," assented the husband. "He had his wife and family with him,
+and servants. He came ashore at all the locks and asked the name of the
+villages, whether from boatmen or lock-keepers; and then he wrote, wrote
+them down. Oh, he wrote enormously! I suppose it was a wager."
+
+A wager was a common enough explanation for our own exploits, but it
+seemed an original reason for taking notes.
+
+
+
+
+THE OISE IN FLOOD
+
+
+Before nine next morning the two canoes were installed on a light
+country cart at Étreux: and we were soon following them along the side
+of a pleasant valley full of hop-gardens and poplars. Agreeable villages
+lay here and there on the slope of the hill; notably, Tupigny, with the
+hop-poles hanging their garlands in the very street, and the houses
+clustered with grapes. There was a faint enthusiasm on our passage;
+weavers put their heads to the windows; children cried out in ecstasy at
+sight of the two "boaties"--_barquettes_; and bloused pedestrians, who
+were acquainted with our charioteer, jested with him on the nature of
+his freight.
+
+We had a shower or two, but light and flying. The air was clean and
+sweet among all these green fields and green things growing. There was
+not a touch of autumn in the weather. And when, at Vadencourt, we
+launched from a little lawn opposite a mill, the sun broke forth and set
+all the leaves shining in the valley of the Oise.
+
+The river was swollen with the long rains. From Vadencourt all the way
+to Origny, it ran with ever-quickening speed, taking fresh heart at each
+mile, and racing as though it already smelt the sea. The water was
+yellow and turbulent, swung with an angry eddy among half-submerged
+willows, and made an angry clatter along stony shores. The course kept
+turning and turning in a narrow and well-timbered valley. Now the river
+would approach the side, and run griding along the chalky base of the
+hill, and show us a few open colza-fields among the trees. Now it would
+skirt the garden-walls of houses, where we might catch a glimpse through
+a doorway, and see a priest pacing in the chequered sunlight. Again,
+the foliage closed so thickly in front that there seemed to be no issue;
+only a thicket of willows, overtopped by elms and poplars, under which
+the river ran flush and fleet, and where a kingfisher flew past like a
+piece of the blue sky. On these different manifestations the sun poured
+its clear and catholic looks. The shadows lay as solid on the swift
+surface of the stream as on the stable meadows. The light sparkled
+golden in the dancing poplar leaves, and brought the hills in communion
+with our eyes. And all the while the river never stopped running or took
+breath; and the reeds along the whole valley stood shivering from top to
+toe.
+
+There should be some myth (but if there is, I know it not) founded on
+the shivering of the reeds. There are not many things in nature more
+striking to man's eye. It is such an eloquent pantomime of terror; and
+to see such a number of terrified creatures taking sanctuary in every
+nook along the shore is enough to infect a silly human with alarm.
+Perhaps they are only a-cold, and no wonder, standing waist-deep in the
+stream. Or perhaps they have never got accustomed to the speed and fury
+of the river's flux, or the miracle of its continuous body. Pan once
+played upon their forefathers; and so, by the hands of his river, he
+still plays upon these later generations down all the valley of the
+Oise; and plays the same air, both sweet and shrill, to tell us of the
+beauty and the terror of the world.
+
+The canoe was like a leaf in the current. It took it up and shook it,
+and carried it masterfully away, like a Centaur carrying off a nymph. To
+keep some command on our direction required hard and diligent plying of
+the paddle. The river was in such a hurry for the sea! Every drop of
+water ran in a panic, like as many people in a frightened crowd. But
+what crowd was ever so numerous, or so single-minded? All the objects of
+sight went by at a dance measure; the eyesight raced with the racing
+river; the exigencies of every moment kept the pegs screwed so tight
+that our being quivered like a well-tuned instrument, and the blood
+shook oft its lethargy, and trotted through all the highways and byways
+of the veins and arteries, and in and out of the heart, as if
+circulation were but a holiday journey, and not the daily moil of
+threescore years and ten. The reeds might nod their heads in warning,
+and with tremulous gestures tell how the river was as cruel as it was
+strong and cold, and how death lurked in the eddy underneath the
+willows. But the reeds had to stand where they were, and those who stand
+still are always timid advisers. As for us, we could have shouted aloud.
+If this lively and beautiful river were, indeed, a thing of death's
+contrivance, the old ashen rogue had famously outwitted himself with us.
+I was living three to the minute. I was scoring points against him every
+stroke of my paddle, every turn of the stream, I have rarely had better
+profit of my life.
+
+For I think we may look upon our little private war with death somewhat
+in this light. If a man knows he will sooner or later be robbed upon a
+journey, he will have a bottle of the best in every inn, and look upon
+all his extravagances as so much gained upon the thieves. And, above
+all, where instead of simply spending, he makes a profitable investment
+for some of his money, when it will be out of risk of loss. So every bit
+of brisk living, and, above all, when it is healthful, is just so much
+gained upon the wholesale filcher, death. We shall have the less in our
+pockets, the more in our stomach, when he cries stand and deliver. A
+swift stream is a favourite artifice of his, and one that brings him in
+a comfortable thing per annum; but when he and I come to settle our
+accounts, I shall whistle in his face for these hours upon the upper
+Oise.
+
+Towards afternoon we got fairly drunken with the sunshine and the
+exhilaration of the pace. We could no longer contain ourselves and our
+content. The canoes were too small for us; we must be out and stretch
+ourselves on shore. And so in a green meadow we bestowed our limbs on
+the grass, and smoked deifying tobacco and proclaimed the world
+excellent. It was the last good hour of the day, and I dwell upon it
+with extreme complacency.
+
+On one side of the valley, high up on the chalky summit of the hill, a
+ploughman with his team appeared and disappeared at regular intervals.
+At each revelation he stood still for a few seconds against the sky: for
+all the world (as the _Cigarette_ declared) like a toy Burns who should
+have just ploughed up the Mountain Daisy. He was the only living thing
+within view, unless we are to count the river.
+
+On the other side of the valley a group of red roofs and a belfry showed
+among the foliage. Thence some inspired bell-ringer made the afternoon
+musical on a chime of bells. There was something very sweet and taking
+in the air he played; and we thought we had never heard bells speak so
+intelligibly or sing so melodiously as these. It must have been to some
+such measure that the spinners and the young maids sang "Come away,
+Death," in the Shakespearian Illyria. There is so often a threatening
+note, something blatant and metallic, in the voice of bells, that I
+believe we have fully more pain than pleasure from hearing them; but
+these, as they sounded abroad, now high, now low, now with a plaintive
+cadence that caught the ear like the burthen of a popular song, were
+always moderate and tunable, and seemed to fall in with the spirit of
+still, rustic places, like the noise of a waterfall or the babble of a
+rookery in spring. I could have asked the bell-ringer for his blessing,
+good, sedate old man, who swung the rope so gently to the time of his
+meditations. I could have blessed the priest or the heritors, or whoever
+may be concerned with such affairs in France, who had left these sweet
+old bells to gladden the afternoon, and not held meetings, and made
+collections, and had their names repeatedly printed in the local paper,
+to rig up a peal of brand-new, brazen, Birmingham-hearted substitutes,
+who should bombard their sides to the provocation of a brand-new
+bell-ringer, and fill the echoes of the valley with terror and riot.
+
+At last the bells ceased, and with their note the sun withdrew. The
+piece was at an end; shadow and silence possessed the valley of the
+Oise. We took to the paddle with glad hearts, like people who have sat
+out a noble performance and returned to work. The river was more
+dangerous here; it ran swifter, the eddies were more sudden and violent.
+All the way down we had had our fill of difficulties. Sometimes it was a
+weir which could be shot, sometimes one so shallow and full of stakes
+that we must withdraw the boats from the water and carry them round. But
+the chief sort of obstacle was a consequence of the late high winds.
+Every two or three hundred yards a tree had fallen across the river, and
+usually involved more than another in its fall. Often there was free
+water at the end, and we could steer round the leafy promontory and hear
+the water sucking and bubbling among the twigs. Often, again, when the
+tree reached from bank to bank, there was room by lying close to shoot
+through underneath, canoe and all. Sometimes it was necessary to get out
+upon the trunk itself and pull the boats across; and sometimes, when the
+stream was too impetuous for this, there was nothing for it but to land
+and "carry over." This made a fine series of accidents in the day's
+career, and kept us aware of ourselves.
+
+Shortly after our re-embarkation, while I was leading by a long way, and
+still full of a noble, exulting spirit in honour of the sun, the swift
+pace, and the church bells, the river made one of its leonine pounces
+round a corner, and I was aware of another fallen tree within a
+stone-cast. I had my back-board down in a trice, and aimed for a place
+where the trunk seemed high enough above the water, and the branches
+not too thick to let me slip below. When a man has just vowed eternal
+brotherhood with the universe, he is not in a temper to take great
+determinations coolly, and this, which might have been a very important
+determination for me, had not been taken under a happy star. The tree
+caught me about the chest, and while I was yet struggling to make less
+of myself and get through, the river took the matter out of my hands,
+and bereaved me of my boat. The _Arethusa_ swung round broadside on,
+leaned over, ejected so much of me as still remained on board, and, thus
+disencumbered, whipped under the tree, righted, and went merrily away
+down stream.
+
+I do not know how long it was before I scrambled on to the tree to which
+I was left clinging, but it was longer than I cared about. My thoughts
+were of a grave and almost sombre character, but I still clung to my
+paddle. The stream ran away with my heels as fast as I could pull up my
+shoulders, and I seemed, by the weight, to have all the water of the
+Oise in my trousers-pockets. You can never know, till you try it, what a
+dead pull a river makes against a man. Death himself had me by the
+heels, for this was his last ambuscado, and he must now join personally
+in the fray. And still I held to my paddle. At last I dragged myself on
+to my stomach on the trunk, and lay there a breathless sop, with a
+mingled sense of humour and injustice. A poor figure I must have
+presented to Burns upon the hill-top with his team. But there was the
+paddle in my hand. On my tomb, if ever I have one, I mean to get these
+words inscribed: "He clung to his paddle."
+
+The _Cigarette_ had gone past a while before; for, as I might have
+observed, if I had been a little less pleased with the universe at the
+moment, there was a clear way round the tree-top at the farther side. He
+had offered his services to haul me out, but as I was then already on my
+elbows I had declined and sent him down stream after the truant
+_Arethusa_. The stream was too rapid for a man to mount with one canoe,
+let alone two, upon his hands. So I crawled along the trunk to shore,
+and proceeded down the meadows by the riverside. I was so cold that my
+heart was sore. I had now an idea of my own why the reeds so bitterly
+shivered. I could have given any of them a lesson. The _Cigarette_
+remarked facetiously that he thought I was "taking exercise" as I drew
+near, until he made out for certain that I was only twittering with
+cold. I had a rub down with a towel, and donned a dry suit from the
+india-rubber bag. But I was not my own man again for the rest of the
+voyage. I had a queasy sense that I wore my last dry clothes upon my
+body. The struggle had tired me; and perhaps, whether I knew it or not,
+I was a little dashed in spirit. The devouring element in the universe
+had leaped out against me, in this green valley quickened by a running
+stream. The bells were all very pretty in their way, but I had heard
+some of the hollow notes of Pan's music. Would the wicked river drag me
+down by the heels, indeed? and look so beautiful all the time? Nature's
+good-humour was only skin-deep after all.
+
+There was still a long way to go by the winding course of the stream,
+and darkness had fallen, and a late bell was ringing in Origny
+Sainte-Benoîte, when we arrived.
+
+
+
+
+ORIGNY SAINTE-BENOÎTE
+
+A BY-DAY
+
+
+The next day was Sunday, and the church bells had little rest; indeed, I
+do not think I remember anywhere else so great a choice of services as
+were here offered to the devout. And while the bells made merry in the
+sunshine, all the world with his dog was out shooting among the beets
+and colza.
+
+In the morning a hawker and his wife went down the street at a
+foot-pace, singing to a very slow, lamentable music, "_O France, mes
+amours_." It brought everybody to the door; and when our landlady called
+in the man to buy the words, he had not a copy of them left. She was not
+the first nor the second who had been taken with the song. There is
+something very pathetic in the love of the French people, since the war,
+for dismal patriotic music-making. I have watched a forester from Alsace
+while someone was singing "_Les malheurs de la France_," at a baptismal
+party in the neighbourhood of Fontainebleau. He arose from the table and
+took his son aside, close by where I was standing. "Listen, listen," he
+said, bearing on the boy's shoulder, "and remember this, my son." A
+little after he went out into the garden suddenly, and I could hear him
+sobbing in the darkness.
+
+The humiliation of their arms and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine made a
+sore pull on the endurance of this sensitive people; and their hearts
+are still hot, not so much against Germany as against the Empire. In
+what other country will you find a patriotic ditty bring all the world
+into the street? But affliction heightens love; and we shall never know
+we are Englishmen until we have lost India. Independent America is still
+the cross of my existence; I cannot think of Farmer George without
+abhorrence; and I never feel more warmly to my own land than when I see
+the Stars and Stripes, and remember what our empire might have been.
+
+The hawker's little book, which I purchased, was a curious mixture. Side
+by side with the flippant, rowdy nonsense of the Paris music-halls,
+there were many pastoral pieces, not without a touch of poetry, I
+thought, and instinct with the brave independence of the poorer class in
+France. There you might read how the wood-cutter gloried in his axe, and
+the gardener scorned to be ashamed of his spade. It was not very well
+written, this poetry of labour, but the pluck of the sentiment redeemed
+what was weak or wordy in the expression. The martial and the patriotic
+pieces, on the other hand, were tearful, womanish productions one and
+all. The poet had passed under the Caudine Forks; he sang for an army
+visiting the tomb of its old renown, with arms reversed; and sang not of
+victory, but of death. There was a number in the hawker's collection
+called "Conscrits Français," which may rank among the most dissuasive
+war-lyrics on record. It would not be possible to fight at all in such a
+spirit. The bravest conscript would turn pale if such a ditty were
+struck up beside him on the morning of battle; and whole regiments would
+pile their arms to its tune.
+
+If Fletcher of Saltoun is in the right about the influence of national
+songs, you would say France was come to a poor pass. But the thing will
+work its own cure, and a sound-hearted and courageous people weary at
+length of sniveling over their disasters. Already Paul Déroulède has
+written some manly military verses. There is not much of the
+trumpet-note in them, perhaps, to stir a man's heart in his bosom; they
+lack the lyrical elation, and move slowly; but they are written in a
+grave, honourable, stoical spirit, which should carry soldiers far in a
+good cause. One feels as if one would like to trust Déroulède with
+something. It will be happy if he can so far inoculate his
+fellow-countrymen that they may be trusted with their own future. And in
+the meantime, here is an antidote to "French Conscripts" and much other
+doleful versification.
+
+We had left the boats over-night in the custody of one whom we shall
+call Carnival. I did not properly catch his name, and perhaps that was
+not unfortunate for him, as I am not in a position to hand him down with
+honour to posterity. To this person's premises we strolled in the course
+of the day, and found quite a little deputation inspecting the canoes.
+There was a stout gentleman with a knowledge of the river, which he
+seemed eager to impart. There was a very elegant young gentleman in a
+black coat, with a smattering of English, who led the talk at once to
+the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. And then there were three handsome
+girls from fifteen to twenty; and an old gentleman in a blouse, with no
+teeth to speak of, and a strong country accent. Quite the pick of
+Origny, I should suppose.
+
+The _Cigarette_ had some mysteries to perform with his rigging in the
+coach-house, so I was left to do the parade single-handed. I found
+myself very much of a hero whether I would or not. The girls were full
+of little shudderings over the dangers of our journey. And I thought it
+would be ungallant not to take my cue from the ladies. My mishap of
+yesterday, told in an off-hand way, produced a deep sensation. It was
+Othello over again, with no less than three Desdemonas and a sprinkling
+of sympathetic senators in the background. Never were the canoes more
+flattered, or flattered more adroitly.
+
+"It is like a violin!" cried one of the girls in an ecstasy.
+
+"I thank you for the word, mademoiselle," said I. "All the more since
+there are people who call out to me that it is like a coffin."
+
+"Oh I but it is really like a violin. It is finished like a violin," she
+went on.
+
+"And polished like a violin," added a senator.
+
+"One has only to stretch the cords," concluded another, "and then
+tum-tumty-tum"--he imitated the result with spirit.
+
+Was not this a graceful little ovation? Where this people finds the
+secret of its pretty speeches, I cannot imagine; unless the secret
+should be no other than a sincere desire to please! But then no disgrace
+is attached in France to saying a thing neatly; whereas in England to
+talk like a book is to give in one's resignation to society.
+
+The old gentleman in the blouse stole into the coach-house, and somewhat
+irrelevantly informed the _Cigarette_ that he was the father of the
+three girls and four more: quite an exploit for a Frenchman.
+
+"You are very fortunate," answered the _Cigarette_ politely.
+
+And the old gentleman, having apparently gained his point, stole away
+again.
+
+We all got very friendly together. The girls proposed to start with us
+on the morrow, if you please! And, jesting apart, every one was anxious
+to know the hour of our departure. Now, when you are going to crawl into
+your canoe from a bad launch, a crowd, however friendly, is undesirable;
+and so we told them not before twelve, and mentally determined to be off
+by ten at latest.
+
+Towards evening we went abroad again to post some letters. It was cool
+and pleasant; the long village was quite empty, except for one or two
+urchins who followed us as they might have followed a menagerie; the
+hills and the tree-tops looked in from all sides through the clear air;
+and the bells were chiming for yet another service.
+
+Suddenly we sighted the three girls standing, with a fourth sister, in
+front of a shop on the wide selvage of the roadway. We had been very
+merry with them a little while ago, to be sure. But what was the
+etiquette of Origny? Had it been a country road, of course we should
+have spoken to them; but here, under the eyes of all the gossips, ought
+we to do even as much as bow? I consulted the _Cigarette_.
+
+"Look," said he.
+
+I looked. There were the four girls on the same spot; but now four backs
+were turned to us, very upright and conscious. Corporal Modesty had
+given the word of command, and the well-disciplined picket had gone
+right-about-face like a single person. They maintained this formation
+all the while we were in sight; but we heard them tittering among
+themselves, and the girl whom we had not met laughed with open mouth,
+and even looked over her shoulder at the enemy. I wonder was it
+altogether modesty after all? or in part a sort of country provocation?
+
+As we were returning to the inn, we beheld something floating in the
+ample field of golden evening sky, above the chalk cliffs and the trees
+that grow along their summit. It was too high up, too large, and too
+steady for a kite; and as it was dark, it could not be a star. For
+although a star were as black as ink and as rugged as a walnut, so amply
+does the sun bathe heaven with radiance, that it would sparkle like a
+point of light for us. The village was dotted with people with their
+heads in air; and the children were in a bustle all along the street and
+far up the straight road that climbs the hill, where we could still see
+them running in loose knots. It was a balloon, we learned, which had
+left St. Quentin at half-past five that evening. Mighty composedly the
+majority of the grown people took it. But we were English, and were soon
+running up the hill with the best. Being travellers ourselves in a small
+way, we would fain have seen these other travellers alight.
+
+The spectacle was over by the time we gained the top of the hill. All
+the gold had withered out of the sky, and the balloon had disappeared.
+Whither? I ask myself; caught up into the seventh heaven? or come safely
+to land somewhere in that blue uneven distance, into which the roadway
+dipped and melted before our eyes? Probably the aeronauts were already
+warming themselves at a farm chimney, for they say it is cold in these
+unhomely regions of the air. The night fell swiftly. Roadside trees and
+disappointed sightseers, returning though the meadows, stood out in
+black against a margin of low red sunset. It was cheerfuller to face the
+other way, and so down the hill we went, with a full moon, the colour of
+a melon, swinging high above the wooded valley, and the white cliffs
+behind us faintly reddened by the fire of the chalk kilns.
+
+The lamps were lighted, and the salads were being made in Origny
+Sainte-Benoîte by the river.
+
+
+
+
+ORIGNY SAINTE-BENOÎTE
+
+THE COMPANY AT TABLE
+
+
+Although we came late for dinner, the company at table treated us to
+sparkling wine. "That is how we are in France," said one. "Those who sit
+down with us are our friends." And the rest applauded.
+
+They were three altogether, and an odd trio to pass the Sunday with.
+
+Two of them were guests like ourselves, both men of the north. One
+ruddy, and of a full habit of body, with copious black hair and beard,
+the intrepid hunter of France, who thought nothing so small, not even a
+lark or a minnow, but he might vindicate his prowess by its capture. For
+such a great, healthy man, his hair flourishing like Samson's, his
+arteries running buckets of red blood, to boast of these infinitesimal
+exploits, produced a feeling of disproportion in the world, as when a
+steam-hammer is set to cracking nuts. The other was a quiet, subdued
+person, blond and lymphatic and sad, with something the look of a Dane:
+"_Tristes têtes de Danois!_" as Gaston Lafenestre used to say.
+
+I must not let that name go by without a word for the best of all good
+fellows now gone down into the dust. We shall never again see Gaston in
+his forest costume--he was Gaston with all the world, in affection, not
+in disrespect--nor hear him wake the echoes of Fontainebleau with the
+woodland horn. Never again shall his kind smile put peace among all
+races of artistic men, and make the Englishman at home in France. Never
+more shall the sheep, who were not more innocent at heart than he, sit
+all unconsciously for his industrious pencil. He died too early, at the
+very moment when he was beginning to put forth fresh sprouts, and
+blossom into something worthy of himself; and yet none who knew him will
+think he lived in vain. I never knew a man so little, for whom yet I had
+so much affection; and I find it a good test of others, how much they
+had learned to understand and value him. His was indeed a good influence
+in life while he was still among us; he had a fresh laugh, it did you
+good to see him; and however sad he may have been at heart, he always
+bore a bold and cheerful countenance, and took fortune's worst as it
+were the showers of spring. But now his mother sits alone by the side of
+Fontainebleau woods, where he gathered mushrooms in his hardy and
+penurious youth.
+
+Many of his pictures found their way across the Channel: besides those
+which were stolen, when a dastardly Yankee left him alone in London with
+two English pence, and perhaps twice as many words of English. If any
+one who reads these lines should have a scene of sheep, in the manner of
+Jacques, with this fine creature's signature, let him tell himself that
+one of the kindest and bravest of men has lent a hand to decorate his
+lodging. There may be better pictures in the National Gallery; but not a
+painter among the generations had a better heart. Precious in the sight
+of the Lord of humanity, the Psalms tell us, is the death of his saints.
+It had need to be precious; for it is very costly, when by the stroke, a
+mother is left desolate, and the peace-maker, and _peace-looker_, of a
+whole society is laid in the ground with Caesar and the Twelve Apostles.
+
+There is something lacking among the oaks of Fontainebleau; and when the
+dessert comes in at Barbizon, people look to the door for a figure that
+is gone.
+
+The third of our companions at Origny was no less a person than the
+landlady's husband: not properly the landlord, since he worked himself
+in a factory during the day, and came to his own house at evening as a
+guest: a man worn to skin and bone by perpetual excitement, with baldish
+head, sharp features, and swift, shining eyes. On Saturday, describing
+some paltry adventure at a duck-hunt, he broke a plate into a score of
+fragments. Whenever he made a remark, he would look all round the table
+with his chin raised, and a spark of green light in either eye, seeking
+approval. His wife appeared now and again in the doorway of the room,
+where she was superintending dinner, with a "Henri, you forget
+yourself," or a "Henri, you can surely talk without making such a
+noise." Indeed, that was what the honest fellow could not do. On the
+most trifling matter his eyes kindled, his fist visited the table, and
+his voice rolled abroad in changeful thunder. I never saw such a petard
+of a man; I think the devil was in him. He had two favourite
+expressions--"it is logical," or illogical, as the case might be; and
+this other, thrown out with a certain bravado, as a man might unfurl a
+banner, at the beginning of many a long and sonorous story: "I am a
+proletarian, you see." Indeed, we saw it very well. God forbid that ever
+I should find him handling a gun in Paris streets! That will not be a
+good moment for the general public.
+
+I thought his two phrases very much represented the good and evil of his
+class, and to some extent of his country. It is a strong thing to say
+what one is, and not be ashamed of it; even although it be in doubtful
+taste to repeat the statement too often in one evening. I should not
+admire it in a duke, of course; but as times go, the trait is honourable
+in a workman. On the other hand, it is not at all a strong thing to put
+one's reliance upon logic; and our own logic particularly, for it is
+generally wrong. We never know where we are to end, if once we begin
+following words or doctors. There is an upright stock in a man's own
+heart, that is trustier than any syllogism; and the eyes, and the
+sympathies and appetites, know a thing or two that have never yet been
+stated in controversy. Reasons are as plentiful as blackberries; and,
+like fisticuffs, they serve impartially with all sides. Doctrines do not
+stand or fall by their proofs, and are only logical in so far as they
+are cleverly put. An able controversialist no more than an able general
+demonstrates the justice of his cause. But France is all gone wandering
+after one or two big words; it will take some time before they can be
+satisfied that they are no more than words, however big; and when once
+that is done, they will perhaps find logic less diverting.
+
+The conversation opened with details of the day's shooting. When all the
+sportsmen of a village shoot over the village territory _pro indiviso_,
+it is plain that many questions of etiquette and priority must arise.
+
+"Here now," cried the landlord, brandishing a plate, "here is a field of
+beet-root. Well. Here am I then. I advance, do I not? _Eh bien!
+sacristi_," and the statement, waxing louder, rolls off into a
+reverberation of oaths, the speaker glaring about for sympathy, and
+everybody nodding his head to him in the name of peace.
+
+The ruddy Northman told some tales of his own prowess in keeping order:
+notably one of a Marquis.
+
+"Marquis," I said, "if you take another step I fire upon you. You have
+committed a dirtiness, Marquis."
+
+Whereupon, it appeared, the Marquis touched his cap and withdrew.
+
+The landlord applauded noisily. "It was well done," he said. "He did all
+that he could. He admitted he was wrong." And then oath upon oath. He
+was no marquis-lover either, but he had a sense of justice in him, this
+proletarian host of ours.
+
+From the matter of hunting, the talk veered into a general comparison of
+Paris and the country. The proletarian beat the table like a drum in
+praise of Paris. "What is Paris? Paris is the cream of France. There are
+no Parisians: it is you and I and everybody who are Parisians. A man has
+eighty chances per cent to get on in the world in Paris." And he drew
+a vivid sketch of the workman in a den no bigger than a dog-hutch,
+making articles that were to go all over the world. "_Eh bien, quoi,
+c'est magnifique, ça!_" cried he.
+
+The sad Northman interfered in praise of a peasant's life; he thought
+Paris bad for men and women; "centralization," said he----
+
+But the landlord was at his throat in a moment. It was all logical, he
+showed him, and all magnificent. "What a spectacle! What a glance for an
+eye!" And the dishes reeled upon the table under a cannonade of blows.
+
+Seeking to make peace, I threw in a word in praise of the liberty of
+opinion in France. I could hardly have shot more amiss. There was an
+instant silence, and a great wagging of significant heads. They did not
+fancy the subject, it was plain; but they gave me to understand that the
+sad Northman was a martyr on account of his views. "Ask him a bit," said
+they. "Just ask him."
+
+"Yes, sir," said he, in his quiet way, answering me, although I had not
+spoken, "I am afraid there is less liberty of opinion in France than you
+may imagine." And with that he dropped his eyes, and seemed to consider
+the subject at an end.
+
+Our curiosity was mightily excited at this. How, or why, or when, was
+this lymphatic bagman martyred? We concluded at once it was on some
+religious question, and brushed up our memories of the Inquisition,
+which were principally drawn from Poe's horrid story, and the sermon in
+"Tristram Shandy," I believe.
+
+On the morrow we had an opportunity of going further into the question;
+for when we rose very early to avoid a sympathizing deputation at our
+departure, we found the hero up before us. He was breaking his fast on
+white wine and raw onions, in order to keep up the character of martyr,
+I conclude. We had a long conversation, and made out what we wanted in
+spite of his reserve. But here was a truly curious circumstance. It
+seems possible for two Scotsmen and a Frenchman to discuss during a
+long half-hour, and each nationality have a different idea in view
+throughout. It was not till the very end that we discovered his heresy
+had been political, or that he suspected our mistake. The terms and
+spirit in which he spoke of his political beliefs were, in our eyes,
+suited to religious beliefs. And _vice versa_.
+
+Nothing could be more characteristic of the two countries. Politics are
+the religion of France; as Nanty Ewart would have said, "A d----d bad
+religion"; while we, at home, keep most of our bitterness for little
+differences about a hymn-book, or a Hebrew word which perhaps neither of
+the parties can translate. And perhaps the misconception is typical of
+many others that may never be cleared up: not only between people of
+different race, but between those of different sex.
+
+As for our friend's martyrdom, he was a Communist, or perhaps only a
+Communard, which is a very different thing; and had lost one or more
+situations in consequence. I think he had also been rejected in
+marriage; but perhaps he had a sentimental way of considering business
+which deceived me. He was a mild, gentle creature, anyway; and I hope he
+has got a better situation, and married a more suitable wife since
+then.
+
+
+
+
+DOWN THE OISE
+
+TO MOY
+
+
+Carnival notoriously cheated us at first. Finding us easy in our ways,
+he regretted having let us oil so cheaply; and taking me aside, told me
+a cock-and-bull story with the moral of another five francs for the
+narrator. The thing was palpably absurd; but I paid up, and at once
+dropped all friendliness of manner, and kept him in his place as an
+inferior with freezing British dignity. He saw in a moment that he had
+gone too far, and killed a willing horse; his face fell; I am sure he
+would have refunded if he could only have thought of a decent pretext.
+He wished me to drink with him, but I would none of his drinks. He grew
+pathetically tender in his professions; but I walked beside him in
+silence or answered him in stately courtesies; and when we got to the
+landing-place, passed the word in English slang to the _Cigarette_.
+
+In spite of the false scent we had thrown out the day before, there must
+have been fifty people about the bridge. We were as pleasant as we could
+be with all but Carnival. We said good-bye, shaking hands with the old
+gentleman who knew the river and the young gentleman who had a
+smattering of English; but never a word for Carnival. Poor Carnival!
+here was a humiliation. He who had been so much identified with the
+canoes, who had given orders in our name, who had shown off the boats
+and even the boatmen like a private exhibition of his own, to be now so
+publicly shamed by the lions of his caravan! I never saw anybody look
+more crestfallen than he. He hung in the background, coming timidly
+forward ever and again as he thought he saw some symptom of a relenting
+humour, and falling hurriedly back when he encountered a cold stare. Let
+us hope it will be a lesson to him.
+
+I would not have mentioned Carnival's peccadillo had not the thing been
+so uncommon in France. This, for instance, was the only case of
+dishonesty or even sharp practice in our whole voyage. We talk very much
+about our honesty in England. It is a good rule to be on your guard
+wherever you hear great professions about a very little piece of virtue.
+If the English could only hear how they are spoken of abroad they might
+confine themselves for a while to remedying the fact; and perhaps even
+when that was done, give us fewer of their airs.
+
+The young ladies, the graces of Origny, were not present at our start,
+but when we got round to the second bridge, behold, it was black with
+sightseers! We were loudly cheered, and for a good way below young lads
+and lasses ran along the bank, still cheering. What with current and
+paddling, we were flashing along like swallows. It was no joke to keep
+up with us upon the woody shore. But the girls picked up their skirts as
+if they were sure they had good ankles, and followed until their breath
+was out. The last to weary were the three graces and a couple of
+companions; and just as they too had had enough, the foremost of the
+three leaped upon a tree-stump and kissed her hand to the canoeists. Not
+Diana herself, although this was more of a Venus after all, could have
+done a graceful thing more gracefully. "Come back again!" she cried; and
+all the others echoed her; and the hills about Origny repeated the
+words, "Come back." But the river had us round an angle in a twinkling,
+and we were alone with the green trees and running water.
+
+Come back? There is no coming back, young ladies, on the impetuous
+stream of life.
+
+    "The merchant bows unto the seaman's star,
+    The ploughman from the sun his season takes."
+
+And we must all set our pocket-watches by the clock of fate. There is a
+headlong, forthright tide, that bears away man with his fancies like a
+straw, and runs fast in time and space. It is full of curves like this,
+your winding river of the Oise; and lingers and returns in pleasant
+pastorals; and yet, rightly thought upon, never returns at all. For
+though it should revisit the same acre of meadow in the same hour, it
+will have made an ample sweep between-whiles; many little streams will
+have fallen in; many exhalations risen towards the sun; and even
+although it were the same acre, it will no more be the same river of
+Oise. And thus, O graces of Origny, although the wandering fortune of my
+life should carry me back again to where you await death's whistle by
+the river, that will not be the old I who walks the street; and those
+wives and mothers, say, will those be you?
+
+There was never any mistake about the Oise, as a matter of fact. In
+these upper reaches it was still in a prodigious hurry for the sea. It
+ran so fast and merrily, through all the windings of its channel, that I
+strained my thumb, fighting with the rapids, and had to paddle all the
+rest of the way with one hand turned up. Sometimes it had to serve
+mills; and being still a little river, ran very dry and shallow in the
+meanwhile. We had to put our legs out of the boat, and shove ourselves
+off the sand of the bottom with our feet. And still it went on its way
+singing among the poplars, and making a green valley in the world. After
+a good woman, and a good book, and tobacco, there is nothing so
+agreeable on earth as a river. I forgave it its attempt on my life;
+which was after all one part owing to the unruly winds of heaven that
+had blown down the tree, one part to my own mismanagement, and only a
+third part to the river itself, and that not out of malice, but from its
+great preoccupation over its business of getting to the sea. A difficult
+business, too; for the detours it had to make are not to be counted. The
+geographers seem to have given up the attempt; for I found no map
+represent the infinite contortion of its course. A fact will say more
+than any of them. After we had been some hours, three if I mistake not,
+flitting by the trees at this smooth, break-neck gallop, when we came
+upon a hamlet and asked where we were, we had got no farther than four
+kilometres (say two miles and a half) from Origny. If it were not for
+the honour of the thing (in the Scots saying), we might almost as well
+have been standing still.
+
+We lunched on a meadow inside a parallelogram of poplars. The leaves
+danced and prattled in the wind all round about us. The river hurried on
+meanwhile, and seemed to chide at our delay. Little we cared. The river
+knew where it was going; not so we: the less our hurry, where we found
+good quarters and a pleasant theatre for a pipe. At that hour,
+stockbrokers were shouting in Paris Bourse for two or three per cent;
+but we minded them as little as the sliding stream, and sacrificed a
+hecatomb of minutes to the gods of tobacco and digestion. Hurry is the
+resource of the faithless. Where a man can trust his own heart, and
+those of his friends, to-morrow is as good as to-day. And if he die in
+the meanwhile, why then, there he dies, and the question is solved.
+
+We had to take to the canal in the course of the afternoon; because,
+where it crossed the river, there was, not a bridge, but a siphon. If it
+had not been for an excited fellow on the bank, we should have paddled
+right into the siphon, and thenceforward not paddled any more. We met a
+man, a gentleman, on the tow-path, who was much interested in our
+cruise. And I was witness to a strange seizure of lying suffered by the
+_Cigarette:_ who, because his knife came from Norway, narrated all sorts
+of adventures in that country, where he has never been. He was quite
+feverish at the end, and pleaded demoniacal possession.
+
+Moy (pronounce Moÿ) was a pleasant little village, gathered round a
+château in a moat. The air was perfumed with hemp from neighbouring
+fields. At the Golden Sheep we found excellent entertainment. German
+shells from the siege of La Fère, Nürnberg figures, gold-fish in a bowl,
+and all manner of knick-knacks, embellished the public room. The
+landlady was a stout, plain, short-sighted, motherly body, with
+something not far short of a genius for cookery. She had a guess of her
+excellence herself. After every dish was sent in, she would come and
+look on at the dinner for a while, with puckered, blinking eyes. "_C'est
+bon, n'est-ce pas?_" she would say; and when she had received a proper
+answer, she disappeared into the kitchen. That common French dish,
+partridge and cabbages, became a new thing in my eyes at the Golden
+Sheep; and many subsequent dinners have bitterly disappointed me in
+consequence. Sweet was our rest in the Golden Sheep at Moy.
+
+
+
+
+LA FÈRE OF CURSED MEMORY
+
+
+We lingered in Moy a good part of the day, for we were fond of being
+philosophical, and scorned long journeys and early starts on principle.
+The place, moreover, invited to repose. People in elaborate shooting
+costumes sallied from the château with guns and game-bags; and this was
+a pleasure in itself, to remain behind while these elegant
+pleasure-seekers took the first of the morning. In this way, all the
+world may be an aristocrat, and play the duke among marquises, and the
+reigning monarch among dukes, if he will only outvie them in
+tranquility. An imperturbable demeanour comes from perfect patience.
+Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or
+misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a
+thunderstorm.
+
+We made a very short day of it to La Fère; but the dusk was falling, and
+a small rain had begun before we stowed the boats. La Fère is a
+fortified town in a plain, and has two belts of rampart. Between the
+first and the second extends a region of waste land and cultivated
+patches. Here and there along the wayside were posters forbidding
+trespass in the name of military engineering. At last, a second gateway
+admitted us to the town itself. Lighted windows looked gladsome, whiffs
+of comfortable cookery came abroad upon the air. The town was full of
+the military reserve, out for the French Autumn Manoeuvres, and the
+reservists walked speedily and wore their formidable great-coats. It was
+a fine night to be within doors over dinner, and hear the rain upon the
+windows.
+
+The _Cigarette_ and I could not sufficiently congratulate each other on
+the prospect, for we had been told there was a capital inn at La Fère.
+Such a dinner as we were going to eat! such beds as we were to sleep
+in!--and all the while the rain raining on houseless folk over all the
+poplared countryside! It made our mouths water. The inn bore the name of
+some woodland animal, stag, or hart, or hind, I forget which. But I
+shall never forget how spacious and how eminently habitable it looked as
+we drew near. The carriage entry was lighted up, not by intention, but
+from the mere superfluity of fire and candle in the house. A rattle of
+many dishes came to our ears; we sighted a great field of tablecloth;
+the kitchen glowed like a forge and smelt like a garden of things to
+eat.
+
+Into this, the inmost shrine and physiological heart of a hostelry, with
+all its furnaces in action, and all its dressers charged with viands,
+you are now to suppose us making our triumphal entry, a pair of damp
+rag-and-bone men, each with a limp india-rubber bag upon his arm. I do
+not believe I have a sound view of that kitchen; I saw it through a sort
+of glory: but it seemed to me crowded with the snowy caps of cookmen,
+who all turned round from their saucepans and looked at us with
+surprise. There was no doubt about the landlady, however: there she was,
+heading her army, a flushed, angry woman, full of affairs. Her I asked
+politely--too politely, thinks the _Cigarette_--if we could have beds:
+she surveying us coldly from head to foot.
+
+"You will find beds in the suburb," she remarked. "We are too busy for
+the like of you."
+
+If we could make an entrance, change our clothes, and order a bottle of
+wine, I felt sure we could put things right; so said I: "If we cannot
+sleep, we may at least dine,"--and was for depositing my bag.
+
+What a terrible convulsion of nature was that which followed in the
+landlady's face! She made a run at us, and stamped her foot.
+
+"Out with you--out of the door!" she screeched. "_Sortez! sortez! sortez
+par la porte!_"
+
+I do not know how it happened, but next moment we were out in the rain
+and darkness, and I was cursing before the carriage entry like a
+disappointed mendicant. Where were the boating men of Belgium? where the
+Judge and his good wines? and where the graces of Origny? Black, black
+was the night after the firelit kitchen; but what was that to the
+blackness in our heart? This was not the first time that I have been
+refused a lodging. Often and often have I planned what I should do if
+such a misadventure happened to me again. And nothing is easier to plan.
+But to put in execution, with the heart boiling at the indignity? Try
+it; try it only once; and tell me what you did.
+
+It is all very fine to talk about tramps and morality. Six hours of
+police surveillance (such as I have had), or one brutal rejection from
+an inn-door, change your views upon the subject like a course of
+lectures. As long as you keep in the upper regions, with all the world
+bowing to you as you go, social arrangements have a very handsome air;
+but once get under the wheels, and you wish society were at the devil. I
+will give most respectable men a fortnight of such a life, and then I
+will offer them twopence for what remains of their morality.
+
+For my part, when I was turned out of the Stag, or the Hind, or whatever
+it was, I would have set the temple of Diana on fire if it had been
+handy. There was no crime complete enough to express my disapproval of
+human institutions. As for the _Cigarette_, I never knew a man so
+altered. "We have been taken for pedlars again," said he. "Good God,
+what it must be to be a pedlar in reality!" He particularized a
+complaint for every joint in the landlady's body. Timon was a
+philanthropist alongside of him. And then, when he was at the top of his
+maledictory bent, he would suddenly break away and begin whimperingly to
+commiserate the poor. "I hope to God," he said,--and I trust the prayer
+was answered,--"that I shall never be uncivil to a pedlar." Was this the
+imperturbable _Cigarette_? This, this was he. O change beyond report,
+thought, or belief!
+
+Meantime the heaven wept upon our heads; and the windows grew brighter
+as the night increased in darkness. We trudged in and out of La Fère
+streets; we saw shops, and private houses where people were copiously
+dining; we saw stables where carters' nags had plenty of fodder and
+clean straw; we saw no end of reservists, who were very sorry for
+themselves this wet night, I doubt not, and yearned for their country
+homes; but had they not each man his place in La Fère barracks? And we,
+what had we?
+
+There seemed to be no other inn in the whole town. People gave us
+directions, which we followed as best we could, generally with the
+effect of bringing us out again upon the scene of our disgrace. We were
+very sad people indeed by the time we had gone all over La Fère; and the
+_Cigarette_ had already made up his mind to lie under a poplar and sup
+off a loaf of bread. But right at the other end, the house next the
+town-gate was full of light and bustle. "_Bazin, aubergiste, loge à
+pied_," was the sign. "_À la Croix de Malte_." There were we received.
+
+The room was full of noisy reservists drinking and smoking; and we were
+very glad indeed when the drums and bugles began to go about the
+streets, and one and all had to snatch shakoes and be off for the
+barracks.
+
+Bazin was a tall man, running to fat: soft-spoken, with a delicate,
+gentle face. We asked him to share our wine; but he excused himself,
+having pledged reservists all day long. This was a very different type
+of the workman-innkeeper from the bawling disputatious fellow at Origny.
+He also loved Paris, where he had worked as a decorative painter in his
+youth. There were such opportunities for self-instruction there, he
+said. And if any one has read Zola's description of the workman's
+marriage-party visiting the Louvre, they would do well to have heard
+Bazin by way of antidote. He had delighted in the museums in his youth.
+"One sees there little miracles of work," he said; "that is what makes a
+good workman; it kindles a spark." We asked him how he managed in La
+Fère. "I am married," he said, "and I have my pretty children. But
+frankly, it is no life at all. From morning to night I pledge a pack of
+good enough fellows who know nothing."
+
+It faired as the night went on, and the moon came out of the clouds. We
+sat in front of the door, talking softly with Bazin. At the guardhouse
+opposite, the guard was being for ever turned out, as trains of field
+artillery kept clanking in out of the night, or patrols of horsemen
+trotted by in their cloaks. Madame Bazin came out after a while; she was
+tired with her day's work, I suppose; and she nestled up to her husband
+and laid her head upon his breast. He had his arm about her, and kept
+gently patting her on the shoulder. I think Bazin was right, and he was
+really married. Of how few people can the same be said!
+
+Little did the Bazins know how much they served us. We were charged for
+candles, for food and drink, and for the beds we slept in. But there was
+nothing in the bill for the husband's pleasant talk; nor for the pretty
+spectacle of their married life. And there was yet another item
+uncharged. For these people's politeness really set us up again in our
+own esteem. We had a thirst for consideration; the sense of insult was
+still hot in our spirits; and civil usage seemed to restore us to our
+position in the world.
+
+How little we pay our way in life! Although we have our purses
+continually in our hand, the better part of service goes still
+unrewarded. But I like to fancy that a grateful spirit gives as good as
+it gets. Perhaps the Bazins knew how much I liked them? perhaps they
+also were healed of some slights by the thanks that I gave them in my
+manner?
+
+
+
+
+DOWN THE OISE
+
+THROUGH THE GOLDEN VALLEY
+
+
+Below La Fère the river runs through a piece of open pastoral country;
+green, opulent, loved by breeders; called the Golden Valley. In wide
+sweeps, and with a swift and equable gallop, the ceaseless stream of
+water visits and makes green the fields. Kine, and horses, and little
+humorous donkeys, browse together in the meadows, and come down in
+troops to the riverside to drink. They make a strange feature in the
+landscape; above all when they are startled, and you see them galloping
+to and fro with their incongruous forms and faces. It gives a feeling as
+of great, unfenced pampas, and the herds of wandering nations. There
+were hills in the distance upon either hand; and on one side, the river
+sometimes bordered on the wooded spurs of Coucy and St. Gobain.
+
+The artillery were practicing at La Fère, and soon the cannon of heaven
+joined in that loud play. Two continents of cloud met and exchanged
+salvos overhead; while all round the horizon we could see sunshine and
+clear air upon the hills. What with the guns and the thunder, the herds
+were all frightened in the Golden Valley. We could see them tossing
+their heads, and running to and fro in timorous indecision; and when
+they had made up their minds, and the donkey followed the horse, and the
+cow was after the donkey, we could hear their hooves thundering abroad
+over the meadows. It had a martial sound, like cavalry charges. And
+altogether, as far as the ears are concerned, we had a very rousing
+battle-piece performed for our amusement.
+
+At last the guns and the thunder dropped off; the sun shone on the wet
+meadows; the air was scented with the breath of rejoicing trees and
+grass; and the river kept unweariedly carrying us on at its best pace.
+There was a manufacturing district about Chauny, and after that the
+banks grew so high that they hid the adjacent country, and we could see
+nothing but clay sides, and one willow after another. Only, here and
+there, we passed by a village or a ferry, and some wondering child upon
+the bank would stare after us until we turned the corner. I daresay we
+continued to paddle in that child's dreams for many a night after.
+
+Sun and shower alternated like day and night, making the hours longer by
+their variety. When the showers were heavy, I could feel each drop
+striking through my jersey to my warm skin; and the accumulation of
+small shocks put me nearly beside myself. I decided I should buy a
+mackintosh at Noyon. It is nothing to get wet; but the misery of these
+individual pricks of cold all over my body at the same instant of time
+made me flail the water with my paddle like a madman. The _Cigarette_
+was greatly amused by these ebullitions. It gave him something else to
+look at besides clay banks and willows.
+
+All the time, the river stole away like a thief in straight places, or
+swung round corners with an eddy; the willows nodded, and were
+undermined all day long; the clay banks tumbled in; the Oise, which had
+been so many centuries making the Golden Valley, seemed to have changed
+its fancy, and to be bent upon undoing its performance. What a number of
+things a river does, by simply following Gravity in the innocence of its
+heart!
+
+
+
+
+NOYON CATHEDRAL
+
+
+Noyon stands about a mile from the river, in a little plain surrounded
+by wooded hills, and entirely covers an eminence with its tile roofs,
+surmounted by a long, straight-backed cathedral with two stiff towers.
+As we got into the town, the tile roofs seemed to tumble uphill one upon
+another, in the oddest disorder; but for all their scrambling, they did
+not attain above the knees of the cathedral, which stood, upright and
+solemn, over all. As the streets drew near to this presiding genius,
+through the market-place under the Hôtel de Ville, they grew emptier and
+more composed. Blank walls and shuttered windows were turned to the
+great edifice, and grass grew on the white causeway. "Put off thy shoes
+from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground."
+The Hôtel du Nord, nevertheless, lights its secular tapers within a
+stone-cast of the church; and we had the superb east-end before our eyes
+all morning from the window of our bedroom. I have seldom looked on the
+east-end of a church with more complete sympathy. As it flanges out in
+three wide terraces and settles down broadly on the earth, it looks like
+the poop of some great old battle-ship. Hollow-backed buttresses carry
+vases, which figure for the stern lanterns. There is a roll in the
+ground, and the towers just appear above the pitch of the roof, as
+though the good ship were bowing lazily over an Atlantic swell. At any
+moment it might be a hundred feet away from you, climbing the next
+billow. At any moment a window might open, and some old admiral thrust
+forth a cocked hat, and proceed to take an observation. The old
+admirals sail the sea no longer; the old ships of battle are all broken
+up, and live only in pictures; but this, that was a church before ever
+they were thought upon, is still a church, and makes as brave an
+appearance by the Oise. The cathedral and the river are probably the two
+oldest things for miles around; and certainly they have both a grand old
+age.
+
+The Sacristan took us to the top of one of the towers, and showed us the
+five bells hanging in their loft. From above, the town was a tessellated
+pavement of roofs and gardens; the old line of rampart was plainly
+traceable; and the Sacristan pointed out to us, far across the plain, in
+a bit of gleaming sky between two clouds, the towers of Château Coucy.
+
+I find I never weary of great churches. It is my favourite kind of
+mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made
+a cathedral: a thing as single and specious as a statue to the first
+glance, and yet, on examination, as lively and interesting as a forest
+in detail. The height of spires cannot be taken by trigonometry; they
+measure absurdly short, but how tall they are to the admiring eye! And
+where we have so many elegant proportions, growing one out of the other,
+and all together into one, it seems as if proportion transcended itself,
+and became something different and more imposing. I could never fathom
+how a man dares to lift up his voice to preach in a cathedral. What is
+he to say that will not be an anti-climax? For though I have heard a
+considerable variety of sermons, I never yet heard one that was so
+expressive as a cathedral. 'Tis the best preacher itself, and preaches
+day and night; not only telling you of man's art and aspirations in the
+past, but convicting your own soul of ardent sympathies; or rather, like
+all good preachers, it sets you preaching to yourself;--and every man is
+his own doctor of divinity in the last resort.
+
+As I sat outside of the hotel in the course of the afternoon, the sweet
+groaning thunder of the organ floated out of the church like a summons.
+I was not averse, liking the theatre so well, to sit out an act or two
+of the play, but I could never rightly make out the nature of the
+service I beheld. Four or five priests and as many choristers were
+singing _Miserere_ before the high altar when I went in. There was no
+congregation but a few old women on chairs and old men kneeling on the
+pavement. After a while a long train of young girls, walking two and
+two, each with a lighted taper in her hand, and all dressed in black
+with a white veil, came from behind the altar, and began to descend the
+nave; the four first carrying a Virgin and child upon a table. The
+priests and choristers arose from their knees and followed after,
+singing "Ave Mary" as they went. In this order they made the circuit of
+the cathedral, passing twice before me where I leaned against a pillar.
+The priest who seemed of most consequence was a strange, down-looking
+old man. He kept mumbling prayers with his lips; but as he looked upon
+me darkling, it did not seem as if prayer were uppermost in his heart.
+Two others, who bore the burthen of the chant, were stout, brutal,
+military-looking men of forty, with bold, over-fed eyes; they sang with
+some lustiness, and trolled forth "Ave Mary" like a garrison catch. The
+little girls were timid and grave. As they footed slowly up the aisle,
+each one took a moment's glance at the Englishman; and the big nun who
+played marshal fairly stared him out of countenance. As for the
+choristers, from first to last they misbehaved as only boys can
+misbehave; and cruelly marred the performance with their antics.
+
+I understood a great deal of the spirit of what went on. Indeed it would
+be difficult not to understand the _Miserere_, which I take to be the
+composition of an atheist. If it ever be a good thing to take such
+despondency to heart, the _Miserere_ is the right music, and a cathedral
+a fit scene. So far I am at one with the Catholics:--an odd name for
+them, after all? But why, in God's name, these holiday choristers? why
+these priests who steal wandering looks about the congregation while
+they feign to be at prayer? why this fat nun, who rudely arranges her
+procession and shakes delinquent virgins by the elbow? why this
+spitting, and snuffing, and forgetting of keys, and the thousand and one
+little misadventures that disturb a frame of mind laboriously edified
+with chants and organings? In any playhouse reverend fathers may see
+what can be done with a little art, and how, to move high sentiments, it
+is necessary to drill the supernumeraries and have every stool in its
+proper place.
+
+One other circumstance distressed me. I could bear a _Miserere_ myself,
+having had a good deal of open-air exercise of late; but I wished the
+old people somewhere else. It was neither the right sort of music nor
+the right sort of divinity for men and women who have come through most
+accidents by this time, and probably have an opinion of their own upon
+the tragic element in life. A person up in years can generally do his
+own _Miserere_ for himself; although I notice that such an one often
+prefers _Jubilate Deo_ for his ordinary singing. On the whole, the most
+religious exercise for the aged is probably to recall their own
+experience; so many friends dead, so many hopes disappointed, so many
+slips and stumbles, and withal so many bright days and smiling
+providences; there is surely the matter of a very eloquent sermon in all
+this.
+
+On the whole, I was greatly solemnized. In the little pictorial map of
+our whole Inland Voyage, which my fancy still preserves, and sometimes
+unrolls for the amusement of odd moments, Noyon cathedral figures on a
+most preposterous scale, and must be nearly as large as a department. I
+can still see the faces of the priests as if they were at my elbow, and
+hear _Ave Maria, ora pro nobis_, sounding through the church. All Noyon
+is blotted out for me by these superior memories; and I do not care to
+say more about the place. It was but a stack of brown roofs at the
+best, where I believe people live very reputably in a quiet way; but the
+shadow of the church falls upon it when the sun is low, and the five
+bells are heard in all quarters, telling that the organ has begun. If
+ever I join the Church of Rome, I shall stipulate to be Bishop of Noyon
+on the Oise.
+
+
+
+
+DOWN THE OISE
+
+TO COMPIÈGNE
+
+
+The most patient people grow weary at last with being continually wetted
+with rain; except of course in the Scottish Highlands, where there are
+not enough fine intervals to point the difference. That was like to be
+our case, the day we left Noyon. I remember nothing of the voyage; it
+was nothing but clay banks and willows, and rain; incessant, pitiless,
+beating rain; until we stopped to lunch at a little inn at Pimprez,
+where the canal ran very near the river. We were so sadly drenched that
+the landlady lit a few sticks in the chimney for our comfort; there we
+sat in a steam of vapour, lamenting our concerns. The husband donned a
+game-bag and strode out to shoot; the wife sat in a far corner watching
+us. I think we were worth looking at. We grumbled over the misfortune of
+La Fère; we forecast other La Fères in the future;--although things went
+better with the _Cigarette_ for spokesman; he had more aplomb altogether
+than I; and a dull, positive way of approaching a landlady that carried
+off the india-rubber bags. Talking of La Fère put us talking of the
+reservists.
+
+"Reservery," said he, "seems a pretty mean way to spend one's autumn
+holiday."
+
+"About as mean," returned I dejectedly, "as canoeing."
+
+"These gentlemen travel for their pleasure?" asked the landlady, with
+unconscious irony.
+
+It was too much. The scales fell from our eyes. Another wet day, it was
+determined, and we put the boats into the train.
+
+The weather took the hint. That was our last wetting. The afternoon
+faired up: grand clouds still voyaged in the sky, but now singly, and
+with a depth of blue around their path; and a sunset in the daintiest
+rose and gold inaugurated a thick night of stars and a month of unbroken
+weather. At the same time, the river began to give us a better outlook
+into the country. The banks were not so high, the willows disappeared
+from along the margin, and pleasant hills stood all along its course and
+marked their profile on the sky.
+
+In a little while the canal, coming to its last lock, began to discharge
+its water-houses on the Oise; so that we had no lack of company to fear.
+Here were all our old friends; the _Deo Gratias_ of Condé and the _Four
+Sons of Aymon_ journeyed cheerily down stream along with us; we
+exchanged waterside pleasantries with the steersman perched among the
+lumber, or the driver hoarse with bawling to his horses; and the
+children came and looked over the side as we paddled by. We had never
+known all this while how much we missed them; but it gave us a fillip to
+see the smoke from their chimneys.
+
+A little below this junction we made another meeting of yet more
+account. For there we were joined by the Aìsne, already a far-travelled
+river and fresh out of Champagne. Here ended the adolescence of the
+Oise; this was his marriage-day; thenceforward he had a stately,
+brimming march, conscious of his own dignity and sundry dams. He became
+a tranquil feature in the scene. The trees and towns saw themselves in
+him, as in a mirror. He carried the canoes lightly on his broad breast;
+there was no need to work hard against an eddy: but idleness became the
+order of the day, and mere straightforward dipping of the paddle, now on
+this side, now on that, without intelligence or effort. Truly we were
+coming into halcyon weather upon all accounts, and were floated towards
+the sea like gentlemen.
+
+We made Compiègne as the sun was going down: a fine profile of a town
+above the river. Over the bridge, a regiment was parading to the drum.
+People loitered on the quay, some fishing, some looking idly at the
+stream. And as the two boats shot in along the water, we could see them
+pointing them out and speaking one to another. We landed at a floating
+lavatory, where the washerwomen were still beating the clothes.
+
+
+
+
+AT COMPIÈGNE
+
+
+We put up at a big, bustling hotel in Compiègne, where nobody observed
+our presence.
+
+Reservery and general _militarismus_ (as the Germans call it) were
+rampant. A camp of conical white tents without the town looked like a
+leaf out of a picture Bible; sword-belts decorated the walls of the
+_cafés_, and the streets kept sounding all day long with military music.
+It was not possible to be an Englishman and avoid a feeling of elation;
+for the men who followed the drums were small, and walked shabbily. Each
+man inclined at his own angle, and jolted to his own convenience, as he
+went. There was nothing of the superb gait with which a regiment of tall
+Highlanders moves behind its music, solemn and inevitable, like a
+natural phenomenon. Who that has seen it can forget the drum-major
+pacing in front, the drummers' tiger-skins, the pipers' swinging plaids,
+the strange elastic rhythm of the whole regiment footing it in time--and
+the bang of the drum, when the brasses cease, and the shrill pipes take
+up the martial story in their place?
+
+A girl, at school in France, began to describe one of our regiments on
+parade to her French schoolmates, and as she went on, she told me, the
+recollection grew so vivid, she became so proud to be the countrywoman
+of such soldiers, and so sorry to be in another country, that her voice
+failed her and she burst into tears. I have never forgotten that girl;
+and I think she very nearly deserves a statue. To call her a young lady,
+with all its niminy associations, would be to offer her an insult. She
+may rest assured of one thing: although she never should marry a heroic
+general, never see any great or immediate result of her life, she will
+not have lived in vain for her native land.
+
+But though French soldiers show to ill advantage on parade, on the march
+they are gay, alert, and willing like a troop of fox-hunters. I remember
+once seeing a company pass through the forest of Fontainebleau, on the
+Chailly road, between the Bas Bréau and the Reine Blanche. One fellow
+walked a little before the rest, and sang a loud, audacious marching
+song. The rest bestirred their feet, and even swung their muskets in
+time. A young officer on horseback had hard ado to keep his countenance
+at the words. You never saw anything so cheerful and spontaneous as
+their gait; schoolboys do not look more eagerly at hare and hounds; and
+you would have thought it impossible to tire such willing marchers.
+
+My great delight in Compiègne was the town-hall. I doted upon the
+town-hall. It is a monument of Gothic insecurity, all turreted, and
+gargoyled, and slashed, and bedizened with half a score of architectural
+fancies. Some of the niches are gilt and painted; and in a great square
+panel in the centre, in black relief on a gilt ground, Louis XII. rides
+upon a pacing horse, with hand on hip and head thrown back. There is
+royal arrogance in every line of him; the stirruped foot projects
+insolently from the frame; the eye is hard and proud; the very horse
+seems to be treading with gratification over prostrate serfs, and to
+have the breath of the trumpet in his nostrils. So rides for ever, on
+the front of the town-hall, the good king Louis XII., the father of his
+people.
+
+Over the king's head, in the tall centre turret, appears the dial of a
+clock; and high above that, three little mechanical figures, each one
+with a hammer in his hand, whose business it is to chime out the hours
+and halves and quarters for the burgesses of Compiègne. The centre
+figure has a gilt breast-plate; the two others wear gilt trunk-hose;
+and they all three have elegant, flapping hats like cavaliers. As the
+quarter approaches, they turn their heads and look knowingly one to the
+other; and then, _kling_ go the three hammers on three little bells
+below. The hour follows, deep and sonorous, from the interior of the
+tower; and the gilded gentlemen rest from their labours with
+contentment.
+
+I had a great deal of healthy pleasure from their manoeuvres, and took
+good care to miss as few performances as possible; and I found that even
+the _Cigarette_, while he pretended to despise my enthusiasm, was more
+or less a devotee himself. There is something highly absurd in the
+exposition of such toys to the outrages of winter on a housetop. They
+would be more in keeping in a glass case before a Nürnberg clock. Above
+all, at night, when the children are abed, and even grown people are
+snoring under quilts, does it not seem impertinent to leave these
+ginger-bread figures winking and tinkling to the stars and the rolling
+moon? The gargoyles may fitly enough twist their ape-like heads; fitly
+enough may the potentate bestride his charger, like a centurion in an
+old German print of the _Via Dolorosa_; but the toys should be put away
+in a box among some cotton, until the sun rises, and the children are
+abroad again to be amused.
+
+In Compiègne post-office a great packet of letters awaited us; and the
+authorities were, for this occasion only, so polite as to hand them over
+upon application.
+
+In some ways, our journey may be said to end with this letter-bag at
+Compiègne. The spell was broken. We had partly come home from that
+moment.
+
+No one should have any correspondence on a journey; it is bad enough to
+have to write, but the receipt of letters is the death of all holiday
+feeling.
+
+"Out of my country and myself I go." I wish to take a dive among new
+conditions for a while, as into another element. I have nothing to do
+with my friends or my affections for the time; when I came away, I left
+my heart at home in a desk, or sent it forward with my portmanteau to
+await me at my destination. After my journey is over, I shall not fail
+to read your admirable letters with the attention they deserve. But I
+have paid all this money, look you, and paddled all these strokes, for
+no other purpose than to be abroad; and yet you keep me at home with
+your perpetual communications. You tug the string, and I feel that I am
+a tethered bird. You pursue me all over Europe with the little vexations
+that I came away to avoid. There is no discharge in the war of life, I
+am well aware; but shall there not be so much as a week's furlough?
+
+We were up by six, the day we were to leave. They had taken so little
+note of us that I hardly thought they would have condescended on a bill.
+But they did, with some smart particulars too, and we paid in a
+civilized manner to an uninterested clerk, and went out of that hotel,
+with the india-rubber bags, unremarked. No one cared to know about us.
+It is not possible to rise before a village; but Compiègne was so grown
+a town, that it took its ease in the morning, and we were up and away
+while it was still in dressing-gown and slippers. The streets were left
+to people washing doorsteps; nobody was in full dress but the cavaliers
+upon the town-hall; they were all washed with dew, spruce in their
+gilding, and full of intelligence and a sense of professional
+responsibility. _Kling_ went they on the bells for the half-past six as
+we went by. I took it kindly of them to make me this parting compliment;
+they never were in better form, not even at noon upon a Sunday.
+
+There was no one to see us off but the early washerwomen--early and
+late--who were already beating the linen in their floating lavatory on
+the river. They were very merry and matutinal in their ways; plunged
+their arms boldly in, and seemed not to feel the shock. It would be
+dispiriting to me, this early beginning and first cold dabble of a most
+dispiriting day's work. But I believe they would have been as unwilling
+to change days with us as we could be to change with them. They crowded
+to the door to watch us paddle away into the thin sunny mists upon the
+river; and shouted heartily alter us till we were through the bridge.
+
+
+
+
+CHANGED TIMES
+
+
+There is a sense in which those mists never rose from off our journey;
+and from that time forth they lie very densely in my note-book. As long
+as the Oise was a small rural river, it took us near by people's doors,
+and we could hold a conversation with natives in the riparian fields.
+But now that it had grown so wide, the life along shore passed us by at
+a distance. It was the same difference as between a great public highway
+and a country by-path that wanders in and out of cottage gardens. We now
+lay in towns, where nobody troubled us with questions; we had floated
+into civilized life, where people pass without salutation. In sparsely
+inhabited places, we make all we can of each encounter; but when it
+comes to a city, we keep to ourselves, and never speak unless we have
+trodden on a man's toes. In these waters we were no longer strange
+birds, and nobody supposed we had travelled farther than from the last
+town. I remember, when we came into L'Isle Adam, for instance, how we
+met dozens of pleasure-boats outing it for the afternoon, and there was
+nothing to distinguish the true voyager from the amateur, except,
+perhaps, the filthy condition of my sail. The company in one boat
+actually thought they recognized me for a neighbour. Was there ever
+anything more wounding? All the romance had come down to that. Now, on
+the upper Oise, where nothing sailed as a general thing but fish, a pair
+of canoeists could not be thus vulgarly explained away; we were strange
+and picturesque intruders; and out of people's wonder sprang a sort of
+light and passing intimacy all along our route. There is nothing but
+tit-for-tat in this world, though sometimes it be a little difficult to
+trace: for the scores are older than we ourselves, and there has never
+yet been a settling-day since things were. You get entertainment pretty
+much in proportion as you give. As long as we were a sort of odd
+wanderers, to be stared at and followed like a quack doctor or a
+caravan, we had no want of amusement in return; but as soon as we sank
+into commonplace ourselves, all whom we met were similarly disenchanted.
+And here is one reason of a dozen, why the world is dull to dull
+persons.
+
+In our earlier adventures there was generally something to do, and that
+quickened us. Even the showers of rain had a revivifying effect, and
+shook up the brain from torpor. But now, when the river no longer ran in
+a proper sense, only glided seaward with an even, out-right, but
+imperceptible speed, and when the sky smiled upon us day after day
+without variety, we began to slip into that golden doze of the mind
+which follows upon much exercise in the open air. I have stupefied
+myself in this way more than once; indeed, I dearly love the feeling;
+but I never had it to the same degree as when paddling down the Oise. It
+was the apotheosis of stupidity.
+
+We ceased reading entirely. Sometimes when I found a new paper, I took a
+particular pleasure in reading a single number of the current novel; but
+I never could bear more than three installments; and even the second was
+a disappointment. As soon as the tale became in any way perspicuous, it
+lost all merit in my eyes; only a single scene, or, as is the way with
+these _feuilletons_, half a scene, without antecedent or consequence,
+like a piece of a dream, had the knack of fixing my interest. The less I
+saw of the novel, the better I liked it: a pregnant reflection. But for
+the most part, as I said, we neither of us read anything in the world,
+and employed the very little while we were awake between bed and dinner
+in poring upon maps. I have always been fond of maps, and can voyage in
+an atlas with the greatest enjoyment. The names of places are
+singularly inviting; the contour of coasts and rivers is enthralling to
+the eye; and to hit, in a map, upon some place you have heard of before
+makes history a new possession. But we thumbed our charts on these
+evenings with the blankest unconcern. We cared not a fraction for this
+place or that. We stared at the sheet as children listen to their
+rattle; and read the names of towns or villages to forget them again at
+once. We had no romance in the matter; there was nobody so fancy-free.
+If you had taken the maps away while we were studying them most
+intently, it is a fair bet whether we might not have continued to study
+the table with the same delight.
+
+About one thing we were mightily taken up, and that was eating. I think
+I made a god of my belly. I remember dwelling in imagination upon this
+or that dish till my mouth watered; and long before we got in for the
+night my appetite was a clamant, instant annoyance. Sometimes we paddled
+alongside for a while, and whetted each other with gastronomical fancies
+as we went. Cake and sherry, a homely refection, but not within reach
+upon the Oise, trotted through my head for many a mile; and once, as we
+were approaching Verberie, the _Cigarette_ brought my heart into my
+mouth by the suggestion of oyster patties and Sauterne.
+
+I suppose none of us recognise the great part that is played in life by
+eating and drinking. The appetite is so imperious that we can stomach
+the least interesting viands, and pass off a dinner-hour thankfully
+enough on bread and water; just as there are men who must read
+something, if it were only "Bradshaw's Guide." But there is a romance
+about the matter after all. Probably the table has more devotees than
+love; and I am sure that food is much more generally entertaining than
+scenery. Do you give in, as Walt Whitman would say, that you are any the
+less immortal for that? The true materialism is to be ashamed of what we
+are. To detect the flavour of aean olive is no less a piece of human
+perfection than to find beauty in the colours of the sunset.
+
+Canoeing was easy work. To dip the paddle at the proper inclination, now
+right, now left; to keep the head down stream; to empty the little pool
+that gathered in the lap of the apron; to screw up the eyes against the
+glittering sparkles of sun upon the water; or now and again to pass
+below the whistling tow-rope of the _Deo Gratias_ of Condé, or the _Four
+Sons of Aymon_--there was not much art in that; certain silly muscles
+managed it between sleep and waking; and meanwhile the brain had a whole
+holiday, and went to sleep. We took in, at a glance, the larger features
+of the scene; and beheld, with half an eye, bloused fishers and dabbling
+washerwomen on the bank. Now and again we might be half-wakened by some
+church spire, by a leaping fish, or by a trail of river grass that clung
+about the paddle and had to be plucked off and thrown away. But these
+luminous intervals were only partially luminous. A little more of us was
+called into action, but never the whole. The central bureau of nerves,
+what in some moods we call Ourselves, enjoyed its holiday without
+disturbance, like a Government office. The great wheels of intelligence
+turned idly in the head, like fly-wheels, grinding no grist. I have gone
+on for half an hour at a time, counting my strokes and forgetting the
+hundreds. I flatter myself the beasts that perish could not underbid
+that, as a low form of consciousness. And what a pleasure it was! What a
+hearty, tolerant temper did it bring about! There is nothing captious
+about a man who has attained to this, the one possible apotheosis in
+life, the Apotheosis of Stupidity; and he begins to feel dignified and
+longaevous like a tree.
+
+There was one odd piece of practical metaphysics which accompanied what
+I may call the depth, if I must not call it the intensity, of my
+abstraction. What philosophers call _me_ and _not-me_, _ego_ and _non
+ego_, preoccupied me whether I would or no. There was less _me_ and
+more _not-me_ than I was accustomed to expect. I looked on upon somebody
+else, who managed the paddling; I was aware of somebody else's feet
+against the stretcher; my own body seemed to have no more intimate
+relation to me than the canoe, or the river, or the river banks. Nor
+this alone: something inside my mind, a part of my brain, a province of
+my proper being, had thrown off allegiance and set up for itself, or
+perhaps for the somebody else who did the paddling. I had dwindled into
+quite a little thing in a corner of myself. I was isolated in my own
+skull. Thoughts presented themselves unbidden; they were not my
+thoughts, they were plainly some one else's; and I considered them like
+a part of the landscape. I take it, in short, that I was about as near
+Nirvana as would be convenient in practical life; and if this be so, I
+make the Buddhists my sincere compliments; 'tis an agreeable state, not
+very consistent with mental brilliancy, not exactly profitable in a
+money point of view, but very calm, golden, and incurious, and one that
+sets a man superior to alarms. It may be best figured by supposing
+yourself to get dead drunk, and yet keep sober to enjoy it. I have a
+notion that open-air labourers must spend a large portion of their days
+in this ecstatic stupor, which explains their high composure and
+endurance. A pity to go to the expense of laudanum, when here is a
+better paradise for nothing!
+
+This frame of mind was the great exploit of our voyage, take it all in
+all. It was the farthest piece of travel accomplished. Indeed, it lies
+so far from beaten paths of language, that I despair of getting the
+reader into sympathy with the smiling, complacent idiocy of my
+condition; when ideas came and went like motes in a sunbeam; when trees
+and church spires along the bank surged up, from time to time into my
+notice, like solid objects through a rolling cloudland; when the
+rhythmical swish of boat and paddle in the water became a cradle-song to
+lull my thoughts asleep; when a piece of mud on the deck was sometimes
+an intolerable eyesore, and sometimes quite a companion for me, and the
+object of pleased consideration;--and all the time, with the river
+running and the shores changing upon either hand, I kept counting my
+strokes and forgetting the hundreds, the happiest animal in France.
+
+
+
+
+DOWN THE OISE
+
+CHURCH INTERIORS
+
+
+We made our first stage below Compiègne to Pont Sainte Maxence. I was
+abroad a little after six the next morning. The air was biting, and
+smelt of frost. In an open place a score of women wrangled together over
+the day's market; and the noise of their negotiation sounded thin and
+querulous like that of sparrows on a winter's morning. The rare
+passengers blew into their hands, and shuffled in their wooden shoes to
+set the blood agog. The streets were full of icy shadow, although the
+chimneys were smoking overhead in golden sunshine. If you wake early
+enough at this season of the year, you may get up in December to break
+your fast in June.
+
+I found my way to the church; for there is always something to see about
+a church, whether living worshipers or dead men's tombs; you find there
+the deadliest earnest, and the hollowest deceit; and even where it is
+not a piece of history, it will be certain to leak out some contemporary
+gossip. It was scarcely so cold in the church as it was without, but it
+looked colder. The white nave was positively arctic to the eye; and the
+tawdriness of a continental altar looked more forlorn than usual in the
+solitude and the bleak air. Two priests sat in the chancel, reading and
+waiting penitents; and out in the nave, one very old woman was engaged
+in her devotions. It was a wonder how she was able to pass her beads
+when healthy young people were breathing in their palms and slapping
+their chest; but though this concerned me, I was yet more dispirited by
+the nature of her exercises. She went from chair to chair, from altar
+to altar, circumnavigating the church. To each shrine she dedicated an
+equal number of beads and an equal length of time. Like a prudent
+capitalist with a somewhat cynical view of the commercial prospect, she
+desired to place her supplications in a great variety of heavenly
+securities. She would risk nothing on the credit of any single
+intercessor. Out of the whole company of saints and angels, not one but
+was to suppose himself her champion-elect against the Great Assize! I
+could only think of it as a dull, transparent jugglery, based upon
+unconscious unbelief.
+
+She was as dead an old woman as ever I saw; no more than bone and
+parchment, curiously put together. Her eyes, with which she interrogated
+mine, were vacant of sense. It depends on what you call seeing, whether
+you might not call her blind. Perhaps she had known love: perhaps borne
+children, suckled them and given them pet names. But now that was all
+gone by, and had left her neither happier nor wiser; and the best she
+could do with her mornings was to come up here into the cold church and
+juggle for a slice of heaven. It was not without a gulp that I escaped
+into the streets and the keen morning air. Morning? why, how tired of it
+she would be before night! and if she did not sleep, how then? It is
+fortunate that not many of us are brought up publicly to justify our
+lives at the bar of threescore years and ten; fortunate that such a
+number are knocked opportunely on the head in what they call the flower
+of their years, and go away to suffer for their follies in private
+somewhere else. Otherwise, between sick children and discontented old
+folk, we might be put out of all conceit of life.
+
+I had need of all my cerebral hygiene during that day's paddle: the old
+devotee stuck in my throat sorely. But I was soon in the seventh heaven
+of stupidity; and knew nothing but that somebody was paddling a canoe,
+while I was counting his strokes, and forgetting the hundreds. I used
+sometimes to be afraid I should remember the hundreds; which would have
+made a toil of a pleasure; but the terror was chimerical, they went out
+of my mind by enchantment, and I knew no more than the man in the moon
+about my only occupation.
+
+At Creil, where we stopped to lunch, we left the canoes in another
+floating lavatory, which, as it was high noon, was packed with
+washerwomen, red-handed and loud-voiced; and they and their broad jokes
+are about all I remember of the place. I could look up my history-books,
+if you were very anxious, and tell you a date or two; for it figured
+rather largely in the English wars. But I prefer to mention a girls'
+boarding-school, which had an interest for us because it was a girls'
+boarding-school, and because we imagined we had rather an interest for
+it. At least--there were the girls about the garden; and here were we on
+the river; and there was more than one handkerchief waved as we went by.
+It caused quite a stir in my heart; and yet how we should have wearied
+and despised each other, these girls and I, if we had been introduced at
+a croquet party! But this is a fashion I love: to kiss the hand or wave
+a handkerchief to people I shall never see again, to play with
+possibility, and knock in a peg for fancy to hang upon. It gives the
+traveller a jog, reminds him that he is not a traveller everywhere, and
+that his journey is no more than a siesta by the way on the real march
+of life.
+
+The church at Creil was a nondescript place in the inside, splashed with
+gaudy lights from the windows, and picked out with medallions of the
+Dolorous Way. But there was one oddity, in the way of an _ex voto_,
+which pleased me hugely: a faithful model of a canal boat, swung from
+the vault, with a written aspiration that God should conduct the _Saint
+Nicolas_ of Creil to a good haven. The thing was neatly executed, and
+would have made the delight of a party of boys on the waterside. But
+what tickled me was the gravity of the peril to be conjured. You might
+hang up the model of a sea-going ship, and welcome: one that is to
+plough a furrow round the world, and visit the tropic or the frosty
+poles, runs dangers that are well worth a candle and a mass. But the
+_Saint Nicolas_ of Creil, which was to be tugged for some ten years by
+patient draught-horses, in a weedy canal, with the poplars chattering
+overhead, and the skipper whistling at the tiller; which was to do all
+its errands in green inland places, and never get out of sight of a
+village belfry in all its cruising; why, you would have thought if
+anything could be done without the intervention of Providence, it would
+be that! But perhaps the skipper was a humorist: or perhaps a prophet,
+reminding people of the seriousness of life by this preposterous token.
+
+At Creil, as at Noyon, Saint Joseph seemed a favourite saint on the
+score of punctuality. Day and hour can be specified; and grateful people
+do not fail to specify them on a votive tablet, when prayers have been
+punctually and neatly answered. Whenever time is a consideration, Saint
+Joseph is the proper intermediary. I took a sort of pleasure in
+observing the vogue he had in France, for the good man plays a very
+small part in my religion at home. Yet I could not help fearing that,
+where the Saint is so much commended for exactitude, he will be expected
+to be very grateful for his tablet.
+
+This is foolishness to us Protestants; and not of great importance
+anyway. Whether people's gratitude for the good gifts that come to them
+be wisely conceived or dutifully expressed is a secondary matter after
+all, so long as they feel gratitude. The true ignorance is when a man
+does not know that he has received a good gift, or begins to imagine
+that he has got it for himself. The self-made man is the funniest
+wind-bag after all! There is a marked difference between decreeing light
+in chaos, and lighting the gas in a metropolitan back-parlour with a box
+of patent matches; and do what we will, there is always something made
+to our hand, if it were only our fingers.
+
+But there was something worse than foolishness placarded in Creil
+Church. The Association of the Living Rosary (of which I had never
+previously heard) is responsible for that. This Association was founded,
+according to the printed advertisement, by a brief of Pope Gregory
+Sixteenth, on the 17th of January, 1832: according to a coloured
+bas-relief, it seems to have been founded, sometime or other, by the
+Virgin giving one rosary to Saint Dominic, and the Infant Saviour giving
+another to Saint Catharine of Siena. Pope Gregory is not so imposing,
+but he is nearer hand. I could not distinctly make out whether the
+Association was entirely devotional, or had an eye to good works; at
+least it is highly organized: the names of fourteen matrons and misses
+were filled in for each week of the month as associates, with one other,
+generally a married woman, at the top for _zélatrice:_ the leader of the
+band. Indulgences, plenary and partial, follow on the performance of the
+duties of the Association. "The partial indulgences are attached to the
+recitation of the rosary." On "the recitation of the required
+_dizaine_," a partial indulgence promptly follows. When people serve the
+kingdom of heaven with a pass-book in their hands, I should always be
+afraid lest they should carry the same commercial spirit into their
+dealings with their fellow-men, which would make a sad and sordid
+business of this life.
+
+There is one more article, however, of happier import. "All these
+indulgences," it appeared, "are applicable to souls in purgatory." For
+God's sake, ye ladies of Creil, apply them all to the souls in purgatory
+without delay! Burns would take no hire for his last songs, preferring
+to serve his country out of unmixed love. Suppose you were to imitate
+the exciseman, mesdames, and even if the souls in purgatory were not
+greatly bettered, some souls in Creil upon the Oise would find
+themselves none the worse either here or hereafter.
+
+I cannot help wondering, as I transcribe these notes, whether a
+Protestant born and bred is in a fit state to understand these signs,
+and do them what justice they deserve; and I cannot help answering that
+he is not. They cannot look so merely ugly and mean to the faithful as
+they do to me. I see that as clearly as a proposition in Euclid. For
+these believers are neither weak nor wicked. They can put up their
+tablet commending Saint Joseph for his despatch, as if he were still a
+village carpenter; they can "recite the required _dizaine_," and
+metaphorically pocket the indulgence, as if they had done a job for
+Heaven; and then they can go out and look down unabashed upon this
+wonderful river flowing by, and up without confusion at the pin-point
+stars, which are themselves great worlds full of flowing rivers greater
+than the Oise. I see it as plainly, I say, as a proposition in Euclid,
+that my Protestant mind has missed the point, and that there goes with
+these deformities some higher and more religious spirit than I dream.
+
+I wonder if other people would make the same allowances for me! Like the
+ladies of Creil, having recited my rosary of toleration, I look for my
+indulgence on the spot.
+
+
+
+
+PRÉCY AND THE MARIONNETTES
+
+
+We made Précy about sundown. The plain is rich with tufts of poplar. In
+a wide, luminous curve, the Oise lay under the hillside. A faint mist
+began to rise and confound the different distances together. There was
+not a sound audible but that of the sheep-bells in some meadows by the
+river, and the creaking of a cart down the long road that descends the
+hill. The villas in their gardens, the shops along the street, all
+seemed to have been deserted the day before, and I felt inclined to walk
+discreetly as one feels in a silent forest. All of a sudden we came
+round a corner, and there, in a little green round the church, was a
+bevy of girls in Parisian costumes playing croquet. Their laughter, and
+the hollow sound of ball and mallet, made a cheery stir in the
+neighbourhood; and the look of these slim figures, all corseted and
+ribboned, produced an answerable disturbance in our hearts. We were
+within sniff of Paris, it seemed. And here were females of our own
+species playing croquet, just as if Précy had been a place in real life,
+instead of a stage in the fairyland of travel. For, to be frank, the
+peasant woman is scarcely to be counted as a woman at all, and after
+having passed by such a succession of people in petticoats digging and
+hoeing and making dinner, this company of coquettes under arms made
+quite a surprising feature in the landscape, and convinced us at once of
+being fallible males.
+
+The inn at Précy is the worst inn in France. Not even in Scotland have I
+found worse fare. It was kept by a brother and sister, neither of whom
+was out of their teens. The sister, so to speak, prepared a meal for us,
+and the brother, who had been tippling, came in and brought with him a
+tipsy butcher, to entertain us as we ate. We found pieces of loo-warm
+pork among the salad, and pieces of unknown yielding substance in the
+_ragoût_. The butcher entertained us with pictures of Parisian life,
+with which he professed himself well acquainted; the brother sitting the
+while on the edge of the billiard table, toppling precariously, and
+sucking the stump of a cigar. In the midst of these diversions, bang
+went a drum past the house, and a hoarse voice began issuing a
+proclamation. It was a man with marionnettes announcing a performance
+for that evening.
+
+He had set up his caravan and lighted his candles on another part of the
+girls' croquet-green, under one of those open sheds which are so common
+in France to shelter markets; and he and his wife, by the time we
+strolled up there, were trying to keep order with the audience.
+
+It was the most absurd contention. The show-people had set out a certain
+number of benches, and all who sat upon them were to pay a couple of
+sous for the accommodation. They were always quite full--a bumper
+house--as long as nothing was going forward; but let the show-woman
+appear with an eye to a collection, and at the first rattle of her
+tambourine the audience slipped off the seats, and stood round on the
+outside with their hands in their pockets. It certainly would have tried
+an angel's temper. The showman roared from the proscenium; he had been
+all over France, and nowhere, nowhere, "not even on the borders of
+Germany," had he met with such misconduct. Such thieves and rogues and
+rascals, as he called them! And every now and again the wife issued on
+another round, and added her shrill quota to the tirade. I remarked
+here, as elsewhere, how far more copious is the female mind in the
+material of insult. The audience laughed in high good-humour over the
+man's declamations, but they bridled and cried aloud under the woman's
+pungent sallies. She picked out the sore points. She had the honour of
+the village at her mercy. Voices answered her angrily out of the crowd,
+and received a smarting retort for their trouble. A couple of old ladies
+beside me, who had duly paid for their seats, waxed very red and
+indignant, and discoursed to each other audibly about the impudence of
+these mountebanks; but as soon as the show-woman caught a whisper of
+this, she was down upon them with a swoop: if mesdames could persuade
+their neighbours to act with common honesty, the mountebanks, she
+assured them, would be polite enough: mesdames had probably had their
+bowl of soup, and perhaps a glass of wine that evening; the mountebanks
+also had a taste for soup, and did not choose to have their little
+earnings stolen from them before their eyes. Once, things came as far as
+a brief personal encounter between the showman and some lads, in which
+the former went down as readily as one of his own marionnettes to a peal
+of jeering laughter.
+
+I was a good deal astonished at this scene, because I am pretty well
+acquainted with the ways of French strollers, more or less artistic; and
+have always found them singularly pleasing. Any stroller must be dear to
+the right-thinking heart; if it were only as a living protest against
+offices and the mercantile spirit, and as something to remind us that
+life is not by necessity the kind of thing we generally make it. Even a
+German band, if you see it leaving town in the early morning for a
+campaign in country places, among trees and meadows, has a romantic
+flavour for the imagination. There is nobody, under thirty, so dead but
+his heart will stir a little at sight of a gypsies' camp. "We are not
+cotton-spinners all"--or, at least, not all through. There is some life
+in humanity yet: and youth will now and again find a brave word to say
+in dispraise of riches, and throw up a situation to go strolling with a
+knapsack.
+
+An Englishman has always special facilities for intercourse with French
+gymnasts; for England is the natural home of gymnasts. This or that
+fellow, in his tights and spangles, is sure to know a word or two of
+English, to have drunk English _aff-'n'-aff_, and perhaps performed in
+an English music-hall. He is a countryman of mine by profession. He
+leaps, like the Belgian boating men, to the notion that I must be an
+athlete myself.
+
+But the gymnast is not my favourite; he has little or no tincture of the
+artist in his composition; his soul is small and pedestrian, for the
+most part, since his profession makes no call upon it, and does not
+accustom him to high ideas. But if a man is only so much of an actor
+that he can stumble through a farce, he is made free of a new order of
+thoughts. He has something else to think about beside the money-box. He
+has a pride of his own, and, what is of far more importance, he has an
+aim before him that he can never quite attain. He has gone upon a
+pilgrimage that will last him his life long, because there is no end to
+it short of perfection. He will better upon himself a little day by day;
+or even if he has given up the attempt, he will always remember that
+once upon a time he had conceived this high ideal, that once upon a time
+he had fallen in love with a star. "'Tis better to have loved and lost."
+Although the moon should have nothing to say to Endymion, although he
+should settle down with Audrey and feed pigs, do you not think he would
+move with a better grace, and cherish higher thoughts to the end? The
+lout he meets at church never had a fancy above Audrey's snood; but
+there is a reminiscence in Endymion's heart that, like a spice, keeps it
+fresh and haughty.
+
+To be even one of the outskirters of art leaves a fine stamp on a man's
+countenance. I remember once dining with a party in the inn at Château
+Landon. Most of them were unmistakable bagmen; others well-to-do
+peasantry; but there was one young fellow in a blouse, whose face stood
+out from among the rest surprisingly. It looked more finished; more of
+the spirit looked out through it; it had a living, expressive air, and
+you could see that his eyes took things in. My companion and I wondered
+greatly who and what he could be. It was fair-time in Château Landon,
+and when we went along to the booths we had our question answered; for
+there was our friend busily fiddling for the peasants to caper to. He
+was a wandering violinist.
+
+A troop of strollers once came to the inn where I was staying, in the
+Department of Seine et Marne. There was a father and mother; two
+daughters, brazen, blowsy hussies, who sang and acted, without an idea
+of how to set about either; and a dark young man, like a tutor, a
+recalcitrant house-painter, who sang and acted not amiss. The mother was
+the genius of the party, so far as genius can be spoken of with regard
+to such a pack of incompetent humbugs; and her husband could not find
+words to express his admiration for her comic countryman. "You should
+see my old woman," said he, and nodded his beery countenance. One night
+they performed in the stable-yard, with flaring lamps--a wretched
+exhibition, coldly looked upon by a village audience. Next night, as
+soon as the lamps were lighted, there came a plump of rain, and they had
+to sweep away their baggage as fast as possible, and make off to the
+barn where they harboured, cold, wet, and supperless. In the morning, a
+dear friend of mine, who has as warm a heart for strollers as I have
+myself, made a little collection, and sent it by my hands to comfort
+them for their disappointment. I gave it to the father; he thanked me
+cordially, and we drank a cup together in the kitchen, talking of roads,
+and audiences, and hard times.
+
+When I was going, up got my old stroller, and off with his hat. "I am
+afraid," said he, "that Monsieur will think me altogether a beggar; but
+I have another demand to make upon him." I began to hate him on the
+spot. "We play again to-night," he went on. "Of course, I shall refuse
+to accept any more money from Monsieur and his friends, who have been
+already so liberal. But our programme of to-night is something truly
+creditable; and I cling to the idea that Monsieur will honour us with
+his presence." And then, with a shrug and a smile: "Monsieur
+understands--the vanity of an artist!" Save the mark! The vanity of an
+artist! That is the kind of thing that reconciles me to life: a ragged,
+tippling, incompetent old rogue, with the manners of a gentleman, and
+the vanity of an artist, to keep up his self-respect!
+
+But the man after my own heart is M. de Vauversin. It is nearly two
+years since I saw him first, and indeed I hope I may see him often
+again. Here is his first programme, as I found it on the
+breakfast-table, and have kept it ever since as a relic of bright
+days:--
+
+     _"Mesdames et Messieurs,_
+
+     _"Mademoiselle Ferrario et M. de Vauversin auront l'honneur de
+     chanter ce soir les morceaux suivants.
+
+     "Mademoiselle Ferrario chantera--Mignon--Oiseaux
+     légers--France--Des Français dorment là--Le château bleu--Où
+     voulez-vous aller?
+
+     "M. de Vauversin--Madame Fountaine et M. Robinet--Les plongeurs à
+     cheval--Le mari mécontent--Tais-toi, gamin--Mon voisin
+     l'original--Heureux comme ça--Comme on est trompé."_
+
+They made a stage at one end of the _salle-à-manger_. And what a sight
+it was to see M. de Vauversin, with a cigarette in his mouth, twanging a
+guitar, and following Mademoiselle Ferrario's eyes with the obedient,
+kindly look of a dog! The entertainment wound up with a tombola, or
+auction of lottery tickets: an admirable amusement, with all the
+excitement of gambling, and no hope of gain to make you ashamed of your
+eagerness; for there all is loss; you make haste to be out of pocket; it
+is a competition who shall lose most money for the benefit of M. de
+Vauversin and Mademoiselle Ferrario.
+
+M. de Vauversin is a small man, with a great head of black hair, a
+vivacious and engaging air, and a smile that would be delightful if he
+had better teeth. He was once an actor in the Châtelet; but he
+contracted a nervous affection from the heat and glare of the
+footlights, which unfitted him for the stage. At this crisis
+Mademoiselle Ferrario, otherwise Mademoiselle Rita of the Alcazar,
+agreed to share his wandering fortunes. "I could never forget the
+generosity of that lady," said he. He wears trousers so tight that it
+has long been a problem to all who knew him how he manages to get in and
+out of them. He sketches a little in water-colours; he writes verses; he
+is the most patient of fishermen, and spent long days at the bottom of
+the inn-garden fruitlessly dabbling a line in the clear river.
+
+You should hear him recounting his experiences over a bottle of wine;
+such a pleasant vein of talk as he has, with a ready smile at his own
+mishaps, and every now and then a sudden gravity, like a man who should
+hear the surf roar while he was telling the perils of the deep. For it
+was no longer ago than last night, perhaps, that the receipts only
+amounted to a franc and a half, to cover three francs of railway fare
+and two of board and lodging. The Maire, a man worth a million of money,
+sat in the front seat, repeatedly applauding Mlle. Ferrario, and yet
+gave no more than three _sous_ the whole evening. Local authorities look
+with such an evil eye upon the strolling artist. Alas! I know it well,
+who have been myself taken for one, and pitilessly incarcerated on the
+strength of the misapprehension. Once M. de Vauversin visited a
+commissary of police for permission to sing. The commissary, who was
+smoking at his ease, politely doffed his hat upon the singer's entrance.
+"Mr. Commissary," he began, "I am an artist." And on went the
+commissary's hat again. No courtesy for the companions of Apollo! "They
+are as degraded as that," said M. de Vauversin, with a sweep of his
+cigarette.
+
+But what pleased me most was one outbreak of his, when we had been
+talking all the evening of the rubs, indignities, and pinchings of his
+wandering life. Someone said, it would be better to have a million of
+money down, and Mlle. Ferrario admitted that she would prefer that
+mightily. "_Eh bien, moi non_;--not I," cried De Vauversin, striking the
+table with his hand. "If anyone is a failure in the world, is it not I?
+I had an art, in which I have done things well--as well as some--better
+perhaps than others; and now it is closed against me. I must go about
+the country gathering coppers and singing nonsense. Do you think I
+regret my life? Do you think I would rather be a fat burgess, like a
+calf? Not I! I have had moments when I have been applauded on the
+boards: I think nothing of that; but I have known in my own mind
+sometimes, when I had not a clap from the whole house, that I had found
+a true intonation, or an exact and speaking gesture; and then,
+messieurs, I have known what pleasure was, what it was to do a thing
+well, what it was to be an artist. And to know what art is, is to have
+an interest for ever, such as no burgess can find in his petty concerns.
+_Tenez, messieurs, je vais vous le dire_--it is like a religion."
+
+Such, making some allowance for the tricks of memory and the
+inaccuracies of translation, was the profession of faith of M. de
+Vauversin. I have given him his own name, lest any other wanderer should
+come across him, with his guitar and cigarette, and Mademoiselle
+Ferrario; for should not all the world delight to honour this
+unfortunate and loyal follower of the Muses? May Apollo send him rhymes
+hitherto undreamed of; may the river be no longer scanty of her silver
+fishes to his lure; may the cold not pinch him on long winter rides, nor
+the village jack-in-office affront him with unseemly manners; and may he
+never miss Mademoiselle Ferrario from his side, to follow with his
+dutiful eyes and accompany on the guitar!
+
+The marionnettes made a very dismal entertainment. They performed a
+piece, called _Pyramus and Thisbe_, in five mortal acts, and all written
+in Alexandrines fully as long as the performers. One marionnette was the
+king; another the wicked counselor; a third, credited with exceptional
+beauty, represented Thisbe; and then there were guards, and obdurate
+fathers, and walking gentlemen. Nothing particular took place during the
+two or three acts that I sat out; but you will be pleased to learn that
+the unities were properly respected, and the whole piece, with one
+exception, moved in harmony with classical rules. That exception was the
+comic countryman, a lean marionnette in wooden shoes, who spoke in prose
+and in a broad _patois_ much appreciated by the audience. He took
+unconstitutional liberties with the person of his sovereign; kicked his
+fellow-marionnettes in the mouth with his wooden shoes, and whenever
+none of the versifying suitors were about, made love to Thisbe on his
+own account in comic prose.
+
+This fellow's evolutions, and the little prologue, in which the showman
+made a humorous eulogium of his troop, praising their indifference to
+applause and hisses, and their single devotion to their art, were the
+only circumstances in the whole affair that you could fancy would so
+much as raise a smile. But the villagers of Précy seemed delighted.
+Indeed, so long as a thing is an exhibition, and you pay to see it, it
+is nearly certain to amuse. If we were charged so much a head for
+sunsets, or if God sent round a drum before the hawthorns came in
+flower, what a work should we not make about their beauty! But these
+things, like good companions, stupid people early cease to observe; and
+the Abstract Bagman tittups past in his spring gig, and is positively
+not aware of the flowers along the lane, or the scenery of the weather
+overhead.
+
+
+
+
+BACK TO THE WORLD
+
+
+Of the next two days' sail little remains in my mind, and nothing
+whatever in my note-book. The river streamed on steadily through
+pleasant riverside landscapes. Washerwomen in blue dresses, fishers in
+blue blouses, diversified the green banks; and the relation of the two
+colours was like that of the flower and the leaf in the forget-me-not. A
+symphony in forget-me-not; I think Théophile Gautier might thus have
+characterized that two days' panorama. The sky was blue and cloudless,
+and the sliding surface of the river held up, in smooth places, a mirror
+to the heaven and the shores. The washerwomen hailed us laughingly, and
+the noise of trees and water made an accompaniment to our dozing
+thoughts, as we fleeted down the stream.
+
+The great volume, the indefatigable purpose of the river, held the mind
+in chain. It seemed now so sure of its end, so strong and easy in its
+gait, like a grown man full of determination. The surf was roaring for
+it on the sands of Havre.
+
+For my own part, slipping along this moving thoroughfare in my
+fiddle-case of a canoe, I also was beginning to grow aweary for my
+ocean. To the civilized man, there must come, sooner or later, a desire
+for civilization. I was weary of dipping the paddle; I was weary of
+living on the skirts of life; I wished to be in the thick of it once
+more; I wished to get to work; I wished to meet people who understood my
+own speech, and could meet with me on equal terms, as a man and no
+longer as a curiosity.
+
+And so a letter at Pontoise decided us, and we drew up our keels for the
+last time out of that river of Oise that had faithfully piloted them,
+through rain and sunshine, for so long. For so many miles had this fleet
+and footless beast of burthen charioted our fortunes, that we turned our
+back upon it with a sense of separation. We had made a long détour out
+of the world, but now we were back in the familiar places, where life
+itself makes all the running, and we are carried to meet adventure
+without a stroke of the paddle. Now we were to return, like the voyager
+in the play, and see what rearrangements fortune had perfected the while
+in our surroundings; what surprises stood ready made for us at home; and
+whither and how far the world had voyaged in our absence. You may paddle
+all day long; but it is when you come back at nightfall, and look in at
+the familiar room, that you find Love or Death awaiting you beside the
+stove; and the most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek.
+
+
+
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+
+The country where they journeyed, that green, breezy valley of the
+Loing, is one very attractive to cheerful and solitary people. The
+weather was superb; all night it thundered and lightened, and the rain
+fell in sheets; by day, the heavens were cloudless, the sun fervent, the
+air vigorous and pure. They walked separate; the _Cigarette_ plodding
+behind with some philosophy, the lean _Arethusa_ posting on ahead. Thus
+each enjoyed his own reflections by the way; each had perhaps time to
+tire of them before he met his comrade at the designated inn; and the
+pleasures of society and solitude combined to fill the day. The
+_Arethusa_ carried in his knapsack the works of Charles of Orleans, and
+employed some of the hours of travel in the concoction of English
+roundels. In this path he must thus have preceded Mr. Lang, Mr. Dobson,
+Mr. Henley, and all contemporary roundeleers; but, for good reasons, he
+will be the last to publish the result. The _Cigarette_ walked burthened
+with a volume of Michelet. And both these books, it will be seen, played
+a part in the subsequent adventure.
+
+The _Arethusa_ was unwisely dressed. He is no precisian in attire; but
+by all accounts he was never so ill-inspired as on that tramp; having
+set forth, indeed, upon a moment's notice, from the most unfashionable
+spot in Europe, Barbizon. On his head he wore a smoking-cap of Indian
+work, the gold lace pitifully frayed and tarnished. A flannel shirt of
+an agreeable dark hue, which the satirical called black; a light tweed
+coat made by a good English tailor; ready-made cheap linen trousers and
+leathern gaiters completed his array. In person, he is exceptionally
+lean; and his face is not, like those of happier mortals, a certificate.
+For years he could not pass a frontier, or visit a bank, without
+suspicion; the police everywhere, but in his native city, looked askance
+upon him; and (although I am sure it will not be credited) he is
+actually denied admittance to the casino of Monte Carlo. If you will
+imagine him dressed as above, stooping under his knapsack, walking
+nearly five miles an hour with the folds of the ready-made trousers
+fluttering about his spindle shanks, and still looking eagerly round him
+as if in terror of pursuit--the figure, when realized, is far from
+reassuring. When Villon journeyed (perhaps by the same pleasant valley)
+to his exile at Roussillon, I wonder if he had not something of the same
+appearance. Something of the same preoccupation he had beyond a doubt,
+for he too must have tinkered verses as he walked, with more success
+than his successor. And if he had anything like the same inspiring
+weather, the same nights of uproar, men in armour rolling and resounding
+down the stairs of heaven, the rain hissing on the village streets, the
+wild bull's-eye of the storm flashing all night long into the bare
+inn-chamber--the same sweet return of day, the same unfathomable blue of
+noon, the same high-coloured, halcyon eves--and above all, if he had
+anything like as good a comrade, anything like as keen a relish for what
+he saw, and what he ate, and the rivers that he bathed in, and the
+rubbish that he wrote, I would exchange estates to-day with the poor
+exile, and count myself a gainer.
+
+But there was another point of similarity between the two journeys, for
+which the _Arethusa_ was to pay dear: both were gone upon in days of
+incomplete security. It was not long after the Franco-Prussian war.
+Swiftly as men forget, that countryside was still alive with tales of
+uhlans and outlying sentries, and hairbreadth 'scapes from the
+ignominious cord, and pleasant momentary friendships between invader and
+invaded. A year, at the most two years, later you might have tramped
+all that country over and not heard one anecdote. And a year or two
+later, you would--if you were a rather ill-looking young man in
+nondescript array--have gone your rounds in greater safety; for along
+with more interesting matter, the Prussian spy would have somewhat faded
+from men's imaginations.
+
+For all that, our voyager had got beyond Château Renard before he was
+conscious of arousing wonder. On the road between that place and
+Châtillon-sur-Loing, however, he encountered a rural postman; they fell
+together in talk, and spoke of a variety of subjects; but through one
+and all, the postman was still visibly preoccupied, and his eyes were
+faithful to the _Arethusa's_ knapsack. At last, with mysterious
+roguishness, he inquired what it contained, and on being answered, shook
+his head with kindly incredulity. "_Non_," said he, "_non, vous avez des
+portraits_." And then with a languishing appeal, "_Voyons_, show me the
+portraits!" It was some little time before the _Arethusa_, with a shout
+of laughter, recognized his drift. By portraits he meant indecent
+photographs; and in the _Arethusa_, an austere and rising author, he
+thought to have identified a pornographic _colporteur_. When
+country-folk in France have made up their minds as to a person's
+calling, argument is fruitless. Along all the rest of the way, the
+postman piped and fluted meltingly to get a sight of the collection; now
+he would upbraid, now he would reason--"_Voyons_, I will tell nobody";
+then he tried corruption, and insisted on paying for a glass of wine;
+and at last, when their ways separated--"_Non_," said he, "_ce n'est pas
+bien de votre part. O non, ce n'est pas bien_." And shaking his head
+with quite a sentimental sense of injury, he departed unrefreshed.
+
+On certain little difficulties encountered by the _Arethusa_ at
+Châtillon-sur-Loing, I have not space to dwell; another Châtillon, of
+grislier memory, looms too near at hand. But the next day, in a certain
+hamlet called La Jussière, he stopped to drink a glass of syrup in a
+very poor, bare drinking-shop. The hostess, a comely woman, suckling a
+child, examined the traveller with kindly and pitying eyes. "You are not
+of this Department?" she asked. The _Arethusa_ told her he was English.
+"Ah!" she said, surprised. "We have no English. We have many Italians,
+however, and they do very well; they do not complain of the people of
+hereabouts. An Englishman may do very well also; it will be something
+new." Here was a dark saying, over which the _Arethusa_ pondered as he
+drank his grenadine; but when he rose and asked what was to pay, the
+light came upon him in a flash. "_O, pour vous_," replied the landlady,
+"a halfpenny!" _Pour vous_? By heaven, she took him for a beggar! He
+paid his halfpenny, feeling that it were ungracious to correct her. But
+when he was forth again upon the road, he became vexed in spirit. The
+conscience is no gentleman, he is a rabbinical fellow; and his
+conscience told him he had stolen the syrup.
+
+That night the travellers slept in Gien; the next day they passed the
+river and set forth (severally, as their custom was) on a short stage
+through the green plain upon the Berry side, to Châtillon-sur-Loire. It
+was the first day of the shooting; and the air rang with the report of
+fire-arms and the admiring cries of sportsmen. Overhead the birds were
+in consternation, wheeling in clouds, settling and re-arising. And yet
+with all this bustle on either hand, the road itself lay solitary. The
+_Arethusa_ smoked a pipe beside a milestone, and I remember he laid down
+very exactly all he was to do at Châtillon: how he was to enjoy a cold
+plunge, to change his shirt, and to await the _Cigarette's_ arrival, in
+sublime inaction, by the margin of the Loire. Fired by these ideas, he
+pushed the more rapidly forward, and came, early in the afternoon, and
+in a breathing heat, to the entering-in of that ill-fated town. Childe
+Roland to the dark tower came.
+
+A polite gendarme threw his shadow on the path.
+
+"_Monsieur est voyageur_?" he asked.
+
+And the _Arethusa_, strong in his innocence, forgetful of his vile
+attire, replied--I had almost said with gaiety: "So it would appear."
+
+"His papers are in order?" said the gendarme. And when the _Arethusa_,
+with a slight change of voice, admitted he had none, he was informed
+(politely enough) that he must appear before the Commissary.
+
+The Commissary sat at a table in his bedroom, stripped to the shirt and
+trousers, but still copiously perspiring; and when he turned upon the
+prisoner a large meaningless countenance, that was (like Bardolph's)
+"all whelks and bubuckles," the dullest might have been prepared for
+grief. Here was a stupid man, sleepy with the heat and fretful at the
+interruption, whom neither appeal nor argument could reach.
+
+_The Commissary:_ "You have no papers?"
+
+_The Arethusa:_ "Not here."
+
+_The Commissary:_ "Why?"
+
+_The Arethusa:_ "I have left them behind in my valise."
+
+_The Commissary:_ "You know, however, that it is forbidden to circulate
+without papers?"
+
+_The Arethusa:_ "Pardon me: I am convinced of the contrary. I am here on
+my rights as an English subject by international treaty."
+
+_The Commissary (with scorn):_ "You call yourself an Englishman?"
+
+_The Arethusa:_ "I do."
+
+_The Commissary:_ "Humph.--What is your trade?"
+
+_The Arethusa:_ "I am a Scottish Advocate."
+
+_The Commissary (with singular annoyance):_ "A Scottish Advocate! Do
+you then pretend to support yourself by that in this Department?"
+
+The _Arethusa_ modestly disclaimed the pretension. The Commissary had
+scored a point.
+
+_The Commissary:_ "Why, then, do you travel?"
+
+_The Arethusa:_ "I travel for pleasure."
+
+_The Commissary (pointing to the knapsack, and with sublime
+incredulity):_ "_Avec ça? Voyez-vous, je suis un homme intelligent!_"
+(With that? Look here, I am a person of intelligence!)
+
+The culprit remaining silent under this home-thrust, the Commissary
+relished his triumph for a while, and then demanded (like the postman,
+but with what different expectations!) to see the contents of the
+knapsack. And here the _Arethusa_, not yet sufficiently awake to his
+position, fell into a grave mistake. There was little or no furniture in
+the room except the Commissary's chair and table; and to facilitate
+matters, the _Arethusa_ (with all the innocence on earth) leant the
+knapsack on a corner of the bed. The Commissary fairly bounded from his
+seat; his face and neck flushed past purple, almost into blue; and he
+screamed to lay the desecrating object on the floor.
+
+The knapsack proved to contain a change of shirts, of shoes, of socks,
+and of linen trousers, a small dressing-case, a piece of soap in one of
+the shoes, two volumes of the _Collection Jannet_ lettered "Poésies de
+Charles d'Orleans," a map, and a version-book containing divers notes in
+prose and the remarkable English roundels of the voyager, still to this
+day unpublished: the Commissary of Châtillon is the only living man who
+has clapped an eye on these artistic trifles. He turned the assortment
+over with a contumelious finger; it was plain from his daintiness that
+he regarded the _Arethusa_ and all his belongings as the very temple of
+infection. Still there was nothing suspicious about the map, nothing
+really criminal except the roundels; as for Charles of Orleans, to the
+ignorant mind of the prisoner, he seemed as good as a certificate; and
+it was supposed the farce was nearly over.
+
+The inquisitor resumed his seat.
+
+_The Commissary (after a pause):_ "_Eh bien, je vais_ _vous dire ce que
+vous êtes. Vous êtes allemand el vous venez chanter à la foire._" (Well,
+then, I will tell you what you are. You are a German, and have come to
+sing at the fair.)
+
+_The Arethusa:_ "Would you like to hear me sing? I believe I could
+convince you of the contrary."
+
+_The Commissary:_ "_Pas de plaisanterie, monsieur_!"
+
+_The Arethusa:_ "Well, sir, oblige me at least by looking at this book.
+Here, I open it with my eyes shut. Read one of these songs--read this
+one--and tell me, you who are a man of intelligence, if it would be
+possible to sing it at a fair?"
+
+_The Commissary (critically):_ "_Mais oui. Tres bien._"
+
+_The Arethusa:_ "_Comment, monsieur!_ What! But do you not observe it is
+antique? It is difficult to understand, even for you and me; but for the
+audience at a fair, it would be meaningless."
+
+_The Commissary (taking a pen):_ "_Enfin, il faut en finir._ What is
+your name?"
+
+_The Arethusa (speaking with the swallowing vivacity of the English):_
+"Robert-Louis-Stev'ns'n."
+
+_The Commissary (aghast):_ "_Hé! Quoi?_"
+
+_The Arethusa (perceiving and improving his advantage):_
+"Rob'rt-Lou's-Stev'ns'n."
+
+_The Commissary (after several conflicts with his pen):_ "_Eh bien, il
+faut se passer du nom. Ça ne s'écrit pas._" (Well, we must do without
+the name: it is unspellable.)
+
+The above is a rough summary of this momentous conversation, in which I
+have been chiefly careful to preserve the plums of the Commissary; but
+the remainder of the scene, perhaps because of his rising anger, has
+left but little definite in the memory of the _Arethusa_. The Commissary
+was not, I think, a practiced literary man; no sooner, at least, had he
+taken pen in hand and embarked on the composition of the
+_procès-verbal_, than he became distinctly more uncivil, and began to
+show a predilection for that simplest of all forms of repartee: "You
+lie." Several times the _Arethusa_ let it pass, and then suddenly
+flared up, refused to accept more insults or to answer further
+questions, defied the Commissary to do his worst, and promised him, if
+he did, that he should bitterly repent it. Perhaps if he had worn this
+proud front from the first, instead of beginning with a sense of
+entertainment and then going on to argue, the thing might have turned
+otherwise; for even at this eleventh hour the Commissary was visibly
+staggered. But it was too late; he had been challenged; the
+_procès-verbal_ was begun; and he again squared his elbows over his
+writing, and the _Arethusa_ was led forth a prisoner.
+
+A step or two down the hot road stood the gendarmerie. Thither was our
+unfortunate conducted, and there he was bidden to empty forth the
+contents of his pockets. A handkerchief, a pen, a pencil, a pipe and
+tobacco, matches, and some ten francs of change: that was all. Not a
+file, not a cipher, not a scrap of writing whether to identify or to
+condemn. The very gendarme was appalled before such destitution.
+
+"I regret," he said, "that I arrested you, for I see that you are no
+_voyou_." And he promised him every indulgence.
+
+The _Arethusa_, thus encouraged, asked for his pipe. That he was told
+was impossible, but if he chewed, he might have some tobacco. He did not
+chew, however, and asked instead to have his handkerchief.
+
+"_Non_," said the gendarme. "_Nous avons eu des histoires de gens qui se
+sont pendus._" (No, we have had histories of people who hanged
+themselves.)
+
+"What!" cried the _Arethusa_. "And is it for that you refuse me my
+handkerchief? But see how much more easily I could hang myself in my
+trousers!"
+
+The man was struck by the novelty of the idea, but he stuck to his
+colours, and only continued to repeat vague offers of service.
+
+"At least," said the _Arethusa_, "be sure that you arrest my comrade; he
+will follow me ere long on the same road, and you can tell him by the
+sack upon his shoulders."
+
+This promised, the prisoner was led round into the back court of the
+building, a cellar door was opened, he was motioned down the stair, and
+bolts grated and chains clanged behind his descending person.
+
+The philosophic and still more the imaginative mind is apt to suppose
+itself prepared for any mortal accident. Prison, among other ills, was
+one that had been often faced by the undaunted _Arethusa_. Even as he
+went down the stairs, he was telling himself that here was a famous
+occasion for a roundel, and that like the committed linnets of the
+tuneful cavalier, he too would make his prison musical. I will tell the
+truth at once: the roundel was never written, or it should be printed in
+this place, to raise a smile. Two reasons interfered: the first moral,
+the second physical.
+
+It is one of the curiosities of human nature, that although all men are
+liars, they can none of them bear to be told so of themselves. To get
+and take the lie with equanimity is a stretch beyond the stoic; and the
+_Arethusa_, who had been surfeited upon that insult, was blazing
+inwardly with a white heat of smothered wrath. But the physical had also
+its part. The cellar in which he was confined was some feet underground,
+and it was only lighted by an unglazed, narrow aperture high up in the
+wall, and smothered in the leaves of a green vine. The walls were of
+naked masonry, the floor of bare earth; by way of furniture there was an
+earthenware basin, a water-jug, and a wooden bedstead with a blue-grey
+cloak for bedding. To be taken from the hot air of a summer's afternoon,
+the reverberation of the road and the stir of rapid exercise, and
+plunged into the gloom and damp of this receptacle for vagabonds, struck
+an instant chill upon the _Arethusa's_ blood. Now see in how small a
+matter a hardship may consist: the floor was exceedingly uneven under
+foot, with the very spade-marks, I suppose, of the labourers who dug the
+foundations of the barrack; and what with the poor twilight and the
+irregular surface, walking was impossible. The caged author resisted
+for a good while, but the chill of the place struck deeper and deeper;
+and at length, with such reluctance as you may fancy, he was driven to
+climb upon the bed and wrap himself in the public covering. There, then,
+he lay upon the verge of shivering, plunged in semi-darkness, wound in a
+garment whose touch he dreaded like the plague, and (in a spirit far
+removed from resignation) telling the roll of the insults he had just
+received. These are not circumstances favourable to the muse.
+
+Meantime (to look at the upper surface where the sun was still shining
+and the guns of sportsmen were still noisy through the tufted plain) the
+_Cigarette_ was drawing near at his more philosophic pace. In those days
+of liberty and health he was the constant partner of the _Arethusa_, and
+had ample opportunity to share in that gentleman's disfavour with the
+police. Many a bitter bowl had he partaken of with that disastrous
+comrade. He was himself a man born to float easily through life, his
+face and manner artfully recommending him to all. There was but one
+suspicious circumstance he could not carry off, and that was his
+companion. He will not readily forget the Commissary in what is
+ironically called the free town of Frankfort-on-the-Main; nor the
+Franco-Belgian frontier; nor the inn at La Fère; last, but not least, he
+is pretty certain to remember Châtillon-sur-Loire.
+
+At the town entry, the gendarme culled him like a wayside flower; and a
+moment later two persons in a high state of surprise were confronted in
+the Commissary's office. For if the _Cigarette_ was surprised to be
+arrested, the Commissary was no less taken aback by the appearance and
+appointments of his captive. Here was a man about whom there could be no
+mistake: a man of an unquestionable and unassailable manner, in
+apple-pie order, dressed not with neatness merely but elegance, ready
+with his passport at a word, and well supplied with money: a man the
+Commissary would have doffed his hat to on chance upon the highway; and
+this _beau cavalier_ unblushingly claimed the _Arethusa_ for his
+comrade! The conclusion of the interview was foregone; of its humours I
+remember only one. "Baronet?" demanded the magistrate, glancing up from
+the passport. "_Alors, monsieur, vous êtes le fils d'un baron?_" And
+when the _Cigarette_ (his one mistake throughout the interview) denied
+the soft impeachment, "_Alors_," from the Commissary, "_ce n'est pas
+voire passeport!_" But these were ineffectual thunders; he never dreamed
+of laying hands upon the _Cigarette_; presently he fell into a mood of
+unrestrained admiration, gloating over the contents of the knapsack,
+commending our friend's tailor. Ah! what an honoured guest was the
+Commissary entertaining! What suitable clothes he wore for the warm
+weather! What beautiful maps, what an attractive work of history he
+carried in his knapsack! You are to understand there was now but one
+point of difference between them: what was to be done with the
+_Arethusa_? the _Cigarette_ demanding his release, the Commissary still
+claiming him as the dungeon's own. Now it chanced that the _Cigarette_
+had passed some years of his life in Egypt, where he had made
+acquaintance with two very bad things, cholera morbus and pashas; and in
+the eye of the Commissary, as he fingered the volume of Michelet, it
+seemed to our traveller there was something Turkish. I pass over this
+lightly; it is highly possible there was some misunderstanding, highly
+possible that the Commissary (charmed with his visitor) supposed the
+attraction to be mutual, and took for an act of growing friendship what
+the _Cigarette_ himself regarded as a bribe. And at any rate, was there
+ever a bribe more singular than an odd volume of Michelet's history! The
+work was promised him for the morrow, before our departure; and
+presently after, either because he had his price, or to show that he was
+not the man to be behind in friendly offices, "_Eh bien_," he said, "_je
+suppose qu'il faut lâcher votre camarade_." And he tore up that feast of
+humour, the unfinished _procès-verbal_. Ah, if he had only torn up
+instead the _Arethusa's_ roundels! There are many works burnt at
+Alexandria, there are many treasured in the British Museum, that I could
+better spare than the _procès-verbal_ of Châtillon. Poor bubuckled
+Commissary! I begin to be sorry that he never had his Michelet:
+perceiving in him fine human traits, a broad-based stupidity, a gusto in
+his magisterial functions, a taste for letters, a ready admiration for
+the admirable. And if he did not admire the _Arethusa_, he was not alone
+in that.
+
+To the imprisoned one, shivering under the public covering, there came
+suddenly a noise of bolts and chains. He sprang to his feet, ready to
+welcome a companion in calamity; and instead of that, the door was flung
+wide, the friendly gendarme appeared above in the strong daylight, and
+with a magnificent gesture (being probably a student of the
+drama)--"_Vous êtes libre_!" he said. None too soon for the _Arethusa_.
+I doubt if he had been half an hour imprisoned; but by the watch in a
+man's brain (which was the only watch he carried) he should have been
+eight times longer; and he passed forth with ecstasy up the cellar
+stairs into the healing warmth of the afternoon sun; and the breath of
+the earth came as sweet as a cow's into his nostril; and he heard again
+(and could have laughed for pleasure) the concord of delicate noises
+that we call the hum of life.
+
+And here it might be thought that my history ended; but not so, this was
+an act-drop and not the curtain. Upon what followed in front of the
+barrack, since there was a lady in the case, I scruple to expatiate. The
+wife of the Maréchal-des-logis was a handsome woman, and yet the
+_Arethusa_ was not sorry to be gone from her society. Something of her
+image, cool as a peach on that hot afternoon, still lingers in his
+memory: yet more of her conversation. "You have there a very fine
+parlour," said the poor gentleman. "Ah!" said Madame la Maréchale
+(des-logis), "you are very well acquainted with such parlours!" And you
+should have seen with what a hard and scornful eye she measured the
+vagabond before her! I do not think he ever hated the Commissary; but
+before that interview was at an end, he hated Madame la Maréchale. His
+passion (as I am led to understand by one who was present) stood
+confessed in a burning eye, a pale cheek, and a trembling utterance;
+Madame, meanwhile tasting the joys of the matador, goading him with
+barbed words and staring him coldly down.
+
+It was certainly good to be away from this lady, and better still to sit
+down to an excellent dinner in the inn. Here, too, the despised
+travellers scraped acquaintance with their next neighbour, a gentleman
+of these parts, returned from the day's sport, who had the good taste to
+find pleasure in their society. The dinner at an end, the gentleman
+proposed the acquaintance should be ripened in the _café_.
+
+The _café_ was crowded with sportsmen conclamantly explaining to each
+other and the world the smallness of their bags. About the centre of the
+room the _Cigarette_ and the _Arethusa_ sat with their new acquaintance;
+a trio very well pleased, for the travellers (after their late
+experience) were greedy of consideration, and their sportsman rejoiced
+in a pair of patient listeners. Suddenly the glass door flew open with a
+crash; the Maréchal-des-logis appeared in the interval, gorgeously
+belted and befrogged, entered with salutation, strode up the room with a
+clang of spurs and weapons, and disappeared through a door at the far
+end. Close at his heels followed the _Arethusa's_ gendarme of the
+afternoon, imitating, with a nice shade of difference, the imperial
+bearing of his chief; only, as he passed, he struck lightly with his
+open hand on the shoulder of his late captive, and with that ringing,
+dramatic utterance of which he had the secret--"_Suivez!_" said he.
+
+The arrest of the members, the oath of the Tennis Court, the signing of
+the Declaration of Independence, Mark Antony's oration, all the brave
+scenes of history, I conceive as having been not unlike that evening in
+the _café_ at Châtillon. Terror breathed upon the assembly. A moment
+later, when the _Arethusa_ had followed his recaptors into the farther
+part of the house, the _Cigarette_ found himself alone with his coffee
+in a ring of empty chairs and tables, all the lusty sportsmen huddled
+into corners, all their clamorous voices hushed in whispering, all their
+eyes shooting at him furtively as at a leper.
+
+And the _Arethusa_? Well, he had a long, sometimes a trying, interview
+in the back kitchen. The Maréchal-des-logis, who was a very handsome
+man, and I believe both intelligent and honest, had no clear opinion on
+the case. He thought the Commissary had done wrong, but he did not wish
+to get his subordinates into trouble; and he proposed this, that, and
+the other, to all of which the _Arethusa_ (with a growing sense of his
+position) demurred.
+
+"In short," suggested the _Arethusa_, "you want to wash your hands of
+further responsibility? Well, then, let me go to Paris."
+
+The Maréchal-des-logis looked at his watch.
+
+"You may leave," said he, "by the ten o'clock train for Paris."
+
+And at noon the next day the travellers were telling their misadventure
+in the dining-room at Siron's.
+
+
+
+
+TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY
+
+IN THE CEVENNES
+
+
+_My dear Sidney Colvin,_
+
+_The journey which this little book is to describe was very agreeable and
+fortunate for me. After an uncouth beginning, I had the best of luck to
+the end. But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the
+wilderness of this world--all, too, travellers with a donkey; and the
+best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate
+voyager who finds many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They are the
+end and the reward of life. They keep us worthy of ourselves; and when
+we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent.
+
+Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of
+him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private
+messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped for
+them in every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays
+the postage. Yet though the letter is directed to all, we have an old
+and kindly custom of addressing it on the outside to one. Of what shall
+a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends? And so, my dear
+Sidney Colvin, it is with pride that I sign myself
+
+Affectionately yours,
+
+R. L. S._
+
+
+
+
+VELAY
+
+     _Many are the mighty things, and naught
+     is more mighty than man.... He
+     masters by his devices the tenant of the
+     fields._
+
+            SOPHOCLES.
+
+     _Who hath loosed the bands of the wild ass?_
+
+              JOB.
+
+
+TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY
+
+THE DONKEY, THE PACK, AND THE PACK-SADDLE
+
+
+In a little place called Le Monastier, in a pleasant highland valley
+fifteen miles from Le Puy, I spent about a month of fine days. Monastier
+is notable for the making of lace, for drunkenness, for freedom of
+language, and for unparalleled political dissension. There are adherents
+of each of the four French parties--Legitimists, Orleanists,
+Imperialists, and Republicans--in this little mountain-town; and they
+all hate, loathe, decry, and calumniate each other. Except for business
+purposes, or to give each other the lie in a tavern brawl, they have
+laid aside even the civility of speech. 'Tis a mere mountain Poland. In
+the midst of this Babylon I found myself a rallying-point; every one was
+anxious to be kind and helpful to the stranger. This was not merely from
+the natural hospitality of mountain people, nor even from the surprise
+with which I was regarded as a man living of his own free will in Le
+Monastier, when he might just as well have lived anywhere else in this
+big world; it arose a good deal from my projected excursion southward
+through the Cevennes. A traveller of my sort was a thing hitherto
+unheard-of in that district. I was looked upon with contempt, like a man
+who should project a journey to the moon, but yet with a respectful
+interest, like one setting forth for the inclement Pole. All were ready
+to help in my preparations; a crowd of sympathizers supported me at the
+critical moment of a bargain; not a step was taken but was heralded by
+glasses round and celebrated by a dinner or a breakfast.
+
+It was already hard upon October before I was ready to set forth, and at
+the high altitudes over which my road lay there was no Indian summer to
+be looked for. I was determined, if not to camp out, at least to have
+the means of camping out in my possession; for there is nothing more
+harassing to an easy mind than the necessity of reaching shelter by
+dusk, and the hospitality of a village inn is not always to be reckoned
+sure by those who trudge on foot. A tent, above all, for a solitary
+traveller, is troublesome to pitch and troublesome to strike again; and
+even on the march it forms a conspicuous feature in your baggage. A
+sleeping-sack, on the other hand, is always ready--you have only to get
+into it; it serves a double purpose--a bed by night, a portmanteau by
+day; and it does not advertise your intention of camping out to every
+curious passer-by. This is a huge point. If a camp is not secret, it is
+but a troubled resting-place; you become a public character; the
+convivial rustic visits your bedside after an early supper; and you must
+sleep with one eye open, and be up before the day. I decided on a
+sleeping-sack; and after repeated visits to Le Puy, and a deal of high
+living for myself and my advisers, a sleeping-sack was designed,
+constructed, and triumphantly brought home.
+
+This child of my invention was nearly six feet square, exclusive of two
+triangular flaps to serve as a pillow by night and as the top and bottom
+of the sack by day. I call it "the sack," but it was never a sack by
+more than courtesy: only a sort of long roll or sausage, green
+waterproof cart-cloth without and blue sheep's fur within. It was
+commodious as a valise, warm and dry for a bed. There was luxurious
+turning room for one; and at a pinch the thing might serve for two. I
+could bury myself in it up to the neck; for my head I trusted to a fur
+cap, with a hood to fold down over my ears, and a band to pass under my
+nose like a respirator; and in case of heavy rain I proposed to make
+myself a little tent, or tentlet, with my waterproof coat, three stones,
+and a bent branch.
+
+It will readily be conceived that I could not carry this huge package on
+my own, merely human, shoulders. It remained to choose a beast of
+burden. Now, a horse is a fine lady among animals--flighty, timid,
+delicate in eating, of tender health; he is too valuable and too restive
+to be left alone, so that you are chained to your brute as to a fellow
+galley-slave; a dangerous road puts him out of his wits; in short, he's
+an uncertain and exacting ally, and adds thirty-fold to the troubles of
+the voyager. What I required was something cheap and small and hardy,
+and of a stolid and peaceful temper; and all these requisites pointed to
+a donkey.
+
+There dwelt an old man in Monastier, of rather unsound intellect
+according to some, much followed by street-boys, and known to fame as
+Father Adam. Father Adam had a cart, and to draw the cart a diminutive
+she-ass, not much bigger than a dog, the colour of a mouse, with a
+kindly eye and a determined under-jaw. There was something neat and
+high-bred, a quakerish elegance, about the rogue that hit my fancy on
+the spot. Our first interview was in Monastier market-place. To prove
+her good temper, one child after another was set upon her back to ride,
+and one after another went head over heels into the air; until a want of
+confidence began to reign in youthful bosoms, and the experiment was
+discontinued from a dearth of subjects. I was already backed by a
+deputation of my friends; but as if this were not enough, all the buyers
+and sellers came round and helped me in the bargain; and the ass and I
+and Father Adam were the centre of a hubbub for near half an hour. At
+length she passed into my service for the consideration of sixty-five
+francs and a glass of brandy. The sack had already cost eighty francs
+and two glasses of beer; so that Modestine, as I instantly baptized her,
+was upon all accounts the cheaper article. Indeed, that was as it
+should be; for she was only an appurtenance of my mattress, or
+self-acting bedstead on four castors.
+
+I had a last interview with Father Adam in a billiard-room at the
+witching hour of dawn, when I administered the brandy. He professed
+himself greatly touched by the separation, and declared he had often
+bought white bread for the donkey when he had been content with black
+bread for himself; but this, according to the best authorities, must
+have been a flight of fancy. He had a name in the village for brutally
+misusing the ass; yet it is certain that he shed a tear, and the tear
+made a clean mark down one cheek.
+
+By the advice of a fallacious local saddler, a leather pad was made for
+me with rings to fasten on my bundle; and I thoughtfully completed my
+kit and arranged my toilette. By way of armoury and utensils, I took a
+revolver, a little spirit-lamp and pan, a lantern and some halfpenny
+candles, a jack-knife and a large leather flask. The main cargo
+consisted of two entire changes of warm clothing--besides my travelling
+wear of country velveteen, pilot-coat, and knitted spencer--some books,
+and my railway-rug, which, being also in the form of a bag, made me a
+double castle for cold nights. The permanent larder was represented by
+cakes of chocolate and tins of Bologna sausage. All this, except what I
+carried about my person, was easily stowed into the sheepskin bag; and
+by good fortune I threw in my empty knapsack, rather for convenience of
+carriage than from any thought that I should want it on my journey. For
+more immediate needs I took a leg of cold mutton, a bottle of
+Beaujolais, an empty bottle to carry milk, an egg-beater, and a
+considerable quantity of black bread and white, like Father Adam, for
+myself and donkey, only in my scheme of things the destinations were
+reversed.
+
+Monastrians, of all shades of thought in politics, had agreed in
+threatening me with many ludicrous misadventures, and with sudden death
+in many surprising forms. Cold, wolves, robbers, above all the
+nocturnal practical joker, were daily and eloquently forced on my
+attention. Yet in these vaticinations, the true, patent danger was left
+out. Like Christian, it was from my pack I suffered by the way. Before
+telling my own mishaps, let me, in two words, relate the lesson of my
+experience. If the pack is well strapped at the ends, and hung at full
+length--not doubled, for your life--across the pack-saddle, the
+traveller is safe. The saddle will certainly not fit, such is the
+imperfection of our transitory life; it will assuredly topple and tend
+to overset; but there are stones on every roadside, and a man soon
+learns the art of correcting any tendency to overbalance with a
+well-adjusted stone.
+
+On the day of my departure I was up a little after five; by six, we
+began to load the donkey; and ten minutes after my hopes were in the
+dust. The pad would not stay on Modestine's back for half a moment. I
+returned it to its maker, with whom I had so contumelious a passage that
+the street outside was crowded from wall to wall with gossips looking on
+and listening. The pad changed hands with much vivacity; perhaps it
+would be more descriptive to say that we threw it at each other's heads;
+and, at any rate, we were very warm and unfriendly, and spoke with a
+deal of freedom.
+
+I had a common donkey pack-saddle--a _barde_, as they call it--fitted
+upon Modestine; and once more loaded her with my effects. The doubled
+sack, my pilot-coat (for it was warm, and I was to walk in my
+waistcoat), a great bar of black bread, and an open basket containing
+the white bread, the mutton, and the bottles, were all corded together
+in a very elaborate system of knots, and I looked on the result with
+fatuous content. In such a monstrous deck-cargo, all poised above the
+donkey's shoulders, with nothing below to balance, on a brand-new
+pack-saddle that had not yet been worn to fit the animal, and fastened
+with brand-new girths that might be expected to stretch and slacken by
+the way, even a very careless traveller should have seen disaster
+brewing. That elaborate system of knots, again, was the work of too many
+sympathizers to be very artfully designed. It is true they tightened the
+cords with a will; as many as three at a time would have a foot against
+Modestine's quarters, and be hauling with clenched teeth; but I learned
+afterwards that one thoughtful person, without any exercise of force,
+can make a more solid job than half a dozen heated and enthusiastic
+grooms. I was then but a novice; even after the misadventure of the pad
+nothing could disturb my security, and I went forth from the stable-door
+as an ox goeth to the slaughter.
+
+
+
+
+THE GREEN DONKEY-DRIVER
+
+
+The bell of Monastier was just striking nine as I got quit of these
+preliminary troubles and descended the hill through the common. As long
+as I was within sight of the windows, a secret shame and the fear of
+some laughable defeat withheld me from tampering with Modestine. She
+tripped along upon her four small hoofs with a sober daintiness of gait;
+from time to time she shook her ears or her tail; and she looked so
+small under the bundle that my mind misgave me. We got across the ford
+without difficulty--there was no doubt about the matter, she was
+docility itself--and once on the other bank, where the road begins to
+mount through pine woods, I took in my right hand the unhallowed staff,
+and with a quaking spirit applied it to the donkey. Modestine brisked up
+her pace for perhaps three steps, and then relapsed into her former
+minuet. Another application had the same effect, and so with the third.
+I am worthy the name of an Englishman, and it goes against my conscience
+to lay my hand rudely on a female. I desisted, and looked her all over
+from head to foot; the poor brute's knees were trembling and her
+breathing was distressed; it was plain that she could go no faster on a
+hill. God forbid, thought I, that I should brutalize this innocent
+creature; let her go at her own pace, and let me patiently follow.
+
+What that pace was there is no word mean enough to describe; it was
+something as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run; it
+kept me hanging on each foot for an incredible length of time; in five
+minutes it exhausted the spirit and set up a fever in all the muscles of
+the leg. And yet I had to keep close at hand and measure my advance
+exactly upon hers; for if I dropped a few yards into the rear, or went
+on a few yards ahead, Modestine came instantly to a halt and began to
+browse. The thought that this was to last from here to Alais nearly
+broke my heart. Of all conceivable journeys this promised to be the most
+tedious. I tried to tell myself it was a lovely day; I tried to charm my
+foreboding spirit with tobacco; but I had a vision ever present to me of
+the long, long roads, up hill and down dale, and a pair of figures ever
+infinitesimally moving, foot by foot, a yard to the minute, and, like
+things enchanted in a nightmare, approaching no nearer to the goal.
+
+In the meantime there came up behind us a tall peasant, perhaps forty
+years of age, of an ironical snuffy countenance, and arrayed in the
+green tail-coat of the country. He overtook us hand over hand, and
+stopped to consider our pitiful advance.
+
+"Your donkey," says he, "is very old?"
+
+I told him, I believed not.
+
+Then, he supposed, we had come far.
+
+I told him, we had but newly left Monastier.
+
+"_Et vous marchez comme ça!_" cried he; and, throwing back his head, he
+laughed long and heartily. I watched him, half prepared to feel
+offended, until he had satisfied his mirth; and then, "You must have no
+pity on these animals," said he; and, plucking a switch out of a
+thicket, he began to lace Modestine about the stern-works, uttering a
+cry. The rogue pricked up her ears and broke into a good round pace,
+which she kept up without flagging, and without exhibiting the least
+symptom of distress, as long as the peasant kept beside us. Her former
+panting and shaking had been, I regret to say, a piece of comedy.
+
+My _deus ex machinâ_, before he left me, supplied some excellent, if
+inhumane, advice; presented me with the switch, which he declared she
+would feel more tenderly than my cane; and finally taught me the true
+cry or masonic word of donkey-drivers, "Proot!" All the time, he
+regarded me with a comical, incredulous air, which was embarrassing to
+confront; and smiled over my donkey-driving, as I might have smiled over
+his orthography, or his green tail-coat. But it was not my turn for the
+moment.
+
+I was proud of my new lore, and thought I had learned the art to
+perfection. And certainly Modestine did wonders for the rest of the
+forenoon, and I had a breathing space to look about me. It was Sabbath;
+the mountain-fields were all vacant in the sunshine; and as we came down
+through St. Martin de Frugères, the church was crowded to the door,
+there were people kneeling without upon the steps, and the sound of the
+priest's chanting came forth out of the dim interior. It gave me a home
+feeling on the spot; for I am a countryman of the Sabbath, so to speak,
+and all Sabbath observances, like a Scottish accent, strike in me mixed
+feelings, grateful and the reverse. It is only a traveller, hurrying by
+like a person from another planet, who can rightly enjoy the peace and
+beauty of the great ascetic feast. The sight of the resting country does
+his spirit good. There is something better than music in the wide,
+unusual silence; and it disposes him to amiable thoughts, like the sound
+of a little river or the warmth of sunlight.
+
+In this pleasant humour I came down the hill to where Goudet stands in a
+green end of a valley, with Château Beaufort opposite upon a rocky
+steep, and the stream, as clear as crystal, lying in a deep pool between
+them. Above and below, you may hear it wimpling over the stones, an
+amiable stripling of a river, which it seems absurd to call the Loire.
+On all sides, Goudet is shut in by mountains; rocky footpaths,
+practicable at best for donkeys, join it to the outer world of France;
+and the men and women drink and swear, in their green corner, or look up
+at the snow-clad peaks in winter from the threshold of their homes, in
+an isolation, you would think, like that of Homer's Cyclops. But it is
+not so; the postman reaches Goudet with the letter-bag; the aspiring
+youth of Goudet are within a day's walk of the railway at Le Puy; and
+here in the inn you may find an engraved portrait of the host's nephew,
+Régis Senac, "Professor of Fencing and Champion of the two Americas," a
+distinction gained by him, along with the sum of five hundred dollars,
+at Tammany Hall, New York, on the 10th April 1876.
+
+I hurried over my midday meal, and was early forth again. But, alas, as
+we climbed the interminable hill upon the other side, "Proot!" seemed to
+have lost its virtue. I prooted like a lion, I prooted mellifluously
+like a sucking-dove; but Modestine would be neither softened nor
+intimidated. She held doggedly to her pace; nothing but a blow would
+move her, and that only for a second. I must follow at her heels,
+incessantly belabouring. A moment's pause in this ignoble toil, and she
+relapsed into her own private gait. I think I never heard of any one in
+as mean a situation. I must reach the lake of Bouchet, where I meant to
+camp, before sundown, and, to have even a hope of this, I must instantly
+maltreat this uncomplaining animal. The sound of my own blows sickened
+me. Once, when I looked at her, she had a faint resemblance to a lady of
+my acquaintance who formerly loaded me with kindness; and this increased
+my horror of my cruelty.
+
+To make matters worse, we encountered another donkey, ranging at will
+upon the roadside; and this other donkey chanced to be a gentleman. He
+and Modestine met nickering for joy, and I had to separate the pair and
+beat down their young romance with a renewed and feverish bastinado. If
+the other donkey had had the heart of a male under his hide, he would
+have fallen upon me tooth and hoof; and this was a kind of
+consolation--he was plainly unworthy of Modestine's affection. But the
+incident saddened me, as did everything that spoke of my donkey's sex.
+
+It was blazing hot up the valley, windless, with vehement sun upon my
+shoulders; and I had to labour so consistently with my stick that the
+sweat ran into my eyes. Every five minutes, too, the pack, the basket,
+and the pilot-coat would take an ugly slew to one side or the other; and
+I had to stop Modestine, just when I had got her to a tolerable pace of
+about two miles an hour, to tug, push, shoulder, and readjust the load.
+And at last, in the village of Ussel, saddle and all, the whole
+hypothec, turned round and grovelled in the dust below the donkey's
+belly. She, none better pleased, incontinently drew up and seemed to
+smile, and a party of one man, two women, and two children came up, and,
+standing round me in a half circle, encouraged her by their example.
+
+I had the devil's own trouble to get the thing righted; and the instant
+I had done so, without hesitation, it toppled and fell down upon the
+other side. Judge if I was hot! And yet not a hand was offered to assist
+me. The man, indeed, told me I ought to have a package of a different
+shape. I suggested, if he knew nothing better to the point in my
+predicament, he might hold his tongue. And the good-natured dog agreed
+with me smilingly. It was the most despicable fix. I must plainly
+content myself with the pack for Modestine, and take the following items
+for my own share of the portage: a cane, a quart flask, a pilot-jacket
+heavily weighted in the pockets, two pounds of black bread, and an open
+basket full of meats and bottles. I believe I may say I am not devoid of
+greatness of soul; for I did not recoil from this infamous burden. I
+disposed it, Heaven knows how, so as to be mildly portable, and then
+proceeded to steer Modestine through the village. She tried, as was
+indeed her invariable habit, to enter every house and every courtyard in
+the whole length; and, encumbered as I was, without a hand to help
+myself, no words can render an idea of my difficulties. A priest, with
+six or seven others, was examining a church in process of repair, and he
+and his acolytes laughed loudly as they saw my plight. I remembered
+having laughed myself when I had seen good men struggling with adversity
+in the person of a jackass, and the recollection filled me with
+penitence. That was in my old light days, before this trouble came upon
+me. God knows at least that I shall never laugh again, thought I. But
+oh, what a cruel thing is a farce to those engaged in it!
+
+A little out of the village, Modestine, filled with the demon, set her
+heart upon a by-road, and positively refused to leave it. I dropped all
+my bundles, and, I am ashamed to say, struck the poor sinner twice
+across the face. It was pitiful to see her lift her head with shut eyes,
+as if waiting for another blow. I came very near crying, but I did a
+wiser thing than that, and sat squarely down by the roadside to consider
+my situation under the cheerful influence of tobacco and a nip of
+brandy. Modestine, in the meanwhile, munched some black bread with a
+contrite hypocritical air. It was plain that I must make a sacrifice to
+the gods of shipwreck. I threw away the empty bottle destined to carry
+milk; I threw away my own white bread, and, disdaining to act by general
+average, kept the black bread for Modestine; lastly, I threw away the
+cold leg of mutton and the egg-whisk, although this last was dear to my
+heart. Thus I found room for everything in the basket, and even stowed
+the boating-coat on the top. By means of an end of cord I slung it under
+one arm, and although the cord cut my shoulder, and the jacket hung
+almost to the ground, it was with a heart greatly lightened that I set
+forth again.
+
+I I had now an arm free to thrash Modestine, and cruelly I chastised
+her. If I were to reach the lake-side before dark she must bestir her
+little shanks to some tune. Already the sun had gone down into a
+windy-looking mist; and although there were still a few streaks of gold
+far off to the east on the hills and the black fir-woods, all was cold
+and grey about our onward path. An infinity of little country by-roads
+led hither and thither among the fields. It was the most pointless
+labyrinth. I could see my destination overhead, or rather the peak that
+dominates it, but choose as I pleased, the roads always ended by turning
+away from it, and sneaking back towards the valley, or northward along
+the margin of the hills. The failing light, the waning colour, the
+naked, unhomely, stony country through which I was travelling, threw me
+into some despondency. I promise you, the stick was not idle; I think
+every decent step that Modestine took must have cost me at least two
+emphatic blows. There was not another sound in the neighbourhood but
+that of my unwearying bastinado.
+
+Suddenly, in the midst of my toils, the load once more bit the dust,
+and, as by enchantment, all the cords were simultaneously loosened, and
+the road scattered with my dear possessions. The packing was to begin
+again from the beginning; and as I had to invent a new and better
+system, I do not doubt but I lost half an hour. It began to be dusk in
+earnest as I reached a wilderness of turf and stones. It had the air of
+being a road which should lead everywhere at the same time; and I was
+falling into something not unlike despair when I saw two figures
+stalking towards me over the stones. They walked one behind the other
+like tramps, but their pace was remarkable. The son led the way, a tall,
+ill-made, sombre, Scottish-looking man; the mother followed, all in her
+Sunday's best, with an elegantly embroidered ribbon to her cap, and a
+new felt hat atop, and proffering, as she strode along with kilted
+petticoats, a string of obscene and blasphemous oaths.
+
+I hailed the son, and asked him my direction. He pointed loosely west
+and north-west, muttered an inaudible comment, and, without slackening
+his pace for an instant, stalked on, as he was going, right athwart my
+path. The mother followed without so much as raising her head. I shouted
+and shouted after them, but they continued to scale the hillside, and
+turned a deaf ear to my outcries. At last, leaving Modestine by herself,
+I was constrained to run after them, hailing the while. They stopped as
+I drew near, the mother still cursing; and I could see she was a
+handsome, motherly, respectable-looking woman. The son once more
+answered me roughly and inaudibly, and was for setting out again. But
+this time I simply collared the mother, who was nearest me, and,
+apologizing for my violence, declared that I could not let them go until
+they had put me on my road. They were neither of them offended--rather
+mollified than otherwise; told me I had only to follow them; and then
+the mother asked me what I wanted by the lake at such an hour. I
+replied, in the Scottish manner, by inquiring if she had far to go
+herself. She told me, with another oath, that she had an hour and a
+half's road before her. And then, without salutation, the pair strode
+forward again up the hillside in the gathering dusk.
+
+I returned for Modestine, pushed her briskly forward, and, after a sharp
+ascent of twenty minutes, reached the edge of a plateau. The view,
+looking back on my day's journey, was both wild and sad. Mount Mézenc
+and the peaks beyond St. Julien stood out in trenchant gloom against a
+cold glitter in the east; and the intervening field of hills had fallen
+together into one broad wash of shadow, except here and there the
+outline of a wooded sugar-loaf in black, here and there a white,
+irregular patch to represent a cultivated farm, and here and there a
+blot where the Loire, the Gazeille, or the Laussonne wandered in a
+gorge.
+
+Soon we were on a high-road, and surprise seized on my mind as I beheld
+a village of some magnitude close at hand; for I had been told that the
+neighbourhood of the lake was uninhabited except by trout. The road
+smoked in the twilight with children driving home cattle from the
+fields; and a pair of mounted stride-legged women, hat and cap and all,
+dashed past me at a hammering trot from the canton where they had been
+to church and market. I asked one of the children where I was. At
+Bouchet St. Nicholas, he told me. Thither, about a mile south of my
+destination, and on the other side of a respectable summit, had these
+confused roads and treacherous peasantry conducted me. My shoulder was
+cut, so that it hurt sharply; my arm ached like tooth-ache from
+perpetual beating; I gave up the lake and my design to camp, and asked
+for the _auberge_.
+
+
+
+
+I HAVE A GOAD
+
+
+The _auberge_ of Bouchet St. Nicholas was among the least pretentious I
+have ever visited; but I saw many more of the like upon my journey.
+Indeed, it was typical of these French highlands. Imagine a cottage of
+two stories, with a bench before the door; the stable and kitchen in a
+suite, so that Modestine and I could hear each other dining; furniture
+of the plainest, earthen floors, a single bed-chamber for travellers,
+and that without any convenience but beds. In the kitchen cooking and
+eating go forward side by side, and the family sleep at night. Any one
+who has a fancy to wash must do so in public at the common table. The
+food is sometimes spare; hard fish and omelette have been my portion
+more than once; the wine is of the smallest, the brandy abominable to
+man; and the visit of a fat sow, grouting under the table and rubbing
+against your legs, is no impossible accompaniment to dinner.
+
+But the people of the inn, in nine cases out of ten, show themselves
+friendly and considerate. As soon as you cross the doors you cease to be
+a stranger; and although these peasantry are rude and forbidding on the
+highway, they show a tincture of kind breeding when you share their
+hearth. At Bouchet, for instance, I uncorked my bottle of Beaujolais,
+and asked the host to join me. He would take but little.
+
+"I am an amateur of such wine, do you see?" he said, "and I am capable
+of leaving you not enough."
+
+In these hedge-inns the traveller is expected to eat with his own knife;
+unless he ask, no other will be supplied: with a glass, a whang of
+bread, and an iron fork, the table is completely laid. My knife was
+cordially admired by the landlord of Bouchet, and the spring filled him
+with wonder.
+
+"I should never have guessed that," he said. "I would bet," he added,
+weighing it in his hand, "that this cost you not less than five francs."
+
+When I told him it had cost me twenty, his jaw dropped.
+
+He was a mild, handsome, sensible, friendly old man, astonishingly
+ignorant. His wife, who was not so pleasant in her manners, knew how to
+read, although I do not suppose she ever did so. She had a share of
+brains, and spoke with a cutting emphasis, like one who ruled the roast.
+
+"My man knows nothing," she said, with an angry nod; "he is like the
+beasts."
+
+And the old gentleman signified acquiescence with his head. There was no
+contempt on her part, and no shame on his; the facts were accepted
+loyally, and no more about the matter.
+
+I was tightly cross-examined about my journey; and the lady understood
+in a moment, and sketched out what I should put into my book when I got
+home. "Whether people harvest or not in such or such a place; if there
+were forests; studies of manners; what, for example, I and the master of
+the house say to you; the beauties of Nature, and all that." And she
+interrogated me with a look.
+
+"It is just that," said I.
+
+"You see," she added to her husband, "I understood that."
+
+They were both much interested by the story of my misadventures.
+
+"In the morning," said the husband, "I will make you something better
+than your cane. Such a beast as that feels nothing; it is in the
+proverb--_dur comme un âne_; you might beat her insensible with a
+cudgel, and yet you would arrive nowhere."
+
+Something better! I little knew what he was offering.
+
+The sleeping-room was furnished with two beds. I had one; and I will own
+I was a little abashed to find a young man and his wife and child in the
+act of mounting into the other. This was my first experience of the
+sort; and if I am always to feel equally silly and extraneous, I pray
+God it be my last as well. I kept my eyes to myself, and know nothing of
+the woman except that she had beautiful arms, and seemed no whit
+embarrassed by my appearance. As a matter of fact, the situation was
+more trying to me than to the pair. A pair keep each other in
+countenance; it is the single gentleman who has to blush. But I could
+not help attributing my sentiments to the husband, and sought to
+conciliate his tolerance with a cup of brandy from my flask. He told me
+that he was a cooper of Alais travelling to St. Etienne in search of
+work, and that in his spare moments he followed the fatal calling of a
+maker of matches. Me he readily enough divined to be a brandy merchant.
+
+I was up first in the morning (Monday, September 23rd), and hastened my
+toilette guiltily, so as to leave a clear field for madam, the cooper's
+wife. I drank a bowl of milk, and set off to explore the neighbourhood
+of Bouchet. It was perishing cold, a grey, windy, wintry morning; misty
+clouds flew fast and low; the wind piped over the naked platform; and
+the only speck of colour was away behind Mount Mézenc and the eastern
+hills, where the sky still wore the orange of the dawn.
+
+It was five in the morning, and four thousand feet above the sea; and I
+had to bury my hands in my pockets and trot. People were trooping out to
+the labours of the field by twos and threes, and all turned round to
+stare upon the stranger. I had seen them coming back last night, I saw
+them going afield again; and there was the life of Bouchet in a
+nutshell.
+
+When I came back to the inn for a bit of breakfast, the landlady was in
+the kitchen combing out her daughter's hair; and I made her my
+compliments upon its beauty.
+
+"Oh, no," said the mother; "it is not so beautiful as it ought to be.
+Look, it is too fine."
+
+Thus does a wise peasantry console itself under adverse physical
+circumstances, and, by a startling democratic process, the defects of
+the majority decide the type of beauty.
+
+"And where," said I, "is monsieur?"
+
+"The master of the house is upstairs," she answered, "making you a
+goad."
+
+Blessed be the man who invented goads! Blessed the innkeeper of Bouchet
+St. Nicholas, who introduced me to their use! This plain wand, with an
+eighth of an inch of pin, was indeed a sceptre when he put it in my
+hands. Thenceforward Modestine was my slave. A prick, and she passed the
+most inviting stable-door. A prick, and she broke forth into a gallant
+little trotlet that devoured the miles. It was not a remarkable speed,
+when all was said; and we took four hours to cover ten miles at the best
+of it. But what a heavenly change since yesterday! No more wielding of
+the ugly cudgel; no more flailing with an aching arm; no more broadsword
+exercise, but a discreet and gentlemanly fence. And what although now
+and then a drop of blood should appear on Modestine's mouse-coloured
+wedge-like rump? I should have preferred it otherwise, indeed; but
+yesterday's exploits had purged my heart of all humanity. The perverse
+little devil, since she would not be taken with kindness, must even go
+with pricking.
+
+It was bleak and bitter cold, and, except a cavalcade of stride-legged
+ladies and a pair of post-runners, the road was dead solitary all the
+way to Pradelles. I scarce remember an incident but one. A handsome foal
+with a bell about his neck came charging up to us upon a stretch of
+common, sniffed the air martially as one about to do great deeds, and,
+suddenly thinking otherwise in his green young heart, put about and
+galloped off as he had come, the bell tinkling in the wind. For a long
+while afterwards I saw his noble attitude as he drew up, and heard the
+note of his bell; and when I struck the high-road, the song of the
+telegraph-wires seemed to continue the same music.
+
+Pradelles stands on a hillside, high above the Allier, surrounded by
+rich meadows. They were cutting aftermath on all sides, which gave the
+neighbourhood, this gusty autumn morning, an untimely smell of hay. On
+the opposite bank of the Allier the land kept mounting for miles to the
+horizon: a tanned and sallow autumn landscape, with black blots of
+fir-wood and white roads wandering through the hills. Over all this the
+clouds shed a uniform and purplish shadow, sad and somewhat menacing,
+exaggerating height and distance, and throwing into still higher relief
+the twisted ribbons of the highway. It was a cheerless prospect, but one
+stimulating to a traveller. For I was now upon the limit of Velay, and
+all that I beheld lay in another county--wild Gévaudan, mountainous,
+uncultivated, and but recently disforested from terror of the wolves.
+
+Wolves, alas! like bandits, seem to flee the traveler's advance, and
+you may trudge through all our comfortable Europe and not meet with an
+adventure worth the name. But here, if anywhere, a man was on the
+frontiers of hope. For this was the land of the ever-memorable BEAST,
+the Napoléon Bonaparte of wolves. What a career was his! He lived ten
+months at free quarters in Gévaudan and Vivarais; he ate women and
+children and "shepherdesses celebrated for their beauty"; he pursued
+armed horsemen; he has been seen at broad noonday chasing a post-chaise
+and outrider along the king's high-road, and chaise and outrider fleeing
+before him at the gallop. He was placarded like a political offender,
+and ten thousand francs were offered for his head. And yet, when he was
+shot and sent to Versailles, behold! a common wolf, and even small for
+that. "Though I could reach from pole to pole," sang Alexander Pope; the
+Little Corporal shook Europe; and if all wolves had been as this wolf
+they would have changed the history of man. M. Élie Berthet has made him
+the hero of a novel, which I have read, and do not wish to read again.
+
+I hurried over my lunch, and was proof against the landlady's desire
+that I should visit our Lady of Pradelles, "who performed many miracles,
+although she was of wood," and before three-quarters of an hour I was
+goading Modestine down the deep descent that leads to Langogne on the
+Allier. On both sides of the road, in big dusty fields, farmers were
+preparing for next spring. Every fifty yards a yoke of great-necked
+stolid oxen were patiently haling at the plough. I saw one of these mild
+formidable servants of the glebe, who took a sudden interest in
+Modestine and me. The furrow down which he was journeying lay at an
+angle to the road, and his head was solidly fixed to the yoke like those
+of caryatides below a ponderous cornice; but he screwed round his big
+honest eyes and followed us with a ruminating look, until his master
+bade him turn the plough and proceed to reascend the field. From all
+these furrowing ploughshares, from the feet of oxen, from a labourer
+here and there who was breaking the dry clods with a hoe, the wind
+carried away a thin dust like so much smoke. It was a fine, busy,
+breathing, rustic landscape; and as I continued to descend, the
+highlands of Gévaudan kept mounting in front of me against the sky.
+
+I had crossed the Loire the day before; now I was to cross the Allier;
+so near are these two confluents in their youth. Just at the bridge of
+Langogne, as the long-promised rain was beginning to fall, a lassie of
+some seven or eight addressed me in the sacramental phrase, "_D'où
+'st-ce-que vous venez?_" She did it with so high an air that she set me
+laughing, and this cut her to the quick. She was evidently one who
+reckoned on respect, and stood looking after me in silent dudgeon, as I
+crossed the bridge and entered the county of Gévaudan.
+
+
+
+
+UPPER GÉVAUDAN
+
+     _The way also here was very wearisome
+     through dirt and slabbiness; nor was
+     there on all this ground so much as one
+     inn or victualling-house wherein to
+     refresh the feebler sort._
+
+                      PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.
+
+
+A CAMP IN THE DARK
+
+
+The next day (Tuesday, September 24th) it was two o'clock in the
+afternoon before I got my journal written up and my knapsack repaired,
+for I was determined to carry my knapsack in the future, and have no
+more ado with baskets; and half an hour afterwards I set out for Le
+Cheylard l'Évéque, a place on the borders of the forest of Mercoire. A
+man, I was told, should walk there in an hour and a half; and I thought
+it scarce too ambitious to suppose that a man encumbered with a donkey
+might cover the same distance in four hours.
+
+All the way up the long hill from Langogne it rained and hailed
+alternately; the wind kept freshening steadily, although slowly;
+plentiful hurrying clouds--some, dragging veils of straight rain-shower,
+others massed and luminous as though promising snow--careered out of the
+north and followed me along my way. I was soon out of the cultivated
+basin of the Allier, and away from the ploughing oxen and such-like
+sights of the country. Moor, heathery marsh, tracts of rock and pines,
+woods of birch all jewelled with the autumn yellow, here and there a few
+naked cottages and bleak fields,--these were the characters of the
+country. Hill and valley followed valley and hill; the little green and
+stony cattle-tracks wandered in and out of one another, split into three
+or four, died away in marshy hollows, and began again sporadically on
+hillsides or at the borders of a wood.
+
+There was no direct road to Cheylard, and it was no easy affair to make
+a passage in this uneven country and through this intermittent labyrinth
+of tracks. It must have been about four when I struck Sagnerousse, and
+went on my way rejoicing in a sure point of departure. Two hours
+afterwards, the dusk rapidly falling, in a lull of the wind, I issued
+from a fir-wood where I had long been wandering, and found, not the
+looked-for village, but another marish bottom among rough-and-tumble
+hills. For some time past I had heard the ringing of cattle-bells ahead;
+and now, as I came out of the skirts of the wood, I saw near upon a
+dozen cows, and perhaps as many more black figures, which I conjectured
+to be children, although the mist had almost unrecognisably exaggerated
+their forms. These were all silently following each other round and
+round in a circle, now taking hands, now breaking up with chains and
+reverences. A dance of children appeals to very innocent and lively
+thoughts; but, at nightfall on the marshes, the thing was eerie and
+fantastic to behold. Even I, who am well enough read in Herbert Spencer,
+felt a sort of silence fall for an instant on my mind. The next, I was
+pricking Modestine forward, and guiding her like an unruly ship through
+the open. In a path, she went doggedly ahead of her own accord, as
+before a fair wind; but once on the turf or among heather, and the brute
+became demented. The tendency of lost travellers to go round in a circle
+was developed in her to the degree of passion, and it took all the
+steering I had in me to keep even a decently straight course through a
+single field.
+
+While I was thus desperately tacking through the bog, children and
+cattle began to disperse, until only a pair of girls remained behind.
+From these I sought direction on my path. The peasantry in general were
+but little disposed to counsel a wayfarer. One old devil simply retired
+into his house, and barricaded the door on my approach; and I might beat
+and shout myself hoarse, he turned a deaf ear. Another, having given me
+a direction which, as I found afterwards, I had misunderstood,
+complacently watched me going wrong without adding a sign. He did not
+care a stalk of parsley if I wandered all night upon the hills! As for
+these two girls, they were a pair of impudent sly sluts, with not a
+thought but mischief. One put out her tongue at me, the other bade me
+follow the cows, and they both giggled and joggled each other's elbows.
+The Beast of Gévaudan ate about a hundred children of this district; I
+began to think of him with sympathy.
+
+Leaving the girls, I pushed on through the bog, and got into another
+wood and upon a well-marked road. It grew darker and darker. Modestine,
+suddenly beginning to smell mischief, bettered the pace of her own
+accord, and from that time forward gave me no trouble. It was the first
+sign of intelligence I had occasion to remark in her. At the same time,
+the wind freshened into half a gale, and another heavy discharge of rain
+came flying up out of the north. At the other side of the wood I sighted
+some red windows in the dusk. This was the hamlet of Fouzilhic; three
+houses on a hillside, near a wood of birches. Here I found a delightful
+old man, who came a little way with me in the rain to put me safely on
+the road for Cheylard. He would hear of no reward, but shook his hands
+above his head almost as if in menace, and refused volubly and shrilly
+in unmitigated _patois_.
+
+All seemed right at last. My thoughts began to turn upon dinner and a
+fireside, and my heart was agreeably softened in my bosom. Alas, and I
+was on the brink of new and greater miseries! Suddenly, at a single
+swoop, the night fell. I have been abroad in many a black night, but
+never in a blacker. A glimmer of rocks, a glimmer of the track where it
+was well beaten, a certain fleecy density, or night within night, for a
+tree--this was all that I could discriminate. The sky was simply
+darkness overhead; even the flying clouds pursued their way invisibly to
+human eyesight. I could not distinguish my hand at arm's-length from the
+track, nor my goad, at the same distance, from the meadows or the sky.
+
+Soon the road that I was following split, after the fashion of the
+country, into three or four in a piece of rocky meadow. Since Modestine
+had shown such a fancy for beaten roads, I tried her instinct in this
+predicament. But the instinct of an ass is what might be expected from
+the name; in half a minute she was clambering round and round among some
+boulders, as lost a donkey as you would wish to see. I should have
+camped long before had I been properly provided; but as this was to be
+so short a stage, I had brought no wine, no bread for myself, and little
+over a pound for my lady friend. Add to this, that I and Modestine were
+both handsomely wetted by the showers. But now, if I could have found
+some water, I should have camped at once in spite of all. Water,
+however, being entirely absent, except in the form of rain, I determined
+to return to Fouzilhic, and ask a guide a little farther on my way--"a
+little farther lend thy guiding hand."
+
+The thing was easy to decide, hard to accomplish. In this sensible
+roaring blackness I was sure of nothing but the direction of the wind.
+To this I set my face; the road had disappeared, and I went across
+country, now in marshy opens, now baffled by walls unscalable to
+Modestine, until I came once more in sight of some red windows. This
+time they were differently disposed. It was not Fouzilhic, but
+Fouzilhac, a hamlet little distant from the other in space, but worlds
+away in the spirit of its inhabitants. I tied Modestine to a gate, and
+groped forward, stumbling among rocks, plunging mid-leg in bog, until I
+gained the entrance of the village. In the first lighted house there was
+a woman who would not open to me. She could do nothing, she cried to me
+through the door, being alone and lame; but if I would apply at the next
+house there was a man who could help me if he had a mind.
+
+They came to the next door in force, a man, two women, and a girl, and
+brought a pair of lanterns to examine the wayfarer. The man was not
+ill-looking, but had a shifty smile. He leaned against the doorpost,
+and heard me state my case. All I asked was a guide as far as Cheylard.
+
+"_C'est que, voyez-vous, il fait noir_," said he.
+
+I told him that was just my reason for requiring help.
+
+"I understand that," said he, looking uncomfortable; "_mais--c'est--de
+la peine_."
+
+I was willing to pay, I said. He shook his head. I rose as high as ten
+francs; but he continued to shake his head. "Name your own price then,"
+said I.
+
+"_Ce n'est pas ça_," he said at length, and with evident difficulty;
+"but I am not going to cross the door--_mais je ne sortirai pas de la
+porte_."
+
+I grew a little warm, and asked him what he proposed that I should do.
+
+"Where are you going beyond Cheylard?" he asked by way of answer.
+
+"That is no affair of yours," I returned, for I was not going to indulge
+his bestial curiosity; "it changes nothing in my present predicament."
+
+"_C'est vrai, ça_," he acknowledged, with a laugh; "_oui, c'est vrai. Et
+d'où venez-vous?_"
+
+A better man than I might have felt nettled.
+
+"Oh," said I, "I am not going to answer any of your questions, so you
+may spare yourself the trouble of putting them. I am late enough
+already; I want help. If you will not guide me yourself, at least help
+me to find some one else who will."
+
+"Hold on," he cried suddenly. "Was it not you who passed in the meadow
+while it was still day?"
+
+"Yes, yes," said the girl, whom I had not hitherto recognized; "it was
+monsieur; I told him to follow the cow."
+
+"As for you, mademoiselle," said I, "you are a _farceuse_."
+
+"And," added the man, "what the devil have you done to be still here?"
+
+What the devil, indeed! But there I was. "The great thing," said I, "is
+to make an end of it," and once more proposed that he should help me to
+find a guide.
+
+"_C'est que_," he said again, "_c'est que_--_il fait noir_."
+
+"Very well," said I; "take one of your lanterns."
+
+"No," he cried, drawing a thought backward, and again entrenching
+himself behind one of his former phrases; "I will not cross the door."
+
+I looked at him. I saw unaffected terror struggling on his face with
+unaffected shame; he was smiling pitifully and wetting his lip with his
+tongue, like a detected schoolboy. I drew a brief picture of my state,
+and asked him what I was to do.
+
+"I don't know," he said; "I will not cross the door."
+
+Here was the Beast of Gévaudan, and no mistake.
+
+"Sir," said I, with my most commanding manners, "you are a coward."
+
+And with that I turned my back upon the family party, who hastened to
+retire within their fortifications; and the famous door was closed
+again, but not till I had overheard the sound of laughter. _Filia
+barbara pater barbarior._ Let me say it in the plural: the Beasts of
+Gévaudan.
+
+The lanterns had somewhat dazzled me, and I ploughed distressfully among
+stones and rubbish-heaps. All the other houses in the village were both
+dark and silent; and though I knocked at here and there a door, my
+knocking was unanswered. It was a bad business; I gave up Fouzilhac with
+my curses. The rain had stopped, and the wind, which still kept rising,
+began to dry my coat and trousers. "Very well," thought I, "water or no
+water, I must camp." But the first thing was to return to Modestine. I
+am pretty sure I was twenty minutes groping for my lady in the dark; and
+if it had not been for the unkindly services of the bog, into which I
+once more stumbled, I might have still been groping for her at the dawn.
+My next business was to gain the shelter of a wood, for the wind was
+cold as well as boisterous. How, in this well-wooded district, I should
+have been so long in finding one, is another of the insoluble mysteries
+of this day's adventures; but I will take my oath that I put near an
+hour to the discovery.
+
+At last black trees began to show upon my left, and, suddenly crossing
+the road, made a cave of unmitigated blackness right in front. I call it
+a cave without exaggeration; to pass below that arch of leaves was like
+entering a dungeon. I felt about until my hand encountered a stout
+branch, and to this I tied Modestine, a haggard, drenched, desponding
+donkey. Then I lowered my pack, laid it along the wall on the margin of
+the road, and unbuckled the straps. I knew well enough where the lantern
+was, but where were the candles? I groped and groped among the tumbled
+articles, and, while I was thus groping, suddenly I touched the
+spirit-lamp. Salvation! This would serve my turn as well. The wind
+roared unwearyingly among the trees; I could hear the boughs tossing and
+the leaves churning through half a mile of forest; yet the scene of my
+encampment was not only as black as the pit, but admirably sheltered. At
+the second match the wick caught flame. The light was both livid and
+shifting; but it cut me off from the universe, and doubled the darkness
+of the surrounding night.
+
+I tied Modestine more conveniently for herself, and broke up half the
+black bread for her supper, reserving the other half against the
+morning. Then I gathered what I should want within reach, took off my
+wet boots and gaiters, which I wrapped in my waterproof, arranged my
+knapsack for a pillow under the flap of my sleeping-bag, insinuated my
+limbs into the interior, and buckled myself in like a _bambino_. I
+opened a tin of Bologna sausage, and broke a cake of chocolate, and that
+was all I had to eat. It may sound offensive, but I ate them together,
+bite by bite, by way of bread and meat. All I had to wash down this
+revolting mixture was neat brandy: a revolting beverage in itself. But
+I was rare and hungry; ate well, and smoked one of the best cigarettes
+in my experience. Then I put a stone in my straw hat, pulled the flap of
+my fur cap over my neck and eyes, put my revolver ready to my hand, and
+snuggled well down among the sheepskins.
+
+I questioned at first if I were sleepy, for I felt my heart beating
+faster than usual, as if with an agreeable excitement to which my mind
+remained a stranger. But as soon as my eyelids touched, that subtle glue
+leaped between them, and they would no more come separate. The wind
+among the trees was my lullaby. Sometimes it sounded for minutes
+together with a steady, even rush, not rising nor abating; and again it
+would swell and burst like a great crashing breaker, and the trees would
+patter me all over with big drops from the rain of the afternoon. Night
+after night, in my own bedroom in the country, I have given ear to this
+perturbing concert of the wind among the woods, but whether it was a
+difference in the trees, or the lie of the ground, or because I was
+myself outside and in the midst of it, the fact remains that the wind
+sang to a different tune among these woods of Gévaudan. I hearkened and
+hearkened; and meanwhile sleep took gradual possession of my body and
+subdued my thoughts and senses; but still my last waking effort was to
+listen and distinguish, and my last conscious state was one of wonder at
+the foreign clamour in my ears.
+
+Twice in the course of the dark hours--once when a stone galled me
+underneath the sack, and again when the poor patient Modestine, growing
+angry, pawed and stamped upon the road--I was recalled for a brief while
+to consciousness, and saw a star or two overhead, and the lace-like edge
+of the foliage against the sky. When I awoke for the third time
+(Wednesday, September 25th), the world was flooded with a blue light,
+the mother of the dawn. I saw the leaves labouring in the wind and the
+ribbon of the road; and, on turning my head, there was Modestine tied
+to a beech, and standing half across the path in an attitude of
+inimitable patience. I closed my eyes again, and set to thinking over
+the experience of the night. I was surprised to find how easy and
+pleasant it had been, even in this tempestuous weather. The stone which
+annoyed me would not have been there had I not been forced to camp
+blindfold in the opaque night; and I had felt no other inconvenience
+except when my feet encountered the lantern or the second volume of
+Peyrat's "Pastors of the Desert" among the mixed contents of my
+sleeping-bag; nay, more, I had felt not a touch of cold, and awakened
+with unusually lightsome and clear sensations.
+
+With that I shook myself, got once more into my boots and gaiters, and,
+breaking up the rest of the bread for Modestine, strolled about to see
+in what part of the world I had awakened. Ulysses, left on Ithaca, and
+with a mind unsettled by the goddess, was not more pleasantly astray. I
+have been after an adventure all my life, a pure dispassionate
+adventure, such as befell early and heroic voyagers; and thus to be
+found by morning in a random woodside nook in Gévaudan--not knowing
+north from south, as strange to my surroundings as the first man upon
+the earth, an inland castaway--was to find a fraction of my daydreams
+realized. I was on the skirts of a little wood of birch, sprinkled with
+a few beeches; behind, it adjoined another wood of fir; and in front, it
+broke up and went down in open order into a shallow and meadowy dale.
+All around there were bare hill-tops, some near, some far away, as the
+perspective closed or opened, but none apparently much higher than the
+rest. The wind huddled the trees. The golden specks of autumn in the
+birches tossed shiveringly. Overhead the sky was full of strings and
+shreds of vapour, flying, vanishing, reappearing, and turning about an
+axis like tumblers, as the wind hounded them through heaven. It was wild
+weather and famishing cold. I ate some chocolate, swallowed a mouthful
+of brandy, and smoked a cigarette before the cold should have time to
+disable my fingers. And by the time I had got all this done, and had
+made my pack and bound it on the pack-saddle, the day was tiptoe on the
+threshold of the east. We had not gone many steps along the lane, before
+the sun, still invisible to me, sent a glow of gold over some cloud
+mountains that lay ranged along the eastern sky.
+
+The wind had us on the stern, and hurried us bitingly forward. I
+buttoned myself into my coat, and walked on in a pleasant frame of mind
+with all men, when suddenly, at a corner, there was Fouzilhic once more
+in front of me. Nor only that, but there was the old gentleman who had
+escorted me so far the night before, running out of his house at sight
+of me, with hands upraised in horror.
+
+"My poor boy!" he cried, "what does this mean?"
+
+I told him what had happened. He beat his old hands like clappers in a
+mill, to think how lightly he had let me go; but when he heard of the
+man of Fouzilhac, anger and depression seized upon his mind.
+
+"This time, at least," said he, "there shall be no mistake."
+
+And he limped along, for he was very rheumatic, for about half a mile,
+and until I was almost within sight of Cheylard, the destination I had
+hunted for so long.
+
+
+
+
+CHEYLARD AND LUC
+
+
+Candidly, it seemed little worthy of all this searching. A few broken
+ends of village, with no particular street, but a succession of open
+places heaped with logs and fagots; a couple of tilted crosses, a shrine
+to Our Lady of all Graces on the summit of a little hill; and all this,
+upon a rattling highland river, in the corner of a naked valley. What
+went ye out for to see? thought I to myself. But the place had a life of
+its own. I found a board commemorating the liberalities of Cheylard for
+the past year, hung up, like a banner, in the diminutive and tottering
+church. In 1877, it appeared, the inhabitants subscribed forty-eight
+francs ten centimes for the "Work of the Propagation of the Faith." Some
+of this, I could not help hoping, would be applied to my native land.
+Cheylard scrapes together halfpence for the darkened souls in Edinburgh,
+while Balquhidder and Dunrossness bemoan the ignorance of Rome. Thus, to
+the high entertainment of the angels, do we pelt each other with
+evangelists, like schoolboys bickering in the snow.
+
+The inn was again singularly unpretentious. The whole furniture of a not
+ill-to-do family was in the kitchen: the beds, the cradle, the clothes,
+the plate-rack, the meal-chest, and the photograph of the parish priest.
+There were five children, one of whom was set to its morning prayers at
+the stair-foot soon after my arrival, and a sixth would ere long be
+forthcoming. I was kindly received by these good folk. They were much
+interested in my misadventure. The wood in which I had slept belonged to
+them; the man of Fouzilhac they thought a monster of iniquity, and
+counseled me warmly to summon him at law--"because I might have died."
+The good wife was horror-stricken to see me drink over a pint of
+uncreamed milk.
+
+"You will do yourself an evil," she said. "Permit me to boil it for
+you."
+
+After I had begun the morning on this delightful liquor, she having an
+infinity of things to arrange, I was permitted, nay requested, to make a
+bowl of chocolate for myself. My boots and gaiters were hung up to dry,
+and, seeing me trying to write my journal on my knee, the eldest
+daughter let down a hinged table in the chimney-corner for my
+convenience. Here I wrote, drank my chocolate, and finally ate an
+omelette before I left. The table was thick with dust; for, as they
+explained, it was not used except in winter weather. I had a clear look
+up the vent, through brown agglomerations of soot and blue vapour, to
+the sky; and whenever a handful of twigs was thrown on to the fire, my
+legs were scorched by the blaze.
+
+The husband had begun life as a muleteer, and when I came to charge
+Modestine showed himself full of the prudence of his art. "You will have
+to change this package," said he; "it ought to be in two parts, and then
+you might have double the weight."
+
+I explained that I wanted no more weight; and for no donkey hitherto
+created would I cut my sleeping-bag in two.
+
+"It fatigues her, however," said the innkeeper; "it fatigues her greatly
+on the march. Look."
+
+Alas, there were her two forelegs no better than raw beef on the inside,
+and blood was running from under her tail. They told me when I started,
+and I was ready to believe it, that before a few days I should come to
+love Modestine like a dog. Three days had passed, we had shared some
+misadventures, and my heart was still as cold as a potato towards my
+beast of burden. She was pretty enough to look at; but then she had
+given proof of dead stupidity, redeemed indeed by patience, but
+aggravated by flashes of sorry and ill-judged light-heartedness. And I
+own this new discovery seemed another point against her. What the devil
+was the good of a she-ass if she could not carry a sleeping-bag and a
+few necessaries? I saw the end of the fable rapidly approaching, when I
+should have to carry Modestine. Æsop was the man to know the world! I
+assure you I set out with heavy thoughts upon my short day's march.
+
+It was not only heavy thoughts about Modestine that weighted me upon the
+way; it was a leaden business altogether. For first, the wind blew so
+rudely that I had to hold on the pack with one hand from Cheylard to
+Luc; and second, my road lay through one of the most beggarly countries
+in the world. It was like the worst of the Scottish Highlands, only
+worse; cold, naked, and ignoble, scant of wood, scant of heather, scant
+of life. A road and some fences broke the unvarying waste, and the line
+of the road was marked by upright pillars, to serve in time of snow.
+
+Why any one should desire to visit either Luc or Cheylard is more than
+my much-inventing spirit can suppose. For my part, I travel not to go
+anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to
+move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come
+down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite
+underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life,
+and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing
+that must be worked for. To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a
+gale out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that
+serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so
+exacting, who can annoy himself about the future?
+
+I came out at length above the Allier. A more unsightly prospect at this
+season of the year it would be hard to fancy. Shelving hills rose round
+it on all sides, here dabbled with wood and fields, there rising to
+peaks alternately naked and hairy with pines. The colour throughout was
+black or ashen, and came to a point in the ruins of the castle of Luc,
+which pricked up impudently from below my feet, carrying on a pinnacle a
+tall white statue of Our Lady, which, I heard with interest, weighed
+fifty quintals, and was to be dedicated on the 6th of October. Through
+this sorry landscape trickled the Allier and a tributary of nearly equal
+size, which came down to join it through a broad nude valley in
+Vivarais. The weather had somewhat lightened, and the clouds massed in
+squadron; but the fierce wind still hunted them through heaven, and cast
+great ungainly splashes of shadow and sunlight over the scene.
+
+Luc itself was a straggling double file of houses wedged between hill
+and river. It had no beauty, nor was there any notable feature, save the
+old castle overhead with its fifty quintals of brand-new Madonna. But
+the inn was clean and large. The kitchen, with its two box-beds hung
+with clean check curtains, with its wide stone chimney, its
+chimney-shelf four yards long and garnished with lanterns and religious
+statuettes, its array of chests and pair of ticking clocks, was the very
+model of what a kitchen ought to be; a melodrama kitchen, suitable for
+bandits or noblemen in disguise. Nor was the scene disgraced by the
+landlady, a handsome, silent, dark old woman, clothed and hooded in
+black like a nun. Even the public bedroom had a character of its own,
+with the long deal tables and benches, where fifty might have dined, set
+out as for a harvest-home, and the three box-beds along the wall. In one
+of these, lying on straw and covered with a pair of table-napkins, did I
+do penance all night long in goose-flesh and chattering teeth, and sigh,
+from time to time as I awakened, for my sheepskin sack and the lee of
+some great wood.
+
+
+
+
+OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS
+
+                    _I behold
+    The House, the Brotherhood austere--
+    And what am I, that I am here?_
+
+                   MATTHEW ARNOLD.
+
+
+FATHER APOLLONARIS
+
+
+Next morning (Thursday, 26th September) I took the road in a new order.
+The sack was no longer doubled, but hung at full length across the
+saddle, a green sausage six feet long with a tuft of blue wool hanging
+out of either end. It was more picturesque, it spared the donkey, and,
+as I began to see, it would ensure stability, blow high, blow low. But
+it was not without a pang that I had so decided. For although I had
+purchased a new cord, and made all as fast as I was able, I was yet
+jealously uneasy lest the flaps should tumble out and scatter my effects
+along the line of march.
+
+My way lay up the bald valley of the river, along the march of Vivarais
+and Gévaudan. The hills of Gévaudan on the right were a little more
+naked, if anything, than those of Vivarais upon the left, and the former
+had a monopoly of a low dotty underwood that grew thickly in the gorges
+and died out in solitary burrs upon the shoulders and the summits. Black
+bricks of fir-wood were plastered here and there upon both sides, and
+here and there were cultivated fields. A railway ran beside the river;
+the only bit of railway in Gévaudan, although there are many proposals
+afoot and surveys being made, and even, as they tell me, a station
+standing ready built in Mende. A year or two hence and this may be
+another world. The desert is beleaguered. Now may some Languedocian
+Wordsworth turn the sonnet into _patois:_ "Mountains and vales and
+floods, heard YE that whistle?"
+
+At a place called La Bastide I was directed to leave the river, and
+follow a road that mounted on the left among the hills of Vivarais, the
+modern Ardèche; for I was now come within a little way of my strange
+destination, the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of the Snows. The sun
+came out as I left the shelter of a pine-wood, and I beheld suddenly a
+fine wild landscape to the south. High rocky hills, as blue as sapphire,
+closed the view, and between these lay ridge upon ridge, heathery,
+craggy, the sun glittering on veins of rock, the underwood clambering in
+the hollows, as rude as God made them at the first. There was not a sign
+of man's hand in all the prospect; and indeed not a trace of his
+passage, save where generation after generation had walked in twisted
+footpaths, in and out among the beeches, and up and down upon the
+channeled slopes. The mists, which had hitherto beset me, were now
+broken into clouds, and fled swiftly and shone brightly in the sun. I
+drew a long breath. It was grateful to come, after so long, upon a scene
+of some attraction for the human heart. I own I like definite form in
+what my eyes are to rest upon; and if landscapes were sold, like the
+sheets of characters of my boyhood, one penny plain and twopence
+coloured, I should go the length of twopence every day of my life.
+
+But if things had grown better to the south, it was still desolate and
+inclement near at hand. A spidery cross on every hill-top marked the
+neighbourhood of a religious house; and a quarter of a mile beyond, the
+outlook southward opening out and growing bolder with every step, a
+white statue of the Virgin at the corner of a young plantation directed
+the traveller to Our Lady of the Snows. Here, then, I struck leftward,
+and pursued my way, driving my secular donkey before me, and creaking in
+my secular boots and gaiters, towards the asylum of silence.
+
+I had not gone very far ere the wind brought to me the clanging of a
+bell, and somehow, I can scarce tell why, my heart sank within me at the
+sound. I have rarely approached anything with more unaffected terror
+than the monastery of Our Lady of the Snows. This it is to have had a
+Protestant education. And suddenly, on turning a corner, fear took hold
+on me from head to foot--slavish, superstitious fear; and though I did
+not stop in my advance, yet I went on slowly, like a man who should have
+passed a bourne unnoticed, and strayed into the country of the dead. For
+there, upon the narrow new-made road, between the stripling pines, was a
+mediæval friar, fighting with a barrowful of turfs. Every Sunday of my
+childhood I used to study the Hermits of Marco Sadeler--enchanting
+prints, full of wood and field and mediæval landscapes, as large as a
+county, for the imagination to go a-travelling in; and here, sure
+enough, was one of Marco Sadeler's heroes. He was robed in white like
+any spectre, and the hood falling back, in the instancy of his
+contention with the barrow, disclosed a pate as bald and yellow as a
+skull. He might have been buried any time these thousand years, and all
+the lively parts of him resolved into earth and broken up with the
+farmer's harrow.
+
+I was troubled besides in my mind as to etiquette. Durst I address a
+person who was under a vow of silence? Clearly not. But drawing near, I
+doffed my cap to him with a far-away superstitious reverence. He nodded
+back, and cheerfully addressed me. Was I going to the monastery? Who was
+I? An Englishman? Ah, an Irishman, then?
+
+"No," I said, "a Scotsman."
+
+A Scotsman? Ah, he had never seen a Scotsman before. And he looked me
+all over, his good, honest, brawny countenance shining with interest, as
+a boy might look upon a lion or an alligator. From him I learned with
+disgust that I could not be received at Our Lady of the Snows; I might
+get a meal, perhaps, but that was all. And then, as our talk ran on, and
+it turned out that I was not a pedlar, but a literary man, who drew
+landscapes and was going to write a book, he changed his manner of
+thinking as to my reception (for I fear they respect persons even in a
+Trappist monastery), and told me I must be sure to ask for the Father
+Prior, and state my case to him in full. On second thoughts he
+determined to go down with me himself; he thought he could manage for me
+better. Might he say that I was a geographer?
+
+No; I thought, in the interests of truth, he positively might not.
+
+"Very well, then" (with disappointment), "an author."
+
+It appeared he had been in a seminary with six young Irishmen, all
+priests, long since, who had received newspapers and kept him informed
+of the state of ecclesiastical affairs in England. And he asked me
+eagerly after Dr. Pusey, for whose conversion the good man had continued
+ever since to pray night and morning.
+
+"I thought he was very near the truth," he said; "and he will reach it
+yet; there is so much virtue in prayer."
+
+He must be a stiff, ungodly Protestant who can take anything but
+pleasure in this kind and hopeful story. While he was thus near the
+subject, the good father asked me if I were a Christian; and when he
+found I was not, or not after his way, he glossed it over with great
+good-will.
+
+The road which we were following, and which this stalwart father had
+made with his own two hands within the space of a year, came to a
+corner, and showed us some white buildings a little farther on beyond
+the wood. At the same time, the bell once more sounded abroad. We were
+hard upon the monastery. Father Apollinaris (for that was my companion's
+name) stopped me.
+
+"I must not speak to you down there," he said. "Ask for the Brother
+Porter, and all will be well. But try to see me as you go out again
+through the wood, where I may speak to you. I am charmed to have made
+your acquaintance."
+
+And then suddenly raising his arms, flapping his fingers, and crying out
+twice, "I must not speak! I must not speak!" he ran away in front of me,
+and disappeared into the monastery door.
+
+I own this somewhat ghastly eccentricity went a good way to revive my
+terrors. But where one was so good and simple, why should not all be
+alike? I took heart of grace, and went forward to the gate as fast as
+Modestine, who seemed to have a disaffection for monasteries, would
+permit. It was the first door, in my acquaintance of her, which she had
+not shown an indecent haste to enter. I summoned the place in form,
+though with a quaking heart. Father Michael, the Father Hospitaller, and
+a pair of brown-robed brothers came to the gate and spoke with me a
+while. I think my sack was the great attraction; it had already beguiled
+the heart of poor Apollinaris, who had charged me on my life to show it
+to the Father Prior. But whether it was my address, or the sack, or the
+idea speedily published among that part of the brotherhood who attend on
+strangers that I was not a pedlar after all, I found no difficulty as to
+my reception. Modestine was led away by a layman to the stables, and I
+and my pack were received into Our Lady of the Snows.
+
+
+
+
+THE MONKS
+
+
+Father Michael, a pleasant, fresh-faced, smiling man, perhaps of
+thirty-five, took me to the pantry, and gave me a glass of liqueur to
+stay me until dinner. We had some talk, or rather I should say he
+listened to my prattle indulgently enough, but with an abstracted air,
+like a spirit with a thing of clay. And truly, when I remember that I
+descanted principally on my appetite, and that it must have been by that
+time more than eighteen hours since Father Michael had so much as broken
+bread, I can well understand that he would find an earthly savour in my
+conversation. But his manner, though superior, was exquisitely gracious;
+and I find I have a lurking curiosity as to Father Michael's past.
+
+The whet administered, I was left alone for a little in the monastery
+garden. This is no more than the main court, laid out in sandy paths and
+beds of parti-coloured dahlias, and with a fountain and a black statue
+of the Virgin in the centre. The buildings stand around it four-square,
+bleak, as yet unseasoned by the years and weather, and with no other
+features than a belfry and a pair of slated gables. Brothers in white,
+brothers in brown, passed silently along the sanded alleys; and when I
+first came out, three hooded monks were kneeling on the terrace at their
+prayers. A naked hill commands the monastery upon one side, and the wood
+commands it on the other. It lies exposed to wind; the snow falls off
+and on from October to May, and sometimes lies six weeks on end; but if
+they stood in Eden with a climate like heaven's, the buildings
+themselves would offer the same wintry and cheerless aspect; and for my
+part, on this wild September day, before I was called to dinner, I felt
+chilly in and out.
+
+When I had eaten well and heartily, Brother Ambrose, a hearty
+conversible Frenchman (for all those who wait on strangers have the
+liberty to speak), led me to a little room in that part of the building
+which is set apart for _MM. les retraitants_. It was clean and
+whitewashed, and furnished with strict necessaries, a crucifix, a bust
+of the late Pope, the "Imitation" in French, a book of religious
+meditations, and the "Life of Elizabeth Seton"--evangelist, it would
+appear, of North America and of New England in particular. As far as my
+experience goes, there is a fair field for some more evangelisation in
+these quarters; but think of Cotton Mather! I should like to give him a
+reading of this little work in heaven, where I hope he dwells; but
+perhaps he knows all that already, and much more; and perhaps he and
+Mrs. Seton are the dearest friends, and gladly unite their voices in the
+everlasting psalm. Over the table, to conclude the inventory of the
+room, hung a set of regulations for _MM. les retraitants:_ what services
+they should attend, when they were to tell their beads or meditate, and
+when they were to rise and go to rest. At the foot was a notable N. B.:
+"_Le temps libre est employé a l'examen de conscience, à la confession,
+à faire de bonnes résolutions,"_ etc. To make good resolutions, indeed!
+You might talk as fruitfully of making the hair grow on your head.
+
+I had scarce explored my niche when Brother Ambrose returned. An English
+boarder, it appeared, would like to speak with me. I professed my
+willingness, and the friar ushered in a fresh, young, little Irishman of
+fifty, a deacon of the Church, arrayed in strict canonicals, and wearing
+on his head what, in default of knowledge, I can only call the
+ecclesiastical shako. He had lived seven years in retreat at a convent
+of nuns in Belgium, and now five at Our Lady of the Snows; he never saw
+an English newspaper; he spoke French imperfectly, and had he spoken it
+like a native, there was not much chance of conversation where he dwelt.
+With this, he was a man eminently sociable, greedy of news, and
+simple-minded like a child. If I was pleased to have a guide about the
+monastery, he was no less delighted to see an English face and hear an
+English tongue.
+
+He showed me his own room, where he passed his time among breviaries,
+Hebrew Bibles, and the Waverley Novels. Thence he led me to the
+cloisters, into the chapter-house, through the vestry, where the
+brothers' gowns and broad straw hats were hanging up, each with his
+religious name upon a board--names full of legendary suavity and
+interest, such as Basil, Hilarion, Raphael, or Pacifique; into the
+library, where were all the works of Veuillot and Chateaubriand, and the
+"Odes et Ballades," if you please, and even Molière, to say nothing of
+innumerable fathers and a great variety of local and general historians.
+Thence my good Irishman took me round the workshops, where brothers bake
+bread, and make cart-wheels, and take photographs; where one
+superintends a collection of curiosities, and another a gallery of
+rabbits. For in a Trappist monastery each monk has an occupation of his
+own choice, apart from his religious duties and the general labours of
+the house. Each must sing in the choir, if he has a voice and ear, and
+join in the haymaking if he has a hand to stir; but in his private
+hours, although he must be occupied, he may be occupied on what he
+likes. Thus I was told that one brother was engaged with literature;
+while Father Apollinaris busies himself in making roads, and the Abbot
+employs himself in binding books. It is not so long since this Abbot was
+consecrated, by the way; and on that occasion, by a special grace, his
+mother was permitted to enter the chapel and witness the ceremony of
+consecration. A proud day for her to have a son a mitred abbot; it makes
+you glad to think they let her in.
+
+In all these journeyings to and fro, many silent fathers and brethren
+fell in our way. Usually they paid no more regard to our passage than if
+we had been a cloud; but sometimes the good deacon had a permission to
+ask of them, and it was granted by a peculiar movement of the hands,
+almost like that of a dog's paws in swimming, or refused by the usual
+negative signs, and in either case with lowered eyelids and a certain
+air of contrition, as of a man who was steering very close to evil.
+
+The monks, by special grace of their Abbot, were still taking two meals
+a day; but it was already time for their grand fast, which begins
+somewhere in September and lasts till Easter, and during which they eat
+but once in the twenty-four hours, and that at two in the afternoon,
+twelve hours after they have begun the toil and vigil of the day. Their
+meals are scanty, but even of these they eat sparingly; and though each
+is allowed a small carafe of wine, many refrain from this indulgence.
+Without doubt, the most of mankind grossly over-eat themselves; our
+meals serve not only for support, but as a hearty and natural diversion
+from the labour of life. Yet, though excess may be hurtful, I should
+have thought this Trappist regimen defective. And I am astonished, as I
+look back, at the freshness of face and cheerfulness of manner of all
+whom I beheld. A happier nor a healthier company I should scarce suppose
+that I have ever seen. As a matter of fact, on this bleak upland, and
+with the incessant occupation of the monks, life is of an uncertain
+tenure, and death no infrequent visitor, at Our Lady of the Snows. This,
+at least, was what was told me. But if they die easily, they must live
+healthily in the meantime, for they seemed all firm of flesh and high in
+colour; and the only morbid sign that I could observe, an unusual
+brilliancy of eye, was one that served rather to increase the general
+impression of vivacity and strength.
+
+Those with whom I spoke were singularly sweet-tempered, with what I can
+only call a holy cheerfulness in air and conversation. There is a note,
+in the direction to visitors, telling them not to be offended at the
+curt speech of those who wait upon them, since it is proper to monks to
+speak little. The note might have been spared; to a man the hospitallers
+were all brimming with innocent talk, and, in my experience of the
+monastery, it was easier to begin than to break off a conversation. With
+the exception of Father Michael, who was a man of the world, they showed
+themselves full of kind and healthy interest in all sorts of
+subjects--in politics, in voyages, in my sleeping-sack--and not without
+a certain pleasure in the sound of their own voices.
+
+As for those who are restricted to silence, I can only wonder how they
+bear their solemn and cheerless isolation. And yet, apart from any view
+of mortification, I can see a certain policy, not only in the exclusion
+of women, but in this vow of silence. I have had some experience of lay
+phalansteries, of an artistic, not to say a bacchanalian, character; and
+seen more than one association easily formed and yet more easily
+dispersed. With a Cistercian rule, perhaps they might have lasted
+longer. In the neighbourhood of women it is but a touch-and-go
+association that can be formed among defenceless men; the stronger
+electricity is sure to triumph; the dreams of boyhood, the schemes of
+youth, are abandoned after an interview of ten minutes, and the arts and
+sciences, and professional male jollity, deserted at once for two sweet
+eyes and a caressing accent. And next after this, the tongue is the
+great divider.
+
+I am almost ashamed to pursue this worldly criticism of a religious
+rule; but there is yet another point in which the Trappist order appeals
+to me as a model of wisdom. By two in the morning the clapper goes upon
+the bell, and so on, hour by hour, and sometimes quarter by quarter,
+till eight, the hour of rest; so infinitesimally is the day divided
+among different occupations. The man who keeps rabbits, for example,
+hurries from his hutches to the chapel, the chapter-room, or the
+refectory, all day long: every hour he has an office to sing, a duty to
+perform; from two, when he rises in the dark, till eight, when he
+returns to receive the comfortable gift of sleep, he is upon his feet
+and occupied with manifold and changing business. I know many persons,
+worth several thousands in the year, who are not so fortunate in the
+disposal of their lives. Into how many houses would not the note of the
+monastery bell, dividing the day into manageable portions, bring peace
+of mind and healthful activity of body! We speak of hardships, but the
+true hardship is to be a dull fool, and permitted to mismanage life in
+our own dull and foolish manner.
+
+From this point of view, we may perhaps better understand the monk's
+existence. A long novitiate and every proof of constancy of mind and
+strength of body is required before admission to the order; but I could
+not find that many were discouraged. In the photographer's studio, which
+figures so strangely among the outbuildings, my eye was attracted by the
+portrait of a young fellow in the uniform of a private of foot. This was
+one of the novices, who came of the age for service, and marched and
+drilled and mounted guard for the proper time among the garrison of
+Algiers. Here was a man who had surely seen both sides of life before
+deciding; yet as soon as he was set free from service he returned to
+finish his novitiate.
+
+This austere rule entitles a man to heaven as by right. When the
+Trappist sickens, he quits not his habit; he lies in the bed of death as
+he has prayed and laboured in his frugal and silent existence; and when
+the Liberator comes, at the very moment, even before they have carried
+him in his robe to lie his little last in the chapel among continual
+chantings, joy-bells break forth, as if for a marriage, from the slated
+belfry, and proclaim throughout the neighbourhood that another soul has
+gone to God.
+
+At night, under the conduct of my kind Irishman, I took my place in the
+gallery to hear compline and _Salve Regina_, with which the Cistercians
+bring every day to a conclusion. There were none of those circumstances
+which strike the Protestant as childish or as tawdry in the public
+offices of Rome. A stern simplicity, heightened by the romance of the
+surroundings, spoke directly to the heart. I recall the whitewashed
+chapel, the hooded figures in the choir, the lights alternately occluded
+and revealed, the strong manly singing, the silence that ensued, the
+sight of cowled heads bowed in prayer, and then the clear trenchant
+beating of the bell breaking in to show that the last office was over
+and the hour of sleep had come; and when I remember, I am not surprised
+that I made my escape into the court with somewhat whirling fancies, and
+stood like a man bewildered in the windy, starry night.
+
+But I was weary; and when I had quieted my spirits with Elizabeth
+Seton's memoirs--a dull work--the cold and the raving of the wind among
+the pines (for my room was on that side of the monastery which adjoins
+the woods) disposed me readily to slumber. I was awakened at black
+midnight, as it seemed, though it was really two in the morning, by the
+first stroke upon the bell. All the brothers were then hurrying to the
+chapel; the dead in life, at this untimely hour, were already beginning
+the uncomforted labours of their day. The dead in life--there was a
+chill reflection. And the words of a French song came back into my
+memory, telling of the best of our mixed existence:
+
+    "Que t'as de belles filles,
+            Giroflé!
+            Girofla!
+    Que t'as de belles filles,
+    _L'Amour les comptera!_"
+
+And I blessed God that I was free to wander, free to hope, and free to
+love.
+
+
+
+
+THE BOARDERS
+
+
+But there was another side to my residence at Our Lady of the Snows. At
+this late season there were not many boarders; and yet I was not alone
+in the public part of the monastery. This itself is hard by the gate,
+with a small dining-room on the ground floor and a whole corridor of
+cells similar to mine upstairs. I have stupidly forgotten the board for
+a regular _retraitant_; but it was somewhere between three and five
+francs a day, and I think most probably the first. Chance visitors like
+myself might give what they chose as a free-will offering, but nothing
+was demanded. I may mention that when I was going away Father Michael
+refused twenty francs as excessive. I explained the reasoning which led
+me to offer him so much; but even then, from a curious point of honour,
+he would not accept it with his own hand. "I have no right to refuse for
+the monastery," he explained, "but I should prefer if you would give it
+to one of the brothers."
+
+I had dined alone, because I arrived late; but at supper I found two
+other guests. One was a country parish priest, who had walked over that
+morning from the seat of his cure near Mende to enjoy four days of
+solitude and prayer. He was a grenadier in person, with the hale colour
+and circular wrinkles of a peasant; and as he complained much of how he
+had been impeded by his skirts upon the march, I have a vivid fancy
+portrait of him, striding along, upright, big-boned, with kilted
+cassock, through the bleak hills of Gévaudan. The other was a short,
+grizzling, thick-set man, from forty-five to fifty, dressed in tweed
+with a knitted spencer, and the red ribbon of a decoration in his
+button-hole. This last was a hard person to classify. He was an old
+soldier, who had seen service and risen to the rank of commandant; and
+he retained some of the brisk decisive manners of the camp. On the other
+hand, as soon as his resignation was accepted, he had come to Our Lady
+of the Snows as a boarder, and, after a brief experience of its ways,
+had decided to remain as a novice. Already the new life was beginning to
+modify his appearance; already he had acquired somewhat of the quiet and
+smiling air of the brethren; and he was as yet neither an officer nor a
+Trappist, but partook of the character of each. And certainly here was a
+man in an interesting nick of life. Out of the noise of cannon and
+trumpets, he was in the act of passing into this still country bordering
+on the grave, where men sleep nightly in their grave-clothes, and, like
+phantoms, communicate by signs.
+
+At supper we talked politics. I make it my business, when I am in
+France, to preach political good-will and moderation, and to dwell on
+the example of Poland, much as some alarmists in England dwell on the
+example of Carthage. The priest and the commandant assured me of their
+sympathy with all I said, and made a heavy sighing over the bitterness
+of contemporary feeling.
+
+"Why, you cannot say anything to a man with which he does not absolutely
+agree," said I, "but he flies up at you in a temper."
+
+They both declared that such a state of things was antichristian.
+
+While we were thus agreeing, what should my tongue stumble upon but a
+word in praise of Gambetta's moderation? The old soldier's countenance
+was instantly suffused with blood; with the palms of his hands he beat
+the table like a naughty child.
+
+"_Comment, monsieur?_" he shouted. "_Comment?_ Gambetta moderate? Will
+you dare to justify these words?"
+
+But the priest had not forgotten the tenor of our talk. And suddenly, in
+the height of his fury, the old soldier found a warning look directed on
+his face; the absurdity of his behaviour was brought home to him in a
+flash; and the storm came to an abrupt end, without another word.
+
+It was only in the morning, over our coffee (Friday, September 27th),
+that this couple found out I was a heretic. I suppose I had misled them
+by some admiring expressions as to the monastic life around us; and it
+was only by a point-blank question that the truth came out. I had been
+tolerantly used both by simple Father Apollinaris and astute Father
+Michael; and the good Irish deacon, when he heard of my religious
+weakness, had only patted me upon the shoulder and said, "You must be a
+Catholic and come to heaven." But I was now among a different sect of
+orthodox. These two men were bitter and upright and narrow, like the
+worst of Scotsmen, and indeed, upon my heart, I fancy they were worse.
+The priest snorted aloud like a battle-horse.
+
+"_Et vous prétendez mourir dans cette espèce de croyance?_" he demanded;
+and there is no type used by mortal printers large enough to qualify his
+accent.
+
+I humbly indicated that I had no design of changing.
+
+But he could not away with such a monstrous attitude. "No, no," he
+cried; "you must change. You have come here, God has led you here, and
+you must embrace the opportunity."
+
+I made a slip in policy; I appealed to the family affections, though I
+was speaking to a priest and a soldier, two classes of men
+circumstantially divorced from the kind and homely ties of life.
+
+"Your father and mother?" cried the priest. "Very well; you will convert
+them in their turn when you go home."
+
+I think I see my father's face! I would rather tackle the Gætulian lion
+in his den than embark on such an enterprise against the family
+theologian.
+
+But now the hunt was up; priest and soldier were in full cry for my
+conversion; and the Work of the Propagation of the Faith, for which the
+people of Cheylard subscribed forty-eight francs ten centimes during
+1877, was being gallantly pursued against myself. It was an odd but most
+effective proselytizing. They never sought to convince me in argument,
+where I might have attempted some defence; but took it for granted that
+I was both ashamed and terrified at my position, and urged me solely on
+the point of time. Now, they said, when God had led me to Our Lady of
+the Snows, now was the appointed hour.
+
+"Do not be withheld by false shame," observed the priest, for my
+encouragement.
+
+For one who feels very similarly to all sects of religion, and who has
+never been able, even for a moment, to weigh seriously the merit of this
+or that creed on the eternal side of things, however much he may see to
+praise or blame upon the secular and temporal side, the situation thus
+created was both unfair and painful. I committed my second fault in
+tact, and tried to plead that it was all the same thing in the end, and
+we were all drawing near by different sides to the same kind and
+undiscriminating Friend and Father. That, as it seems to lay spirits,
+would be the only gospel worthy of the name. But different men think
+differently; and this revolutionary aspiration brought down the priest
+with all the terrors of the law. He launched into harrowing details of
+hell. The damned, he said--on the authority of a little book which he
+had read not a week before, and which, to add conviction to conviction,
+he had fully intended to bring along with him in his pocket--were to
+occupy the same attitude through all eternity in the midst of dismal
+tortures. And as he thus expatiated, he grew in nobility of aspect with
+his enthusiasm.
+
+As a result the pair concluded that I should seek out the Prior, since
+the Abbot was from home, and lay my case immediately before him.
+
+"_C'est mon conseil comme ancien militaire_," observed the commandant;
+"_et celui de monsieur comme prêtre_."
+
+"_Oui_," added the _curé_, sententiously nodding; "_comme ancien
+militaire_--_et comme prêtre_."
+
+At this moment, whilst I was somewhat embarrassed how to answer, in came
+one of the monks, a little brown fellow, as lively as a grig, and with
+an Italian accent, who threw himself at once into the contention, but in
+a milder and more persuasive vein, as befitted one of these pleasant
+brethren. Look at _him_, he said. The rule was very hard; he would have
+dearly liked to stay in his own country, Italy--it was well known how
+beautiful it was, the beautiful Italy; but then there were no Trappists
+in Italy; and he had a soul to save; and here he was.
+
+I am afraid I must be at bottom, what a cheerful Indian critic has
+dubbed me, "a faddling hedonist," for this description of the brother's
+motives gave me somewhat of a shock. I should have preferred to think he
+had chosen the life for its own sake, and not for ulterior purposes; and
+this shows how profoundly I was out of sympathy with these good
+Trappists, even when I was doing my best to sympathize. But to the curé
+the argument seemed decisive.
+
+"Hear that!" he cried. "And I have seen a marquis here, a marquis, a
+marquis"--he repeated the holy word three times over--"and other persons
+high in society; and generals. And here, at your side, is this
+gentleman, who has been so many years in armies--decorated, an old
+warrior. And here he is, ready to dedicate himself to God."
+
+I was by this time so thoroughly embarrassed that I pled cold feet, and
+made my escape from the apartment. It was a furious windy morning, with
+a sky much cleared, and long and potent intervals of sunshine; and I
+wandered until dinner in the wild country towards the east, sorely
+staggered and beaten upon by the gale, but rewarded with some striking
+views.
+
+At dinner the Work of the Propagation of the Faith was recommenced, and
+on this occasion still more distastefully to me. The priest asked me
+many questions as to the contemptible faith of my fathers, and received
+my replies with a kind of ecclesiastical titter.
+
+"Your sect," he said once; "for I think you will admit it would be doing
+it too much honour to call it a religion."
+
+"As you please, monsieur," said I. "_La parole est à vous."_
+
+At length I grew annoyed beyond endurance; and although he was on his
+own ground, and, what is more to the purpose, an old man, and so holding
+a claim upon my toleration, I could not avoid a protest against this
+uncivil usage. He was sadly discountenanced.
+
+"I assure you," he said, "I have no inclination to laugh in my heart. I
+have no other feeling but interest in your soul."
+
+And there ended my conversion. Honest man! he was no dangerous deceiver;
+but a country parson, full of zeal and faith. Long may he tread Gévaudan
+with his kilted skirts--a man strong to walk and strong to comfort his
+parishioners in death! I daresay he would beat bravely through a
+snowstorm where his duty called him; and it is not always the most
+faithful believer who makes the cunningest apostle.
+
+
+
+
+UPPER GÉVAUDAN
+_(Continued)_
+
+    _The bed was made, the room was fit,
+    By punctual eve the stars were lit;
+    The air was still, the water ran;
+    No need there was for maid or man,
+    When we put up, my ass and I,
+    At God's green caravanserai._
+                               OLD PLAY.
+
+
+ACROSS THE GOULET
+
+
+The wind fell during dinner, and the sky remained clear; so it was under
+better auspices that I loaded Modestine before the monastery gate. My
+Irish friend accompanied me so far on the way. As we came through the
+wood, there was Père Apollinaire hauling his barrow; and he too quitted
+his labours to go with me for perhaps a hundred yards, holding my hand
+between both of his in front of him. I parted first from one and then
+from the other with unfeigned regret, but yet with the glee of the
+traveller who shakes off the dust of one stage before hurrying forth
+upon another. Then Modestine and I mounted the course of the Allier,
+which here led us back into Gévaudan towards its sources in the forest
+of Mercoire. It was but an inconsiderable burn before we left its
+guidance. Thence, over a hill, our way lay through a naked plateau,
+until we reached Chasseradès at sundown.
+
+The company in the inn kitchen that night were all men employed in
+survey for one of the projected railways. They were intelligent and
+conversible, and we decided the future of France over hot wine, until
+the state of the clock frightened us to rest. There were four beds in
+the little upstairs room; and we slept six. But I had a bed to myself,
+and persuaded them to leave the window open.
+
+"_Hé, bourgeois; il est cinq heures!_" was the cry that wakened me in
+the morning (Saturday, September 28th). The room was full of a
+transparent darkness, which dimly showed me the other three beds and the
+five different nightcaps on the pillows. But out of the window the dawn
+was growing ruddy in a long belt over the hill-tops, and day was about
+to flood the plateau. The hour was inspiriting; and there seemed a
+promise of calm weather, which was perfectly fulfilled. I was soon
+under way with Modestine. The road lay for a while over the plateau, and
+then descended through a precipitous village into the valley of the
+Chassezac. This stream ran among green meadows, well hidden from the
+world by its steep banks; the broom was in flower, and here and there
+was a hamlet sending up its smoke.
+
+At last the path crossed the Chassezac upon a bridge, and, forsaking
+this deep hollow, set itself to cross the mountain of La Goulet. It
+wound up through Lestampes by upland fields and woods of beech and
+birch, and with every corner brought me into an acquaintance with some
+new interest. Even in the gully of the Chassezac my ear had been struck
+by a noise like that of a great bass bell ringing at the distance of
+many miles; but this, as I continued to mount and draw nearer to it,
+seemed to change in character, and I found at length that it came from
+some one leading flocks afield to the note of a rural horn. The narrow
+street of Lestampes stood full of sheep, from wall to wall--black sheep
+and white, bleating with one accord like the birds in spring, and each
+one accompanying himself upon the sheep-bell round his neck. It made a
+pathetic concert, all in treble. A little higher, and I passed a pair of
+men in a tree with pruning-hooks, and one of them was singing the music
+of a _bourrée_. Still further, and when I was already threading the
+birches, the crowing of cocks came cheerfully up to my ears, and along
+with that the voice of a flute discoursing a deliberate and plaintive
+air from one of the upland villages. I pictured to myself some grizzled,
+apple-cheeked, country schoolmaster fluting in his bit of a garden in
+the clear autumn sunshine. All these beautiful and interesting sounds
+filled my heart with an unwonted expectation; and it appeared to me
+that, once past this range which I was mounting, I should descend into
+the garden of the world. Nor was I deceived, for I was now done with
+rains and winds and a bleak country. The first part of my journey ended
+here; and this was like an induction of sweet sounds into the other and
+more beautiful.
+
+There are other degrees of _feyness_, as of punishment, besides the
+capital; and I was now led by my good spirits into an adventure which I
+relate in the interest of future donkey-drivers. The road zigzagged so
+widely on the hillside, that I chose a short cut by map and compass, and
+struck through the dwarf woods to catch the road again upon a higher
+level. It was my one serious conflict with Modestine. She would none of
+my short cut; she turned in my face; she backed, she reared; she, whom I
+had hitherto imagined to be dumb, actually brayed with a loud hoarse
+flourish, like a cock crowing for the dawn. I plied the goad with one
+hand; with the other, so steep was the ascent, I had to hold on the
+pack-saddle. Half a dozen times she was nearly over backwards on the top
+of me; half a dozen times, from sheer weariness of spirit, I was nearly
+giving it up, and leading her down again to follow the road. But I took
+the thing as a wager, and fought it through. I was surprised, as I went
+on my way again, by what appeared to be chill rain-drops falling on my
+hand, and more than once looked up in wonder at the cloudless sky. But
+it was only sweat which came dropping from my brow.
+
+Over the summit of the Goulet there was no marked road--only upright
+stones posted from space to space to guide the drovers. The turf
+underfoot was springy and well scented. I had no company but a lark or
+two, and met but one bullock-cart between Lestampes and Bleymard. In
+front of me I saw a shallow valley, and beyond that the range of the
+Lozère, sparsely wooded and well enough modeled in the flanks, but
+straight and dull in outline. There was scarce a sign of culture; only
+about Bleymard, the white high-road from Villefort to Mende traversed a
+range of meadows, set with spiry poplars, and sounding from side to side
+with the bells of flocks and herds.
+
+
+
+
+A NIGHT AMONG THE PINES
+
+
+From Bleymard after dinner, although it was already late, I set out to
+scale a portion of the Lozère. An ill-marked stony drove-road guided me
+forward; and I met nearly half a dozen bullock-carts descending from the
+woods, each laden with a whole pine-tree for the winter's firing. At the
+top of the woods, which do not climb very high upon this cold ridge, I
+struck leftward by a path among the pines, until I hit on a dell of
+green turf, where a streamlet made a little spout over some stones to
+serve me for a water-tap. "In a more sacred or sequestered bower ... nor
+nymph nor faunus haunted." The trees were not old, but they grew thickly
+round the glade: there was no outlook, except north-eastward upon
+distant hill-tops, or straight upward to the sky; and the encampment
+felt secure and private like a room. By the time I had made my
+arrangements and fed Modestine, the day was already beginning to
+decline. I buckled myself to the knees into my sack and made a hearty
+meal; and as soon as the sun went down I pulled my cap over my eyes and
+fell asleep.
+
+Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof: but in the open world it
+passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are
+marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal
+death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and
+living slumber to the man who sleeps afield. All night long he can hear
+Nature breathing deeply and freely; even as she takes her rest, she
+turns and smiles; and there is one stirring hour unknown to those who
+dwell in houses, when a wakeful influence goes abroad over the sleeping
+hemisphere, and all the outdoor world are on their feet. It is then that
+the cock first crows, not this time to announce the dawn, but like a
+cheerful watchman speeding the course of night. Cattle awake on the
+meadows; sheep break their fast on dewy hillsides, and change to a new
+lair among the ferns; and houseless men, who have lain down with the
+fowls, open their dim eyes and behold the beauty of the night.
+
+At what inaudible summons, at what gentle touch of Nature, are all these
+sleepers thus recalled in the same hour to life? Do the stars rain down
+an influence, or do we share some thrill of mother earth below our
+resting bodies? Even shepherds and old country-folk, who are the deepest
+read in these arcana, have not a guess as to the means or purpose of
+this nightly resurrection. Towards two in the morning they declare the
+thing takes place, and neither know nor inquire further. And at least it
+is a pleasant incident. We are disturbed in our slumber, only, like the
+luxurious Montaigne, "that we may the better and more sensibly relish
+it." We have a moment to look up on the stars. And there is a special
+pleasure for some minds in the reflection that we share the impulse with
+all outdoor creatures in our neighbourhood, that we have escaped out of
+the Bastille of civilization, and are become, for the time being, a mere
+kindly animal and a sheep of Nature's flock.
+
+When that hour came to me among the pines, I wakened thirsty. My tin was
+standing by me half full of water. I emptied it at a draught; and
+feeling broad awake after this internal cold aspersion, sat upright to
+make a cigarette. The stars were clear, coloured, and jewel-like, but
+not frosty. A faint silvery vapour stood for the Milky Way. All around
+me the black fir-points stood upright and stock-still. By the whiteness
+of the pack-saddle, I could see Modestine walking round and round at the
+length of her tether; I could hear her steadily munching at the sward;
+but there was not another sound, save the indescribable quiet talk of
+the runnel over the stones. I lay lazily smoking and studying the colour
+of the sky, as we call the void of space, from where it showed a reddish
+grey behind the pines to where it showed a glossy blue-black between the
+stars. As if to be more like a pedlar, I wear a silver ring. This I
+could see faintly shining as I raised or lowered the cigarette; and at
+each whiff the inside of my hand was illuminated, and became for a
+second the highest light in the landscape.
+
+A faint wind, more like a moving coolness than a stream of air, passed
+down the glade from time to time; so that even in my great chamber the
+air was being renewed all night long. I thought with horror of the inn
+at Chasseradès and the congregated nightcaps; with horror of the
+nocturnal prowesses of clerks and students, of hot theatres and
+pass-keys and close rooms. I have not often enjoyed a more serene
+possession of myself, nor felt more independent of material aids. The
+outer world, from which we cower into our houses, seemed after all a
+gentle habitable place; and night after night a man's bed, it seemed,
+was laid and waiting for him in the fields, where God keeps an open
+house. I thought I had rediscovered one of those truths which are
+revealed to savages and hid from political economists; at the least, I
+had discovered a new pleasure for myself. And yet even while I was
+exulting in my solitude I became aware of a strange lack. I wished a
+companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but
+ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than
+solitude, and which rightly understood, is solitude made perfect. And to
+live out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most
+complete and free.
+
+As I thus lay, between content and longing, a faint noise stole towards
+me through the pines. I thought, at first, it was the crowing of cocks
+or the barking of dogs at some very distant farm; but steadily and
+gradually it took articulate shape in my ears, until I became aware
+that a passenger was going by upon the high-road in the valley, and
+singing loudly as he went. There was more of good-will than grace in his
+performance; but he trolled with ample lungs; and the sound of his voice
+took hold upon the hillside and set the air shaking in the leafy glens.
+I have heard people passing by night in sleeping cities; some of them
+sang; one, I remember, played loudly on the bagpipes. I have heard the
+rattle of a cart or carriage spring up suddenly after hours of
+stillness, and pass, for some minutes, within the range of my hearing as
+I lay abed. There is a romance about all who are abroad in the black
+hours, and with something of a thrill we try to guess their business.
+But here the romance was double: first, this glad passenger, lit
+internally with wine, who sent up his voice in music through the night;
+and then I, on the other hand, buckled into my sack, and smoking alone
+in the pine-woods between four and five thousand feet towards the stars.
+
+When I awoke again (Sunday, 29th September), many of the stars had
+disappeared; only the stronger companions of the night still burned
+visibly overhead; and away towards the east I saw a faint haze of light
+upon the horizon, such as had been the Milky Way when I was last awake.
+Day was at hand. I lit my lantern, and by its glow-worm light put on my
+boots and gaiters; then I broke up some bread for Modestine, filled my
+can at the water-tap, and lit my spirit-lamp to boil myself some
+chocolate. The blue darkness lay long in the glade where I had so
+sweetly slumbered; but soon there was a broad streak of orange melting
+into gold along the mountain-tops of Vivarais. A solemn glee possessed
+my mind at this gradual and lovely coming in of day. I heard the runnel
+with delight; I looked round me for something beautiful and unexpected;
+but the still black pine-trees, the hollow glade, the munching ass,
+remained unchanged in figure. Nothing had altered but the light, and
+that, indeed, shed over all a spirit of life and of breathing peace, and
+moved me to a strange exhilaration.
+
+I drank my water-chocolate, which was hot if it was not rich, and
+strolled here and there, and up and down about the glade. While I was
+thus delaying, a gush of steady wind, as long as a heavy sigh, poured
+direct out of the quarter of the morning. It was cold, and set me
+sneezing. The trees near at hand tossed their black plumes in its
+passage; and I could see the thin distant spires of pine along the edge
+of the hill rock slightly to and fro against the golden east. Ten
+minutes later, the sunlight spread at a gallop along the hillside,
+scattering shadows and sparkles, and the day had come completely.
+
+I hastened to prepare my pack, and tackle the steep ascent that lay
+before me; but I had something on my mind. It was only a fancy; yet a
+fancy will sometimes be importunate. I had been most hospitably received
+and punctually served in my green caravanserai. The room was airy, the
+water excellent, and the dawn had called me to a moment. I say nothing
+of the tapestries or the inimitable ceiling, nor yet of the view which I
+commanded from the windows; but I felt I was in some one's debt for all
+this liberal entertainment. And so it pleased me, in a half-laughing
+way, to leave pieces of money on the turf as I went along, until I had
+left enough for my night's lodging. I trust they did not fall to some
+rich and churlish drover.
+
+
+
+
+THE COUNTRY OF THE CAMISARDS
+
+    _We travelled in the print of olden wars;
+              Yet all the land was green;
+              And love we found, and peace,
+              Where fire and war had been.
+    They pass and smile, the children of the sword--
+              No more the sword they wield;
+              And O, how deep the corn
+              Along the battlefield!_
+                                  W. P. BANNATYNE.
+
+ACROSS THE LOZÈRE
+
+
+The track that I had followed in the evening soon died out, and I
+continued to follow over a bald turf ascent a row of stone pillars, such
+as had conducted me across the Goulet. It was already warm. I tied my
+jacket on the pack, and walked in my knitted waistcoat. Modestine
+herself was in high spirits, and broke of her own accord, for the first
+time in my experience, into a jolting trot that sent the oats swashing
+in the pocket of my coat. The view, back upon the northern Gévaudan,
+extended with every step; scarce a tree, scarce a house, appeared upon
+the fields of wild hill that ran north, east, and west, all blue and
+gold in the haze and sunlight of the morning. A multitude of little
+birds kept sweeping and twittering about my path; they perched on the
+stone pillars, they pecked and strutted on the turf, and I saw them
+circle in volleys in the blue air, and show, from time to time,
+translucent flickering wings between the sun and me.
+
+Almost from the first moment of my march, a faint large noise, like a
+distant surf, had filled my ears. Sometimes I was tempted to think it
+the voice of a neighbouring waterfall, and sometimes a subjective result
+of the utter stillness of the hill. But as I continued to advance, the
+noise increased, and became like the hissing of an enormous tea urn, and
+at the same time breaths of cool air began to reach me from the
+direction of the summit. At length I understood. It was blowing stiffly
+from the south upon the other slope of the Lozère, and every step that I
+took I was drawing nearer to the wind.
+
+Although it had been long desired, it was quite unexpectedly at last
+that my eyes rose above the summit. A step that seemed no way more
+decisive than many other steps that had preceded it--and, "like stout
+Cortez when, with eagle eyes, he stared at the Pacific," I took
+possession, in my own name, of a new quarter of the world. For behold,
+instead of the gross turf rampart I had been mounting for so long, a
+view into the hazy air of heaven, and a land of intricate blue hills
+below my feet.
+
+The Lozère lies nearly east and west, cutting Gévaudan into two unequal
+parts; its highest point, this Pic de Finiels, on which I was then
+standing, rises upwards of five thousand six hundred feet above the sea,
+and in clear weather commands a view over all lower Languedoc to the
+Mediterranean Sea. I have spoken with people who either pretended or
+believed that they had seen, from the Pic de Finiels, white ships
+sailing by Montpellier and Cette. Behind was the upland northern country
+through which my way had lain, peopled by a dull race, without wood,
+without much grandeur of hill-form, and famous in the past for little
+besides wolves. But in front of me, half veiled in sunny haze, lay a new
+Gévaudan, rich, picturesque, illustrious for stirring events. Speaking
+largely, I was in the Cevennes at Monastier, and during all my journey;
+but there is a strict and local sense in which only this confused and
+shaggy country at my feet has any title to the name, and in this sense
+the peasantry employ the word. These are the Cevennes with an emphasis:
+the Cevennes of the Cevennes. In that undecipherable labyrinth of hills,
+a war of bandits, a war of wild beasts, raged for two years between the
+Grand Monarch with all his troops and marshals on the one hand, and a
+few thousand Protestant mountaineers upon the other. A hundred and
+eighty years ago, the Camisards held a station even on the Lozère, where
+I stood; they had an organization, arsenals, a military and religious
+hierarchy; their affairs were "the discourse of every coffee-house" in
+London; England sent fleets in their support; their leaders prophesied
+and murdered; with colours and drums, and the singing of old French
+Psalms, their bands sometimes affronted daylight, marched before walled
+cities, and dispersed the generals of the king; and sometimes at night,
+or in masquerade, possessed themselves of strong castles, and avenged
+treachery upon their allies and cruelty upon their foes. There, a
+hundred and eighty years ago, was the chivalrous Roland, "Count and Lord
+Roland, generalissimo of the Protestants in France," grave, silent,
+imperious, pock-marked ex-dragoon, whom a lady followed in his
+wanderings out of love. There was Cavalier, a baker's apprentice with a
+genius for war, elected brigadier of Camisards at seventeen, to die at
+fifty-five the English Governor of Jersey. There again was Castanet, a
+partisan leader in a voluminous peruke and with a taste for
+controversial divinity. Strange generals, who moved apart to take
+counsel with the God of Hosts, and fled or offered battle, set sentinels
+or slept in an unguarded camp, as the Spirit whispered to their hearts!
+And there, to follow these and other leaders, was the rank and file of
+prophets and disciples, bold, patient, indefatigable, hardy to run upon
+the mountains, cheering their rough life with psalms, eager to fight,
+eager to pray, listening devoutly to the oracles of brain-sick children,
+and mystically putting a grain of wheat among the pewter balls with
+which they charged their muskets.
+
+I had travelled hitherto through a dull district, and in the track of
+nothing more notable than the child-eating Beast of Gévaudan, the
+Napoléon Bonaparte of wolves. But now I was to go down into the scene of
+a romantic chapter--or, better, a romantic footnote--in the history of
+the world. What was left of all this bygone dust and heroism? I was told
+that Protestantism still survived in this head seat of Protestant
+resistance; so much the priest himself had told me in the monastery
+parlour. But I had yet to learn if it were a bare survival, or a lively
+and generous tradition. Again, if in the northern Cevennes the people
+are narrow in religious judgments, and more filled with zeal than
+charity, what was I to look for in this land of persecution and
+reprisal--in a land where the tyranny of the Church produced the
+Camisard rebellion, and the terror of the Camisards threw the Catholic
+peasantry into legalized revolt upon the other side, so that Camisard
+and Florentin skulked for each other's lives among the mountains?
+
+Just on the brow of the hill, where I paused to look before me, the
+series of stone pillars came abruptly to an end; and only a little
+below, a sort of track appeared and began to go down a break-neck slope,
+turning like a corkscrew as it went. It led into a valley between
+falling hills, stubbly with rocks like a reaped field of corn, and
+floored farther down with green meadows. I followed the track with
+precipitation; the steepness of the slope, the continual agile turning
+of the line of the descent, and the old unwearied hope of finding
+something new in a new country, all conspired to lend me wings. Yet a
+little lower and a stream began, collecting itself together out of many
+fountains, and soon making a glad noise among the hills. Sometimes it
+would cross the track in a bit of waterfall, with a pool, in which
+Modestine refreshed her feet.
+
+The whole descent is like a dream to me, so rapidly was it accomplished.
+I had scarcely left the summit ere the valley had closed round my path,
+and the sun beat upon me, walking in a stagnant lowland atmosphere. The
+track became a road, and went up and down in easy undulations. I passed
+cabin after cabin, but all seemed deserted; and I saw not a human
+creature, nor heard any sound except that of the stream. I was, however,
+in a different country from the day before. The stony skeleton of the
+world was here vigorously displayed to sun and air. The slopes were
+steep and changeful. Oak-trees clung along the hills, well grown,
+wealthy in leaf, and touched by the autumn with strong and luminous
+colours. Here and there another stream would fall in from the right or
+the left, down a gorge of snow-white and tumultuary boulders. The river
+in the bottom (for it was rapidly growing a river, collecting on all
+hands as it trotted on its way) here foamed a while in desperate rapids,
+and there lay in pools of the most enchanting sea-green shot with watery
+browns. As far as I have gone, I have never seen a river of so changeful
+and delicate a hue; crystal was not more clear, the meadows were not by
+half so green; and at every pool I saw I felt a thrill of longing to be
+out of these hot, dusty, and material garments, and bathe my naked body
+in the mountain air and water. All the time as I went on I never forgot
+it was the Sabbath; the stillness was a perpetual reminder; and I heard
+in spirit the church-bells clamouring all over Europe, and the psalms of
+a thousand churches.
+
+At length a human sound struck upon my ear--a cry strangely modulated
+between pathos and derision; and looking across the valley, I saw a
+little urchin sitting in a meadow, with his hands about his knees, and
+dwarfed to almost comical smallness by the distance. But the rogue had
+picked me out as I went down the road, from oak wood on to oak wood,
+driving Modestine; and he made me the compliments of the new country in
+this tremulous high-pitched salutation. And as all noises are lovely and
+natural at a sufficient distance, this also, coming through so much
+clean hill air and crossing all the green valley, sounded pleasant to my
+ear, and seemed a thing rustic, like the oaks or the river.
+
+A little after, the stream that I was following fell into the Tarn at
+Pont de Montvert of bloody memory.
+
+
+
+
+PONT DE MONTVERT
+
+
+One of the first things I encountered in Pont de Montvert was, if I
+remember rightly, the Protestant temple; but this was but the type of
+other novelties. A subtle atmosphere distinguishes a town in England
+from a town in France, or even in Scotland. At Carlisle you can see you
+are in the one country; at Dumfries, thirty miles away, you are as sure
+that you are in the other. I should find it difficult to tell in what
+particulars Pont de Montvert differed from Monastier or Langogne, or
+even Bleymard; but the difference existed, and spoke eloquently to the
+eyes. The place, with its houses, its lanes, its glaring riverbed, wore
+an indescribable air of the South.
+
+All was Sunday bustle in the streets and in the public-houses, as all
+had been Sabbath peace among the mountains. There must have been near a
+score of us at dinner by eleven before noon; and after I had eaten and
+drunken, and sat writing up my journal, I suppose as many more came
+dropping in one after another, or by twos and threes. In crossing the
+Lozère I had not only come among new natural features, but moved into
+the territory of a different race. These people, as they hurriedly
+despatched their viands in an intricate sword-play of knives, questioned
+and answered me with a degree of intelligence which excelled all that I
+had met, except among the railway folk at Chasseradès. They had open
+telling faces, and were lively both in speech and manner. They not only
+entered thoroughly into the spirit of my little trip, but more than one
+declared, if he were rich enough, he would like to set forth on such
+another.
+
+Even physically there was a pleasant change. I had not seen a pretty
+woman since I left Monastier, and there but one. Now of the three who
+sat down with me to dinner, one was certainly not beautiful--a poor
+timid thing of forty, quite troubled at this roaring _table d'hôte_,
+whom I squired and helped to wine, and pledged and tried generally to
+encourage, with quite a contrary effect; but the other two, both
+married, were both more handsome than the average of women. And
+Clarisse? What shall I say of Clarisse? She waited the table with a
+heavy placable nonchalance, like a performing cow; her great grey eyes
+were steeped in amorous languor; her features, although fleshy, were of
+an original and accurate design; her mouth had a curl; her nostril spoke
+of dainty pride; her cheek fell into strange and interesting lines. It
+was a face capable of strong emotion, and, with training, it offered the
+promise of delicate sentiment. It seemed pitiful to see so good a model
+left to country admirers and a country way of thought. Beauty should at
+least have touched society; then, in a moment, it throws off a weight
+that lay upon it, it becomes conscious of itself, it puts on an
+elegance, learns a gait and a carriage of the head, and, in a moment,
+_patet dea_. Before I left I assured Clarisse of my hearty admiration.
+She took it like milk, without embarrassment or wonder, merely looking
+at me steadily with her great eyes; and I own the result upon myself was
+some confusion. If Clarisse could read English, I should not dare to add
+that her figure was unworthy of her face. Hers was a case for stays; but
+that may perhaps grow better as she gets up in years.
+
+Pont de Montvert, or Greenhill Bridge, as we might say at home, is a
+place memorable in the story of the Camisards. It was here that the war
+broke out; here that those southern Covenanters slew their Archbishop
+Sharpe. The persecution on the one hand, the febrile enthusiasm on the
+other, are almost equally difficult to understand in these quiet modern
+days, and with our easy modern beliefs and disbeliefs. The Protestants
+were one and all beside their right minds with zeal and sorrow. They
+were all prophets and prophetesses. Children at the breast would exhort
+their parents to good works. "A child of fifteen months at Quissac spoke
+from its mother's arms, agitated and sobbing, distinctly and with a loud
+voice." Marshal Villars has seen a town where all the women "seemed
+possessed by the devil," and had trembling fits, and uttered prophecies
+publicly upon the streets. A prophetess of Vivarais was hanged at
+Montpellier because blood flowed from her eyes and nose, and she
+declared that she was weeping tears of blood for the misfortunes of the
+Protestants. And it was not only women and children. Stalwart dangerous
+fellows, used to swing the sickle or to wield the forest axe, were
+likewise shaken with strange paroxysms, and spoke oracles with sobs and
+streaming tears. A persecution unsurpassed in violence had lasted near a
+score of years, and this was the result upon the persecuted; hanging,
+burning, breaking on the wheel, had been in vain; the dragoons had left
+their hoofmarks over all the countryside; there were men rowing in the
+galleys, and women pining in the prisons of the Church; and not a
+thought was changed in the heart of any upright Protestant.
+
+Now the head and forefront of the persecution--after Lamoignon de
+Bâvile--François de Langlade du Chayla (pronounce Chéïla), Archpriest of
+the Cevennes and Inspector of Missions in the same country, had a house
+in which he sometimes dwelt in the town of Pont de Montvert. He was a
+conscientious person, who seems to have been intended by nature for a
+pirate, and now fifty-five, an age by which a man has learned all the
+moderation of which he is capable. A missionary in his youth in China,
+he there suffered martyrdom, was left for dead, and only succoured and
+brought back to life by the charity of a pariah. We must suppose the
+pariah devoid of second-sight, and not purposely malicious in this act.
+Such an experience, it might be thought, would have cured a man of the
+desire to persecute; but the human spirit is a thing strangely put
+together; and, having been a Christian martyr, Du Chayla became a
+Christian persecutor. The Work of the Propagation of the Faith went
+roundly forward in his hands. His house in Pont de Montvert served him
+as a prison. There he closed the hands of his prisoners upon live coal,
+and plucked out the hairs of their beards, to convince them that they
+were deceived in their opinions. And yet had not he himself tried and
+proved the inefficacy of these carnal arguments among the Buddhists in
+China?
+
+Not only was life made intolerable in Languedoc, but flight was rigidly
+forbidden. One Massip, a muleteer, and well acquainted with the
+mountain-paths, had already guided several troops of fugitives in safety
+to Geneva; and on him, with another convoy, consisting mostly of women
+dressed as men, Du Chayla, in an evil hour for himself, laid his hands.
+The Sunday following, there was a conventicle of Protestants in the
+woods of Altefage upon Mount Bouges; where there stood up one
+Séguier--Spirit Séguier, as his companions called him--a wool-carder,
+tall, black-faced, and toothless, but a man full of prophecy. He
+declared, in the name of God, that the time for submission had gone by,
+and they must betake themselves to arms for the deliverance of their
+brethren and the destruction of the priests.
+
+The next night, 24th July 1702, a sound disturbed the Inspector of
+Missions as he sat in his prison-house at Pont de Montvert: the voices
+of many men upraised in psalmody drew nearer and nearer through the
+town. It was ten at night; he had his court about him, priests,
+soldiers, and servants, to the number of twelve or fifteen; and now
+dreading the insolence of a conventicle below his very windows, he
+ordered forth his soldiers to report. But the psalm-singers were already
+at his door, fifty strong, led by the inspired Séguier, and breathing
+death. To their summons, the archpriest made answer like a stout old
+persecutor, and bade his garrison fire upon the mob. One Camisard (for,
+according to some, it was in this night's work that they came by the
+name) fell at this discharge: his comrades burst in the door with
+hatchets and a beam of wood, overran the lower story of the house, set
+free the prisoners, and finding one of them in the _vine_, a sort of
+Scavenger's Daughter of the place and period, redoubled in fury against
+Du Chayla, and sought by repeated assaults to carry the upper floors.
+But he, on his side, had given absolution to his men, and they bravely
+held the staircase.
+
+"Children of God," cried the prophet, "hold your hands. Let us burn the
+house, with the priest and the satellites of Baal."
+
+The fire caught readily. Out of an upper window Du Chayla and his men
+lowered themselves into the garden by means of knotted sheets; some
+escaped across the river under the bullets of the insurgents; but the
+archpriest himself fell, broke his thigh, and could only crawl into the
+hedge. What were his reflections as this second martyrdom drew near? A
+poor, brave, besotted, hateful man, who had done his duty resolutely
+according to his light both in the Cevennes and China. He found at least
+one telling word to say in his defence; for when the roof fell in and
+the upbursting flames discovered his retreat, and they came and dragged
+him to the public place of the town, raging and calling him damned--"If
+I be damned," said he, "why should you also damn yourselves?"
+
+Here was a good reason for the last; but in the course of his
+inspectorship he had given many stronger which all told in a contrary
+direction; and these he was now to hear. One by one, Séguier first, the
+Camisards drew near and stabbed him. "This," they said, "is for my
+father broken on the wheel. This for my brother in the galleys. That for
+my mother or my sister imprisoned in your cursed convents." Each gave
+his blow and his reason; and then all kneeled and sang psalms around the
+body till the dawn. With the dawn, still singing, they defiled away
+towards Frugères, farther up the Tarn, to pursue the work of vengeance,
+leaving Du Chayla's prison-house in ruins, and his body pierced with
+two-and-fifty wounds upon the public place.
+
+'Tis a wild night's work, with its accompaniment of psalms; and it seems
+as if a psalm must always have a sound of threatening in that town upon
+the Tarn. But the story does not end, even so far as concerns Pont de
+Montvert, with the departure of the Camisards. The career of Séguier was
+brief and bloody. Two more priests and a whole family at Ladevèze, from
+the father to the servants, fell by his hand or by his orders; and yet
+he was but a day or two at large, and restrained all the time by the
+presence of the soldiery. Taken at length by a famous soldier of
+fortune, Captain Poul, he appeared unmoved before his judges.
+
+"Your name?" they asked.
+
+"Pierre Séguier."
+
+"Why are you called Spirit?"
+
+"Because the Spirit of the Lord is with me."
+
+"Your domicile?"
+
+"Lately in the desert, and soon in heaven."
+
+"Have you no remorse for your crimes?"
+
+"I have committed none. _My soul is like a garden full of shelter and of
+fountains._"
+
+At Pont de Montvert, on the 12th of August, he had his right hand
+stricken from his body, and was burned alive. And his soul was like a
+garden? So perhaps was the soul of Du Chayla, the Christian martyr. And
+perhaps if you could read in my soul, or I could read in yours, our own
+composure might seem little less surprising.
+
+Du Chayla's house still stands, with a new roof, beside one of the
+bridges of the town; and if you are curious you may see the
+terrace-garden into which he dropped.
+
+
+
+
+IN THE VALLEY OF THE TARN
+
+
+A new road leads from Pont de Montvert to Florac by the valley of the
+Tarn; a smooth sandy ledge, it runs about half-way between the summit of
+the cliffs and the river in the bottom of the valley; and I went in and
+out, as I followed it, from bays of shadow into promontories of
+afternoon sun. This was a pass like that of Killiecrankie; a deep
+turning gully in the hills, with the Tarn making a wonderful hoarse
+uproar far below, and craggy summits standing in the sunshine high
+above. A thin fringe of ash trees ran about the hill-tops, like ivy on a
+ruin; but, on the lower slopes, and far up every glen, the Spanish
+chestnut trees stood each four-square to heaven under its tented
+foliage. Some were planted, each on its own terrace no larger than a
+bed; some, trusting in their roots, found strength to grow and prosper
+and be straight and large upon the rapid slopes of the valley; others,
+where there was a margin to the river, stood marshaled in a line and
+mighty like cedars of Lebanon. Yet even where they grew most thickly
+they were not to be thought of as a wood, but as a herd of stalwart
+individuals; and the dome of each tree stood forth separate and large,
+and as it were a little bill, from among the domes of its companions.
+They gave forth a faint sweet perfume which pervaded the air of the
+afternoon; autumn had put tints of gold and tarnish in the green; and
+the sun so shone through and kindled the broad foliage, that each
+chestnut was relieved against another, not in shadow, but in light. A
+humble sketcher here laid down his pencil in despair.
+
+I wish I could convey a notion of the growth of these noble trees; of
+how they strike out boughs like the oak, and trail sprays of drooping
+foliage like the willow; of how they stand on upright fluted columns
+like the pillars of a church; or like the olive, from the most shattered
+hole can put out smooth and youthful shoots, and begin a new life upon
+the ruins of the old. Thus they partake of the nature of many different
+trees; and even their prickly top-knots, seen near at hand against the
+sky, have a certain palm-like air that impresses the imagination. But
+their individuality, although compounded of so many elements, is but the
+richer and the more original. And to look down upon a level filled with
+these knolls of foliage, or to see a clan of old unconquerable chestnuts
+cluster "like herded elephants" upon the spur of a mountain, is to rise
+to higher thoughts of the powers that are in Nature.
+
+Between Modestine's laggard humour and the beauty of the scene, we made
+little progress all that afternoon; and at last finding the sun,
+although still far from setting, was already beginning to desert the
+narrow valley of the Tarn, I began to cast about for a place to camp in.
+This was not easy to find; the terraces were too narrow, and the ground,
+where it was unterraced, was usually too steep for a man to lie upon. I
+should have slipped all night, and awakened towards morning with my feet
+or my head in the river.
+
+After perhaps a mile, I saw, some sixty feet above the road, a little
+plateau large enough to hold my sack, and securely parapeted by the
+trunk of an aged and enormous chestnut. Thither, with infinite trouble,
+I goaded and kicked the reluctant Modestine, and there I hastened to
+unload her. There was only room for myself upon the plateau, and I had
+to go nearly as high again before I found so much as standing-room for
+the ass. It was on a heap of rolling stones, on an artificial terrace,
+certainly not five feet square in all. Here I tied her to a chestnut,
+and having given her corn and bread and made a pile of chestnut-leaves,
+of which I found her greedy, I descended once more to my own encampment.
+
+The position was unpleasantly exposed. One or two carts went by upon the
+road; and as long as daylight lasted I concealed myself, for all the
+world like a hunted Camisard, behind my fortification of vast chestnut
+trunk; for I was passionately afraid of discovery and the visit of
+jocular persons in the night. Moreover, I saw that I must be early
+awake; for these chestnut gardens had been the scene of industry no
+further gone than on the day before. The slope was strewn with lopped
+branches, and here and there a great package of leaves was propped
+against a trunk; for even the leaves are serviceable, and the peasants
+use them in winter by way of fodder for their animals. I picked a meal
+in fear and trembling, half lying down to hide myself from the road; and
+I daresay I was as much concerned as if I had been a scout from Joani's
+band above upon the Lozère, or from Salomon's across the Tarn, in the
+old times of psalm-singing and blood. Or indeed, perhaps more; for the
+Camisards had a remarkable confidence in God; and a tale comes back into
+my memory of how the Count of Gévaudan, riding with a party of dragoons
+and a notary at his saddlebow to enforce the oath of fidelity in all the
+country hamlets, entered a valley in the woods, and found Cavalier and
+his men at dinner, gaily seated on the grass, and their hats crowned
+with box-tree garlands, while fifteen women washed their linen in the
+stream. Such was a field festival in 1703; at that date Antony Watteau
+would be painting similar subjects.
+
+This was a very different camp from that of the night before in the cool
+and silent pine-woods. It was warm and even stifling in the valley. The
+shrill song of frogs, like the tremolo note of a whistle with a pea in
+it, rang up from the riverside before the sun was down. In the growing
+dusk, faint rustlings began to run to and fro among the fallen leaves;
+from time to time a faint chirping or cheeping noise would fall upon my
+ear; and from time to time I thought I could see the movement of
+something swift and indistinct between the chestnuts. A profusion of
+large ants swarmed upon the ground; bats whisked by, and mosquitoes
+droned overhead. The long boughs with their bunches of leaves hung
+against the sky like garlands; and those immediately above and around me
+had somewhat the air of a trellis which should have been wrecked and
+half overthrown in a gale of wind.
+
+Sleep for a long time fled my eyelids; and just as I was beginning to
+feel quiet stealing over my limbs, and settling densely on my mind, a
+noise at my head startled me broad awake again, and, I will frankly
+confess it, brought my heart into my mouth. It was such a noise as a
+person would make scratching loudly with a finger-nail; it came from
+under the knapsack which served me for a pillow, and it was thrice
+repeated before I had time to sit up and turn about. Nothing was to be
+seen, nothing more was to be heard, but a few of these mysterious
+rustlings far and near, and the ceaseless accompaniment of the river and
+the frogs. I learned next day that the chestnut gardens are infested by
+rats; rustling, chirping, and scraping were probably all due to these;
+but the puzzle, for the moment, was insoluble, and I had to compose
+myself for sleep as best I could, in wondering uncertainty about my
+neighbours.
+
+I was wakened in the grey of the morning (Monday, 30th September) by the
+sound of footsteps not far off upon the stones, and, opening my eyes, I
+beheld a peasant going by among the chestnuts by a footpath that I had
+not hitherto observed. He turned his head neither to the right nor to
+the left, and disappeared in a few strides among the foliage. Here was
+an escape! But it was plainly more than time to be moving. The peasantry
+were abroad; scarce less terrible to me in my nondescript position than
+the soldiers of Captain Poul to an undaunted Camisard. I fed Modestine
+with what haste I could; but as I was returning to my sack, I saw a man
+and a boy come down the hillside in a direction crossing mine. They
+unintelligibly hailed me, and I replied with inarticulate but cheerful
+sounds, and hurried forward to get into my gaiters.
+
+The pair, who seemed to be father and son, came slowly up to the
+plateau, and stood close beside me for some time in silence. The bed was
+open, and I saw with regret my revolver lying patently disclosed on the
+blue wool. At last, after they had looked me all over, and the silence
+had grown laughably embarrassing, the man demanded in what seemed
+unfriendly tones:--
+
+"You have slept here?"
+
+"Yes," said I. "As you see."
+
+"Why?" he asked.
+
+"My faith," I answered lightly, "I was tired."
+
+He next inquired where I was going, and what I had had for dinner; and
+then, without the least transition, "_C'est bien,"_ he added, "come
+along." And he and his son, without another word, turned oil to the next
+chestnut-tree but one, which they set to pruning. The thing had passed
+off more simply than I hoped. He was a grave, respectable man; and his
+unfriendly voice did not imply that he thought he was speaking to a
+criminal, but merely to an inferior.
+
+I was soon on the road, nibbling a cake of chocolate and seriously
+occupied with a case of conscience. Was I to pay for my night's lodging?
+I had slept ill, the bed was full of fleas in the shape of ants, there
+was no water in the room, the very dawn had neglected to call me in the
+morning. I might have missed a train, had there been any in the
+neighbourhood to catch. Clearly, I was dissatisfied with my
+entertainment; and I decided I should not pay unless I met a beggar.
+
+The valley looked even lovelier by morning; and soon the road descended
+to the level of the river. Here, in a place where many straight and
+prosperous chestnuts stood together, making an aisle upon a swarded
+terrace, I made my morning toilette in the water of the Tarn. It was
+marvelously clear, thrillingly cool; the soap-suds disappeared as if by
+magic in the swift current, and the white boulders gave one a model for
+cleanliness. To wash in one of God's rivers in the open air seems to me
+a sort of cheerful solemnity or semi-pagan act of worship. To dabble
+among dishes in a bedroom may perhaps make clean the body; but the
+imagination takes no share in such a cleansing. I went on with a light
+and peaceful heart, and sang psalms to the spiritual ear as I advanced.
+
+Suddenly up came an old woman, who point-blank demanded alms.
+
+"Good," thought I; "here comes the waiter with the bill."
+
+And I paid for my night's lodging on the spot. Take it how you please,
+but this was the first and the last beggar that I met with during all my
+tour.
+
+A step or two farther I was overtaken by an old man in a brown nightcap,
+clear-eyed, weather-beaten, with a faint excited smile. A little girl
+followed him, driving two sheep and a goat; but she kept in our wake,
+while the old man walked beside me and talked about the morning and the
+valley. It was not much past six; and for healthy people who have slept
+enough that is an hour of expansion and of open and trustful talk.
+
+"_Connaissez-vous le Seigneur?_" he said at length.
+
+I asked him what Seigneur he meant; but he only repeated the question
+with more emphasis and a look in his eyes denoting hope and interest.
+
+"Ah," said I, pointing upwards, "I understand you now. Yes, I know Him;
+He is the best of acquaintances."
+
+The old man said he was delighted. "Hold," he added, striking his bosom;
+"it makes me happy here." There were a few who knew the Lord in these
+valleys, he went on to tell me; not many, but a few. "Many are called,"
+he quoted, "and few chosen."
+
+"My father," said I, "it is not easy to say who know the Lord; and it
+is none of our business. Protestants and Catholics, and even those who
+worship stones, may know Him and be known by Him; for He has made all."
+
+I did not know I was so good a preacher.
+
+The old man assured me he thought as I did, and repeated his expressions
+of pleasure at meeting me. "We are so few," he said. "They call us
+Moravians here; but down in the Department of Gard, where there are also
+a good number, they are called Derbists, after an English pastor."
+
+I began to understand that I was figuring, in questionable taste, as a
+member of some sect to me unknown; but I was more pleased with the
+pleasure of my companion than embarrassed by my own equivocal position.
+Indeed, I can see no dishonesty in not avowing a difference; and
+especially in these high matters, where we have all a sufficient
+assurance that, whoever may be in the wrong, we ourselves are not
+completely in the right. The truth is much talked about; but this old
+man in a brown nightcap showed himself so simple, sweet and friendly,
+that I am not unwilling to profess myself his convert. He was, as a
+matter of fact, a Plymouth Brother. Of what that involves in the way of
+doctrine I have no idea nor the time to inform myself; but I know right
+well that we are all embarked upon a troublesome world, the children of
+one Father, striving in many essential points to do and to become the
+same. And although it was somewhat in a mistake that he shook hands with
+me so often and showed himself so ready to receive my words, that was a
+mistake of the truth-finding sort. For charity begins blindfold; and
+only through a series of similar misapprehensions rises at length into a
+settled principle of love and patience, and a firm belief in all our
+fellow-men. If I deceived this good old man, in the like manner I would
+willingly go on to deceive others. And if ever at length, out of our
+separate and sad ways, we should all come together into one common
+house, I have a hope, to which I cling dearly, that my mountain Plymouth
+Brother will hasten to shake hands with me again.
+
+Thus, talking like Christian and Faithful by the way, he and I came down
+upon a hamlet by the Tarn. It was but a humble place, called La Vernède,
+with less than a dozen houses, and a Protestant chapel on a knoll. Here
+he dwelt; and here, at the inn, I ordered my breakfast. The inn was kept
+by an agreeable young man, a stone-breaker on the road, and his sister, a
+pretty and engaging girl. The village schoolmaster dropped in to speak
+with the stranger. And these were all Protestants--a fact which pleased
+me more than I should have expected; and, what pleased me still more,
+they seemed all upright and simple people. The Plymouth Brother hung
+round me with a sort of yearning interest, and returned at least thrice
+to make sure I was enjoying my meal. His behaviour touched me deeply at
+the time, and even now moves me in recollection. He feared to intrude,
+but he would not willingly forego one moment of my society; and he
+seemed never weary of shaking me by the hand.
+
+When all the rest had drifted off to their day's work, I sat for near
+half an hour with the young mistress of the house, who talked pleasantly
+over her seam of the chestnut harvest, and the beauties of the Tarn, and
+old family affections, broken up when young folk go from home, yet still
+subsisting. Hers, I am sure, was a sweet nature, with a country
+plainness and much delicacy underneath; and he who takes her to his
+heart will doubtless be a fortunate young man.
+
+The valley below La Vernède pleased me more and more as I went forward.
+Now the hills approached from either hand, naked and crumbling, and
+walled in the river between cliffs; and now the valley widened and
+became green. The road led me past the old castle of Miral on a steep;
+past a battlemented monastery, long since broken up and turned into a
+church and parsonage; and past a cluster of black roofs, the village of
+Cocurès, sitting among vineyards and meadows and orchards thick with red
+apples, and where, along the highway, they were knocking down walnuts
+from the roadside trees, and gathering them in sacks and baskets. The
+hills, however much the vale might open, were still tall and bare, with
+cliffy battlements and here and there a pointed summit; and the Tarn
+still rattled through the stones with a mountain noise. I had been led,
+by bagmen of a picturesque turn of mind, to expect a horrific country
+after the heart of Byron; but to my Scottish eyes it seemed smiling and
+plentiful, as the weather still gave an impression of high summer to my
+Scottish body; although the chestnuts were already picked out by the
+autumn, and the poplars, that here began to mingle with them, had turned
+into pale gold against the approach of winter.
+
+There was something in this landscape, smiling although wild, that
+explained to me the spirit of the Southern Covenanters. Those who took
+to the hills for conscience' sake in Scotland had all gloomy and
+bedevilled thoughts; for once that they received God's comfort they
+would be twice engaged with Satan; but the Camisards had only bright and
+supporting visions. They dealt much more in blood, both given and taken;
+yet I find no obsession of the Evil One in their records. With a light
+conscience, they pursued their life in these rough times and
+circumstances. The soul of Séguier, let us not forget, was like a
+garden. They knew they were on God's side, with a knowledge that has no
+parallel among the Scots; for the Scots, although they might be certain
+of the cause, could never rest confident of the person.
+
+"We flew," says one old Camisard, "when we heard the sound of
+psalm-singing, we flew as if with wings. We felt within us an animating
+ardour, a transporting desire. The feeling cannot be expressed in words.
+It is a thing that must have been experienced to be understood. However
+weary we might be, we thought no more of our weariness, and grew light
+so soon as the psalms fell upon our ears."
+
+The valley of the Tarn and the people whom I met at La Vernède not only
+explain to me this passage, but the twenty years of suffering which
+those, who were so stiff and so bloody when once they betook themselves
+to war, endured with the meekness of children and the constancy of
+saints and peasants.
+
+
+
+
+FLORAC
+
+
+On a branch of the Tarn stands Florac, the seat of a sub-prefecture with
+an old castle, an alley of planes, many quaint street-corners, and a
+live fountain welling from the hill. It is notable, besides, for
+handsome women, and as one of the two capitals, Alais being the other,
+of the country of the Camisards.
+
+The landlord of the inn took me, after I had eaten, to an adjoining
+café, where I, or rather my journey, became the topic of the afternoon.
+Every one had some suggestion for my guidance; and the sub-prefectorial
+map was fetched from the sub-prefecture itself, and much thumbed among
+coffee-cups and glasses of liqueur. Most of these kind advisers were
+Protestant, though I observed that Protestant and Catholic intermingled
+in a very easy manner; and it surprised me to see what a lively memory
+still subsisted of the religious war. Among the hills of the south-west,
+by Mauchline, Cumnock, or Carsphairn, in isolated farms or in the manse,
+serious Presbyterian people still recall the days of the great
+persecution, and the graves of local martyrs are still piously regarded.
+But in towns and among the so-called better classes, I fear that these
+old doings have become an idle tale. If you met a mixed company in the
+King's Arms at Wigtown, it is not likely that the talk would run on
+Covenanters. Nay, at Muirkirk of Glenluce, I found the beadle's wife had
+not so much as heard of Prophet Peden. But these Cévenols were proud of
+their ancestors in quite another sense; the war was their chosen topic;
+its exploits were their own patent of nobility; and where a man or a
+race has had but one adventure, and that heroic, we must expect and
+pardon some prolixity of reference. They told me the country was still
+full of legends hitherto uncollected; I heard from them about Cavalier's
+descendants--not direct descendants, be it understood, but only cousins
+or nephews--who were still prosperous people in the scene of the
+boy-general's exploits; and one farmer had seen the bones of old
+combatants dug up into the air of an afternoon in the nineteenth
+century, in a field where the ancestors had fought, and the
+great-grandchildren were peaceably ditching.
+
+Later in the day one of the Protestant pastors was so good as to visit
+me: a young man, intelligent and polite, with whom I passed an hour or
+two in talk. Florac, he told me, is part Protestant, part Catholic; and
+the difference in religion is usually doubled by a difference in
+politics. You may judge of my surprise, coming as I did from such a
+babbling purgatorial Poland of a place as Monastier, when I learned that
+the population lived together on very quiet terms; and there was even an
+exchange of hospitalities between households thus doubly separated.
+Black Camisard and White Camisard, militiaman and Miquelet and dragoon,
+Protestant prophet and Catholic cadet of the White Cross, they had all
+been sabring and shooting, burning, pillaging, and murdering, their
+hearts hot with indignant passion; and here, after a hundred and seventy
+years, Protestant is still Protestant, Catholic still Catholic, in
+mutual toleration and mild amity of life. But the race of man, like that
+indomitable nature whence it sprang, has medicating virtues of its own;
+the years and seasons bring various harvests; the sun returns after the
+rain; and mankind outlives secular animosities, as a single man awakens
+from the passions of a day. We judge our ancestors from a more divine
+position; and the dust being a little laid with several centuries, we
+can see both sides adorned with human virtues and fighting with a show
+of right.
+
+I have never thought it easy to be just, and find it daily even harder
+than I thought. I own I met these Protestants with delight and a sense
+of coming home. I was accustomed to speak their language, in another and
+deeper sense of the word than that which distinguishes between French
+and English; for the true Babel is a divergence upon morals. And hence I
+could hold more free communication with the Protestants, and judge them
+more justly, than the Catholics. Father Apollinaris may pair off with my
+mountain Plymouth Brother as two guileless and devout old men; yet I ask
+myself if I had as ready a feeling for the virtues of the Trappist; or,
+had I been a Catholic, if I should have felt so warmly to the dissenter
+of La Vernède. With the first I was on terms of mere forbearance; but
+with the other, although only on a misunderstanding and by keeping on
+selected points, it was still possible to hold converse and exchange
+some honest thoughts. In this world of imperfection we gladly welcome
+even partial intimacies. And if we find but one to whom we can speak out
+of our heart freely, with whom we can walk in love and simplicity
+without dissimulation, we have no ground of quarrel with the world or
+God.
+
+
+
+
+IN THE VALLEY OF THE MIMENTE
+
+
+On Tuesday, 1st October, we left Florac late in the afternoon, a tired
+donkey and tired donkey-driver. A little way up the Tarnon, a covered
+bridge of wood introduced us into the valley of the Mimente. Steep rocky
+red mountains overhung the stream; great oaks and chestnuts grew upon
+the slopes or in stony terraces; here and there was a red field of
+millet or a few apple trees studded with red apples; and the road passed
+hard by two black hamlets, one with an old castle atop to please the
+heart of the tourist.
+
+It was difficult here again to find a spot fit for my encampment. Even
+under the oaks and chestnuts the ground had not only a very rapid slope,
+but was heaped with loose stones; and where there was no timber the
+hills descended to the stream in a red precipice tufted with heather.
+The sun had left the highest peak in front of me, and the valley was
+full of the lowing sound of herdsmen's horns as they recalled the flocks
+into the stable, when I spied a bight of meadow some way below the
+roadway in an angle of the river. Thither I descended, and, tying
+Modestine provisionally to a tree, proceeded to investigate the
+neighbourhood. A grey pearly evening shadow filled the glen; objects at
+a little distance grew indistinct and melted bafflingly into each other;
+and the darkness was rising steadily like an exhalation. I approached a
+great oak which grew in the meadow, hard by the river's brink; when to
+my disgust the voices of children fell upon my ear, and I beheld a house
+round the angle on the other bank. I had half a mind to pack and be gone
+again, but the growing darkness moved me to remain. I had only to make
+no noise until the night was fairly come, and trust to the dawn to call
+me early in the morning. But it was hard to be annoyed by neighbours in
+such a great hotel.
+
+A hollow underneath the oak was my bed. Before I had fed Modestine and
+arranged my sack, three stars were already brightly shining, and the
+others were beginning dimly to appear. I slipped down to the river,
+which looked very black among its rocks, to fill my can; and dined with
+a good appetite in the dark, for I scrupled to light a lantern while so
+near a house. The moon, which I had seen a pallid crescent all
+afternoon, faintly illuminated the summit of the hills, but not a ray
+fell into the bottom of the glen where I was lying. The oak rose before
+me like a pillar of darkness; and overhead the heartsome stars were set
+in the face of the night. No one knows the stars who has not slept, as
+the French happily put it, _à la belle étoile_. He may know all their
+names and distances and magnitudes, and yet be ignorant of what alone
+concerns mankind,--their serene and gladsome influence on the mind. The
+greater part of poetry is about the stars; and very justly, for they are
+themselves the most classical of poets. These same far-away worlds,
+sprinkled like tapers or shaken together like a diamond dust upon the
+sky, had looked not otherwise to Roland or Cavalier, when, in the words
+of the latter, they had "no other tent but the sky, and no other bed
+than my mother earth."
+
+All night a strong wind blew up the valley, and the acorns fell
+pattering over me from the oak. Yet on this first night of October, the
+air was as mild as May, and I slept with the fur thrown back.
+
+I was much disturbed by the barking of a dog, an animal that I fear more
+than any wolf. A dog is vastly braver, and is besides supported by the
+sense of duty. If you kill a wolf, you meet with encouragement and
+praise; but if you kill a dog, the sacred rights of property and the
+domestic affections come clamouring round you for redress. At the end
+of a fagging day, the sharp, cruel note of a dog's bark is in itself a
+keen annoyance; and to a tramp like myself, he represents the sedentary
+and respectable world in its most hostile form. There is something of
+the clergyman or the lawyer about this engaging animal; and it he were
+not amenable to stones, the boldest man would shrink from travelling
+afoot. I respect dogs much in the domestic circle; but on the highway,
+or sleeping afield, I both detest and fear them.
+
+I was wakened next morning (Wednesday, October 2nd) by the same dog--for
+I knew his bark--making a charge down the bank, and then, seeing me sit
+up, retreating again with great alacrity. The stars were not yet quite
+extinguished. The heaven was of that enchanting mild grey-blue of the
+early morn. A still clear light began to fall, and the trees on the
+hillside were outlined sharply against the sky. The wind had veered more
+to the north, and no longer reached me in the glen; but as I was going
+on with my preparations, it drove a white cloud very swiftly over the
+hill-top; and looking up, I was surprised to see the cloud dyed with
+gold. In these high regions of the air the sun was already shining as at
+noon. If only the clouds travelled high enough, we should see the same
+thing all night long. For it is always daylight in the fields of space.
+
+As I began to go up the valley, a draught of wind came down it out of
+the seat of the sunrise, although the clouds continued to run overhead
+in an almost contrary direction. A few steps farther, and I saw a whole
+hillside gilded with the sun; and still a little beyond, between two
+peaks, a centre of dazzling brilliancy appeared floating in the sky, and
+I was once more face to face with the big bonfire that occupies the
+kernel of our system.
+
+I met but one human being that forenoon, a dark military-looking
+wayfarer, who carried a game-bag on a baldric; but he made a remark that
+seems worthy of record. For when I asked him if he were Protestant or
+Catholic--
+
+"Oh," said he, "I make no shame of my religion. I am a Catholic."
+
+He made no shame of it! The phrase is a piece of natural statistics; for
+it is the language of one in a minority. I thought with a smile of
+Bâvile and his dragoons, and how you may ride rough-shod over a religion
+for a century, and leave it only the more lively for the friction.
+Ireland is still Catholic; the Cevennes still Protestant. It is not a
+basketful of law-papers, nor the hoofs and pistol-butts of a regiment of
+horse, that can change one tittle of a ploughman's thoughts. Outdoor
+rustic people have not many ideas, but such as they have are hardy
+plants, and thrive flourishingly in persecution. One who has grown a
+long while in the sweat of laborious noons, and under the stars at
+night, a frequenter of hills and forests, an old honest countryman, has,
+in the end, a sense of communion with the powers of the universe, and
+amicable relations towards his God. Like my mountain Plymouth Brother,
+he knows the Lord. His religion does not repose upon a choice of logic;
+it is the poetry of the man's experience, the philosophy of the history
+of his life. God, like a great power, like a great shining sun, has
+appeared to this simple fellow in the course of years, and become the
+ground and essence of his least reflections; and you may change creeds
+and dogma by authority, or proclaim a new religion with the sound of
+trumpets, if you will; but here is a man who has his own thoughts, and
+will stubbornly adhere to them in good and evil. He is a Catholic, a
+Protestant, or a Plymouth Brother, in the same indefeasible sense that a
+man is not a woman, or a woman not a man. For he could not vary from his
+faith, unless he could eradicate all memory of the past, and, in a
+strict and not a conventional meaning, change his mind.
+
+
+
+
+THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
+
+
+I was now drawing near to Cassagnas, a cluster of black roofs upon the
+hillside, in this wild valley, among chestnut gardens, and looked upon
+in the clear air by many rocky peaks. The road along the Mimente is yet
+new, nor have the mountaineers recovered their surprise when the first
+cart arrived at Cassagnas. But although it lay thus apart from the
+current of men's business, this hamlet had already made a figure in the
+history of France. Hard by, in caverns of the mountain, was one of the
+five arsenals of the Camisards; where they laid up clothes and corn and
+arms against necessity, forged bayonets and sabres, and made themselves
+gunpowder with willow charcoal and saltpetre boiled in kettles. To the
+same caves, amid this multifarious industry, the sick and wounded were
+brought up to heal; and there they were visited by the two surgeons,
+Chabrier and Tavan, and secretly nursed by women of the neighbourhood.
+
+Of the five legions into which the Camisards were divided, it was the
+oldest and the most obscure that had its magazines by Cassagnas. This
+was the band of Spirit Séguier; men who had joined their voices with his
+in the 68th Psalm as they marched down by night on the archpriest of the
+Cevennes. Séguier, promoted to heaven, was succeeded by Salomon Couderc,
+whom Cavalier treats in his memoirs as chaplain-general to the whole
+army of the Camisards. He was a prophet; a great reader of the heart,
+who admitted people to the sacrament, or refused them, by "intentively
+viewing every man" between the eyes; and had the most of the Scriptures
+off by rote. And this was surely happy; since in a surprise in August
+1703, he lost his mule, his portfolios, and his Bible. It is only
+strange that they were not surprised more often and more effectually;
+for this legion of Cassagnas was truly patriarchal in its theory of war,
+and camped without sentries, leaving that duty to the angels of the God
+for whom they fought. This is a token, not only of their faith, but of
+the trackless country where they harboured. M. de Caladon, taking a
+stroll one fine day, walked without warning into their midst, as he
+might have walked into "a flock of sheep in a plain," and found some
+asleep and some awake and psalm-singing. A traitor had need of no
+recommendation to insinuate himself among their ranks, beyond "his
+faculty of singing psalms"; and even the prophet Salomon "took him into
+a particular friendship." Thus, among their intricate hills, the rustic
+troop subsisted; and history can attribute few exploits to them but
+sacraments and ecstasies.
+
+People of this tough and simple stock will not, as I have just been
+saying, prove variable in religion; nor will they get nearer to apostasy
+than a mere external conformity like that of Naaman in the house of
+Rimmon. When Louis XVI., in the words of the edict, "convinced by the
+uselessness of a century of persecutions, and rather from necessity than
+sympathy," granted at last a royal grace of toleration, Cassagnas was
+still Protestant; and to a man, it is so to this day. There is, indeed,
+one family that is not Protestant, but neither is it Catholic. It is
+that of a Catholic _curé_ in revolt, who has taken to his bosom a
+schoolmistress. And his conduct, it is worth noting, is disapproved by
+the Protestant villagers.
+
+"It is a bad idea for a man," said one, "to go back from his
+engagements."
+
+The villagers whom I saw seemed intelligent after a countrified fashion,
+and were all plain and dignified in manner. As a Protestant myself, I
+was well looked upon, and my acquaintance with history gained me
+further respect. For we had something not unlike a religious
+controversy at table, a gendarme and a merchant with whom I dined being
+both strangers to the place, and Catholics. The young men of the house
+stood round and supported me; and the whole discussion was tolerantly
+conducted, and surprised a man brought up among the infinitesimal and
+contentious differences of Scotland. The merchant, indeed, grew a little
+warm, and was far less pleased than some others with my historical
+acquirements. But the gendarme was mighty easy over it all.
+
+"It's a bad idea for a man to change," said he; and the remark was
+generally applauded.
+
+That was not the opinion of the priest and soldier at Our Lady of the
+Snows. But this is a different race; and perhaps the same
+great-heartedness that upheld them to resist, now enables them to differ
+in a kind spirit. For courage respects courage; but where a faith has
+been trodden out, we may look for a mean and narrow population. The true
+work of Bruce and Wallace was the union of the nations; not that they
+should stand apart a while longer, skirmishing upon their borders; but
+that, when the time came, they might unite with self-respect.
+
+The merchant was much interested in my journey, and thought it dangerous
+to sleep afield.
+
+"There are the wolves," said he; "and then it is known you are an
+Englishman. The English have always long purses, and it might very well
+enter into some one's head to deal you an ill blow some night."
+
+I told him I was not much afraid of such accidents; and at any rate
+judged it unwise to dwell upon alarms or consider small perils in the
+arrangement of life. Life itself, I submitted, was a far too risky
+business as a whole to make each additional particular of danger worth
+regard. "Something," said I, "might burst in your inside any day of the
+week, and there would be an end of you, if you were locked in your room
+with three turns of the key."
+
+"_Cependant_," said he, "_coucher dehors_!"
+
+"God," said I, "is everywhere."
+
+"_Cependant, coucher dehors!_" he repeated, and his voice was eloquent
+of terror.
+
+He was the only person, in all my voyage, who saw anything hardy in so
+simple a proceeding; although many considered it superfluous. Only one,
+on the other hand, professed much delight in the idea; and that was my
+Plymouth Brother, who cried out, when I told him I sometimes preferred
+sleeping under the stars to a close and noisy alehouse, "Now I see that
+you know the Lord!"
+
+The merchant asked me for one of my cards as I was leaving, for he said
+I should be something to talk of in the future, and desired me to make a
+note of his request and reason; a desire with which I have thus
+complied.
+
+A little after two I struck across the Mimente, and took a rugged path
+southward up a hillside covered with loose stones and tufts of heather.
+At the top, as is the habit of the country, the path disappeared; and I
+left my she-ass munching heather, and went forward alone to seek a road.
+
+I was now on the separation of two vast watersheds; behind me all the
+streams were bound for the Garonne and the Western Ocean; before me was
+the basin of the Rhone. Hence, as from the Lozère, you can see in clear
+weather the shining of the Gulf of Lyons; and perhaps from here the
+soldiers of Salomon may have watched for the topsails of Sir Cloudesley
+Shovel, and the long-promised aid from England. You may take this ridge
+as lying in the heart of the country of the Camisards; four of the five
+legions camped all round it and almost within view--Salomon and Joani to
+the north, Castanet and Roland to the south; and when Julien had
+finished his famous work, the devastation of the High Cevennes, which
+lasted all through October and November, 1703, and during which four
+hundred and sixty villages and hamlets were, with fire and pickaxe,
+utterly subverted, a man standing on this eminence would have looked
+forth upon a silent, smokeless, and dispeopled land. Time and man's
+activity have now repaired these ruins; Cassagnas is once more roofed
+and sending up domestic smoke; and in the chestnut gardens, in low and
+leafy corners, many a prosperous farmer returns, when the day's work is
+done, to his children and bright hearth. And still it was perhaps the
+wildest view of all my journey. Peak upon peak, chain upon chain of
+hills ran surging southward, channeled and sculptured by the winter
+streams, feathered from head to foot with chestnuts, and here and there
+breaking out into a coronal of cliffs. The sun, which was still far from
+setting, sent a drift of misty gold across the hill-tops, but the
+valleys were already plunged in a profound and quiet shadow.
+
+A very old shepherd, hobbling on a pair of sticks, and wearing a black
+cap of liberty, as if in honour of his nearness to the grave, directed
+me to the road for St. Germain de Calberte. There was something solemn
+in the isolation of this infirm and ancient creature. Where he dwelt,
+how he got upon this high ridge, or how he proposed to get down again,
+were more than I could fancy. Not far off upon my right was the famous
+Plan de Font Morte, where Poul with his Armenian sabre slashed down the
+Camisards of Séguier. This, methought, might be some Rip van Winkle of
+the war, who had lost his comrades, fleeing before Poul, and wandered
+ever since upon the mountains. It might be news to him that Cavalier had
+surrendered, or Roland had fallen fighting with his back against an
+olive. And while I was thus working on my fancy, I heard him hailing in
+broken tones, and saw him waving me to come back with one of his two
+sticks. I had already got some way past him; but, leaving Modestine once
+more, retraced my steps.
+
+Alas, it was a very commonplace affair. The old gentleman had forgot to
+ask the pedlar what he sold, and wished to remedy this neglect.
+
+I told him sternly, "Nothing."
+
+"Nothing?" cried he.
+
+I repeated "Nothing," and made off.
+
+It's odd to think of, but perhaps I thus became as inexplicable to the
+old man as he had been to me.
+
+The road lay under chestnuts, and though I saw a hamlet or two below me
+in the vale, and many lone houses of the chestnut farmers, it was a very
+solitary march all afternoon; and the evening began early underneath the
+trees. But I heard the voice of a woman singing some sad, old, endless
+ballad not far off. It seemed to be about love and a _bel amoureux_, her
+handsome sweetheart; and I wished I could have taken up the strain and
+answered her, as I went on upon my invisible woodland way, weaving, like
+Pippa in the poem, my own thoughts with hers. What could I have told
+her? Little enough; and yet all the heart requires. How the world gives
+and takes away, and brings sweethearts near only to separate them again
+into distant and strange lands; but to love is the great amulet which
+makes the world a garden; and "hope, which comes to all," outwears the
+accidents of life, and reaches with tremulous hand beyond the grave and
+death. Easy to say: yea, but also, by God's mercy, both easy and
+grateful to believe!
+
+We struck at last into a wide white high-road carpeted with noiseless
+dust. The night had come; the moon had been shining for a long while
+upon the opposite mountain; when on turning a corner my donkey and I
+issued ourselves into her light. I had emptied out my brandy at Florac,
+for I could bear the stuff no longer, and replaced it with some generous
+and scented Volnay; and now I drank to the moon's sacred majesty upon
+the road. It was but a couple of mouthfuls; yet I became thenceforth
+unconscious of my limbs, and my blood flowed with luxury. Even Modestine
+was inspired by this purified nocturnal sunshine, and bestirred her
+little hoofs as to a livelier measure. The road wound and descended
+swiftly among masses of chestnuts. Hot dust rose from our feet and
+flowed away. Our two shadows--mine deformed with the knapsack, hers
+comically bestridden by the pack--now lay before us clearly outlined on
+the road, and now, as we turned a corner, went off into the ghostly
+distance, and sailed along the mountain like clouds. From time to time a
+warm wind rustled down the valley, and set all the chestnuts dangling
+their bunches of foliage and fruit; the ear was filled with whispering
+music, and the shadows danced in tune. And next moment the breeze had
+gone by, and in all the valley nothing moved except our travelling feet.
+On the opposite slope, the monstrous ribs and gullies of the mountain
+were faintly designed in the moonshine; and high overhead, in some lone
+house, there burned one lighted window, one square spark of red in the
+huge field of sad nocturnal colouring.
+
+At a certain point, as I went downward, turning many acute angles, the
+moon disappeared behind the hill; and I pursued my way in great
+darkness, until another turning shot me without preparation into St.
+Germain de Calberte. The place was asleep and silent, and buried in
+opaque night. Only from a single open door, some lamplight escaped upon
+the road to show me that I was come among men's habitations. The two
+last gossips of the evening, still talking by a garden wall, directed me
+to the inn. The landlady was getting her chicks to bed; the fire was
+already out, and had, not without grumbling, to be rekindled; half an
+hour later, and I must have gone supperless to roost.
+
+
+
+
+THE LAST DAY
+
+
+When I awoke (Thursday, 2nd October), and, hearing a great flourishing
+of cocks and chuckling of contented hens, betook me to the window of the
+clean and comfortable room where I had slept the night, I looked forth
+on a sunshiny morning in a deep vale of chestnut gardens. It was still
+early, and the cockcrows, and the slanting lights, and the long shadows,
+encouraged me to be out and look round me.
+
+St. Germain de Calberte is a great parish nine leagues round about. At
+the period of the wars, and immediately before the devastation, it was
+inhabited by two hundred and seventy-five families, of which only nine
+were Catholic; and it took the _curé_ seventeen September days to go
+from house to house on horseback for a census. But the place itself,
+although capital of a canton, is scarce larger than a hamlet. It lies
+terraced across a steep slope in the midst of mighty chestnuts. The
+Protestant chapel stands below upon a shoulder; in the midst of the town
+is the quaint old Catholic church.
+
+It was here that poor Du Chayla, the Christian martyr, kept his library
+and held a court of missionaries; here he had built his tomb, thinking
+to lie among a grateful population whom he had redeemed from error; and
+hither on the morrow of his death they brought the body, pierced with
+two-and-fifty wounds, to be interred. Clad in his priestly robes, he was
+laid out in state in the church. The _curé_, taking his text from Second
+Samuel, twentieth chapter and twelfth verse, "And Amasa wallowed in his
+blood in the highway," preached a rousing sermon, and exhorted his
+brethren to die each at his post, like their unhappy and illustrious
+superior. In the midst of this eloquence there came a breeze that
+Spirit Séguier was near at hand; and behold! all the assembly took to
+their horses' heels, some east, some west, and the _curé_ himself as far
+as Alais.
+
+Strange was the position of this little Catholic metropolis, a
+thimbleful of Rome, in such a wild and contrary neighbourhood. On the
+one hand, the legion of Salomon overlooked it from Cassagnas; on the
+other, it was cut off from assistance by the legion of Roland at Mialet.
+The _curé_, Louvrelenil, although he took a panic at the arch-priest's
+funeral, and so hurriedly decamped to Alais, stood well by his isolated
+pulpit, and thence uttered fulminations against the crimes of the
+Protestants. Salomon besieged the village for an hour and a half, but
+was beaten back. The militiamen, on guard before the _curé's_ door,
+could be heard, in the black hours, singing Protestant psalms and
+holding friendly talk with the insurgents. And in the morning, although
+not a shot had been fired, there would not be a round of powder in their
+flasks. Where was it gone? All handed over to the Camisards for a
+consideration. Untrusty guardians for an isolated priest!
+
+That these continual stirs were once busy in St. Germain de Calberte,
+the imagination with difficulty receives; all is now so quiet, the pulse
+of human life now beats so low and still in this hamlet of the
+mountains. Boys followed me a great way off, like a timid sort of
+lion-hunters; and people turned round to have a second look, or came out
+of their houses, as I went by. My passage was the first event, you would
+have fancied, since the Camisards. There was nothing rude or forward in
+this observation; it was but a pleased and wondering scrutiny, like that
+of oxen or the human infant; yet it wearied my spirits, and soon drove
+me from the street.
+
+I took refuge on the terraces, which are here greenly carpeted with
+sward, and tried to imitate with a pencil the inimitable attitudes of
+the chestnuts as they bear up their canopy of leaves. Ever and again a
+little wind went by, and the nuts dropped all around me, with a light
+and dull sound, upon the sward. The noise was as of a thin fall of
+great hailstones; but there went with it a cheerful human sentiment of
+an approaching harvest and farmers rejoicing in their gains. Looking up,
+I could see the brown nut peering through the husk, which was already
+gaping; and between the stems the eye embraced an amphitheatre of hill,
+sunlit and green with leaves.
+
+I have not often enjoyed a place more deeply. I moved in an atmosphere
+of pleasure, and felt light and quiet and content. But perhaps it was
+not the place alone that so disposed my spirit. Perhaps some one was
+thinking of me in another country; or perhaps some thought of my own had
+come and gone unnoticed, and yet done me good. For some thoughts, which
+sure would be the most beautiful, vanish before we can rightly scan
+their features; as though a god, travelling by our green highways,
+should but ope the door, give one smiling look into the house, and go
+again for ever. Was it Apollo, or Mercury, or Love with folded wings?
+Who shall say? But we go the lighter about our business, and feel peace
+and pleasure in our hearts.
+
+I dined with a pair of Catholics. They agreed in the condemnation of a
+young man, a Catholic, who had married a Protestant girl and gone over
+to the religion of his wife. A Protestant born they could understand and
+respect: indeed, they seemed to be of the mind of an old Catholic woman,
+who told me that same day there was no difference between the two sects,
+save that "wrong was more wrong for the Catholic," who had more light
+and guidance; but this of a man's desertion filled them with contempt.
+
+"It's a bad idea for a man to change," said one.
+
+It may have been accidental, but you see how this phrase pursued me; and
+for myself, I believe it is the current philosophy in these parts. I
+have some difficulty in imagining a better. It's not only a great flight
+of confidence for a man to change his creed and go out of his family for
+heaven's sake; but the odds are--nay, and the hope is--that, with all
+this great transition in the eyes of man, he has not changed himself a
+hairbreadth to the eyes of God. Honour to those who do so, for the
+wrench is sore. But it argues something narrow, whether of strength or
+weakness, whether of the prophet or the fool, in those who can take a
+sufficient interest in such infinitesimal and human operations, or who
+can quit a friendship for a doubtful process of the mind. And I think I
+should not leave my old creed for another, changing only words for other
+words; but by some brave reading, embrace it in spirit and truth, and
+find wrong as wrong for me as for the best of other communions.
+
+The phylloxera was in the neighbourhood; and instead of wine we drank at
+dinner a more economical juice of the grape--La Parisienne, they call
+it. It is made by putting the fruit whole into a cask with water; one by
+one the berries ferment and burst; what is drunk during the day is
+supplied at night in water; so, with ever another pitcher from the well,
+and ever another grape exploding and giving out its strength, one cask
+of Parisienne may last a family till spring. It is, as the reader will
+anticipate, a feeble beverage, but very pleasant to the taste.
+
+What with dinner and coffee, it was long past three before I left St.
+Germain de Calberte. I went down beside the Gardon of Mialet, a great
+glaring watercourse devoid of water, and through St. Etienne de Vallée
+Française, or Val Francesque, as they used to call it; and towards
+evening began to ascend the hill of St. Pierre. It was a long and steep
+ascent. Behind me an empty carriage returning to St. Jean du Gard kept
+hard upon my tracks, and near the summit overtook me. The driver, like
+the rest of the world, was sure I was a pedlar; but, unlike others, he
+was sure of what I had to sell. He had noticed the blue wool which hung
+out of my pack at either end; and from this he had decided, beyond my
+power to alter his decision, that I dealt in blue wool collars, such as
+decorate the neck of the French draught-horse.
+
+I had hurried to the topmost powers of Modestine, for I dearly desired
+to see the view upon the other side before the day had faded. But it was
+night when I reached the summit; the moon was riding high and clear; and
+only a few grey streaks of twilight lingered in the west. A yawning
+valley, gulfed in blackness, lay like a hole in created nature at my
+feet; but the outline of the hills was sharp against the sky. There was
+Mount Aigoal, the stronghold of Castanet. And Castanet, not only as an
+active undertaking leader, deserves some mention among Camisards; for
+there is a spray of rose among his laurel; and he showed how, even in a
+public tragedy, love will have its way. In the high tide of war he
+married, in his mountain citadel, a young and pretty lass called
+Mariette. There were great rejoicings; and the bridegroom released
+five-and-twenty prisoners in honour of the glad event. Seven months
+afterwards, Mariette, the Princess of the Cevennes, as they called her
+in derision, fell into the hands of the authorities, where it was like
+to have gone hard with her. But Castanet was a man of execution, and
+loved his wife. He fell on Valleraugue, and got a lady there for a
+hostage; and for the first and last time in that war there was an
+exchange of prisoners. Their daughter, pledge of some starry night upon
+Mount Aigoal, has left descendants to this day.
+
+Modestine and I--it was our last meal together--had a snack upon the top
+of St. Pierre, I on a heap of stones, she standing by me in the
+moonlight and decorously eating bread out of my hand. The poor brute
+would eat more heartily in this manner; for she had a sort of affection
+for me, which I was soon to betray.
+
+It was a long descent upon St. Jean du Gard, and we met no one but a
+carter, visible afar off by the glint of the moon on his extinguished
+lantern.
+
+Before ten o'clock we had got in and were at supper; fifteen miles and a
+stiff hill in little beyond six hours!
+
+
+
+
+FAREWELL, MODESTINE!
+
+
+On examination, on the morning of October 3rd, Modestine was pronounced
+unfit for travel. She would need at least two days' repose, according to
+the ostler; but I was now eager to reach Alais for my letters; and,
+being in a civilized country of stage-coaches, I determined to sell my
+lady friend and be off by the diligence that afternoon. Our yesterday's
+march, with the testimony of the driver who had pursued us up the long
+hill of St. Pierre, spread a favourable notion of my donkey's
+capabilities. Intending purchasers were aware of an unrivaled
+opportunity. Before ten I had an offer of twenty-five francs; and before
+noon, after a desperate engagement, I sold her, saddle and all, for
+five-and-thirty. The pecuniary gain is not obvious, but I had bought
+freedom into the bargain.
+
+St. Jean du Gard is a large place, and largely Protestant. The maire, a
+Protestant, asked me to help him in a small matter which is itself
+characteristic of the country. The young women of the Cevennes profit by
+the common religion and the difference of the language to go largely as
+governesses into England; and here was one, a native of Mialet,
+struggling with English circulars from two different agencies in London.
+I gave what help I could; and volunteered some advice, which struck me
+as being excellent.
+
+One thing more I note. The phylloxera has ravaged the vineyards in this
+neighbourhood; and in the early morning, under some chestnuts by the
+river, I found a party of men working with a cider-press. I could not at
+first make out what they were after, and asked one fellow to explain.
+
+"Making cider," he said. "_Oui, c'est comme ça. Comme dans le nord!_"
+
+There was a ring of sarcasm in his voice: the country was going to the
+devil.
+
+It was not until I was fairly seated by the driver, and rattling through
+a rocky valley with dwarf olives, that I became aware of my bereavement.
+I had lost Modestine. Up to that moment I had thought I hated her; but
+now she was gone,
+
+                   "And O!
+    The difference to me!"
+
+For twelve days we had been fast companions; we had travelled upwards of
+a hundred and twenty miles, crossed several respectable ridges, and
+jogged along with our six legs by many a rocky and many a boggy by-road.
+After the first day, although sometimes I was hurt and distant in
+manner, I still kept my patience; and as for her, poor soul! she had
+come to regard me as a god. She loved to eat out of my hand. She was
+patient, elegant in form, the colour of an ideal mouse, and inimitably
+small. Her faults were those of her race and sex; her virtues were her
+own. Farewell, and if for ever--
+
+Father Adam wept when he sold her to me; after I had sold her in my
+turn, I was tempted to follow his example; and being alone with a
+stage-driver and four or five agreeable young men, I did not hesitate to
+yield to my emotion.
+
+
+
+
+A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE
+
+A FRAGMENT
+
+1879
+
+    _Originally intended to serve as the opening chapter of
+    "Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes"_
+
+
+Le Monastier is the chief place of a hilly canton in Haute Loire, the
+ancient Velay. As the name betokens, the town is of monastic origin; and
+it still contains a towered bulk of monastery and a church of some
+architectural pretensions, the seat of an archpriest and several vicars.
+It stands on the side of a hill above the river Gazeille, about fifteen
+miles from Le Puy, up a steep road where the wolves sometimes pursue the
+diligence in winter. The road, which is bound for Vivarais, passes
+through the town from end to end in a single narrow street; there you
+may see the fountain where women fill their pitchers; there also some
+old houses with carved doors and pediments and ornamental work in iron.
+For Monastier, like Maybole in Ayrshire, was a sort of country capital,
+where the local aristocracy had their town mansions for the winter; and
+there is a certain baron still alive and, I am told, extremely penitent,
+who found means to ruin himself by high living in this village on the
+hills. He certainly has claims to be considered the most remarkable
+spendthrift on record. How he set about it, in a place where there are
+no luxuries for sale, and where the board at the best inn comes to
+little more than a shilling a day, is a problem for the wise. His son,
+ruined as the family was, went as far as Paris to sow his wild oats; and
+so the cases of father and son mark an epoch in the history of
+centralization in France. Not until the latter had got into the train
+was the work of Richelieu complete.
+
+It is a people of lace-makers. The women sit in the streets by groups of
+five or six; and the noise of the bobbins is audible from one group to
+another. Now and then you will hear one woman clattering off prayers for
+the edification of the others at their work. They wear gaudy shawls,
+white caps with a gay ribbon about the head, and sometimes a black felt
+brigand hat above the cap; and so they give the street colour and
+brightness and a foreign air. A while ago, when England largely supplied
+herself from this district with the lace called _torchon_, it was not
+unusual to earn five francs a day; and five francs in Monastier is worth
+a pound in London. Now, from a change in the market, it takes a clever
+and industrious workwoman to earn from three to four in the week, or
+less than an eighth of what she made easily a few years ago. The tide of
+prosperity came and went, as with our northern pitmen, and left nobody
+the richer. The women bravely squandered their gains, kept the men in
+idleness, and gave themselves up, as I was told, to sweethearting and a
+merry life. From week's end to week's end it was one continuous gala in
+Monastier; people spent the day in the wine-shops, and the drum or the
+bagpipes led on the _bourrées_ up to ten at night. Now these dancing
+days are over. "_Il n'y a plus de jeunesse,_" said Victor the garçon. I
+hear of no great advance in what are thought the essentials of morality;
+but the _bourrée_, with its rambling, sweet, interminable music, and
+alert and rustic figures, has fallen into disuse, and is mostly
+remembered as a custom of the past. Only on the occasion of the fair
+shall you hear a drum discreetly rattling in a wine-shop or perhaps one
+of the company singing the measure while the others dance. I am sorry at
+the change, and marvel once more at the complicated scheme of things
+upon this earth, and how a turn of fashion in England can silence so
+much mountain merriment in France. The lace-makers themselves have not
+entirely forgiven our countrywomen; and I think they take a special
+pleasure in the legend of the northern quarter of the town, called
+L'Anglade, because there the English free-lances were arrested and
+driven back by the potency of a little Virgin Mary on the wall.
+
+From time to time a market is held, and the town has a season of
+revival; cattle and pigs are stabled in the streets; and pickpockets
+have been known to come all the way from Lyons for the occasion. Every
+Sunday the country folk throng in with daylight to buy apples, to attend
+mass, and to visit one of the wine-shops, of which there are no fewer
+than fifty in this little town. Sunday wear for the men is a green
+tail-coat of some coarse sort of drugget, and usually a complete suit to
+match. I have never set eyes on such degrading raiment. Here it clings,
+there bulges; and the human body, with its agreeable and lively lines,
+is turned into a mockery and laughing-stock. Another piece of Sunday
+business with the peasants is to take their ailments to the chemist for
+advice. It is as much a matter for Sunday as church-going. I have seen a
+woman who had been unable to speak since the Monday before, wheezing,
+catching her breath, endlessly and painfully coughing; and yet she had
+waited upwards of a hundred hours before coming to seek help, and had
+the week been twice as long, she would have waited still. There was a
+canonical day for consultation; such was the ancestral habit, to which a
+respectable lady must study to conform.
+
+Two conveyances go daily to Le Puy, but they rival each other in polite
+concessions rather than in speed. Each will wait an hour or two hours
+cheerfully while an old lady does her marketing or a gentleman finishes
+the papers in a café. The _Courrier_(such is the name of one) should
+leave Le Puy by two in the afternoon on the return voyage, and arrive at
+Monastier in good time for a six o'clock dinner. But the driver dares
+not disoblige his customers. He will postpone his departure again and
+again, hour after hour; and I have known the sun to go down on his
+delay. These purely personal favours, this consideration of men's
+fancies, rather than the hands of a mechanical clock, as marking the
+advance of the abstraction, time, makes a more humorous business of
+stage-coaching than we are used to see it.
+
+As far as the eye can reach, one swelling line of hill-top rises and
+falls behind another; and if you climb an eminence, it is only to see
+new and farther ranges behind these. Many little rivers run from all
+sides in cliffy valleys; and one of them, a few miles from Monastier,
+bears the great name of Loire. The mean level of the country is a little
+more than three thousand feet above the sea, which makes the atmosphere
+proportionally brisk and wholesome. There is little timber except pines,
+and the greater part of the country lies in moorland pasture. The
+country is wild and tumbled rather than commanding; an upland rather
+than a mountain district; and the most striking as well as the most
+agreeable scenery lies low beside the rivers. There, indeed, you will
+find many corners that take the fancy; such as made the English noble
+choose his grave by a Swiss streamlet, where Nature is at her freshest,
+and looks as young as on the seventh morning. Such a place is the course
+of the Gazeille, where it waters the common of Monastier and thence
+downward till it joins the Loire; a place to hear birds singing; a place
+for lovers to frequent. The name of the river was perhaps suggested by
+the sound of its passage over the stones; for it is a great warbler, and
+at night, after I was in bed in Monastier, I could hear it go singing
+down the valley till I fell asleep.
+
+On the whole, this is a Scottish landscape, although not so noble as the
+best in Scotland; and by an odd coincidence the population is, in its
+way, as Scottish as the country. They have abrupt, uncouth, Fifeshire
+manners, and accost you, as if you were trespassing, with an "_Où'st-ce
+que vous allez?_" only translatable into the Lowland "Whau'r ye gaun?"
+They keep the Scottish Sabbath. There is no labour done on that day but
+to drive in and out the various pigs and sheep and cattle that make so
+pleasant a tinkling in the meadows. The lace-makers have disappeared
+from the street. Not to attend mass would involve social degradation;
+and you may find people reading Sunday books, in particular a sort of
+Catholic _Monthly Visitor_ on the doings of Our Lady of Lourdes. I
+remember one Sunday, when I was walking in the country, that I fell on a
+hamlet and found all the inhabitants, from the patriarch to the baby,
+gathered in the shadow of a gable at prayer. One strapping lass stood
+with her back to the wall and did the solo part, the rest chiming in
+devoutly. Not far off, a lad lay flat on his face asleep among some
+straw, to represent the worldly element.
+
+Again, this people is eager to proselytize; and the postmaster's
+daughter used to argue with me by the half-hour about my heresy, until
+she grew quite flushed. I have heard the reverse process going on
+between a Scots-woman and a French girl; and the arguments in the two
+cases were identical. Each apostle based her claim on the superior
+virtue and attainments of her clergy, and clinched the business with a
+threat of hell-fire. "_Pas bong prêtres ici_," said the Presbyterian,
+"_bong prêtres en Écosse_." And the postmaster's daughter, taking up the
+same weapon, plied me, so to speak, with the butt of it instead of the
+bayonet. We are a hopeful race, it seems, and easily persuaded for our
+good. One cheerful circumstance I note in these guerrilla missions, that
+each side relies on hell, and Protestant and Catholic alike address
+themselves to a supposed misgiving in their adversary's heart. And I
+call it cheerful, for faith is a more supporting quality than
+imagination.
+
+Here, as in Scotland, many peasant families boast a son in holy orders.
+And here also, the young men have a tendency to emigrate. It is
+certainly not poverty that drives them to the great cities or across the
+seas, for many peasant families, I was told, have a fortune of at least
+40,000 francs. The lads go forth pricked with the spirit of adventure
+and the desire to rise in life, and leave their homespun elders
+grumbling and wondering over the event. Once, at a village called
+Laussonne, I met one of these disappointed parents: a drake who had
+fathered a wild swan and seen it take wing and disappear. The wild swan
+in question was now an apothecary in Brazil. He had flown by way of
+Bordeaux, and first landed in America, bare-headed and barefoot, and
+with a single halfpenny in his pocket. And now he was an apothecary!
+Such a wonderful thing is an adventurous life! I thought he might as
+well have stayed at home; but you never can tell wherein a man's life
+consists, nor in what he sets his pleasure: one to drink, another to
+marry, a third to write scurrilous articles and be repeatedly caned in
+public, and now this fourth, perhaps, to be an apothecary in Brazil. As
+for his old father, he could conceive no reason for the lad's behaviour.
+"I had always bread for him," he said; "he ran away to annoy me. He
+loved to annoy me. He had no gratitude." But at heart he was swelling
+with pride over his travelled offspring, and he produced a letter out of
+his pocket, where, as he said, it was rotting, a mere lump of paper
+rags, and waved it gloriously in the air. "This comes from America," he
+cried, "six thousand leagues away!" And the wine-shop audience looked
+upon it with a certain thrill.
+
+I soon became a popular figure, and was known for miles in the country.
+_Où'st-ce que vous allez?_ was changed for me into _Quoi, vous rentrez
+au Monastier ce soir?_ and in the town itself every urchin seemed to
+know my name, although no living creature could pronounce it. There was
+one particular group of lace-makers who brought out a chair for me
+whenever I went by, and detained me from my walk to gossip. They were
+filled with curiosity about England, its language, its religion, the
+dress of the women, and were never weary of seeing the Queen's head on
+English postage-stamps, or seeking for French words in English Journals.
+The language, in particular, filled them with surprise.
+
+"Do they speak _patois_ in England?" I was once asked; and when I told
+them not, "Ah, then, French?" said they.
+
+"No, no," I said, "not French."
+
+"Then," they concluded, "they speak _patois_."
+
+You must obviously either speak French or _patois_. Talk of the force of
+logic--here it was in all its weakness. I gave up the point, but
+proceeding to give illustrations of ray native jargon, I was met with a
+new mortification. Of all _patois_ they declared that mine was the most
+preposterous and the most jocose in sound. At each new word there was a
+new explosion of laughter, and some of the younger ones were glad to
+rise from their chairs and stamp about the street in ecstasy; and I
+looked on upon their mirth in a faint and slightly disagreeable
+bewilderment. "Bread," which sounds a commonplace, plain-sailing
+monosyllable in England, was the word that most delighted these good
+ladies of Monastier; it seemed to them frolicsome and racy, like a page
+of Pickwick; and they all got it carefully by heart, as a stand-by, I
+presume, for winter evenings. I have tried it since then with every sort
+of accent and inflection, but I seem to lack the sense of humour.
+
+They were of all ages: children at their first web of lace, a stripling
+girl with a bashful but encouraging play of eyes, solid married women,
+and grandmothers, some on the top of their age and some falling towards
+decrepitude. One and all were pleasant and natural, ready to laugh and
+ready with a certain quiet solemnity when that was called for by the
+subject of our talk. Life, since the fall in wages, had begun to appear
+to them with a more serious air. The stripling girl would sometimes
+laugh at me in a provocative and not unadmiring manner, if I judge
+aright; and one of the grandmothers, who was my great friend of the
+party, gave me many a sharp word of judgment on my sketches, my heresy,
+or even my arguments, and gave them with a wry mouth and a humorous
+twinkle in her eye that were eminently Scottish. But the rest used me
+with a certain reverence, as something come from afar and not entirely
+human. Nothing would put them at their ease but the irresistible gaiety
+of my native tongue. Between the old lady and myself I think there was a
+real attachment. She was never weary of sitting to me for her portrait,
+in her best cap and brigand hat, and with all her wrinkles tidily
+composed, and though she never failed to repudiate the result, she would
+always insist upon another trial. It was as good as a play to see her
+sitting in judgment over the last. "No, no," she would say, "that is not
+it. I am old, to be sure, but I am better-looking than that. We must try
+again." When I was about to leave she bade me good-bye for this life in
+a somewhat touching manner. We should not meet again, she said; it was a
+long farewell, and she was sorry. But life is so full of crooks, old
+lady, that who knows? I have said good-bye to people for greater
+distances and times, and, please God, I mean to see them yet again.
+
+One thing was notable about these women, from the youngest to the
+oldest, and with hardly an exception. In spite of their piety, they
+could twang off an oath with Sir Toby Belch in person. There was nothing
+so high or so low, in heaven or earth or in the human body, but a woman
+of this neighbourhood would whip out the name of it, fair and square, by
+way of conversational adornment. My landlady, who was pretty and young,
+dressed like a lady and avoided _patois_ like a weakness, commonly
+addressed her child in the language of a drunken bully. And of all the
+swearers that I ever heard, commend me to an old lady in Gondet, a
+village of the Loire. I was making a sketch, and her curse was not yet
+ended when I had finished it and took my departure. It is true she had
+a right to be angry; for here was her son, a hulking fellow, visibly the
+worse for drink before the day was well begun. But it was strange to
+hear her unwearying flow of oaths and obscenities, endless like a river,
+and now and then rising to a passionate shrillness, in the clear and
+silent air of the morning. In city slums, the thing might have passed
+unnoticed; but in a country valley, and from a plain and honest
+countrywoman, this beastliness of speech surprised the ear.
+
+The _Conductor_, as he is called, _of Roads and Bridges_ was my
+principal companion. He was generally intelligent, and could have spoken
+more or less falsetto on any of the trite topics; but it was his
+specialty to have a generous taste in eating. This was what was most
+indigenous in the man; it was here he was an artist; and I found in his
+company what I had long suspected, that enthusiasm and special knowledge
+are the great social qualities, and what they are about, whether white
+sauce or Shakespeare's plays, an altogether secondary question.
+
+I used to accompany the _Conductor_ on his professional rounds, and grew
+to believe myself an expert in the business. I thought I could make an
+entry in a stone-breaker's time-book, or order manure off the wayside
+with any living engineer in France. Gondet was one of the places we
+visited together; and Laussonne, where I met the apothecary's father,
+was another. There, at Laussonne, George Sand spent a day while she was
+gathering materials for the "Marquis de Villemer"; and I have spoken
+with an old man, who was then a child running about the inn kitchen, and
+who still remembers her with a sort of reverence. It appears that he
+spoke French imperfectly; for this reason George Sand chose him for
+companion, and whenever he let slip a broad and picturesque phrase in
+_patois_, she would make him repeat it again and again till it was
+graven in her memory. The word for a frog particularly pleased her
+fancy; and it would be curious to know if she afterwards employed it in
+her works. The peasants, who knew nothing of letters and had never so
+much as heard of local colour, could not explain her chattering with
+this backward child; and to them she seemed a very homely lady and far
+from beautiful: the most famous man-killer of the age appealed so little
+to Velaisian swine-herds!
+
+On my first engineering excursion, which lay up by Crouzials towards
+Mount Mézenc and the borders of Ardèche, I began an improving
+acquaintance with the foreman road-mender. He was in great glee at
+having me with him, passed me off among his subalterns as the
+supervising engineer, and insisted on what he called "the gallantry" of
+paying for my breakfast in a roadside wine-shop. On the whole, he was a
+man of great weather-wisdom, some spirits, and a social temper. But I am
+afraid he was superstitious. When he was nine years old, he had seen one
+night a company of _bourgeois et dames qui faisaient la manège avec des
+chaises_, and concluded that he was in the presence of a witches'
+Sabbath. I suppose, but venture with timidity on the suggestion, that
+this may have been a romantic and nocturnal picnic party. Again, coming
+from Pradelles with his brother, they saw a great empty cart drawn by
+six enormous horses before them on the road. The driver cried aloud and
+filled the mountains with the cracking of his whip. He never seemed to
+go faster than a walk, yet it was impossible to overtake him; and at
+length, at the corner of a hill, the whole equipage disappeared bodily
+into the night. At the time, people said it was the devil _qui s'amusait
+à faire ça_.
+
+I suggested there was nothing more likely, as he must have some
+amusement.
+
+The foreman said it was odd, but there was less of that sort of thing
+than formerly. "_C'est difficile_," he added, "_à expliquer_."
+
+When we were well up on the moors and the _Conductor_ was trying some
+road-metal with the gauge--
+
+"Hark!" said the foreman, "do you hear nothing?"
+
+We listened, and the wind, which was blowing chilly out of the east,
+brought a faint, tangled jangling to our ears.
+
+"It is the flocks of Vivarais," said he.
+
+For every summer, the flocks out of all Ardèche are brought up to
+pasture on these grassy plateaux.
+
+Here and there a little private flock was being tended by a girl, one
+spinning with a distaff, another seated on a wall and intently making
+lace. This last, when we addressed her, leaped up in a panic and put out
+her arms, like a person swimming, to keep us at a distance, and it was
+some seconds before we could persuade her of the honesty of our
+intentions.
+
+The _Conductor_ told me of another herdswoman from whom he had once
+asked his road while he was yet new to the country, and who fled from
+him, driving her beasts before her, until he had given up the
+information in despair. A tale of old lawlessness may yet be read in
+these uncouth timidities.
+
+The winter in these uplands is a dangerous and melancholy time. Houses
+are snowed up, and wayfarers lost in a flurry within hail of their own
+fireside. No man ventures abroad without meat and a bottle of wine,
+which he replenishes at every wine-shop; and even thus equipped he takes
+the road with terror. All day the family sits about the fire in a foul
+and airless hovel, and equally without work or diversion. The father may
+carve a rude piece of furniture, but that is all that will be done until
+the spring sets in again, and along with it the labours of the field. It
+is not for nothing that you find a clock in the meanest of these
+mountain habitations. A clock and an almanack, you would fancy, were
+indispensable in such a life....
+
+
+
+
+EDINBURGH
+PICTURESQUE NOTES
+EDINBURGH
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTORY
+
+
+The ancient and famous metropolis of the North sits overlooking a windy
+estuary from the slope and summit of three hills. No situation could be
+more commanding for the head city of a kingdom; none better chosen for
+noble prospects. From her tall precipice and terraced gardens she looks
+far and wide on the sea and broad champaigns. To the east you may catch
+at sunset the spark of the May lighthouse, where the Firth expands into
+the German Ocean; and away to the west, over all the carse of Stirling,
+you can see the first snows upon Ben Ledi.
+
+But Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest
+climates under heaven. She is liable to be beaten upon by all the winds
+that blow, to be drenched with rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs out
+of the east, and powdered with the snow as it comes flying southward
+from the Highland hills. The weather is raw and boisterous in winter,
+shifty and ungenial in summer, and a downright meteorological purgatory
+in the spring. The delicate die early, and I, as a survivor, among bleak
+winds and plumping rain, have been sometimes tempted to envy them their
+fate. For all who love shelter and the blessings of the sun, who hate
+dark weather and perpetual tilting against squalls, there could scarcely
+be found a more unhomely and harassing place of residence. Many such
+aspire angrily after that Somewhere else of the imagination, where all
+troubles are supposed to end. They lean over the great bridge which
+joins the New Town with the Old--that windiest spot, or high altar, in
+this northern temple of the winds--and watch the trains smoking out from
+under them and vanishing into the tunnel on a voyage to brighter skies.
+Happy the passengers who shake off the dust of Edinburgh, and have heard
+for the last time the cry of the east wind among her chimney-tops! And
+yet the place establishes an interest in people's hearts; go where they
+will, they find no city of the same distinction; go where they will,
+they take a pride in their old home.
+
+Venice, it has been said, differs from all other cities in the sentiment
+which she inspires. The rest may have admirers; she only, a famous fair
+one, counts lovers in her train. And indeed, even by her kindest
+friends, Edinburgh is not considered in a similar sense. These like her
+for many reasons, not any one of which is satisfactory in itself. They
+like her whimsically, if you will, and somewhat as a virtuoso dotes upon
+his cabinet. Her attraction is romantic in the narrowest meaning of the
+term. Beautiful as she is, she is not so much beautiful as interesting.
+She is pre-eminently Gothic, and all the more so since she has set
+herself off with some Greek airs, and erected classic temples on her
+crags. In a word, and above all, she is a curiosity. The Palace of
+Holyrood has been left aside in the growth of Edinburgh, and stands grey
+and silent in a workman's quarter, and among breweries and gas works. It
+is a house of many memories. Great people of yore, kings and queens,
+buffoons, and grave ambassadors, played their stately farce for
+centuries in Holyrood. Wars have been plotted, dancing has lasted deep
+into the night, murder has been done in its chambers. There Prince
+Charlie held his phantom levées, and in a very gallant manner
+represented a fallen dynasty for some hours. Now, all these things of
+clay are mingled with the dust, the king's crown itself is shown for
+sixpence to the vulgar; but the stone palace has outlived these changes.
+For fifty weeks together, it is no more than a show for tourists and a
+museum of old furniture; but on the fifty-first, behold the palace
+reawakened and mimicking its past. The Lord Commissioner, a kind of
+stage sovereign, sits among stage courtiers; a coach and six and
+clattering escort come and go before the gate; at night, the windows are
+lighted up, and its near neighbours, the workmen, may dance in their own
+houses to the palace music. And in this the palace is typical. There is
+a spark among the embers; from time to time the old volcano smokes.
+Edinburgh has but partly abdicated, and still wears, in parody, her
+metropolitan trappings. Half a capital and half a country town, the
+whole city leads a double existence; it has long trances of the one and
+flashes of the other; like the king of the Black Isles, it is half alive
+and half a monumental marble. There are armed men and cannon in the
+citadel overhead; you may see the troops Marshalled on the high parade;
+and at night after the early winter evenfall, and in the morning before
+the laggard winter dawn, the wind carries abroad over Edinburgh the
+sound of drums and bugles. Grave judges sit bewigged in what was once
+the scene of imperial deliberations. Close by in the High Street perhaps
+the trumpets may sound about the stroke of noon; and you see a troop of
+citizens in tawdry masquerade; tabard above, heather-mixture trouser
+below, and the men themselves trudging in the mud among unsympathetic
+bystanders. The grooms of a well-appointed circus tread the streets with
+a better presence. And yet these are the Heralds and Pursuivants of
+Scotland, who are about to proclaim a new law of the United Kingdom
+before two score boys, and thieves, and hackney-coachmen. Meanwhile
+every hour the bell of the University rings out over the hum of the
+streets, and every hour a double tide of students, coming and going,
+fills the deep archways. And lastly, one night in the spring-time--or
+say one morning rather, at the peep of day--late folk may hear the
+voices of many men singing a psalm in unison from a church on one side
+of the old High Street, and a little after, or perhaps a little before,
+the sound of many men singing a psalm in unison from another church on
+the opposite side of the way. There will be something in the words about
+the dew of Hermon, and how goodly it is to see brethren dwelling
+together in unity. And the late folk will tell themselves that all this
+singing denotes the conclusion of two yearly ecclesiastical
+parliaments--the parliaments of Churches which are brothers in many
+admirable virtues, but not specially like brothers in this particular of
+a tolerant and peaceful life.
+
+Again, meditative people will find a charm in a certain consonancy
+between the aspect of the city and its odd and stirring history. Few
+places, if any, offer a more barbaric display of contrasts to the eye.
+In the very midst stands one of the most satisfactory crags in nature--a
+Bass Rock upon dry land, rooted in a garden, shaken by passing trains,
+carrying a crown of battlements and turrets, and describing its warlike
+shadow over the liveliest and brightest thoroughfare of the new town.
+From their smoky beehives, ten stories high, the unwashed look down upon
+the open squares and gardens of the wealthy; and gay people sunning
+themselves along Princes Street, with its mile of commercial palaces all
+beflagged upon some great occasion, see, across a gardened valley set
+with statues, where the washings of the old town flutter in the breeze
+at its high windows. And then, upon all sides, what a clashing of
+architecture! In this one valley, where the life of the town goes most
+busily forward, there may be seen, shown one above and behind another by
+the accidents of the ground, buildings in almost every style upon the
+globe. Egyptian and Greek temples, Venetian palaces and Gothic spires,
+are huddled one over another in a most admired disorder; while, above
+all, the brute mass of the Castle and the summit of Arthur's Seat look
+down upon these imitations with a becoming dignity, as the works of
+Nature may look down upon the monuments of Art. But Nature is a more
+indiscriminate patroness than we imagine, and in no way frightened of a
+strong effect. The birds roost as willingly among the Corinthian
+capitals as in the crannies of the crag; the same atmosphere and
+daylight close the eternal rock and yesterday's imitation portico; and
+as the soft northern sunshine throws out everything into a glorified
+distinctness--or easterly mists, coming up with the blue evening, fuse
+all these incongruous features into one, and the lamps begin to glitter
+along the street, and faint lights to burn in the high windows across
+the valley--the feeling grows upon you that this also is a piece of
+nature in the most intimate sense; that this profusion of
+eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock, is not a
+drop-scene in a theatre, but a city in the world of every-day reality,
+connected by railway and telegraph-wire with all the capitals of Europe,
+and inhabited by citizens of the familiar type, who keep ledgers, and
+attend church, and have sold their immortal portion to a daily paper. By
+all the canons of romance, the place demands to be half deserted and
+leaning towards decay; birds we might admit in profusion, the play of
+the sun and winds, and a few gypsies encamped in the chief thoroughfare;
+but these citizens, with their cabs and tramways, their trains and
+posters, are altogether out of key. Chartered tourists, they make free
+with historic localities, and rear their young among the most
+picturesque sites with a grand human indifference. To see them thronging
+by, in their neat clothes and conscious moral rectitude, and with a
+little air of possession that verges on the absurd, is not the least
+striking feature of the place.[1]
+
+And the story of the town is as eccentric as its appearance. For
+centuries it was a capital thatched with heather, and more than once, in
+the evil days of English invasion, it has gone up in flame to heaven, a
+beacon to ships at sea. It was the jousting-ground of jealous nobles,
+not only on Greenside or by the King's Stables, where set tournaments
+were fought to the sound of trumpets and under the authority of the
+royal presence, but in every alley where there was room to cross swords,
+and in the main street, where popular tumult under the Blue Blanket
+alternated with the brawls of outlandish clansmen and retainers. Down in
+the Palace John Knox reproved his queen in the accents of modern
+democracy. In the town, in one of those little shops plastered like so
+many swallows' nests among the buttresses of the old Cathedral, that
+familiar autocrat, James VI., would gladly share a bottle of wine with
+George Heriot the goldsmith. Up on the Pentland Hills, that so quietly
+look down on the Castle with the city lying in waves around it, those
+mad and dismal fanatics, the Sweet Singers, haggard from long exposure
+on the moors, sat day and night with "tearful psalms" to see Edinburgh
+consumed with fire from heaven, like another Sodom or Gomorrah. There,
+in the Grassmarket, stiff-necked, covenanting heroes offered up the
+often unnecessary, but not less honourable, sacrifice of their lives,
+and bade eloquent farewell to sun, moon, and stars, and earthly
+friendships, or died silent to the roll of drums. Down by yon outlet
+rode Grahame of Claverhouse and his thirty dragoons, with the town
+beating to arms behind their horses' tails--a sorry handful thus riding
+for their lives, but with a man at the head who was to return in a
+different temper, make a dash that staggered Scotland to the heart, and
+die happily in the thick of fight. There Aikenhead was hanged for a
+piece of boyish incredulity; there, a few years afterwards, David Hume
+ruined Philosophy and Faith, an undisturbed and well-reputed citizen;
+and thither, in yet a few years more, Burns came from the plough-tail,
+as to an academy of gilt unbelief and artificial letters. There, when
+the great exodus was made across the valley, and the new town began to
+spread abroad its draughty parallelograms and rear its long frontage on
+the opposing hill, there was such a flitting, such a change of domicile
+and dweller, as was never excelled in the history of cities: the cobbler
+succeeded the earl; the beggar ensconced himself by the judge's chimney;
+what had been a palace was used as a pauper refuge; and great mansions
+were so parceled out among the least and lowest in society, that the
+hearth-stone of the old proprietor was thought large enough to be
+partitioned off into a bedroom by the new.
+
+[1] These sentences have, I hear, given offence in my native town; and a
+proportionable pleasure to our rivals of Glasgow. I confess the news
+caused me both pain and merriment. May I remark, as a balm for wounded
+fellow-townsmen, that there is nothing deadly in my accusations? Small
+blame to them if they keep ledgers: 'tis an excellent business habit.
+Church-going is not, that ever I heard, a subject of reproach; decency
+of linen is a mark of prosperous affairs, and conscious moral rectitude
+one of the tokens of good living. It is not their fault if the city
+calls for something more specious by the way of inhabitants. A man in a
+frock-coat looks out of place upon an Alp or Pyramid, although he has
+the virtues of a Peabody and the talents of a Bentham. And let them
+console themselves--they do as well as anybody else; the population of
+(let us say) Chicago would cut quite as rueful a figure on the same
+romantic stage. To the Glasgow people I would say only one word, but
+that is of gold: _I have not yet written a book about Glasgow._
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+OLD TOWN: THE LANDS
+
+
+The Old Town, it is pretended, is the chief characteristic, and, from a
+picturesque point of view, the liver-wing of Edinburgh. It is one of the
+most common forms of depreciation to throw cold water on the whole by
+adroit over-commendation of a part, since everything worth judging,
+whether it be a man, a work of art, or only a fine city, must be judged
+upon its merits as a whole. The Old Town depends for much of its effect
+on the new quarters that lie around it, on the sufficiency of its
+situation, and on the hills that back it up. If you were to set it
+somewhere else by itself, it would look remarkably like Stirling in a
+bolder and loftier edition. The point is to see this embellished
+Stirling planted in the midst of a large, active, and fantastic modern
+city; for there the two react in a picturesque sense, and the one is
+the making of the other.
+
+The Old Town occupies a sloping ridge or tail of diluvial matter,
+protected, in some subsidence of the waters, by the Castle cliffs which
+fortify it to the west. On the one side of it and the other the new
+towns of the south and of the north occupy their lower, broader, and
+more gentle hill-tops. Thus, the quarter of the Castle overtops the
+whole city and keeps an open view to sea and land. It dominates for
+miles on every side; and people on the decks of ships, or ploughing in
+quiet country places over in Fife, can see the banner on the Castle
+battlements, and the smoke of the Old Town blowing abroad over the
+subjacent country. A city that is set upon a hill. It was, I suppose,
+from this distant aspect that she got her nickname of _Auld Reekie_.
+Perhaps it was given her by people who had never crossed her doors: day
+after day, from their various rustic Pisgahs, they had seen the pile of
+building on the hill-top, and the long plume of smoke over the plain; so
+it appeared to them; so it had appeared to their fathers tilling the
+same field; and as that was all they knew of the place, it could be all
+expressed in these two words.
+
+Indeed, even on a nearer view, the Old Town is properly smoked; and
+though it is well washed with rain all the year round, it has a grim and
+sooty aspect among its younger suburbs. It grew, under the law that
+regulates the growth of walled cities in precarious situations: not in
+extent, but in height and density. Public buildings were forced,
+wherever there was room for them, into the midst of thoroughfares;
+thoroughfares were diminished into lanes; houses sprang up story after
+story, neighbour mounting upon neighbour's shoulder, as in some Black
+Hole of Calcutta, until the population slept fourteen or fifteen deep in
+a vertical direction. The tallest of these lands, as they are locally
+termed, have long since been burnt out; but to this day it is not
+uncommon to see eight or ten windows at a flight; and the cliff of
+building which hangs imminent over Waverley Bridge would still put many
+natural precipices to shame. The cellars are already high above the
+gazer's head, planted on the steep hillside; as for the garret, all the
+furniture may be in the pawnshop, but it commands a famous prospect to
+the Highland hills. The poor man may roost up there in the centre of
+Edinburgh, and yet have a peep of the green country from his window; he
+shall see the quarters of the well-to-do fathoms underneath, with their
+broad squares and gardens; he shall have nothing overhead but a few
+spires, the stone top-gallants of the city; and perhaps the wind may
+reach him with a rustic pureness, and bring a smack of the sea, or of
+flowering lilacs in the spring.
+
+It is almost the correct literary sentiment to deplore the revolutionary
+improvements of Mr. Chambers and his following. It is easy to be a
+conservator of the discomforts of others; indeed, it is only our good
+qualities we find it irksome to, conserve. Assuredly, in driving streets
+through the black labyrinth, a few curious old corners have been swept
+away, and some associations turned out of house and home. But what
+slices of sunlight, what breaths of clean air, have been let in! And
+what a picturesque world remains untouched! You go under dark arches,
+and down dark stairs and alleys. The way is so narrow that you can lay a
+hand on either wall; so steep that, in greasy winter weather, the
+pavement is almost as treacherous as ice. Washing dangles above washing
+from the windows; the houses bulge outwards upon flimsy brackets; you
+see a bit of sculpture in a dark corner; at the top of all, a gable and
+a few crowsteps are printed on the sky. Here, you come into a court
+where the children are at play and the grown people sit upon their
+doorsteps, and perhaps a church spire shows itself above the roofs.
+Here, in the narrowest of the entry, you find a great old mansion still
+erect, with some insignia of its former state--some scutcheon, some holy
+or courageous motto, on the lintel. The local antiquary points out where
+famous and well-born people had their lodging; and as you look up, out
+pops the head of a slatternly woman from the countess's window. The
+Bedouins camp within Pharaoh's palace walls, and the old war-ship is
+given over to the rats. We are already a far way from the days when
+powdered heads were plentiful in these alleys, with jolly, port-wine
+faces underneath. Even in the chief thoroughfares Irish washings flutter
+at the windows, and the pavements are encumbered with loiterers.
+
+These loiterers are a true character of the scene. Some shrewd Scotch
+workmen may have paused on their way to a job, debating Church affairs
+and politics with their tools upon their arm. But the most part are of a
+different order--skulking jail-birds; unkempt, barefoot children;
+big-mouthed, robust women, in a sort of uniform of striped flannel
+petticoat and short tartan shawl: among these, a few supervising
+constables and a dismal sprinkling of mutineers and broken men from
+higher ranks in society, with some mark of better days upon them, like a
+brand. In a place no larger than Edinburgh, and where the traffic is
+mostly centred in five or six chief streets, the same face comes often
+under the notice of an idle stroller. In fact, from this point of view,
+Edinburgh is not so much a small city as the largest of small towns. It
+is scarce possible to avoid observing your neighbours; and I never yet
+heard of any one who tried. It has been my fortune, in this anonymous
+accidental way, to watch more than one of these downward travellers for
+some stages on the road to ruin. One man must have been upwards of sixty
+before I first observed him, and he made then a decent, personable
+figure in broadcloth of the best. For three years he kept
+falling--grease coming and buttons going from the square-skirted coat,
+the face puffing and pimpling, the shoulders growing bowed, the hair
+falling scant and grey upon his head; and the last that ever I saw of
+him, he was standing at the mouth of an entry with several men in
+moleskin, three parts drunk, and his old black raiment daubed with mud.
+I fancy that I still can hear him laugh. There was something
+heart-breaking in this gradual declension at so advanced an age; you
+would have thought a man of sixty out of the reach of these calamities;
+you would have thought that he was niched by that time into a safe place
+in life, whence he could pass quietly and honourably into the grave.
+
+One of the earliest marks of these _dégringolades_ is, that the victim
+begins to disappear from the New Town thoroughfares, and takes to the
+High Street, like a wounded animal to the woods. And such an one is the
+type of the quarter. It also has fallen socially. A scutcheon over the
+door somewhat jars in sentiment where there is a washing at every
+window. The old man, when I saw him last, wore the coat in which he had
+played the gentleman three years before; and that was just what gave
+him so pre-eminent an air of wretchedness.
+
+It is true that the over-population was at least as dense in the epoch
+of lords and ladies, and that nowadays some customs which made
+Edinburgh notorious of yore have been fortunately pretermitted. But an
+aggregation of comfort is not distasteful like an aggregation of the
+reverse. Nobody cares how many lords and ladies, and divines and
+lawyers, may have been crowded into these houses in the past--perhaps
+the more the merrier. The glasses clink around the china punch-bowl,
+some one touches the virginals, there are peacocks' feathers on the
+chimney, and the tapers burn clear and pale in the red firelight. That
+is not an ugly picture in itself, nor will it become ugly upon
+repetition. All the better if the like were going on in every second
+room; the _land_ would only look the more inviting. Times are changed.
+In one house, perhaps, twoscore families herd together; and, perhaps,
+not one of them is wholly out of the reach of want. The great hotel is
+given over to discomfort from the foundation to the chimney-tops;
+everywhere a pinching, narrow habit, scanty meals, and an air of
+sluttishness and dirt. In the first room there is a birth, in another a
+death, in a third a sordid drinking-bout, and the detective and the
+Bible-reader cross upon the stairs. High words are audible from dwelling
+to dwelling, and children have a strange experience from the first; only
+a robust soul, you would think, could grow up in such conditions without
+hurt. And even if God tempers His dispensations to the young, and all
+the ill does not arise that our apprehensions may forecast, the sight of
+such a way of living is disquieting to people who are more happily
+circumstanced. Social inequality is nowhere more ostentatious than at
+Edinburgh. I have mentioned already how, to the stroller along Princes
+Street, the High Street callously exhibits its back garrets. It is true,
+there is a garden between. And although nothing could be more glaring by
+way of contrast, sometimes the opposition is more immediate; sometimes
+the thing lies in a nutshell, and there is not so much as a blade of
+grass between the rich and poor. To look over the South Bridge and see
+the Cowgate below full of crying hawkers, is to view one rank of society
+from another in the twinkling of an eye.
+
+One night I went along the Cowgate after every one was abed but the
+policeman, and stopped by hazard before a tall _land_. The moon touched
+upon its chimneys, and shone blankly on the upper windows; there was no
+light anywhere in the great bulk of building; but as I stood there it
+seemed to me that I could hear quite a body of quiet sounds from the
+interior; doubtless there were many clocks ticking, and people snoring
+on their backs. And thus, as I fancied, the dense life within made
+itself faintly audible in my ears, family after family contributing its
+quota to the general hum, and the whole pile beating in tune to its
+time-pieces, like a great disordered heart. Perhaps it was little more
+than a fancy altogether, but it was strangely impressive at the time,
+and gave me an imaginative measure of the disproportion between the
+quantity of living flesh and the trifling walls that separated and
+contained it.
+
+There was nothing fanciful, at least, but every circumstance of terror
+and reality, in the fall of the _land_ in the High Street. The building
+had grown rotten to the core; the entry underneath had suddenly closed
+up so that the scavenger's barrow could not pass; cracks and
+reverberations sounded through the house at night; the inhabitants of
+the huge old human bee-hive discussed their peril when they encountered
+on the stair; some had even left their dwellings in a panic of fear, and
+returned to them again in a fit of economy or self-respect; when, in the
+black hours of a Sunday morning, the whole structure ran together with a
+hideous uproar and tumbled story upon story to the ground. The physical
+shock was felt far and near; and the moral shock travelled with the
+morning milkmaid into all the suburbs. The church-bells never sounded
+more dismally over Edinburgh than that grey forenoon. Death had made a
+brave harvest; and, like Samson, by pulling down one roof destroyed many
+a home. None who saw it can have forgotten the aspect of the gable: here
+it was plastered, there papered, according to the rooms; here the kettle
+still stood on the hob, high overhead; and there a cheap picture of the
+Queen was pasted over the chimney, So, by this disaster, you had a
+glimpse into the life of thirty families, all suddenly cut off from the
+revolving years. The _land_ had fallen; and with the _land_ how much!
+Far in the country, people saw a gap in the city ranks, and the sun
+looked through between the chimneys in an unwonted place. And all over
+the world, in London, in Canada, in New Zealand, fancy what a multitude
+of people could exclaim with truth: "The house that I was born in fell
+last night!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE
+
+
+Time has wrought its changes most notably around the precinct of St.
+Giles's Church. The church itself, if it were not for the spire, would
+be unrecognizable; the _Krames_ are all gone, not a shop is left to
+shelter in its buttresses; and zealous magistrates and a misguided
+architect have shorn the design of manhood, and left it poor, naked, and
+pitifully pretentious. As St. Giles's must have had in former days a
+rich and quaint appearance now forgotten, so the neighbourhood was
+bustling, sunless, and romantic. It was here that the town was most
+overbuilt; but the overbuilding has been all rooted out, and not only a
+free fairway left along the High Street with an open space on either
+side of the church, but a great porthole, knocked in the main line of
+the _lands_, gives an outlook to the north and the New Town.
+
+There is a silly story of a subterranean passage between the Castle and
+Holyrood, and a bold Highland piper who volunteered to explore its
+windings. He made his entrance by the upper end, playing a strathspey;
+the curious footed it after him down the street, following his descent
+by the sound of the chanter from below; until all of a sudden, about the
+level of St. Giles's, the music came abruptly to an end, and the people
+in the street stood at fault with hands uplifted. Whether he was choked
+with gases, or perished in a quag, or was removed bodily by the Evil
+One, remains a point of doubt; but the piper has never again been seen
+or heard of from that day to this. Perhaps he wandered down into the
+land of Thomas the Rhymer, and some day, when it is least expected, may
+take a thought to revisit the sunlit upper world. That will be a
+strange moment for the cabmen on the stance beside St. Giles's, when
+they hear the drone of his pipes reascending from the bowels of the
+earth below their horses' feet.
+
+But it is not only pipers who have vanished, many a solid bulk of
+masonry has been likewise spirited into the air. Here, for example, is
+the shape of a heart let into the causeway. This was the site of the
+Tolbooth, the Heart of Midlothian, a place old in story and name-father
+to a noble book. The walls are now down in the dust; there is no more
+_squalor carceris_ for merry debtors, no more cage for the old,
+acknowledged prison-breaker; but the sun and the wind play freely over
+the foundations of the jail. Nor is this the only memorial that the
+pavement keeps of former days. The ancient burying-ground of Edinburgh
+lay behind St. Giles's Church, running downhill to the Cowgate and
+covering the site of the present Parliament House. It has disappeared as
+utterly as the prison or the Luckenbooths; and for those ignorant of its
+history, I know only one token that remains. In the Parliament Close,
+trodden daily underfoot by advocates, two letters and a date mark the
+resting-place of the man who made Scotland over again in his own image,
+the indefatigable, undissuadable John Knox. He sleeps within call of the
+church that so often echoed to his preaching.
+
+Hard by the reformer, a bandy-legged and garlanded Charles Second, made
+of lead, bestrides a tun-bellied charger. The King has his back turned,
+and, as you look, seems to be trotting clumsily away from such a
+dangerous neighbour. Often, for hours together, these two will be alone
+in the close, for it lies out of the way of all but legal traffic. On
+one side the south wall of the church, on the other the arcades of the
+Parliament House, inclose this irregular bight of causeway and describe
+their shadows on it in the sun. At either end, from round St. Giles's
+buttresses, you command a look into the High Street with its motley
+passengers; but the stream goes by east and west, and leaves the
+Parliament Close to Charles the Second and the birds. Once in a while, a
+patient crowd may be seen loitering there all day, some eating fruit,
+some reading a newspaper; and to judge by their quiet demeanour, you
+would think they were waiting for a distribution of soup-tickets. The
+fact is far otherwise; within in the Justiciary Court a man is upon
+trial for his life, and these are some of the curious for whom the
+gallery was found too narrow. Towards afternoon, if the prisoner is
+unpopular, there will be a round of hisses when he is brought forth.
+Once in a while, too, an advocate in wig and gown, hand upon mouth, full
+of pregnant nods, sweeps to and fro in the arcade listening to an agent;
+and at certain regular hours a whole tide of lawyers hurries across the
+space.
+
+The Parliament Close has been the scene of marking incidents in Scottish
+history. Thus, when the Bishops were ejected from the Convention in
+1688, "all fourteen of them gathered together with pale faces and stood
+in a cloud in the Parliament Close": poor episcopal personages who were
+done with fair weather for life! Some of the west-country Societarians
+standing by, who would have "rejoiced more than in great sums" to be at
+their hanging, hustled them so rudely that they knocked their heads
+together. It was not magnanimous behaviour to dethroned enemies; but
+one, at least, of the Societarians had groaned in the _boots_, and they
+had all seen their dear friends upon the scaffold. Again, at the "woeful
+Union," it was here that people crowded to escort their favourite from
+the last of Scottish parliaments: people flushed with nationality, as
+Boswell would have said, ready for riotous acts, and fresh from throwing
+stones at the author of "Robinson Crusoe" as he looked out of window.
+
+One of the pious in the seventeenth century, going to pass his _trials_
+(examinations as we now say) for the Scottish Bar, beheld the Parliament
+Close open and had a vision of the mouth of Hell. This, and small
+wonder, was the means of his conversion. Nor was the vision unsuitable
+to the locality; for after an hospital, what uglier piece is there in
+civilization than a court of law? Hither come envy, malice, and all
+uncharitableness to wrestle it out in public tourney; crimes, broken
+fortunes, severed households, the knave and his victim, gravitate to
+this low building with the arcade. To how many has not St. Giles's bell
+told the first hour after ruin? I think I see them pause to count the
+strokes, and wander on again into the moving High Street, stunned and
+sick at heart.
+
+A pair of swing doors gives admittance to a hall with a carved roof,
+hung with legal portraits, adorned with legal statuary, lighted by
+windows of painted glass, and warmed by three vast fires. This the
+_Salle des pas perdus_ of the Scottish Bar. Here, by a ferocious custom,
+idle youths must promenade from ten till two. From end to end, singly or
+in pairs or trios, the gowns and wigs go back and forward. Through a hum
+of talk and footfalls, the piping tones of a Macer announce a fresh
+cause and call upon the names of those concerned. Intelligent men have
+been walking here daily for ten or twenty years without a rag of
+business or a shilling of reward. In process of time, they may perhaps
+be made the Sheriff-Substitute and Fountain of Justice at Lerwick or
+Tobermory. There is nothing required, you would say, but a little
+patience and a taste for exercise and bad air. To breathe dust and
+bombazine, to feed the mind on cackling gossip, to hear three parts of a
+case and drink a glass of sherry, to long with indescribable longings
+for the hour when a man may slip out of his travesty and devote himself
+to golf for the rest of the afternoon, and to do this day by day and
+year after year, may seem so small a thing to the inexperienced! But
+those who have made the experiment are of a different way of thinking,
+and count it the most arduous form of idleness.
+
+More swing doors open into pigeon-holes where Judges of the First
+Appeal sit singly, and halls of audience where the supreme Lords sit by
+three or four. Here, you may see Scott's place within the bar, where he
+wrote many a page of Waverley novels to the drone of judicial
+proceeding. You will hear a good deal of shrewdness, and, as their
+Lordships do not altogether disdain pleasantry, a fair proportion of dry
+fun. The broadest of broad Scotch is now banished from the bench; but
+the courts still retain a certain national flavour. We have a solemn
+enjoyable way of lingering on a case. We treat law as a fine art, and
+relish and digest a good distinction. There is no hurry: point after
+point must be rightly examined and reduced to principle; judge after
+judge must utter forth his _obiter dicta_ to delighted brethren.
+
+Besides the courts, there are installed under the same roof no less than
+three libraries: two of no mean order; confused and semi-subterranean,
+full of stairs and galleries; where you may see the most
+studious-looking wigs fishing out novels by lantern light, in the very
+place where the old Privy Council tortured Covenanters. As the
+Parliament House is built upon a slope, although it presents only one
+story to the north, it measures half-a-dozen at least upon the south;
+and range after range of vaults extend below the libraries. Few places
+are more characteristic of this hilly capital. You descend one stone
+stair after another, and wander, by the flicker of a match, in a
+labyrinth of stone cellars. Now, you pass below the Outer Hall and hear
+overhead, brisk but ghostly, the interminable pattering of legal feet.
+Now, you come upon a strong door with a wicket: on the other side are
+the cells of the police office and the trap-stair that gives admittance
+to the dock in the Justiciary Court. Many a foot that has gone up there
+lightly enough, has been dead-heavy in the descent. Many a man's life
+has been argued away from him during long hours in the court above. But
+just now that tragic stage is empty and silent like a church on a
+week-day, with the bench all sheeted up and nothing moving but the
+sunbeams on the wall. A little farther and you strike upon a room, not
+empty like the rest, but crowded with _productions_ from bygone criminal
+cases: a grim lumber: lethal weapons, poisoned organs in a jar, a door
+with a shot hole through the panel, behind which a man fell dead. I
+cannot fancy why they should preserve them, unless it were against the
+Judgment Day. At length, as you continue to descend, you see a peep of
+yellow gaslight and hear a jostling, whispering noise ahead; next moment
+you turn a corner, and there, in a whitewashed passage, is a machinery
+belt industriously turning on its wheels. You would think the engine had
+grown there of its own accord, like a cellar fungus, and would soon spin
+itself out and fill the vaults from end to end with its mysterious
+labours. In truth, it is only some gear of the steam ventilator; and you
+will find the engineers at hand, and may step out of their door into the
+sunlight. For all this while, you have not been descending towards the
+earth's centre, but only to the bottom of the hill and the foundations
+of the Parliament House; low down, to be sure, but still under the open
+heaven and in a field of grass. The daylight shines garishly on the back
+windows of the Irish quarter; on broken shutters, wry gables, old
+palsied houses on the brink of ruin, a crumbling human pig-sty fit for
+human pigs. There are few signs of life, besides a scanty washing or a
+face at a window: the dwellers are abroad, but they will return at night
+and stagger to their pallets.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+LEGENDS
+
+
+The character of a place is often most perfectly expressed in its
+associations. An event strikes root and grows into a legend, when it has
+happened amongst congenial surroundings. Ugly actions, above all in ugly
+places, have the true romantic quality, and become an undying property
+of their scene. To a man like Scott, the different appearances of nature
+seemed each to contain its own legend ready made, which it was his to
+call forth: in such or such a place, only such or such events ought with
+propriety to happen; and in this spirit he made the "Lady of the Lake"
+for Ben Venue, the "Heart of Midlothian" for Edinburgh, and the
+"Pirate," so indifferently written but so romantically conceived, for
+the desolate islands and roaring tideways of the North. The common run
+of mankind have, from generation to generation, an instinct almost as
+delicate as that of Scott; but where he created new things, they only
+forget what is unsuitable among the old; and by survival of the fittest,
+a body of tradition becomes a work of art. So, in the low dens and
+high-flying garrets of Edinburgh, people may go back upon dark passages
+in the town's adventures, and chill their marrow with winter's tales
+about the fire: tales that are singularly apposite and characteristic,
+not only of the old life, but of the very constitution of built nature
+in that part, and singularly well qualified to add horror to horror,
+when the wind pipes around the tall _lands_, and hoots adown arched
+passages, and the far-spread wilderness of city lamps keeps quavering
+and flaring in the gusts.
+
+Here, it is the tale of Begbie the bank-porter, stricken to the heart at
+a blow and left in his blood within a step or two of the crowded High
+Street. There, people hush their voices over Burke and Hare; over drugs
+and violated graves, and the resurrection-men smothering their victims
+with their knees. Here, again, the fame of Deacon Brodie is kept piously
+fresh. A great man in his day was the Deacon; well seen in good society,
+crafty with his hands as a cabinet-maker, and one who could sing a song
+with taste. Many a citizen was proud to welcome the Deacon to supper,
+and dismissed him with regret at a timeous hour, who would have been
+vastly disconcerted had he known how soon, and in what guise, his
+visitor returned. Many stories are told of this redoubtable Edinburgh
+burglar, but the one I have in my mind most vividly gives the key of all
+the rest. A friend of Brodie's, nested some way towards heaven in one of
+these great _lands_, had told him of a projected visit to the country,
+and afterwards, detained by some affairs, put it off and stayed the
+night in town. The good man had lain some time awake; it was far on in
+the small hours by the Tron bell; when suddenly there came a creak, a
+jar, a faint light. Softly he clambered out of bed and up to a false
+window which looked upon another room, and there, by the glimmer of a
+thieves' lantern, was his good friend the Deacon in a mask. It is
+characteristic of the town and the town's manners that this little
+episode should have been quietly tided over, and quite a good time
+elapsed before a great robbery, an escape, a Bow Street runner, a
+cock-fight, an apprehension in a cupboard in Amsterdam, and a last step
+into the air off his own greatly improved gallows drop, brought the
+career of Deacon William Brodie to an end. But still, by the mind's eye,
+he may be seen, a man harassed below a mountain of duplicity, slinking
+from a magistrate's supper-room to a thieves' ken, and pickeering among
+the closes by the flicker of a dark lamp.
+
+Or where the Deacon is out of favour, perhaps some memory lingers of the
+great plagues, and of fatal houses still unsafe to enter within the
+memory of man. For in time of pestilence the discipline had been sharp
+and sudden, and what we now call "stamping out contagion" was carried on
+with deadly rigour. The officials, in their gowns of grey, with a white
+St. Andrew's cross on back and breast, and white cloth carried before
+them on a staff, perambulated the city, adding the terror of man's
+justice to the fear of God's visitation. The dead they buried on the
+Borough Muir; the living who had concealed the sickness were drowned, if
+they were women, in the Quarry Holes, and if they were men, were hanged
+and gibbeted at their own doors; and wherever the evil had passed,
+furniture was destroyed and houses closed. And the most bogeyish part of
+the story is about such houses. Two generations back they still stood
+dark and empty; people avoided them as they passed by; the boldest
+schoolboy only shouted through the key-hole and made off; for within, it
+was supposed, the plague lay ambushed like a basilisk, ready to flow
+forth and spread blain and pustule through the city. What a terrible
+next-door neighbour for superstitious citizens! A rat scampering within
+would send a shudder through the stoutest heart. Here, if you like, was
+a sanitary parable, addressed by our uncleanly forefathers to their own
+neglect.
+
+And then we have Major Weir; for although even his house is now
+demolished, old Edinburgh cannot clear herself of his unholy memory. He
+and his sister lived together in an odour of sour piety. She was a
+marvelous spinster; he had a rare gift of supplication, and was known
+among devout admirers by the name of Angelical Thomas. "He was a tall,
+black man, and ordinarily looked down to the ground; a grim countenance,
+and a big nose. His garb was still a cloak, and somewhat dark, and he
+never went without his staff." How it came about that Angelical Thomas
+was burned in company with his staff, and his sister in gentler manner
+hanged, and whether these two were simply religious maniacs of the more
+furious order, or had real as well as imaginary sins upon their
+old-world shoulders, are points happily beyond the reach of our
+intention. At least, it is suitable enough that out of this
+superstitious city some such example should have been put forth: the
+outcome and fine flower of dark and vehement religion. And at least the
+facts struck the public fancy and brought forth a remarkable family of
+myths. It would appear that the Major's staff went upon his errands, and
+even ran before him with a lantern on dark nights. Gigantic females,
+"stentoriously laughing and gaping with tehees of laughter" at
+unseasonable hours of night and morning, haunted the purlieus of his
+abode. His house fell under such a load of infamy that no one dared to
+sleep in it, until municipal improvement leveled the structure with the
+ground. And my father has often been told in the nursery how the devil's
+coach, drawn by six coal-black horses with fiery eyes, would drive at
+night into the West Bow, and belated people might see the dead Major
+through the glasses.
+
+Another legend is that of the two maiden sisters. A legend I am afraid
+it may be, in the most discreditable meaning of the term; or perhaps
+something worse--a mere yesterday's fiction. But it is a story of some
+vitality, and is worthy of a place in the Edinburgh kalendar. This pair
+inhabited a single room; from the facts, it must have been
+double-bedded; and it may have been of some dimensions; but when all is
+said, it was a single room. Here our two spinsters fell out--on some
+point of controversial divinity belike: but fell out so bitterly that
+there was never a word spoken between them, black or white, from that
+day forward. You would have thought they would separate: but no; whether
+from lack of means, or the Scottish fear of scandal, they continued to
+keep house together where they were. A chalk line drawn upon the floor
+separated their two domains; it bisected the doorway and the fireplace,
+so that each could go out and in, and do her cooking, without violating
+the territory of the other. So, for years, they co-existed in a hateful
+silence; their meals, their ablutions, their friendly visitors, exposed
+to an unfriendly scrutiny; and at night, in the dark watches, each could
+hear the breathing of her enemy. Never did four walls look down upon an
+uglier spectacle than these sisters rivaling in unsisterliness. Here is
+a canvas for Hawthorne to have turned into a cabinet picture--he had a
+Puritanic vein, which would have fitted him to treat this Puritanic
+horror; he could have shown them to us in their sicknesses and at their
+hideous twin devotions, thumbing a pair of great Bibles, or praying
+aloud for each other's penitence with marrowy emphasis; now each, with
+kilted petticoat, at her own corner of the fire on some tempestuous
+evening; now sitting each at her window, looking out upon the summer
+landscape sloping far below them towards the firth, and the field-paths
+where they had wandered hand in hand; or, as age and infirmity grew upon
+them and prolonged their toilettes, and their hands began to tremble and
+their heads to nod involuntarily, growing only the more steeled in
+enmity with years; until one fine day, at a word, a look, a visit, or
+the approach of death, their hearts would melt and the chalk boundary be
+overstepped for ever.
+
+Alas! to those who know the ecclesiastical history of the race--the most
+perverse and melancholy in man's annals--this will seem only a figure of
+much that is typical of Scotland and her high-seated capital above the
+Forth--a figure so grimly realistic that it may pass with strangers for
+a caricature. We are wonderful patient haters for conscience' sake up
+here in the North. I spoke, in the first of these papers, of the
+Parliaments of the Established and Free Churches, and how they can hear
+each other singing psalms across the street. There is but a street
+between them in space, but a shadow between them in principle; and yet
+there they sit, enchanted, and in damnatory accents pray for each
+other's growth in grace. It would be well if there were no more than
+two; but the sects in Scotland form a large family of sisters, and the
+chalk lines are thickly drawn, and run through the midst of many private
+homes. Edinburgh is a city of churches, as though it were a place of
+pilgrimage. You will see four within a stone-cast at the head of the
+West Bow. Some are crowded to the doors; some are empty like monuments;
+and yet you will ever find new ones in the building. Hence that
+surprising clamour of church bells that suddenly breaks out upon the
+Sabbath morning, from Trinity and the sea-skirts to Morningside on the
+borders of the hills. I have heard the chimes of Oxford playing their
+symphony in a golden autumn morning, and beautiful it was to hear. But
+in Edinburgh all manner of loud bells join, or rather disjoin, in one
+swelling, brutal babblement of noise. Now one overtakes another, and now
+lags behind it; now five or six all strike on the pained tympanum at the
+same punctual instant of time, and make together a dismal chord of
+discord; and now for a second all seem to have conspired to hold their
+peace. Indeed, there are not many uproars in this world more dismal than
+that of the Sabbath bells in Edinburgh: a harsh ecclesiastical tocsin;
+the outcry of incongruous orthodoxies, calling on every separate
+conventicler to put up a protest, each in his own synagogue, against
+"right-hand extremes and left-hand defections." And surely there are few
+worse extremes than this extremity of zeal; and few more deplorable
+defections than this disloyalty to Christian love. Shakespeare wrote a
+comedy of "Much Ado about Nothing." The Scottish nation made a fantastic
+tragedy on the same subject. And it is for the success of this
+remarkable piece that these bells are sounded every Sabbath morning on
+the hills above the Forth. How many of them might rest silent in the
+steeple, how many of these ugly churches might be demolished and turned
+once more into useful building material, if people who think almost
+exactly the same thoughts about religion would condescend to worship God
+under the same roof! But there are the chalk lines. And which is to
+pocket pride, and speak the foremost word?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+GREYFRIARS
+
+
+It was Queen Mary who threw open the gardens of the Grey Friars: a new
+and semi-rural cemetery in those days, although it has grown an
+antiquity in its turn and been superseded by half-a-dozen others. The
+Friars must have had a pleasant time on summer evenings; for their
+gardens were situated to a wish, with the tall Castle and the tallest of
+the Castle crags in front. Even now, it is one of our famous Edinburgh
+points of view; and strangers are led thither to see, by yet another
+instance, how strangely the city lies upon her hills. The enclosure is
+of an irregular shape; the double church of Old and New Greyfriars
+stands on the level at the top; a few thorns are dotted here and there,
+and the ground falls by terrace and steep slope towards the north. The
+open shows many slabs and table tombstones; and all round the margin,
+the place is girt by an array of aristocratic mausoleums appallingly
+adorned. Setting aside the tombs of Roubilliac, which belong to the
+heroic order of graveyard art, we Scotch stand, to my fancy, highest
+among nations in the matter of grimly illustrating death. We seem to
+love for their own sake the emblems of time and the great change; and
+even around country churches you will find a wonderful exhibition of
+skulls, and crossbones, and noseless angels, and trumpets pealing for
+the Judgment Day. Every mason was a pedestrian Holbein: he had a deep
+consciousness of death, and loved to put its terrors pithily before the
+churchyard loiterer; he was brimful of rough hints upon mortality, and
+any dead farmer was seized upon to be a text. The classical examples of
+this art are in Greyfriars. In their time, these were doubtless costly
+monuments, and reckoned of a very elegant proportion by contemporaries;
+and now, when the elegance is not so apparent, the significance remains.
+You may perhaps look with a smile on the profusion of Latin
+mottoes--some crawling endwise up the shaft of a pillar, some issuing on
+a scroll from angels' trumpets--on the emblematic horrors, the figures
+rising headless from the grave, and all the traditional ingenuities in
+which it pleased our fathers to set forth their sorrow for the dead and
+their sense of earthly mutability. But it is not a hearty sort of mirth.
+Each ornament may have been executed by the merriest apprentice,
+whistling as he plied the mallet; but the original meaning of each, and
+the combined effect of so many of them in this quiet enclosure, is
+serious to the point of melancholy.
+
+Round a great part of the circuit, houses of a low class present their
+backs to the churchyard. Only a few inches separate the living from the
+dead. Here, a window is partly blocked up by the pediment of a tomb;
+there, where the street falls far below the level of the graves, a
+chimney has been trained up the back of a monument, and a red pot looks
+vulgarly over from behind. A damp smell of the graveyard finds its way
+into houses where workmen sit at meat. Domestic life on a small scale
+goes forward visibly at the windows. The very solitude and stillness of
+the enclosure, which lies apart from the town's traffic, serves to
+accentuate the contrast. As you walk upon the graves, you see children
+scattering crumbs to feed the sparrows; you hear people singing or
+washing dishes, or the sound of tears and castigation; the linen on a
+clothes-pole flaps against funereal sculpture; or perhaps the cat slips
+over the lintel and descends on a memorial urn. And as there is nothing
+else astir, these incongruous sights and noises take hold on the
+attention and exaggerate the sadness of the place.
+
+Greyfriars is continually overrun by cats. I have seen one afternoon, as
+many as thirteen of them seated on the grass beside old Milne, the
+Master Builder, all sleek and fat, and complacently blinking, as if they
+had fed upon strange meats. Old Milne was chanting with the saints, as
+we may hope, and cared little for the company about his grave; but I
+confess the spectacle had an ugly side for me; and I was glad to step
+forward and raise my eyes to where the Castle and the roofs of the Old
+Town, and the spire of the Assembly Hall, stood deployed against the sky
+with the colourless precision of engraving. An open outlook is to be
+desired from a churchyard, and a sight of the sky and some of the
+world's beauty relieves a mind from morbid thoughts.
+
+I shall never forget one visit. It was a grey, dropping day; the grass
+was strung with rain-drops; and the people in the houses kept hanging
+out their shirts and petticoats and angrily taking them in again, as the
+weather turned from wet to fair and back again. A gravedigger, and a
+friend of his, a gardener from the country, accompanied me into one
+after another of the cells and little courtyards in which it gratified
+the wealthy of old days to enclose their old bones from neighbourhood.
+In one, under a sort of shrine, we found a forlorn human effigy, very
+realistically executed down to the detail of his ribbed stockings, and
+holding in his hand a ticket with the date of his demise. He looked most
+pitiful and ridiculous, shut up by himself in his aristocratic precinct,
+like a bad old boy or an inferior forgotten deity under a new
+dispensation; the burdocks grew familiarly about his feet, the rain
+dripped all round him; and the world maintained the most entire
+indifference as to who he was or whither he had gone. In another, a
+vaulted tomb, handsome externally but horrible inside with damp and
+cobwebs, there were three mounds of black earth and an uncovered
+thigh-bone. This was the place of interment, it appeared, of a family
+with whom the gardener had been long in service. He was among old
+acquaintances. "This'll be Miss Marg'et's," said he, giving the bone a
+friendly kick. "The auld ---- !" I have always an uncomfortable feeling in
+a graveyard, at sight of so many tombs to perpetuate memories best
+forgotten; but I never had the impression so strongly as that day.
+People had been at some expense in both these cases: to provoke a
+melancholy feeling of derision in the one, and an insulting epithet in
+the other. The proper inscription for the most part of mankind, I began
+to think, is the cynical jeer, _cras tibi_. That, if anything, will stop
+the mouth of a carper; since it both admits the worst and carries the
+war triumphantly into the enemy's camp.
+
+Greyfriars is a place of many associations. There was one window in a
+house at the lower end, now demolished, which was pointed out to me by
+the gravedigger as a spot of legendary interest. Burke, the
+resurrection-man, infamous for so many murders at five shillings a head,
+used to sit thereat, with pipe and nightcap, to watch burials going
+forward on the green. In a tomb higher up, which must then have been but
+newly finished, John Knox, according to the same informant, had taken
+refuge in a turmoil of the Reformation. Behind the church is the haunted
+mausoleum of Sir George Mackenzie: Bloody Mackenzie, Lord Advocate in
+the Covenanting troubles and author of some pleasing sentiments on
+toleration. Here, in the last century, an old Heriot's Hospital boy once
+harboured from the pursuit of the police. The Hospital is next door to
+Greyfriars--a courtly building among lawns, where, on Founder's Day, you
+may see a multitude of children playing Kiss-in-the-Ring and Round the
+Mulberry-bush. Thus, when the fugitive had managed to conceal himself in
+the tomb, his old schoolmates had a hundred opportunities to bring him
+food; and there he lay in safety till a ship was found to smuggle him
+abroad. But his must have been indeed a heart of brass, to lie all day
+and night alone with the dead persecutor; and other lads were far from
+emulating him in courage. When a man's soul is certainly in hell, his
+body will scarce lie quiet in a tomb, however costly; some time or other
+the door must open, and the reprobate come forth in the abhorred
+garments of the grave. It was thought a high piece of prowess to knock
+at the Lord Advocate's mausoleum and challenge him to appear. "Bluidy
+Mackenzie, come oot if ye daur!" sang the foolhardy urchins. But Sir
+George had other affairs on hand; and the author of an essay on
+toleration continues to sleep peacefully among the many whom he so
+intolerantly helped to slay.
+
+For this _infelix campus_, as it is dubbed in one of its own
+inscriptions--an inscription over which Dr. Johnson passed a critical
+eye--is in many ways sacred to the memory of the men whom Mackenzie
+persecuted. It was here, on the flat tombstones, that the Covenant was
+signed by an enthusiastic people. In the long arm of the churchyard that
+extends to Lauriston, the prisoners from Bothwell Bridge--fed on bread
+and water, and guarded, life for life, by vigilant marksmen--lay five
+months looking for the scaffold or the plantations. And while the good
+work was going forward in the Grassmarket, idlers in Greyfriars might
+have heard the throb of the military drums that drowned the voices of
+the martyrs. Nor is this all: for down in the corner farthest from Sir
+George, there stands a monument, dedicated, in uncouth Covenanting
+verse, to all who lost their lives in that contention. There is no
+moorsman shot in a snow shower beside Irongray or Co'monell; there is
+not one of the two hundred who were drowned off the Orkneys; nor so much
+as a poor, over-driven, Covenanting slave in the American plantations;
+but can lay claim to a share in that memorial, and, if such things
+interest just men among the shades, can boast he has a monument on earth
+as well as Julius Caesar or the Pharaohs. Where they may all lie, I know
+not. Far-scattered bones, indeed! But if the reader cares to learn how
+some of them--or some part of some of them--found their way at length to
+such honourable sepulture, let him listen to the words of one who was
+their comrade in life and their apologist when they were dead. Some of
+the insane controversial matter I omit, as well as some digressions,
+but leave the rest in Patrick Walker's language and orthography:--
+
+     "The never to be forgotten Mr. _James Renwlck_ told me, that he was
+     Witness to their Public Murder at the _Gallowlee_, between _Leith_
+     and _Edinburgh_, when he saw the Hangman hash and hagg off all their
+     Five heads, with _Patrick Foreman's_ Right Hand: Their Bodies were
+     all buried at the Gallows Foot: their Heads, with _Patrick's_ Hand,
+     were brought and put upon five Pikes on the _Pleasaunce-Port_....
+     Mr. _Renwick_ told me that it was the first public Action that his
+     Hand was at, to conveen Friends, and lift their murthered Bodies,
+     and carried them to the West Churchyard of _Edinburgh_,"--not
+     Greyfriars, this time,--"and buried them there. Then they came about
+     the City ... and took down these Five Heads and that Hand; and Day
+     being come, they went quickly up the _Pleasaunce_; and when they
+     came to _Lauristoun_ Yards, upon the South-side of the City, they
+     durst not venture, being so light, to go and bury their Heads with
+     their Bodies, which they designed; it being present death, if any of
+     them had been found. _Alexander Tweedie_, a Friend, being with them,
+     who at that Time was Gardner in these Yards, concluded to bury them
+     in his Yard, being in a Box (wrapped in Linen), where they lay 45
+     Years except 3 Days, being executed upon the 10th of _October_ 1681,
+     and found the 7th Day of _October_ 1726. That Piece of Ground lay
+     for some years unlaboured; and trenching it, the Gardner found them,
+     which affrighted him; the Box was consumed. Mr. _Schaw_, the Owner
+     of these Yards, caused lift them, and lay them upon a Table in his
+     Summer-house: Mr. _Schaw's_ mother was so kind, as to cut out a
+     Linen-cloth and cover them. They lay Twelve Days there, where all
+     had Access to see them. _Alexander Tweedie_, the foresaid Gardner,
+     said, when dying, There was a Treasure hid in his Yard, but neither
+     Gold nor Silver. _Daniel Tweedie_, his Son, came along with me to
+     that Yard, and told me that his Father planted a white Rose-bush
+     above them, and farther down the Yard a red Rose-bush, which were
+     more fruitful than any other Bush in the Yard.... Many came"--to see
+     the heads--"out of Curiosity; yet I rejoiced to see so many
+     concerned grave Men and Women favouring the Dust of our Martyrs.
+     There were Six of us concluded to bury them upon the Nineteenth Day
+     of _October_ 1726, and every one of us to acquaint Friends of the
+     Day and Hour, being _Wednesday_, the Day of the Week on which most
+     of them were executed, and at 4 of the Clock at Night, being the
+     Hour that most of them went to their resting Graves. We caused make
+     a compleat Coffin for them in Black, with four Yards of fine Linen,
+     the way that our Martyrs Corps were managed.... Accordingly we kept
+     the aforesaid Day and Hour, and doubled the Linen, and laid the Half
+     of it below them, their nether Jaws being parted from their Heads;
+     but being young Men, their Teeth remained. All were Witness to the
+     Holes in each of their Heads, which the Hangman broke with his
+     Hammer; and according to the Bigness of their Sculls, we laid the
+     Jaws to them, and drew the other Half of the Linen above them, and
+     stufft the Coffin with Shavings. Some prest hard to go thorow the
+     chief Parts of the City as was done at the Revolution; but this we
+     refused, considering that it looked airy and frothy, to make such
+     Show of them, and inconsistent with the solid serious Observing of
+     such an affecting, surprizing unheard-of Dispensation: But took the
+     ordinary Way of other Burials from that Place, to wit, we went east
+     the Back of the Wall, and in at _Bristo-Port_, and down the Way to
+     the Head of the _Cowgate_, and turned up to the Churchyard, where
+     they were interred closs to the Martyrs Tomb, with the greatest
+     Multitude of People Old and Young, Men and Women, Ministers and
+     others, that ever I saw together."
+
+And so there they were at last, in "their resting graves." So long as
+men do their duty, even if it be greatly in a misapprehension, they will
+be leading pattern lives; and whether or not they come to lie beside a
+martyrs' monument, we may be sure they will find a safe haven somewhere
+in the providence of God. It is not well to think of death, unless we
+temper the thought with that of heroes who despised it. Upon what
+ground, is of small account; if it be only the bishop who was burned for
+his faith in the antipodes, his memory lightens the heart and makes us
+walk undisturbed among graves. And so the martyrs' monument is a
+wholesome heartsome spot in the field of the dead; and as we look upon
+it, a brave influence comes to us from the land of those who have won
+their discharge and, in another phrase of Patrick Walker's, got "cleanly
+off the stage."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+NEW TOWN: TOWN AND COUNTRY
+
+
+It is as much a matter of course to decry the New Town as to exalt the
+Old; and the most celebrated authorities have picked out this quarter as
+the very emblem of what is condemnable in architecture. Much may be
+said, much indeed has been said, upon the text; but to the
+unsophisticated, who call anything pleasing if it only pleases them, the
+New Town of Edinburgh seems, in itself, not only gay and airy, but
+highly picturesque. An old skipper, invincibly ignorant of all theories
+of the sublime and beautiful, once propounded as his most radiant notion
+for Paradise: "The new town of Edinburgh, with the wind the matter of a
+point free." He has now gone to that sphere where all good tars are
+promised pleasant weather in the song, and perhaps his thoughts fly
+somewhat higher. But there are bright and temperate days--with soft air
+coming from the inland hills, military music sounding bravely from the
+hollow of the gardens, the flags all waving on the palaces of Princes
+Street--when I have seen the town through a sort of glory, and shaken
+hands in sentiment with the old sailor. And indeed, for a man who has
+been much tumbled round Orcadian skerries, what scene could be more
+agreeable to witness? On such a day, the valley wears a surprising air
+of festival. It seems (I do not know how else to put my meaning) as if
+it were a trifle too good to be true. It is what Paris ought to be. It
+has the scenic quality that would best set off a life of unthinking,
+open-air diversion. It was meant by nature for the realization of the
+society of comic operas. And you can imagine, if the climate were but
+towardly, how all the world and his wife would flock into these gardens
+in the cool of the evening, to hear cheerful music, to sip pleasant
+drinks, to see the moon rise from behind Arthur's Seat and shine upon
+the spires and monuments and the green tree-tops in the valley. Alas!
+and the next morning the rain is splashing on the window, and the
+passengers flee along Princes Street before the galloping squalls.
+
+It cannot be denied that the original design was faulty and
+short-sighted, and did not fully profit by the capabilities of the
+situation. The architect was essentially a town bird, and he laid out
+the modern city with a view to street scenery, and to street scenery
+alone. The country did not enter into his plan; he had never lifted his
+eyes to the hills. If he had so chosen, every street upon the northern
+slope might have been a noble terrace and commanded an extensive and
+beautiful view. But the space has been too closely built; many of the
+houses front the wrong way, intent, like the Man with the Muck-Rake, on
+what is not worth observation, and standing discourteously back-foremost
+in the ranks; and in a word, it is too often only from attic windows, or
+here and there at a crossing, that you can get a look beyond the city
+upon its diversified surroundings. But perhaps it is all the more
+surprising, to come suddenly on a corner, and see a perspective of a
+mile or more of falling street, and beyond that woods and villas, and a
+blue arm of sea, and the hills upon the farther side.
+
+Fergusson, our Edinburgh poet, Burns's model, once saw a butterfly at
+the Town Cross; and the sight inspired him with a worthless little ode.
+This painted countryman, the dandy of the rose garden, looked far abroad
+in such a humming neighbourhood; and you can fancy what moral
+considerations a youthful poet would supply. But the incident, in a
+fanciful sort of way, is characteristic of the place. Into no other city
+does the sight of the country enter so far; if you do not meet a
+butterfly, you shall certainly catch a glimpse of far-away trees upon
+your walk; and the place is full of theatre tricks in the way of
+scenery. You peep under an arch, you descend stairs that look as if
+they would land you in a cellar, you turn to the back window of a grimy
+tenement in a lane:--and behold! you are face-to-face with distant and
+bright prospects. You turn a corner, and there is the sun going down
+into the Highland hills. You look down an alley, and see ships tacking
+for the Baltic.
+
+For the country people to see Edinburgh on her hill-tops is one thing;
+it is another for the citizen, from the thick of his affairs, to
+overlook the country. It should be a genial and ameliorating influence
+in life; it should prompt good thoughts and remind him of Nature's
+unconcern: that he can watch from day to day, as he trots officeward,
+how the Spring green brightens in the wood or the field grows black
+under a moving ploughshare. I have been tempted, in this connection, to
+deplore the slender faculties of the human race, with its penny-whistle
+of a voice, its dull ears, and its narrow range of sight. If you could
+see as people are to see in heaven, if you had eyes such as you can
+fancy for a superior race, if you could take clear note of the objects
+of vision, not only a few yards, but a few miles from where you
+stand:--think how agreeably your sight would be entertained, how
+pleasantly your thoughts would be diversified, as you walked the
+Edinburgh streets! For you might pause, in some business perplexity, in
+the midst of the city traffic, and perhaps catch the eye of a shepherd
+as he sat down to breathe upon a heathery shoulder of the Pentlands; or
+perhaps some urchin, clambering in a country elm, would put aside the
+leaves and show you his flushed and rustic visage; or a fisher racing
+seawards, with the tiller under his elbow, and the sail sounding in the
+wind, would fling you a salutation from between Anst'er and the May.
+
+To be old is not the same thing as to be picturesque; nor because the
+Old Town bears a strange physiognomy, does it at all follow that the New
+Town shall look commonplace. Indeed, apart from antique houses, it is
+curious how much description would apply commonly to either. The same
+sudden accidents of ground, a similar dominating site above the plain,
+and the same superposition of one rank of society over another, are to
+be observed in both. Thus, the broad and comely approach to Princes
+Street from the east, lined with hotels and public offices, makes a leap
+over the gorge of the Low Calton; if you cast a glance over the parapet,
+you look direct into that sunless and disreputable confluent of Leith
+Street; and the same tall houses open upon both thoroughfares. This is
+only the New Town passing overhead above its own cellars; walking, so to
+speak, over its own children, as is the way of cities and the human
+race. But at the Dean Bridge, you may behold a spectacle of a more novel
+order. The river runs at the bottom of a deep valley, among rocks and
+between gardens; the crest of either bank is occupied by some of the
+most commodious streets and crescents in the modern city; and a handsome
+bridge unites the two summits. Over this, every afternoon, private
+carriages go spinning by, and ladies with card cases pass to and fro
+about the duties of society. And yet down below, you may still see, with
+its mills and foaming weir, the little rural village of Dean. Modern
+improvement has gone overhead on its high-level viaduct; and the
+extended city has cleanly overleapt, and left unaltered, what was once
+the summer retreat of its comfortable citizens. Every town embraces
+hamlets in its growth; Edinburgh herself has embraced a good few; but it
+is strange to see one still surviving--and to see it some hundreds of
+feet below your path. Is it Torre del Greco that is built above buried
+Herculaneum? Herculaneum was dead at least; but the sun still shines
+upon the roofs of Dean; the smoke still rises thriftily from its
+chimneys; the dusty miller comes to his door, looks at the gurgling
+water, hearkens to the turning wheel and the birds about the shed, and
+perhaps whistles an air of his own to enrich the symphony--for all the
+world as if Edinburgh were still the old Edinburgh on the Castle Hill,
+and Dean were still the quietest of hamlets buried a mile or so in the
+green country.
+
+It is not so long ago since magisterial David Hume lent the authority of
+his example to the exodus from the Old Town, and took up his new abode
+in a street which is still (so oddly may a jest become perpetuated)
+known as Saint David Street. Nor is the town so large but a holiday
+schoolboy may harry a bird's nest within half a mile of his own door.
+There are places that still smell of the plough in memory's nostrils.
+Here, one had heard a blackbird on a hawthorn; there, another was taken
+on summer evenings to eat strawberries and cream; and you have seen a
+waving wheatfield on the site of your present residence. The memories of
+an Edinburgh boy are but partly memories of the town. I look back with
+delight on many an escalade of garden walls; many a ramble among lilacs
+full of piping birds; many an exploration in obscure quarters that were
+neither town nor country; and I think that both for my companions and
+myself, there was a special interest, a point of romance, and a
+sentiment as of foreign travel, when we hit in our excursions on the
+butt-end of some former hamlet, and found a few rustic cottages embedded
+among streets and squares. The tunnel to the Scotland Street Station,
+the sight of the trains shooting out of its dark maw with the two guards
+upon the brake, the thought of its length and the many ponderous
+edifices and open thoroughfares above, were certainly things of
+paramount impressiveness to a young mind. It was a subterranean passage,
+although of a larger bore than we were accustomed to in Ainsworth's
+novels; and these two words, "subterranean passage," were in themselves
+an irresistible attraction, and seemed to bring us nearer in spirit to
+the heroes we loved and the black rascals we secretly aspired to
+imitate. To scale the Castle Rock from West Princes Street Gardens, and
+lay a triumphal hand against the rampart itself, was to taste a high
+order of romantic pleasure. And there are other sights and exploits
+which crowd back upon my mind under a very strong illumination of
+remembered pleasure. But the effect of not one of them all will compare
+with the discoverer's joy, and the sense of old Time and his slow
+changes on the face of this earth, with which I explored such corners as
+Cannon-mills or Water Lane, or the nugget of cottages at Broughton
+Market. They were more rural than the open country, and gave a greater
+impression of antiquity than the oldest _land_ upon the High Street.
+They too, like Fergusson's butterfly, had a quaint air of having
+wandered far from their own place; they looked abashed and homely, with
+their gables and their creeping plants, their outside stairs and running
+null-streams; there were corners that smelt like the end of the country
+garden where I spent my Aprils; and the people stood to gossip at their
+doors, as they might have done in Colinton or Cramond.
+
+In a great measure we may, and shall, eradicate this haunting flavour of
+the country. The last elm is dead in Elm Row; and the villas and the
+workmen's quarters spread apace on all the borders of the city. We can
+cut down the trees; we can bury the grass under dead paving-stones; we
+can drive brisk streets through all our sleepy quarters; and we may
+forget the stories and the play-grounds of our boyhood. But we have some
+possessions that not even the infuriate zeal of builders can utterly
+abolish and destroy. Nothing can abolish the hills, unless it be a
+cataclysm of nature, which shall subvert Edinburgh Castle itself and lay
+all her florid structures in the dust. And as long as we have the hills
+and the Firth, we have a famous heritage to leave our children. Our
+windows, at no expense to us, are mostly artfully stained to represent a
+landscape. And when the Spring comes round, and the hawthorn begins to
+flower, and the meadows to smell of young grass, even in the thickest of
+our streets, the country hill-tops find out a young man's eyes, and set
+his heart beating for travel and pure air.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE VILLA QUARTERS
+
+
+Mr. Ruskin's denunciation of the New Town of Edinburgh includes, as I
+have heard it repeated, nearly all the stone and lime we have to show.
+Many, however, find a grand air and something settled and imposing in
+the better parts; and upon many, as I have said, the confusion of styles
+induces an agreeable stimulation of the mind. But upon the subject of
+our recent villa architecture, I am frankly ready to mingle my tears
+with Mr. Ruskin's, and it is a subject which makes one envious of his
+large declamatory and controversial eloquence.
+
+Day by day, one new villa, one new object of offence, is added to
+another; all around Newington and Morningside, the dismalest structures
+keep springing up like mushrooms; the pleasant hills are loaded with
+them, each impudently squatted in its garden, each roofed and carrying
+chimneys like a house. And yet a glance of an eye discovers their true
+character. They are not houses; for they were not designed with a view
+to human habitation, and the internal arrangements are, as they tell me,
+fantastically unsuited to the needs of man. They are not buildings; for
+you can scarcely say a thing is built where every measurement is in
+clamant disproportion with its neighbour. They belong to no style to
+art, only to a form of business much to be regretted.
+
+Why should it be cheaper to erect a structure where the size of the
+windows bears no rational relation to the size of the front? Is there
+any profit in a misplaced chimney-stalk? Does a hard-working, greedy
+builder gain more on a monstrosity than on a decent cottage of equal
+plainness? Frankly, we should say, No. Bricks may be omitted, and green
+timber employed, in the construction of even a very elegant design; and
+there is no reason why a chimney should be made to vent, because it is
+so situated as to look comely from without. On the other hand, there is
+a noble way of being ugly: a high-aspiring fiasco like the fall of
+Lucifer. There are daring and gaudy buildings that manage to be
+offensive, without being contemptible; and we know that "fools rush in
+where angels fear to tread." But to aim at making a commonplace villa,
+and to make it insufferably ugly in each particular; to attempt the
+homeliest achievement and to attain the bottom of derided failure; not
+to have any theory but profit, and yet, at an equal expense, to outstrip
+all competitors in the art of conceiving and rendering permanent
+deformity; and to do this in what is, by nature, one of the most
+agreeable neighbourhoods in Britain:--what are we to say, but that this
+also is a distinction, hard to earn although not greatly worshipful?
+
+Indifferent buildings give pain to the sensitive; but these things
+offend the plainest taste. It is a danger which threatens the amenity of
+the town; and as this eruption keeps spreading on our borders, we have
+ever the farther to walk among unpleasant sights, before we gain the
+country air. If the population of Edinburgh were a living, autonomous
+body, it would arise like one man and make night hideous with arson; the
+builders and their accomplices would be driven to work, like the Jews of
+yore, with the trowel in one hand and the defensive cutlass in the
+other; and as soon as one of these masonic wonders had been consummated,
+right-minded iconoclasts should fall thereon and make an end of it at
+once.
+
+Possibly these words may meet the eye of a builder or two. It is no use
+asking them to employ an architect; for that would be to touch them in a
+delicate quarter, and its use would largely depend on what architect
+they were minded to call in. But let them get any architect in the world
+to point out any reasonably well-proportioned villa not his own design;
+and let them reproduce that model to satiety.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE CALTON HILL
+
+
+The east of New Edinburgh is guarded by a craggy hill, of no great
+elevation, which the town embraces. The old London road runs on one side
+of it; while the New Approach, leaving it on the other hand, completes
+the circuit. You mount by stairs in a cutting of the rock to find
+yourself in a field of monuments. Dugald Stewart has the honours of
+situation and architecture; Burns is memorialized lower down upon a
+spur; Lord Nelson, as befits a sailor, gives his name to the top-gallant
+of the Calton Hill. This latter erection has been differently and yet,
+in both cases, aptly compared to a telescope and a butterchurn;
+comparisons apart, it ranks among the vilest of men's handiworks. But
+the chief feature is an unfinished range of columns, "the Modern Ruin"
+as it has been called, an imposing object from far and near, and giving
+Edinburgh, even from the sea, that false air of a modern Athens which
+has earned for her so many slighting speeches. It was meant to be a
+National Monument; and its present state is a very suitable monument to
+certain national characteristics. The old Observatory--a quaint brown
+building on the edge of the steep--and the New Observatory--a classical
+edifice with a dome--occupy the central portion of the summit. All these
+are scattered on a green turf, browsed over by some sheep.
+
+The scene suggests reflections on fame and on man's injustice to the
+dead. You see Dugald Stewart rather more handsomely commemorated than
+Burns. Immediately below, in the Canongate churchyard, lies Robert
+Fergusson, Burns's master in his art, who died insane while yet a
+stripling; and if Dugald Stewart has been somewhat too boisterously
+acclaimed, the Edinburgh poet, on the other hand, is most unrighteously
+forgotten. The votaries of Burns, a crew too common in all ranks in
+Scotland, and more remarkable for number than discretion, eagerly
+suppress all mention of the lad who handed to him the poetic impulse,
+and, up to the time when he grew famous, continued to influence him in
+his manner and the choice of subjects. Burns himself not only
+acknowledged his debt in a fragment of autobiography, but erected a tomb
+over the grave in Canongate churchyard. This was worthy of an artist,
+but it was done in vain; and although I think I have read nearly all the
+biographies of Burns, I cannot remember one in which the modesty of
+nature was not violated, or where Fergusson was not sacrificed to the
+credit of his follower's originality. There is a kind of gaping
+admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have
+a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author
+without disparaging all others. They are indeed mistaken if they think
+to please the great originals; and whoever puts Fergusson right with
+fame cannot do better than dedicate his labours to the memory of Burns,
+who will be the best delighted of the dead.
+
+Of all places for a view, this Calton Hill is perhaps the best; since
+you can see the Castle, which you lose from the Castle, and Arthur's
+Seat, which you cannot see from Arthur's Seat. It is the place to stroll
+on one of those days of sunshine and east wind which are so common in
+our more than temperate summer. The breeze comes off the sea, with a
+little of the freshness, and that touch of chill, peculiar to the
+quarter, which is delightful to certain very ruddy organizations and
+greatly the reverse to the majority of mankind. It brings with it a
+faint, floating haze, a cunning decolouriser, although not thick enough
+to obscure outlines near at hand. But the haze lies more thickly to
+windward at the far end of Musselburgh Bay; and over the Links of
+Aberlady and Berwick Law and the hump of the Bass Rock it assumes the
+aspect of a bank of thin sea fog.
+
+Immediately underneath upon the south, you command the yards of the High
+School, and the towers and courts of the new Jail--a large place,
+castellated to the extent of folly, standing by itself on the edge of a
+steep cliff, and often joyfully hailed by tourists as the Castle. In the
+one, you may perhaps see female prisoners taking exercise like a string
+of nuns; in the other, schoolboys running at play and their shadows
+keeping step with them. From the bottom of the valley, a gigantic
+chimney rises almost to the level of the eye, a taller and a shapelier
+edifice than Nelson's Monument. Look a little farther, and there is
+Holyrood Palace, with its Gothic frontal and ruined abbey, and the red
+sentry pacing smartly to and fro before the door like a mechanical
+figure in a panorama. By way of an outpost, you can single out the
+little peak-roofed lodge, over which Rizzio's murderers made their
+escape, and where Queen Mary herself, according to gossip, bathed in
+white wine to entertain her loveliness. Behind and overhead, lie the
+Queen's Park, from Muschat's Cairn to Dumbiedykes, St. Margaret's Loch,
+and the long wall of Salisbury Crags; and thence, by knoll and rocky
+bulwark and precipitous slope, the eye rises to the top of Arthur's
+Seat, a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold design.
+This upon your left. Upon the right, the roofs and spires of the Old
+Town climb one above another to where the citadel prints its broad bulk
+and jagged crown of bastions on the western sky.--Perhaps it is now one
+in the afternoon; and at the same instant of time, a ball rises to the
+summit of Nelson's flagstaff close at hand, and, far away, a puff of
+smoke followed by a report bursts from the half-moon battery at the
+Castle. This is the time-gun by which people set their watches, as far
+as the sea coast or in hill farms upon the Pentlands.--To complete the
+view, the eye enfilades Princes Street, black with traffic, and has a
+broad look over the valley between the Old Town and the New: here, full
+of railway trains and stepped over by the high North Bridge upon its
+many columns, and there, green with trees and gardens.
+
+On the north, the Calton Hill is neither so abrupt in itself nor has it
+so exceptional an outlook; and yet even here it commands a striking
+prospect. A gully separates it from the New Town. This is Greenside,
+where witches were burned and tournaments held in former days. Down that
+almost precipitous bank, Bothwell launched his horse, and so first, as
+they say, attracted the bright eyes of Mary. It is now tessellated with
+sheets and blankets out to dry, and the sound of people beating carpets
+is rarely absent. Beyond all this, the suburbs run out to Leith; Leith
+camps on the seaside with her forest of masts; Leith roads are full of
+ships at anchor; the sun picks out the white pharos upon Inchkeith
+Island: the Firth extends on either hand from the Ferry to the May; the
+towns of Fifeshire sit, each in its bank of blowing smoke, along the
+opposite coast; and the hills inclose the view, except to the farthest
+east, where the haze of the horizon rests upon the open sea. There lies
+the road to Norway: a dear road for Sir Patrick Spens and his Scots
+Lords; and yonder smoke on the hither side of Largo Law is Aberdour,
+from whence they sailed to seek a queen for Scotland.
+
+    "O lang, lang, may the ladies sit,
+      Wi' their fans into their hand,
+    Or e'er they see Sir Patrick Spens
+      Come sailing to the land!"
+
+The sight of the sea, even from a city, will bring thoughts of storm and
+sea disaster. The sailors' wives of Leith and the fisherwomen of
+Cockenzie, not sitting languorously with fans, but crowding to the tail
+of the harbour with a shawl about their ears, may still look vainly for
+brave Scotsmen who will return no more, or boats that have gone on their
+last fishing. Since Sir Patrick sailed from Aberdour, what a multitude
+have gone down in the North Sea! Yonder is Auldhame, where the London
+smack went ashore and wreckers cut the rings from ladies' fingers; and a
+few miles round Fife Ness is the fatal Inchcape, now a star of guidance;
+and the lee shore to the east of the Inchcape is that Forfarshire coast
+where Mucklebackit sorrowed for his son.
+
+These are the main features of the scene roughly sketched. How they are
+all tilted by the inclination of the ground, how each stands out in
+delicate relief against the rest, what manifold detail, and play of sun
+and shadow, animate and accentuate the picture, is a matter for a person
+on the spot, and turning swiftly on his heels, to grasp and bind
+together in one comprehensive look. It is the character of such a
+prospect, to be full of change and of things moving. The multiplicity
+embarrasses the eye; and the mind, among so much, suffers itself to grow
+absorbed with single points. You remark a tree in a hedgerow, or follow
+a cart along a country road. You turn to the city, and see children,
+dwarfed by distance into pygmies, at play about suburban doorsteps; you
+have a glimpse upon a thoroughfare where people are densely moving; you
+note ridge after ridge of chimney-stacks running downhill one behind
+another, and church spires rising bravely from the sea of roofs. At one
+of the innumerable windows, you watch a figure moving; on one of the
+multitude of roofs, you watch clambering chimney-sweeps. The wind takes
+a run and scatters the smoke; bells are heard, far and near, faint and
+loud, to tell the hour; or perhaps a bird goes dipping evenly over the
+housetops, like a gull across the waves. And here you are in the
+meantime, on this pastoral hillside, among nibbling sheep and looked
+upon by monumental buildings.
+
+Return thither on some clear, dark, moonless night, with a ring of frost
+in the air, and only a star or two set sparsely in the vault of heaven;
+and you will find a sight as stimulating as the hoariest summit of the
+Alps. The solitude seems perfect; the patient astronomer, flat on his
+back under the Observatory dome and spying heaven's secrets, is your
+only neighbour; and yet from all round you there come up the dull hum of
+the city, the tramp of countless people marching out of time, the rattle
+of carriages and the continuous jingle of the tramway bells. An hour or
+so before, the gas was turned on; lamplighters scoured the city; in
+every house, from kitchen to attic, the windows kindled and gleamed
+forth into the dusk. And so now, although the town lies blue and
+darkling on her hills, innumerable spots of the bright element shine far
+and near along the pavements and upon the high façades. Moving lights of
+the railway pass and re-pass below the stationary lights upon the
+bridge. Lights burn in the Jail. Lights burn high up in the tall _lands_
+and on the Castle turrets; they burn low down in Greenside or along the
+Park. They run out one beyond the other into the dark country. They walk
+in a procession down to Leith, and shine singly far along Leith Pier.
+Thus, the plan of the city and her suburbs is mapped out upon the ground
+of blackness, as when a child pricks a drawing full of pinholes and
+exposes it before a candle; not the darkest night of winter can conceal
+her high station and fanciful design; every evening in the year she
+proceeds to illuminate herself in honour of her own beauty; and as if to
+complete the scheme--or rather as if some prodigal Pharaoh were
+beginning to extend to the adjacent sea and country--half-way over to
+Fife, there is an outpost of light upon Inchkeith, and far to seaward,
+yet another on the May.
+
+And while you are looking, across upon the Castle Hill, the drums and
+bugles begin to recall the scattered garrison; the air thrills with the
+sound; the bugles sing aloud; and the last rising flourish mounts and
+melts into the darkness like a star: a martial swan-song, fitly rounding
+in the labours of the day.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+WINTER AND NEW YEAR
+
+
+The Scots dialect is singularly rich in terms of reproach against the
+winter wind. _Snell_, _blae_, _nirly_, and _scowthering_, are four of
+these significant vocables; they are all words that carry a shiver with
+them; and for my part as I see them aligned before me on the page, I am
+persuaded that a big wind comes tearing over the Firth from Burntisland
+and the northern hills; I think I can hear it howl in the chimney, and
+as I set my face northwards, feel its smarting kisses on my cheek. Even
+in the names of places there is often a desolate, inhospitable sound;
+and I remember two from the near neighbourhood of Edinburgh, Cauldhame
+and Blaw-weary, that would promise but starving comfort to their
+inhabitants. The inclemency of heaven, which has thus endowed the
+language of Scotland with words, has also largely modified the spirit of
+its poetry. Both poverty and a northern climate teach men the love of
+the hearth and the sentiment of the family; and the latter, in its own
+right, inclines a poet to the praise of strong waters. In Scotland, all
+our singers have a stave or two for blazing fires and stout
+potations:--to get indoors out of the wind and to swallow something hot
+to the stomach, are benefits so easily appreciated where they dwelt!
+
+And this is not only so in country districts where the shepherd must
+wade in the snow all day after his flock, but in Edinburgh itself, and
+nowhere more apparently stated than in the works of our Edinburgh poet,
+Fergusson. He was a delicate youth, I take it, and willingly slunk from
+the robustious winter to an inn fireside. Love was absent from his
+life, or only present, if you prefer, in such a form that even the least
+serious of Burns's amourettes was ennobling by comparison; and so there
+is nothing to temper the sentiment of indoor revelry which pervades the
+poor boy's verses. Although it is characteristic of his native town, and
+the manners of its youth to the present day, this spirit has perhaps
+done something to restrict his popularity. He recalls a supper-party
+pleasantry with something akin to tenderness; and sounds the praises of
+the act of drinking as if it were virtuous, or at least witty, in
+itself. The kindly jar, the warm atmosphere of tavern parlours, and the
+revelry of lawyers' clerks, do not offer by themselves the materials of
+rich existence. It was not choice, so much as an external fate, that
+kept Fergusson in this round of sordid pleasures. A Scot of poetic
+temperament, and without religious exaltation, drops as if by nature
+into the public-house. The picture may not be pleasing; but what else is
+a man to do in this dog's weather?
+
+To none but those who have themselves suffered the thing in the body,
+can the gloom and depression of our Edinburgh winters be brought home.
+For some constitutions there is something almost physically disgusting
+in the bleak ugliness of easterly weather; the wind wearies, the sickly
+sky depresses them; and they turn back from their walk to avoid the
+aspect of the unrefulgent sun going down among perturbed and pallid
+mists. The days are so short that a man does much of his business, and
+certainly all his pleasure, by the haggard glare of gas lamps. The roads
+are as heavy as a fallow. People go by, so drenched and draggle-tailed
+that I have often wondered how they found the heart to undress. And
+meantime the wind whistles through the town as if it were an open
+meadow; and if you lie awake all night, you hear it shrieking and raving
+overhead with a noise of shipwrecks and of falling houses. In a word,
+life is so unsightly that there are times when the heart turns sick in
+a man's inside; and the look of a tavern, or the thought of the warm,
+firelit study, is like the touch of land to one who has been long
+struggling with the seas.
+
+As the weather hardens towards frost, the world begins to improve for
+Edinburgh people. We enjoy superb, sub-arctic sunsets, with the profile
+of the city stamped in indigo upon a sky of luminous green. The wind may
+still be cold, but there is a briskness in the air that stirs good
+blood. People do not all look equally sour and downcast. They fall into
+two divisions: one, the knight of the blue face and hollow paunch, whom
+Winter has gotten by the vitals; the other well lined with New-year's
+fare, conscious of the touch of cold on his periphery, but stepping
+through it by the glow of his internal fires. Such an one I remember,
+triply cased in grease, whom no extremity of temperature could vanquish.
+"Well," would be his jovial salutation, "here's a sneezer!" And the look
+of these warm fellows is tonic, and upholds their drooping
+fellow-townsmen. There is yet another class who do not depend on
+corporal advantages, but support the winter in virtue of a brave and
+merry heart. One shivering evening, cold enough for frost but with too
+high a wind, and a little past sundown, when the lamps were beginning to
+enlarge their circles in the growing dusk, a brace of barefoot lassies
+were seen coming eastward in the teeth of the wind. If the one was as
+much as nine, the other was certainly not more than seven. They were
+miserably clad; and the pavement was so cold, you would have thought no
+one could lay a naked foot on it unflinching. Yet they came along
+waltzing, if you please, while the elder sang a tune to give them music.
+The person who saw this, and whose heart was full of bitterness at the
+moment, pocketed a reproof which has been of use to him ever since, and
+which he now hands on, with his good wishes, to the reader.
+
+At length, Edinburgh, with her satellite hills and all the sloping
+country, is sheeted up in white. If it has happened in the dark hours,
+nurses pluck their children out of bed and run with them to some
+commanding window, whence they may see the change that has been worked
+upon earth's face. "A' the hills are covered wi' snaw," they sing, "and
+Winter's noo come fairly!" And the children, marveling at the silence
+and the white landscape, find a spell appropriate to the season in the
+words. The reverberation of the snow increases the pale daylight, and
+brings all objects nearer the eye. The Pentlands are smooth and
+glittering, with here and there the black ribbon of a dry-stone dyke,
+and here and there, if there be wind, a cloud of blowing snow upon a
+shoulder. The Firth seems a leaden creek, that a man might almost jump
+across, between well-powdered Lothian and well-powdered Fife. And the
+effect is not, as in other cities, a thing of half a day; the streets
+are soon trodden black, but the country keeps its virgin white; and you
+have only to lift your eyes and look over miles of country snow. An
+indescribable cheerfulness breathes about the city; and the well-fed
+heart sits lightly and beats gaily in the bosom. It is New-year's
+weather.
+
+New-year's Day, the great national festival, is a time of family
+expansions and of deep carousal. Sometimes, by a sore stroke of fate for
+this Calvinistic people, the year's anniversary falls upon a Sunday,
+when the public-houses are inexorably closed, when singing and even
+whistling is banished from our homes and highways, and the oldest toper
+feels called upon to go to church. Thus pulled about, as if between two
+loyalties, the Scots have to decide many nice cases of conscience, and
+ride the marches narrowly between the weekly and the annual observance.
+A party of convivial musicians, next door to a friend of mine, hung
+suspended in this manner on the brink of their diversions. From ten
+o'clock on Sunday night, my friend heard them tuning their instruments;
+and as the hour of liberty drew near, each must have had his music open,
+his bow in readiness across the fiddle, his foot already raised to mark
+the time, and his nerves braced for execution; for hardly had the
+twelfth stroke sounded from the earliest steeple, before they had
+launched forth into a secular bravura.
+
+Currant-loaf is now popular eating in all households. For weeks before
+the great morning, confectioners display stacks of Scots bun--a dense,
+black substance, inimical to life--and full moons of shortbread adorned
+with mottoes of peel or sugar-plum, in honour of the season and the
+family affections. "Frae Auld Reekie," "A guid New Year to ye a'," "For
+the Auld Folk at Hame," are among the most favoured of these devices.
+Can you not see the carrier, after half-a-day's journey on pinching
+hill-roads, draw up before a cottage in Teviotdale, or perhaps in Manor
+Glen among the rowans, and the old people receiving the parcel with
+moist eyes and a prayer for Jock or Jean in the city? For at this
+season, on the threshold of another year of calamity and stubborn
+conflict, men feel a need to draw closer the links that unite them; they
+reckon the number of their friends, like allies before a war; and the
+prayers grow longer in the morning as the absent are recommended by name
+into God's keeping.
+
+On the day itself, the shops are all shut as on a Sunday; only taverns,
+toyshops, and other holiday magazines, keep open doors. Everyone looks
+for his handsel. The postmen and the lamplighters have left, at every
+house in their districts, a copy of vernacular verses, asking and
+thanking in a breath; and it is characteristic of Scotland that these
+verses may have sometimes a touch of reality in detail of sentiment and
+a measure of strength in the handling. All over the town, you may see
+comforter'd schoolboys hastening to squander their half-crowns. There
+are an infinity of visits to be paid; all the world is in the street,
+except the daintier classes; the sacramental greeting is heard upon all
+sides; Auld Lang Syne is much in people's mouths; and whisky and
+shortbread are staple articles of consumption. From an early hour a
+stranger will be impressed by the number of drunken men; and by
+afternoon drunkenness has spread to the women. With some classes of
+society, it is as much a matter of duty to drink hard on New-year's Day
+as to go to church on Sunday. Some have been saving their wages for
+perhaps a month to do the season honour. Many carry a whisky-bottle in
+their pocket, which they will press with embarrassing effusion on a
+perfect stranger. It is not expedient to risk one's body in a cab, or
+not, at least, until after a prolonged study of the driver. The streets,
+which are thronged from end to end, become a place for delicate
+pilotage. Singly or arm-in-arm, some speechless, others noisy and
+quarrelsome, the votaries of the New Year go meandering in and out and
+cannoning one against another; and now and again, one falls, and lies as
+he has fallen. Before night, so many have gone to bed or the police
+office, that the streets seem almost clearer. And as _guisards_ and
+_first-footers_ are now not much seen except in country places, when
+once the New Year has been rung in and proclaimed at the Tron railings,
+the festivities begin to find their way indoors and something like quiet
+returns upon the town. But think, in these piled _lands_, of all the
+senseless snorers, all the broken heads and empty pockets!
+
+Of old, Edinburgh University was the scene of heroic snowballing; and
+one riot obtained the epic honours of military intervention. But the
+great generation, I am afraid, is at an end; and even during my own
+college days, the spirit appreciably declined. Skating and sliding, on
+the other hand, are honoured more and more; and curling, being a
+creature of the national genius, is little likely to be disregarded. The
+patriotism that leads a man to eat Scots bun will scarcely desert him at
+the curling pond. Edinburgh, with its long, steep pavements, is the
+proper home of sliders; many a happy urchin can slide the whole way to
+school; and the profession of errand-boy is transformed into a holiday
+amusement. As for skating, there is scarce any city so handsomely
+provided. Duddingston Loch lies under the abrupt southern side of
+Arthur's Seat; in summer, a shield of blue, with swans sailing from the
+reeds; in winter, a field of ringing ice. The village church sits above
+it on a green promontory; and the village smoke rises from among goodly
+trees. At the church gates is the historical _jougs_, a place of penance
+for the neck of detected sinners, and the historical _louping-on stane_,
+from which Dutch-built lairds and farmers climbed into the saddle. Here
+Prince Charlie slept before the battle of Prestonpans; and here Deacon
+Brodie, or one of his gang, stole a plough coulter before the burglary
+in Chessel's Court. On the opposite side of the loch, the ground rises
+to Craigmillar Castle, a place friendly to Stuart Mariolaters. It is
+worth a climb, even in summer, to look down upon the loch from Arthur's
+Seat; but it is tenfold more so on a day of skating. The surface is
+thick with people moving easily and swiftly and leaning over at a
+thousand graceful inclinations; the crowd opens and closes, and keeps
+moving through itself like water; and the ice rings to half a mile away,
+with the flying steel. As night draws on, the single figures melt into
+the dusk, until only an obscure stir and coming and going of black
+clusters is visible upon the loch. A little longer, and the first torch
+is kindled and begins to flit rapidly across the ice in a ring of yellow
+reflection, and this is followed by another and another, until the whole
+field is full of skimming lights.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+TO THE PENTLAND HILLS
+
+
+On three sides of Edinburgh, the country slopes downward from the city,
+here to the sea, there to the fat farms of Haddington, there to the
+mineral fields of Linlithgow. On the south alone, it keeps rising, until
+it not only out-tops the Castle, but looks down on Arthur's Seat. The
+character of the neighbourhood is pretty strongly marked by a scarcity
+of hedges; by many stone walls of varying height; by a fair amount of
+timber, some of it well grown, but apt to be of a bushy, northern
+profile and poor in foliage; by here and there a little river, Esk or
+Leith or Almond, busily journeying in the bottom of its glen; and from
+almost every point, by a peep of the sea or the hills. There is no lack
+of variety, and yet most of the elements are common to all parts; and
+the southern district is alone distinguished by considerable summits and
+a wide view.
+
+From Boroughmuirhead, where the Scottish army encamped before Flodden,
+the road descends a long hill, at the bottom of which, and just as it is
+preparing to mount up on the other side, it passes a toll-bar and issues
+at once into the open country. Even as I write these words, they are
+becoming antiquated in the progress of events, and the chisels are
+tinkling on a new row of houses. The builders have at length adventured
+beyond the toll which held them in respect so long, and proceed to
+career in these fresh pastures like a herd of colts turned loose. As
+Lord Beaconsfield proposed to hang an architect by way of stimulation, a
+man, looking on these doomed meads, imagines a similar example to deter
+the builders; for it seems as if it must come to an open fight at last
+to preserve a corner of green country unbedevilled. And here,
+appropriately enough, there stood in old days a crow-haunted gibbet,
+with two bodies hanged in chains. I used to be shown, when a child, a
+flat stone in the roadway to which the gibbet had been fixed. People of
+a willing fancy were persuaded, and sought to persuade others, that this
+stone was never dry. And no wonder, they would add, for the two men had
+only stolen fourpence between them.
+
+For about two miles the road climbs upwards, a long hot walk in summer
+time. You reach the summit at a place where four ways meet, beside the
+toll of Fairmilehead. The spot is breezy and agreeable both in name and
+aspect. The hills are close by across a valley: Kirk Yetton, with its
+long, upright scars visible as far as Fife, and Allermuir the tallest on
+this side: with wood and tilled field running high up on their borders,
+and haunches all moulded into innumerable glens and shelvings and
+variegated with heather and fern. The air comes briskly and sweetly off
+the hills, pure from the elevation, and rustically scented by the upland
+plants; and even at the toll, you may hear the curlew calling on its
+mate. At certain seasons, when the gulls desert their surfy forelands,
+the birds of sea and mountain hunt and scream together in the same field
+by Fairmilehead. The winged, wild things intermix their wheelings, the
+sea-birds skim the tree-tops and fish among the furrows of the plough.
+These little craft of air are at home in all the world, so long as they
+cruise in their own element; and like sailors, ask but food and water
+from the shores they coast.
+
+Below, over a stream, the road passes Bow Bridge, now a dairy-farm, but
+once a distillery of whisky. It chanced, some time in the past century,
+that the distiller was on terms of good-fellowship with the visiting
+officer of excise. The latter was of an easy, friendly disposition, and
+a master of convivial arts. Now and again, he had to walk out of
+Edinburgh to measure the distiller's stock; and although it was
+agreeable to find his business lead him in a friend's direction, it was
+unfortunate that the friend should be a loser by his visits.
+Accordingly, when he got about the level of Fairmilehead, the gauger
+would take his flute, without which he never travelled, from his pocket,
+fit it together, and set manfully to playing, as if for his own
+delectation and inspired by the beauty of the scene. His favourite air,
+it seems, was "Over the Hills and Far Away." At the first note, the
+distiller pricked his ears. A flute at Fairmilehead? and playing, "Over
+the Hills and Far Away"? This must be his friendly enemy, the gauger.
+Instantly, horses were harnessed, and sundry barrels of whisky were got
+upon a cart, driven at a gallop round Hill End, and buried in the mossy
+glen behind Kirk Yetton. In the same breath, you may be sure, a fat fowl
+was put to the fire, and the whitest napery prepared for the back
+parlour. A little after, the gauger, having had his fill of music for
+the moment, came strolling down with the most innocent air imaginable,
+and found the good people at Bow Bridge taken entirely unawares by his
+arrival, but none the less glad to see him. The distiller's liquor and
+the gauger's flute would combine to speed the moments of digestion; and
+when both were somewhat mellow, they would wind up the evening with
+"Over the Hills and Far Away," to an accompaniment of knowing glances.
+And at least there is a smuggling story, with original and half-idyllic
+features.
+
+A little farther, the road to the right passes an upright stone in a
+field. The country people call it General Kay's monument. According to
+them, an officer of that name had perished there in battle at some
+indistinct period before the beginning of history. The date is
+reassuring; for I think cautious writers are silent on the General's
+exploits. But the stone is connected with one of those remarkable
+tenures of land which linger on into the modern world from Feudalism.
+Whenever the reigning sovereign passes by, a certain landed proprietor
+is held bound to climb on to the top, trumpet in hand, and sound a
+flourish according to the measure of his knowledge in that art. Happily
+for a respectable family, crowned heads have no great business in the
+Pentland Hills. But the story lends a character of comicality to the
+stone; and the passer-by will sometimes chuckle to himself.
+
+The district is dear to the superstitious. Hard by, at the back-gate of
+Comiston, a belated carter beheld a lady in white, "with the most
+beautiful, clear shoes upon her feet," who looked upon him in a very
+ghastly manner, and then vanished; and just in front is the Hunters'
+Tryst, once a roadside inn, and not so long ago haunted by the devil in
+person. Satan led the inhabitants a pitiful existence. He shook the four
+corners of the building with lamentable outcries, beat at the doors and
+windows, over-threw crockery in the dead hours of the morning, and
+danced unholy dances on the roof. Every kind of spiritual disinfectant
+was put in requisition; chosen ministers were summoned out of Edinburgh
+and prayed by the hour; pious neighbours sat up all night making a noise
+of psalmody; but Satan minded them no more than the wind about the
+hill-tops; and it was only after years of persecution, that he left the
+Hunters' Tryst in peace to occupy himself with the remainder of mankind.
+What with General Kay, and the white lady, and this singular visitation,
+the neighbourhood offers great facilities to the makers of sun-myths;
+and without exactly casting in one's lot with that disenchanting school
+of writers, one cannot help hearing a good deal of the winter wind in
+the last story. "That nicht," says Burns, in one of his happiest
+moments,--
+
+    "That nicht a child might understand
+    The deil had business on his hand."
+
+And if people sit up all night in lone places on the hills, with Bibles
+and tremulous psalms, they will be apt to hear some of the most
+fiendish noises in the world: the wind will beat on doors and dance upon
+roofs for them, and make the hills howl around their cottage with a
+clamour like the Judgment Day.
+
+The road goes down through another valley, and then finally begins to
+scale the main slope of the Pentlands. A bouquet of old trees stands
+round a white farmhouse; and from a neighbouring dell, you can see smoke
+rising and leaves ruffling in the breeze. Straight above, the hills
+climb a thousand feet into the air. The neighbourhood, about the time of
+lambs, is clamorous with the bleating of flocks; and you will be
+awakened, in the grey of early summer mornings, by the barking of a dog
+or the voice of a shepherd shouting to the echoes. This, with the hamlet
+lying behind unseen, is Swanston.
+
+The place in the dell is immediately connected with the city. Long ago,
+this sheltered field was purchased by the Edinburgh magistrates for the
+sake of the springs that rise or gather there. After they had built
+their water-house and laid their pipes, it occurred to them that the
+place was suitable for junketing. Once entertained, with jovial
+magistrates and public funds, the idea led speedily to accomplishment;
+and Edinburgh could soon boast of a municipal Pleasure House. The dell
+was turned into a garden; and on the knoll that shelters it from the
+plain and the sea winds, they built a cottage looking to the hills. They
+brought crockets and gargoyles from old St. Giles's, which they were
+then restoring, and disposed them on the gables and over the door and
+about the garden; and the quarry which had supplied them with building
+material, they draped with clematis and carpeted with beds of roses. So
+much for the pleasure of the eye; for creature comfort, they made a
+capacious cellar in the hillside and fitted it with bins of the hewn
+stone. In process of time, the trees grew higher and gave shade to the
+cottage, and the evergreens sprang up and turned the dell into a
+thicket. There, purple magistrates relaxed themselves from the pursuit
+of municipal ambition; cocked hats paraded soberly about the garden and
+in and out among the hollies; authoritative canes drew ciphering upon
+the path; and at night, from high up on the hills, a shepherd saw
+lighted windows through the foliage and heard the voice of city
+dignitaries raised in song.
+
+The farm is older. It was first a grange of Whitekirk Abbey, tilled and
+inhabited by rosy friars. Thence, after the Reformation, it passed into
+the hands of a true-blue Protestant family. During the Covenanting
+troubles, when a night conventicle was held upon the Pentlands, the farm
+doors stood hospitably open till the morning; the dresser was laden with
+cheese and bannocks, milk and brandy; and the worshipers kept lipping
+down from the hill between two exercises, as couples visit the
+supper-room between two dances of a modern ball. In the Forty-Five, some
+foraging Highlanders from Prince Charlie's army fell upon Swanston in
+the dawn. The great-grandfather of the late farmer was then a little
+child; him they awakened by plucking the blankets from his bed, and he
+remembered, when he was an old man, their truculent looks and uncouth
+speech. The churn stood full of cream in the dairy, and with this they
+made their brose in high delight. "It was braw brose," said one of them.
+At last they made off, laden like camels with their booty; and Swanston
+Farm has lain out of the way of history from that time forward. I do not
+know what may be yet in store for it. On dark days, when the mist runs
+low upon the hill, the house has a gloomy air as if suitable for private
+tragedy. But in hot July, you can fancy nothing more perfect than the
+garden, laid out in alleys and arbours and bright, old-fashioned
+flower-plots, and ending in a miniature ravine, all trellis-work and
+moss and tinkling waterfall, and housed from the sun under fathoms of
+broad foliage.
+
+The hamlet behind is one of the least considerable of hamlets, and
+consists of a few cottages on a green beside a burn. Some of them (a
+strange thing in Scotland) are models of internal neatness; the beds
+adorned with patchwork, the shelves arrayed with willow-pattern plates,
+the floors and tables bright with scrubbing or pipeclay, and the very
+kettle polished like silver. It is the sign of a contented old age in
+country places, where there is little matter for gossip and no street
+sights. Housework becomes an art; and at evening, when the cottage
+interior shines and twinkles in the glow of the fire, the housewife
+folds her hands and contemplates her finished picture; the snow and the
+wind may do their worst, she has made herself a pleasant corner in the
+world. The city might be a thousand miles away: and yet it was close by
+that Mr. Bough painted the distant view of Edinburgh which has been
+engraved for this collection:[2] and you have only to look at the cut,
+to see how near it is at hand. But hills and hill people are not easily
+sophisticated; and if you walk out here on a summer Sunday, it is as
+like as not the shepherd may set his dogs upon you. But keep an unmoved
+countenance; they look formidable at the charge, but their hearts are in
+the right place; and they will only bark and sprawl about you on the
+grass, unmindful of their master's excitations.
+
+Kirk Yetton forms the north-eastern angle of the range; thence, the
+Pentlands trend off to south and west. From the summit you look over a
+great expanse of champaign sloping to the sea and behold a large variety
+of distant hills. There are the hills of Fife, the hills of Peebles, the
+Lammermoors, and the Ochils, more or less mountainous in outline, more
+or less blue with distance. Of the Pentlands themselves, you see a field
+of wild heathery peaks with a pond gleaming in the midst; and to that
+side the view is as desolate as if you were looking into Galloway or
+Applecross. To turn to the other, is like a piece of travel. Far out in
+the lowlands Edinburgh shows herself, making a great smoke on clear
+days and spreading her suburbs about her for miles; the Castle rises
+darkly in the midst; and close by, Arthur's Seat makes a bold figure in
+the landscape. All around, cultivated fields, and woods, and smoking
+villages, and white country roads, diversify the uneven surface of the
+land. Trains crawl slowly abroad upon the railway lines; little ships
+are tacking in the Firth; the shadow of a mountainous cloud, as large as
+a parish, travels before the wind; the wind itself ruffles the wood and
+standing corn, and sends pulses of varying colour across the landscape.
+So you sit, like Jupiter on Olympus, and look down from afar upon men's
+life. The city is as silent as a city of the dead: from all its humming
+thoroughfares, not a voice, not a footfall, reaches you upon the hill.
+The sea surf, the cries of ploughmen, the streams and the mill-wheels,
+the birds and the wind, keep up an animated concert through the plain;
+from farm to farm, dogs and crowing cocks contend together in defiance;
+and yet from this Olympian station, except for the whispering rumour of
+a train, the world has fallen into a dead silence and the business of
+town and country grown voiceless in your ears. A crying hill-bird, the
+bleat of a sheep, a wind singing in the dry grass, seem not so much to
+interrupt, as to accompany, the stillness; but to the spiritual ear, the
+whole scene makes a music at once human and rural, and discourses
+pleasant reflections on the destiny of man. The spiry habitable city,
+ships, the divided fields, and browsing herds, and the straight
+highways, tell visibly of man's active and comfortable ways; and you may
+be never so laggard and never so unimpressionable, but there is
+something in the view that spirits up your blood and puts you in the
+vein for cheerful labour.
+
+Immediately below is Fairmilehead, a spot of roof and a smoking chimney,
+where two roads, no thicker than packthread, intersect beside a hanging
+wood. If you are fanciful, you will be reminded of the gauger in the
+story. And the thought of this old exciseman, who once lipped and
+fingered on his pipe and uttered clear notes from it in the mountain
+air, and the words of the song he affected, carry your mind "Over the
+hills and far away" to distant countries; and you have a vision of
+Edinburgh not, as you see her, in the midst of a little neighbourhood,
+but as a boss upon the round world with all Europe and the deep sea for
+her surroundings. For every place is a centre to the earth, whence
+highways radiate or ships set sail for foreign ports; the limit of a
+parish is not more imaginary than the frontier of an empire; and as a
+man sitting at home in his cabinet and swiftly writing books, so a city
+sends abroad an influence and a portrait of herself. There is no
+Edinburgh emigrant, far or near, from China to Peru, but he or she
+carries some lively pictures of the mind, some sunset behind the Castle
+cliffs, some snow scene, some maze of city lamps, indelible in the
+memory and delightful to study in the intervals of toil. For any such,
+if this book fall in their way, here are a few more home pictures. It
+would be pleasant if they should recognise a house where they had dwelt,
+or a walk that they had taken.
+
+[2] Reference to an etching in original edition.
+
+END OF VOL. I.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson -
+Swanston Edition, by Robert Louis Stevenson
+
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Works Of Robert Louis Stevenson, Swanston Edition Volume I.
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson -
+Swanston Edition, by Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition
+       Vol. 1 (of 25)
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+Commentator: Andrew Lang
+
+Release Date: June 6, 2007 [EBook #21686]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORKS OF R.L. STEVENSON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Marcia Brooks and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<h1>THE WORKS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON</h1>
+
+<h3>SWANSTON EDITION</h3>
+
+<h4>VOLUME I</h4>
+
+<div class="center">
+<i>Of this SWANSTON EDITION in Twenty-five</i><br />
+<i>Volumes of the Works of ROBERT LOUIS</i><br />
+<i>STEVENSON Two Thousand and Sixty Copies</i><br />
+<i>have been printed, of which only Two Thousand</i><br />
+<i>Copies are for sale.</i><br /></div>
+
+
+<h5><i>This is No. 1678</i></h5>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/image01.jpg" width="30%" alt="image01" title="An Inland Voyage"/></div>
+<div class="figcenter"><span class="caption">AN INLAND VOYAGE<br />
+TITLE-PAGE DESIGNED BY MR. WALTER CRANE</span></div>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<h2>THE WORKS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON</h2>
+
+
+<h3>WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
+ANDREW LANG</h3>
+
+
+<h3>VOLUME ONE</h3>
+
+
+<h5>LONDON: PUBLISHED BY CHATTO AND<br />
+WINDUS: IN ASSOCIATION WITH CASSELL<br />
+AND COMPANY LIMITED: WILLIAM<br />
+HEINEMANN: AND LONGMANS GREEN<br />
+AND COMPANY MDCCCCXI</h5>
+
+<h6>ALL RIGHTS RESERVED</h6>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<ul>
+<li><span class="ralign">PAGE</span></li>
+<li style="list-style:none"><br /></li>
+<li><a href="#INTRODUCTION_TO_THE_SWANSTON_EDITION"><span class="smcap">Introduction to the Swanston Edition</span></a></li>
+<li style="list-style:none"><br /></li>
+<li><a href="#DEDICATION"><span class="smcap">Dedication</span></a></li>
+<li style="list-style:none"><br /></li>
+<li><a href="#PREFACE_TO_THE_FIRST_EDITION"><span class="smcap">Preface To The First Edition</span></a></li>
+<li style="list-style:none"><br /></li>
+<li style="list-style:none"><br /></li>
+<li><center><a href="#AN_INLAND_VOYAGE"><b>AN INLAND VOYAGE</b></a></center></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Antwerp To Boom</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_7">7</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">On The Willebroek Canal</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_11">11</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">The Royal Sport Nautique</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_16">16</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">At Maubeuge</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_21">21</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">On The Sambre Canalised: To Quartes</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_26">26</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Pont-sur-sambre:</span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap" style="margin-left: 4em;">We Are Pedlars</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_31">31</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap" style="margin-left: 4em;">The Travelling Merchant</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_36">36</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">On The Sambre Canalised: To Landrecies</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_41">41</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">At Landrecies</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_46">46</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Sambre And Oise Canal: Canal Boats</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_50">50</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">The Oise In Flood</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_55">55</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Origny Sainte-beno&icirc;te:</span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap" style="margin-left: 4em;">A By-day</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_62">62</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap" style="margin-left: 4em;">The Company At Table</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_68">68</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Down The Oise: To Moy</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_74">74</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">La F&egrave;re Of Cursed Memory</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_79">79</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Down The Oise: Through The Golden Valley</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_84">84</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Noyon Cathedral</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Down The Oise: To Compi&egrave;gne</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_91">91</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">At Compi&egrave;gne</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_94">94</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Changed Times</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_99">99</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Down The Oise: Church Interiors</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_105">105</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Pr&eacute;cy And The Marionnettes</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_111">111</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Back To The World</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_120">120</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Epilogue</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_122">122</a></span></li>
+<li style="list-style:none"><br /></li>
+<li style="list-style:none"><br /></li>
+
+<li><center><a href="#TRAVELS_WITH_A_DONKEY"><b>TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY IN THE CEVENNES</b></a></center></li>
+<li style="list-style:none"><br /></li>
+<li><center>VELAY</center></li>
+<li style="list-style:none"><br /></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">The Donkey, The Pack, and the Pack-saddle</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_143">143</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">The Green Donkey-driver</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_149">149</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">I Have a Goad</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_158">158</a></span></li>
+<li style="list-style:none"><br /></li>
+
+<li><center>UPPER  G&Eacute;VAUDAN</center></li>
+<li style="list-style:none"><br /></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">A Camp in the Dark</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_167">167</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Cheylard And Luc</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_177">177</a></span></li>
+<li style="list-style:none"><br /></li>
+
+<li><center>OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS</center></li>
+<li style="list-style:none"><br /></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Father Apollinaris</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_183">183</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">The Monks</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_188">188</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">The Boarders</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_195">195</a></span></li>
+<li style="list-style:none"><br /></li>
+
+<li><center>UPPER  G&Eacute;VAUDAN  (<i>continued</i>)</center></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap">Across The Goulet</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_203">203</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">A Night Among The Pines</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_206">206</a></span></li>
+<li style="list-style:none"><br /></li>
+
+<li><center>THE COUNTRY OF THE CAMISARDS</center></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap">Across the Loz&egrave;re</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_213">213</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Pont de Montvert</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_218">218</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">In the Valley of the Tarn</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_224">224</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Florac</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_234">234</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">In the Valley of the Mimente</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_237">237</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">The Heart of the Country</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_241">241</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">The Last Day</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_248">248</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Farewell, Modestine!</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_253">253</a></span></li>
+<li style="list-style:none"><br /></li>
+
+<li><center><a href="#A_MOUNTAIN_TOWN_IN_FRANCE"><b>A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE</b></a><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_257">257</a></span></center></li>
+<li style="list-style:none"><br /></li>
+<li style="list-style:none"><br /></li>
+
+<li><center><a href="#EDINBURGH"><b>EDINBURGH: PICTURESQUE NOTES</b></a></center></li>
+
+<li><small>CHAPTER</small></li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I. <span class="smcap">Introductory</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_271">271</a></span></li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;II. <span class="smcap">Old Town: The Lands</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_278">278</a></span></li>
+<li>&nbsp;III. <span class="smcap">The Parliament Close</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_285">285</a></span></li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;IV. <span class="smcap">Legends</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_291">291</a></span></li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;V. <span class="smcap">Greyfriars</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_298">298</a></span></li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;VI. <span class="smcap">New Town: Town and Country</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_305">305</a></span></li>
+<li>&nbsp;VII. <span class="smcap">The Villa Quarters</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_311">311</a></span></li>
+<li>VIII. <span class="smcap">The Calton Hill</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_314">314</a></span></li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;IX. <span class="smcap">Winter and New Year</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_320">320</a></span></li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;X. <span class="smcap">To the Pentland Hills</span><span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_327">327</a></span></li>
+</ul>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="INTRODUCTION_TO_THE_SWANSTON_EDITION" id="INTRODUCTION_TO_THE_SWANSTON_EDITION"></a>INTRODUCTION TO THE SWANSTON EDITION</h2>
+
+
+<p>So much has been written on R. L. Stevenson, as a boy, a man, and a man
+of letters, so much has been written both by himself and others, that I
+can hope to add nothing essential to the world's knowledge of his
+character and appreciation of his genius. What is essential has been
+said, once for all, by Sir Sidney Colvin in "Notes and Introductions" to
+R. L. S.'s "Letters to His Family and Friends." I can but contribute the
+personal views of one who knew, loved, and esteemed his junior that is
+already a classic; but who never was of the inner circle of his
+intimates. We shared, however, a common appreciation of his genius, for
+he was not so dull as to suppose, or so absurd as to pretend to suppose,
+that much of his work was not excellent. His tale "Thrawn Janet" "is
+good," he says in a letter, with less vigour than but with as much truth
+as Thackeray exclaiming "that's genius," when he describes Becky's
+admiration of Rawdon's treatment of Lord Steyne, in the affray in Curzon
+Street. About the work of other men and novelists, or poets, we were
+almost invariably of the same mind; we were of one mind about the great
+Charles Gordon. "He was filled," too, "with enthusiasm for Joan of Arc,"
+says his biographer, "a devotion, and also a cool headed admiration,
+which he never lost." In a letter he quotes Byron as having said that
+Jeanne "was a fanatical strumpet," and he cries shame on the noble
+poet. He projected an essay on the Blessed Maid, which is not in "the
+veniable part of things lost."</p>
+
+<p>Thus we were so much of the same sentiments, in so many ways, that I can
+hope to speak with sympathy, if not always with complete understanding,
+of Stevenson. Like a true Scot, he was interested in his ancestry, his
+heredity; regarding Robert Fergusson, the young Scottish poet, who died
+so young, in an asylum, as his spiritual forefather, and hoping to
+attach himself to a branch of the Royal Clan Alpine, the MacGregors, as
+the root of the Stevensons. Of Fergusson, he had, in early youth, the
+waywardness, the liking for taverns and tavern talk, the half-rueful
+appreciation of the old closes and wynds of Old Edinburgh, a touch of
+the recklessness and more than all the pictorial power which, in
+Fergusson, Burns so magnanimously admired.</p>
+
+<p>But genealogical research shows that Stevenson drew nothing from the
+dispossessed MacGregors, a clan greatly wronged, from Robert Bruce's
+day, and greatly given to wronging others. Alan Breck did not like "the
+Gregara," apart from their courage, and in Alan's day they were not
+consistent walkers.</p>
+
+<p>Stevenson, as far as one can learn, had no Celtic blood; none, at least,
+of traceable infusion: he was more purely Lowland than Sir Walter Scott.
+His paternal line could be traced back to a West Country Stevenson of
+1675; probably a tenant farmer, who was contemporary with the Whig
+rising at Bothwell Bridge, with the murder of Archbishop Sharp, with
+Claverhouse, and Sir George Mackenzie, called "the bluidy Advocate." An
+earnest student of Mr. Wodrow's "History of the Sufferings," Louis did
+not find "James Stevenson in Nether Carsewell" among the many martyrs
+who live in the <i>Libre d'Or</i> of the Remnant. But he had "a Covenanting
+childhood;" his father, Mr. Thomas Stevenson, was loyal to the positions
+of John Knox (the theological positions); and, brought up in these,
+Louis had a taste, when the tenets of Calvin ceased to convince his
+reason, of what non-Covenanters endured at the hands of the godly in
+their day of power.</p>
+
+<p>Every little Presbyterian, fifty years ago, was compelled to be familiar
+with the Genevan creed, as expressed in "The Shorter Catechism," but
+most little Presbyterians regarded that document as a necessary but
+unintelligible evil&mdash;the sorrow that haunted the Sabbath. I knew it by
+rote, Effectual Calling and all, but did not perceive that it possessed
+either meaning or actuality. Nobody was so unkind as to interpret the
+significance of the questions and answers; but somebody did interpret
+them for Stevenson, or his early genius enabled him to discover what it
+is all about, as he told me once, and it seems that the tendency of the
+theology is terribly depressing. A happier though more or less
+theological influence on his childhood he found in the adventures and
+sufferings of the Covenanters. It is curious (and shows how much early
+education can do) that he never was a little Royalist: always his heart,
+like Lockhart's, which is no less strange, was with the true blue
+Remnant. I can remember no proof that he was fascinated by the greatness
+of Montrose.</p>
+
+<p>As is well known, at about the age of sixteen he perverted a romance of
+his own making, "Hackston of Rathillet" (a fanatic of Fife), into a
+treatise: "The Pentland Rising, a Page of History," published in 1866.
+One would rather have possessed the romance.</p>
+
+<p>Stevenson came from the Balfours of Pilrig, and was of gentle blood, on
+the spindle side. An ancestress of his mother was a granddaughter of Sir
+Gilbert Elliot (as a "law lord," or judge, Lord Minto), and so he could
+say: "I have shaken a spear in the debatable land, and shouted the
+slogan of the Elliots": perhaps "And wha dares meddle wi' me!" In "Weir
+of Hermiston" he returns to "the auld bauld Elliots" with zest. He was
+not, perhaps, aware that, through some remote ancestress on the spindle
+side, he "came of Harden's line," so that he and I had a common forebear
+with Sir Walter Scott, and were hundredth cousins of each other, if we
+reckon in the primitive manner by female descent. Of these Border
+ancestors, Louis inherited the courage; he was a fearless person, but
+one would not trace his genius to "The Bard of Rule," an Elliot named
+"Sweet Milk" who was slain in a duel by another minstrel, about 1627.</p>
+
+<p>Genius is untraceable; the granite intellect of Louis's great
+engineering forefathers, the Stevensons, was not, like his, tuneful:
+though his father was imaginative, diverting himself with daydreams; and
+his uncle, Alan Stevenson, the builder of Skerryvore, yielded to the
+fascinations of the religious Muse. A volume of verse was the pledge of
+this dalliance. His mother, who gave him her gay indifference to
+discomfort and readiness for travel, also read to him, in his childhood,
+much good literature; for not till he was eight years of age was he an
+unreluctant reader&mdash;which is strange. The whole record of his life, from
+his eighteenth month, is a chronicle of fever and ill-health, borne
+always with heroic fortitude. His dear nurse, Alison Cunningham, seems
+to have been a kind of festive Cameronian. Her recitation of hymns was,
+though she hated "the playhouse," "grand and dramatic." There is a hymn,
+"Jehovah Tsidkenu," in which he rejoiced; and no wonder, for the refrain
+"Jehovah Tsidkenu was nothing to me," moves with the galloping
+hoof-beats of</p>
+
+<center>"'Tis up wi' the bonnets o' Bonny Dundee!"</center>
+
+<p>I have, however, ascertained that this theological piece is not sung to
+the tune, "The cavalry canter of Bonny Dundee." When the experiment is
+made, the results are unspeakably strange.</p>
+
+<p>It need not be said, Stevenson has told us in verse and prose, that in
+childhood "his whole vocation was endless imitation." He was the hunter
+and the pirate and the king&mdash;throwing his fancy very seriously into each
+of his <i>r&ocirc;les</i>, though visualizing never passed with him, as with some
+children it does, into actual hallucination. He had none of the
+invisible playmates that, to some children, are visible and real. He was
+less successful than Shelley in seeing apparitions: but the dreams which
+he communicated to Mr. Frederic Myers were curious illustrations of his
+subconscious activities&mdash;his Brownies, as he called them. They told him
+stories of which he could not foresee the end; one led up to a love
+affair forbidden even by exogamous law (with male descent and the
+sub-class system), and thus a fine plot was ruined.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout life, he always played his part, as in childhood, with full
+conscious and picturesque effect, as did the great Montrose and the
+English Admirals, in whom he notes this dramatic trait. He was not a
+<i>poseur</i>; he was merely sensitively conscious of himself and of life as
+an art. As a little boy with curls and a velvet tunic, he read
+"Ministering Children," and yearned to be a ministering child. An
+opportunity seemed to present itself; the class of boys called "keelies"
+by the more comfortable boys in Edinburgh, used to play in the street
+under the windows of his father's house. One lame boy, a baker's son,
+could only look on. Here was a chance to minister! Louis, with a beating
+heart, walked out on his angelic mission.</p>
+
+<p>"Little boy, would you like to play with me?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"You go to &mdash;&mdash;!" was the answer of the independent son of the hardy
+baker.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult to pass from the enchanted childhood of this eternal
+child, with its imaginative playing at everything, broken only by fevers
+whereof the dreams were the nightmares of unconscious genius. He has
+told of all this as only he could tell it.</p>
+
+<p>As a boy, despite his interrupted education, he laid the foundations of
+a knowledge of French and German, acquired Latin, and was not like that
+other boy who, <i>Euclide viso, cohorruit et evasit.</i> He was a
+mathematician! He never played cricket, I deeply regret to say, and his
+early love of football deserted him. He was no golfer, and a good day's
+trout-fishing, during which he neglected to kill each trout as it was
+taken, caused remorse, and made him abandon the contemplative boy's
+recreation. Boating, riding, and walking were his exercises. He read the
+good books that never lose their charm&mdash;Scott, Dumas, Shakespeare, "The
+Arabian Nights"; when very young he was delighted with "The Book of
+Snobs"; he also read Mayne Reid and "Ballantyne the Brave," and any
+story that contained <i>Skeltica</i>, cloaks, swords, wigs on the green,
+pirates and great adventures. He lived in literature, for Romance.</p>
+
+<p>His doings at Edinburgh University, and as a budding engineer, he has
+chronicled; he took part in snowball rows, in the debates of the
+Speculative Society, and in private dramatic performances, organized by
+his senior and friend, Professor Fleeming Jenkin. To "dress up" in old
+costumes always pleased him. He happened to praise the acting of a girl
+of fourteen, who, in her family circle, said, "Perhaps when I am old,
+like the lady in Ronsard, I will say 'R. L. Stevenson sang of me.'" His
+gambols "with the wild Prince and Poins" are not unrecorded. These were
+his Fergussonian years. Perhaps he might have expressed Burns's esteem
+for the "class of men called black-guards," as far as their
+unconventionality is concerned. He saw a great deal of life in many
+varieties; like Scott in Liddesdale, "he was making himsel' a' the
+time." With his cousin R. A. M. Stevenson, Walter Ferrier, Mr. Charles
+Baxter, and Sir Walter Simpson (a good golfer and not a bad bat), he
+performed "acts of Libbelism," and discussed all things in the universe.
+He was wildly gay, and profoundly serious, he had the earnestness of the
+Covenanter in forming speculations more or less unorthodox. It is
+needless to dwell on the strain caused by his theological ideals and
+those of a loving but sternly Calvinistic sire, to whom his love was
+ever loyal.</p>
+
+<p>These things bred melancholy, of necessity, and melancholy was purged by
+an almost unexampled interest, not in literature alone, but in the
+technique of style, and the construction of sentences and periods. Few
+of his confessions are better known than those on his apprenticeship in
+style to the great authors of the past. He gave himself up to the
+schools of Hazlitt, Lamb, Wordsworth, Sir Thomas Browne, Defoe,
+Hawthorne, Montaigne, Baudelaire, William Morris, and Obermann (De
+Senancour).</p>
+
+<p>This he did when he was aged about eighteen, when other lads are trying
+to write Latin prose like Cicero, or Livy, or Tacitus (Tacitus is the
+easiest to ape, in a way), and Latin verse like Ovid, or Horace, or
+Virgil. This they do because it is "part of the curricoolum," as the
+Scottish baronet said, of school and college. But I do not remember
+anecdotes of other boys with a genius for English prose who set
+themselves to acquire style before they deemed that they had anything in
+particular to say.</p>
+
+<p>In English essays at college a young fellow may be told by his tutor not
+to imitate Carlyle or Macaulay: the attempt to repeat the tones of
+Thackeray is most incident to youth. But to aim, like Stevenson while a
+student of Edinburgh University, at "the choice of the essential note
+and the right word," in exercises written for his own improvement, is a
+thing so original that it keeps me wondering. Like most of us, I have
+always thought, with Mr. Froude, when asked how he acquired his style,
+that a man sits down and says what he has to say, and there is an end of
+it. We must not write like Clarendon now, even if we could; our
+sentences must be brief. It would be affectation to write like Sir
+Thomas Browne, if we could; or like de Quincey; and nobody can write
+like Mr. Ruskin, when he is simple, or like the late Master of Balliol,
+Mr. Jowett.</p>
+
+<p>How far and how early Stevenson succeeded in the pursuit of style may be
+seen in his "Juvenilia": for example, in the essay on the Old Gardener.
+But one is inclined to think that he succeeded because he had a very
+keen natural perception of all things, was a most minute observer, knew
+what told in the matter of words, in fact, had a genius of his own; and
+that these graces came to him, though he says that they did not, by
+nature. He tells us how often he wrote and rewrote some of his
+chapters, some of his books. His <i>prima cura</i> we have not seen; perhaps
+it was as good as his most polished copy. "Prince Otto" has even seemed
+to me, in places, over-written. He now and then ran near the rock of
+preciosity, though he very seldom piled up his barque on that reef. His
+style is, to the right reader, a perpetual feast, "a dreiping roast,"
+and his style cannot be parodied. I never saw a parody that came within
+a league of the jest it aimed at, save one burlesque of the deliberately
+stilted manner of his "New Arabian Nights." This triumph was achieved by
+Mr. Walter Pollock.</p>
+
+<p>Stevenson's manner was too appropriate to his matter for parody: for
+nobody could reproduce his matter and the vividness of his
+visualization. When his characters were Scots, Lowlanders or
+Highlanders, it seems to me that their style has no rival except in the
+talk of Sir Walter's countrymen. A minute student who knew Stevenson,
+has told me that he once suggested "chafts," where Louis had written
+"cheeks" or "jaws," and that the emendation was accepted, but his Scots
+always use "the right word," and never (in prose) say "tae" for "to," I
+think. Theirs is the good Scots.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps I am biased in my doubt concerning the usefulness of his
+persistence in re-writing, by my regret that he destroyed so many of his
+romances, as not worthy of him. "King's chaff is better than other
+folk's corn" says our proverb. In his day, I bored him by pressing him
+to write more, and more rapidly; he never could have been commonplace,
+he never could have been less than excellent. But his conscience was
+adamant: no man was less of an improviser, as, fortunately, Scott was;
+had he <i>not</i> been, there would not be so many Waverley Novels.</p>
+
+<p>Stevenson was hard on Scott, who wrote much as he himself did in
+boyhood. "I forgot to say," remarks the early Stevensonian hero, after
+describing a day full of adventures with Red Indians, "that I had made
+love to a beautiful girl." There is a faint resemblance to this
+over-sight in a long sentence of "Guy Mannering," which Stevenson
+criticized; but "Guy Mannering" was written in about six weeks, "to
+refresh the machine." Fastidious himself, conscientious almost to a
+fault in style, Stevenson's joy was in the romances of Xavier de
+Mont&eacute;pin and Fortun&eacute; du Boisgobey, names which suggest</p>
+
+<div style="margin-left: 12em;"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Old crusading knights austere,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That bore King Louis company."<br /></span>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>When Dumas and Scott, and perhaps Mrs. Radcliffe, had been read too
+recently, Louis went to Fortun&eacute; and Xavier, and, doubtless, to the
+father of them, Gaboriau. None of these benefactors of the race was a
+student of style, but they gave him what Thackeray liked, stories "hot,
+<i>with</i>," as he says, briefly but adequately.</p>
+
+<p>All of us are led, like that ancient people Israel, like all humanity,
+by a way we know not, and a path we do not understand. If some
+benevolent genie, who understood Stevenson's qualities and genius, could
+have directed his career, how would that spirit have educated him?</p>
+
+<p>For some reason not intelligible he was put on an allowance of five
+shillings weekly, for his <i>menus plaisirs</i>, till he was twenty-three
+years of age. He never was an expensive man (except in giving, wherein
+he knew no stint); his favourite velvet coats, his yellow shoes, his
+black shirts, with a necktie of a scrap of carpet, he said (I failed to
+guess its nature), were not extravagant. (The last occasion on which I
+saw him in the legendary velvet coat was also the only moment in which I
+viewed the author of his being. The circumstances were of the wildest
+comedy, but the tale can never be told; though in all respects it
+redounds to the credit of everybody concerned. Not one of us let a laugh
+out of himself.)</p>
+
+<p>But a young man in his position likes to do many harmless things which
+cannot be done on five shillings a week, and so he sought the haunts of
+"thieves and chimney sweeps!" he says, and wrote sonnets in those shy
+retreats, which are known, perhaps, in Scotland, as "shebeens." Why
+"shebeens"? Is the word Gaelic misspelled? Cases of "shebeening" are
+tried before the Edinburgh magistrates, and as "my circle was being
+continually changed by the action of the police magistrates" (he says)
+conceivably his was a shebeening circle.</p>
+
+<p>Another lad of his age, some eighty years earlier, was partial, like
+him, to taverns and old clothes. "They be good enough for drinking in,"
+said Walter Scott, when Erskine, or some other friend, ventured to
+remonstrate. Scott, like Stevenson, knew queer people, knew beggars&mdash;but
+had not one of them shaken hands with Prince Charles? Certainly, after
+Scott met Green Mantle, and sheltered her, as she came from church,
+under his umbrella (a piece of furniture which Stevenson can never have
+possessed), he left off his old clothes, and went into the best company.
+But R. L. S. did not delight in the good company of his native town; nor
+did he suffer gladly the conventional raiment of the evening hours.
+Green Mantle there was none, as far as we learn. He was not popular with
+the young Scots of his age, his biographer says so candidly; candidly
+have they said as much to me, yet they were good fellows.</p>
+
+<p>From childhood he had enjoyed all the indulgences of an only son, and an
+invalid; now he was "brought up short," and there were the religious
+disputes with a sire to whom he was devoted. The climate of his own
+romantic town (the worst in the world) was his foe; the wandering spirit
+in his blood called him to the south and the sun; he tells of months in
+which he had no mortal to whom he could speak freely, his cousin Bob
+being absent; he was unhappy; he was out of his <i>milieu.</i></p>
+
+<p>What would the genie have done for him? Neither of the English
+Universities would have been to his taste; the rebel in him would have
+kicked at morning chapel, lectures, cap and gown, Proctors, the talk of
+"oars" and "bats"; manifestly Balliol was not the place for R. L. S.,
+though he might have been happy with his contemporary John Churton
+Collins. He, I remember&mdash;even to the velvet coat&mdash;was like Stevenson,
+and was a rebel. Grant Allen, too, would have been his contemporary&mdash;the
+only man in Oxford who took to Herbert Spencer, whom Stevenson also read
+with much edification.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it is clear that Stevenson should not have been domiciled in the
+paternal mansion of Heriot Row. The genie might have transported him to
+a German University, perhaps to Heidelberg.</p>
+
+<p><i>Dis aliter visum</i>, and the result, for us, is his matchless book on
+Edinburgh. To see a copy thereof is to take it up, and read through it
+again; it is better at every reading.</p>
+
+<p>In 1871 he broke to his father the news that the profession of
+engineering was not for him. The Scottish Bar (1874-1875) was not more
+attractive, and in 1873 his meeting with Mr. (now Sir) Sidney Colvin
+(then Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge, and already well known
+as a critic), and with a lady, Mrs. Sitwell, to whom many of his most
+carefully written early letters are addressed, probably sealed Stevenson
+into the profession of literature.</p>
+
+<p>He has left this note on his prospects:</p>
+
+<blockquote>"I think now, this 5th or 6th of April, 1873, that I can see my
+    future life. I think it will run stiller and stiller year by year; a
+    very quiet, desultorily studious existence. If God only gives me
+    tolerable health, I think now I shall be very happy; work and
+    science calm the mind and stop gnawing in the brain; and as I am
+    glad to say that I do now recognise that I shall never be a great
+    man, I may set myself peacefully on a smaller journey; not without
+    hope of coming to the inn before nightfall.</blockquote>
+
+<div style="margin-left: 4em;"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i11">O dass mein Leben<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nach diesem Ziel ein ewig Wandeln sey!<br /></span>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">DESIDERATA<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;&nbsp;I. Good Health<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;II. 2 to 3 hundred a year<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">III. O du lieber Gott, <i>friends</i>!<br /></span>
+<span class="i10">AMEN<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i22"><span class="smcap">Robert Louis Stevenson"</span><br /></span>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>He wrote an article, this born wayfarer, on "Roads," which was accepted
+by P. G. Hamerton for the "Portfolio," but in November, 1873, "nervous
+exhaustion, with a threatening of phthisis," caused him to be "Ordered
+South" to Mentone&mdash;a lonely exile. Here he was joined by Mr. Colvin, and
+in Mr. Colvin's rooms, for I also was "ordered South," I first met this
+surprising figure. Our schooldays had just overlapped; he was a "gyte"
+(a child in the lowest form; "class" we called it), when I was in the
+highest, but I had never seen him, nor heard of him.</p>
+
+<p>In some rhymes of his later years, when Count Nerli was painting his
+portrait, Louis wrote:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">"Oh, will he paint me the way I like, and as bonny as a girlie,<br />
+Or will he make me an ugly tyke; and be d&mdash;&mdash; to Mr. Nerli?"</div>
+
+<p>When first we met, he really was "as bonny as a girlie"; with his oval
+face, his flushed cheeks, his brown eyes, large and radiant, and his
+hair of a length more romantic than conventional. He wore a wide blue
+cloak, with a grace which hovered between that of an Italian poet and an
+early pirate.</p>
+
+<p>It was impossible not to discover, in a short conversation, that he was
+very clever, but, as a girl said once of her first meeting with another
+girl, "We looked at each other with horny eyes of disapproval." I
+thought that he was affecting the poet, and in me he found a donnish
+affectation of the British sportsman. He said later that I complained,
+concerning Monsieur Paul de St. Victor, that he was "no sportsman,"
+though his style was effulgent.</p>
+
+<p>We seldom met again, unhappily, for I was then with a family in whose
+company he would have been happy: all young, all kind, simple, and
+beautiful, and all doomed. Stevenson was then seriously ill, certainly a
+short walk fatigued him.</p>
+
+<p>The next news I had of him was in his essay, "Ordered South," concerning
+the emotions, apathies, and pleasures, on that then fairy coast, of a
+young man who thinks that his days are numbered. After reading this
+paper, I was absolutely convinced that, among the writers of our
+generation, Stevenson was first, like Eclipse, and the rest nowhere.
+There was nobody to be spoken of in his company as a writer. It was not
+his style alone&mdash;Pater's style had bewitched me in his first book&mdash;but
+it was the life that underlay the style of Stevenson.</p>
+
+<p>He came home, and found peace at home, and a less inadequate allowance,
+and he put up a brazen plate, "R.L. Stevenson, Advocate," on the door in
+Heriot Row. But his practice was a jest. Some senior men sought his
+society, his old friends were with him; his articles were welcomed by
+Mr. Leslie Stephen in "The Cornhill Magazine," and were eagerly expected
+by a few. Directed by Mr. Stephen, he found Mr. Henley in the Edinburgh
+Infirmary, and that friendship began which was of such considerable
+influence in his life and work.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Henley's "maimed strength," his impeded vigour, even his blond
+upstanding hair and "beard all tangled," his uncomplaining fortitude
+under the most cruel trials, and the candid freshness of his
+conversation on men and books, won Stevenson's heart.</p>
+
+<p>In London, Stevenson appeared now and again at the Savile Club, then
+tenanting a rather gloomy little house in Savile Row. The members were
+mostly connected with science, literature, journalism, and the stage,
+and Stevenson became intimate with many of them, especially with the
+staff and the sub-editor (in those days) of "The Saturday Review," Mr.
+Walter Pollock; and with Mr. Saintsbury, Mr. Traill, Mr. Charles
+Brookfield, Sir Walter Besant; a little later with Mr. Edmund Gosse, who
+was by much his favourite in this little society. In addition to the
+chaff of the "Saturday" reviewers, he enjoyed the talk of Prof.
+Robertson Smith, Prof. W. H. Clifford, and Prof. Fleeming Jenkin.</p>
+
+<p>Stevenson never wrote, to my knowledge, in "The Saturday Review";
+journalism never "set his genius." For one reason among many, his manner
+was by far too personal in those days of unsigned contributions. He
+needed money, he wished to be financially independent, but, in the
+Press, his independence could not be all that he desired. He did not
+wield the ready, punctual pen of him whom Lockhart most invidiously
+calls "the bronzed and mother-naked gentleman of the Press."</p>
+
+<p>His conversation at luncheon, and after luncheon, in the Club was the
+delight of all, but, for various reasons, I was seldom present. I do
+remember an afternoon when I had him all to myself, but that was later.
+He poured out stories of his American wanderings, including a tale of a
+murderous lonely inn, kept by Scots, whose genius tended to
+assassination. He knew nothing of their exploits at home, but, then or
+afterwards, I heard of them from a boatman on Loch Awe. Their mother was
+a witch!</p>
+
+<p>At this period Stevenson was much in Paris, and alone, or with his
+cousin Bob dwelt at Barbizon and other forest haunts of painters. The
+chronicle of these merry days is written in the early chapters of "The
+Wrecker."</p>
+
+<p>In literature he was "finding himself," in his Essays, but the world did
+not find him easily or early.</p>
+
+<p>History much attracted him, as it did Thackeray, who said, "I like
+history, it is so gentlemanly." But it can only be written by gentlemen
+of independent means. Stevenson's favourite period was that of the
+France of the fifteenth century, and he studied later some aspects of
+that time in essays on Charles d'Orleans, in his admirable picture of
+Villon as a man and poet, and especially in "A Lodging for the Night,"
+and "The Sieur de Mal&eacute;troit's Door," shut on a windy night in the month
+after the Maid failed at Paris (September, 1429).</p>
+
+<p>These unexcelled short stories really revealed Stevenson as the
+narrator, his path lay clear before him. But even his friends were then
+divided in opinion; some preferring his essays, and his two books of
+sentimental travel, "An Inland Voyage" (1878) and "Travels with a
+Donkey" (1879). These were, indeed, admirable in style, humour,
+description, and incident, but the creative imagination in the stories
+of Villon's night and of the Sieur de Mal&eacute;troit's door, the painting of
+character, the romance, the vividness, were worth many such volumes.
+They were well received by the Press, these sketches of travel, but, as
+Monsieur Got says in his "Journal" (1857), "Les succ&egrave;s des d&eacute;licats
+sont, m&ecirc;me quand ils s'&eacute;tablissent, trop lents &agrave; s'&eacute;tablir. La foule
+s'est tellement d&eacute;mocratis&eacute;e qu'il n'a pas de salut si l'on ne frappe
+brutalement." The needful brutality was not employed till Stevenson
+"knocked them" with "Jekyll and Hyde."</p>
+
+<p>"The world is so full of a number of things," that a few essays, two or
+three short stories in a magazine, a little book of sketches in prose,
+may be masterpieces in their three several ways, but they escape the
+notice of all but a few amateurs. Mr. Kipling's knock was much more
+insistent; he could not be unheard. It was not by essays on Burns and
+Knox, however independently done, that Stevenson could make his mark.</p>
+
+<p>Concerning these heroes, Scotland has a vision of her own, and no man
+must undo it; no man must tell, about Knox, facts ignored by Professors
+of Church History. Indeed, to study Knox afresh demands research for
+which Stevenson had not the opportunity. The Covenanting side of his
+nature appeared in his study of the moral aspect of Burns; his feet of
+clay. It is agreed that we must veil the feet of clay. As Lockhart says,
+Scott infuriated Mr. Alexander Peterkin by remarking that Burns "was not
+chivalrous." Stevenson went further, and annoyed the Peterkins of his
+day. His task required courage: it was not found wanting.</p>
+
+<p>In 1877, Stevenson had a new, if very narrow, opening. A friend of his
+at Edinburgh University, a young Mr. Caldwell Brown (so Stevenson named
+him to me; his real name seems to have been Glasgow Brown), came to the
+great metropolis to found a Conservative weekly journal. "London" was
+its name, but Edinburgh was its nature, and base, if a base it had. The
+editor was "in the air"; he knew nothing of his business and its
+difficulties; nothing of what the Conservative public, with sixpences to
+spend, was likely to want. He approached some of Stevenson's friends,
+and he gave the Conservative party scores of lively <i>ballades,
+villanelles</i>, and <i>rondeaux.</i> They were brilliant. Stevenson would not
+tell me the author's name; he proved to be Mr. Henley, who came to town,
+and, on the death of Mr. Brown, edited this unread periodical. There
+were "Society" notes, although Mr. Henley's haunts were not those of
+that kind of society, and one occasional contributor ventured to
+remonstrate about the chatter on the "professional beauties" of that
+distant day.</p>
+
+<p>The "New Arabian Nights," with all their humour, and horror, all their
+intellectual high spirits, and reckless absurdity, were poured by
+Stevenson into this outcast flutterer of a Tory paper, to the great joy
+of some of the very irregular contributors. (It was an honest
+flutterer&mdash;its contributors received their wages.)</p>
+
+<p>Then "London" died, and then seriousness enough came into the life of
+our Arabian author. In August, 1879, he disappeared; he went to America
+to marry the lady whom he had first met at Fontainebleau, whom he wedded
+at San Francisco (1880), and loved with all his heart.</p>
+
+<p>Reconciled to his father, he returned to Scotland. His health had been
+anew impaired by troubles and privations, and the rest of his life in
+the Old World was occupied by a series of maladies, vain roamings in
+search of climate, and hard work constantly interrupted.</p>
+
+<p>From his early childhood onwards, an army of maladies surrounded him,
+invested him, cut him off if, in an hour of health, he ventured on any
+sally; but they never overcame his invincible resolution. He was, as one
+of his favourite old authors says about I forget what emperor, "an
+entertainer of fortune by the day," making the most of every sunny hour,
+and the best of every hour passed under the shadow of imminent death. I
+remember that, soon after his marriage, he was staying in London at the
+house of a friend. Going to see him, I noted in him a somewhat anxious
+look, and I did not wonder at it! Mr. Henley was seated in a great
+chair, the whole of his face, from the eyes downwards, muffled in a huge
+crimson silk pocket handkerchief, of which the point covered his aureate
+beard.</p>
+
+<p>The room was a large room, and as Louis flitted about it, <i>more suo</i>, he
+managed to tell me privily that Henley had a very bad cold, and that he
+himself caught every cold which came within a limited radius. He <i>did</i>
+catch that cold, I heard, and when once such an invader entered his
+system, nobody knew what the end of it might be. His lungs usually
+suffered; hemorrhage was frequent and often alarming. In one of these
+accesses, unable to speak, he wrote, "Do not be frightened. If this is
+the end it is an easy one."</p>
+
+<p>Many scraps written by him in circumstances like these used to exist;
+some of them, though brief, were rich in the simple eloquence of
+indignation.</p>
+
+<p>Almost no climate did him any good: in 1880-1881, he chiefly suffered at
+Davos, and in the tempests of September, in Braemar. At Davos he had few
+consolations except the society of Mr. J. A. Symonds (the Opalstein of
+his essay on "Talk and Talkers") and his family. He was still attached
+to the indigent Muse of History: meditating a "History of the
+Highlands," and another book on that much trampled topic, the Union of
+1707. When one thinks of the commercial statistics necessary to the
+student of the Union&mdash;to take that grim aspect of it alone&mdash;<i>enfin</i>, "I
+have been there, and would not go." In the nature of things the History
+of the Union would have become a romance, with that impudent,
+entertaining rogue, Ker of Kersland, and his bewildered Cameronians, for
+the heroes: with Hamilton the waverer, and the dark, sardonic Lockhart
+of Carnwath, and Daniel Defoe as the English looker-on. The study of
+Highland history led to the reading of the Trial of James of the Glens,
+and the vain hunt for Alan Breck, and so to "Kidnapped."</p>
+
+<p>Stevenson felt and described the exhilaration of Alpine mornings, but
+his style was as sensitive as his bronchial apparatus, and he declares
+that when he tried to write, the style suffered from "yeasty inflation,"
+while his nights were haunted by the nightmares of his childhood.</p>
+
+<p>The next change carried him to a cottage near Pitlochry, whence he wrote
+that he was engaged in the composition of "crawlers." The first and best
+of these, "Thrawn Janet," was (with his "Tod Lapraik" in "Kidnapped")
+the only pendant to Scott's "Wandering Willie's Tale," in the northern
+vernacular. The tale has a limited circle; no Southern can appreciate
+all its merits, the thing is so absolutely and essentially Scots;
+especially the atmosphere. He said that it was "true for a hill parish
+in Scotland in old days, not true for mankind and the world." So it is
+fortunate to be a native of a hill parish in Scotland!</p>
+
+<p>"The Merry Men," as "a fantasia or vision of the sea," is excellent; the
+poor negro never was, to myself, "convincing." However, knowing
+Stevenson's taste in art, I designed for him, in Skeltic taste, an
+illustration (coloured) of the negro pursuing the wicked uncle (in the
+philabeg) over the crests of Ben Mor, Mull.</p>
+
+<p>Descending from these heights, Stevenson, like every bookish Scot,
+"ettled at" a professorial chair&mdash;that of "History and Constitutional
+Law," in the University of Edinburgh.</p>
+
+<p>The election was in the winter, the legist and historian occupied the
+autumn in composing the first half of "Treasure Island" (originally "The
+Sea Cook").</p>
+
+<p>Everyone knows the story: how, playing with his stepson, Stevenson drew
+a map of an island&mdash;an island like a <i>dragon seyant</i>; considered the
+caves and hills and streams, and thought of the place as a haunt of
+these serviceable pirates, who always dumped down their hard-earned swag
+on distant and on deadly shores, which they carefully abstained from
+revisiting. The legends of Captain Kidd's <i>caches</i> have long haunted the
+imagination; the idea of Hidden Treasure has its eternal charm, and the
+story thereof was told, once for all, by Poe. Soon after "Treasure
+Island" appeared there was a real treasure hunt. The deposit, so I was
+informed, was "put down by a Fin," and Mr. Rider Haggard and I were
+actually paying (at least Mr. Haggard sent me a cheque) for shares in
+this alluring enterprise, when I learned that the Fin (or Finn? a native
+of Finland), had looted the church plate of some Spanish cathedral in
+America. Knowing this, I returned his cheque to Mr. Haggard; happily,
+for the isle was the playroom of young earthquakes, which had upset the
+soil and the landmarks to such a degree that the gentleman adventurer
+returned&mdash;<i>bredouille</i>! I hope Stevenson had nothing on.</p>
+
+<p>In the Highland cottage, during the rain eternal, he amused himself with
+writing his story, as Shelley, Byron, Polidori, and Mary Godwin had
+diverted themselves in Swiss wet weather, with their ghost stories,
+"Frankenstein," and Byron's good opening of a romance of a vampire.</p>
+
+<p>Visitors came&mdash;Mr. Colvin, Mr. Gosse, and Dr. Japp&mdash;they liked the tale
+as chapter by chapter was read aloud, and it was offered to a penny
+periodical for boys. A much better market might easily have been found;
+indeed, Stevenson "wasted his mercies." He was paid like the humblest of
+unknown scribblers; not even illustrations were given to the obscure
+romance running in dim inner pages of the periodical, and it appears
+that, as Th&eacute;ophile Gautier's editor said about one of <i>his</i> narratives,
+"the <i>abonn&eacute;</i> was bored with the style."</p>
+
+<p>It was an audacious thing for a man of Louis's health, and intermittent
+inspiration, to send in half the "copy," meaning to send the rest later
+from Davos. He might not be able, physically, to write&mdash;the inspiration
+might vanish&mdash;and there was John Addington Symonds, eager for him to
+write on the "Characters" of Theophrastus! He might as well have
+written, or better, on the "Characters" of Sir Thomas Overbury, which
+are rather less remote from the ken of the British public than those of
+the Greek.</p>
+
+<p>If any young man or woman, not in possession of independent means, reads
+these lines of mine, let him or her take warning, and deserting history,
+morals, the essay, biography, and shunning anthropology as they would
+kippered sturgeon or the devil, cleave only to fiction!</p>
+
+<p>Biography also allured Stevenson&mdash;his literary tastes were nearly his
+ruin; he wanted, at Davos, to write a "Life of Hazlitt," and at
+Bournemouth a biography of Arthur, Duke of Wellington. But time and
+strength were lacking; nor have we R. L. S.'s mature opinion of the
+strategy and tactics of the victor of Assaye. The Muse of piratical
+enterprise returned, and "Treasure Island" reached its haven, with no
+applause, in the paper for boys.</p>
+
+<p>In the following May, Messrs. Cassell proposed to publish "Treasure
+Island" in book form, being spirited up, I suppose, by Mr. Henley, who
+was editing for them "The Magazine of Art," in which Stevenson wrote two
+or three articles. (I remember that a letter of my own to "The Editor,"
+as Mr. Henley had proudly signed himself, came automatically into the
+hands of the General Editor, a clergyman, if I do not err, and that my
+observations on the Art of Savages, lighting on the wrong sort of
+ground, sprang up and nearly choked Mr. Henley.) Stevenson was already
+the victim of the Yankee pirate, whose industry, at least, made his
+name, though wrongly spelled, known to the community which later paid
+him so well for his work, and displayed for him an enthusiasm of
+affectionate admiration.</p>
+
+<p>In 1884 he worked at the often rewritten "Prince Otto," and did a
+pot-boiler&mdash;"The Black Arrow"&mdash;which pleased the boy public of the paper
+much better than "Treasure Island." His time, from January, 1883, to
+May, 1884, was passed at Hy&egrave;res. In the end of November, "Treasure
+Island" was published in book form, and was warmly welcomed by the Press
+and by such friends of the author as retained, at least in letters, any
+smack of youth. It was forced, as far as "You must read it, please,"
+even on the friends of the friends, and so on in successive waves, yet
+it did not reach a wide circle: five or six thousand copies were sold in
+the first year. That is failure in the eyes of many of our novelists
+whose style does not bore the unfastidious <i>abonn&eacute;.</i> Stevenson, in
+writing an article for a magazine on his "First Book," chose "Treasure
+Island," for books other than novels do not count as books. He spoke of
+terror as the motive and interest of the tale; the dread for each and
+all of a mutiny headed by his ruthless favourite, John Silver. Indeed,
+terror, whether caused by the eccentric furies of Mr. William Bones,
+mariner, or of the awful blind Pew with his tapping staff, runs through
+the volume as the dominant motive. But there is so much else: the many
+landscapes, so various and so vivid; the humour of the Doctor and the
+Squire, the variety of the seamen's characters; the Man of the Island,
+with his craving for a piece of cheese; above all, John Silver. He is
+terrible, this coldly cruel, crafty, and masterful Odysseus of the
+Pacific. His creator liked him, but I could have seen Silver withering
+on the wuddie at Execution Dock, or suspended from a yardarm, without
+shedding the tears of sensibility. "A pirate is rather a beast than
+otherwise," says a young critic in "The Human Boy," and I cannot get
+over Silver gloating on the prospect of torturing Trelawny. At all
+events, he is an original creation, and a miraculous portent in a boy's
+book.</p>
+
+<p>Fiercer attacks of illness in various forms drove Stevenson to
+Bournemouth; he was engaged, when he had the strength, on those plays
+(in collaboration with Mr. Henley) which prove that he had not the
+mysterious gift of writing for the stage. "I hope Mr. Henley wrote most
+of it," said a lady, as she left the theatre where she had seen "Deacon
+Brodie" played. Had Deacon Brodie been Archdeacon Brodie, there would
+have been more piquancy in the contrast of his "double life."</p>
+
+<p>This idea of the double life of each man had long haunted Stevenson. He
+told me once that he meant to write a story "about a fellow who was two
+fellows," which did not, when thus stated, seem a fortunate idea.
+However, happily, he continued to think of Hyde and Jekyll, yet knew not
+how to manage them. One night, after eating bread and jam freely, he had
+a nightmare; he saw Hyde, pursued, take refuge in a closet, swallow "the
+mixture as before"&mdash;the mysterious powder or potion&mdash;and change horribly
+into Jekyll.</p>
+
+<p>He set to work at once, and in three feverish days completed the first
+draft of his parable. In this the Hyde aspect was only Jekyll's
+unassuming disguise, adopted at hours when he wished to be a little gay.
+Stevenson burned his first draft, and rewrote the whole in three days.</p>
+
+<p>He knew, it seems, that the magical powder was an error. One sees how
+the thing could be managed otherwise, with a slight strain on the
+resources of psychical research. But in no way could the story have
+attained "the probable impossible," which Aristotle preferred to "the
+improbable possible."</p>
+
+<p>Stevenson sent the manuscript to my friend Mr. Charles Longman, who, in
+turn, sent it to me. I began to read it one night, in the security of a
+modest London drawing-room, and, naturally, it fascinated me from the
+first page. Then I came to a certain page, which produced such an
+emotion that I threw the manuscript on a chair, and scuttled
+apprehensively to the safety of bed. Later, a kinsman, who seldom read a
+book, told me that, living alone in a great Highland house, he had
+thrown down the printed book at the same passage, and made the same
+inglorious retreat. Anyone who knows the book, knows what the passage
+is.</p>
+
+<p>The story was produced in a paper-covered volume costing a shilling, and
+was little heeded till a reviewer in <i>The Times</i> "caught this great
+stupid public by the ear," as Thackeray said.</p>
+
+<p>The clergy of all denominations did the rest. As they had preached on
+"Pamela," a hundred and forty years earlier, so they called the
+attention of their flocks to Hyde and to Jekyll. "Who are Hyde and
+Jekyll, my brethren? <i>You</i> are Hyde and Jekyll. <i>I</i> am Jekyll and Hyde;
+each of us is Jekyll, and, alas, <i>each of us is Hyde</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>Stevenson had long ago "found himself"; now he was found by the public.
+The names of his two rascally heroes (Dr. Jekyll is even less of a
+gentleman than Hyde) became proverbial.</p>
+
+<p>The gruesome parable occupied an interval in the making of what I
+suppose is his masterpiece&mdash;"Kidnapped." The story centres on the Appin
+Murder of 1751, about which he had made inquiries in the neighbourhood
+of Rannoch, where Alan Breck skulked after the shooting of Campbell of
+Glenure in the hanging wood south of Ballachulish. Stevenson could not
+learn who "the other man" was&mdash;the real murderer in the romance. I know,
+but respect the Celtic secret. The fatal gun was found, very many years
+after the deed, by an old woman, in a hollow tree, and it was <i>not</i> the
+gun of James Stewart.</p>
+
+<p>(I have a friend whose great-great-grandfather was standing beside James
+of the Glens, watching the digging of potatoes. A horse was heard
+approaching at such a pace that James said, "Whoever the rider is, the
+horse is not his own." As he galloped past, the rider shouted: "Glenure
+is shot!" "Who did it I don't know, but I am the man that will hang for
+it," said James, too truly.)</p>
+
+<p>Of "Kidnapped," Stevenson said (as Thackeray said of Henry Esmond and
+Lady Castlewood, as Scott says of Dugald Dalgetty) that, in this book
+alone of his, "the characters took the bit in their teeth," at a certain
+point. "It was they who spoke, it was they who wrote the remainder of
+the story."</p>
+
+<p>They are spontaneous, they are living. Balfour, in the <i>scenario</i> of the
+tale, was to have been kidnapped and carried to the American
+plantations. But he and Alan "went their ain gait." At the end, you can
+see the pen drop from the weary fingers; they left half-told the story
+of Alan, to be continued in "Catriona."</p>
+
+<p>A love of Jacobite times, and of Alan Breck's country, Lochaber,
+Glencoe, Mamore, may bias me; but in "Kidnapped" Stevenson appears to me
+to reach the height of his genius in designing character and landscape;
+in humour, dialogue, and creative power. As in his preceding stories,
+there is hardly the flutter of a petticoat, but the tale, like Prince
+Charles at Holyrood, can point to a Highland man of the sword, and say,
+"These are my beauties." I remember that Mr. Matthew Arnold admired the
+story greatly, and <i>he</i> had no Jacobite or local bias.</p>
+
+<p>In May, 1887, Stevenson lost his father, and paid his last visit to his
+native country.</p>
+
+<p>It was during this period, in 1886 probably, that I, for the first time,
+saw Stevenson confined to bed in one of his frequent illnesses, and
+then, also, I saw him for the last time. So emaciated was he (we need
+not dwell on what seemed that "last face of Hippocrates"), that we could
+not believe there remained for him some crowded years of life and
+comparatively healthy and joy-bestowing energy. If the ocean was
+henceforth to roll between us, at least he said that we were always best
+friends when furthest apart; though, indeed, we were never so intimate
+as to be otherwise than friendly. It was never the man that I knew best;
+but the genius that I delighted in, "on this side idolatry." Always, in
+verse or in prose, in Scots or in English, he made one reader happy; by
+a kind of pre-established harmony of taste which might not have
+prevailed in the intercourse of every day's life.</p>
+
+<p>In August, 1887, Stevenson left England for ever, arriving at New York
+as a lion, hunted by reporters, whom, no doubt, he received with the
+majestic courtesy of his own Prince of Bohemia. Two versions of Jekyll
+and Hyde were being acted; all this was very unlike the calm
+indifference of his native land. It seems that in Jekyll, as "Terryfled"
+(in Scott's phrase), there is a "love interest"; love is alien to Dr.
+Jekyll, as to the shepherd before he found that Love was a dweller on
+the rocks. The Terryfication was, at least, an advertisement. To
+advertise himself, in the modern way, Stevenson was not competent. He
+never was interviewed as a Celebrity at Home, as far as I am aware.
+Indeed, he loved not society papers, and lit a bonfire and danced a
+dance around it in his garden, when some editor of a journal of that
+sort was committed to prison. His name is not mentioned, but Stevenson
+and I had against him a grudge of very old standing.</p>
+
+<p>Dollars in sufficient profusion were offered for his works, and in the
+Adirondack Hills, beside a frozen river in the starlit night, he dreamed
+of "a story of many years and countries, of the sea and the land,
+savagery and civilization." He thought of that old Indian marvel, the
+suspended life of the buried fakir, over whose grave the corn is sown
+and grown. He thought of an evil genius on whom this method should be
+tried in frozen Canadian earth. Thus, what seems like the far-fetched
+idea of a wearied fancy in "The Master of Ballantrae" was, from the
+first, of the essence of that bitter romance. The new conception fitted
+in with a tale, already dreamed of on the Perthshire moors, about the
+dark adventurous years of the Jacobite eclipse. The Prince was hidden in
+a convent of Paris, or flashing for a moment in the Mall, or cruising, a
+dingy bearded wanderer, in Germany or the Netherlands; while his
+followers were serving under French colours, under Montcalm or
+Lally-Tolendal. Men who had charged side by side at Gledsmuir and
+Culloden, might meet as foes in Canada or Hindostan. There is matter
+enough, in 1750-1765, for scores of romances, but who now can write
+them? But the Master did not now begin his deeds of bale. Stevenson's
+stepson, Mr. Osbourne, then very young, himself wrote "The Finsbury
+Tontine; or The Game of Bluff," and I was informed at the time by
+Stevenson's devoted admirer, Mr. McClure, that the book was completed by
+Mr. Osbourne for the Press. Then Stevenson took up the manuscript, and,
+as Mr. Osbourne says, "forced the thing to live as it had never lived
+before." Indeed, the style of "The Wrong Box" throughout, is Louis's
+style in such romantic farces as "The New Arabian Nights," a manner of
+his own creation.</p>
+
+<p>I seem to remember that I saw the finished manuscript, or perhaps an
+early copy of the book, and I did not care for it. Mr. Kipling rather
+surprised me by finding it so very amusing. Mr. Osbourne says that the
+story "still retains (it seems to me) a sense of failure," and that the
+public does not relish it. For my own part, on later re-readings, the
+little farce has made me laugh hysterically at the sorrows of Mr.
+William Pitman, that mild drawing-master, caught up and whirled away
+into adventures worthy of the great Fortun&eacute; du Boisgobey. The scene in
+which he is described as the American Broadwood, a person inured to a
+simple patriarchal life, a being of violent passions; with the immortal
+John in the character of the Great Vance; and that joy for ever, Uncle
+Joseph, with his deathless thirst for popular information and
+instruction&mdash;these personages, this "educated insolence," never cease to
+amuse. Uncle Joseph is no caricature. But the world likes its
+sensational novels to be written with becoming seriousness; in short,
+"The Wrong Box" is aimed at a small but devoted circle of admirers.</p>
+
+<p>People constantly ask men who have collaborated how they do the
+business? As a rule, so some French collaborator says, "some one is the
+dupe, and he is the man of genius." This was not true, too notably, in
+the case of Alexandre Dumas, nor was it true in Stevenson's case. As a
+rule, one man does the work, and the other looks on, but, again, this
+was not the way in which Stevenson and Mr. Osbourne worked. They first
+talked over the book together, and ideas were struck out in the
+encounter of minds. This practice may, very probably, prove unfruitful,
+or even injurious, to many writers; they are confused rather than
+assisted. After or during the course of the conversations (when he had
+an ally), after reflection, when he had not, Stevenson used to write out
+a series of chapter headings. One, I remember, was "The Master of
+Ballantrae to the Rescue," an incident in a tale which he began about
+the obscure adventures of Prince Charles in 1749-1750. "Ballantrae to
+the Rescue"&mdash;the sound was promising, but I do not know who was to be
+obliged by the Master.</p>
+
+<p>After the list of chapters was completed, Mr. Osbourne used to write the
+first draft, "to break the ground," and then each wrote and rewrote, an
+indefinite number of times. The style, the general effect produced, are
+the style and the effect of Stevenson. "He liked the comradeship." More
+care was taken than on a novel of which I and another were greatly
+guilty. My partner represented Mr. Nicholas Wogan as rubbing his hands
+after a bullet at Fontenoy (as history and I made quite clear) had
+deprived Mr. Wogan of one of his arms. There is no such error in the
+"Iliad," despite the unnumbered multitude of collaborators detected by
+the Higher Criticism.</p>
+
+<p>In June, 1888, Stevenson sailed out on the Pacific in search of health,
+and followed the shining shadow through the isles and seas till he made
+his last home at Samoa. It was a three years' cruise among "summer isles
+of Eden." Perhaps no book of Stevenson's is less popular than his
+narrative of storm and calm, of beachcombers and brown Polynesian
+princes. The scenery is too exotic for the general taste. The joy and
+sorrow of Stevenson was to find a society "in much the same
+convulsionary and transitional state" as the Highlands and Islands after
+1745. He was always haunted, and in popularity retarded, by History. He
+wanted to know about details of savage custom and of superstitious
+belief, a taste very far from being universal even in the most highly
+cultivated circles, where Folklore is a name of fear. He found among the
+natives such fatal Polynesian fairy ladies as they of Glenfinlas, on
+whom Scott wrote the ballad. He found a medicine-man who hypnotized him
+from behind his back, which nobody at home had been able to do before
+his face. He exchanged stories with the clansmen&mdash;Scots for Polynesian;
+they were much the same in character and incident. He had found, in
+Polynesia, the way out of our own present. He met a Polynesian Queen&mdash;a
+Mary Stuart or a Helen of Troy grown old. "She had been passed from
+chief to chief; she had been fought for and taken in war"; a "Queen of
+Cannibals, tattooed from head to foot." Now she had reached the Elysian
+plain and a windless age, living in religion, as it were: "she passes
+all her days with the sisters."</p>
+
+<p>She was not a white woman: none of these people, so courteous and kind,
+were white, were up-to-date. In London and New York amateurs did not
+want to be told about them in Stevenson's "Letters from the South
+Seas." Stevenson "collected songs and legends": fortunately he also
+worked at "The Master of Ballantrae," in spite of frequent illnesses,
+and many perils of the sea. "The Master of Ballantrae" was finished at
+Honolulu; the closing chapters are the work of a weary pen.</p>
+
+<p>He had made tryst with an evil genius that was essential to the
+conception of the book, and with a hideous tale of fraternal hatred,
+told by a constitutional coward. Everything is under the shadow of
+thunder and lit by lightning. A glimpse of Allan Breck, and the
+babblings of the Chevalier Bourke, are the only relief. But the life is
+as clearly seen as life in Stevenson's books always is, for example when
+the guinea is thrown through the stained window pane, or the old
+serving-man holds the candle to light the duel of brothers who are born
+foes; or as in the final scenes of desperate wanderings in the company
+of murderers through Canadian snows. But the book, as Sir Henry Yule
+said, is "as grim as the road to Lucknow"&mdash;as it was intended to be.</p>
+
+<p>A fresh cruise, in the following year, bettered his health, and brought
+him the anecdote of a mystery of the sea which was the germ of "The
+Wrecker." He saw Samoa, and bought land there&mdash;Vailima&mdash;the last and
+best of his resting-places; and here he was joined, in 1891, by his
+intrepid mother. He was now a lord of land, a householder in his
+unpretentious Abbotsford, and "a great chief" among the natives,
+distracted as they were by a king <i>de facto</i>, and a king over the water,
+with the sonorous names of Malietoa and Mataafa. Samoan politics, the
+strifes of Germany, England, and the States, were labyrinthine: their
+chronicle is written in his "Footnote to History." My conjectures as to
+the romantic side of his dealings with the rightful king are vague and
+need not be recorded. "You can be in a new conspiracy every day," said
+an Irishman with zest, but conspiracies are better things in fiction
+than in real life; and Stevenson had no personal ambitions, and, withal,
+as much common sense as Shelley displayed in certain late events of his
+life. He turned to the half-finished "Wrecker" and completed it.</p>
+
+<p>When the story began to appear in "Scribner's Magazine" it seemed full
+of vivacity and promise. The opening scenes in the Pacific were like
+Paradise, as the author said, to dwellers in Brixton, or other purlieus
+of London. The financial school at which Loudon Dodd was educated in
+Stock Exchange flutters was rather less convincing than any dream of
+Paradise, but none the less amusing. At home in Edinburgh, with the old
+Scottish master of jerry-building and of "plinths," the atmosphere was
+truly Scots, tea-coseys and all, while the reminiscences of Paris and
+Fontainebleau, and the <i>grandeurs et mis&egrave;res</i> of "the young
+Americo-Parisienne sculptor" were perfectly fresh to the world, though
+some of the anecdotes were known to Stevenson's intimates. Mr. James
+Pinkerton is a laudable creation, with his loyalty, his innocence, his
+total ignorance and complete lack of taste, and his scampers too near
+the wind of commercial probity. The spirit of hustle incarnate in a man
+otherwise so innocent, the ideals caught from heaven knows what American
+works for the young, and the inspired patriotism, the blundering
+enthusiastic affection, make the early Pinkerton a study as original as
+it is entertaining.</p>
+
+<p>The sale by auction of the wreck, which, by arrangement, is to be
+Pinkerton's prey, the mysterious opposition of the other bidder, so
+determined to win an object apparently so worthless, is no less
+thrilling than the sale of the fur coat in Boisgobey's "Crime de
+l'Op&eacute;ra." But the reader knows why the fur coat is so much desired,
+whereas I remember being driven so wild by curiosity about the value of
+the wreck that I wrote to Louis, desiring to learn the secret. He would
+not divulge it, and when, after the voyage to the island and the
+excitement of knocking the wreck to pieces were over&mdash;when the secret
+came out, it was neither pleasant nor probable. That a mild British
+amateur of water-colour drawing should have taken part in a massacre of
+men, shot painfully with cheap revolvers, was an example of "the
+possible improbable," and much more of a tax on belief than the
+transformation of Dr. Jekyll. When I mildly urged this criticism, I
+learned, by return of post, from a correspondent usually as dilatory as
+Wordsworth, that I was a stay-at-home person ignorant of the world, and
+of life as it is lived by full-blooded men on the high seas. That was
+very true, but the amateur in water-colour was also a mild kind of good
+being. "What would I have done with the crew who were such compromising
+witnesses, and were butchered?" I would have marooned them.</p>
+
+<p>"The Beach of Fales&aacute;" is a revelation of unfamiliar life and character,
+and one is attached to the little brown heroine. There was to have been
+"a supernatural element," better, probably, than the device of the
+&AElig;olian harps hung in the thicket. "I have got the smell and the look of
+the thing a good deal," he said, and he had got the style of his rough
+English narrator, who was, as he told the missionary, "what you call a
+sinner, what I call a sweep," but repented in time.</p>
+
+<p>A period of many projects followed; one, "The Young Chevalier," had a
+germ in "The Letter of Henry Goring" (1749-1750), with which I brought
+him acquainted, not knowing then that it was merely a romance by the
+prolific Eliza Heywood. It was in this tale that the Master of
+Ballantrae was to come to the rescue, and I think that a Scottish
+assassin (who lurks obscure in real history) and Mandrin, the famed
+French robber, were to appear, but only a chapter is published among
+other fragments. As it stands, Prince Charles's eyes are alternately
+blue and brown; brown was their actual colour&mdash;they were like
+Stevenson's own.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately, the "Chevalier" was deserted for the continuation of
+"Kidnapped," a sequel which is as good as, or, thanks to the two
+heroines, Catriona and Barbara Grant, is even better than, the original.
+To think of it is to wish to take it from the shelf and read it again.
+It is all excellent, from the scenes where Alan is hiding under a
+haystack (suggested by an adventure of the Chevalier Johnstone after
+Culloden), and the first meeting with that good daughter of Clan Alpine
+and of James Mor, onwards.</p>
+
+<p>Stevenson excited a good deal of odium among fiery Celts by his
+scoundrel Master of Lovat. There is no reason, as far as I am aware, to
+suppose that Simon was a scoundrel, but, as a figure in fiction, he is
+very firmly drawn. The abortive duel of Balfour with the Highland
+Ensign, who conceives high esteem of "Palfour," is in the author's best
+manner, as are the days of prison in that "unco place, the Bass," and he
+was justly proud of the wizard tale of Tod Lapraik. The bristling
+demeanour of Alan Breck and James Mor (a very gallant but distinctly
+unfortunate son of Rob Roy), seems a correct picture. Indeed, James Mor
+was correctly divined, probably from letters of his published in Scott's
+"Rob Roy." It does not appear that Stevenson ever saw a number of
+James's letters in the character of a spy (a spy who appears to be
+carefully bamboozling his employers), which exist in the Newcastle MSS.
+in the British Museum. But the James of these letters is the James of
+"Catriona." The scenes with the advocates of James of the Glens, at
+Inveraray, read as if they had been recorded in shorthand, at the
+moment. David himself is, of course, the Lowland prig he is meant to be,
+but Catriona, at last, was a moving heroine, though Stevenson, justly,
+preferred to her the beautiful Miss Grant, and entirely overcame the
+difficulty of making us realise her beauty. The Princess, in "Prince
+Otto," is a fair shadow, compared to Miss Grant, and Stevenson at last
+convinced most readers that if he had omitted the interest of womanhood,
+it was not from incompetence&mdash;though it may have been from diffidence.</p>
+
+<p>At this time we used to receive letters from him not infrequently; he
+sent me the "Luck of Apemama," which he sacrilegiously purchased from
+its holder. This fetish, the palladium of the island, was in one point
+remarkable&mdash;a very ordinary shell in a perfectly new box of native make.
+Why it was thought "great medicine" and ignorantly worshipped, the
+pale-face student of magic and religion could not understand. However,
+it was the Luck of the island, and when it crossed the sea to Europe a
+pestilence of measles fell on the native population. There was no
+manifest connection of cause and effect.</p>
+
+<p>Stevenson's letters to me were merely such notes as he might have
+written had we both been living within the four-mile radius; usually
+notes about books which he needed, always brightened with a quip and
+some original application of slang. Occasionally there were rhymes. One
+was about a lady:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Who beckled, beckled, beckled gaily."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Another had the refrain:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The dibs that take the islands<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Are the dollars of Peru."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>One long and lively piece was on the Achaean hero of a fantastic romance
+by Mr. Rider Haggard and myself: the Ithacan, the Stormer of the City.
+Stevenson exclaimed:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"Ye wily auld blackguard,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">How far ye hae staggered,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Frae Homer to Haggard<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And Lang."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>How variously excellent he was as a letter-writer the readers of his
+correspondence know, and how vast, considering his labours and his
+health, that correspondence is! Often it is freakish, often it is
+serious, but except in some epistles of the period of his
+apprenticeship, it is never written as if he anticipated the publisher
+and the editor. Good examples are his letters to a reviewer, who,
+criticizing him without knowing him, wrote as if he were either an
+insensible athletic optimist, or a sufferer who was a <i>poseur.</i> "The
+fact is, consciously or not, you doubt my honesty.... <i>Any brave man may
+make out</i> a life which shall be happy for himself, and, by so being,
+beneficent to those about him. And if he fail, why should I hear him
+weeping?" Why, indeed? Think of Mr. Carlyle! "Did I groan loud, or did I
+groan low, Wackford?" said Mr. Squeers. Mr. Carlyle groaned loud,
+sometimes with fair reason. Stevenson did not groan at all. If he
+posed, if his silence was a pose, it was heroic. But his intellectual
+high spirits were almost invincible. If he had a pen in his hand, the
+<i>follet</i> of Moli&egrave;re rode it. Mr. Thomas Emmett, that famous Yorkshire
+cricketer, has spoken words of gold: "I was always happy as long as I
+was bowling." Stevenson, I think, was almost always happy when he was
+writing, when the instrument of his art was in his fingers.</p>
+
+<p>Consider the deliberate and self-conscious glumness; the willful making
+the worst of things (in themselves pretty bad, I admit), that mark the
+novels of eminent moderns who thrive on their inexpensive pessimism, and
+have a name as <i>Psychologues! Oh&eacute;, les Psychologues</i>! Does anyone
+suppose that Stevenson could not have dipped his pencil in squalor and
+gloom, and psychology, and "oppositions of science falsely so-called,"
+as St. Paul, in the spirit of prophecy, remarks? "Ugliness is only the
+prose of horror," he said. "It is when you are not able to write
+'Macbeth' that you write 'Th&eacute;r&egrave;se Raquin' ... In any case, and under any
+fashion, the great man produces beauty, terror, and mirth, and the
+little man produces&mdash;&mdash;" We know what he produces, and though his books
+may be praised as if the little man were a Sophocles up to date, he and
+his works are a weariness to think upon. In them is neither beauty,
+mirth, nor terror, except the terror of illimitable ennui.</p>
+
+<p>None the less, I believe that the little men of woe are happy; are
+enjoying themselves, while they are writing, while they are doing their
+best to make the public comfortably miserable. If these authors were as
+candid as Stevenson they would admit that they enjoy their "merry days
+of desolation," and that the world is not such a bad place for them,
+after all. But perhaps before this truth can be accepted and confessed
+by these eminent practitioners in pessimism, a gleam of humour must
+arise on their darkness&mdash;and that is past praying for. There is a burden
+of a Scots song which, perhaps, may have sung itself in the ear of
+Louis, when life was at its darkest:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>"And werena my heart licht I wad die!"</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Having finished "Catriona," at about the age that Scott had when he
+wrote his first novel, "Waverley," Stevenson thought of "Weir of
+Hermiston," ("I thought of Mr. Pickwick," says Dickens with admirable
+simplicity), and fell to that work furiously, as was his wont when a
+great theme dawned on him. But soon, as usual, came the cold fit; his
+inspirations being intermittent for some untraced reason, physical or
+psychological. Possibly he foresaw the practical difficulty of his
+initial idea: that the Roman Father should sit on the bench of Scottish
+Themis and try his own son on a capital charge. This would not have been
+permitted to occur in Scotland, even when "the Fifteen" were first
+constituted into a Court. If humane emotions did not forbid, it must
+have been clear that no Scottish judge (they were not "kinless loons")
+would have permitted his son to be found guilty. Conceivably this
+damping circumstance occurred to Stevenson. He dropped, for a while, the
+hanging judge, and began "St. Ives" as a short story. It was now that,
+early in 1893, under an attack of hemorrhage, Stevenson dictated his
+tale to his stepdaughter, on his fingers, in the gesture alphabet of the
+dumb. Perhaps this feat is as marvelous as Scott's dictating "The Bride
+of Lammermoor," <i>in tormentis</i>, to Will Laidlaw.</p>
+
+<p>We see how his maladies hung on Stevenson's flank, even in Samoa, where
+his health had so remarkably improved, and permitted to him unwonted
+activities. After a visit to Sydney, he took up "The Ebb-Tide" in
+collaboration with Mr. Osbourne, whose draft of the first chapters he
+warmly applauded. It is not one of his central successes. His pencil was
+dipped in moral gloom, but even to the odious Cockney scoundrel, Huish,
+his Shakespearian tolerance accorded the virtue of indomitable courage.
+He could not help filling the book full with his abundant vitality and
+his keen observation of the islands and the beachcombers. The thing, to
+use an obsolete piece of slang, is <i>v&eacute;cu.</i> There were other projects,
+many of them, which dawned rosily, and faded into the grey; and there
+was the rich and copious correspondence dated from Vailima. His friends,
+no doubt, hearing of his good health, now and then, hoped to see his
+face again; the grouse on the hills of home were calling their eternal
+<i>Come back! come back!</i></p>
+
+<p>Stevenson, who himself could live contentedly on so little, was the most
+open-handed of men, the most liberal and cheerful of givers; and whether
+to Samoans in distressful times, or to others who sought his aid, his
+purse was never closed; while his hospitality was like Sir Walter's.
+Probably, in his hour of greatest success, he never was among "the best
+sellers." But any financial anxieties which may have beset him were
+assuaged, and his heart was greatly held up, by the success of the
+beautiful "Edinburgh Edition" of his works, conceived and carried out by
+the energy of his friend of old Edinburgh days, Mr. Charles Baxter.</p>
+
+<p>His latest work was "Weir of Hermiston"; the plenitude of his genius
+shines in every page. He himself thought that this was his best work;
+so far as we can judge by the considerable fragment that exists, he was
+in the right. There is nothing immature, nothing here of the boy; he is
+approaching, in his tale, a fateful point of passion and disaster; his
+characters, especially the elder woman, the nurse, are entirely human,
+with no touch of caprice; they all live their separate lives in our
+memories. Then the end came. One moment of bewildered
+consciousness&mdash;then unconsciousness and death. He had written to me,
+some months before, a letter full of apprehensions of the fate of Scott
+and Swift; whether warned by some monitory experience, or whether he had
+merely chanced to be thinking of the two great men who outlived
+themselves. To him death had come almost as a friend in the fullness of
+his powers; there was no touch of weakness or decay, and he was mourned
+like a king by his Samoans, by his family, by all who had known him, and
+by many thousands who had never seen his face. There was mourning at
+home in Scotland (where we hoped against hope that the news was untrue),
+in England, in Europe, in America, in Australia and the Isles. He who
+had been such "a friendly writer," who had created for us so many
+friends in his characters, had made more friends for himself, friends
+more and more various in age, race, tastes, character, and temper, than
+any British writer, perhaps, since Dickens. He was taken from us
+untimely; broken was our strong hope in the future gifts of his genius,
+and there was a pain that does not attend the peaceful passing, in the
+fullness of years and wisdom and honour, of an immortal like Tennyson.</p>
+
+<p>Any attempt by a contemporary to "place" Stevenson, to give him his
+"class" in English literature, would be a folly. The future must judge
+for itself, and, if we may estimate the taste of the future by that of
+the present, the reading public will not often look behind the most
+recent publications of its own day. But <i>les d&eacute;licats</i> will look back on
+Stevenson as they now look back on Fielding, who, to my simple thinking,
+remains unsurpassed as a novelist; and as they turn to Lamb and Hazlitt
+as essayists. The poet is, of course, at his best immortal&mdash;time cannot
+stale <i>Beowulf</i>, or the nameless lyrists of the fourteenth century, or
+Chaucer, or Spenser, and so with the rest, <i>la mort n'y mord.</i> But it is
+as a writer of prose that Stevenson must be remembered. If he is not the
+master British essayist of the later nineteenth century, I really cannot
+imagine who is to be preferred to him. His vivacity, vitality, his
+original reflections on life, his personal and fascinating style, claim
+for him the crown. Nobody, perhaps, places him beside Lamb, and he would
+not have dreamed of being equaled in renown with Hazlitt, while he is,
+I conceive, more generally sympathetic than Mr. Pater, whose place is
+apart, whose province is entirely his own. When we think of Stevenson as
+a novelist, there is this conspicuous drawback, that he never did write
+a novel on characters and conditions in the mid-stream of the life that
+was contemporary with himself. He does not compete, therefore, with
+Thackeray and Dickens, Mr. Hardy and Mr. Meredith, but Scott is also no
+competitor.</p>
+
+<p>"St. Ronan's Well" is Scott's only novel that deals with precisely
+contemporary life, and "St. Ronan's Well" is a kind of backwater; the
+story of a remote contemporary watering-place, of local squireens, and
+of a tragedy, mangled in deference to James Ballantyne. Scott did not
+often care to trust himself out of the last echoes of "the pipes that
+played for Charlie," and though his knowledge of contemporary life was
+infinitely wider than Stevenson's, we see many good reasons for his
+abstention from use of his knowledge. For example, it is obvious that he
+could not attempt a romance of the War in the Peninsula, and of life in
+London, let us say, while Wellington was holding Torres Vedras. Even
+among Stevenson's abandoned projects, there is not, I think, one which
+deals with English society in the 'eighties. His health and his fugitive
+life imposed on him those limitations against which his taste did not
+rebel, for his taste led him to the past, and to adventure in a present
+not English, but exotic. He is not in the same field, so to speak, as
+Richardson and Fielding, Dickens and Thackeray, Mr. Hardy and Mr.
+Meredith; and their field, the great living world of their time, is what
+the general reader wants the novelist to deal with as he best may.</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare, to be sure, wrote no drama on Elizabethan times in England;
+we must go to Heywood and Ben Jonson for the drama of his contemporary
+world. Many circumstances caused Stevenson, when at his best, to be a
+historical novelist, and he is, since Scott and Thackeray, the best
+historical novelist whom we have.</p>
+
+<p>Add to all this his notable eminence in tales of shorter scope; in
+essays, whether on life or on literature, so various and original, so
+graceful and so strong; add the fantasies of his fables, and remember
+that almost all he did is good&mdash;and we must, I think, give to Stevenson
+a very high place in the literature of his century.</p>
+
+<p>Of his verse I have hitherto said nothing, and I do not think that if he
+had written verse alone, his place would have been highly distinguished.
+His "Child's Garden of Verse" is a little masterpiece in a <i>genre</i> of
+his own invention. His verses in Scots are full of humour, and he had a
+complete mastery of the old Northern English of the Lowlands. His more
+serious poems often contain ideas and the expression of moods which he
+handled better, I think, in his prose. Even the story of "Ticonderoga" I
+would rather have received from him in prose than in his ballad measure.
+Possibly I am prejudiced a little by his willfulness in giving to a
+Cameron the part of the generous hero; true to his word, in spite of the
+desire to avenge a brother, and of the thrice-repeated monition of the
+dead. It is not that I grudge any glory to the children of Lochiel, a
+clan, in General Wolfe's opinion, the bravest where all were brave, a
+clan of constant and boundless loyalty. But in Stevenson's own note to
+his poem, the Cameron "swears by his sword and Ben Cruachan," and
+"Cruachan" is a slogan of the Campbells. The hero, as a matter of fact,
+was a Campbell of Inverawe. "Between the name of <i>Cameron</i> and that of
+<i>Campbell</i> the Muse will never hesitate," says Stevenson. One name means
+"Wry mouth," the other "Crooked nose"; so far, the Muse has a poor
+choice! But the tale is a tale of the Campbells, of Clan Diarmaid, and
+the Muse must adhere to the historic truth.</p>
+
+<p>This essay must not close on a difference of opinion concerning
+historical events&mdash;a jarring note.</p>
+
+<p>There are points enough in Stevenson's character and opinions which I
+have not touched; such as his religious views. He never mentioned the
+topic of religion in my hearing; it is to his printed words that the
+reader must turn, and he cannot but perceive that Stevenson's was a
+deeply religious nature. With his faith, whatever its tenets may have
+been, was implicated his uneasily active conscience; his sense of duty.
+This appears to have directed his life; and was practically the same
+thing as his sense of honour. Honour, I conceive, is, in a phrase of
+Aristotle's, duty "with a bloom on it."</p>
+
+<p>Readers of his Letters, and of his Biography by his cousin, Mr. Balfour;
+readers of his essays, and of his novels, must see that he was keenly
+interested in cases of conscience; in the right course to steer in an
+apparent conflict of duties. To say that his theory of the right course,
+in a hypothetical instance, was always the same as my own would be to
+abuse the confidence of the reader. As Preston-grange observes: "I would
+never charge myself with Mr. David's conscience; and if you could cast
+some part of it (as you went by) in a moss bog, you would find yourself
+to ride much easier without it"; and <i>not</i>, perhaps, always in the wrong
+direction. There is a case of conscience in "The Wrecker," something
+about opium-smuggling, and the conscience of Mr. Loudon Dodd (a truly
+Balfourian character), which I have studied, aided by other casuists,
+for a summer's day. We never could agree as to what the case really was,
+as to what was the moral issue.</p>
+
+<p>Casuistry may not be my strong point. I have found myself between no
+less authorities than a Chancellor of England and a learned Jesuit, both
+of whom, I thought, would certainly accept my view of a very unusual
+case of conduct. A certain cleric, in his ecclesiastical duties,
+happened to overhear an automatically uttered remark by another person;
+who never meant to speak or to be overheard. The cleric acted on this
+information, with results distressing to a pair of true lovers. I
+maintained that he did wrong. "There was no appeal," I said, "to the
+umpire. Nobody in the field asked 'How's that?'" But the Chancellor and
+the learned Jesuit backed the clergyman.</p>
+
+<p>Now, I never knew for certain how "Mr. David's conscience" would decide,
+but I think he would have been with me on this occasion, and with the
+Rules of the Game.</p>
+
+<p>There was a very pleasant trait in Stevenson's character which, perhaps,
+does not display itself in most of his writings; his great affection for
+children. In "A Child's Garden of Verse," delightful as it is, and not
+to be read without "a great inclination to cry," the child is himself,
+the child "that is gone." But, in an early letter, he writes: "Kids is
+what is the matter with me ... Children are too good to be true." He had
+a natural infatuation, so to say, for children as children, which many
+men of the pen overcome with no apparent difficulty. He could not
+overcome it; little boys and girls were his delight, and he was theirs.
+At Molokai, the Leper Island, he played croquet with the little girls;
+refusing to wear gloves, lest he should remind them of their condition.
+Sensitive and weak in body as he was, Nelson was not more fearless. It
+was equally characteristic of another quality of his, the open hand,
+that he gave a grand piano to these leper children.</p>
+
+<p>He says:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"But the nearest friends are the auldest friends,</span><br />
+<span class="i4">And the grave's the place to seek them."</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Among the nearest and the oldest friends of his I never was, but to few
+friends, nearer and older, does my <i>desiderium</i> go back so frequently;
+simply because almost every day brings something newly learned or known,
+which would have appealed most to his unequaled breadth of knowledge
+and interest and sympathy.</p>
+
+<span style="margin-left: 32em;">ANDREW LANG.</span>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<h2>AN INLAND VOYAGE</h2>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span>
+<span class="i11">"Thus sang they in the English boat."</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i30">MARVELL.</span><br /></div></div>
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>
+
+<h2><a name="DEDICATION" id="DEDICATION"></a>DEDICATION</h2>
+<blockquote><center><i>TO</i></center>
+
+<center><i>SIR WALTER GRINDLAY SIMPSON, BART.</i></center>
+
+
+<p><i>My dear "Cigarette,"</i></p>
+
+<p><i>It was enough that you should have shared so liberally in the rains and
+portages of our voyage; that you should have had so hard a paddle to
+recover the derelict "Arethusa" on the flooded Oise: and that you should
+thenceforth have piloted a mere wreck of mankind to Origny
+Sainte-Beno&icirc;te and a supper so eagerly desired. It was perhaps more than
+enough, as you once somewhat piteously complained, that I should have
+set down all the strong language to you, and kept the appropriate
+reflections for myself. I could not in decency expose you to share the
+disgrace of another and more public shipwreck. But now that this voyage
+of ours is going into a cheap edition, that peril, we shall hope, is at
+an end, and I may put your name on the burgee.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>But I cannot pause till I have lamented the fate of our two ships. That,
+sir, was not a fortunate day when we projected the possession of a canal
+barge; it was not a fortunate day when we shared our daydream with the
+most hopeful of daydreamers. For a while, indeed, the world looked
+smilingly. The barge was procured and christened, and as the "Eleven
+Thousand Virgins of Cologne," lay for some months, the admired of all
+admirers, in a pleasant river and under the walls of an ancient town. M.
+Mattras, the accomplished carpenter of Moret, had made her a centre of
+emulous labour; and you will not have forgotten the amount of sweet
+champagne consumed in the inn at the bridge end, to give zeal to the
+workmen and speed to the work. On the financial aspect I would</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> <i>not
+willingly dwell. The "Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne" rotted in the
+stream where she was beautified. She felt not the impulse of the breeze;
+she was never harnessed to the patent track-horse. And when at length
+she was sold, by the indignant carpenter of Moret, there were sold along
+with her the "Arethusa" and the "Cigarette", she of cedar, she, as we
+knew so keenly on a portage, of solid-hearted English oak. Now these
+historic vessels fly the tricolour and are known by new and alien
+names.</i></p>
+
+<p><i><span style="margin-left: 32em;">R. L. S.</span></i></p></blockquote>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="PREFACE_TO_THE_FIRST_EDITION" id="PREFACE_TO_THE_FIRST_EDITION"></a>PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>To equip so small a book with a preface is, I am half afraid, to sin
+against proportion. But a preface is more than an author can resist, for
+it is the reward of his labours. When the foundation-stone is laid, the
+architect appears with his plans, and struts for an hour before the
+public eye. So with the writer in his preface: he may have never a word
+to say, but he must show himself for a moment in the portico, hat in
+hand, and with an urbane demeanour.</p>
+
+<p>It is best, in such circumstances, to represent a delicate shade of
+manner between humility and superiority: as if the book had been written
+by someone else, and you had merely run over it and inserted what was
+good. But for my part I have not yet learned the trick to that
+perfection; I am not yet able to dissemble the warmth of my sentiments
+towards a reader; and if I meet him on the threshold, it is to invite
+him in with country cordiality.</p>
+
+<p>To say truth, I had no sooner finished reading this little book in
+proof, than I was seized upon by a distressing apprehension. It occurred
+to me that I might not only be the first to read these pages, but the
+last as well; that I might have pioneered this very smiling tract of
+country all in vain, and find not a soul to follow in my steps. The more
+I thought, the more I disliked the notion; until the distaste grew into
+a sort of panic terror, and I rushed into this Preface, which is no more
+than an advertisement for readers.</p>
+
+<p>What am I to say for my book? Caleb and Joshua<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> brought back from
+Palestine a formidable bunch of grapes; alas! my book produces naught so
+nourishing; and for the matter of that, we live in an age when people
+prefer a definition to any quantity of fruit.</p>
+
+<p>I wonder, would a negative be found enticing? for, from the negative
+point of view, I flatter myself this volume has a certain stamp.
+Although it runs to considerably upwards of two hundred pages, it
+contains not a single reference to the imbecility of God's universe, nor
+so much as a single hint that I could have made a better one myself.&mdash;I
+really do not know where my head can have been. I seem to have forgotten
+all that makes it glorious to be man.&mdash;'Tis an omission that renders the
+book philosophically unimportant; but I am in hopes the eccentricity may
+please in frivolous circles.</p>
+
+<p>To the friend who accompanied me I owe many thanks already, indeed I
+wish I owed him nothing else; but at this moment I feel towards him an
+almost exaggerated tenderness. He, at least, will become my reader:&mdash;if
+it were only to follow his own travels alongside of mine.</p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 32em;">R. L. S.</span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1><a name="AN_INLAND_VOYAGE" id="AN_INLAND_VOYAGE"></a>AN INLAND VOYAGE</h1><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>
+
+<h2>ANTWERP TO BOOM</h2>
+
+
+<p>We made a great stir in Antwerp Docks. A stevedore and a lot of dock
+porters took up the two canoes, and ran with them for the slip. A crowd
+of children followed cheering. The <i>Cigarette</i> went off in a splash and
+a bubble of small breaking water. Next moment the <i>Arethusa</i> was after
+her. A steamer was coming down, men on the paddle-box shouted hoarse
+warnings, the stevedore and his porters were bawling from the quay. But
+in a stroke or two the canoes were away out in the middle of the
+Scheldt, and all steamers, and stevedores, and other long-shore vanities
+were left behind.</p>
+
+<p>The sun shone brightly; the tide was making&mdash;four jolly miles an hour;
+the wind blew steadily, with occasional squalls. For my part, I had
+never been in a canoe under sail in my life; and my first experiment out
+in the middle of this big river was not made without some trepidation.
+What would happen when the wind first caught my little canvas? I suppose
+it was almost as trying a venture into the regions of the unknown as to
+publish a first book, or to marry. But my doubts were not of long
+duration; and in five minutes you will not be surprised to learn that I
+had tied my sheet.</p>
+
+<p>I own I was a little struck by this circumstance myself; of course, in
+company with the rest of my fellow-men, I had always tied the sheet in a
+sailing-boat; but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> in so little and crank a concern as a canoe, and with
+these charging squalls, I was not prepared to find myself follow the
+same principle; and it inspired me with some contemptuous views of our
+regard for life. It is certainly easier to smoke with the sheet
+fastened; but I had never before weighed a comfortable pipe of tobacco
+against an obvious risk, and gravely elected for the comfortable pipe.
+It is a commonplace, that we cannot answer for ourselves before we have
+been tried. But it is not so common a reflection, and surely more
+consoling, that we usually find ourselves a great deal braver and better
+than we thought. I believe this is every one's experience: but an
+apprehension that they may belie themselves in the future prevents
+mankind from trumpeting this cheerful sentiment abroad. I wish
+sincerely, for it would have saved me much trouble, there had been some
+one to put me in a good heart about life when I was younger; to tell me
+how dangers are most portentous on a distant sight; and how the good in
+a man's spirit will not suffer itself to be overlaid, and rarely or
+never deserts him in the hour of need. But we are all for tootling on
+the sentimental flute in literature; and not a man among us will go to
+the head of the march to sound the heady drums.</p>
+
+<p>It was agreeable upon the river. A barge or two went past laden with
+hay. Reeds and willows bordered the stream; and cattle and grey
+venerable horses came and hung their mild heads over the embankment.
+Here and there was a pleasant village among trees, with a noisy
+shipping-yard; here and there a villa in a lawn. The wind served us well
+up the Scheldt and thereafter up the Rupel, and we were running pretty
+free when we began to sight the brickyards of Boom, lying for a long way
+on the right bank of the river. The left bank was still green and
+pastoral, with alleys of trees along the embankment, and here and there
+a flight of steps to serve a ferry, where perhaps there sat a woman with
+her elbows on her knees, or an old gentleman with a staff and silver
+spectacles.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> But Boom and its brickyards grew smokier and shabbier with
+every minute; until a great church with a clock, and a wooden bridge
+over the river, indicated the central quarters of the town.</p>
+
+<p>Boom is not a nice place, and is only remarkable for one thing: that the
+majority of the inhabitants have a private opinion that they can speak
+English, which is not justified by fact. This gave a kind of haziness to
+our intercourse. As for the H&ocirc;tel de la Navigation, I think it is the
+worst feature of the place. It boasts of a sanded parlour, with a bar at
+one end, looking on the street; and another sanded parlour, darker and
+colder, with an empty bird-cage and a tricolor subscription box by way
+of sole adornment, where we made shift to dine in the company of three
+uncommunicative engineer apprentices and a silent bagman. The food, as
+usual in Belgium, was of a nondescript occasional character; indeed, I
+have never been able to detect anything in the nature of a meal among
+this pleasing people; they seem to peck and trifle with viands all day
+long in an amateur spirit: tentatively French, truly German, and somehow
+falling between the two.</p>
+
+<p>The empty bird-cage, swept and garnished, and with no trace of the old
+piping favourite, save where two wires had been pushed apart to hold its
+lump of sugar, carried with it a sort of graveyard cheer. The engineer
+apprentices would have nothing to say to us, nor indeed to the bagman;
+but talked low and sparingly to one another, or raked us in the gaslight
+with a gleam of spectacles. For though handsome lads, they were all (in
+the Scots phrase) barnacled.</p>
+
+<p>There was an English maid in the hotel, who had been long enough out of
+England to pick up all sorts of funny foreign idioms, and all sorts of
+curious foreign ways, which need not here be specified. She spoke to us
+very fluently in her jargon, asked us information as to the manners of
+the present day in England, and obligingly corrected us<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> when we
+attempted to answer. But as we were dealing with a woman, perhaps our
+information was not so much thrown away as it appeared. The sex likes to
+pick up knowledge and yet preserve its superiority. It is good policy,
+and almost necessary in the circumstances. If a man finds a woman admire
+him, were it only for his acquaintance with geography, he will begin at
+once to build upon the admiration. It is only by unintermittent snubbing
+that the pretty ones can keep us in our place. Men, as Miss Howe or Miss
+Harlowe would have said, "are such <i>encroachers.</i>" For my part, I am
+body and soul with the women; and after a well-married couple, there is
+nothing so beautiful in the world as the myth of the divine huntress. It
+is no use for a man to take to the woods; we know him; St. Anthony tried
+the same thing long ago, and had a pitiful time of it by all accounts.
+But there is this about some women, which overtops the best gymnosophist
+among men, that they suffice to themselves, and can walk in a high and
+cold zone without the countenance of any trousered being. I declare,
+although the reverse of a professed ascetic, I am more obliged to women
+for this ideal than I should be to the majority of them, or indeed to
+any but one, for a spontaneous kiss. There is nothing so encouraging as
+the spectacle of self-sufficiency. And when I think of the slim and
+lovely maidens, running the woods all night to the note of Diana's horn;
+moving among the old oaks, as fancy-free as they; things of the forest
+and the starlight, not touched by the commotion of man's hot and turbid
+life&mdash;although there are plenty other ideals that I should prefer&mdash;I
+find my heart beat at the thought of this one. 'Tis to fail in life, but
+to fail with what a grace! That is not lost which is not regretted. And
+where&mdash;here slips out the male&mdash;where would be much of the glory of
+inspiring love, if there were no contempt to overcome?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>ON THE WILLEBROEK CANAL</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>Next morning, when we set forth on the Willebroek Canal, the rain began
+heavy and chill. The water of the canal stood at about the drinking
+temperature of tea; and under this cold aspersion the surface was
+covered with steam. The exhilaration of departure, and the easy motion
+of the boats under each stroke of the paddles, supported us through this
+misfortune while it lasted; and when the cloud passed and the sun came
+out again, our spirits went up above the range of stay-at-home humours.
+A good breeze rustled and shivered in the rows of trees that bordered
+the canal. The leaves flickered in and out of the light in tumultuous
+masses. It seemed sailing weather to eye and ear; but down between the
+banks, the wind reached us only in faint and desultory puffs. There was
+hardly enough to steer by. Progress was intermittent and unsatisfactory.
+A jocular person, of marine antecedents, hailed us from the tow-path
+with a "<i>C'est vite, mais c'est long.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>The canal was busy enough. Every now and then we met or overtook a long
+string of boats, with great green tillers; high sterns with a window on
+either side of the rudder, and perhaps a jug or a flower-pot in one of
+the windows; a dinghy following behind; a woman busied about the day's
+dinner, and a handful of children. These barges were all tied one behind
+the other with tow ropes, to the number of twenty-five or thirty; and
+the line was headed and kept in motion by a steamer of strange
+construction. It had neither paddle-wheel nor screw; but by some gear
+not rightly comprehensible to the unmechanical mind, it fetched up over
+its bow a small bright<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> chain which lay along the bottom of the canal,
+and paying it out again over the stern, dragged itself forward, link by
+link, with its whole retinue of loaded skows. Until one had found out
+the key to the enigma, there was something solemn and uncomfortable in
+the progress of one of these trains, as it moved gently along the water
+with nothing to mark its advance but an eddy alongside dying away into
+the wake.</p>
+
+<p>Of all the creatures of commercial enterprise, a canal barge is by far
+the most delightful to consider. It may spread its sails, and then you
+see it sailing high above the tree-tops and the windmill, sailing on the
+aqueduct, sailing through the green corn-lands: the most picturesque of
+things amphibious. Or the horse plods along at a foot-pace, as if there
+were no such thing as business in the world; and the man dreaming at the
+tiller sees the same spire on the horizon all day long. It is a mystery
+how things ever get to their destination at this rate; and to see the
+barges waiting their turn at a lock affords a fine lesson of how easily
+the world may be taken. There should be many contented spirits on board,
+for such a life is both to travel and to stay at home.</p>
+
+<p>The chimney smokes for dinner as you go along; the banks of the canal
+slowly unroll their scenery to contemplative eyes; the barge floats by
+great forests and through great cities with their public buildings and
+their lamps at night; and for the barge, in his floating home,
+"travelling abed," it is merely as if he were listening to another man's
+story or turning the leaves of a picture-book in which he had no
+concern. He may take his afternoon walk in some foreign country on the
+banks of the canal, and then come home to dinner at his own fireside.</p>
+
+<p>There is not enough exercise in such a life for any high measure of
+health; but a high measure of health is only necessary for unhealthy
+people. The slug of a fellow, who is never ill nor well, has a quiet
+time of it in life, and dies all the easier.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I am sure I would rather be a barge than occupy any position under
+heaven that required attendance at an office. There are few callings, I
+should say, where a man gives up less of his liberty in return for
+regular meals. The barge is on shipboard&mdash;he is master in his own
+ship&mdash;he can land whenever he will&mdash;he can never be kept beating off a
+lee-shore a whole frosty night when the sheets are as hard as iron; and,
+so far as I can make out, time stands as nearly still with him as is
+compatible with the return of bed-time or the dinner-hour. It is not
+easy to see why a barge should ever die.</p>
+
+<p>Half-way between Willebroek and Villevorde, in a beautiful reach of
+canal like a squire's avenue, we went ashore to lunch. There were two
+eggs, a junk of bread, and a bottle of wine on board the <i>Arethusa</i>; and
+two eggs and an Etna cooking apparatus on board the <i>Cigarette.</i> The
+master of the latter boat smashed one of the eggs in the course of
+disembarkation; but observing pleasantly that it might still be cooked
+<i>&agrave; la papier</i>, he dropped it into the Etna, in its covering of Flemish
+newspaper. We landed in a blink of fine weather; but we had not been two
+minutes ashore before the wind freshened into half a gale, and the rain
+began to patter on our shoulders. We sat as close about the Etna as we
+could. The spirits burned with great ostentation; the grass caught flame
+every minute or two, and had to be trodden out; and before long, there
+were several burnt fingers of the party. But the solid quantity of
+cookery accomplished was out of proportion with so much display; and
+when we desisted, after two applications of the fire, the sound egg was
+little more than loo-warm; and as for <i>&agrave; la papier</i>, it was a cold and
+sordid <i>fricass&eacute;e</i> of printer's ink and broken egg-shell. We made shift
+to roast the other two, by putting them close to the burning spirits;
+and that with better success. And then we uncorked the bottle of wine,
+and sat down in a ditch with our canoe aprons over our knees. It rained
+smartly. Discomfort,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> when it is honestly uncomfortable and makes no
+nauseous pretensions to the contrary, is a vastly humorous business; and
+people well steeped and stupefied in the open air are in a good vein for
+laughter. From this point of view, even egg <i>&agrave; la papier</i> offered by way
+of food may pass muster as a sort of accessory to the fun. But this
+manner of jest, although it may be taken in good part, does not invite
+repetition; and from that time forward, the Etna voyaged like a
+gentleman in the locker of the <i>Cigarette.</i></p>
+
+<p>It is almost unnecessary to mention that when lunch was over and we got
+aboard again and made sail, the wind promptly died away. The rest of the
+journey to Villevorde, we still spread our canvas to the unfavouring
+air; and with now and then a puff, and now and then a spell of paddling,
+drifted along from lock to lock, between the orderly trees.</p>
+
+<p>It was a fine, green, fat landscape; or rather a mere green water-lane,
+going on from village to village. Things had a settled look, as in
+places long lived in. Crop-headed children spat upon us from the bridges
+as we went below, with a true conservative feeling. But even more
+conservative were the fishermen, intent upon their floats, who let us go
+by without one glance. They perched upon sterlings and buttresses and
+along the slope of the embankment, gently occupied. They were
+indifferent, like pieces of dead nature. They did not move any more than
+if they had been fishing in an old Dutch print. The leaves fluttered,
+the water lapped, but they continued in one stay like so many churches
+established by law. You might have trepanned every one of their innocent
+heads, and found no more than so much coiled fishing-line below their
+skulls. I do not care for your stalwart fellows in india-rubber
+stockings breasting up mountain torrents with a salmon rod; but I do
+dearly love the class of man who plies his unfruitful art, for ever and
+a day, by still and depopulated waters.</p>
+
+<p>At the last lock, just beyond Villevorde, there was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> a lock-mistress who
+spoke French comprehensibly, and told us we were still a couple of
+leagues from Brussels. At the same place the rain began again. It fell
+in straight, parallel lines; and the surface of the canal was thrown up
+into an infinity of little crystal fountains. There were no beds to be
+had in the neighbourhood. Nothing for it but to lay the sails aside and
+address ourselves to steady paddling in the rain.</p>
+
+<p>Beautiful country houses, with clocks and long lines of shuttered
+windows, and fine old trees standing in groves and avenues, gave a rich
+and sombre aspect in the rain and the deepening dusk to the shores of
+the canal. I seem to have seen something of the same effect in
+engravings: opulent landscapes, deserted and overhung with the passage
+of storm. And throughout we had the escort of a hooded cart, which
+trotted shabbily along the tow-path, and kept at an almost uniform
+distance in our wake.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE ROYAL SPORT NAUTIQUE</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>The rain took off near Laeken. But the sun was already down; the air was
+chill; and we had scarcely a dry stitch between the pair of us. Nay, now
+we found ourselves near the end of the All&eacute;e Verte, and on the very
+threshold of Brussels, we were confronted by a serious difficulty. The
+shores were closely lined by canal boats waiting their turn at the lock.
+Nowhere was there any convenient landing-place; nowhere so much as a
+stable-yard to leave the canoes in for the night. We scrambled ashore
+and entered an <i>estaminet</i> where some sorry fellows were drinking with
+the landlord. The landlord was pretty round with us; he knew of no
+coach-house or stable-yard, nothing of the sort; and seeing we had come
+with no mind to drink, he did not conceal his impatience to be rid of
+us. One of the sorry fellows came to the rescue. Somewhere in the corner
+of the basin there was a slip, he informed us, and something else
+besides, not very clearly defined by him, but hopefully construed by his
+hearers.</p>
+
+<p>Sure enough there was the slip in the corner of the basin, and at the
+top of it two nice-looking lads in boating clothes. The <i>Arethusa</i>
+addressed himself to these. One of them said there would be no
+difficulty about a night's lodging for our boats; and the other, taking
+a cigarette from his lips, inquired if they were made by Searle and Son.
+The name was quite an introduction. Half a dozen other young men came
+out of a boat-house bearing the superscription ROYAL SPORT NAUTIQUE, and
+joined in the talk. They were all very polite, voluble, and
+enthusiastic; and their discourse was interlarded with English boating<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>
+terms, and the names of English boat-builders and English clubs. I do
+not know, to my shame, any spot in my native land where I should have
+been so warmly received by the same number of people. We were English
+boating-men, and the Belgian boating-men fell upon our necks. I wonder
+if French Huguenots were as cordially greeted by English Protestants
+when they came across the Channel out of great tribulation. But, after
+all, what religion knits people so closely as a common sport?</p>
+
+<p>The canoes were carried into the boat-house; they were washed down for
+us by the Club servants, the sails were hung out to dry, and everything
+made as snug and tidy as a picture. And in the meanwhile we were led
+upstairs by our new-found brethren, for so more than one of them stated
+the relationship, and made free of their lavatory. This one lent us
+soap, that one a towel, a third and fourth helped us to undo our bags.
+And all the time such questions, such assurances of respect and
+sympathy! I declare I never knew what glory was before.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes; the <i>Royal Sport Nautique</i> is the oldest club in Belgium."</p>
+
+<p>"We number two hundred."</p>
+
+<p>"We"&mdash;this is not a substantive speech, but an abstract of many
+speeches, the impression left upon my mind after a great deal of talk;
+and very youthful, pleasant, natural, and patriotic it seems to me to
+be&mdash;"We have gained all races, except those where we were cheated by the
+French."</p>
+
+<p>"You must leave all your wet things to be dried."</p>
+
+<p>"O! <i>entre fr&egrave;res!</i> In any boat-house in England we should find the
+same." (I cordially hope they might.)</p>
+
+<p>"<i>En Angleterre, vous employez des sliding-seats, n'est-ce pas?</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"We are all employed in commerce during the day; but in the evening,
+<i>voyez-vous, nous sommes s&egrave;rieux.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>These were the words. They were all employed over<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> the frivolous
+mercantile concerns of Belgium during the day; but in the evening they
+found some hours for the serious concerns of life. I may have a wrong
+idea of wisdom, but I think that was a very wise remark. People
+connected with literature and philosophy are busy all their days in
+getting rid of second-hand notions and false standards. It is their
+profession, in the sweat of their brows, by dogged thinking, to recover
+their old fresh view of life, and distinguish what they really and
+originally like, from what they have only learned to tolerate perforce.
+And these Royal Nautical Sportsmen had the distinction still quite
+legible in their hearts. They had still those clean perceptions of what
+is nice and nasty, what is interesting and what is dull, which envious
+old gentlemen refer to as illusions. The nightmare illusion of middle
+age, the bear's hug of custom gradually squeezing the life out of a
+man's soul, had not yet begun for these happy-starred young Belgians.
+They still knew that the interest they took in their business was a
+trifling affair compared to their spontaneous, long-suffering affection
+for nautical sports. To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying
+Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept
+your soul alive. Such a man may be generous; he may be honest in
+something more than the commercial sense; he may love his friends with
+an elective, personal sympathy, and not accept them as an adjunct of the
+station to which he has been called. He may be a man, in short, acting
+on his own instincts, keeping in his own shape that God made him in; and
+not a mere crank in the social engine-house, welded on principles that
+he does not understand, and for purposes that he does not care for.</p>
+
+<p>For will any one dare to tell me that business is more entertaining than
+fooling among boats? He must have never seen a boat, or never seen an
+office, who says so. And for certain the one is a great deal better for
+the health. There should be nothing so much a man's business as his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>
+amusements. Nothing but money-grubbing can be put forward to the
+contrary; no one but</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From Heaven,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>durst risk a word in answer. It is but a lying cant that would represent
+the merchant and the banker as people disinterestedly toiling for
+mankind, and then most useful when they are most absorbed in their
+transactions; for the man is more important than his services. And when
+my Royal Nautical Sportsman shall have so far fallen from his hopeful
+youth that he cannot pluck up an enthusiasm over anything but his
+ledger, I venture to doubt whether he will be near so nice a fellow, and
+whether he would welcome, with so good a grace, a couple of drenched
+Englishmen paddling into Brussels in the dusk.</p>
+
+<p>When we had changed our wet clothes and drunk a glass of pale ale to the
+Club's prosperity, one of their number escorted us to an hotel. He would
+not join us at our dinner, but he had no objection to a glass of wine.
+Enthusiasm is very wearing; and I begin to understand why prophets were
+unpopular in Judea, where they were best known. For three stricken
+hours did this excellent young man sit beside us to dilate on boats and
+boat-races; and before he left, he was kind enough to order our bedroom
+candles.</p>
+
+<p>We endeavoured now and again to change the subject; but the diversion
+did not last a moment: the Royal Nautical Sportsman bridled, shied,
+answered the question, and then breasted once more into the swelling
+tide of his subject. I call it his subject; but I think it was he who
+was subjected. The <i>Arethusa</i>, who holds all racing as a creature of the
+devil, found himself in a pitiful dilemma. He durst not own his
+ignorance, for the honour of Old England, and spoke away about English
+clubs and English oarsmen whose fame had never before come to his ears.
+Several times, and, once above all, on the question of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> sliding-seats,
+he was within an ace of exposure. As for the <i>Cigarette</i>, who has rowed
+races in the heat of his blood, but now disowns these slips of his
+wanton youth, his case was still more desperate; for the Royal Nautical
+proposed that he should take an oar in one of their eights on the
+morrow, to compare the English with the Belgian stroke. I could see my
+friend perspiring in his chair whenever that particular topic came up.
+And there was yet another proposal which had the same effect on both of
+us. It appeared that the champion canoeist of Europe (as well as most
+other champions) was a Royal Nautical Sportsman. And if we would only
+wait until the Sunday, this infernal paddler would be so condescending
+as to accompany us on our next stage. Neither of us had the least desire
+to drive the coursers of the sun against Apollo.</p>
+
+<p>When the young man was gone, we countermanded our candles, and ordered
+some brandy and water. The great billows had gone over our head. The
+Royal Nautical Sportsmen were as nice young fellows as a man would wish
+to see, but they were a trifle too young and a thought too nautical for
+us. We began to see that we were old and cynical; we liked ease and the
+agreeable rambling of the human mind about this and the other subject;
+we did not want to disgrace our native land by messing an eight, or
+toiling pitifully in the wake of the champion canoeist. In short, we had
+recourse to flight. It seemed ungrateful, but we tried to make that good
+on a card loaded with sincere compliments. And indeed it was no time for
+scruples; we seemed to feel the hot breath of the champion on our
+necks.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>AT MAUBEUGE</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>Partly from the terror we had of our good friends the Royal Nauticals,
+partly from the fact that there were no fewer than fifty-five locks
+between Brussels and Charleroi, we concluded that we should travel by
+train across the frontier, boats and all. Fifty-five locks in a day's
+journey was pretty well tantamount to trudging the whole distance on
+foot, with the canoes upon our shoulders, an object of astonishment to
+the trees on the canal side, and of honest derision to all
+right-thinking children.</p>
+
+<p>To pass the frontier even in a train is a difficult matter for the
+<i>Arethusa.</i> He is somehow or other a marked man for the official eye.
+Wherever he journeys there are the officers gathered together. Treaties
+are solemnly signed, foreign ministers, ambassadors, and consuls sit
+throned in state from China to Peru, and the Union Jack flutters on all
+the winds of heaven. Under these safeguards, portly clergymen,
+schoolmistresses, gentlemen in grey tweed suits, and all the ruck and
+rabble of British touristry pour unhindered, "Murray" in hand, over the
+railways of the Continent, and yet the slim person of the <i>Arethusa</i> is
+taken in the meshes, while these great fish go on their way rejoicing.
+If he travels without a passport, he is cast, without any figure about
+the matter, into noisome dungeons: if his papers are in order, he is
+suffered to go his way indeed, but not until he has been humiliated by a
+general incredulity. He is a born British subject, yet he has never
+succeeded in persuading a single official of his nationality. He
+flatters himself he is indifferent honest; yet he is rarely taken for
+anything better than a spy, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> there is no absurd and disreputable
+means of livelihood but has been attributed to him in some heat of
+official or popular distrust....</p>
+
+<p>For the life of me I cannot understand it. I, too, have been knolled to
+church, and sat at good men's feasts; but I bear no mark of it. I am as
+strange as a Jack Indian to their official spectacles. I might come from
+any part of the globe, it seems, except from where I do. My ancestors
+have laboured in vain, and the glorious Constitution cannot protect me
+in my walks abroad. It is a great thing, believe me, to present a good
+normal type of the nation you belong to.</p>
+
+<p>Nobody else was asked for his papers on the way to Maubeuge; but I was,
+and although I clung to my rights, I had to choose at last between
+accepting the humiliation and being left behind by the train. I was
+sorry to give way; but I wanted to get to Maubeuge.</p>
+
+<p>Maubeuge is a fortified town, with a very good inn, the <i>Grand Cerf.</i> It
+seemed to be inhabited principally by soldiers and bagmen; at least,
+these were all that we saw, except the hotel servants. We had to stay
+there some time, for the canoes were in no hurry to follow us, and at
+last stuck hopelessly in the custom-house until we went back to liberate
+them. There was nothing to do, nothing to see. We had good meals, which
+was a great matter; but that was all.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Cigarette</i> was nearly taken up upon a charge of drawing the
+fortifications: a feat of which he was hopelessly incapable. And
+besides, as I suppose each belligerent nation has a plan of the other's
+fortified places already, these precautions are of the nature of
+shutting the stable door after the steed is away. But I have no doubt
+they help to keep up a good spirit at home. It is a great thing if you
+can persuade people that they are somehow or other partakers in a
+mystery. It makes them feel bigger. Even the Freemasons, who have been
+shown up to satiety, preserve a kind of pride; and not a grocer among
+them,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> however honest, harmless, and empty-headed he may feel himself to
+be at bottom, but comes home from one of their <i>c&#339;nacula</i> with a
+portentous significance for himself.</p>
+
+<p>It is an odd thing, how happily two people, if there are two, can live
+in a place where they have no acquaintance. I think the spectacle of a
+whole life in which you have no part paralysis personal desire. You are
+content to become a mere spectator. The baker stands in his door; the
+colonel with his three medals goes by to the <i>caf&eacute;</i> at night; the troops
+drum and trumpet and man the ramparts, as bold as so many lions. It
+would task language to say how placidly you behold all this. In a place
+where you have taken some root, you are provoked out of your
+indifference; you have a hand in the game; your friends are fighting
+with the army. But in a strange town, not small enough to grow too soon
+familiar, nor so large as to have laid itself out for travellers, you
+stand so far apart from the business that you positively forget it would
+be possible to go nearer; you have so little human interest around you,
+that you do not remember yourself to be a man. Perhaps, in a very short
+time, you would be one no longer. Gymnosophists go into a wood, with all
+nature seething around them, with romance on every side; it would be
+much more to the purpose if they took up their abode in a dull country
+town, where they should see just so much of humanity as to keep them
+from desiring more, and only the stale externals of man's life. These
+externals are as dead to us as so many formalities, and speak a dead
+language in our eyes and ears. They have no more meaning than an oath or
+a salutation. We are so much accustomed to see married couples going to
+church of a Sunday that we have clean forgotten what they represent; and
+novelists are driven to rehabilitate adultery, no less, when they wish
+to show us what a beautiful thing it is for a man and a woman to live
+for each other.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>One person in Maubeuge, however, showed me something more than his
+outside. That was the driver of the hotel omnibus: a mean enough looking
+little man, as well as I can remember; but with a spark of something
+human in his soul. He had heard of our little journey, and came to me at
+once in envious sympathy. How he longed to travel! he told me. How he
+longed to be somewhere else, and see the round world before he went into
+the grave! "Here I am," said he. "I drive to the station. Well. And then
+I drive back again to the hotel. And so on every day, and all the week
+round. My God, is that life?" I could not say I thought it was&mdash;for him.
+He pressed me to tell him where I had been, and where I hoped to go; and
+as he listened, I declare the fellow sighed. Might not this have been a
+brave African traveller, or gone to the Indies after Drake? But it is an
+evil age for the gypsily inclined among men. He who can sit squarest on
+a three-legged stool, he it is who has the wealth and glory.</p>
+
+<p>I wonder if my friend is still driving the omnibus for the <i>Grand Cerf</i>?
+Not very likely, I believe; for I think he was on the eve of mutiny when
+we passed through, and perhaps our passage determined him for good.
+Better a thousand times that he should be a tramp, and mend pots and
+pans by the wayside, and sleep under trees, and see the dawn and the
+sunset every day above a new horizon. I think I hear you say that it is
+a respectable position to drive an omnibus? Very well. What right has
+he, who likes it not, to keep those who would like it dearly out of this
+respectable position? Suppose a dish were not to my taste, and you told
+me that it was a favourite amongst the rest of the company, what should
+I conclude from that? Not to finish the dish against my stomach, I
+suppose.</p>
+
+<p>Respectability is a very good thing in its way, but it does not rise
+superior to all considerations. I would not for a moment venture to hint
+that it was a matter of taste;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> but I think I will go as far as this:
+that if a position is admittedly unkind, uncomfortable, unnecessary, and
+superfluously useless, although it were as respectable as the Church of
+England, the sooner a man is out of it, the better for himself, and all
+concerned.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>ON THE SAMBRE CANALISED</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>
+
+<h4>TO QUARTES</h4>
+
+
+<p>About three in the afternoon the whole establishment of the <i>Grand Cerf</i>
+accompanied us to the water's edge. The man of the omnibus was there
+with haggard eyes. Poor cage-bird! Do I not remember the time when I
+myself haunted the station, to watch train after train carry its
+complement of freemen into the night, and read the names of distant
+places on the time-bills with indescribable longings?</p>
+
+<p>We were not clear of the fortifications before the rain began. The wind
+was contrary, and blew in furious gusts; nor were the aspects of nature
+any more clement than the doings of the sky. For we passed through a
+stretch of blighted country, sparsely covered with brush, but handsomely
+enough diversified with factory chimneys. We landed in a soiled meadow
+among some pollards, and there smoked a pipe in a flaw of fair weather.
+But the wind blew so hard, we could get little else to smoke. There were
+no natural objects in the neighbourhood, but some sordid workshops. A
+group of children headed by a tall girl stood and watched us from a
+little distance all the time we stayed. I heartily wonder what they
+thought of us.</p>
+
+<p>At Hautmont, the lock was almost impassable; the landing-place being
+steep and high, and the launch at a long distance. Near a dozen grimy
+workmen lent us a hand. They refused any reward; and, what is much
+better, refused it handsomely, without conveying any sense of insult.
+"It is a way we have in our country<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>side," said they. And a very
+becoming way it is. In Scotland, where also you will get services for
+nothing, the good people reject your money as if you had been trying to
+corrupt a voter. When people take the trouble to do dignified acts, it
+is worth while to take a little more, and allow the dignity to be common
+to all concerned. But in our brave Saxon countries, where we plod
+threescore years and ten in the mud, and the wind keeps singing in our
+ears from birth to burial, we do our good and bad with a high hand, and
+almost offensively; and make even our alms a witness-bearing and an act
+of war against the wrong.</p>
+
+<p>After Hautmont, the sun came forth again and the wind went down; and a
+little paddling took us beyond the ironworks and through a delectable
+land. The river wound among low hills, so that sometimes the sun was at
+our backs, and sometimes it stood right ahead, and the river before us
+was one sheet of intolerable glory. On either hand, meadows and orchards
+bordered, with a margin of sedge and water flowers, upon the river. The
+hedges were of great height, woven about the trunks of hedgerow elms;
+and the fields, as they were often very small, looked like a series of
+bowers along the stream. There was never any prospect; sometimes a
+hill-top with its trees would look over the nearest hedgerow, just to
+make a middle distance for the sky; but that was all. The heaven was
+bare of clouds. The atmosphere, after the rain, was of enchanting
+purity. The river doubled among the hillocks, a shining strip of mirror
+glass; and the dip of the paddles set the flowers shaking along the
+brink.</p>
+
+<p>In the meadows wandered black and white cattle fantastically marked. One
+beast, with a white head and the rest of the body glossy black, came to
+the edge to drink, and stood gravely twitching his ears at me as I went
+by, like some sort of preposterous clergyman in a play. A moment after I
+heard a loud plunge, and, turning<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> my head, saw the clergyman struggling
+to shore. The bank had given way under his feet.</p>
+
+<p>Besides the cattle, we saw no living things except a few birds and a
+great many fishermen. These sat along the edges of the meadows,
+sometimes with one rod, sometimes with as many as half a score. They
+seemed stupefied with contentment; and when we induced them to exchange
+a few words with us about the weather, their voices sounded quiet and
+far away. There was a strange diversity of opinion among them as to the
+kind of fish for which they set their lures; although they were all
+agreed in this, that the river was abundantly supplied. Where it was
+plain that no two of them had ever caught the same kind of fish, we
+could not help suspecting that perhaps not any one of them had ever
+caught a fish at all. I hope, since the afternoon was so lovely, that
+they were one and all rewarded; and that a silver booty went home in
+every basket for the pot. Some of my friends would cry shame on me for
+this; but I prefer a man, were he only an angler, to the bravest pair of
+gills in all God's waters. I do not affect fishes unless when cooked in
+sauce; whereas an angler is an important piece of river scenery, and
+hence deserves some recognition among canoeists. He can always tell you
+where you are after a mild fashion; and his quiet presence serves to
+accentuate the solitude and stillness, and remind you of the glittering
+citizens below your boat.</p>
+
+<p>The Sambre turned so industriously to and fro among his little hills,
+that it was past six before we drew near the lock at Quartes. There were
+some children on the tow-path, with whom the <i>Cigarette</i> fell into a
+chaffing talk as they ran along beside us. It was in vain that I warned
+him. In vain I told him, in English, that boys were the most dangerous
+creatures; and if once you began with them, it was safe to end in a
+shower of stones. For my own part, whenever anything was addressed to
+me, I smiled gently and shook my head as though I were an inoffensive<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>
+person inadequately acquainted with French. For indeed I have had such
+experience at home, that I would sooner meet many wild animals than a
+troop of healthy urchins.</p>
+
+<p>But I was doing injustice to these peaceable young Hainaulters. When the
+<i>Cigarette</i> went off to make inquiries, I got out upon the bank to smoke
+a pipe and superintend the boats, and became at once the centre of much
+amiable curiosity. The children had been joined by this time by a young
+woman and a mild lad who had lost an arm; and this gave me more
+security. When I let slip my first word or so in French, a little girl
+nodded her head with a comical grown-up air. "Ah, you see," she said,
+"he understands well enough now; he was just making believe." And the
+little group laughed together very good-naturedly.</p>
+
+<p>They were much impressed when they heard we came from England; and the
+little girl proffered the information that England was an island "and a
+far way from here&mdash;<i>bien loin d'ici.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, you may say that,&mdash;a far way from here," said the lad with one arm.</p>
+
+<p>I was as nearly home-sick as ever I was in my life; they seemed to make
+it such an incalculable distance to the place where I first saw the day.</p>
+
+<p>They admired the canoes very much. And I observed one piece of delicacy
+in these children, which is worthy of record. They had been deafening us
+for the last hundred yards with petitions for a sail; ay, and they
+deafened us to the same tune next morning when we came to start; but
+then, when the canoes were lying empty, there was no word of any such
+petition. Delicacy? or perhaps a bit of fear for the water in so crank a
+vessel? I hate cynicism a great deal worse than I do the devil; unless
+perhaps the two were the same thing! And yet 'tis a good tonic; the cold
+tub and bath-towel of the sentiments; and positively necessary to life
+in cases of advanced sensibility.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>From the boats they turned to my costume. They could not make enough of
+my red sash; and my knife filled them with awe.</p>
+
+<p>"They make them like that in England," said the boy with one arm. I was
+glad he did not know how badly we make them in England nowadays. "They
+are for people who go away to sea," he added, "and to defend one's life
+against great fish."</p>
+
+<p>I felt I was becoming a more and more romantic figure to the little
+group at every word. And so I suppose I was. Even my pipe, although it
+was an ordinary French clay, pretty well "trousered," as they call it,
+would have a rarity in their eyes, as a thing coming from so far away.
+And if my feathers were not very fine in themselves, they were all from
+over seas. One thing in my outfit, however, tickled them out of all
+politeness; and that was the bemired condition of my canvas shoes. I
+suppose they were sure the mud at any rate was a home product. The
+little girl (who was the genius of the party) displayed her own sabots
+in competition; and I wish you could have seen how gracefully and
+merrily she did it.</p>
+
+<p>The young woman's milk-can, a great amphora of hammered brass, stood
+some way off upon the sward. I was glad of an opportunity to divert
+public attention from myself, and return some of the compliments I had
+received. So I admired it cordially both for form and colour, telling
+them, and very truly, that it was as beautiful as gold. They were not
+surprised. The things were plainly the boast of the countryside. And the
+children expatiated on the costliness of these amphorae, which sell
+sometimes as high as thirty francs apiece; told me how they were carried
+on donkeys, one on either side of the saddle, a brave caparison in
+themselves; and how they were to be seen all over the district, and at
+the larger farms in great number and of great size.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>PONT-SUR-SAMBRE</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>
+
+<h4>WE ARE PEDLARS</h4>
+
+
+<p>The <i>Cigarette</i> returned with good news. There were beds to be had some
+ten minutes' walk from where we were, at a place called Pont. We stowed
+the canoes in a granary, and asked among the children for a guide. The
+circle at once widened round us, and our offers of reward were received
+in dispiriting silence. We were plainly a pair of Bluebeards to the
+children; they might speak to us in public places, and where they had
+the advantage of numbers; but it was another thing to venture off alone
+with two uncouth and legendary characters, who had dropped from the
+clouds upon their hamlet this quiet afternoon, sashed and be-knived, and
+with a flavour of great voyages. The owner of the granary came to our
+assistance, singled out one little fellow and threatened him with
+corporalities; or I suspect we should have had to find the way for
+ourselves. As it was, he was more frightened at the granary man than the
+strangers, having perhaps had some experience of the former. But I fancy
+his little heart must have been going at a fine rate; for he kept
+trotting at a respectful distance in front, and looking back at us with
+scared eyes. Not otherwise may the children of the young world have
+guided Jove or one of his Olympian compeers on an adventure.</p>
+
+<p>A miry lane led us up from Quartes with its church and bickering
+windmill. The hinds were trudging homewards from the fields. A brisk
+little woman passed us by. She was seated across a donkey between a pair
+of glitter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>ing milk-cans; and, as she went, she kicked jauntily with her
+heels upon the donkey's side, and scattered shrill remarks among the
+wayfarers. It was notable that none of the tired men took the trouble to
+reply. Our conductor soon led us out of the lane and across country. The
+sun had gone down, but the west in front of us was one lake of level
+gold. The path wandered a while in the open, and then passed under a
+trellis like a bower indefinitely prolonged. On either hand were shadowy
+orchards; cottages lay low among the leaves, and sent their smoke to
+heaven; every here and there, in an opening, appeared the great gold
+face of the west.</p>
+
+<p>I never saw the <i>Cigarette</i> in such an idyllic frame of mind. He waxed
+positively lyrical in praise of country scenes. I was little less
+exhilarated myself; the mild air of the evening, the shadows, the rich
+lights and the silence, made a symphonious accompaniment about our walk;
+and we both determined to avoid towns for the future and sleep in
+hamlets.</p>
+
+<p>At last the path went between two houses, and turned the party out into
+a wide muddy high-road, bordered, as far as the eye could reach on
+either hand, by an unsightly village. The houses stood well back,
+leaving a ribbon of waste land on either side of the road, where there
+were stacks of firewood, carts, barrows, rubbish-heaps, and a little
+doubtful grass. Away on the left, a gaunt tower stood in the middle of
+the street. What it had been in past ages I know not: probably a hold in
+time of war; but nowadays it bore an illegible dial-plate in its upper
+parts, and near the bottom an iron letter-box.</p>
+
+<p>The inn to which we had been recommended at Quartes was full, or else
+the landlady did not like our looks. I ought to say, that with our long,
+damp india-rubber bags, we presented rather a doubtful type of
+civilization: like rag-and-bone men, the <i>Cigarette</i> imagined. "These
+gentlemen are pedlars?&mdash;<i>Ces messieurs sont des marchands?</i>"&mdash;asked the
+landlady. And then, without wait<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>ing for an answer, which I suppose she
+thought superfluous in so plain a case, recommended us to a butcher who
+lived hard by the tower, and took in travellers to lodge.</p>
+
+<p>Thither went we. But the butcher was flitting, and all his beds were
+taken down. Or else he didn't like our look. As a parting shot, we had
+"These gentlemen are pedlars?"</p>
+
+<p>It began to grow dark in earnest. We could no longer distinguish the
+faces of the people who passed us by with an inarticulate good-evening.
+And the householders of Pont seemed very economical with their oil; for
+we saw not a single window lighted in all that long village. I believe
+it is the longest village in the world; but I daresay in our predicament
+every pace counted three times over. We were much cast down when we came
+to the last auberge; and looking in at the dark door, asked timidly if
+we could sleep there for the night. A female voice assented in no very
+friendly tones. We clapped the bags down and found our way to chairs.</p>
+
+<p>The place was in total darkness, save a red glow in the chinks and
+ventilators of the stove. But now the landlady lit a lamp to see her new
+guests; I suppose the darkness was what saved us another expulsion; for
+I cannot say she looked gratified at our appearance. We were in a large
+bare apartment, adorned with two allegorical prints of Music and
+Painting, and a copy of the law against public drunkenness. On one side,
+there was a bit of a bar, with some half-a-dozen bottles. Two labourers
+sat waiting supper, in attitudes of extreme weariness; a plain-looking
+lass bustled about with a sleepy child of two; and the landlady began to
+derange the pots upon the stove and set some beefsteak to grill.</p>
+
+<p>"These gentlemen are pedlars?" she asked sharply. And that was all the
+conversation forthcoming. We began to think we might be pedlars after
+all. I never knew a population with so narrow a range of conjecture as
+the innkeepers of Pont-sur-Sambre. But manners and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> bearing have not a
+wider currency than bank-notes. You have only to get far enough out of
+your beat, and all your accomplished airs will go for nothing. These
+Hainaulters could see no difference between us and the average pedlar.
+Indeed, we had some grounds for reflection while the steak was getting
+ready, to see how perfectly they accepted us at their own valuation, and
+how our best politeness and best efforts at entertainment seemed to fit
+quite suitably with the character of packmen. At least it seemed a good
+account of the profession in France, that even before such judges we
+could not beat them at our own weapons.</p>
+
+<p>At last we were called to table. The two hinds (and one of them looked
+sadly worn and white in the face, as though sick with over-work and
+under-feeding) supped off a single plate of some sort of bread-berry,
+some potatoes in their jackets, a small cup of coffee sweetened with
+sugar-candy, and one tumbler of swipes. The landlady, her son, and the
+lass aforesaid, took the same. Our meal was quite a banquet by
+comparison. We had some beefsteak, not so tender as it might have been,
+some of the potatoes, some cheese, an extra glass of the swipes, and
+white sugar in our coffee.</p>
+
+<p>You see what it is to be a gentleman&mdash;I beg your pardon, what it is to
+be a pedlar. It had not before occurred to me that a pedlar was a great
+man in a labourer's alehouse; but now that I had to enact the part for
+an evening I found that so it was. He has in his hedge quarters somewhat
+the same pre-eminency as the man who takes a private parlour in a hotel.
+The more you look into it, the more infinite are the class distinctions
+among men; and possibly, by a happy dispensation, there is no one at all
+at the bottom of the scale; no one but can find some superiority over
+somebody else, to keep up his pride withal.</p>
+
+<p>We were displeased enough with our fare. Particularly the <i>Cigarette</i>,
+for I tried to make believe that I was amused with the adventure, tough
+beefsteak and all. According to the Lucretian maxim, our steak should
+have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> been flavoured by the look of the other people's bread-berry. But
+we did not find it so in practice. You may have a head-knowledge that
+other people live more poorly than yourself, but it is not agreeable&mdash;I
+was going to say, it is against the etiquette of the universe&mdash;to sit at
+the same table and pick your own superior diet from among their crusts.
+I had not seen such a thing done since the greedy boy at school with his
+birthday cake. It was odious enough to witness, I could remember; and I
+had never thought to play the part myself. But there again you see what
+it is to be a pedlar.</p>
+
+<p>There is no doubt that the poorer classes in our country are much more
+charitably disposed than their superiors in wealth. And I fancy it must
+arise a great deal from the comparative indistinction of the easy and
+the not so easy in these ranks. A workman or a pedlar cannot shutter
+himself off from his less comfortable neighbours. If he treats himself
+to a luxury he must do it in the face of a dozen who cannot. And what
+should more directly lead to charitable thoughts?... Thus the poor man,
+camping out in life, sees it as it is, and knows that every mouthful he
+puts in his belly has been wrenched out of the fingers of the hungry.</p>
+
+<p>But at a certain stage of prosperity, as in a balloon ascent, the
+fortunate person passes through a zone of clouds, and sublunary matters
+are thenceforward hidden from his view. He sees nothing but the heavenly
+bodies, all in admirable order, and positively as good as new. He finds
+himself surrounded in the most touching manner by the attentions of
+Providence, and compares himself involuntarily with the lilies and the
+skylarks. He does not precisely sing, of course; but then he looks so
+unassuming in his open landau! If all the world dined at one table, this
+philosophy would meet with some rude knocks.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>PONT-SUR-SAMBRE</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>
+
+<h4>THE TRAVELLING MERCHANT</h4>
+
+
+<p>Like the lackeys in Moli&egrave;re's farce, when the true nobleman broke in on
+their high life below stairs, we were destined to be confronted with a
+real pedlar. To make the lesson still more poignant for fallen gentlemen
+like us, he was a pedlar of infinitely more consideration than the sort
+of scurvy fellows we were taken for: like a lion among mice, or a ship
+of war bearing down upon two cock-boats. Indeed, he did not deserve the
+name of pedlar at all: he was a travelling merchant.</p>
+
+<p>I suppose it was about half-past eight when this worthy, Monsieur Hector
+Gilliard of Maubeuge, turned up at the alehouse door in a tilt cart
+drawn by a donkey, and cried cheerily on the inhabitants. He was a lean,
+nervous flibbertigibbet of a man, with something the look of an actor,
+and something the look of a horse-jockey. He had evidently prospered
+without any of the favours of education; for he adhered with stern
+simplicity to the masculine gender, and in the course of the evening
+passed off some fancy futures in a very florid style of architecture.
+With him came his wife, a comely young woman with her hair tied in a
+yellow kerchief, and their son, a little fellow of four, in a blouse and
+military <i>k&eacute;pi.</i> It was notable that the child was many degrees better
+dressed than either of the parents. We were informed he was already at a
+boarding-school; but the holidays having just commenced, he was off to
+spend them with his parents on a cruise. An enchanting holiday
+occupation, was it not, to travel all day with father and mother in the
+tilt<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> cart full of countless treasures; the green country rattling by on
+either side, and the children in all the villages contemplating him with
+envy and wonder? It is better fun, during the holidays, to be the son of
+a travelling merchant than son and heir to the greatest cotton-spinner
+in creation. And as for being a reigning prince&mdash;indeed I never saw one
+if it was not Master Gilliard!</p>
+
+<p>While M. Hector and the son of the house were putting up the donkey, and
+getting all the valuables under lock and key, the landlady warmed up the
+remains of our beefsteak, and fried the cold potatoes in slices, and
+Madame Gilliard set herself to waken the boy, who had come far that day,
+and was peevish and dazzled by the light. He was no sooner awake than he
+began to prepare himself for supper by eating galette, unripe pears, and
+cold potatoes&mdash;with, so far as I could judge, positive benefit to his
+appetite.</p>
+
+<p>The landlady, fired with motherly emulation, awoke her own little girl;
+and the two children were confronted. Master Gilliard looked at her for
+a moment, very much as a dog looks at his own reflection in a mirror
+before he turns away. He was at that time absorbed in the galette. His
+mother seemed crestfallen that he should display so little inclination
+towards the other sex; and expressed her disappointment with some
+candour and a very proper reference to the influence of years.</p>
+
+<p>Sure enough a time will come when he will pay more attention to the
+girls, and think a great deal less of his mother: let us hope she will
+like it as well as she seemed to fancy. But it is odd enough: the very
+women who profess most contempt for mankind as a sex, seem to find even
+its ugliest particulars rather lively and high-minded in their own sons.</p>
+
+<p>The little girl looked longer and with more interest, probably because
+she was in her own house, while he was a traveller and accustomed to
+strange sights. And besides there was no galette in the case with her.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>All the time of supper, there was nothing spoken of but my young lord.
+The two parents were both absurdly fond of their child. Monsieur kept
+insisting on his sagacity: how he knew all the children at school by
+name; and when this utterly failed on trial, how he was cautious and
+exact to a strange degree, and, if asked anything, he would sit and
+think&mdash;and think, and if he did not know it, "my faith, he wouldn't tell
+you at all&mdash;<i>ma foi, il ne vous le dira pas</i>": which is certainly a very
+high degree of caution. At intervals, M. Hector would appeal to his
+wife, with his mouth full of beefsteak, as to the little fellow's age at
+such or such a time when he had said or done something memorable; and I
+noticed that Madame usually pooh-poohed these inquiries. She herself was
+not boastful in her vein, but she never had her fill of caressing the
+child; and she seemed to take a gentle pleasure in recalling all that
+was fortunate in his little existence. No schoolboy could have talked
+more of the holidays which were just beginning and less of the black
+school-time which must inevitably follow after. She showed, with a pride
+perhaps partly mercantile in origin, his pockets preposterously swollen
+with tops and whistles and string. When she called at a house in the way
+of business, it appeared he kept her company; and whenever a sale was
+made, received a sou out of the profit. Indeed they spoiled him vastly,
+these two good people. But they had an eye to his manners for all that,
+and reproved him for some little faults in breeding, which occurred from
+time to time during supper.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole, I was not much hurt at being taken for a pedlar. I might
+think that I ate with greater delicacy, or that my mistakes in French
+belonged to a different order; but it was plain that these distinctions
+would be thrown away upon the landlady and the two labourers. In all
+essential things we and the Gilliards cut very much the same figure in
+the alehouse kitchen. M. Hector was more at home, indeed, and took a
+higher tone with the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> world; but that was explicable on the ground of
+his driving a donkey-cart, while we poor bodies tramped afoot. I daresay
+the rest of the company thought us dying with envy, though in no ill
+sense, to be as far up in the profession as the new arrival.</p>
+
+<p>And of one thing I am sure: that every one thawed and became more
+humanized and conversible as soon as these innocent people appeared upon
+the scene. I would not very readily trust the travelling merchant with
+any extravagant sum of money; but I am sure his heart was in the right
+place. In this mixed world, if you can find one or two sensible places
+in a man&mdash;above all, if you should find a whole family living together
+on such pleasant terms,&mdash;you may surely be satisfied, and take the rest
+for granted; or, what is a great deal better, boldly make up your mind
+that you can do perfectly well without the rest, and that ten thousand
+bad traits cannot make a single good one any the less good.</p>
+
+<p>It was getting late. M. Hector lit a stable lantern and went off to his
+cart for some arrangements; and my young gentleman proceeded to divest
+himself of the better part of his raiment, and play gymnastics on his
+mother's lap, and thence on to the floor, with accompaniment of
+laughter.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you going to sleep alone?" asked the servant lass.</p>
+
+<p>"There's little fear of that," says Master Gilliard.</p>
+
+<p>"You sleep alone at school," objected his mother. "Come, come, you must
+be a man."</p>
+
+<p>But he protested that school was a different matter from the holidays;
+that there were dormitories at school; and silenced the discussion with
+kisses: his mother smiling, no one better pleased than she.</p>
+
+<p>There certainly was, as he phrased it, very little fear that he should
+sleep alone; for there was but one bed for the trio. We, on our part,
+had firmly protested against one man's accommodation for two; and we had
+a double-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>bedded pen in the loft of the house, furnished, beside the
+beds, with exactly three hat-pegs and one table. There was not so much
+as a glass of water. But the window would open, by good fortune.</p>
+
+<p>Some time before I fell asleep the loft was full of the sound of mighty
+snoring: the Gilliards, and the labourers, and the people of the inn,
+all at it, I suppose, with one consent. The young moon outside shone
+very clearly over Pont-sur-Sambre, and down upon the alehouse where all
+we pedlars were abed.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>ON THE SAMBRE CANALISED</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>
+
+<h4>TO LANDRECIES</h4>
+
+
+<p>In the morning, when we came downstairs, the landlady pointed out to us
+two pails of water behind the street-door. "<i>Voil&agrave; de l'eau pour vous
+d&eacute;barbouiller</i>," says she. And so there we made a shift to wash
+ourselves, while Madame Gilliard brushed the family boots on the outer
+doorstep, and M. Hector, whistling cheerily, arranged some small goods
+for the day's campaign in a portable chest of drawers, which formed a
+part of his baggage. Meanwhile the child was letting off Waterloo
+crackers all over the floor.</p>
+
+<p>I wonder, by-the-bye, what they call Waterloo crackers in France;
+perhaps Austerlitz crackers. There is a great deal in the point of view.
+Do you remember the Frenchman who, travelling by way of Southampton, was
+put down in Waterloo Station, and had to drive across Waterloo Bridge?
+He had a mind to go home again, it seems.</p>
+
+<p>Pont itself is on the river, but whereas it is ten minutes' walk from
+Quartes by dry land, it is six weary kilom&egrave;tres by water. We left our
+bags at the inn, and walked to our canoes through the wet orchards
+unencumbered. Some of the children were there to see us off, but we were
+no longer the mysterious beings of the night before. A departure is much
+less romantic than an unexplained arrival in the golden evening.
+Although we might be greatly taken at a ghost's first appearance, we
+should behold him vanish with comparative equanimity.</p>
+
+<p>The good folk of the inn at Pont, when we called there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> for the bags,
+were overcome with marveling. At sight of these two dainty little
+boats, with a fluttering Union Jack on each, and all the varnish shining
+from the sponge, they began to perceive that they had entertained angels
+unawares. The landlady stood upon the bridge, probably lamenting she had
+charged so little; the son ran to and fro, and called out the neighbours
+to enjoy the sight; and we paddled away from quite a crowd of rapt
+observers. These gentlemen pedlars, indeed! Now you see their quality
+too late.</p>
+
+<p>The whole day was showery, with occasional drenching plumps. We were
+soaked to the skin, then partially dried in the sun, then soaked once
+more. But there were some calm intervals, and one notably, when we were
+skirting the forest of Mormal, a sinister name to the ear, but a place
+most gratifying to sight and smell. It looked solemn along the
+riverside, drooping its boughs into the water, and piling them up aloft
+into a wall of leaves. What is a forest but a city of nature's own, full
+of hardy and innocuous living things, where there is nothing dead and
+nothing made with the hands, but the citizens themselves are the houses
+and public monuments? There is nothing so much alive, and yet so quiet,
+as a woodland; and a pair of people, swinging past in canoes, feel very
+small and bustling by comparison.</p>
+
+<p>And surely of all smells in the world, the smell of many trees is the
+sweetest and most fortifying. The sea has a rude, pistolling sort of
+odour, that takes you in the nostrils like snuff, and carries with it a
+fine sentiment of open water and tall ships; but the smell of a forest,
+which comes nearest to this in tonic quality, surpasses it by many
+degrees in the quality of softness. Again, the smell of the sea has
+little variety, but the smell of a forest is infinitely changeful; it
+varies with the hour of the day, not in strength merely, but in
+character; and the different sorts of trees, as you go from one zone of
+the wood to another, seem to live among different kinds of atmo<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>sphere.
+Usually the resin of the fir predominates. But some woods are more
+coquettish in their habits; and the breath of the forest of Mormal, as
+it came aboard upon us that showery afternoon, was perfumed with nothing
+less delicate than sweetbrier.</p>
+
+<p>I wish our way had always lain among woods. Trees are the most civil
+society. An old oak that has been growing where he stands since before
+the Reformation, taller than many spires, more stately than the greater
+part of mountains, and yet a living thing, liable to sicknesses and
+death, like you and me: is not that in itself a speaking lesson in
+history? But acres on acres full of such patriarchs contiguously rooted,
+their green tops billowing in the wind, their stalwart younglings
+pushing up about their knees: a whole forest, healthy and beautiful,
+giving colour to the light, giving perfume to the air: what is this but
+the most imposing piece in nature's repertory? Heine wished to lie like
+Merlin under the oaks of Broceliande. I should not be satisfied with one
+tree; but if the wood grew together like a banyan grove, I would be
+buried under the tap-root of the whole; my parts should circulate from
+oak to oak; and my consciousness should be diffused abroad in all the
+forest, and give a common heart to that assembly of green spires, so
+that it also might rejoice in its own loveliness and dignity. I think I
+feel a thousand squirrels leaping from bough to bough in my vast
+mausoleum; and the birds and the winds merrily coursing over its uneven,
+leafy surface.</p>
+
+<p>Alas! the forest of Mormal is only a little bit of a wood, and it was
+but for a little way that we skirted by its boundaries. And the rest of
+the time the rain kept coming in squirts and the wind in squalls, until
+one's heart grew weary of such fitful, scolding weather. It was odd how
+the showers began when we had to carry the boats over a lock, and must
+expose our legs. They always did. This is a sort of thing that readily
+begets a personal feeling against nature. There seems no reason why the
+shower<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> should not come five minutes before or five minutes after,
+unless you suppose an intention to affront you. The <i>Cigarette</i> had a
+mackintosh which put him more or less above these contrarieties. But I
+had to bear the brunt uncovered. I began to remember that nature was a
+woman. My companion, in a rosier temper, listened with great
+satisfaction to my Jeremiads, and ironically concurred. He instanced, as
+a cognate matter, the action of the tides, "which," said he, "was
+altogether designed for the confusion of canoeists, except in so far as
+it was calculated to minister to a barren vanity on the part of the
+moon."</p>
+
+<p>At the last lock, some little way out of Landrecies, I refused to go any
+farther; and sat in a drift of rain by the side of the bank to have a
+reviving pipe. A vivacious old man, whom I take to have been the devil,
+drew near and questioned me about our journey. In the fullness of my
+heart I laid bare our plans before him. He said it was the silliest
+enterprise that ever he heard of. Why, did I not know, he asked me, that
+it was nothing but locks, locks, locks, the whole way? not to mention
+that, at this season of the year, we should find the Oise quite dry?
+"Get into a train, my little young man," said he, "and go you away home
+to your parents." I was so astounded at the man's malice that I could
+only stare at him in silence. A tree would never have spoken to me like
+this. At last I got out with some words. We had come from Antwerp
+already, I told him, which was a good long way; and we should do the
+rest in spite of him. Yes, I said, if there were no other reason, I
+would do it now, just because he had dared to say we could not. The
+pleasant old gentleman looked at me sneeringly, made an allusion to my
+canoe, and marched off, waggling his head.</p>
+
+<p>I was still inwardly fuming, when up came a pair of young fellows, who
+imagined I was the <i>Cigarette's</i> servant, on a comparison, I suppose, of
+my bare jersey with the other's mackintosh, and asked me many questions
+about<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> my place and my master's character. I said he was a good enough
+fellow, but had this absurd voyage on the head. "O no, no," said one,
+"you must not say that; it is not absurd; it is very courageous of him."
+I believe these were a couple of angels sent to give me heart again. It
+was truly fortifying to reproduce all the old man's insinuations, as if
+they were original to me in my character of a malcontent footman, and
+have them brushed away like so many flies by these admirable young men.</p>
+
+<p>When I recounted this affair to the <i>Cigarette</i>, "They must have a
+curious idea of how English servants behave," says he, dryly, "for you
+treated me like a brute beast at the lock."</p>
+
+<p>I was a good deal mortified; but my temper had suffered, it is a fact.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>AT LANDRECIES</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>At Landrecies the rain still fell and the wind still blew; but we found
+a double-bedded room with plenty of furniture, real water-jugs with real
+water in them, and dinner: a real dinner, not innocent of real wine.
+After having been a pedlar for one night, and a butt for the elements
+during the whole of the next day, these comfortable circumstances fell
+on my heart like sunshine. There was an English fruiterer at dinner,
+travelling with a Belgian fruiterer; in the evening at the <i>caf&eacute;</i> we
+watched our compatriot drop a good deal of money at corks, and I don't
+know why, but this pleased us.</p>
+
+<p>It turned out we were to see more of Landrecies than we expected; for
+the weather next day was simply bedlamite. It is not the place one would
+have chosen for a day's rest; for it consists almost entirely of
+fortifications. Within the ramparts a few blocks of houses, a long row
+of barracks, and a church, figure, with what countenance they may, as
+the town. There seems to be no trade; and a shopkeeper from whom I
+bought a sixpenny flint-and-steel was so much affected that he filled my
+pockets with spare flints into the bargain. The only public buildings
+that had any interest for us were the hotel and the <i>caf&eacute;.</i> But we
+visited the church. There lies Marshal Clarke. But as neither of us had
+ever heard of that military hero, we bore the associations of the spot
+with fortitude.</p>
+
+<p>In all garrison towns, guard-calls and <i>r&eacute;veilles</i>, and such like, make
+a fine romantic interlude in civic business. Bugles, and drums, and
+fifes are of themselves most excellent things in nature; and when they
+carry the mind to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> marching armies, and the picturesque vicissitudes of
+war, they stir up something proud in the heart. But in a shadow of a
+town like Landrecies, with little else moving, these points of war made
+a proportionate commotion. Indeed, they were the only things to
+remember. It was just the place to hear the round going by at night in
+the darkness, with the solid tramp of men marching, and the startling
+reverberations of the drum. It reminded you that even this place was a
+point in the great warfaring system of Europe, and might on some future
+day be ringed about with cannon smoke and thunder, and make itself a
+name among strong towns.</p>
+
+<p>The drum, at any rate, from its martial voice and notable physiological
+effect&mdash;nay, even from its cumbrous and comical shape,&mdash;stands alone
+among the instruments of noise. And if it be true, as I have heard it
+said, that drums are covered with asses' skin, what a picturesque irony
+is there in that! As if this long-suffering animal's hide had not been
+sufficiently belaboured during life, now by Lyonnese costermongers, now
+by presumptuous Hebrew prophets, it must be stripped from his poor
+hinder quarters after death, stretched on a drum, and beaten night after
+night round the streets of every garrison town in Europe. And up the
+heights of Alma and Spicheren, and wherever death has his red flag
+a-flying, and sounds his own potent tuck upon the cannons, there also
+must the drummer-boy, hurrying with white face over fallen comrades,
+batter and bemaul this slip of skin from the loins of peaceable donkeys.</p>
+
+<p>Generally a man is never more uselessly employed than when he is at this
+trick of bastinadoing asses' hide. We know what effect it has in life,
+and how your dull ass will not mend his pace with beating. But in this
+state of mummy and melancholy survival of itself, when the hollow skin
+reverberates to the drummer's wrist, and each dub-a-dub goes direct to a
+man's heart, and puts madness there, and that disposition of the pulses
+which we, in our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> big way of talking nickname Heroism:&mdash;is there not
+something in the nature of a revenge upon the donkey's persecutors? Of
+old, he might say, you drubbed me up hill and down dale, and I must
+endure; but now that I am dead, those dull thwacks that were scarcely
+audible in country lanes have become stirring music in front of the
+brigade; and for every blow that you lay on my old great-coat you will
+see a comrade stumble and fall.</p>
+
+<p>Not long after the drums had passed the <i>caf&eacute;</i> the <i>Cigarette</i> and the
+<i>Arethusa</i> began to grow sleepy, and set out for the hotel, which was
+only a door or two away. But although we had been somewhat indifferent
+to Landrecies, Landrecies had not been indifferent to us. All day, we
+learned, people had been running out between the squalls to visit our
+two boats. Hundreds of persons, so said report, although it fitted ill
+with our idea of the town&mdash;hundreds of persons had inspected them where
+they lay in a coal-shed. We were becoming lions in Landrecies, who had
+been only pedlars the night before in Pont.</p>
+
+<p>And now, when we left the <i>caf&eacute;</i>, we were pursued and overtaken at the
+hotel door by no less a person than the <i>Juge de Paix</i>: a functionary,
+as far as I can make out, of the character of a Scots
+Sheriff-Substitute. He gave us his card and invited us to sup with him
+on the spot, very neatly, very gracefully, as Frenchmen can do these
+things. It was for the credit of Landrecies, said he; and although we
+knew very well how little credit we could do the place, we must have
+been churlish fellows to refuse an invitation so politely introduced.</p>
+
+<p>The house of the Judge was close by; it was a well-appointed bachelor's
+establishment, with a curious collection of old brass warming-pans upon
+the walls. Some of these were most elaborately carved. It seemed a
+picturesque idea for a collector. You could not help thinking how many
+nightcaps had wagged over these warming-pans in past generations; what
+jests may have been made and kisses taken, while they were in service;
+and how<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> often they had been uselessly paraded in the bed of death. If
+they could only speak, at what absurd, indecorous, and tragical scenes
+had they not been present!</p>
+
+<p>The wine was excellent. When we made the Judge our compliments upon a
+bottle, "I do not give it you as my worst," said he. I wonder when
+Englishmen will learn these hospitable graces. They are worth learning;
+they set off life, and make ordinary moments ornamental.</p>
+
+<p>There were two other Landrecienses present. One was the collector of
+something or other, I forget what; the other, we were told, was the
+principal notary of the place. So it happened that we all five more or
+less followed the law. At this rate, the talk was pretty certain to
+become technical. The <i>Cigarette</i> expounded the Poor Laws very
+magisterially. And a little later I found myself laying down the Scots
+Law of Illegitimacy, of which I am glad to say I know nothing. The
+collector and the notary, who were both married men, accused the Judge,
+who was a bachelor, of having started the subject. He deprecated the
+charge, with a conscious, pleased air, just like all the men I have ever
+seen, be they French or English. How strange that we should all, in our
+unguarded moments, rather like to be thought a bit of a rogue with the
+women!</p>
+
+<p>As the evening went on, the wine grew more to my taste; the spirits
+proved better than the wine; the company was genial. This was the
+highest water mark of popular favour on the whole cruise. After all,
+being in a Judge's house, was there not something semi-official in the
+tribute? And so, remembering what a great country France is, we did full
+justice to our entertainment. Landrecies had been a long while asleep
+before we returned to the hotel; and the sentries on the ramparts were
+already looking for daybreak.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>SAMBRE AND OISE CANAL</h2>
+
+<h4>CANAL BOATS</h4>
+
+
+<p>Next day we made a late start in the rain. The Judge politely escorted
+us to the end of the lock under an umbrella. We had now brought
+ourselves to a pitch of humility in the matter of weather not often
+attained except in the Scottish Highlands. A rag of blue sky or a
+glimpse of sunshine set our hearts singing; and when the rain was not
+heavy, we counted the day almost fair.</p>
+
+<p>Long lines of barges lay one after another along the canal, many of them
+looking mighty spruce and ship-shape in their jerkin of Archangel tar
+picked out with white and green. Some carried gay iron railings, and
+quite a parterre of flower-pots. Children played on the decks, as
+heedless of the rain as if they had been brought up on Loch Carron side;
+men fished over the gunwale, some of them under umbrellas; women did
+their washing; and every barge boasted its mongrel cur by way of
+watch-dog. Each one barked furiously at the canoes, running alongside
+until he had got to the end of his own ship, and so passing on the word
+to the dog aboard the next. We must have seen something like a hundred
+of these embarkations in the course of that day's paddle, ranged one
+after another like the houses in a street; and from not one of them were
+we disappointed of this accompaniment. It was like visiting a menagerie,
+the <i>Cigarette</i> remarked.</p>
+
+<p>These little cities by the canal side had a very odd effect upon the
+mind. They seemed, with their flower-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>pots and smoking chimneys, their
+washings and dinners, a rooted piece of nature in the scene; and yet if
+only the canal below were to open, one junk after another would hoist
+sail or harness horses and swim away into all parts of France; and the
+impromptu hamlet would separate, house by house, to the four winds. The
+children who played together to-day by the Sambre and Oise Canal, each
+at his own father's threshold, when and where might they next meet?</p>
+
+<p>For some time past the subject of barges had occupied a great deal of
+our talk, and we had projected an old age on the canals of Europe. It
+was to be the most leisurely of progresses, now on a swift river at the
+tail of a steam-boat, now waiting horses for days together on some
+inconsiderable junction. We should be seen pottering on deck in all the
+dignity of years, our white beards falling into our laps. We were ever
+to be busied among paint-pots; so that there should be no white fresher,
+and no green more emerald than ours, in all the navy of the canals.
+There should be books in the cabin, and tobacco-jars, and some old
+Burgundy as red as a November sunset and as odorous as a violet in
+April. There should be a flageolet, whence the <i>Cigarette</i>, with cunning
+touch, should draw melting music under the stars; or perhaps, laying
+that aside, upraise his voice&mdash;somewhat thinner than of yore, and with
+here and there a quaver, or call it a natural grace-note&mdash;in rich and
+solemn psalmody.</p>
+
+<p>All this, simmering in my mind, set me wishing to go aboard one of these
+ideal houses of lounging, I had plenty to choose from, as I coasted one
+after another, and the dogs bayed at me for a vagrant. At last I saw a
+nice old man and his wife looking at me with some interest, so I gave
+them good-day and pulled up alongside. I began with a remark upon their
+dog, which had somewhat the look of a pointer; thence I slid into a
+compliment on Madame's flowers, and thence into a word in praise of
+their way of life.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>If you ventured on such an experiment in England you would get a slap in
+the face at once. The life would be shown to be a vile one, not without
+a side shot at your better fortune. Now, what I like so much in France
+is the clear unflinching recognition by everybody of his own luck. They
+all know on which side their bread is buttered, and take a pleasure in
+showing it to others, which is surely the better part of religion. And
+they scorn to make a poor mouth over their poverty, which I take to be
+the better part of manliness. I have heard a woman, in quite a better
+position at home, with a good bit of money in hand, refer to her own
+child with a horrid whine as "a poor man's child." I would not say such
+a thing to the Duke of Westminster. And the French are full of this
+spirit of independence. Perhaps it is the result of republican
+institutions, as they call them. Much more likely it is because there
+are so few people really poor that the whiners are not enough to keep
+each other in countenance.</p>
+
+<p>The people on the barge were delighted to hear that I admired their
+state. They understood perfectly well, they told me, how Monsieur envied
+them. Without doubt Monsieur was rich; and in that case he might make a
+canal boat as pretty as a villa&mdash;<i>joli comme un ch&acirc;teau.</i> And with that
+they invited me on board their own water villa. They apologized for
+their cabin; they had not been rich enough to make it as it ought to be.</p>
+
+<p>"The fire should have been here, at this side," explained the husband.
+"Then one might have a writing-table in the middle&mdash;books&mdash;and"
+(comprehensively) "all. It would be quite coquettish&mdash;<i>&ccedil;a serait
+tout-&agrave;-fait coquet.</i>" And he looked about him as though the improvements
+were already made. It was plainly not the first time that he had thus
+beautified his cabin in imagination; and when next he makes a hit, I
+should expect to see the writing-table in the middle.</p>
+
+<p>Madame had three birds in a cage. They were no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> great thing, she
+explained. Fine birds were so dear. They had sought to get a
+<i>Hollandais</i> last winter in Rouen (Rouen? thought I; and is this whole
+mansion, with its dogs and birds and smoking chimneys, so far a
+traveller as that? and as homely an object among the cliffs and orchards
+of the Seine as on the green plains of Sambre?)&mdash;they had sought to get
+a <i>Hollandais</i> last winter in Rouen; but these cost fifteen francs
+apiece&mdash;picture it&mdash;fifteen francs!</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Pour un tout petit oiseau</i>&mdash;For quite a little bird," added the
+husband.</p>
+
+<p>As I continued to admire, the apologetics died away, and the good people
+began to brag of their barge, and their happy condition in life, as if
+they had been Emperor and Empress of the Indies. It was, in the Scots
+phrase, a good hearing, and put me in good humour with the world. If
+people knew what an inspiriting thing it is to hear a man boasting, so
+long as he boasts of what he really has, I believe they would do it more
+freely and with a better grace.</p>
+
+<p>They began to ask about our voyage. You should have seen how they
+sympathized. They seemed half ready to give up their barge and follow
+us. But these <i>canaletti</i> are only gypsies semi-domesticated. The
+semi-domestication came out in rather a pretty form. Suddenly Madame's
+brow darkened. "<i>Cependant</i>," she began, and then stopped; and then
+began again by asking me if I were single.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said I.</p>
+
+<p>"And your friend who went by just now?"</p>
+
+<p>He also was unmarried.</p>
+
+<p>O then&mdash;all was well. She could not have wives left alone at home; but
+since there were no wives in the question, we were doing the best we
+could.</p>
+
+<p>"To see about one in the world," said the husband, "<i>il n'y a que
+&ccedil;a</i>&mdash;there is nothing else worth while. A man, look you, who sticks in
+his own village like a bear," he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> went on, "&mdash;very well, he sees
+nothing. And then death is the end of all. And he has seen nothing."</p>
+
+<p>Madame reminded her husband of an Englishman who had come up this canal
+in a steamer.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps Mr. Moens in the <i>Ytene</i>," I suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"That's it," assented the husband. "He had his wife and family with him,
+and servants. He came ashore at all the locks and asked the name of the
+villages, whether from boatmen or lock-keepers; and then he wrote, wrote
+them down. Oh, he wrote enormously! I suppose it was a wager."</p>
+
+<p>A wager was a common enough explanation for our own exploits, but it
+seemed an original reason for taking notes.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE OISE IN FLOOD</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>Before nine next morning the two canoes were installed on a light
+country cart at &Eacute;treux: and we were soon following them along the side
+of a pleasant valley full of hop-gardens and poplars. Agreeable villages
+lay here and there on the slope of the hill; notably, Tupigny, with the
+hop-poles hanging their garlands in the very street, and the houses
+clustered with grapes. There was a faint enthusiasm on our passage;
+weavers put their heads to the windows; children cried out in ecstasy at
+sight of the two "boaties"&mdash;<i>barquettes</i>; and bloused pedestrians, who
+were acquainted with our charioteer, jested with him on the nature of
+his freight.</p>
+
+<p>We had a shower or two, but light and flying. The air was clean and
+sweet among all these green fields and green things growing. There was
+not a touch of autumn in the weather. And when, at Vadencourt, we
+launched from a little lawn opposite a mill, the sun broke forth and set
+all the leaves shining in the valley of the Oise.</p>
+
+<p>The river was swollen with the long rains. From Vadencourt all the way
+to Origny, it ran with ever-quickening speed, taking fresh heart at each
+mile, and racing as though it already smelt the sea. The water was
+yellow and turbulent, swung with an angry eddy among half-submerged
+willows, and made an angry clatter along stony shores. The course kept
+turning and turning in a narrow and well-timbered valley. Now the river
+would approach the side, and run griding along the chalky base of the
+hill, and show us a few open colza-fields among the trees. Now it would
+skirt the garden-walls of houses, where we might catch a glimpse through
+a doorway, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> see a priest pacing in the chequered sunlight. Again,
+the foliage closed so thickly in front that there seemed to be no issue;
+only a thicket of willows, overtopped by elms and poplars, under which
+the river ran flush and fleet, and where a kingfisher flew past like a
+piece of the blue sky. On these different manifestations the sun poured
+its clear and catholic looks. The shadows lay as solid on the swift
+surface of the stream as on the stable meadows. The light sparkled
+golden in the dancing poplar leaves, and brought the hills in communion
+with our eyes. And all the while the river never stopped running or took
+breath; and the reeds along the whole valley stood shivering from top to
+toe.</p>
+
+<p>There should be some myth (but if there is, I know it not) founded on
+the shivering of the reeds. There are not many things in nature more
+striking to man's eye. It is such an eloquent pantomime of terror; and
+to see such a number of terrified creatures taking sanctuary in every
+nook along the shore is enough to infect a silly human with alarm.
+Perhaps they are only a-cold, and no wonder, standing waist-deep in the
+stream. Or perhaps they have never got accustomed to the speed and fury
+of the river's flux, or the miracle of its continuous body. Pan once
+played upon their forefathers; and so, by the hands of his river, he
+still plays upon these later generations down all the valley of the
+Oise; and plays the same air, both sweet and shrill, to tell us of the
+beauty and the terror of the world.</p>
+
+<p>The canoe was like a leaf in the current. It took it up and shook it,
+and carried it masterfully away, like a Centaur carrying off a nymph. To
+keep some command on our direction required hard and diligent plying of
+the paddle. The river was in such a hurry for the sea! Every drop of
+water ran in a panic, like as many people in a frightened crowd. But
+what crowd was ever so numerous, or so single-minded? All the objects of
+sight went by at a dance measure; the eyesight raced with the racing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>
+river; the exigencies of every moment kept the pegs screwed so tight
+that our being quivered like a well-tuned instrument, and the blood
+shook oft its lethargy, and trotted through all the highways and byways
+of the veins and arteries, and in and out of the heart, as if
+circulation were but a holiday journey, and not the daily moil of
+threescore years and ten. The reeds might nod their heads in warning,
+and with tremulous gestures tell how the river was as cruel as it was
+strong and cold, and how death lurked in the eddy underneath the
+willows. But the reeds had to stand where they were, and those who stand
+still are always timid advisers. As for us, we could have shouted aloud.
+If this lively and beautiful river were, indeed, a thing of death's
+contrivance, the old ashen rogue had famously outwitted himself with us.
+I was living three to the minute. I was scoring points against him every
+stroke of my paddle, every turn of the stream, I have rarely had better
+profit of my life.</p>
+
+<p>For I think we may look upon our little private war with death somewhat
+in this light. If a man knows he will sooner or later be robbed upon a
+journey, he will have a bottle of the best in every inn, and look upon
+all his extravagances as so much gained upon the thieves. And, above
+all, where instead of simply spending, he makes a profitable investment
+for some of his money, when it will be out of risk of loss. So every bit
+of brisk living, and, above all, when it is healthful, is just so much
+gained upon the wholesale filcher, death. We shall have the less in our
+pockets, the more in our stomach, when he cries stand and deliver. A
+swift stream is a favourite artifice of his, and one that brings him in
+a comfortable thing per annum; but when he and I come to settle our
+accounts, I shall whistle in his face for these hours upon the upper
+Oise.</p>
+
+<p>Towards afternoon we got fairly drunken with the sunshine and the
+exhilaration of the pace. We could no longer contain ourselves and our
+content. The canoes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> were too small for us; we must be out and stretch
+ourselves on shore. And so in a green meadow we bestowed our limbs on
+the grass, and smoked deifying tobacco and proclaimed the world
+excellent. It was the last good hour of the day, and I dwell upon it
+with extreme complacency.</p>
+
+<p>On one side of the valley, high up on the chalky summit of the hill, a
+ploughman with his team appeared and disappeared at regular intervals.
+At each revelation he stood still for a few seconds against the sky: for
+all the world (as the <i>Cigarette</i> declared) like a toy Burns who should
+have just ploughed up the Mountain Daisy. He was the only living thing
+within view, unless we are to count the river.</p>
+
+<p>On the other side of the valley a group of red roofs and a belfry showed
+among the foliage. Thence some inspired bell-ringer made the afternoon
+musical on a chime of bells. There was something very sweet and taking
+in the air he played; and we thought we had never heard bells speak so
+intelligibly or sing so melodiously as these. It must have been to some
+such measure that the spinners and the young maids sang "Come away,
+Death," in the Shakespearian Illyria. There is so often a threatening
+note, something blatant and metallic, in the voice of bells, that I
+believe we have fully more pain than pleasure from hearing them; but
+these, as they sounded abroad, now high, now low, now with a plaintive
+cadence that caught the ear like the burthen of a popular song, were
+always moderate and tunable, and seemed to fall in with the spirit of
+still, rustic places, like the noise of a waterfall or the babble of a
+rookery in spring. I could have asked the bell-ringer for his blessing,
+good, sedate old man, who swung the rope so gently to the time of his
+meditations. I could have blessed the priest or the heritors, or whoever
+may be concerned with such affairs in France, who had left these sweet
+old bells to gladden the afternoon, and not held meetings, and made
+collections, and had their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> names repeatedly printed in the local paper,
+to rig up a peal of brand-new, brazen, Birmingham-hearted substitutes,
+who should bombard their sides to the provocation of a brand-new
+bell-ringer, and fill the echoes of the valley with terror and riot.</p>
+
+<p>At last the bells ceased, and with their note the sun withdrew. The
+piece was at an end; shadow and silence possessed the valley of the
+Oise. We took to the paddle with glad hearts, like people who have sat
+out a noble performance and returned to work. The river was more
+dangerous here; it ran swifter, the eddies were more sudden and violent.
+All the way down we had had our fill of difficulties. Sometimes it was a
+weir which could be shot, sometimes one so shallow and full of stakes
+that we must withdraw the boats from the water and carry them round. But
+the chief sort of obstacle was a consequence of the late high winds.
+Every two or three hundred yards a tree had fallen across the river, and
+usually involved more than another in its fall. Often there was free
+water at the end, and we could steer round the leafy promontory and hear
+the water sucking and bubbling among the twigs. Often, again, when the
+tree reached from bank to bank, there was room by lying close to shoot
+through underneath, canoe and all. Sometimes it was necessary to get out
+upon the trunk itself and pull the boats across; and sometimes, when the
+stream was too impetuous for this, there was nothing for it but to land
+and "carry over." This made a fine series of accidents in the day's
+career, and kept us aware of ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>Shortly after our re-embarkation, while I was leading by a long way, and
+still full of a noble, exulting spirit in honour of the sun, the swift
+pace, and the church bells, the river made one of its leonine pounces
+round a corner, and I was aware of another fallen tree within a
+stone-cast. I had my back-board down in a trice, and aimed for a place
+where the trunk seemed high enough above<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> the water, and the branches
+not too thick to let me slip below. When a man has just vowed eternal
+brotherhood with the universe, he is not in a temper to take great
+determinations coolly, and this, which might have been a very important
+determination for me, had not been taken under a happy star. The tree
+caught me about the chest, and while I was yet struggling to make less
+of myself and get through, the river took the matter out of my hands,
+and bereaved me of my boat. The <i>Arethusa</i> swung round broadside on,
+leaned over, ejected so much of me as still remained on board, and, thus
+disencumbered, whipped under the tree, righted, and went merrily away
+down stream.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know how long it was before I scrambled on to the tree to which
+I was left clinging, but it was longer than I cared about. My thoughts
+were of a grave and almost sombre character, but I still clung to my
+paddle. The stream ran away with my heels as fast as I could pull up my
+shoulders, and I seemed, by the weight, to have all the water of the
+Oise in my trousers-pockets. You can never know, till you try it, what a
+dead pull a river makes against a man. Death himself had me by the
+heels, for this was his last ambuscado, and he must now join personally
+in the fray. And still I held to my paddle. At last I dragged myself on
+to my stomach on the trunk, and lay there a breathless sop, with a
+mingled sense of humour and injustice. A poor figure I must have
+presented to Burns upon the hill-top with his team. But there was the
+paddle in my hand. On my tomb, if ever I have one, I mean to get these
+words inscribed: "He clung to his paddle."</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Cigarette</i> had gone past a while before; for, as I might have
+observed, if I had been a little less pleased with the universe at the
+moment, there was a clear way round the tree-top at the farther side. He
+had offered his services to haul me out, but as I was then already on my
+elbows I had declined and sent him down stream after<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> the truant
+<i>Arethusa.</i> The stream was too rapid for a man to mount with one canoe,
+let alone two, upon his hands. So I crawled along the trunk to shore,
+and proceeded down the meadows by the riverside. I was so cold that my
+heart was sore. I had now an idea of my own why the reeds so bitterly
+shivered. I could have given any of them a lesson. The <i>Cigarette</i>
+remarked facetiously that he thought I was "taking exercise" as I drew
+near, until he made out for certain that I was only twittering with
+cold. I had a rub down with a towel, and donned a dry suit from the
+india-rubber bag. But I was not my own man again for the rest of the
+voyage. I had a queasy sense that I wore my last dry clothes upon my
+body. The struggle had tired me; and perhaps, whether I knew it or not,
+I was a little dashed in spirit. The devouring element in the universe
+had leaped out against me, in this green valley quickened by a running
+stream. The bells were all very pretty in their way, but I had heard
+some of the hollow notes of Pan's music. Would the wicked river drag me
+down by the heels, indeed? and look so beautiful all the time? Nature's
+good-humour was only skin-deep after all.</p>
+
+<p>There was still a long way to go by the winding course of the stream,
+and darkness had fallen, and a late bell was ringing in Origny
+Sainte-Beno&icirc;te, when we arrived.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>ORIGNY SAINTE-BENO&Icirc;TE</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>
+
+<h4>A BY-DAY</h4>
+
+
+<p>The next day was Sunday, and the church bells had little rest; indeed, I
+do not think I remember anywhere else so great a choice of services as
+were here offered to the devout. And while the bells made merry in the
+sunshine, all the world with his dog was out shooting among the beets
+and colza.</p>
+
+<p>In the morning a hawker and his wife went down the street at a
+foot-pace, singing to a very slow, lamentable music, "<i>O France, mes
+amours.</i>" It brought everybody to the door; and when our landlady called
+in the man to buy the words, he had not a copy of them left. She was not
+the first nor the second who had been taken with the song. There is
+something very pathetic in the love of the French people, since the war,
+for dismal patriotic music-making. I have watched a forester from Alsace
+while someone was singing "<i>Les malheurs de la France</i>," at a baptismal
+party in the neighbourhood of Fontainebleau. He arose from the table and
+took his son aside, close by where I was standing. "Listen, listen," he
+said, bearing on the boy's shoulder, "and remember this, my son." A
+little after he went out into the garden suddenly, and I could hear him
+sobbing in the darkness.</p>
+
+<p>The humiliation of their arms and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine made a
+sore pull on the endurance of this sensitive people; and their hearts
+are still hot, not so much against Germany as against the Empire. In
+what other country will you find a patriotic ditty bring all the world
+into the street? But affliction heightens love; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> we shall never know
+we are Englishmen until we have lost India. Independent America is still
+the cross of my existence; I cannot think of Farmer George without
+abhorrence; and I never feel more warmly to my own land than when I see
+the Stars and Stripes, and remember what our empire might have been.</p>
+
+<p>The hawker's little book, which I purchased, was a curious mixture. Side
+by side with the flippant, rowdy nonsense of the Paris music-halls,
+there were many pastoral pieces, not without a touch of poetry, I
+thought, and instinct with the brave independence of the poorer class in
+France. There you might read how the wood-cutter gloried in his axe, and
+the gardener scorned to be ashamed of his spade. It was not very well
+written, this poetry of labour, but the pluck of the sentiment redeemed
+what was weak or wordy in the expression. The martial and the patriotic
+pieces, on the other hand, were tearful, womanish productions one and
+all. The poet had passed under the Caudine Forks; he sang for an army
+visiting the tomb of its old renown, with arms reversed; and sang not of
+victory, but of death. There was a number in the hawker's collection
+called "Conscrits Fran&ccedil;ais," which may rank among the most dissuasive
+war-lyrics on record. It would not be possible to fight at all in such a
+spirit. The bravest conscript would turn pale if such a ditty were
+struck up beside him on the morning of battle; and whole regiments would
+pile their arms to its tune.</p>
+
+<p>If Fletcher of Saltoun is in the right about the influence of national
+songs, you would say France was come to a poor pass. But the thing will
+work its own cure, and a sound-hearted and courageous people weary at
+length of sniveling over their disasters. Already Paul D&eacute;roul&egrave;de has
+written some manly military verses. There is not much of the
+trumpet-note in them, perhaps, to stir a man's heart in his bosom; they
+lack the lyrical elation, and move slowly; but they are written in a
+grave, honourable, stoical spirit, which should carry soldiers far in a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>
+good cause. One feels as if one would like to trust D&eacute;roul&egrave;de with
+something. It will be happy if he can so far inoculate his
+fellow-countrymen that they may be trusted with their own future. And in
+the meantime, here is an antidote to "French Conscripts" and much other
+doleful versification.</p>
+
+<p>We had left the boats over-night in the custody of one whom we shall
+call Carnival. I did not properly catch his name, and perhaps that was
+not unfortunate for him, as I am not in a position to hand him down with
+honour to posterity. To this person's premises we strolled in the course
+of the day, and found quite a little deputation inspecting the canoes.
+There was a stout gentleman with a knowledge of the river, which he
+seemed eager to impart. There was a very elegant young gentleman in a
+black coat, with a smattering of English, who led the talk at once to
+the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. And then there were three handsome
+girls from fifteen to twenty; and an old gentleman in a blouse, with no
+teeth to speak of, and a strong country accent. Quite the pick of
+Origny, I should suppose.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Cigarette</i> had some mysteries to perform with his rigging in the
+coach-house, so I was left to do the parade single-handed. I found
+myself very much of a hero whether I would or not. The girls were full
+of little shudderings over the dangers of our journey. And I thought it
+would be ungallant not to take my cue from the ladies. My mishap of
+yesterday, told in an off-hand way, produced a deep sensation. It was
+Othello over again, with no less than three Desdemonas and a sprinkling
+of sympathetic senators in the background. Never were the canoes more
+flattered, or flattered more adroitly.</p>
+
+<p>"It is like a violin!" cried one of the girls in an ecstasy.</p>
+
+<p>"I thank you for the word, mademoiselle," said I. "All the more since
+there are people who call out to me that it is like a coffin."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh I but it is really like a violin. It is finished like a violin," she
+went on.</p>
+
+<p>"And polished like a violin," added a senator.</p>
+
+<p>"One has only to stretch the cords," concluded another, "and then
+tum-tumty-tum"&mdash;he imitated the result with spirit.</p>
+
+<p>Was not this a graceful little ovation? Where this people finds the
+secret of its pretty speeches, I cannot imagine; unless the secret
+should be no other than a sincere desire to please! But then no disgrace
+is attached in France to saying a thing neatly; whereas in England to
+talk like a book is to give in one's resignation to society.</p>
+
+<p>The old gentleman in the blouse stole into the coach-house, and somewhat
+irrelevantly informed the <i>Cigarette</i> that he was the father of the
+three girls and four more: quite an exploit for a Frenchman.</p>
+
+<p>"You are very fortunate," answered the <i>Cigarette</i> politely.</p>
+
+<p>And the old gentleman, having apparently gained his point, stole away
+again.</p>
+
+<p>We all got very friendly together. The girls proposed to start with us
+on the morrow, if you please! And, jesting apart, every one was anxious
+to know the hour of our departure. Now, when you are going to crawl into
+your canoe from a bad launch, a crowd, however friendly, is undesirable;
+and so we told them not before twelve, and mentally determined to be off
+by ten at latest.</p>
+
+<p>Towards evening we went abroad again to post some letters. It was cool
+and pleasant; the long village was quite empty, except for one or two
+urchins who followed us as they might have followed a menagerie; the
+hills and the tree-tops looked in from all sides through the clear air;
+and the bells were chiming for yet another service.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly we sighted the three girls standing, with a fourth sister, in
+front of a shop on the wide selvage of the roadway. We had been very
+merry with them a little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> while ago, to be sure. But what was the
+etiquette of Origny? Had it been a country road, of course we should
+have spoken to them; but here, under the eyes of all the gossips, ought
+we to do even as much as bow? I consulted the <i>Cigarette.</i></p>
+
+<p>"Look," said he.</p>
+
+<p>I looked. There were the four girls on the same spot; but now four backs
+were turned to us, very upright and conscious. Corporal Modesty had
+given the word of command, and the well-disciplined picket had gone
+right-about-face like a single person. They maintained this formation
+all the while we were in sight; but we heard them tittering among
+themselves, and the girl whom we had not met laughed with open mouth,
+and even looked over her shoulder at the enemy. I wonder was it
+altogether modesty after all? or in part a sort of country provocation?</p>
+
+<p>As we were returning to the inn, we beheld something floating in the
+ample field of golden evening sky, above the chalk cliffs and the trees
+that grow along their summit. It was too high up, too large, and too
+steady for a kite; and as it was dark, it could not be a star. For
+although a star were as black as ink and as rugged as a walnut, so amply
+does the sun bathe heaven with radiance, that it would sparkle like a
+point of light for us. The village was dotted with people with their
+heads in air; and the children were in a bustle all along the street and
+far up the straight road that climbs the hill, where we could still see
+them running in loose knots. It was a balloon, we learned, which had
+left St. Quentin at half-past five that evening. Mighty composedly the
+majority of the grown people took it. But we were English, and were soon
+running up the hill with the best. Being travellers ourselves in a small
+way, we would fain have seen these other travellers alight.</p>
+
+<p>The spectacle was over by the time we gained the top of the hill. All
+the gold had withered out of the sky,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> and the balloon had disappeared.
+Whither? I ask myself; caught up into the seventh heaven? or come safely
+to land somewhere in that blue uneven distance, into which the roadway
+dipped and melted before our eyes? Probably the aeronauts were already
+warming themselves at a farm chimney, for they say it is cold in these
+unhomely regions of the air. The night fell swiftly. Roadside trees and
+disappointed sightseers, returning though the meadows, stood out in
+black against a margin of low red sunset. It was cheerfuller to face the
+other way, and so down the hill we went, with a full moon, the colour of
+a melon, swinging high above the wooded valley, and the white cliffs
+behind us faintly reddened by the fire of the chalk kilns.</p>
+
+<p>The lamps were lighted, and the salads were being made in Origny
+Sainte-Beno&icirc;te by the river.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>ORIGNY SAINTE-BENO&Icirc;TE</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>
+
+<h4>THE COMPANY AT TABLE</h4>
+
+
+<p>Although we came late for dinner, the company at table treated us to
+sparkling wine. "That is how we are in France," said one. "Those who sit
+down with us are our friends." And the rest applauded.</p>
+
+<p>They were three altogether, and an odd trio to pass the Sunday with.</p>
+
+<p>Two of them were guests like ourselves, both men of the north. One
+ruddy, and of a full habit of body, with copious black hair and beard,
+the intrepid hunter of France, who thought nothing so small, not even a
+lark or a minnow, but he might vindicate his prowess by its capture. For
+such a great, healthy man, his hair flourishing like Samson's, his
+arteries running buckets of red blood, to boast of these infinitesimal
+exploits, produced a feeling of disproportion in the world, as when a
+steam-hammer is set to cracking nuts. The other was a quiet, subdued
+person, blond and lymphatic and sad, with something the look of a Dane:
+"<i>Tristes t&ecirc;tes de Danois!</i>" as Gaston Lafenestre used to say.</p>
+
+<p>I must not let that name go by without a word for the best of all good
+fellows now gone down into the dust. We shall never again see Gaston in
+his forest costume&mdash;he was Gaston with all the world, in affection, not
+in disrespect&mdash;nor hear him wake the echoes of Fontainebleau with the
+woodland horn. Never again shall his kind smile put peace among all
+races of artistic men, and make the Englishman at home in France. Never
+more shall the sheep, who were not more innocent at heart than he,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> sit
+all unconsciously for his industrious pencil. He died too early, at the
+very moment when he was beginning to put forth fresh sprouts, and
+blossom into something worthy of himself; and yet none who knew him will
+think he lived in vain. I never knew a man so little, for whom yet I had
+so much affection; and I find it a good test of others, how much they
+had learned to understand and value him. His was indeed a good influence
+in life while he was still among us; he had a fresh laugh, it did you
+good to see him; and however sad he may have been at heart, he always
+bore a bold and cheerful countenance, and took fortune's worst as it
+were the showers of spring. But now his mother sits alone by the side of
+Fontainebleau woods, where he gathered mushrooms in his hardy and
+penurious youth.</p>
+
+<p>Many of his pictures found their way across the Channel: besides those
+which were stolen, when a dastardly Yankee left him alone in London with
+two English pence, and perhaps twice as many words of English. If any
+one who reads these lines should have a scene of sheep, in the manner of
+Jacques, with this fine creature's signature, let him tell himself that
+one of the kindest and bravest of men has lent a hand to decorate his
+lodging. There may be better pictures in the National Gallery; but not a
+painter among the generations had a better heart. Precious in the sight
+of the Lord of humanity, the Psalms tell us, is the death of his saints.
+It had need to be precious; for it is very costly, when by the stroke, a
+mother is left desolate, and the peace-maker, and <i>peace-looker</i>, of a
+whole society is laid in the ground with Caesar and the Twelve Apostles.</p>
+
+<p>There is something lacking among the oaks of Fontainebleau; and when the
+dessert comes in at Barbizon, people look to the door for a figure that
+is gone.</p>
+
+<p>The third of our companions at Origny was no less a person than the
+landlady's husband: not properly the landlord, since he worked himself
+in a factory during the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> day, and came to his own house at evening as a
+guest: a man worn to skin and bone by perpetual excitement, with baldish
+head, sharp features, and swift, shining eyes. On Saturday, describing
+some paltry adventure at a duck-hunt, he broke a plate into a score of
+fragments. Whenever he made a remark, he would look all round the table
+with his chin raised, and a spark of green light in either eye, seeking
+approval. His wife appeared now and again in the doorway of the room,
+where she was superintending dinner, with a "Henri, you forget
+yourself," or a "Henri, you can surely talk without making such a
+noise." Indeed, that was what the honest fellow could not do. On the
+most trifling matter his eyes kindled, his fist visited the table, and
+his voice rolled abroad in changeful thunder. I never saw such a petard
+of a man; I think the devil was in him. He had two favourite
+expressions&mdash;"it is logical," or illogical, as the case might be; and
+this other, thrown out with a certain bravado, as a man might unfurl a
+banner, at the beginning of many a long and sonorous story: "I am a
+proletarian, you see." Indeed, we saw it very well. God forbid that ever
+I should find him handling a gun in Paris streets! That will not be a
+good moment for the general public.</p>
+
+<p>I thought his two phrases very much represented the good and evil of his
+class, and to some extent of his country. It is a strong thing to say
+what one is, and not be ashamed of it; even although it be in doubtful
+taste to repeat the statement too often in one evening. I should not
+admire it in a duke, of course; but as times go, the trait is honourable
+in a workman. On the other hand, it is not at all a strong thing to put
+one's reliance upon logic; and our own logic particularly, for it is
+generally wrong. We never know where we are to end, if once we begin
+following words or doctors. There is an upright stock in a man's own
+heart, that is trustier than any syllogism; and the eyes, and the
+sympathies and appetites, know a thing or two that have never yet been
+stated in contro<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>versy. Reasons are as plentiful as blackberries; and,
+like fisticuffs, they serve impartially with all sides. Doctrines do not
+stand or fall by their proofs, and are only logical in so far as they
+are cleverly put. An able controversialist no more than an able general
+demonstrates the justice of his cause. But France is all gone wandering
+after one or two big words; it will take some time before they can be
+satisfied that they are no more than words, however big; and when once
+that is done, they will perhaps find logic less diverting.</p>
+
+<p>The conversation opened with details of the day's shooting. When all the
+sportsmen of a village shoot over the village territory <i>pro indiviso</i>,
+it is plain that many questions of etiquette and priority must arise.</p>
+
+<p>"Here now," cried the landlord, brandishing a plate, "here is a field of
+beet-root. Well. Here am I then. I advance, do I not? <i>Eh bien!
+sacristi</i>," and the statement, waxing louder, rolls off into a
+reverberation of oaths, the speaker glaring about for sympathy, and
+everybody nodding his head to him in the name of peace.</p>
+
+<p>The ruddy Northman told some tales of his own prowess in keeping order:
+notably one of a Marquis.</p>
+
+<p>"Marquis," I said, "if you take another step I fire upon you. You have
+committed a dirtiness, Marquis."</p>
+
+<p>Whereupon, it appeared, the Marquis touched his cap and withdrew.</p>
+
+<p>The landlord applauded noisily. "It was well done," he said. "He did all
+that he could. He admitted he was wrong." And then oath upon oath. He
+was no marquis-lover either, but he had a sense of justice in him, this
+proletarian host of ours.</p>
+
+<p>From the matter of hunting, the talk veered into a general comparison of
+Paris and the country. The proletarian beat the table like a drum in
+praise of Paris. "What is Paris? Paris is the cream of France. There are
+no Parisians: it is you and I and everybody who are Parisians. A man has
+eighty chances per cent to get on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> in the world in Paris." And he drew
+a vivid sketch of the workman in a den no bigger than a dog-hutch,
+making articles that were to go all over the world. "<i>Eh bien, quoi,
+c'est magnifique, &ccedil;a!</i>" cried he.</p>
+
+<p>The sad Northman interfered in praise of a peasant's life; he thought
+Paris bad for men and women; "centralization," said he&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>But the landlord was at his throat in a moment. It was all logical, he
+showed him, and all magnificent. "What a spectacle! What a glance for an
+eye!" And the dishes reeled upon the table under a cannonade of blows.</p>
+
+<p>Seeking to make peace, I threw in a word in praise of the liberty of
+opinion in France. I could hardly have shot more amiss. There was an
+instant silence, and a great wagging of significant heads. They did not
+fancy the subject, it was plain; but they gave me to understand that the
+sad Northman was a martyr on account of his views. "Ask him a bit," said
+they. "Just ask him."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir," said he, in his quiet way, answering me, although I had not
+spoken, "I am afraid there is less liberty of opinion in France than you
+may imagine." And with that he dropped his eyes, and seemed to consider
+the subject at an end.</p>
+
+<p>Our curiosity was mightily excited at this. How, or why, or when, was
+this lymphatic bagman martyred? We concluded at once it was on some
+religious question, and brushed up our memories of the Inquisition,
+which were principally drawn from Poe's horrid story, and the sermon in
+"Tristram Shandy," I believe.</p>
+
+<p>On the morrow we had an opportunity of going further into the question;
+for when we rose very early to avoid a sympathizing deputation at our
+departure, we found the hero up before us. He was breaking his fast on
+white wine and raw onions, in order to keep up the character of martyr,
+I conclude. We had a long conversation, and made out what we wanted in
+spite of his reserve. But here was a truly curious circumstance. It
+seems possible<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> for two Scotsmen and a Frenchman to discuss during a
+long half-hour, and each nationality have a different idea in view
+throughout. It was not till the very end that we discovered his heresy
+had been political, or that he suspected our mistake. The terms and
+spirit in which he spoke of his political beliefs were, in our eyes,
+suited to religious beliefs. And <i>vice versa.</i></p>
+
+<p>Nothing could be more characteristic of the two countries. Politics are
+the religion of France; as Nanty Ewart would have said, "A d&mdash;&mdash; d bad
+religion"; while we, at home, keep most of our bitterness for little
+differences about a hymn-book, or a Hebrew word which perhaps neither of
+the parties can translate. And perhaps the misconception is typical of
+many others that may never be cleared up: not only between people of
+different race, but between those of different sex.</p>
+
+<p>As for our friend's martyrdom, he was a Communist, or perhaps only a
+Communard, which is a very different thing; and had lost one or more
+situations in consequence. I think he had also been rejected in
+marriage; but perhaps he had a sentimental way of considering business
+which deceived me. He was a mild, gentle creature, anyway; and I hope he
+has got a better situation, and married a more suitable wife since
+then.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>DOWN THE OISE</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>
+
+<h4>TO MOY</h4>
+
+
+<p>Carnival notoriously cheated us at first. Finding us easy in our ways,
+he regretted having let us oil so cheaply; and taking me aside, told me
+a cock-and-bull story with the moral of another five francs for the
+narrator. The thing was palpably absurd; but I paid up, and at once
+dropped all friendliness of manner, and kept him in his place as an
+inferior with freezing British dignity. He saw in a moment that he had
+gone too far, and killed a willing horse; his face fell; I am sure he
+would have refunded if he could only have thought of a decent pretext.
+He wished me to drink with him, but I would none of his drinks. He grew
+pathetically tender in his professions; but I walked beside him in
+silence or answered him in stately courtesies; and when we got to the
+landing-place, passed the word in English slang to the <i>Cigarette.</i></p>
+
+<p>In spite of the false scent we had thrown out the day before, there must
+have been fifty people about the bridge. We were as pleasant as we could
+be with all but Carnival. We said good-bye, shaking hands with the old
+gentleman who knew the river and the young gentleman who had a
+smattering of English; but never a word for Carnival. Poor Carnival!
+here was a humiliation. He who had been so much identified with the
+canoes, who had given orders in our name, who had shown off the boats
+and even the boatmen like a private exhibition of his own, to be now so
+publicly shamed by the lions of his caravan! I never saw anybody look
+more crestfallen than he. He hung in the background, coming timidly
+forward ever<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> and again as he thought he saw some symptom of a relenting
+humour, and falling hurriedly back when he encountered a cold stare. Let
+us hope it will be a lesson to him.</p>
+
+<p>I would not have mentioned Carnival's peccadillo had not the thing been
+so uncommon in France. This, for instance, was the only case of
+dishonesty or even sharp practice in our whole voyage. We talk very much
+about our honesty in England. It is a good rule to be on your guard
+wherever you hear great professions about a very little piece of virtue.
+If the English could only hear how they are spoken of abroad they might
+confine themselves for a while to remedying the fact; and perhaps even
+when that was done, give us fewer of their airs.</p>
+
+<p>The young ladies, the graces of Origny, were not present at our start,
+but when we got round to the second bridge, behold, it was black with
+sightseers! We were loudly cheered, and for a good way below young lads
+and lasses ran along the bank, still cheering. What with current and
+paddling, we were flashing along like swallows. It was no joke to keep
+up with us upon the woody shore. But the girls picked up their skirts as
+if they were sure they had good ankles, and followed until their breath
+was out. The last to weary were the three graces and a couple of
+companions; and just as they too had had enough, the foremost of the
+three leaped upon a tree-stump and kissed her hand to the canoeists. Not
+Diana herself, although this was more of a Venus after all, could have
+done a graceful thing more gracefully. "Come back again!" she cried; and
+all the others echoed her; and the hills about Origny repeated the
+words, "Come back." But the river had us round an angle in a twinkling,
+and we were alone with the green trees and running water.</p>
+
+<p>Come back? There is no coming back, young ladies, on the impetuous
+stream of life.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The merchant bows unto the seaman's star,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The ploughman from the sun his season takes."<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>And we must all set our pocket-watches by the clock of fate. There is a
+headlong, forthright tide, that bears away man with his fancies like a
+straw, and runs fast in time and space. It is full of curves like this,
+your winding river of the Oise; and lingers and returns in pleasant
+pastorals; and yet, rightly thought upon, never returns at all. For
+though it should revisit the same acre of meadow in the same hour, it
+will have made an ample sweep between-whiles; many little streams will
+have fallen in; many exhalations risen towards the sun; and even
+although it were the same acre, it will no more be the same river of
+Oise. And thus, O graces of Origny, although the wandering fortune of my
+life should carry me back again to where you await death's whistle by
+the river, that will not be the old I who walks the street; and those
+wives and mothers, say, will those be you?</p>
+
+<p>There was never any mistake about the Oise, as a matter of fact. In
+these upper reaches it was still in a prodigious hurry for the sea. It
+ran so fast and merrily, through all the windings of its channel, that I
+strained my thumb, fighting with the rapids, and had to paddle all the
+rest of the way with one hand turned up. Sometimes it had to serve
+mills; and being still a little river, ran very dry and shallow in the
+meanwhile. We had to put our legs out of the boat, and shove ourselves
+off the sand of the bottom with our feet. And still it went on its way
+singing among the poplars, and making a green valley in the world. After
+a good woman, and a good book, and tobacco, there is nothing so
+agreeable on earth as a river. I forgave it its attempt on my life;
+which was after all one part owing to the unruly winds of heaven that
+had blown down the tree, one part to my own mismanagement, and only a
+third part to the river itself, and that not out of malice, but from its
+great preoccupation over its business of getting to the sea. A difficult
+business, too; for the detours it had to make are not to be counted. The
+geographers seem to have given up the attempt; for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> I found no map
+represent the infinite contortion of its course. A fact will say more
+than any of them. After we had been some hours, three if I mistake not,
+flitting by the trees at this smooth, break-neck gallop, when we came
+upon a hamlet and asked where we were, we had got no farther than four
+kilometres (say two miles and a half) from Origny. If it were not for
+the honour of the thing (in the Scots saying), we might almost as well
+have been standing still.</p>
+
+<p>We lunched on a meadow inside a parallelogram of poplars. The leaves
+danced and prattled in the wind all round about us. The river hurried on
+meanwhile, and seemed to chide at our delay. Little we cared. The river
+knew where it was going; not so we: the less our hurry, where we found
+good quarters and a pleasant theatre for a pipe. At that hour,
+stockbrokers were shouting in Paris Bourse for two or three per cent.;
+but we minded them as little as the sliding stream, and sacrificed a
+hecatomb of minutes to the gods of tobacco and digestion. Hurry is the
+resource of the faithless. Where a man can trust his own heart, and
+those of his friends, to-morrow is as good as to-day. And if he die in
+the meanwhile, why then, there he dies, and the question is solved.</p>
+
+<p>We had to take to the canal in the course of the afternoon; because,
+where it crossed the river, there was, not a bridge, but a siphon. If it
+had not been for an excited fellow on the bank, we should have paddled
+right into the siphon, and thenceforward not paddled any more. We met a
+man, a gentleman, on the tow-path, who was much interested in our
+cruise. And I was witness to a strange seizure of lying suffered by the
+<i>Cigarette</i>: who, because his knife came from Norway, narrated all sorts
+of adventures in that country, where he has never been. He was quite
+feverish at the end, and pleaded demoniacal possession.</p>
+
+<p>Moy (pronounce Mo&yuml;) was a pleasant little village, gathered round a
+ch&acirc;teau in a moat. The air was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> perfumed with hemp from neighbouring
+fields. At the Golden Sheep we found excellent entertainment. German
+shells from the siege of La F&egrave;re, N&uuml;rnberg figures, gold-fish in a bowl,
+and all manner of knick-knacks, embellished the public room. The
+landlady was a stout, plain, short-sighted, motherly body, with
+something not far short of a genius for cookery. She had a guess of her
+excellence herself. After every dish was sent in, she would come and
+look on at the dinner for a while, with puckered, blinking eyes. "<i>C'est
+bon, n'est-ce pas?</i>" she would say; and when she had received a proper
+answer, she disappeared into the kitchen. That common French dish,
+partridge and cabbages, became a new thing in my eyes at the Golden
+Sheep; and many subsequent dinners have bitterly disappointed me in
+consequence. Sweet was our rest in the Golden Sheep at Moy.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>LA F&Egrave;RE OF CURSED MEMORY</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>We lingered in Moy a good part of the day, for we were fond of being
+philosophical, and scorned long journeys and early starts on principle.
+The place, moreover, invited to repose. People in elaborate shooting
+costumes sallied from the ch&acirc;teau with guns and game-bags; and this was
+a pleasure in itself, to remain behind while these elegant
+pleasure-seekers took the first of the morning. In this way, all the
+world may be an aristocrat, and play the duke among marquises, and the
+reigning monarch among dukes, if he will only outvie them in
+tranquility. An imperturbable demeanour comes from perfect patience.
+Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or
+misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a
+thunderstorm.</p>
+
+<p>We made a very short day of it to La F&egrave;re; but the dusk was falling, and
+a small rain had begun before we stowed the boats. La F&egrave;re is a
+fortified town in a plain, and has two belts of rampart. Between the
+first and the second extends a region of waste land and cultivated
+patches. Here and there along the wayside were posters forbidding
+trespass in the name of military engineering. At last, a second gateway
+admitted us to the town itself. Lighted windows looked gladsome, whiffs
+of comfortable cookery came abroad upon the air. The town was full of
+the military reserve, out for the French Autumn Manoeuvres, and the
+reservists walked speedily and wore their formidable great-coats. It was
+a fine night to be within doors over dinner, and hear the rain upon the
+windows.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Cigarette</i> and I could not sufficiently congratulate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> each other on
+the prospect, for we had been told there was a capital inn at La F&egrave;re.
+Such a dinner as we were going to eat! such beds as we were to sleep
+in!&mdash;and all the while the rain raining on houseless folk over all the
+poplared countryside! It made our mouths water. The inn bore the name of
+some woodland animal, stag, or hart, or hind, I forget which. But I
+shall never forget how spacious and how eminently habitable it looked as
+we drew near. The carriage entry was lighted up, not by intention, but
+from the mere superfluity of fire and candle in the house. A rattle of
+many dishes came to our ears; we sighted a great field of tablecloth;
+the kitchen glowed like a forge and smelt like a garden of things to
+eat.</p>
+
+<p>Into this, the inmost shrine and physiological heart of a hostelry, with
+all its furnaces in action, and all its dressers charged with viands,
+you are now to suppose us making our triumphal entry, a pair of damp
+rag-and-bone men, each with a limp india-rubber bag upon his arm. I do
+not believe I have a sound view of that kitchen; I saw it through a sort
+of glory: but it seemed to me crowded with the snowy caps of cookmen,
+who all turned round from their saucepans and looked at us with
+surprise. There was no doubt about the landlady, however: there she was,
+heading her army, a flushed, angry woman, full of affairs. Her I asked
+politely&mdash;too politely, thinks the <i>Cigarette</i>&mdash;if we could have beds:
+she surveying us coldly from head to foot.</p>
+
+<p>"You will find beds in the suburb," she remarked. "We are too busy for
+the like of you."</p>
+
+<p>If we could make an entrance, change our clothes, and order a bottle of
+wine, I felt sure we could put things right; so said I: "If we cannot
+sleep, we may at least dine,"&mdash;and was for depositing my bag.</p>
+
+<p>What a terrible convulsion of nature was that which followed in the
+landlady's face! She made a run at us, and stamped her foot.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Out with you&mdash;out of the door!" she screeched. "<i>Sortez! sortez! sortez
+par la porte!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>I do not know how it happened, but next moment we were out in the rain
+and darkness, and I was cursing before the carriage entry like a
+disappointed mendicant. Where were the boating men of Belgium? where the
+Judge and his good wines? and where the graces of Origny? Black, black
+was the night after the firelit kitchen; but what was that to the
+blackness in our heart? This was not the first time that I have been
+refused a lodging. Often and often have I planned what I should do if
+such a misadventure happened to me again. And nothing is easier to plan.
+But to put in execution, with the heart boiling at the indignity? Try
+it; try it only once; and tell me what you did.</p>
+
+<p>It is all very fine to talk about tramps and morality. Six hours of
+police surveillance (such as I have had), or one brutal rejection from
+an inn-door, change your views upon the subject like a course of
+lectures. As long as you keep in the upper regions, with all the world
+bowing to you as you go, social arrangements have a very handsome air;
+but once get under the wheels, and you wish society were at the devil. I
+will give most respectable men a fortnight of such a life, and then I
+will offer them twopence for what remains of their morality.</p>
+
+<p>For my part, when I was turned out of the Stag, or the Hind, or whatever
+it was, I would have set the temple of Diana on fire if it had been
+handy. There was no crime complete enough to express my disapproval of
+human institutions. As for the <i>Cigarette</i>, I never knew a man so
+altered. "We have been taken for pedlars again," said he. "Good God,
+what it must be to be a pedlar in reality!" He particularized a
+complaint for every joint in the landlady's body. Timon was a
+philanthropist alongside of him. And then, when he was at the top of his
+maledictory bent, he would suddenly break away and begin whimperingly to
+commiserate the poor. "I hope to God,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> he said,&mdash;and I trust the prayer
+was answered,&mdash;"that I shall never be uncivil to a pedlar." Was this the
+imperturbable <i>Cigarette</i>? This, this was he. O change beyond report,
+thought, or belief!</p>
+
+<p>Meantime the heaven wept upon our heads; and the windows grew brighter
+as the night increased in darkness. We trudged in and out of La F&egrave;re
+streets; we saw shops, and private houses where people were copiously
+dining; we saw stables where carters' nags had plenty of fodder and
+clean straw; we saw no end of reservists, who were very sorry for
+themselves this wet night, I doubt not, and yearned for their country
+homes; but had they not each man his place in La F&egrave;re barracks? And we,
+what had we?</p>
+
+<p>There seemed to be no other inn in the whole town. People gave us
+directions, which we followed as best we could, generally with the
+effect of bringing us out again upon the scene of our disgrace. We were
+very sad people indeed by the time we had gone all over La F&egrave;re; and the
+<i>Cigarette</i> had already made up his mind to lie under a poplar and sup
+off a loaf of bread. But right at the other end, the house next the
+town-gate was full of light and bustle. "<i>Bazin, aubergiste, loge &agrave;
+pied</i>," was the sign. "<i>&Agrave; la Croix de Malte.</i>" There were we received.</p>
+
+<p>The room was full of noisy reservists drinking and smoking; and we were
+very glad indeed when the drums and bugles began to go about the
+streets, and one and all had to snatch shakoes and be off for the
+barracks.</p>
+
+<p>Bazin was a tall man, running to fat: soft-spoken, with a delicate,
+gentle face. We asked him to share our wine; but he excused himself,
+having pledged reservists all day long. This was a very different type
+of the workman-innkeeper from the bawling disputatious fellow at Origny.
+He also loved Paris, where he had worked as a decorative painter in his
+youth. There were such opportunities for self-instruction there, he
+said. And if any one has read Zola's description of the workman's
+marriage-party visiting the Louvre, they would do<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> well to have heard
+Bazin by way of antidote. He had delighted in the museums in his youth.
+"One sees there little miracles of work," he said; "that is what makes a
+good workman; it kindles a spark." We asked him how he managed in La
+F&egrave;re. "I am married," he said, "and I have my pretty children. But
+frankly, it is no life at all. From morning to night I pledge a pack of
+good enough fellows who know nothing."</p>
+
+<p>It faired as the night went on, and the moon came out of the clouds. We
+sat in front of the door, talking softly with Bazin. At the guardhouse
+opposite, the guard was being for ever turned out, as trains of field
+artillery kept clanking in out of the night, or patrols of horsemen
+trotted by in their cloaks. Madame Bazin came out after a while; she was
+tired with her day's work, I suppose; and she nestled up to her husband
+and laid her head upon his breast. He had his arm about her, and kept
+gently patting her on the shoulder. I think Bazin was right, and he was
+really married. Of how few people can the same be said!</p>
+
+<p>Little did the Bazins know how much they served us. We were charged for
+candles, for food and drink, and for the beds we slept in. But there was
+nothing in the bill for the husband's pleasant talk; nor for the pretty
+spectacle of their married life. And there was yet another item
+uncharged. For these people's politeness really set us up again in our
+own esteem. We had a thirst for consideration; the sense of insult was
+still hot in our spirits; and civil usage seemed to restore us to our
+position in the world.</p>
+
+<p>How little we pay our way in life! Although we have our purses
+continually in our hand, the better part of service goes still
+unrewarded. But I like to fancy that a grateful spirit gives as good as
+it gets. Perhaps the Bazins knew how much I liked them? perhaps they
+also were healed of some slights by the thanks that I gave them in my
+manner?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>DOWN THE OISE</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>
+
+<h4>THROUGH THE GOLDEN VALLEY</h4>
+
+
+<p>Below La F&egrave;re the river runs through a piece of open pastoral country;
+green, opulent, loved by breeders; called the Golden Valley. In wide
+sweeps, and with a swift and equable gallop, the ceaseless stream of
+water visits and makes green the fields. Kine, and horses, and little
+humorous donkeys, browse together in the meadows, and come down in
+troops to the riverside to drink. They make a strange feature in the
+landscape; above all when they are startled, and you see them galloping
+to and fro with their incongruous forms and faces. It gives a feeling as
+of great, unfenced pampas, and the herds of wandering nations. There
+were hills in the distance upon either hand; and on one side, the river
+sometimes bordered on the wooded spurs of Coucy and St. Gobain.</p>
+
+<p>The artillery were practicing at La F&egrave;re, and soon the cannon of heaven
+joined in that loud play. Two continents of cloud met and exchanged
+salvos overhead; while all round the horizon we could see sunshine and
+clear air upon the hills. What with the guns and the thunder, the herds
+were all frightened in the Golden Valley. We could see them tossing
+their heads, and running to and fro in timorous indecision; and when
+they had made up their minds, and the donkey followed the horse, and the
+cow was after the donkey, we could hear their hooves thundering abroad
+over the meadows. It had a martial sound, like cavalry charges. And
+altogether, as far as the ears are concerned, we had a very rousing
+battle-piece performed for our amusement.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At last the guns and the thunder dropped off; the sun shone on the wet
+meadows; the air was scented with the breath of rejoicing trees and
+grass; and the river kept unweariedly carrying us on at its best pace.
+There was a manufacturing district about Chauny, and after that the
+banks grew so high that they hid the adjacent country, and we could see
+nothing but clay sides, and one willow after another. Only, here and
+there, we passed by a village or a ferry, and some wondering child upon
+the bank would stare after us until we turned the corner. I daresay we
+continued to paddle in that child's dreams for many a night after.</p>
+
+<p>Sun and shower alternated like day and night, making the hours longer by
+their variety. When the showers were heavy, I could feel each drop
+striking through my jersey to my warm skin; and the accumulation of
+small shocks put me nearly beside myself. I decided I should buy a
+mackintosh at Noyon. It is nothing to get wet; but the misery of these
+individual pricks of cold all over my body at the same instant of time
+made me flail the water with my paddle like a madman. The <i>Cigarette</i>
+was greatly amused by these ebullitions. It gave him something else to
+look at besides clay banks and willows.</p>
+
+<p>All the time, the river stole away like a thief in straight places, or
+swung round corners with an eddy; the willows nodded, and were
+undermined all day long; the clay banks tumbled in; the Oise, which had
+been so many centuries making the Golden Valley, seemed to have changed
+its fancy, and to be bent upon undoing its performance. What a number of
+things a river does, by simply following Gravity in the innocence of its
+heart!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>NOYON CATHEDRAL</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>Noyon stands about a mile from the river, in a little plain surrounded
+by wooded hills, and entirely covers an eminence with its tile roofs,
+surmounted by a long, straight-backed cathedral with two stiff towers.
+As we got into the town, the tile roofs seemed to tumble uphill one upon
+another, in the oddest disorder; but for all their scrambling, they did
+not attain above the knees of the cathedral, which stood, upright and
+solemn, over all. As the streets drew near to this presiding genius,
+through the market-place under the H&ocirc;tel de Ville, they grew emptier and
+more composed. Blank walls and shuttered windows were turned to the
+great edifice, and grass grew on the white causeway. "Put off thy shoes
+from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground."
+The H&ocirc;tel du Nord, nevertheless, lights its secular tapers within a
+stone-cast of the church; and we had the superb east-end before our eyes
+all morning from the window of our bedroom. I have seldom looked on the
+east-end of a church with more complete sympathy. As it flanges out in
+three wide terraces and settles down broadly on the earth, it looks like
+the poop of some great old battle-ship. Hollow-backed buttresses carry
+vases, which figure for the stern lanterns. There is a roll in the
+ground, and the towers just appear above the pitch of the roof, as
+though the good ship were bowing lazily over an Atlantic swell. At any
+moment it might be a hundred feet away from you, climbing the next
+billow. At any moment a window might open, and some old admiral thrust
+forth a cocked hat, and proceed to take an observation. The old
+admirals<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> sail the sea no longer; the old ships of battle are all broken
+up, and live only in pictures; but this, that was a church before ever
+they were thought upon, is still a church, and makes as brave an
+appearance by the Oise. The cathedral and the river are probably the two
+oldest things for miles around; and certainly they have both a grand old
+age.</p>
+
+<p>The Sacristan took us to the top of one of the towers, and showed us the
+five bells hanging in their loft. From above, the town was a tessellated
+pavement of roofs and gardens; the old line of rampart was plainly
+traceable; and the Sacristan pointed out to us, far across the plain, in
+a bit of gleaming sky between two clouds, the towers of Ch&acirc;teau Coucy.</p>
+
+<p>I find I never weary of great churches. It is my favourite kind of
+mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made
+a cathedral: a thing as single and specious as a statue to the first
+glance, and yet, on examination, as lively and interesting as a forest
+in detail. The height of spires cannot be taken by trigonometry; they
+measure absurdly short, but how tall they are to the admiring eye! And
+where we have so many elegant proportions, growing one out of the other,
+and all together into one, it seems as if proportion transcended itself,
+and became something different and more imposing. I could never fathom
+how a man dares to lift up his voice to preach in a cathedral. What is
+he to say that will not be an anti-climax? For though I have heard a
+considerable variety of sermons, I never yet heard one that was so
+expressive as a cathedral. 'Tis the best preacher itself, and preaches
+day and night; not only telling you of man's art and aspirations in the
+past, but convicting your own soul of ardent sympathies; or rather, like
+all good preachers, it sets you preaching to yourself;&mdash;and every man is
+his own doctor of divinity in the last resort.</p>
+
+<p>As I sat outside of the hotel in the course of the afternoon, the sweet
+groaning thunder of the organ floated out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> of the church like a summons.
+I was not averse, liking the theatre so well, to sit out an act or two
+of the play, but I could never rightly make out the nature of the
+service I beheld. Four or five priests and as many choristers were
+singing <i>Miserere</i> before the high altar when I went in. There was no
+congregation but a few old women on chairs and old men kneeling on the
+pavement. After a while a long train of young girls, walking two and
+two, each with a lighted taper in her hand, and all dressed in black
+with a white veil, came from behind the altar, and began to descend the
+nave; the four first carrying a Virgin and child upon a table. The
+priests and choristers arose from their knees and followed after,
+singing "Ave Mary" as they went. In this order they made the circuit of
+the cathedral, passing twice before me where I leaned against a pillar.
+The priest who seemed of most consequence was a strange, down-looking
+old man. He kept mumbling prayers with his lips; but as he looked upon
+me darkling, it did not seem as if prayer were uppermost in his heart.
+Two others, who bore the burthen of the chant, were stout, brutal,
+military-looking men of forty, with bold, over-fed eyes; they sang with
+some lustiness, and trolled forth "Ave Mary" like a garrison catch. The
+little girls were timid and grave. As they footed slowly up the aisle,
+each one took a moment's glance at the Englishman; and the big nun who
+played marshal fairly stared him out of countenance. As for the
+choristers, from first to last they misbehaved as only boys can
+misbehave; and cruelly marred the performance with their antics.</p>
+
+<p>I understood a great deal of the spirit of what went on. Indeed it would
+be difficult not to understand the <i>Miserere</i>, which I take to be the
+composition of an atheist. If it ever be a good thing to take such
+despondency to heart, the <i>Miserere</i> is the right music, and a cathedral
+a fit scene. So far I am at one with the Catholics:&mdash;an odd name for
+them, after all? But why, in God's name,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> these holiday choristers? why
+these priests who steal wandering looks about the congregation while
+they feign to be at prayer? why this fat nun, who rudely arranges her
+procession and shakes delinquent virgins by the elbow? why this
+spitting, and snuffing, and forgetting of keys, and the thousand and one
+little misadventures that disturb a frame of mind laboriously edified
+with chants and organings? In any playhouse reverend fathers may see
+what can be done with a little art, and how, to move high sentiments, it
+is necessary to drill the supernumeraries and have every stool in its
+proper place.</p>
+
+<p>One other circumstance distressed me. I could bear a <i>Miserere</i> myself,
+having had a good deal of open-air exercise of late; but I wished the
+old people somewhere else. It was neither the right sort of music nor
+the right sort of divinity for men and women who have come through most
+accidents by this time, and probably have an opinion of their own upon
+the tragic element in life. A person up in years can generally do his
+own <i>Miserere</i> for himself; although I notice that such an one often
+prefers <i>Jubilate Deo</i> for his ordinary singing. On the whole, the most
+religious exercise for the aged is probably to recall their own
+experience; so many friends dead, so many hopes disappointed, so many
+slips and stumbles, and withal so many bright days and smiling
+providences; there is surely the matter of a very eloquent sermon in all
+this.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole, I was greatly solemnized. In the little pictorial map of
+our whole Inland Voyage, which my fancy still preserves, and sometimes
+unrolls for the amusement of odd moments, Noyon cathedral figures on a
+most preposterous scale, and must be nearly as large as a department. I
+can still see the faces of the priests as if they were at my elbow, and
+hear <i>Ave Maria, ora pro nobis</i>, sounding through the church. All Noyon
+is blotted out for me by these superior memories; and I do not care to
+say more about the place. It was but a stack of brown<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> roofs at the
+best, where I believe people live very reputably in a quiet way; but the
+shadow of the church falls upon it when the sun is low, and the five
+bells are heard in all quarters, telling that the organ has begun. If
+ever I join the Church of Rome, I shall stipulate to be Bishop of Noyon
+on the Oise.</p>
+
+
+
+<h2>DOWN THE OISE</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>
+
+<h4>TO COMPI&Egrave;GNE</h4>
+
+
+<p>The most patient people grow weary at last with being continually wetted
+with rain; except of course in the Scottish Highlands, where there are
+not enough fine intervals to point the difference. That was like to be
+our case, the day we left Noyon. I remember nothing of the voyage; it
+was nothing but clay banks and willows, and rain; incessant, pitiless,
+beating rain; until we stopped to lunch at a little inn at Pimprez,
+where the canal ran very near the river. We were so sadly drenched that
+the landlady lit a few sticks in the chimney for our comfort; there we
+sat in a steam of vapour, lamenting our concerns. The husband donned a
+game-bag and strode out to shoot; the wife sat in a far corner watching
+us. I think we were worth looking at. We grumbled over the misfortune of
+La F&egrave;re; we forecast other La F&egrave;res in the future;&mdash;although things went
+better with the <i>Cigarette</i> for spokesman; he had more aplomb altogether
+than I; and a dull, positive way of approaching a landlady that carried
+off the india-rubber bags. Talking of La F&egrave;re put us talking of the
+reservists.</p>
+
+<p>"Reservery," said he, "seems a pretty mean way to spend one's autumn
+holiday."</p>
+
+<p>"About as mean," returned I dejectedly, "as canoeing."</p>
+
+<p>"These gentlemen travel for their pleasure?" asked the landlady, with
+unconscious irony.</p>
+
+<p>It was too much. The scales fell from our eyes. Another wet day, it was
+determined, and we put the boats into the train.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The weather took the hint. That was our last wetting. The afternoon
+faired up: grand clouds still voyaged in the sky, but now singly, and
+with a depth of blue around their path; and a sunset in the daintiest
+rose and gold inaugurated a thick night of stars and a month of unbroken
+weather. At the same time, the river began to give us a better outlook
+into the country. The banks were not so high, the willows disappeared
+from along the margin, and pleasant hills stood all along its course and
+marked their profile on the sky.</p>
+
+<p>In a little while the canal, coming to its last lock, began to discharge
+its water-houses on the Oise; so that we had no lack of company to fear.
+Here were all our old friends; the <i>Deo Gratias</i> of Cond&eacute; and the <i>Four
+Sons of Aymon</i> journeyed cheerily down stream along with us; we
+exchanged waterside pleasantries with the steersman perched among the
+lumber, or the driver hoarse with bawling to his horses; and the
+children came and looked over the side as we paddled by. We had never
+known all this while how much we missed them; but it gave us a fillip to
+see the smoke from their chimneys.</p>
+
+<p>A little below this junction we made another meeting of yet more
+account. For there we were joined by the A&igrave;sne, already a far-travelled
+river and fresh out of Champagne. Here ended the adolescence of the
+Oise; this was his marriage-day; thenceforward he had a stately,
+brimming march, conscious of his own dignity and sundry dams. He became
+a tranquil feature in the scene. The trees and towns saw themselves in
+him, as in a mirror. He carried the canoes lightly on his broad breast;
+there was no need to work hard against an eddy: but idleness became the
+order of the day, and mere straightforward dipping of the paddle, now on
+this side, now on that, without intelligence or effort. Truly we were
+coming into halcyon weather upon all accounts, and were floated towards
+the sea like gentlemen.</p>
+
+<p>We made Compi&egrave;gne as the sun was going down: a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> fine profile of a town
+above the river. Over the bridge, a regiment was parading to the drum.
+People loitered on the quay, some fishing, some looking idly at the
+stream. And as the two boats shot in along the water, we could see them
+pointing them out and speaking one to another. We landed at a floating
+lavatory, where the washerwomen were still beating the clothes.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>AT COMPI&Egrave;GNE</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>We put up at a big, bustling hotel in Compi&egrave;gne, where nobody observed
+our presence.</p>
+
+<p>Reservery and general <i>militarismus</i> (as the Germans call it) were
+rampant. A camp of conical white tents without the town looked like a
+leaf out of a picture Bible; sword-belts decorated the walls of the
+<i>caf&eacute;s</i>, and the streets kept sounding all day long with military music.
+It was not possible to be an Englishman and avoid a feeling of elation;
+for the men who followed the drums were small, and walked shabbily. Each
+man inclined at his own angle, and jolted to his own convenience, as he
+went. There was nothing of the superb gait with which a regiment of tall
+Highlanders moves behind its music, solemn and inevitable, like a
+natural phenomenon. Who that has seen it can forget the drum-major
+pacing in front, the drummers' tiger-skins, the pipers' swinging plaids,
+the strange elastic rhythm of the whole regiment footing it in time&mdash;and
+the bang of the drum, when the brasses cease, and the shrill pipes take
+up the martial story in their place?</p>
+
+<p>A girl, at school in France, began to describe one of our regiments on
+parade to her French schoolmates, and as she went on, she told me, the
+recollection grew so vivid, she became so proud to be the countrywoman
+of such soldiers, and so sorry to be in another country, that her voice
+failed her and she burst into tears. I have never forgotten that girl;
+and I think she very nearly deserves a statue. To call her a young lady,
+with all its niminy associations, would be to offer her an insult. She
+may rest assured of one thing: although she never should<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> marry a heroic
+general, never see any great or immediate result of her life, she will
+not have lived in vain for her native land.</p>
+
+<p>But though French soldiers show to ill advantage on parade, on the march
+they are gay, alert, and willing like a troop of fox-hunters. I remember
+once seeing a company pass through the forest of Fontainebleau, on the
+Chailly road, between the Bas Br&eacute;au and the Reine Blanche. One fellow
+walked a little before the rest, and sang a loud, audacious marching
+song. The rest bestirred their feet, and even swung their muskets in
+time. A young officer on horseback had hard ado to keep his countenance
+at the words. You never saw anything so cheerful and spontaneous as
+their gait; schoolboys do not look more eagerly at hare and hounds; and
+you would have thought it impossible to tire such willing marchers.</p>
+
+<p>My great delight in Compi&egrave;gne was the town-hall. I doted upon the
+town-hall. It is a monument of Gothic insecurity, all turreted, and
+gargoyled, and slashed, and bedizened with half a score of architectural
+fancies. Some of the niches are gilt and painted; and in a great square
+panel in the centre, in black relief on a gilt ground, Louis XII. rides
+upon a pacing horse, with hand on hip and head thrown back. There is
+royal arrogance in every line of him; the stirruped foot projects
+insolently from the frame; the eye is hard and proud; the very horse
+seems to be treading with gratification over prostrate serfs, and to
+have the breath of the trumpet in his nostrils. So rides for ever, on
+the front of the town-hall, the good king Louis XII., the father of his
+people.</p>
+
+<p>Over the king's head, in the tall centre turret, appears the dial of a
+clock; and high above that, three little mechanical figures, each one
+with a hammer in his hand, whose business it is to chime out the hours
+and halves and quarters for the burgesses of Compi&egrave;gne. The centre
+figure has a gilt breast-plate; the two others wear gilt<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> trunk-hose;
+and they all three have elegant, flapping hats like cavaliers. As the
+quarter approaches, they turn their heads and look knowingly one to the
+other; and then, <i>kling</i> go the three hammers on three little bells
+below. The hour follows, deep and sonorous, from the interior of the
+tower; and the gilded gentlemen rest from their labours with
+contentment.</p>
+
+<p>I had a great deal of healthy pleasure from their manoeuvres, and took
+good care to miss as few performances as possible; and I found that even
+the <i>Cigarette</i>, while he pretended to despise my enthusiasm, was more
+or less a devotee himself. There is something highly absurd in the
+exposition of such toys to the outrages of winter on a housetop. They
+would be more in keeping in a glass case before a N&uuml;rnberg clock. Above
+all, at night, when the children are abed, and even grown people are
+snoring under quilts, does it not seem impertinent to leave these
+ginger-bread figures winking and tinkling to the stars and the rolling
+moon? The gargoyles may fitly enough twist their ape-like heads; fitly
+enough may the potentate bestride his charger, like a centurion in an
+old German print of the <i>Via Dolorosa</i>; but the toys should be put away
+in a box among some cotton, until the sun rises, and the children are
+abroad again to be amused.</p>
+
+<p>In Compi&egrave;gne post-office a great packet of letters awaited us; and the
+authorities were, for this occasion only, so polite as to hand them over
+upon application.</p>
+
+<p>In some ways, our journey may be said to end with this letter-bag at
+Compi&egrave;gne. The spell was broken. We had partly come home from that
+moment.</p>
+
+<p>No one should have any correspondence on a journey; it is bad enough to
+have to write, but the receipt of letters is the death of all holiday
+feeling.</p>
+
+<p>"Out of my country and myself I go." I wish to take a dive among new
+conditions for a while, as into another element. I have nothing to do
+with my friends<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> or my affections for the time; when I came away, I left
+my heart at home in a desk, or sent it forward with my portmanteau to
+await me at my destination. After my journey is over, I shall not fail
+to read your admirable letters with the attention they deserve. But I
+have paid all this money, look you, and paddled all these strokes, for
+no other purpose than to be abroad; and yet you keep me at home with
+your perpetual communications. You tug the string, and I feel that I am
+a tethered bird. You pursue me all over Europe with the little vexations
+that I came away to avoid. There is no discharge in the war of life, I
+am well aware; but shall there not be so much as a week's furlough?</p>
+
+<p>We were up by six, the day we were to leave. They had taken so little
+note of us that I hardly thought they would have condescended on a bill.
+But they did, with some smart particulars too, and we paid in a
+civilized manner to an uninterested clerk, and went out of that hotel,
+with the india-rubber bags, unremarked. No one cared to know about us.
+It is not possible to rise before a village; but Compi&egrave;gne was so grown
+a town, that it took its ease in the morning, and we were up and away
+while it was still in dressing-gown and slippers. The streets were left
+to people washing doorsteps; nobody was in full dress but the cavaliers
+upon the town-hall; they were all washed with dew, spruce in their
+gilding, and full of intelligence and a sense of professional
+responsibility. <i>Kling</i> went they on the bells for the half-past six as
+we went by. I took it kindly of them to make me this parting compliment;
+they never were in better form, not even at noon upon a Sunday.</p>
+
+<p>There was no one to see us off but the early washerwomen&mdash;early and
+late&mdash;who were already beating the linen in their floating lavatory on
+the river. They were very merry and matutinal in their ways; plunged
+their arms boldly in, and seemed not to feel the shock. It would be
+dispiriting to me, this early beginning and first<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> cold dabble of a most
+dispiriting day's work. But I believe they would have been as unwilling
+to change days with us as we could be to change with them. They crowded
+to the door to watch us paddle away into the thin sunny mists upon the
+river; and shouted heartily alter us till we were through the bridge.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHANGED TIMES</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>There is a sense in which those mists never rose from off our journey;
+and from that time forth they lie very densely in my note-book. As long
+as the Oise was a small rural river, it took us near by people's doors,
+and we could hold a conversation with natives in the riparian fields.
+But now that it had grown so wide, the life along shore passed us by at
+a distance. It was the same difference as between a great public highway
+and a country by-path that wanders in and out of cottage gardens. We now
+lay in towns, where nobody troubled us with questions; we had floated
+into civilized life, where people pass without salutation. In sparsely
+inhabited places, we make all we can of each encounter; but when it
+comes to a city, we keep to ourselves, and never speak unless we have
+trodden on a man's toes. In these waters we were no longer strange
+birds, and nobody supposed we had travelled farther than from the last
+town. I remember, when we came into L'Isle Adam, for instance, how we
+met dozens of pleasure-boats outing it for the afternoon, and there was
+nothing to distinguish the true voyager from the amateur, except,
+perhaps, the filthy condition of my sail. The company in one boat
+actually thought they recognized me for a neighbour. Was there ever
+anything more wounding? All the romance had come down to that. Now, on
+the upper Oise, where nothing sailed as a general thing but fish, a pair
+of canoeists could not be thus vulgarly explained away; we were strange
+and picturesque intruders; and out of people's wonder sprang a sort of
+light and passing intimacy all along our route. There is nothing but
+tit-for-tat in this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> world, though sometimes it be a little difficult to
+trace: for the scores are older than we ourselves, and there has never
+yet been a settling-day since things were. You get entertainment pretty
+much in proportion as you give. As long as we were a sort of odd
+wanderers, to be stared at and followed like a quack doctor or a
+caravan, we had no want of amusement in return; but as soon as we sank
+into commonplace ourselves, all whom we met were similarly disenchanted.
+And here is one reason of a dozen, why the world is dull to dull
+persons.</p>
+
+<p>In our earlier adventures there was generally something to do, and that
+quickened us. Even the showers of rain had a revivifying effect, and
+shook up the brain from torpor. But now, when the river no longer ran in
+a proper sense, only glided seaward with an even, out-right, but
+imperceptible speed, and when the sky smiled upon us day after day
+without variety, we began to slip into that golden doze of the mind
+which follows upon much exercise in the open air. I have stupefied
+myself in this way more than once; indeed, I dearly love the feeling;
+but I never had it to the same degree as when paddling down the Oise. It
+was the apotheosis of stupidity.</p>
+
+<p>We ceased reading entirely. Sometimes when I found a new paper, I took a
+particular pleasure in reading a single number of the current novel; but
+I never could bear more than three installments; and even the second was
+a disappointment. As soon as the tale became in any way perspicuous, it
+lost all merit in my eyes; only a single scene, or, as is the way with
+these <i>feuilletons</i>, half a scene, without antecedent or consequence,
+like a piece of a dream, had the knack of fixing my interest. The less I
+saw of the novel, the better I liked it: a pregnant reflection. But for
+the most part, as I said, we neither of us read anything in the world,
+and employed the very little while we were awake between bed and dinner
+in poring upon maps. I have always been fond of maps, and can voyage in
+an atlas with the greatest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> enjoyment. The names of places are
+singularly inviting; the contour of coasts and rivers is enthralling to
+the eye; and to hit, in a map, upon some place you have heard of before
+makes history a new possession. But we thumbed our charts on these
+evenings with the blankest unconcern. We cared not a fraction for this
+place or that. We stared at the sheet as children listen to their
+rattle; and read the names of towns or villages to forget them again at
+once. We had no romance in the matter; there was nobody so fancy-free.
+If you had taken the maps away while we were studying them most
+intently, it is a fair bet whether we might not have continued to study
+the table with the same delight.</p>
+
+<p>About one thing we were mightily taken up, and that was eating. I think
+I made a god of my belly. I remember dwelling in imagination upon this
+or that dish till my mouth watered; and long before we got in for the
+night my appetite was a clamant, instant annoyance. Sometimes we paddled
+alongside for a while, and whetted each other with gastronomical fancies
+as we went. Cake and sherry, a homely refection, but not within reach
+upon the Oise, trotted through my head for many a mile; and once, as we
+were approaching Verberie, the <i>Cigarette</i> brought my heart into my
+mouth by the suggestion of oyster patties and Sauterne.</p>
+
+<p>I suppose none of us recognise the great part that is played in life by
+eating and drinking. The appetite is so imperious that we can stomach
+the least interesting viands, and pass off a dinner-hour thankfully
+enough on bread and water; just as there are men who must read
+something, if it were only "Bradshaw's Guide." But there is a romance
+about the matter after all. Probably the table has more devotees than
+love; and I am sure that food is much more generally entertaining than
+scenery. Do you give in, as Walt Whitman would say, that you are any the
+less immortal for that? The true materialism is to be ashamed of what we
+are. To detect the flavour of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> aean olive is no less a piece of human
+perfection than to find beauty in the colours of the sunset.</p>
+
+<p>Canoeing was easy work. To dip the paddle at the proper inclination, now
+right, now left; to keep the head down stream; to empty the little pool
+that gathered in the lap of the apron; to screw up the eyes against the
+glittering sparkles of sun upon the water; or now and again to pass
+below the whistling tow-rope of the <i>Deo Gratias</i> of Cond&eacute;, or the <i>Four
+Sons of Aymon</i>&mdash;there was not much art in that; certain silly muscles
+managed it between sleep and waking; and meanwhile the brain had a whole
+holiday, and went to sleep. We took in, at a glance, the larger features
+of the scene; and beheld, with half an eye, bloused fishers and dabbling
+washerwomen on the bank. Now and again we might be half-wakened by some
+church spire, by a leaping fish, or by a trail of river grass that clung
+about the paddle and had to be plucked off and thrown away. But these
+luminous intervals were only partially luminous. A little more of us was
+called into action, but never the whole. The central bureau of nerves,
+what in some moods we call Ourselves, enjoyed its holiday without
+disturbance, like a Government office. The great wheels of intelligence
+turned idly in the head, like fly-wheels, grinding no grist. I have gone
+on for half an hour at a time, counting my strokes and forgetting the
+hundreds. I flatter myself the beasts that perish could not underbid
+that, as a low form of consciousness. And what a pleasure it was! What a
+hearty, tolerant temper did it bring about! There is nothing captious
+about a man who has attained to this, the one possible apotheosis in
+life, the Apotheosis of Stupidity; and he begins to feel dignified and
+longaevous like a tree.</p>
+
+<p>There was one odd piece of practical metaphysics which accompanied what
+I may call the depth, if I must not call it the intensity, of my
+abstraction. What philosophers call <i>me</i> and <i>not-me</i>, <i>ego</i> and <i>non
+ego</i>, preoccupied me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> whether I would or no. There was less <i>me</i> and
+more <i>not-me</i> than I was accustomed to expect. I looked on upon somebody
+else, who managed the paddling; I was aware of somebody else's feet
+against the stretcher; my own body seemed to have no more intimate
+relation to me than the canoe, or the river, or the river banks. Nor
+this alone: something inside my mind, a part of my brain, a province of
+my proper being, had thrown off allegiance and set up for itself, or
+perhaps for the somebody else who did the paddling. I had dwindled into
+quite a little thing in a corner of myself. I was isolated in my own
+skull. Thoughts presented themselves unbidden; they were not my
+thoughts, they were plainly some one else's; and I considered them like
+a part of the landscape. I take it, in short, that I was about as near
+Nirvana as would be convenient in practical life; and if this be so, I
+make the Buddhists my sincere compliments; 'tis an agreeable state, not
+very consistent with mental brilliancy, not exactly profitable in a
+money point of view, but very calm, golden, and incurious, and one that
+sets a man superior to alarms. It may be best figured by supposing
+yourself to get dead drunk, and yet keep sober to enjoy it. I have a
+notion that open-air labourers must spend a large portion of their days
+in this ecstatic stupor, which explains their high composure and
+endurance. A pity to go to the expense of laudanum, when here is a
+better paradise for nothing!</p>
+
+<p>This frame of mind was the great exploit of our voyage, take it all in
+all. It was the farthest piece of travel accomplished. Indeed, it lies
+so far from beaten paths of language, that I despair of getting the
+reader into sympathy with the smiling, complacent idiocy of my
+condition; when ideas came and went like motes in a sunbeam; when trees
+and church spires along the bank surged up, from time to time into my
+notice, like solid objects through a rolling cloudland; when the
+rhythmical swish of boat and paddle in the water became a cradle-song to
+lull my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> thoughts asleep; when a piece of mud on the deck was sometimes
+an intolerable eyesore, and sometimes quite a companion for me, and the
+object of pleased consideration;&mdash;and all the time, with the river
+running and the shores changing upon either hand, I kept counting my
+strokes and forgetting the hundreds, the happiest animal in France.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>DOWN THE OISE</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>
+
+<h4>CHURCH INTERIORS</h4>
+
+
+<p>We made our first stage below Compi&egrave;gne to Pont Sainte Maxence. I was
+abroad a little after six the next morning. The air was biting, and
+smelt of frost. In an open place a score of women wrangled together over
+the day's market; and the noise of their negotiation sounded thin and
+querulous like that of sparrows on a winter's morning. The rare
+passengers blew into their hands, and shuffled in their wooden shoes to
+set the blood agog. The streets were full of icy shadow, although the
+chimneys were smoking overhead in golden sunshine. If you wake early
+enough at this season of the year, you may get up in December to break
+your fast in June.</p>
+
+<p>I found my way to the church; for there is always something to see about
+a church, whether living worshipers or dead men's tombs; you find there
+the deadliest earnest, and the hollowest deceit; and even where it is
+not a piece of history, it will be certain to leak out some contemporary
+gossip. It was scarcely so cold in the church as it was without, but it
+looked colder. The white nave was positively arctic to the eye; and the
+tawdriness of a continental altar looked more forlorn than usual in the
+solitude and the bleak air. Two priests sat in the chancel, reading and
+waiting penitents; and out in the nave, one very old woman was engaged
+in her devotions. It was a wonder how she was able to pass her beads
+when healthy young people were breathing in their palms and slapping
+their chest; but though this concerned me, I was yet more dispirited by
+the nature of her exercises. She<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> went from chair to chair, from altar
+to altar, circumnavigating the church. To each shrine she dedicated an
+equal number of beads and an equal length of time. Like a prudent
+capitalist with a somewhat cynical view of the commercial prospect, she
+desired to place her supplications in a great variety of heavenly
+securities. She would risk nothing on the credit of any single
+intercessor. Out of the whole company of saints and angels, not one but
+was to suppose himself her champion-elect against the Great Assize! I
+could only think of it as a dull, transparent jugglery, based upon
+unconscious unbelief.</p>
+
+<p>She was as dead an old woman as ever I saw; no more than bone and
+parchment, curiously put together. Her eyes, with which she interrogated
+mine, were vacant of sense. It depends on what you call seeing, whether
+you might not call her blind. Perhaps she had known love: perhaps borne
+children, suckled them and given them pet names. But now that was all
+gone by, and had left her neither happier nor wiser; and the best she
+could do with her mornings was to come up here into the cold church and
+juggle for a slice of heaven. It was not without a gulp that I escaped
+into the streets and the keen morning air. Morning? why, how tired of it
+she would be before night! and if she did not sleep, how then? It is
+fortunate that not many of us are brought up publicly to justify our
+lives at the bar of threescore years and ten; fortunate that such a
+number are knocked opportunely on the head in what they call the flower
+of their years, and go away to suffer for their follies in private
+somewhere else. Otherwise, between sick children and discontented old
+folk, we might be put out of all conceit of life.</p>
+
+<p>I had need of all my cerebral hygiene during that day's paddle: the old
+devotee stuck in my throat sorely. But I was soon in the seventh heaven
+of stupidity; and knew nothing but that somebody was paddling a canoe,
+while I was counting his strokes, and forgetting the hundreds. I used
+sometimes to be afraid I should remember the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> hundreds; which would have
+made a toil of a pleasure; but the terror was chimerical, they went out
+of my mind by enchantment, and I knew no more than the man in the moon
+about my only occupation.</p>
+
+<p>At Creil, where we stopped to lunch, we left the canoes in another
+floating lavatory, which, as it was high noon, was packed with
+washerwomen, red-handed and loud-voiced; and they and their broad jokes
+are about all I remember of the place. I could look up my history-books,
+if you were very anxious, and tell you a date or two; for it figured
+rather largely in the English wars. But I prefer to mention a girls'
+boarding-school, which had an interest for us because it was a girls'
+boarding-school, and because we imagined we had rather an interest for
+it. At least&mdash;there were the girls about the garden; and here were we on
+the river; and there was more than one handkerchief waved as we went by.
+It caused quite a stir in my heart; and yet how we should have wearied
+and despised each other, these girls and I, if we had been introduced at
+a croquet party! But this is a fashion I love: to kiss the hand or wave
+a handkerchief to people I shall never see again, to play with
+possibility, and knock in a peg for fancy to hang upon. It gives the
+traveller a jog, reminds him that he is not a traveller everywhere, and
+that his journey is no more than a siesta by the way on the real march
+of life.</p>
+
+<p>The church at Creil was a nondescript place in the inside, splashed with
+gaudy lights from the windows, and picked out with medallions of the
+Dolorous Way. But there was one oddity, in the way of an <i>ex voto</i>,
+which pleased me hugely: a faithful model of a canal boat, swung from
+the vault, with a written aspiration that God should conduct the <i>Saint
+Nicolas</i> of Creil to a good haven. The thing was neatly executed, and
+would have made the delight of a party of boys on the waterside. But
+what tickled me was the gravity of the peril to be conjured. You might
+hang up the model of a sea-going<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> ship, and welcome: one that is to
+plough a furrow round the world, and visit the tropic or the frosty
+poles, runs dangers that are well worth a candle and a mass. But the
+<i>Saint Nicolas</i> of Creil, which was to be tugged for some ten years by
+patient draught-horses, in a weedy canal, with the poplars chattering
+overhead, and the skipper whistling at the tiller; which was to do all
+its errands in green inland places, and never get out of sight of a
+village belfry in all its cruising; why, you would have thought if
+anything could be done without the intervention of Providence, it would
+be that! But perhaps the skipper was a humorist: or perhaps a prophet,
+reminding people of the seriousness of life by this preposterous token.</p>
+
+<p>At Creil, as at Noyon, Saint Joseph seemed a favourite saint on the
+score of punctuality. Day and hour can be specified; and grateful people
+do not fail to specify them on a votive tablet, when prayers have been
+punctually and neatly answered. Whenever time is a consideration, Saint
+Joseph is the proper intermediary. I took a sort of pleasure in
+observing the vogue he had in France, for the good man plays a very
+small part in my religion at home. Yet I could not help fearing that,
+where the Saint is so much commended for exactitude, he will be expected
+to be very grateful for his tablet.</p>
+
+<p>This is foolishness to us Protestants; and not of great importance
+anyway. Whether people's gratitude for the good gifts that come to them
+be wisely conceived or dutifully expressed is a secondary matter after
+all, so long as they feel gratitude. The true ignorance is when a man
+does not know that he has received a good gift, or begins to imagine
+that he has got it for himself. The self-made man is the funniest
+wind-bag after all! There is a marked difference between decreeing light
+in chaos, and lighting the gas in a metropolitan back-parlour with a box
+of patent matches; and do what we will, there is always something made
+to our hand, if it were only our fingers.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But there was something worse than foolishness placarded in Creil
+Church. The Association of the Living Rosary (of which I had never
+previously heard) is responsible for that. This Association was founded,
+according to the printed advertisement, by a brief of Pope Gregory
+Sixteenth, on the 17th of January, 1832: according to a coloured
+bas-relief, it seems to have been founded, sometime or other, by the
+Virgin giving one rosary to Saint Dominic, and the Infant Saviour giving
+another to Saint Catharine of Siena. Pope Gregory is not so imposing,
+but he is nearer hand. I could not distinctly make out whether the
+Association was entirely devotional, or had an eye to good works; at
+least it is highly organized: the names of fourteen matrons and misses
+were filled in for each week of the month as associates, with one other,
+generally a married woman, at the top for <i>z&eacute;latrice</i>: the leader of the
+band. Indulgences, plenary and partial, follow on the performance of the
+duties of the Association. "The partial indulgences are attached to the
+recitation of the rosary." On "the recitation of the required
+<i>dizaine</i>," a partial indulgence promptly follows. When people serve the
+kingdom of heaven with a pass-book in their hands, I should always be
+afraid lest they should carry the same commercial spirit into their
+dealings with their fellow-men, which would make a sad and sordid
+business of this life.</p>
+
+<p>There is one more article, however, of happier import. "All these
+indulgences," it appeared, "are applicable to souls in purgatory." For
+God's sake, ye ladies of Creil, apply them all to the souls in purgatory
+without delay! Burns would take no hire for his last songs, preferring
+to serve his country out of unmixed love. Suppose you were to imitate
+the exciseman, mesdames, and even if the souls in purgatory were not
+greatly bettered, some souls in Creil upon the Oise would find
+themselves none the worse either here or hereafter.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot help wondering, as I transcribe these notes,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> whether a
+Protestant born and bred is in a fit state to understand these signs,
+and do them what justice they deserve; and I cannot help answering that
+he is not. They cannot look so merely ugly and mean to the faithful as
+they do to me. I see that as clearly as a proposition in Euclid. For
+these believers are neither weak nor wicked. They can put up their
+tablet commending Saint Joseph for his despatch, as if he were still a
+village carpenter; they can "recite the required <i>dizaine</i>," and
+metaphorically pocket the indulgence, as if they had done a job for
+Heaven; and then they can go out and look down unabashed upon this
+wonderful river flowing by, and up without confusion at the pin-point
+stars, which are themselves great worlds full of flowing rivers greater
+than the Oise. I see it as plainly, I say, as a proposition in Euclid,
+that my Protestant mind has missed the point, and that there goes with
+these deformities some higher and more religious spirit than I dream.</p>
+
+<p>I wonder if other people would make the same allowances for me! Like the
+ladies of Creil, having recited my rosary of toleration, I look for my
+indulgence on the spot.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>PR&Eacute;CY AND THE MARIONNETTES</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>We made Pr&eacute;cy about sundown. The plain is rich with tufts of poplar. In
+a wide, luminous curve, the Oise lay under the hillside. A faint mist
+began to rise and confound the different distances together. There was
+not a sound audible but that of the sheep-bells in some meadows by the
+river, and the creaking of a cart down the long road that descends the
+hill. The villas in their gardens, the shops along the street, all
+seemed to have been deserted the day before, and I felt inclined to walk
+discreetly as one feels in a silent forest. All of a sudden we came
+round a corner, and there, in a little green round the church, was a
+bevy of girls in Parisian costumes playing croquet. Their laughter, and
+the hollow sound of ball and mallet, made a cheery stir in the
+neighbourhood; and the look of these slim figures, all corseted and
+ribboned, produced an answerable disturbance in our hearts. We were
+within sniff of Paris, it seemed. And here were females of our own
+species playing croquet, just as if Pr&eacute;cy had been a place in real life,
+instead of a stage in the fairyland of travel. For, to be frank, the
+peasant woman is scarcely to be counted as a woman at all, and after
+having passed by such a succession of people in petticoats digging and
+hoeing and making dinner, this company of coquettes under arms made
+quite a surprising feature in the landscape, and convinced us at once of
+being fallible males.</p>
+
+<p>The inn at Pr&eacute;cy is the worst inn in France. Not even in Scotland have I
+found worse fare. It was kept by a brother and sister, neither of whom
+was out of their teens. The sister, so to speak, prepared a meal for us,
+and the brother, who had been tippling, came in and brought<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> with him a
+tipsy butcher, to entertain us as we ate. We found pieces of loo-warm
+pork among the salad, and pieces of unknown yielding substance in the
+<i>rago&ucirc;t.</i> The butcher entertained us with pictures of Parisian life,
+with which he professed himself well acquainted; the brother sitting the
+while on the edge of the billiard table, toppling precariously, and
+sucking the stump of a cigar. In the midst of these diversions, bang
+went a drum past the house, and a hoarse voice began issuing a
+proclamation. It was a man with marionnettes announcing a performance
+for that evening.</p>
+
+<p>He had set up his caravan and lighted his candles on another part of the
+girls' croquet-green, under one of those open sheds which are so common
+in France to shelter markets; and he and his wife, by the time we
+strolled up there, were trying to keep order with the audience.</p>
+
+<p>It was the most absurd contention. The show-people had set out a certain
+number of benches, and all who sat upon them were to pay a couple of
+sous for the accommodation. They were always quite full&mdash;a bumper
+house&mdash;as long as nothing was going forward; but let the show-woman
+appear with an eye to a collection, and at the first rattle of her
+tambourine the audience slipped off the seats, and stood round on the
+outside with their hands in their pockets. It certainly would have tried
+an angel's temper. The showman roared from the proscenium; he had been
+all over France, and nowhere, nowhere, "not even on the borders of
+Germany," had he met with such misconduct. Such thieves and rogues and
+rascals, as he called them! And every now and again the wife issued on
+another round, and added her shrill quota to the tirade. I remarked
+here, as elsewhere, how far more copious is the female mind in the
+material of insult. The audience laughed in high good-humour over the
+man's declamations, but they bridled and cried aloud under the woman's
+pungent sallies. She picked out the sore points. She<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> had the honour of
+the village at her mercy. Voices answered her angrily out of the crowd,
+and received a smarting retort for their trouble. A couple of old ladies
+beside me, who had duly paid for their seats, waxed very red and
+indignant, and discoursed to each other audibly about the impudence of
+these mountebanks; but as soon as the show-woman caught a whisper of
+this, she was down upon them with a swoop: if mesdames could persuade
+their neighbours to act with common honesty, the mountebanks, she
+assured them, would be polite enough: mesdames had probably had their
+bowl of soup, and perhaps a glass of wine that evening; the mountebanks
+also had a taste for soup, and did not choose to have their little
+earnings stolen from them before their eyes. Once, things came as far as
+a brief personal encounter between the showman and some lads, in which
+the former went down as readily as one of his own marionnettes to a peal
+of jeering laughter.</p>
+
+<p>I was a good deal astonished at this scene, because I am pretty well
+acquainted with the ways of French strollers, more or less artistic; and
+have always found them singularly pleasing. Any stroller must be dear to
+the right-thinking heart; if it were only as a living protest against
+offices and the mercantile spirit, and as something to remind us that
+life is not by necessity the kind of thing we generally make it. Even a
+German band, if you see it leaving town in the early morning for a
+campaign in country places, among trees and meadows, has a romantic
+flavour for the imagination. There is nobody, under thirty, so dead but
+his heart will stir a little at sight of a gypsies' camp. "We are not
+cotton-spinners all"&mdash;or, at least, not all through. There is some life
+in humanity yet: and youth will now and again find a brave word to say
+in dispraise of riches, and throw up a situation to go strolling with a
+knapsack.</p>
+
+<p>An Englishman has always special facilities for intercourse with French
+gymnasts; for England is the natural<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> home of gymnasts. This or that
+fellow, in his tights and spangles, is sure to know a word or two of
+English, to have drunk English <i>aff-'n'-aff</i>, and perhaps performed in
+an English music-hall. He is a countryman of mine by profession. He
+leaps, like the Belgian boating men, to the notion that I must be an
+athlete myself.</p>
+
+<p>But the gymnast is not my favourite; he has little or no tincture of the
+artist in his composition; his soul is small and pedestrian, for the
+most part, since his profession makes no call upon it, and does not
+accustom him to high ideas. But if a man is only so much of an actor
+that he can stumble through a farce, he is made free of a new order of
+thoughts. He has something else to think about beside the money-box. He
+has a pride of his own, and, what is of far more importance, he has an
+aim before him that he can never quite attain. He has gone upon a
+pilgrimage that will last him his life long, because there is no end to
+it short of perfection. He will better upon himself a little day by day;
+or even if he has given up the attempt, he will always remember that
+once upon a time he had conceived this high ideal, that once upon a time
+he had fallen in love with a star. "'Tis better to have loved and lost."
+Although the moon should have nothing to say to Endymion, although he
+should settle down with Audrey and feed pigs, do you not think he would
+move with a better grace, and cherish higher thoughts to the end? The
+lout he meets at church never had a fancy above Audrey's snood; but
+there is a reminiscence in Endymion's heart that, like a spice, keeps it
+fresh and haughty.</p>
+
+<p>To be even one of the outskirters of art leaves a fine stamp on a man's
+countenance. I remember once dining with a party in the inn at Ch&acirc;teau
+Landon. Most of them were unmistakable bagmen; others well-to-do
+peasantry; but there was one young fellow in a blouse, whose face stood
+out from among the rest surprisingly. It looked more finished; more of
+the spirit looked out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> through it; it had a living, expressive air, and
+you could see that his eyes took things in. My companion and I wondered
+greatly who and what he could be. It was fair-time in Ch&acirc;teau Landon,
+and when we went along to the booths we had our question answered; for
+there was our friend busily fiddling for the peasants to caper to. He
+was a wandering violinist.</p>
+
+<p>A troop of strollers once came to the inn where I was staying, in the
+Department of Seine et Marne. There was a father and mother; two
+daughters, brazen, blowsy hussies, who sang and acted, without an idea
+of how to set about either; and a dark young man, like a tutor, a
+recalcitrant house-painter, who sang and acted not amiss. The mother was
+the genius of the party, so far as genius can be spoken of with regard
+to such a pack of incompetent humbugs; and her husband could not find
+words to express his admiration for her comic countryman. "You should
+see my old woman," said he, and nodded his beery countenance. One night
+they performed in the stable-yard, with flaring lamps&mdash;a wretched
+exhibition, coldly looked upon by a village audience. Next night, as
+soon as the lamps were lighted, there came a plump of rain, and they had
+to sweep away their baggage as fast as possible, and make off to the
+barn where they harboured, cold, wet, and supperless. In the morning, a
+dear friend of mine, who has as warm a heart for strollers as I have
+myself, made a little collection, and sent it by my hands to comfort
+them for their disappointment. I gave it to the father; he thanked me
+cordially, and we drank a cup together in the kitchen, talking of roads,
+and audiences, and hard times.</p>
+
+<p>When I was going, up got my old stroller, and off with his hat. "I am
+afraid," said he, "that Monsieur will think me altogether a beggar; but
+I have another demand to make upon him." I began to hate him on the
+spot. "We play again to-night," he went on. "Of course, I shall refuse
+to accept any more money from Monsieur<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> and his friends, who have been
+already so liberal. But our programme of to-night is something truly
+creditable; and I cling to the idea that Monsieur will honour us with
+his presence." And then, with a shrug and a smile: "Monsieur
+understands&mdash;the vanity of an artist!" Save the mark! The vanity of an
+artist! That is the kind of thing that reconciles me to life: a ragged,
+tippling, incompetent old rogue, with the manners of a gentleman, and
+the vanity of an artist, to keep up his self-respect!</p>
+
+<p>But the man after my own heart is M. de Vauversin. It is nearly two
+years since I saw him first, and indeed I hope I may see him often
+again. Here is his first programme, as I found it on the
+breakfast-table, and have kept it ever since as a relic of bright
+days:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>"Mesdames et Messieurs,</i></p>
+
+    <p><i>Mademoiselle Ferrario et M. de Vauversin auront l'honneur de
+    chanter ce soir les morceaux suivants.</i></p>
+
+    <p><i>Mademoiselle Ferrario chantera&mdash;Mignon&mdash;Oiseaux l&eacute;gers&mdash;France&mdash;Des
+    Fran&ccedil;ais dorment l&agrave;&mdash;Le ch&acirc;teau bleu&mdash;O&ugrave; voulez-vous aller?</i></p>
+
+    <p><i>M. de Vauversin&mdash;Madame Fountaine et M. Robinet&mdash;Les plongeurs &agrave;
+    cheval&mdash;Le mari m&eacute;content&mdash;Tais-toi, gamin&mdash;Mon voisin
+    l'original&mdash;Heureux comme &ccedil;a&mdash;Comme on est tromp&eacute;."</i></p></div>
+
+<p>They made a stage at one end of the <i>salle-&agrave;-manger.</i> And what a sight
+it was to see M. de Vauversin, with a cigarette in his mouth, twanging a
+guitar, and following Mademoiselle Ferrario's eyes with the obedient,
+kindly look of a dog! The entertainment wound up with a tombola, or
+auction of lottery tickets: an admirable amusement, with all the
+excitement of gambling, and no hope of gain to make you ashamed of your
+eagerness; for there all is loss; you make haste to be out of pocket; it
+is a competition who shall lose most money for the benefit of M. de
+Vauversin and Mademoiselle Ferrario.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>M. de Vauversin is a small man, with a great head of black hair, a
+vivacious and engaging air, and a smile that would be delightful if he
+had better teeth. He was once an actor in the Ch&acirc;telet; but he
+contracted a nervous affection from the heat and glare of the
+footlights, which unfitted him for the stage. At this crisis
+Mademoiselle Ferrario, otherwise Mademoiselle Rita of the Alcazar,
+agreed to share his wandering fortunes. "I could never forget the
+generosity of that lady," said he. He wears trousers so tight that it
+has long been a problem to all who knew him how he manages to get in and
+out of them. He sketches a little in water-colours; he writes verses; he
+is the most patient of fishermen, and spent long days at the bottom of
+the inn-garden fruitlessly dabbling a line in the clear river.</p>
+
+<p>You should hear him recounting his experiences over a bottle of wine;
+such a pleasant vein of talk as he has, with a ready smile at his own
+mishaps, and every now and then a sudden gravity, like a man who should
+hear the surf roar while he was telling the perils of the deep. For it
+was no longer ago than last night, perhaps, that the receipts only
+amounted to a franc and a half, to cover three francs of railway fare
+and two of board and lodging. The Maire, a man worth a million of money,
+sat in the front seat, repeatedly applauding Mlle. Ferrario, and yet
+gave no more than three <i>sous</i> the whole evening. Local authorities look
+with such an evil eye upon the strolling artist. Alas! I know it well,
+who have been myself taken for one, and pitilessly incarcerated on the
+strength of the misapprehension. Once M. de Vauversin visited a
+commissary of police for permission to sing. The commissary, who was
+smoking at his ease, politely doffed his hat upon the singer's entrance.
+"Mr. Commissary," he began, "I am an artist." And on went the
+commissary's hat again. No courtesy for the companions of Apollo! "They
+are as degraded as that," said M. de Vauversin, with a sweep of his
+cigarette.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But what pleased me most was one outbreak of his, when we had been
+talking all the evening of the rubs, indignities, and pinchings of his
+wandering life. Someone said, it would be better to have a million of
+money down, and Mlle. Ferrario admitted that she would prefer that
+mightily. "<i>Eh bien, moi non</i>;&mdash;not I," cried De Vauversin, striking the
+table with his hand. "If anyone is a failure in the world, is it not I?
+I had an art, in which I have done things well&mdash;as well as some&mdash;better
+perhaps than others; and now it is closed against me. I must go about
+the country gathering coppers and singing nonsense. Do you think I
+regret my life? Do you think I would rather be a fat burgess, like a
+calf? Not I! I have had moments when I have been applauded on the
+boards: I think nothing of that; but I have known in my own mind
+sometimes, when I had not a clap from the whole house, that I had found
+a true intonation, or an exact and speaking gesture; and then,
+messieurs, I have known what pleasure was, what it was to do a thing
+well, what it was to be an artist. And to know what art is, is to have
+an interest for ever, such as no burgess can find in his petty concerns.
+<i>Tenez, messieurs, je vais vous le dire</i>&mdash;it is like a religion."</p>
+
+<p>Such, making some allowance for the tricks of memory and the
+inaccuracies of translation, was the profession of faith of M. de
+Vauversin. I have given him his own name, lest any other wanderer should
+come across him, with his guitar and cigarette, and Mademoiselle
+Ferrario; for should not all the world delight to honour this
+unfortunate and loyal follower of the Muses? May Apollo send him rhymes
+hitherto undreamed of; may the river be no longer scanty of her silver
+fishes to his lure; may the cold not pinch him on long winter rides, nor
+the village jack-in-office affront him with unseemly manners; and may he
+never miss Mademoiselle Ferrario from his side, to follow with his
+dutiful eyes and accompany on the guitar!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The marionnettes made a very dismal entertainment. They performed a
+piece, called <i>Pyramus and Thisbe</i>, in five mortal acts, and all written
+in Alexandrines fully as long as the performers. One marionnette was the
+king; another the wicked counselor; a third, credited with exceptional
+beauty, represented Thisbe; and then there were guards, and obdurate
+fathers, and walking gentlemen. Nothing particular took place during the
+two or three acts that I sat out; but you will be pleased to learn that
+the unities were properly respected, and the whole piece, with one
+exception, moved in harmony with classical rules. That exception was the
+comic countryman, a lean marionnette in wooden shoes, who spoke in prose
+and in a broad <i>patois</i> much appreciated by the audience. He took
+unconstitutional liberties with the person of his sovereign; kicked his
+fellow-marionnettes in the mouth with his wooden shoes, and whenever
+none of the versifying suitors were about, made love to Thisbe on his
+own account in comic prose.</p>
+
+<p>This fellow's evolutions, and the little prologue, in which the showman
+made a humorous eulogium of his troop, praising their indifference to
+applause and hisses, and their single devotion to their art, were the
+only circumstances in the whole affair that you could fancy would so
+much as raise a smile. But the villagers of Pr&eacute;cy seemed delighted.
+Indeed, so long as a thing is an exhibition, and you pay to see it, it
+is nearly certain to amuse. If we were charged so much a head for
+sunsets, or if God sent round a drum before the hawthorns came in
+flower, what a work should we not make about their beauty! But these
+things, like good companions, stupid people early cease to observe; and
+the Abstract Bagman tittups past in his spring gig, and is positively
+not aware of the flowers along the lane, or the scenery of the weather
+overhead.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>BACK TO THE WORLD</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>Of the next two days' sail little remains in my mind, and nothing
+whatever in my note-book. The river streamed on steadily through
+pleasant riverside landscapes. Washerwomen in blue dresses, fishers in
+blue blouses, diversified the green banks; and the relation of the two
+colours was like that of the flower and the leaf in the forget-me-not. A
+symphony in forget-me-not; I think Th&eacute;ophile Gautier might thus have
+characterized that two days' panorama. The sky was blue and cloudless,
+and the sliding surface of the river held up, in smooth places, a mirror
+to the heaven and the shores. The washerwomen hailed us laughingly, and
+the noise of trees and water made an accompaniment to our dozing
+thoughts, as we fleeted down the stream.</p>
+
+<p>The great volume, the indefatigable purpose of the river, held the mind
+in chain. It seemed now so sure of its end, so strong and easy in its
+gait, like a grown man full of determination. The surf was roaring for
+it on the sands of Havre.</p>
+
+<p>For my own part, slipping along this moving thoroughfare in my
+fiddle-case of a canoe, I also was beginning to grow aweary for my
+ocean. To the civilized man, there must come, sooner or later, a desire
+for civilization. I was weary of dipping the paddle; I was weary of
+living on the skirts of life; I wished to be in the thick of it once
+more; I wished to get to work; I wished to meet people who understood my
+own speech, and could meet with me on equal terms, as a man and no
+longer as a curiosity.</p>
+
+<p>And so a letter at Pontoise decided us, and we drew up our keels for the
+last time out of that river of Oise that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> had faithfully piloted them,
+through rain and sunshine, for so long. For so many miles had this fleet
+and footless beast of burthen charioted our fortunes, that we turned our
+back upon it with a sense of separation. We had made a long d&eacute;tour out
+of the world, but now we were back in the familiar places, where life
+itself makes all the running, and we are carried to meet adventure
+without a stroke of the paddle. Now we were to return, like the voyager
+in the play, and see what rearrangements fortune had perfected the while
+in our surroundings; what surprises stood ready made for us at home; and
+whither and how far the world had voyaged in our absence. You may paddle
+all day long; but it is when you come back at nightfall, and look in at
+the familiar room, that you find Love or Death awaiting you beside the
+stove; and the most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>EPILOGUE</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>The country where they journeyed, that green, breezy valley of the
+Loing, is one very attractive to cheerful and solitary people. The
+weather was superb; all night it thundered and lightened, and the rain
+fell in sheets; by day, the heavens were cloudless, the sun fervent, the
+air vigorous and pure. They walked separate; the <i>Cigarette</i> plodding
+behind with some philosophy, the lean <i>Arethusa</i> posting on ahead. Thus
+each enjoyed his own reflections by the way; each had perhaps time to
+tire of them before he met his comrade at the designated inn; and the
+pleasures of society and solitude combined to fill the day. The
+<i>Arethusa</i> carried in his knapsack the works of Charles of Orleans, and
+employed some of the hours of travel in the concoction of English
+roundels. In this path he must thus have preceded Mr. Lang, Mr. Dobson,
+Mr. Henley, and all contemporary roundeleers; but, for good reasons, he
+will be the last to publish the result. The <i>Cigarette</i> walked burthened
+with a volume of Michelet. And both these books, it will be seen, played
+a part in the subsequent adventure.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Arethusa</i> was unwisely dressed. He is no precisian in attire; but
+by all accounts he was never so ill-inspired as on that tramp; having
+set forth, indeed, upon a moment's notice, from the most unfashionable
+spot in Europe, Barbizon. On his head he wore a smoking-cap of Indian
+work, the gold lace pitifully frayed and tarnished. A flannel shirt of
+an agreeable dark hue, which the satirical called black; a light tweed
+coat made by a good English tailor; ready-made cheap linen trousers and
+leathern gaiters completed his array. In person, he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> is exceptionally
+lean; and his face is not, like those of happier mortals, a certificate.
+For years he could not pass a frontier, or visit a bank, without
+suspicion; the police everywhere, but in his native city, looked askance
+upon him; and (although I am sure it will not be credited) he is
+actually denied admittance to the casino of Monte Carlo. If you will
+imagine him dressed as above, stooping under his knapsack, walking
+nearly five miles an hour with the folds of the ready-made trousers
+fluttering about his spindle shanks, and still looking eagerly round him
+as if in terror of pursuit&mdash;the figure, when realized, is far from
+reassuring. When Villon journeyed (perhaps by the same pleasant valley)
+to his exile at Roussillon, I wonder if he had not something of the same
+appearance. Something of the same preoccupation he had beyond a doubt,
+for he too must have tinkered verses as he walked, with more success
+than his successor. And if he had anything like the same inspiring
+weather, the same nights of uproar, men in armour rolling and resounding
+down the stairs of heaven, the rain hissing on the village streets, the
+wild bull's-eye of the storm flashing all night long into the bare
+inn-chamber&mdash;the same sweet return of day, the same unfathomable blue of
+noon, the same high-coloured, halcyon eves&mdash;and above all, if he had
+anything like as good a comrade, anything like as keen a relish for what
+he saw, and what he ate, and the rivers that he bathed in, and the
+rubbish that he wrote, I would exchange estates to-day with the poor
+exile, and count myself a gainer.</p>
+
+<p>But there was another point of similarity between the two journeys, for
+which the <i>Arethusa</i> was to pay dear: both were gone upon in days of
+incomplete security. It was not long after the Franco-Prussian war.
+Swiftly as men forget, that countryside was still alive with tales of
+uhlans and outlying sentries, and hairbreadth 'scapes from the
+ignominious cord, and pleasant momentary friendships between invader and
+invaded. A year, at the most<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> two years, later you might have tramped
+all that country over and not heard one anecdote. And a year or two
+later, you would&mdash;if you were a rather ill-looking young man in
+nondescript array&mdash;have gone your rounds in greater safety; for along
+with more interesting matter, the Prussian spy would have somewhat faded
+from men's imaginations.</p>
+
+<p>For all that, our voyager had got beyond Ch&acirc;teau Renard before he was
+conscious of arousing wonder. On the road between that place and
+Ch&acirc;tillon-sur-Loing, however, he encountered a rural postman; they fell
+together in talk, and spoke of a variety of subjects; but through one
+and all, the postman was still visibly preoccupied, and his eyes were
+faithful to the <i>Arethusa's</i> knapsack. At last, with mysterious
+roguishness, he inquired what it contained, and on being answered, shook
+his head with kindly incredulity. "<i>Non</i>," said he, "<i>non, vous avez des
+portraits.</i>" And then with a languishing appeal, "<i>Voyons</i>, show me the
+portraits!" It was some little time before the <i>Arethusa</i>, with a shout
+of laughter, recognized his drift. By portraits he meant indecent
+photographs; and in the <i>Arethusa</i>, an austere and rising author, he
+thought to have identified a pornographic <i>colporteur.</i> When
+country-folk in France have made up their minds as to a person's
+calling, argument is fruitless. Along all the rest of the way, the
+postman piped and fluted meltingly to get a sight of the collection; now
+he would upbraid, now he would reason&mdash;"<i>Voyons</i>, I will tell nobody";
+then he tried corruption, and insisted on paying for a glass of wine;
+and at last, when their ways separated&mdash;"<i>Non</i>," said he, "<i>ce n'est pas
+bien de votre part. O non, ce n'est pas bien.</i>" And shaking his head
+with quite a sentimental sense of injury, he departed unrefreshed.</p>
+
+<p>On certain little difficulties encountered by the <i>Arethusa</i> at
+Ch&acirc;tillon-sur-Loing, I have not space to dwell; another Ch&acirc;tillon, of
+grislier memory, looms too near at hand. But the next day, in a certain
+hamlet called La<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> Jussi&egrave;re, he stopped to drink a glass of syrup in a
+very poor, bare drinking-shop. The hostess, a comely woman, suckling a
+child, examined the traveller with kindly and pitying eyes. "You are not
+of this Department?" she asked. The <i>Arethusa</i> told her he was English.
+"Ah!" she said, surprised. "We have no English. We have many Italians,
+however, and they do very well; they do not complain of the people of
+hereabouts. An Englishman may do very well also; it will be something
+new." Here was a dark saying, over which the <i>Arethusa</i> pondered as he
+drank his grenadine; but when he rose and asked what was to pay, the
+light came upon him in a flash. "<i>O, pour vous</i>," replied the landlady,
+"a halfpenny!" <i>Pour vous</i>? By heaven, she took him for a beggar! He
+paid his halfpenny, feeling that it were ungracious to correct her. But
+when he was forth again upon the road, he became vexed in spirit. The
+conscience is no gentleman, he is a rabbinical fellow; and his
+conscience told him he had stolen the syrup.</p>
+
+<p>That night the travellers slept in Gien; the next day they passed the
+river and set forth (severally, as their custom was) on a short stage
+through the green plain upon the Berry side, to Ch&acirc;tillon-sur-Loire. It
+was the first day of the shooting; and the air rang with the report of
+fire-arms and the admiring cries of sportsmen. Overhead the birds were
+in consternation, wheeling in clouds, settling and re-arising. And yet
+with all this bustle on either hand, the road itself lay solitary. The
+<i>Arethusa</i> smoked a pipe beside a milestone, and I remember he laid down
+very exactly all he was to do at Ch&acirc;tillon: how he was to enjoy a cold
+plunge, to change his shirt, and to await the <i>Cigarette's</i> arrival, in
+sublime inaction, by the margin of the Loire. Fired by these ideas, he
+pushed the more rapidly forward, and came, early in the afternoon, and
+in a breathing heat, to the entering-in of that ill-fated town. Childe
+Roland to the dark tower came.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A polite gendarme threw his shadow on the path.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Monsieur est voyageur</i>?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>And the <i>Arethusa</i>, strong in his innocence, forgetful of his vile
+attire, replied&mdash;I had almost said with gaiety: "So it would appear."</p>
+
+<p>"His papers are in order?" said the gendarme. And when the <i>Arethusa</i>,
+with a slight change of voice, admitted he had none, he was informed
+(politely enough) that he must appear before the Commissary.</p>
+
+<p>The Commissary sat at a table in his bedroom, stripped to the shirt and
+trousers, but still copiously perspiring; and when he turned upon the
+prisoner a large meaningless countenance, that was (like Bardolph's)
+"all whelks and bubuckles," the dullest might have been prepared for
+grief. Here was a stupid man, sleepy with the heat and fretful at the
+interruption, whom neither appeal nor argument could reach.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Commissary</i>: "You have no papers?"</p>
+
+<p><i>The Arethusa</i>: "Not here."</p>
+
+<p><i>The Commissary</i>: "Why?"</p>
+
+<p><i>The Arethusa</i>: "I have left them behind in my valise."</p>
+
+<p><i>The Commissary</i>: "You know, however, that it is forbidden to circulate
+without papers?"</p>
+
+<p><i>The Arethusa</i>: "Pardon me: I am convinced of the contrary. I am here on
+my rights as an English subject by international treaty."</p>
+
+<p><i>The Commissary</i> (<i>with scorn</i>): "You call yourself an Englishman?"</p>
+
+<p><i>The Arethusa</i>: "I do."</p>
+
+<p><i>The Commissary</i>: "Humph.&mdash;What is your trade?"</p>
+
+<p><i>The Arethusa</i>: "I am a Scottish Advocate."</p>
+
+<p><i>The Commissary</i> (<i>with singular annoyance</i>): "A Scottish Advocate! Do
+you then pretend to support yourself by that in this Department?"</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Arethusa</i> modestly disclaimed the pretension. The Commissary had
+scored a point.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>The Commissary</i>: "Why, then, do you travel?"</p>
+
+<p><i>The Arethusa</i>: "I travel for pleasure."</p>
+
+<p><i>The Commissary (pointing to the knapsack, and with sublime
+incredulity)</i>: "<i>Avec &ccedil;a? Voyez-vous, je suis un homme intelligent!</i>"
+(With that? Look here, I am a person of intelligence!)</p>
+
+<p>The culprit remaining silent under this home-thrust, the Commissary
+relished his triumph for a while, and then demanded (like the postman,
+but with what different expectations!) to see the contents of the
+knapsack. And here the <i>Arethusa</i>, not yet sufficiently awake to his
+position, fell into a grave mistake. There was little or no furniture in
+the room except the Commissary's chair and table; and to facilitate
+matters, the <i>Arethusa</i> (with all the innocence on earth) leant the
+knapsack on a corner of the bed. The Commissary fairly bounded from his
+seat; his face and neck flushed past purple, almost into blue; and he
+screamed to lay the desecrating object on the floor.</p>
+
+<p>The knapsack proved to contain a change of shirts, of shoes, of socks,
+and of linen trousers, a small dressing-case, a piece of soap in one of
+the shoes, two volumes of the <i>Collection Jannet</i> lettered "Po&eacute;sies de
+Charles d'Orleans," a map, and a version-book containing divers notes in
+prose and the remarkable English roundels of the voyager, still to this
+day unpublished: the Commissary of Ch&acirc;tillon is the only living man who
+has clapped an eye on these artistic trifles. He turned the assortment
+over with a contumelious finger; it was plain from his daintiness that
+he regarded the <i>Arethusa</i> and all his belongings as the very temple of
+infection. Still there was nothing suspicious about the map, nothing
+really criminal except the roundels; as for Charles of Orleans, to the
+ignorant mind of the prisoner, he seemed as good as a certificate; and
+it was supposed the farce was nearly over.</p>
+
+<p>The inquisitor resumed his seat.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Commissary (after a pause)</i>: "<i>Eh bien, je vais</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> <i>vous dire ce que
+vous &ecirc;tes. Vous &ecirc;tes allemand el vous venez chanter &agrave; la foire.</i>" (Well,
+then, I will tell you what you are. You are a German, and have come to
+sing at the fair.)</p>
+
+<p><i>The Arethusa</i>: "Would you like to hear me sing? I believe I could
+convince you of the contrary."</p>
+
+<p><i>The Commissary</i>: "<i>Pas de plaisanterie, monsieur</i>!"</p>
+
+<p><i>The Arethusa</i>: "Well, sir, oblige me at least by looking at this book.
+Here, I open it with my eyes shut. Read one of these songs&mdash;read this
+one&mdash;and tell me, you who are a man of intelligence, if it would be
+possible to sing it at a fair?"</p>
+
+<p><i>The Commissary (critically)</i>: "<i>Mais oui. Tres bien.</i>"</p>
+
+<p><i>The Arethusa</i>: "<i>Comment, monsieur</i>! What! But do you not observe it is
+antique? It is difficult to understand, even for you and me; but for the
+audience at a fair, it would be meaningless."</p>
+
+<p><i>The Commissary</i> (<i>taking a pen</i>): "<i>Enfin, il faut en finir.</i> What is
+your name?"</p>
+
+<p><i>The Arethusa</i> (<i>speaking with the swallowing vivacity of the English</i>):
+"Robert-Louis-Stev'ns'n."</p>
+
+<p><i>The Commissary</i> (<i>aghast</i>): "<i>H&eacute;! Quoi</i>?"</p>
+
+<p><i>The Arethusa</i> (<i>perceiving and improving his advantage</i>):
+"Rob'rt-Lou's-Stev'ns'n."</p>
+
+<p><i>The Commissary</i> (<i>after several conflicts with his pen</i>): "<i>Eh bien, il
+faut se passer du nom. &Ccedil;a ne s'&eacute;crit pas.</i>" (Well, we must do without
+the name: it is unspellable.)</p>
+
+<p>The above is a rough summary of this momentous conversation, in which I
+have been chiefly careful to preserve the plums of the Commissary; but
+the remainder of the scene, perhaps because of his rising anger, has
+left but little definite in the memory of the <i>Arethusa.</i> The Commissary
+was not, I think, a practiced literary man; no sooner, at least, had he
+taken pen in hand and embarked on the composition of the
+<i>proc&egrave;s-verbal</i>, than he became distinctly more uncivil, and began to
+show a predilection for that simplest of all forms of repartee: "You
+lie." Several times the <i>Arethusa</i> let it pass, and then suddenly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>
+flared up, refused to accept more insults or to answer further
+questions, defied the Commissary to do his worst, and promised him, if
+he did, that he should bitterly repent it. Perhaps if he had worn this
+proud front from the first, instead of beginning with a sense of
+entertainment and then going on to argue, the thing might have turned
+otherwise; for even at this eleventh hour the Commissary was visibly
+staggered. But it was too late; he had been challenged; the
+<i>proc&egrave;s-verbal</i> was begun; and he again squared his elbows over his
+writing, and the <i>Arethusa</i> was led forth a prisoner.</p>
+
+<p>A step or two down the hot road stood the gendarmerie. Thither was our
+unfortunate conducted, and there he was bidden to empty forth the
+contents of his pockets. A handkerchief, a pen, a pencil, a pipe and
+tobacco, matches, and some ten francs of change: that was all. Not a
+file, not a cipher, not a scrap of writing whether to identify or to
+condemn. The very gendarme was appalled before such destitution.</p>
+
+<p>"I regret," he said, "that I arrested you, for I see that you are no
+<i>voyou.</i>" And he promised him every indulgence.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Arethusa</i>, thus encouraged, asked for his pipe. That he was told
+was impossible, but if he chewed, he might have some tobacco. He did not
+chew, however, and asked instead to have his handkerchief.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Non</i>," said the gendarme. "<i>Nous avons eu des histoires de gens qui se
+sont pendus.</i>" (No, we have had histories of people who hanged
+themselves.)</p>
+
+<p>"What!" cried the <i>Arethusa.</i> "And is it for that you refuse me my
+handkerchief? But see how much more easily I could hang myself in my
+trousers!"</p>
+
+<p>The man was struck by the novelty of the idea, but he stuck to his
+colours, and only continued to repeat vague offers of service.</p>
+
+<p>"At least," said the <i>Arethusa</i>, "be sure that you arrest my comrade; he
+will follow me ere long on the same road, and you can tell him by the
+sack upon his shoulders."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This promised, the prisoner was led round into the back court of the
+building, a cellar door was opened, he was motioned down the stair, and
+bolts grated and chains clanged behind his descending person.</p>
+
+<p>The philosophic and still more the imaginative mind is apt to suppose
+itself prepared for any mortal accident. Prison, among other ills, was
+one that had been often faced by the undaunted <i>Arethusa.</i> Even as he
+went down the stairs, he was telling himself that here was a famous
+occasion for a roundel, and that like the committed linnets of the
+tuneful cavalier, he too would make his prison musical. I will tell the
+truth at once: the roundel was never written, or it should be printed in
+this place, to raise a smile. Two reasons interfered: the first moral,
+the second physical.</p>
+
+<p>It is one of the curiosities of human nature, that although all men are
+liars, they can none of them bear to be told so of themselves. To get
+and take the lie with equanimity is a stretch beyond the stoic; and the
+<i>Arethusa</i>, who had been surfeited upon that insult, was blazing
+inwardly with a white heat of smothered wrath. But the physical had also
+its part. The cellar in which he was confined was some feet underground,
+and it was only lighted by an unglazed, narrow aperture high up in the
+wall, and smothered in the leaves of a green vine. The walls were of
+naked masonry, the floor of bare earth; by way of furniture there was an
+earthenware basin, a water-jug, and a wooden bedstead with a blue-grey
+cloak for bedding. To be taken from the hot air of a summer's afternoon,
+the reverberation of the road and the stir of rapid exercise, and
+plunged into the gloom and damp of this receptacle for vagabonds, struck
+an instant chill upon the <i>Arethusa's</i> blood. Now see in how small a
+matter a hardship may consist: the floor was exceedingly uneven under
+foot, with the very spade-marks, I suppose, of the labourers who dug the
+foundations of the barrack; and what with the poor twilight and the
+irregular surface,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> walking was impossible. The caged author resisted
+for a good while, but the chill of the place struck deeper and deeper;
+and at length, with such reluctance as you may fancy, he was driven to
+climb upon the bed and wrap himself in the public covering. There, then,
+he lay upon the verge of shivering, plunged in semi-darkness, wound in a
+garment whose touch he dreaded like the plague, and (in a spirit far
+removed from resignation) telling the roll of the insults he had just
+received. These are not circumstances favourable to the muse.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime (to look at the upper surface where the sun was still shining
+and the guns of sportsmen were still noisy through the tufted plain) the
+<i>Cigarette</i> was drawing near at his more philosophic pace. In those days
+of liberty and health he was the constant partner of the <i>Arethusa</i>, and
+had ample opportunity to share in that gentleman's disfavour with the
+police. Many a bitter bowl had he partaken of with that disastrous
+comrade. He was himself a man born to float easily through life, his
+face and manner artfully recommending him to all. There was but one
+suspicious circumstance he could not carry off, and that was his
+companion. He will not readily forget the Commissary in what is
+ironically called the free town of Frankfort-on-the-Main; nor the
+Franco-Belgian frontier; nor the inn at La F&egrave;re; last, but not least, he
+is pretty certain to remember Ch&acirc;tillon-sur-Loire.</p>
+
+<p>At the town entry, the gendarme culled him like a wayside flower; and a
+moment later two persons in a high state of surprise were confronted in
+the Commissary's office. For if the <i>Cigarette</i> was surprised to be
+arrested, the Commissary was no less taken aback by the appearance and
+appointments of his captive. Here was a man about whom there could be no
+mistake: a man of an unquestionable and unassailable manner, in
+apple-pie order, dressed not with neatness merely but elegance, ready
+with his passport at a word, and well supplied with money: a man the
+Commissary would have doffed his hat to on chance<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> upon the highway; and
+this <i>beau cavalier</i> unblushingly claimed the <i>Arethusa</i> for his
+comrade! The conclusion of the interview was foregone; of its humours I
+remember only one. "Baronet?" demanded the magistrate, glancing up from
+the passport. "<i>Alors, monsieur, vous &ecirc;tes le fils d'un baron?</i>" And
+when the <i>Cigarette</i> (his one mistake throughout the interview) denied
+the soft impeachment, "<i>Alors</i>," from the Commissary, "<i>ce n'est pas
+voire passeport!</i>" But these were ineffectual thunders; he never dreamed
+of laying hands upon the <i>Cigarette</i>; presently he fell into a mood of
+unrestrained admiration, gloating over the contents of the knapsack,
+commending our friend's tailor. Ah! what an honoured guest was the
+Commissary entertaining! What suitable clothes he wore for the warm
+weather! What beautiful maps, what an attractive work of history he
+carried in his knapsack! You are to understand there was now but one
+point of difference between them: what was to be done with the
+<i>Arethusa</i>? the <i>Cigarette</i> demanding his release, the Commissary still
+claiming him as the dungeon's own. Now it chanced that the <i>Cigarette</i>
+had passed some years of his life in Egypt, where he had made
+acquaintance with two very bad things, cholera morbus and pashas; and in
+the eye of the Commissary, as he fingered the volume of Michelet, it
+seemed to our traveller there was something Turkish. I pass over this
+lightly; it is highly possible there was some misunderstanding, highly
+possible that the Commissary (charmed with his visitor) supposed the
+attraction to be mutual, and took for an act of growing friendship what
+the <i>Cigarette</i> himself regarded as a bribe. And at any rate, was there
+ever a bribe more singular than an odd volume of Michelet's history! The
+work was promised him for the morrow, before our departure; and
+presently after, either because he had his price, or to show that he was
+not the man to be behind in friendly offices, "<i>Eh bien</i>," he said, "<i>je
+suppose qu'il faut l&acirc;cher votre camarade.</i>" And he tore up that feast of
+humour, the unfinished <i>proc&egrave;s-verbal.</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> Ah, if he had only torn up
+instead the <i>Arethusa's</i> roundels! There are many works burnt at
+Alexandria, there are many treasured in the British Museum, that I could
+better spare than the <i>proc&egrave;s-verbal</i> of Ch&acirc;tillon. Poor bubuckled
+Commissary! I begin to be sorry that he never had his Michelet:
+perceiving in him fine human traits, a broad-based stupidity, a gusto in
+his magisterial functions, a taste for letters, a ready admiration for
+the admirable. And if he did not admire the <i>Arethusa</i>, he was not alone
+in that.</p>
+
+<p>To the imprisoned one, shivering under the public covering, there came
+suddenly a noise of bolts and chains. He sprang to his feet, ready to
+welcome a companion in calamity; and instead of that, the door was flung
+wide, the friendly gendarme appeared above in the strong daylight, and
+with a magnificent gesture (being probably a student of the
+drama)&mdash;"<i>Vous &ecirc;tes libre</i>!" he said. None too soon for the <i>Arethusa.</i>
+I doubt if he had been half an hour imprisoned; but by the watch in a
+man's brain (which was the only watch he carried) he should have been
+eight times longer; and he passed forth with ecstasy up the cellar
+stairs into the healing warmth of the afternoon sun; and the breath of
+the earth came as sweet as a cow's into his nostril; and he heard again
+(and could have laughed for pleasure) the concord of delicate noises
+that we call the hum of life.</p>
+
+<p>And here it might be thought that my history ended; but not so, this was
+an act-drop and not the curtain. Upon what followed in front of the
+barrack, since there was a lady in the case, I scruple to expatiate. The
+wife of the Mar&eacute;chal-des-logis was a handsome woman, and yet the
+<i>Arethusa</i> was not sorry to be gone from her society. Something of her
+image, cool as a peach on that hot afternoon, still lingers in his
+memory: yet more of her conversation. "You have there a very fine
+parlour," said the poor gentleman. "Ah!" said Madame la Mar&eacute;chale
+(des-logis), "you are very well acquainted with such parlours!" And you
+should have seen with what a hard and scornful<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> eye she measured the
+vagabond before her! I do not think he ever hated the Commissary; but
+before that interview was at an end, he hated Madame la Mar&eacute;chale. His
+passion (as I am led to understand by one who was present) stood
+confessed in a burning eye, a pale cheek, and a trembling utterance;
+Madame, meanwhile tasting the joys of the matador, goading him with
+barbed words and staring him coldly down.</p>
+
+<p>It was certainly good to be away from this lady, and better still to sit
+down to an excellent dinner in the inn. Here, too, the despised
+travellers scraped acquaintance with their next neighbour, a gentleman
+of these parts, returned from the day's sport, who had the good taste to
+find pleasure in their society. The dinner at an end, the gentleman
+proposed the acquaintance should be ripened in the <i>caf&eacute;.</i></p>
+
+<p>The <i>caf&eacute;</i> was crowded with sportsmen conclamantly explaining to each
+other and the world the smallness of their bags. About the centre of the
+room the <i>Cigarette</i> and the <i>Arethusa</i> sat with their new acquaintance;
+a trio very well pleased, for the travellers (after their late
+experience) were greedy of consideration, and their sportsman rejoiced
+in a pair of patient listeners. Suddenly the glass door flew open with a
+crash; the Mar&eacute;chal-des-logis appeared in the interval, gorgeously
+belted and befrogged, entered with salutation, strode up the room with a
+clang of spurs and weapons, and disappeared through a door at the far
+end. Close at his heels followed the <i>Arethusa's</i> gendarme of the
+afternoon, imitating, with a nice shade of difference, the imperial
+bearing of his chief; only, as he passed, he struck lightly with his
+open hand on the shoulder of his late captive, and with that ringing,
+dramatic utterance of which he had the secret&mdash;"<i>Suivez!</i>" said he.</p>
+
+<p>The arrest of the members, the oath of the Tennis Court, the signing of
+the Declaration of Independence, Mark Antony's oration, all the brave
+scenes of history, I conceive as having been not unlike that evening in
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> <i>caf&eacute;</i> at Ch&acirc;tillon. Terror breathed upon the assembly. A moment
+later, when the <i>Arethusa</i> had followed his recaptors into the farther
+part of the house, the <i>Cigarette</i> found himself alone with his coffee
+in a ring of empty chairs and tables, all the lusty sportsmen huddled
+into corners, all their clamorous voices hushed in whispering, all their
+eyes shooting at him furtively as at a leper.</p>
+
+<p>And the <i>Arethusa</i>? Well, he had a long, sometimes a trying, interview
+in the back kitchen. The Mar&eacute;chal-des-logis, who was a very handsome
+man, and I believe both intelligent and honest, had no clear opinion on
+the case. He thought the Commissary had done wrong, but he did not wish
+to get his subordinates into trouble; and he proposed this, that, and
+the other, to all of which the <i>Arethusa</i> (with a growing sense of his
+position) demurred.</p>
+
+<p>"In short," suggested the <i>Arethusa</i>, "you want to wash your hands of
+further responsibility? Well, then, let me go to Paris."</p>
+
+<p>The Mar&eacute;chal-des-logis looked at his watch.</p>
+
+<p>"You may leave," said he, "by the ten o'clock train for Paris."</p>
+
+<p>And at noon the next day the travellers were telling their misadventure
+in the dining-room at Siron's.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>
+<h2><a name="TRAVELS_WITH_A_DONKEY" id="TRAVELS_WITH_A_DONKEY"></a>TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY<br />
+IN THE CEVENNES</h2>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<blockquote><p><i>My dear Sidney Colvin,</i></p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>
+
+<p><i>The journey which this little book is to describe was very agreeable and
+fortunate for me. After an uncouth beginning, I had the best of luck to
+the end. But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the
+wilderness of this world&mdash;all, too, travellers with a donkey; and the
+best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate
+voyager who finds many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They are the
+end and the reward of life. They keep us worthy of ourselves; and when
+we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of
+him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private
+messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped for
+them in every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays
+the postage. Yet though the letter is directed to all, we have an old
+and kindly custom of addressing it on the outside to one. Of what shall
+a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends? And so, my dear
+Sidney Colvin, it is with pride that I sign myself</i></p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 18em;"><i>Affectionately yours,</i></span></p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 32em;"><i>R. L. S.</i></span></p></blockquote>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3>VELAY</h3><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10"><i>Many are the mighty things, and naught</i></span><br />
+<span class="i11"><i>is more mighty than man.... He</i></span><br />
+<span class="i11"><i>masters by his devices the tenant of the</i></span><br />
+<span class="i11"><i>fields.</i></span><br />
+<span class="i22"><span class="smcap">SOPHOCLES.</span></span><br />
+</div></div>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10"><i>Who hath loosed the bands of the wild ass?</i></span><br />
+<span class="i22"><span class="smcap">JOB.</span></span><br />
+</div></div>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<h2>TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>
+
+<h4>THE DONKEY, THE PACK, AND THE PACK-SADDLE</h4>
+
+
+<p>In a little place called Le Monastier, in a pleasant highland valley
+fifteen miles from Le Puy, I spent about a month of fine days. Monastier
+is notable for the making of lace, for drunkenness, for freedom of
+language, and for unparalleled political dissension. There are adherents
+of each of the four French parties&mdash;Legitimists, Orleanists,
+Imperialists, and Republicans&mdash;in this little mountain-town; and they
+all hate, loathe, decry, and calumniate each other. Except for business
+purposes, or to give each other the lie in a tavern brawl, they have
+laid aside even the civility of speech. 'Tis a mere mountain Poland. In
+the midst of this Babylon I found myself a rallying-point; every one was
+anxious to be kind and helpful to the stranger. This was not merely from
+the natural hospitality of mountain people, nor even from the surprise
+with which I was regarded as a man living of his own free will in Le
+Monastier, when he might just as well have lived anywhere else in this
+big world; it arose a good deal from my projected excursion southward
+through the Cevennes. A traveller of my sort was a thing hitherto
+unheard-of in that district. I was looked upon with contempt, like a man
+who should project a journey to the moon, but yet with a respectful
+interest, like one setting forth for the inclement Pole. All were ready
+to help in my preparations; a crowd of sympathizers supported me at the
+critical moment of a bargain; not a step was taken but was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> heralded by
+glasses round and celebrated by a dinner or a breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>It was already hard upon October before I was ready to set forth, and at
+the high altitudes over which my road lay there was no Indian summer to
+be looked for. I was determined, if not to camp out, at least to have
+the means of camping out in my possession; for there is nothing more
+harassing to an easy mind than the necessity of reaching shelter by
+dusk, and the hospitality of a village inn is not always to be reckoned
+sure by those who trudge on foot. A tent, above all, for a solitary
+traveller, is troublesome to pitch and troublesome to strike again; and
+even on the march it forms a conspicuous feature in your baggage. A
+sleeping-sack, on the other hand, is always ready&mdash;you have only to get
+into it; it serves a double purpose&mdash;a bed by night, a portmanteau by
+day; and it does not advertise your intention of camping out to every
+curious passer-by. This is a huge point. If a camp is not secret, it is
+but a troubled resting-place; you become a public character; the
+convivial rustic visits your bedside after an early supper; and you must
+sleep with one eye open, and be up before the day. I decided on a
+sleeping-sack; and after repeated visits to Le Puy, and a deal of high
+living for myself and my advisers, a sleeping-sack was designed,
+constructed, and triumphantly brought home.</p>
+
+<p>This child of my invention was nearly six feet square, exclusive of two
+triangular flaps to serve as a pillow by night and as the top and bottom
+of the sack by day. I call it "the sack," but it was never a sack by
+more than courtesy: only a sort of long roll or sausage, green
+waterproof cart-cloth without and blue sheep's fur within. It was
+commodious as a valise, warm and dry for a bed. There was luxurious
+turning room for one; and at a pinch the thing might serve for two. I
+could bury myself in it up to the neck; for my head I trusted to a fur
+cap, with a hood to fold down over my ears, and a band to pass under<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> my
+nose like a respirator; and in case of heavy rain I proposed to make
+myself a little tent, or tentlet, with my waterproof coat, three stones,
+and a bent branch.</p>
+
+<p>It will readily be conceived that I could not carry this huge package on
+my own, merely human, shoulders. It remained to choose a beast of
+burden. Now, a horse is a fine lady among animals&mdash;flighty, timid,
+delicate in eating, of tender health; he is too valuable and too restive
+to be left alone, so that you are chained to your brute as to a fellow
+galley-slave; a dangerous road puts him out of his wits; in short, he's
+an uncertain and exacting ally, and adds thirty-fold to the troubles of
+the voyager. What I required was something cheap and small and hardy,
+and of a stolid and peaceful temper; and all these requisites pointed to
+a donkey.</p>
+
+<p>There dwelt an old man in Monastier, of rather unsound intellect
+according to some, much followed by street-boys, and known to fame as
+Father Adam. Father Adam had a cart, and to draw the cart a diminutive
+she-ass, not much bigger than a dog, the colour of a mouse, with a
+kindly eye and a determined under-jaw. There was something neat and
+high-bred, a quakerish elegance, about the rogue that hit my fancy on
+the spot. Our first interview was in Monastier market-place. To prove
+her good temper, one child after another was set upon her back to ride,
+and one after another went head over heels into the air; until a want of
+confidence began to reign in youthful bosoms, and the experiment was
+discontinued from a dearth of subjects. I was already backed by a
+deputation of my friends; but as if this were not enough, all the buyers
+and sellers came round and helped me in the bargain; and the ass and I
+and Father Adam were the centre of a hubbub for near half an hour. At
+length she passed into my service for the consideration of sixty-five
+francs and a glass of brandy. The sack had already cost eighty francs
+and two glasses of beer; so that Modestine, as I instantly baptized her,
+was upon all accounts the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> cheaper article. Indeed, that was as it
+should be; for she was only an appurtenance of my mattress, or
+self-acting bedstead on four castors.</p>
+
+<p>I had a last interview with Father Adam in a billiard-room at the
+witching hour of dawn, when I administered the brandy. He professed
+himself greatly touched by the separation, and declared he had often
+bought white bread for the donkey when he had been content with black
+bread for himself; but this, according to the best authorities, must
+have been a flight of fancy. He had a name in the village for brutally
+misusing the ass; yet it is certain that he shed a tear, and the tear
+made a clean mark down one cheek.</p>
+
+<p>By the advice of a fallacious local saddler, a leather pad was made for
+me with rings to fasten on my bundle; and I thoughtfully completed my
+kit and arranged my toilette. By way of armoury and utensils, I took a
+revolver, a little spirit-lamp and pan, a lantern and some halfpenny
+candles, a jack-knife and a large leather flask. The main cargo
+consisted of two entire changes of warm clothing&mdash;besides my travelling
+wear of country velveteen, pilot-coat, and knitted spencer&mdash;some books,
+and my railway-rug, which, being also in the form of a bag, made me a
+double castle for cold nights. The permanent larder was represented by
+cakes of chocolate and tins of Bologna sausage. All this, except what I
+carried about my person, was easily stowed into the sheepskin bag; and
+by good fortune I threw in my empty knapsack, rather for convenience of
+carriage than from any thought that I should want it on my journey. For
+more immediate needs I took a leg of cold mutton, a bottle of
+Beaujolais, an empty bottle to carry milk, an egg-beater, and a
+considerable quantity of black bread and white, like Father Adam, for
+myself and donkey, only in my scheme of things the destinations were
+reversed.</p>
+
+<p>Monastrians, of all shades of thought in politics, had agreed in
+threatening me with many ludicrous misadventures, and with sudden death
+in many surprising<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> forms. Cold, wolves, robbers, above all the
+nocturnal practical joker, were daily and eloquently forced on my
+attention. Yet in these vaticinations, the true, patent danger was left
+out. Like Christian, it was from my pack I suffered by the way. Before
+telling my own mishaps, let me, in two words, relate the lesson of my
+experience. If the pack is well strapped at the ends, and hung at full
+length&mdash;not doubled, for your life&mdash;across the pack-saddle, the
+traveller is safe. The saddle will certainly not fit, such is the
+imperfection of our transitory life; it will assuredly topple and tend
+to overset; but there are stones on every roadside, and a man soon
+learns the art of correcting any tendency to overbalance with a
+well-adjusted stone.</p>
+
+<p>On the day of my departure I was up a little after five; by six, we
+began to load the donkey; and ten minutes after my hopes were in the
+dust. The pad would not stay on Modestine's back for half a moment. I
+returned it to its maker, with whom I had so contumelious a passage that
+the street outside was crowded from wall to wall with gossips looking on
+and listening. The pad changed hands with much vivacity; perhaps it
+would be more descriptive to say that we threw it at each other's heads;
+and, at any rate, we were very warm and unfriendly, and spoke with a
+deal of freedom.</p>
+
+<p>I had a common donkey pack-saddle&mdash;a <i>barde</i>, as they call it&mdash;fitted
+upon Modestine; and once more loaded her with my effects. The doubled
+sack, my pilot-coat (for it was warm, and I was to walk in my
+waistcoat), a great bar of black bread, and an open basket containing
+the white bread, the mutton, and the bottles, were all corded together
+in a very elaborate system of knots, and I looked on the result with
+fatuous content. In such a monstrous deck-cargo, all poised above the
+donkey's shoulders, with nothing below to balance, on a brand-new
+pack-saddle that had not yet been worn to fit the animal, and fastened
+with brand-new girths that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> might be expected to stretch and slacken by
+the way, even a very careless traveller should have seen disaster
+brewing. That elaborate system of knots, again, was the work of too many
+sympathizers to be very artfully designed. It is true they tightened the
+cords with a will; as many as three at a time would have a foot against
+Modestine's quarters, and be hauling with clenched teeth; but I learned
+afterwards that one thoughtful person, without any exercise of force,
+can make a more solid job than half a dozen heated and enthusiastic
+grooms. I was then but a novice; even after the misadventure of the pad
+nothing could disturb my security, and I went forth from the stable-door
+as an ox goeth to the slaughter.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE GREEN DONKEY-DRIVER</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>The bell of Monastier was just striking nine as I got quit of these
+preliminary troubles and descended the hill through the common. As long
+as I was within sight of the windows, a secret shame and the fear of
+some laughable defeat withheld me from tampering with Modestine. She
+tripped along upon her four small hoofs with a sober daintiness of gait;
+from time to time she shook her ears or her tail; and she looked so
+small under the bundle that my mind misgave me. We got across the ford
+without difficulty&mdash;there was no doubt about the matter, she was
+docility itself&mdash;and once on the other bank, where the road begins to
+mount through pine woods, I took in my right hand the unhallowed staff,
+and with a quaking spirit applied it to the donkey. Modestine brisked up
+her pace for perhaps three steps, and then relapsed into her former
+minuet. Another application had the same effect, and so with the third.
+I am worthy the name of an Englishman, and it goes against my conscience
+to lay my hand rudely on a female. I desisted, and looked her all over
+from head to foot; the poor brute's knees were trembling and her
+breathing was distressed; it was plain that she could go no faster on a
+hill. God forbid, thought I, that I should brutalize this innocent
+creature; let her go at her own pace, and let me patiently follow.</p>
+
+<p>What that pace was there is no word mean enough to describe; it was
+something as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run; it
+kept me hanging on each foot for an incredible length of time; in five
+minutes it exhausted the spirit and set up a fever in all the muscles of
+the leg. And yet I had to keep close at hand and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> measure my advance
+exactly upon hers; for if I dropped a few yards into the rear, or went
+on a few yards ahead, Modestine came instantly to a halt and began to
+browse. The thought that this was to last from here to Alais nearly
+broke my heart. Of all conceivable journeys this promised to be the most
+tedious. I tried to tell myself it was a lovely day; I tried to charm my
+foreboding spirit with tobacco; but I had a vision ever present to me of
+the long, long roads, up hill and down dale, and a pair of figures ever
+infinitesimally moving, foot by foot, a yard to the minute, and, like
+things enchanted in a nightmare, approaching no nearer to the goal.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime there came up behind us a tall peasant, perhaps forty
+years of age, of an ironical snuffy countenance, and arrayed in the
+green tail-coat of the country. He overtook us hand over hand, and
+stopped to consider our pitiful advance.</p>
+
+<p>"Your donkey," says he, "is very old?"</p>
+
+<p>I told him, I believed not.</p>
+
+<p>Then, he supposed, we had come far.</p>
+
+<p>I told him, we had but newly left Monastier.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Et vous marchez comme &ccedil;a!</i>" cried he; and, throwing back his head, he
+laughed long and heartily. I watched him, half prepared to feel
+offended, until he had satisfied his mirth; and then, "You must have no
+pity on these animals," said he; and, plucking a switch out of a
+thicket, he began to lace Modestine about the stern-works, uttering a
+cry. The rogue pricked up her ears and broke into a good round pace,
+which she kept up without flagging, and without exhibiting the least
+symptom of distress, as long as the peasant kept beside us. Her former
+panting and shaking had been, I regret to say, a piece of comedy.</p>
+
+<p>My <i>deus ex machin&acirc;</i>, before he left me, supplied some excellent, if
+inhumane, advice; presented me with the switch, which he declared she
+would feel more tenderly than my cane; and finally taught me the true
+cry or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> masonic word of donkey-drivers, "Proot!" All the time, he
+regarded me with a comical, incredulous air, which was embarrassing to
+confront; and smiled over my donkey-driving, as I might have smiled over
+his orthography, or his green tail-coat. But it was not my turn for the
+moment.</p>
+
+<p>I was proud of my new lore, and thought I had learned the art to
+perfection. And certainly Modestine did wonders for the rest of the
+forenoon, and I had a breathing space to look about me. It was Sabbath;
+the mountain-fields were all vacant in the sunshine; and as we came down
+through St. Martin de Frug&egrave;res, the church was crowded to the door,
+there were people kneeling without upon the steps, and the sound of the
+priest's chanting came forth out of the dim interior. It gave me a home
+feeling on the spot; for I am a countryman of the Sabbath, so to speak,
+and all Sabbath observances, like a Scottish accent, strike in me mixed
+feelings, grateful and the reverse. It is only a traveller, hurrying by
+like a person from another planet, who can rightly enjoy the peace and
+beauty of the great ascetic feast. The sight of the resting country does
+his spirit good. There is something better than music in the wide,
+unusual silence; and it disposes him to amiable thoughts, like the sound
+of a little river or the warmth of sunlight.</p>
+
+<p>In this pleasant humour I came down the hill to where Goudet stands in a
+green end of a valley, with Ch&acirc;teau Beaufort opposite upon a rocky
+steep, and the stream, as clear as crystal, lying in a deep pool between
+them. Above and below, you may hear it wimpling over the stones, an
+amiable stripling of a river, which it seems absurd to call the Loire.
+On all sides, Goudet is shut in by mountains; rocky footpaths,
+practicable at best for donkeys, join it to the outer world of France;
+and the men and women drink and swear, in their green corner, or look up
+at the snow-clad peaks in winter from the threshold of their homes, in
+an isolation, you would think,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> like that of Homer's Cyclops. But it is
+not so; the postman reaches Goudet with the letter-bag; the aspiring
+youth of Goudet are within a day's walk of the railway at Le Puy; and
+here in the inn you may find an engraved portrait of the host's nephew,
+R&eacute;gis Senac, "Professor of Fencing and Champion of the two Americas," a
+distinction gained by him, along with the sum of five hundred dollars,
+at Tammany Hall, New York, on the 10th April 1876.</p>
+
+<p>I hurried over my midday meal, and was early forth again. But, alas, as
+we climbed the interminable hill upon the other side, "Proot!" seemed to
+have lost its virtue. I prooted like a lion, I prooted mellifluously
+like a sucking-dove; but Modestine would be neither softened nor
+intimidated. She held doggedly to her pace; nothing but a blow would
+move her, and that only for a second. I must follow at her heels,
+incessantly belabouring. A moment's pause in this ignoble toil, and she
+relapsed into her own private gait. I think I never heard of any one in
+as mean a situation. I must reach the lake of Bouchet, where I meant to
+camp, before sundown, and, to have even a hope of this, I must instantly
+maltreat this uncomplaining animal. The sound of my own blows sickened
+me. Once, when I looked at her, she had a faint resemblance to a lady of
+my acquaintance who formerly loaded me with kindness; and this increased
+my horror of my cruelty.</p>
+
+<p>To make matters worse, we encountered another donkey, ranging at will
+upon the roadside; and this other donkey chanced to be a gentleman. He
+and Modestine met nickering for joy, and I had to separate the pair and
+beat down their young romance with a renewed and feverish bastinado. If
+the other donkey had had the heart of a male under his hide, he would
+have fallen upon me tooth and hoof; and this was a kind of
+consolation&mdash;he was plainly unworthy of Modestine's affection. But the
+incident saddened me, as did everything that spoke of my donkey's sex.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was blazing hot up the valley, windless, with vehement sun upon my
+shoulders; and I had to labour so consistently with my stick that the
+sweat ran into my eyes. Every five minutes, too, the pack, the basket,
+and the pilot-coat would take an ugly slew to one side or the other; and
+I had to stop Modestine, just when I had got her to a tolerable pace of
+about two miles an hour, to tug, push, shoulder, and readjust the load.
+And at last, in the village of Ussel, saddle and all, the whole
+hypothec, turned round and grovelled in the dust below the donkey's
+belly. She, none better pleased, incontinently drew up and seemed to
+smile, and a party of one man, two women, and two children came up, and,
+standing round me in a half circle, encouraged her by their example.</p>
+
+<p>I had the devil's own trouble to get the thing righted; and the instant
+I had done so, without hesitation, it toppled and fell down upon the
+other side. Judge if I was hot! And yet not a hand was offered to assist
+me. The man, indeed, told me I ought to have a package of a different
+shape. I suggested, if he knew nothing better to the point in my
+predicament, he might hold his tongue. And the good-natured dog agreed
+with me smilingly. It was the most despicable fix. I must plainly
+content myself with the pack for Modestine, and take the following items
+for my own share of the portage: a cane, a quart flask, a pilot-jacket
+heavily weighted in the pockets, two pounds of black bread, and an open
+basket full of meats and bottles. I believe I may say I am not devoid of
+greatness of soul; for I did not recoil from this infamous burden. I
+disposed it, Heaven knows how, so as to be mildly portable, and then
+proceeded to steer Modestine through the village. She tried, as was
+indeed her invariable habit, to enter every house and every courtyard in
+the whole length; and, encumbered as I was, without a hand to help
+myself, no words can render an idea of my difficulties. A priest,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> with
+six or seven others, was examining a church in process of repair, and he
+and his acolytes laughed loudly as they saw my plight. I remembered
+having laughed myself when I had seen good men struggling with adversity
+in the person of a jackass, and the recollection filled me with
+penitence. That was in my old light days, before this trouble came upon
+me. God knows at least that I shall never laugh again, thought I. But
+oh, what a cruel thing is a farce to those engaged in it!</p>
+
+<p>A little out of the village, Modestine, filled with the demon, set her
+heart upon a by-road, and positively refused to leave it. I dropped all
+my bundles, and, I am ashamed to say, struck the poor sinner twice
+across the face. It was pitiful to see her lift her head with shut eyes,
+as if waiting for another blow. I came very near crying, but I did a
+wiser thing than that, and sat squarely down by the roadside to consider
+my situation under the cheerful influence of tobacco and a nip of
+brandy. Modestine, in the meanwhile, munched some black bread with a
+contrite hypocritical air. It was plain that I must make a sacrifice to
+the gods of shipwreck. I threw away the empty bottle destined to carry
+milk; I threw away my own white bread, and, disdaining to act by general
+average, kept the black bread for Modestine; lastly, I threw away the
+cold leg of mutton and the egg-whisk, although this last was dear to my
+heart. Thus I found room for everything in the basket, and even stowed
+the boating-coat on the top. By means of an end of cord I slung it under
+one arm, and although the cord cut my shoulder, and the jacket hung
+almost to the ground, it was with a heart greatly lightened that I set
+forth again.</p>
+
+<p>I I had now an arm free to thrash Modestine, and cruelly I chastised
+her. If I were to reach the lake-side before dark she must bestir her
+little shanks to some tune. Already the sun had gone down into a
+windy-looking mist; and although there were still a few streaks<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> of gold
+far off to the east on the hills and the black fir-woods, all was cold
+and grey about our onward path. An infinity of little country by-roads
+led hither and thither among the fields. It was the most pointless
+labyrinth. I could see my destination overhead, or rather the peak that
+dominates it, but choose as I pleased, the roads always ended by turning
+away from it, and sneaking back towards the valley, or northward along
+the margin of the hills. The failing light, the waning colour, the
+naked, unhomely, stony country through which I was travelling, threw me
+into some despondency. I promise you, the stick was not idle; I think
+every decent step that Modestine took must have cost me at least two
+emphatic blows. There was not another sound in the neighbourhood but
+that of my unwearying bastinado.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, in the midst of my toils, the load once more bit the dust,
+and, as by enchantment, all the cords were simultaneously loosened, and
+the road scattered with my dear possessions. The packing was to begin
+again from the beginning; and as I had to invent a new and better
+system, I do not doubt but I lost half an hour. It began to be dusk in
+earnest as I reached a wilderness of turf and stones. It had the air of
+being a road which should lead everywhere at the same time; and I was
+falling into something not unlike despair when I saw two figures
+stalking towards me over the stones. They walked one behind the other
+like tramps, but their pace was remarkable. The son led the way, a tall,
+ill-made, sombre, Scottish-looking man; the mother followed, all in her
+Sunday's best, with an elegantly embroidered ribbon to her cap, and a
+new felt hat atop, and proffering, as she strode along with kilted
+petticoats, a string of obscene and blasphemous oaths.</p>
+
+<p>I hailed the son, and asked him my direction. He pointed loosely west
+and north-west, muttered an inaudible comment, and, without slackening
+his pace for an instant,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> stalked on, as he was going, right athwart my
+path. The mother followed without so much as raising her head. I shouted
+and shouted after them, but they continued to scale the hillside, and
+turned a deaf ear to my outcries. At last, leaving Modestine by herself,
+I was constrained to run after them, hailing the while. They stopped as
+I drew near, the mother still cursing; and I could see she was a
+handsome, motherly, respectable-looking woman. The son once more
+answered me roughly and inaudibly, and was for setting out again. But
+this time I simply collared the mother, who was nearest me, and,
+apologizing for my violence, declared that I could not let them go until
+they had put me on my road. They were neither of them offended&mdash;rather
+mollified than otherwise; told me I had only to follow them; and then
+the mother asked me what I wanted by the lake at such an hour. I
+replied, in the Scottish manner, by inquiring if she had far to go
+herself. She told me, with another oath, that she had an hour and a
+half's road before her. And then, without salutation, the pair strode
+forward again up the hillside in the gathering dusk.</p>
+
+<p>I returned for Modestine, pushed her briskly forward, and, after a sharp
+ascent of twenty minutes, reached the edge of a plateau. The view,
+looking back on my day's journey, was both wild and sad. Mount M&eacute;zenc
+and the peaks beyond St. Julien stood out in trenchant gloom against a
+cold glitter in the east; and the intervening field of hills had fallen
+together into one broad wash of shadow, except here and there the
+outline of a wooded sugar-loaf in black, here and there a white,
+irregular patch to represent a cultivated farm, and here and there a
+blot where the Loire, the Gazeille, or the Laussonne wandered in a
+gorge.</p>
+
+<p>Soon we were on a high-road, and surprise seized on my mind as I beheld
+a village of some magnitude close at hand; for I had been told that the
+neighbourhood of the lake was uninhabited except by trout. The road
+smoked<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> in the twilight with children driving home cattle from the
+fields; and a pair of mounted stride-legged women, hat and cap and all,
+dashed past me at a hammering trot from the canton where they had been
+to church and market. I asked one of the children where I was. At
+Bouchet St. Nicholas, he told me. Thither, about a mile south of my
+destination, and on the other side of a respectable summit, had these
+confused roads and treacherous peasantry conducted me. My shoulder was
+cut, so that it hurt sharply; my arm ached like tooth-ache from
+perpetual beating; I gave up the lake and my design to camp, and asked
+for the <i>auberge.</i></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>I HAVE A GOAD</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>The <i>auberge</i> of Bouchet St. Nicholas was among the least pretentious I
+have ever visited; but I saw many more of the like upon my journey.
+Indeed, it was typical of these French highlands. Imagine a cottage of
+two stories, with a bench before the door; the stable and kitchen in a
+suite, so that Modestine and I could hear each other dining; furniture
+of the plainest, earthen floors, a single bed-chamber for travellers,
+and that without any convenience but beds. In the kitchen cooking and
+eating go forward side by side, and the family sleep at night. Any one
+who has a fancy to wash must do so in public at the common table. The
+food is sometimes spare; hard fish and omelette have been my portion
+more than once; the wine is of the smallest, the brandy abominable to
+man; and the visit of a fat sow, grouting under the table and rubbing
+against your legs, is no impossible accompaniment to dinner.</p>
+
+<p>But the people of the inn, in nine cases out of ten, show themselves
+friendly and considerate. As soon as you cross the doors you cease to be
+a stranger; and although these peasantry are rude and forbidding on the
+highway, they show a tincture of kind breeding when you share their
+hearth. At Bouchet, for instance, I uncorked my bottle of Beaujolais,
+and asked the host to join me. He would take but little.</p>
+
+<p>"I am an amateur of such wine, do you see?" he said, "and I am capable
+of leaving you not enough."</p>
+
+<p>In these hedge-inns the traveller is expected to eat with his own knife;
+unless he ask, no other will be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> supplied: with a glass, a whang of
+bread, and an iron fork, the table is completely laid. My knife was
+cordially admired by the landlord of Bouchet, and the spring filled him
+with wonder.</p>
+
+<p>"I should never have guessed that," he said. "I would bet," he added,
+weighing it in his hand, "that this cost you not less than five francs."</p>
+
+<p>When I told him it had cost me twenty, his jaw dropped.</p>
+
+<p>He was a mild, handsome, sensible, friendly old man, astonishingly
+ignorant. His wife, who was not so pleasant in her manners, knew how to
+read, although I do not suppose she ever did so. She had a share of
+brains, and spoke with a cutting emphasis, like one who ruled the roast.</p>
+
+<p>"My man knows nothing," she said, with an angry nod; "he is like the
+beasts."</p>
+
+<p>And the old gentleman signified acquiescence with his head. There was no
+contempt on her part, and no shame on his; the facts were accepted
+loyally, and no more about the matter.</p>
+
+<p>I was tightly cross-examined about my journey; and the lady understood
+in a moment, and sketched out what I should put into my book when I got
+home. "Whether people harvest or not in such or such a place; if there
+were forests; studies of manners; what, for example, I and the master of
+the house say to you; the beauties of Nature, and all that." And she
+interrogated me with a look.</p>
+
+<p>"It is just that," said I.</p>
+
+<p>"You see," she added to her husband, "I understood that."</p>
+
+<p>They were both much interested by the story of my misadventures.</p>
+
+<p>"In the morning," said the husband, "I will make you something better
+than your cane. Such a beast as that feels nothing; it is in the
+proverb&mdash;<i>dur comme un &acirc;ne</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>; you might beat her insensible with a
+cudgel, and yet you would arrive nowhere."</p>
+
+<p>Something better! I little knew what he was offering.</p>
+
+<p>The sleeping-room was furnished with two beds. I had one; and I will own
+I was a little abashed to find a young man and his wife and child in the
+act of mounting into the other. This was my first experience of the
+sort; and if I am always to feel equally silly and extraneous, I pray
+God it be my last as well. I kept my eyes to myself, and know nothing of
+the woman except that she had beautiful arms, and seemed no whit
+embarrassed by my appearance. As a matter of fact, the situation was
+more trying to me than to the pair. A pair keep each other in
+countenance; it is the single gentleman who has to blush. But I could
+not help attributing my sentiments to the husband, and sought to
+conciliate his tolerance with a cup of brandy from my flask. He told me
+that he was a cooper of Alais travelling to St. Etienne in search of
+work, and that in his spare moments he followed the fatal calling of a
+maker of matches. Me he readily enough divined to be a brandy merchant.</p>
+
+<p>I was up first in the morning (Monday, September 23rd), and hastened my
+toilette guiltily, so as to leave a clear field for madam, the cooper's
+wife. I drank a bowl of milk, and set off to explore the neighbourhood
+of Bouchet. It was perishing cold, a grey, windy, wintry morning; misty
+clouds flew fast and low; the wind piped over the naked platform; and
+the only speck of colour was away behind Mount M&eacute;zenc and the eastern
+hills, where the sky still wore the orange of the dawn.</p>
+
+<p>It was five in the morning, and four thousand feet above the sea; and I
+had to bury my hands in my pockets and trot. People were trooping out to
+the labours of the field by twos and threes, and all turned round to
+stare upon the stranger. I had seen them coming back last night, I saw
+them going afield again; and there was the life of Bouchet in a
+nutshell.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>When I came back to the inn for a bit of breakfast, the landlady was in
+the kitchen combing out her daughter's hair; and I made her my
+compliments upon its beauty.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no," said the mother; "it is not so beautiful as it ought to be.
+Look, it is too fine."</p>
+
+<p>Thus does a wise peasantry console itself under adverse physical
+circumstances, and, by a startling democratic process, the defects of
+the majority decide the type of beauty.</p>
+
+<p>"And where," said I, "is monsieur?"</p>
+
+<p>"The master of the house is upstairs," she answered, "making you a
+goad."</p>
+
+<p>Blessed be the man who invented goads! Blessed the innkeeper of Bouchet
+St. Nicholas, who introduced me to their use! This plain wand, with an
+eighth of an inch of pin, was indeed a sceptre when he put it in my
+hands. Thenceforward Modestine was my slave. A prick, and she passed the
+most inviting stable-door. A prick, and she broke forth into a gallant
+little trotlet that devoured the miles. It was not a remarkable speed,
+when all was said; and we took four hours to cover ten miles at the best
+of it. But what a heavenly change since yesterday! No more wielding of
+the ugly cudgel; no more flailing with an aching arm; no more broadsword
+exercise, but a discreet and gentlemanly fence. And what although now
+and then a drop of blood should appear on Modestine's mouse-coloured
+wedge-like rump? I should have preferred it otherwise, indeed; but
+yesterday's exploits had purged my heart of all humanity. The perverse
+little devil, since she would not be taken with kindness, must even go
+with pricking.</p>
+
+<p>It was bleak and bitter cold, and, except a cavalcade of stride-legged
+ladies and a pair of post-runners, the road was dead solitary all the
+way to Pradelles. I scarce remember an incident but one. A handsome foal
+with a bell about his neck came charging up to us upon a stretch<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> of
+common, sniffed the air martially as one about to do great deeds, and,
+suddenly thinking otherwise in his green young heart, put about and
+galloped off as he had come, the bell tinkling in the wind. For a long
+while afterwards I saw his noble attitude as he drew up, and heard the
+note of his bell; and when I struck the high-road, the song of the
+telegraph-wires seemed to continue the same music.</p>
+
+<p>Pradelles stands on a hillside, high above the Allier, surrounded by
+rich meadows. They were cutting aftermath on all sides, which gave the
+neighbourhood, this gusty autumn morning, an untimely smell of hay. On
+the opposite bank of the Allier the land kept mounting for miles to the
+horizon: a tanned and sallow autumn landscape, with black blots of
+fir-wood and white roads wandering through the hills. Over all this the
+clouds shed a uniform and purplish shadow, sad and somewhat menacing,
+exaggerating height and distance, and throwing into still higher relief
+the twisted ribbons of the highway. It was a cheerless prospect, but one
+stimulating to a traveller. For I was now upon the limit of Velay, and
+all that I beheld lay in another county&mdash;wild G&eacute;vaudan, mountainous,
+uncultivated, and but recently disforested from terror of the wolves.</p>
+
+<p>Wolves, alas! like bandits, seem to flee the traveler's advance, and
+you may trudge through all our comfortable Europe and not meet with an
+adventure worth the name. But here, if anywhere, a man was on the
+frontiers of hope. For this was the land of the ever-memorable <span class="smcap">beast</span>,
+the Napol&eacute;on Bonaparte of wolves. What a career was his! He lived ten
+months at free quarters in G&eacute;vaudan and Vivarais; he ate women and
+children and "shepherdesses celebrated for their beauty"; he pursued
+armed horsemen; he has been seen at broad noonday chasing a post-chaise
+and outrider along the king's high-road, and chaise and outrider fleeing
+before him at the gallop. He was placarded like a political offender,
+and ten thousand francs<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> were offered for his head. And yet, when he was
+shot and sent to Versailles, behold! a common wolf, and even small for
+that. "Though I could reach from pole to pole," sang Alexander Pope; the
+Little Corporal shook Europe; and if all wolves had been as this wolf
+they would have changed the history of man. M. &Eacute;lie Berthet has made him
+the hero of a novel, which I have read, and do not wish to read again.</p>
+
+<p>I hurried over my lunch, and was proof against the landlady's desire
+that I should visit our Lady of Pradelles, "who performed many miracles,
+although she was of wood," and before three-quarters of an hour I was
+goading Modestine down the deep descent that leads to Langogne on the
+Allier. On both sides of the road, in big dusty fields, farmers were
+preparing for next spring. Every fifty yards a yoke of great-necked
+stolid oxen were patiently haling at the plough. I saw one of these mild
+formidable servants of the glebe, who took a sudden interest in
+Modestine and me. The furrow down which he was journeying lay at an
+angle to the road, and his head was solidly fixed to the yoke like those
+of caryatides below a ponderous cornice; but he screwed round his big
+honest eyes and followed us with a ruminating look, until his master
+bade him turn the plough and proceed to reascend the field. From all
+these furrowing ploughshares, from the feet of oxen, from a labourer
+here and there who was breaking the dry clods with a hoe, the wind
+carried away a thin dust like so much smoke. It was a fine, busy,
+breathing, rustic landscape; and as I continued to descend, the
+highlands of G&eacute;vaudan kept mounting in front of me against the sky.</p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span><p>I had crossed the Loire the day before; now I was to cross the Allier;
+so near are these two confluents in their youth. Just at the bridge of
+Langogne, as the long-promised rain was beginning to fall, a lassie of
+some seven or eight addressed me in the sacramental phrase, "<i>D'o&ugrave;
+'st-ce-que vous venez?</i>" She did it with so high an air that she set me
+laughing, and this cut her to the quick. She was evidently one who
+reckoned on respect, and stood looking after me in silent dudgeon, as I
+crossed the bridge and entered the county of G&eacute;vaudan.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3>UPPER G&Eacute;VAUDAN</h3><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10"><i>The way also here was very wearisome</i></span><br />
+<span class="i11"><i>through dirt and slabbiness; nor was</i></span><br />
+<span class="i11"><i>there on all this ground so much as one</i></span><br />
+<span class="i11"><i>inn or victualling-house wherein to</i></span><br />
+<span class="i11"><i>refresh the feebler sort.</i></span><br />
+<span class="i22"><span class="smcap">PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.</span></span><br />
+</div></div>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<h2>A CAMP IN THE DARK</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>The next day (Tuesday, September 24th) it was two o'clock in the
+afternoon before I got my journal written up and my knapsack repaired,
+for I was determined to carry my knapsack in the future, and have no
+more ado with baskets; and half an hour afterwards I set out for Le
+Cheylard l'&Eacute;v&eacute;que, a place on the borders of the forest of Mercoire. A
+man, I was told, should walk there in an hour and a half; and I thought
+it scarce too ambitious to suppose that a man encumbered with a donkey
+might cover the same distance in four hours.</p>
+
+<p>All the way up the long hill from Langogne it rained and hailed
+alternately; the wind kept freshening steadily, although slowly;
+plentiful hurrying clouds&mdash;some, dragging veils of straight rain-shower,
+others massed and luminous as though promising snow&mdash;careered out of the
+north and followed me along my way. I was soon out of the cultivated
+basin of the Allier, and away from the ploughing oxen and such-like
+sights of the country. Moor, heathery marsh, tracts of rock and pines,
+woods of birch all jewelled with the autumn yellow, here and there a few
+naked cottages and bleak fields,&mdash;these were the characters of the
+country. Hill and valley followed valley and hill; the little green and
+stony cattle-tracks wandered in and out of one another, split into three
+or four, died away in marshy hollows, and began again sporadically on
+hillsides or at the borders of a wood.</p>
+
+<p>There was no direct road to Cheylard, and it was no easy affair to make
+a passage in this uneven country and through this intermittent labyrinth
+of tracks. It must have been about four when I struck Sagnerousse,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> and
+went on my way rejoicing in a sure point of departure. Two hours
+afterwards, the dusk rapidly falling, in a lull of the wind, I issued
+from a fir-wood where I had long been wandering, and found, not the
+looked-for village, but another marish bottom among rough-and-tumble
+hills. For some time past I had heard the ringing of cattle-bells ahead;
+and now, as I came out of the skirts of the wood, I saw near upon a
+dozen cows, and perhaps as many more black figures, which I conjectured
+to be children, although the mist had almost unrecognisably exaggerated
+their forms. These were all silently following each other round and
+round in a circle, now taking hands, now breaking up with chains and
+reverences. A dance of children appeals to very innocent and lively
+thoughts; but, at nightfall on the marshes, the thing was eerie and
+fantastic to behold. Even I, who am well enough read in Herbert Spencer,
+felt a sort of silence fall for an instant on my mind. The next, I was
+pricking Modestine forward, and guiding her like an unruly ship through
+the open. In a path, she went doggedly ahead of her own accord, as
+before a fair wind; but once on the turf or among heather, and the brute
+became demented. The tendency of lost travellers to go round in a circle
+was developed in her to the degree of passion, and it took all the
+steering I had in me to keep even a decently straight course through a
+single field.</p>
+
+<p>While I was thus desperately tacking through the bog, children and
+cattle began to disperse, until only a pair of girls remained behind.
+From these I sought direction on my path. The peasantry in general were
+but little disposed to counsel a wayfarer. One old devil simply retired
+into his house, and barricaded the door on my approach; and I might beat
+and shout myself hoarse, he turned a deaf ear. Another, having given me
+a direction which, as I found afterwards, I had misunderstood,
+complacently watched me going wrong without adding a sign. He did not
+care a stalk of parsley if I wandered all night upon the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> hills! As for
+these two girls, they were a pair of impudent sly sluts, with not a
+thought but mischief. One put out her tongue at me, the other bade me
+follow the cows, and they both giggled and joggled each other's elbows.
+The Beast of G&eacute;vaudan ate about a hundred children of this district; I
+began to think of him with sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving the girls, I pushed on through the bog, and got into another
+wood and upon a well-marked road. It grew darker and darker. Modestine,
+suddenly beginning to smell mischief, bettered the pace of her own
+accord, and from that time forward gave me no trouble. It was the first
+sign of intelligence I had occasion to remark in her. At the same time,
+the wind freshened into half a gale, and another heavy discharge of rain
+came flying up out of the north. At the other side of the wood I sighted
+some red windows in the dusk. This was the hamlet of Fouzilhic; three
+houses on a hillside, near a wood of birches. Here I found a delightful
+old man, who came a little way with me in the rain to put me safely on
+the road for Cheylard. He would hear of no reward, but shook his hands
+above his head almost as if in menace, and refused volubly and shrilly
+in unmitigated <i>patois.</i></p>
+
+<p>All seemed right at last. My thoughts began to turn upon dinner and a
+fireside, and my heart was agreeably softened in my bosom. Alas, and I
+was on the brink of new and greater miseries! Suddenly, at a single
+swoop, the night fell. I have been abroad in many a black night, but
+never in a blacker. A glimmer of rocks, a glimmer of the track where it
+was well beaten, a certain fleecy density, or night within night, for a
+tree&mdash;this was all that I could discriminate. The sky was simply
+darkness overhead; even the flying clouds pursued their way invisibly to
+human eyesight. I could not distinguish my hand at arm's-length from the
+track, nor my goad, at the same distance, from the meadows or the sky.</p>
+
+<p>Soon the road that I was following split, after the fashion of the
+country, into three or four in a piece of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> rocky meadow. Since Modestine
+had shown such a fancy for beaten roads, I tried her instinct in this
+predicament. But the instinct of an ass is what might be expected from
+the name; in half a minute she was clambering round and round among some
+boulders, as lost a donkey as you would wish to see. I should have
+camped long before had I been properly provided; but as this was to be
+so short a stage, I had brought no wine, no bread for myself, and little
+over a pound for my lady friend. Add to this, that I and Modestine were
+both handsomely wetted by the showers. But now, if I could have found
+some water, I should have camped at once in spite of all. Water,
+however, being entirely absent, except in the form of rain, I determined
+to return to Fouzilhic, and ask a guide a little farther on my way&mdash;"a
+little farther lend thy guiding hand."</p>
+
+<p>The thing was easy to decide, hard to accomplish. In this sensible
+roaring blackness I was sure of nothing but the direction of the wind.
+To this I set my face; the road had disappeared, and I went across
+country, now in marshy opens, now baffled by walls unscalable to
+Modestine, until I came once more in sight of some red windows. This
+time they were differently disposed. It was not Fouzilhic, but
+Fouzilhac, a hamlet little distant from the other in space, but worlds
+away in the spirit of its inhabitants. I tied Modestine to a gate, and
+groped forward, stumbling among rocks, plunging mid-leg in bog, until I
+gained the entrance of the village. In the first lighted house there was
+a woman who would not open to me. She could do nothing, she cried to me
+through the door, being alone and lame; but if I would apply at the next
+house there was a man who could help me if he had a mind.</p>
+
+<p>They came to the next door in force, a man, two women, and a girl, and
+brought a pair of lanterns to examine the wayfarer. The man was not
+ill-looking, but had a shifty smile. He leaned against the doorpost,
+and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> heard me state my case. All I asked was a guide as far as Cheylard.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>C'est que, voyez-vous, il fait noir</i>," said he.</p>
+
+<p>I told him that was just my reason for requiring help.</p>
+
+<p>"I understand that," said he, looking uncomfortable; "<i>mais&mdash;c'est&mdash;de
+la peine.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>I was willing to pay, I said. He shook his head. I rose as high as ten
+francs; but he continued to shake his head. "Name your own price then,"
+said I.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Ce n'est pas &ccedil;a</i>," he said at length, and with evident difficulty;
+"but I am not going to cross the door&mdash;<i>mais je ne sortirai pas de la
+porte.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>I grew a little warm, and asked him what he proposed that I should do.</p>
+
+<p>"Where are you going beyond Cheylard?" he asked by way of answer.</p>
+
+<p>"That is no affair of yours," I returned, for I was not going to indulge
+his bestial curiosity; "it changes nothing in my present predicament."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>C'est vrai, &ccedil;a</i>," he acknowledged, with a laugh; "<i>oui, c'est vrai. Et
+d'o&ugrave; venez-vous?</i>"</p>
+
+<p>A better man than I might have felt nettled.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said I, "I am not going to answer any of your questions, so you
+may spare yourself the trouble of putting them. I am late enough
+already; I want help. If you will not guide me yourself, at least help
+me to find some one else who will."</p>
+
+<p>"Hold on," he cried suddenly. "Was it not you who passed in the meadow
+while it was still day?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes," said the girl, whom I had not hitherto recognized; "it was
+monsieur; I told him to follow the cow."</p>
+
+<p>"As for you, mademoiselle," said I, "you are a <i>farceuse.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"And," added the man, "what the devil have you done to be still here?"</p>
+
+<p>What the devil, indeed! But there I was. "The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> great thing," said I, "is
+to make an end of it," and once more proposed that he should help me to
+find a guide.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>C'est que</i>," he said again, "<i>c'est que</i>&mdash;<i>il fait noir.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"Very well," said I; "take one of your lanterns."</p>
+
+<p>"No," he cried, drawing a thought backward, and again entrenching
+himself behind one of his former phrases; "I will not cross the door."</p>
+
+<p>I looked at him. I saw unaffected terror struggling on his face with
+unaffected shame; he was smiling pitifully and wetting his lip with his
+tongue, like a detected schoolboy. I drew a brief picture of my state,
+and asked him what I was to do.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," he said; "I will not cross the door."</p>
+
+<p>Here was the Beast of G&eacute;vaudan, and no mistake.</p>
+
+<p>"Sir," said I, with my most commanding manners, "you are a coward."</p>
+
+<p>And with that I turned my back upon the family party, who hastened to
+retire within their fortifications; and the famous door was closed
+again, but not till I had overheard the sound of laughter. <i>Filia
+barbara pater barbarior.</i> Let me say it in the plural: the Beasts of
+G&eacute;vaudan.</p>
+
+<p>The lanterns had somewhat dazzled me, and I ploughed distressfully among
+stones and rubbish-heaps. All the other houses in the village were both
+dark and silent; and though I knocked at here and there a door, my
+knocking was unanswered. It was a bad business; I gave up Fouzilhac with
+my curses. The rain had stopped, and the wind, which still kept rising,
+began to dry my coat and trousers. "Very well," thought I, "water or no
+water, I must camp." But the first thing was to return to Modestine. I
+am pretty sure I was twenty minutes groping for my lady in the dark; and
+if it had not been for the unkindly services of the bog, into which I
+once more stumbled, I might have still been groping for her at the dawn.
+My next business was to gain the shelter of a wood, for the wind was
+cold as well as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> boisterous. How, in this well-wooded district, I should
+have been so long in finding one, is another of the insoluble mysteries
+of this day's adventures; but I will take my oath that I put near an
+hour to the discovery.</p>
+
+<p>At last black trees began to show upon my left, and, suddenly crossing
+the road, made a cave of unmitigated blackness right in front. I call it
+a cave without exaggeration; to pass below that arch of leaves was like
+entering a dungeon. I felt about until my hand encountered a stout
+branch, and to this I tied Modestine, a haggard, drenched, desponding
+donkey. Then I lowered my pack, laid it along the wall on the margin of
+the road, and unbuckled the straps. I knew well enough where the lantern
+was, but where were the candles? I groped and groped among the tumbled
+articles, and, while I was thus groping, suddenly I touched the
+spirit-lamp. Salvation! This would serve my turn as well. The wind
+roared unwearyingly among the trees; I could hear the boughs tossing and
+the leaves churning through half a mile of forest; yet the scene of my
+encampment was not only as black as the pit, but admirably sheltered. At
+the second match the wick caught flame. The light was both livid and
+shifting; but it cut me off from the universe, and doubled the darkness
+of the surrounding night.</p>
+
+<p>I tied Modestine more conveniently for herself, and broke up half the
+black bread for her supper, reserving the other half against the
+morning. Then I gathered what I should want within reach, took off my
+wet boots and gaiters, which I wrapped in my waterproof, arranged my
+knapsack for a pillow under the flap of my sleeping-bag, insinuated my
+limbs into the interior, and buckled myself in like a <i>bambino.</i> I
+opened a tin of Bologna sausage, and broke a cake of chocolate, and that
+was all I had to eat. It may sound offensive, but I ate them together,
+bite by bite, by way of bread and meat. All I had to wash down this
+revolting mixture was neat<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> brandy: a revolting beverage in itself. But
+I was rare and hungry; ate well, and smoked one of the best cigarettes
+in my experience. Then I put a stone in my straw hat, pulled the flap of
+my fur cap over my neck and eyes, put my revolver ready to my hand, and
+snuggled well down among the sheepskins.</p>
+
+<p>I questioned at first if I were sleepy, for I felt my heart beating
+faster than usual, as if with an agreeable excitement to which my mind
+remained a stranger. But as soon as my eyelids touched, that subtle glue
+leaped between them, and they would no more come separate. The wind
+among the trees was my lullaby. Sometimes it sounded for minutes
+together with a steady, even rush, not rising nor abating; and again it
+would swell and burst like a great crashing breaker, and the trees would
+patter me all over with big drops from the rain of the afternoon. Night
+after night, in my own bedroom in the country, I have given ear to this
+perturbing concert of the wind among the woods, but whether it was a
+difference in the trees, or the lie of the ground, or because I was
+myself outside and in the midst of it, the fact remains that the wind
+sang to a different tune among these woods of G&eacute;vaudan. I hearkened and
+hearkened; and meanwhile sleep took gradual possession of my body and
+subdued my thoughts and senses; but still my last waking effort was to
+listen and distinguish, and my last conscious state was one of wonder at
+the foreign clamour in my ears.</p>
+
+<p>Twice in the course of the dark hours&mdash;once when a stone galled me
+underneath the sack, and again when the poor patient Modestine, growing
+angry, pawed and stamped upon the road&mdash;I was recalled for a brief while
+to consciousness, and saw a star or two overhead, and the lace-like edge
+of the foliage against the sky. When I awoke for the third time
+(Wednesday, September 25th), the world was flooded with a blue light,
+the mother of the dawn. I saw the leaves labouring in the wind and the
+ribbon of the road; and, on turning my head, there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> was Modestine tied
+to a beech, and standing half across the path in an attitude of
+inimitable patience. I closed my eyes again, and set to thinking over
+the experience of the night. I was surprised to find how easy and
+pleasant it had been, even in this tempestuous weather. The stone which
+annoyed me would not have been there had I not been forced to camp
+blindfold in the opaque night; and I had felt no other inconvenience
+except when my feet encountered the lantern or the second volume of
+Peyrat's "Pastors of the Desert" among the mixed contents of my
+sleeping-bag; nay, more, I had felt not a touch of cold, and awakened
+with unusually lightsome and clear sensations.</p>
+
+<p>With that I shook myself, got once more into my boots and gaiters, and,
+breaking up the rest of the bread for Modestine, strolled about to see
+in what part of the world I had awakened. Ulysses, left on Ithaca, and
+with a mind unsettled by the goddess, was not more pleasantly astray. I
+have been after an adventure all my life, a pure dispassionate
+adventure, such as befell early and heroic voyagers; and thus to be
+found by morning in a random woodside nook in G&eacute;vaudan&mdash;not knowing
+north from south, as strange to my surroundings as the first man upon
+the earth, an inland castaway&mdash;was to find a fraction of my daydreams
+realized. I was on the skirts of a little wood of birch, sprinkled with
+a few beeches; behind, it adjoined another wood of fir; and in front, it
+broke up and went down in open order into a shallow and meadowy dale.
+All around there were bare hill-tops, some near, some far away, as the
+perspective closed or opened, but none apparently much higher than the
+rest. The wind huddled the trees. The golden specks of autumn in the
+birches tossed shiveringly. Overhead the sky was full of strings and
+shreds of vapour, flying, vanishing, reappearing, and turning about an
+axis like tumblers, as the wind hounded them through heaven. It was wild
+weather and famishing cold. I ate some chocolate, swallowed a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> mouthful
+of brandy, and smoked a cigarette before the cold should have time to
+disable my fingers. And by the time I had got all this done, and had
+made my pack and bound it on the pack-saddle, the day was tiptoe on the
+threshold of the east. We had not gone many steps along the lane, before
+the sun, still invisible to me, sent a glow of gold over some cloud
+mountains that lay ranged along the eastern sky.</p>
+
+<p>The wind had us on the stern, and hurried us bitingly forward. I
+buttoned myself into my coat, and walked on in a pleasant frame of mind
+with all men, when suddenly, at a corner, there was Fouzilhic once more
+in front of me. Nor only that, but there was the old gentleman who had
+escorted me so far the night before, running out of his house at sight
+of me, with hands upraised in horror.</p>
+
+<p>"My poor boy!" he cried, "what does this mean?"</p>
+
+<p>I told him what had happened. He beat his old hands like clappers in a
+mill, to think how lightly he had let me go; but when he heard of the
+man of Fouzilhac, anger and depression seized upon his mind.</p>
+
+<p>"This time, at least," said he, "there shall be no mistake."</p>
+
+<p>And he limped along, for he was very rheumatic, for about half a mile,
+and until I was almost within sight of Cheylard, the destination I had
+hunted for so long.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHEYLARD AND LUC</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>Candidly, it seemed little worthy of all this searching. A few broken
+ends of village, with no particular street, but a succession of open
+places heaped with logs and fagots; a couple of tilted crosses, a shrine
+to Our Lady of all Graces on the summit of a little hill; and all this,
+upon a rattling highland river, in the corner of a naked valley. What
+went ye out for to see? thought I to myself. But the place had a life of
+its own. I found a board commemorating the liberalities of Cheylard for
+the past year, hung up, like a banner, in the diminutive and tottering
+church. In 1877, it appeared, the inhabitants subscribed forty-eight
+francs ten centimes for the "Work of the Propagation of the Faith." Some
+of this, I could not help hoping, would be applied to my native land.
+Cheylard scrapes together halfpence for the darkened souls in Edinburgh,
+while Balquhidder and Dunrossness bemoan the ignorance of Rome. Thus, to
+the high entertainment of the angels, do we pelt each other with
+evangelists, like schoolboys bickering in the snow.</p>
+
+<p>The inn was again singularly unpretentious. The whole furniture of a not
+ill-to-do family was in the kitchen: the beds, the cradle, the clothes,
+the plate-rack, the meal-chest, and the photograph of the parish priest.
+There were five children, one of whom was set to its morning prayers at
+the stair-foot soon after my arrival, and a sixth would ere long be
+forthcoming. I was kindly received by these good folk. They were much
+interested in my misadventure. The wood in which I had slept belonged to
+them; the man of Fouzilhac they thought a monster of iniquity, and
+counseled me warmly to summon him at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> law&mdash;"because I might have died."
+The good wife was horror-stricken to see me drink over a pint of
+uncreamed milk.</p>
+
+<p>"You will do yourself an evil," she said. "Permit me to boil it for
+you."</p>
+
+<p>After I had begun the morning on this delightful liquor, she having an
+infinity of things to arrange, I was permitted, nay requested, to make a
+bowl of chocolate for myself. My boots and gaiters were hung up to dry,
+and, seeing me trying to write my journal on my knee, the eldest
+daughter let down a hinged table in the chimney-corner for my
+convenience. Here I wrote, drank my chocolate, and finally ate an
+omelette before I left. The table was thick with dust; for, as they
+explained, it was not used except in winter weather. I had a clear look
+up the vent, through brown agglomerations of soot and blue vapour, to
+the sky; and whenever a handful of twigs was thrown on to the fire, my
+legs were scorched by the blaze.</p>
+
+<p>The husband had begun life as a muleteer, and when I came to charge
+Modestine showed himself full of the prudence of his art. "You will have
+to change this package," said he; "it ought to be in two parts, and then
+you might have double the weight."</p>
+
+<p>I explained that I wanted no more weight; and for no donkey hitherto
+created would I cut my sleeping-bag in two.</p>
+
+<p>"It fatigues her, however," said the innkeeper; "it fatigues her greatly
+on the march. Look."</p>
+
+<p>Alas, there were her two forelegs no better than raw beef on the inside,
+and blood was running from under her tail. They told me when I started,
+and I was ready to believe it, that before a few days I should come to
+love Modestine like a dog. Three days had passed, we had shared some
+misadventures, and my heart was still as cold as a potato towards my
+beast of burden. She was pretty enough to look at; but then she had
+given proof of dead<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> stupidity, redeemed indeed by patience, but
+aggravated by flashes of sorry and ill-judged light-heartedness. And I
+own this new discovery seemed another point against her. What the devil
+was the good of a she-ass if she could not carry a sleeping-bag and a
+few necessaries? I saw the end of the fable rapidly approaching, when I
+should have to carry Modestine. &AElig;sop was the man to know the world! I
+assure you I set out with heavy thoughts upon my short day's march.</p>
+
+<p>It was not only heavy thoughts about Modestine that weighted me upon the
+way; it was a leaden business altogether. For first, the wind blew so
+rudely that I had to hold on the pack with one hand from Cheylard to
+Luc; and second, my road lay through one of the most beggarly countries
+in the world. It was like the worst of the Scottish Highlands, only
+worse; cold, naked, and ignoble, scant of wood, scant of heather, scant
+of life. A road and some fences broke the unvarying waste, and the line
+of the road was marked by upright pillars, to serve in time of snow.</p>
+
+<p>Why any one should desire to visit either Luc or Cheylard is more than
+my much-inventing spirit can suppose. For my part, I travel not to go
+anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to
+move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come
+down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite
+underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life,
+and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing
+that must be worked for. To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a
+gale out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that
+serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so
+exacting, who can annoy himself about the future?</p>
+
+<p>I came out at length above the Allier. A more unsightly prospect at this
+season of the year it would be hard to fancy. Shelving hills rose round
+it on all sides, here<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> dabbled with wood and fields, there rising to
+peaks alternately naked and hairy with pines. The colour throughout was
+black or ashen, and came to a point in the ruins of the castle of Luc,
+which pricked up impudently from below my feet, carrying on a pinnacle a
+tall white statue of Our Lady, which, I heard with interest, weighed
+fifty quintals, and was to be dedicated on the 6th of October. Through
+this sorry landscape trickled the Allier and a tributary of nearly equal
+size, which came down to join it through a broad nude valley in
+Vivarais. The weather had somewhat lightened, and the clouds massed in
+squadron; but the fierce wind still hunted them through heaven, and cast
+great ungainly splashes of shadow and sunlight over the scene.</p>
+
+<p>Luc itself was a straggling double file of houses wedged between hill
+and river. It had no beauty, nor was there any notable feature, save the
+old castle overhead with its fifty quintals of brand-new Madonna. But
+the inn was clean and large. The kitchen, with its two box-beds hung
+with clean check curtains, with its wide stone chimney, its
+chimney-shelf four yards long and garnished with lanterns and religious
+statuettes, its array of chests and pair of ticking clocks, was the very
+model of what a kitchen ought to be; a melodrama kitchen, suitable for
+bandits or noblemen in disguise. Nor was the scene disgraced by the
+landlady, a handsome, silent, dark old woman, clothed and hooded in
+black like a nun. Even the public bedroom had a character of its own,
+with the long deal tables and benches, where fifty might have dined, set
+out as for a harvest-home, and the three box-beds along the wall. In one
+of these, lying on straw and covered with a pair of table-napkins, did I
+do penance all night long in goose-flesh and chattering teeth, and sigh,
+from time to time as I awakened, for my sheepskin sack and the lee of
+some great wood.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i22"><i>I behold</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i11"><i>The House, the Brotherhood austere&mdash;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i11"><i>And what am I, that I am here?</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i22"><span class="smcap">Matthew Arnold.<br /></span></span>
+</div></div>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<h2>FATHER APOLLONARIS</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>
+
+<p>Next morning (Thursday, 26th September) I took the road in a new order.
+The sack was no longer doubled, but hung at full length across the
+saddle, a green sausage six feet long with a tuft of blue wool hanging
+out of either end. It was more picturesque, it spared the donkey, and,
+as I began to see, it would ensure stability, blow high, blow low. But
+it was not without a pang that I had so decided. For although I had
+purchased a new cord, and made all as fast as I was able, I was yet
+jealously uneasy lest the flaps should tumble out and scatter my effects
+along the line of march.</p>
+
+<p>My way lay up the bald valley of the river, along the march of Vivarais
+and G&eacute;vaudan. The hills of G&eacute;vaudan on the right were a little more
+naked, if anything, than those of Vivarais upon the left, and the former
+had a monopoly of a low dotty underwood that grew thickly in the gorges
+and died out in solitary burrs upon the shoulders and the summits. Black
+bricks of fir-wood were plastered here and there upon both sides, and
+here and there were cultivated fields. A railway ran beside the river;
+the only bit of railway in G&eacute;vaudan, although there are many proposals
+afoot and surveys being made, and even, as they tell me, a station
+standing ready built in Mende. A year or two hence and this may be
+another world. The desert is beleaguered. Now may some Languedocian
+Wordsworth turn the sonnet into <i>patois</i>: "Mountains and vales and
+floods, heard YE that whistle?"</p>
+
+<p>At a place called La Bastide I was directed to leave the river, and
+follow a road that mounted on the left<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> among the hills of Vivarais, the
+modern Ard&egrave;che; for I was now come within a little way of my strange
+destination, the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of the Snows. The sun
+came out as I left the shelter of a pine-wood, and I beheld suddenly a
+fine wild landscape to the south. High rocky hills, as blue as sapphire,
+closed the view, and between these lay ridge upon ridge, heathery,
+craggy, the sun glittering on veins of rock, the underwood clambering in
+the hollows, as rude as God made them at the first. There was not a sign
+of man's hand in all the prospect; and indeed not a trace of his
+passage, save where generation after generation had walked in twisted
+footpaths, in and out among the beeches, and up and down upon the
+channeled slopes. The mists, which had hitherto beset me, were now
+broken into clouds, and fled swiftly and shone brightly in the sun. I
+drew a long breath. It was grateful to come, after so long, upon a scene
+of some attraction for the human heart. I own I like definite form in
+what my eyes are to rest upon; and if landscapes were sold, like the
+sheets of characters of my boyhood, one penny plain and twopence
+coloured, I should go the length of twopence every day of my life.</p>
+
+<p>But if things had grown better to the south, it was still desolate and
+inclement near at hand. A spidery cross on every hill-top marked the
+neighbourhood of a religious house; and a quarter of a mile beyond, the
+outlook southward opening out and growing bolder with every step, a
+white statue of the Virgin at the corner of a young plantation directed
+the traveller to Our Lady of the Snows. Here, then, I struck leftward,
+and pursued my way, driving my secular donkey before me, and creaking in
+my secular boots and gaiters, towards the asylum of silence.</p>
+
+<p>I had not gone very far ere the wind brought to me the clanging of a
+bell, and somehow, I can scarce tell why, my heart sank within me at the
+sound. I have rarely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> approached anything with more unaffected terror
+than the monastery of Our Lady of the Snows. This it is to have had a
+Protestant education. And suddenly, on turning a corner, fear took hold
+on me from head to foot&mdash;slavish, superstitious fear; and though I did
+not stop in my advance, yet I went on slowly, like a man who should have
+passed a bourne unnoticed, and strayed into the country of the dead. For
+there, upon the narrow new-made road, between the stripling pines, was a
+medi&aelig;val friar, fighting with a barrowful of turfs. Every Sunday of my
+childhood I used to study the Hermits of Marco Sadeler&mdash;enchanting
+prints, full of wood and field and medi&aelig;val landscapes, as large as a
+county, for the imagination to go a-travelling in; and here, sure
+enough, was one of Marco Sadeler's heroes. He was robed in white like
+any spectre, and the hood falling back, in the instancy of his
+contention with the barrow, disclosed a pate as bald and yellow as a
+skull. He might have been buried any time these thousand years, and all
+the lively parts of him resolved into earth and broken up with the
+farmer's harrow.</p>
+
+<p>I was troubled besides in my mind as to etiquette. Durst I address a
+person who was under a vow of silence? Clearly not. But drawing near, I
+doffed my cap to him with a far-away superstitious reverence. He nodded
+back, and cheerfully addressed me. Was I going to the monastery? Who was
+I? An Englishman? Ah, an Irishman, then?</p>
+
+<p>"No," I said, "a Scotsman."</p>
+
+<p>A Scotsman? Ah, he had never seen a Scotsman before. And he looked me
+all over, his good, honest, brawny countenance shining with interest, as
+a boy might look upon a lion or an alligator. From him I learned with
+disgust that I could not be received at Our Lady of the Snows; I might
+get a meal, perhaps, but that was all. And then, as our talk ran on, and
+it turned out that I was not a pedlar, but a literary man, who drew<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>
+landscapes and was going to write a book, he changed his manner of
+thinking as to my reception (for I fear they respect persons even in a
+Trappist monastery), and told me I must be sure to ask for the Father
+Prior, and state my case to him in full. On second thoughts he
+determined to go down with me himself; he thought he could manage for me
+better. Might he say that I was a geographer?</p>
+
+<p>No; I thought, in the interests of truth, he positively might not.</p>
+
+<p>"Very well, then" (with disappointment), "an author."</p>
+
+<p>It appeared he had been in a seminary with six young Irishmen, all
+priests, long since, who had received newspapers and kept him informed
+of the state of ecclesiastical affairs in England. And he asked me
+eagerly after Dr. Pusey, for whose conversion the good man had continued
+ever since to pray night and morning.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought he was very near the truth," he said; "and he will reach it
+yet; there is so much virtue in prayer."</p>
+
+<p>He must be a stiff, ungodly Protestant who can take anything but
+pleasure in this kind and hopeful story. While he was thus near the
+subject, the good father asked me if I were a Christian; and when he
+found I was not, or not after his way, he glossed it over with great
+good-will.</p>
+
+<p>The road which we were following, and which this stalwart father had
+made with his own two hands within the space of a year, came to a
+corner, and showed us some white buildings a little farther on beyond
+the wood. At the same time, the bell once more sounded abroad. We were
+hard upon the monastery. Father Apollinaris (for that was my companion's
+name) stopped me.</p>
+
+<p>"I must not speak to you down there," he said. "Ask for the Brother
+Porter, and all will be well. But try to see me as you go out again
+through the wood, where I may speak to you. I am charmed to have made
+your acquaintance."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And then suddenly raising his arms, flapping his fingers, and crying out
+twice, "I must not speak! I must not speak!" he ran away in front of me,
+and disappeared into the monastery door.</p>
+
+<p>I own this somewhat ghastly eccentricity went a good way to revive my
+terrors. But where one was so good and simple, why should not all be
+alike? I took heart of grace, and went forward to the gate as fast as
+Modestine, who seemed to have a disaffection for monasteries, would
+permit. It was the first door, in my acquaintance of her, which she had
+not shown an indecent haste to enter. I summoned the place in form,
+though with a quaking heart. Father Michael, the Father Hospitaller, and
+a pair of brown-robed brothers came to the gate and spoke with me a
+while. I think my sack was the great attraction; it had already beguiled
+the heart of poor Apollinaris, who had charged me on my life to show it
+to the Father Prior. But whether it was my address, or the sack, or the
+idea speedily published among that part of the brotherhood who attend on
+strangers that I was not a pedlar after all, I found no difficulty as to
+my reception. Modestine was led away by a layman to the stables, and I
+and my pack were received into Our Lady of the Snows.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE MONKS</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>Father Michael, a pleasant, fresh-faced, smiling man, perhaps of
+thirty-five, took me to the pantry, and gave me a glass of liqueur to
+stay me until dinner. We had some talk, or rather I should say he
+listened to my prattle indulgently enough, but with an abstracted air,
+like a spirit with a thing of clay. And truly, when I remember that I
+descanted principally on my appetite, and that it must have been by that
+time more than eighteen hours since Father Michael had so much as broken
+bread, I can well understand that he would find an earthly savour in my
+conversation. But his manner, though superior, was exquisitely gracious;
+and I find I have a lurking curiosity as to Father Michael's past.</p>
+
+<p>The whet administered, I was left alone for a little in the monastery
+garden. This is no more than the main court, laid out in sandy paths and
+beds of parti-coloured dahlias, and with a fountain and a black statue
+of the Virgin in the centre. The buildings stand around it four-square,
+bleak, as yet unseasoned by the years and weather, and with no other
+features than a belfry and a pair of slated gables. Brothers in white,
+brothers in brown, passed silently along the sanded alleys; and when I
+first came out, three hooded monks were kneeling on the terrace at their
+prayers. A naked hill commands the monastery upon one side, and the wood
+commands it on the other. It lies exposed to wind; the snow falls off
+and on from October to May, and sometimes lies six weeks on end; but if
+they stood in Eden with a climate like heaven's, the buildings
+themselves would offer the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> same wintry and cheerless aspect; and for my
+part, on this wild September day, before I was called to dinner, I felt
+chilly in and out.</p>
+
+<p>When I had eaten well and heartily, Brother Ambrose, a hearty
+conversible Frenchman (for all those who wait on strangers have the
+liberty to speak), led me to a little room in that part of the building
+which is set apart for <i>MM. les retraitants.</i> It was clean and
+whitewashed, and furnished with strict necessaries, a crucifix, a bust
+of the late Pope, the "Imitation" in French, a book of religious
+meditations, and the "Life of Elizabeth Seton"&mdash;evangelist, it would
+appear, of North America and of New England in particular. As far as my
+experience goes, there is a fair field for some more evangelisation in
+these quarters; but think of Cotton Mather! I should like to give him a
+reading of this little work in heaven, where I hope he dwells; but
+perhaps he knows all that already, and much more; and perhaps he and
+Mrs. Seton are the dearest friends, and gladly unite their voices in the
+everlasting psalm. Over the table, to conclude the inventory of the
+room, hung a set of regulations for <i>MM. les retraitants</i>: what services
+they should attend, when they were to tell their beads or meditate, and
+when they were to rise and go to rest. At the foot was a notable N.B.:
+"<i>Le temps libre est employ&eacute; a l'examen de conscience, &agrave; la confession,
+&agrave; faire de bonnes r&eacute;solutions,"</i> etc. To make good resolutions, indeed!
+You might talk as fruitfully of making the hair grow on your head.</p>
+
+<p>I had scarce explored my niche when Brother Ambrose returned. An English
+boarder, it appeared, would like to speak with me. I professed my
+willingness, and the friar ushered in a fresh, young, little Irishman of
+fifty, a deacon of the Church, arrayed in strict canonicals, and wearing
+on his head what, in default of knowledge, I can only call the
+ecclesiastical shako. He had lived seven years in retreat at a convent
+of nuns in Belgium, and now five at Our Lady of the Snows; he never saw<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>
+an English newspaper; he spoke French imperfectly, and had he spoken it
+like a native, there was not much chance of conversation where he dwelt.
+With this, he was a man eminently sociable, greedy of news, and
+simple-minded like a child. If I was pleased to have a guide about the
+monastery, he was no less delighted to see an English face and hear an
+English tongue.</p>
+
+<p>He showed me his own room, where he passed his time among breviaries,
+Hebrew Bibles, and the Waverley Novels. Thence he led me to the
+cloisters, into the chapter-house, through the vestry, where the
+brothers' gowns and broad straw hats were hanging up, each with his
+religious name upon a board&mdash;names full of legendary suavity and
+interest, such as Basil, Hilarion, Raphael, or Pacifique; into the
+library, where were all the works of Veuillot and Chateaubriand, and the
+"Odes et Ballades," if you please, and even Moli&egrave;re, to say nothing of
+innumerable fathers and a great variety of local and general historians.
+Thence my good Irishman took me round the workshops, where brothers bake
+bread, and make cart-wheels, and take photographs; where one
+superintends a collection of curiosities, and another a gallery of
+rabbits. For in a Trappist monastery each monk has an occupation of his
+own choice, apart from his religious duties and the general labours of
+the house. Each must sing in the choir, if he has a voice and ear, and
+join in the haymaking if he has a hand to stir; but in his private
+hours, although he must be occupied, he may be occupied on what he
+likes. Thus I was told that one brother was engaged with literature;
+while Father Apollinaris busies himself in making roads, and the Abbot
+employs himself in binding books. It is not so long since this Abbot was
+consecrated, by the way; and on that occasion, by a special grace, his
+mother was permitted to enter the chapel and witness the ceremony of
+consecration. A proud day for her to have a son a mitred abbot; it makes
+you glad to think they let her in.</p>
+
+<p>In all these journeyings to and fro, many silent fathers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> and brethren
+fell in our way. Usually they paid no more regard to our passage than if
+we had been a cloud; but sometimes the good deacon had a permission to
+ask of them, and it was granted by a peculiar movement of the hands,
+almost like that of a dog's paws in swimming, or refused by the usual
+negative signs, and in either case with lowered eyelids and a certain
+air of contrition, as of a man who was steering very close to evil.</p>
+
+<p>The monks, by special grace of their Abbot, were still taking two meals
+a day; but it was already time for their grand fast, which begins
+somewhere in September and lasts till Easter, and during which they eat
+but once in the twenty-four hours, and that at two in the afternoon,
+twelve hours after they have begun the toil and vigil of the day. Their
+meals are scanty, but even of these they eat sparingly; and though each
+is allowed a small carafe of wine, many refrain from this indulgence.
+Without doubt, the most of mankind grossly over-eat themselves; our
+meals serve not only for support, but as a hearty and natural diversion
+from the labour of life. Yet, though excess may be hurtful, I should
+have thought this Trappist regimen defective. And I am astonished, as I
+look back, at the freshness of face and cheerfulness of manner of all
+whom I beheld. A happier nor a healthier company I should scarce suppose
+that I have ever seen. As a matter of fact, on this bleak upland, and
+with the incessant occupation of the monks, life is of an uncertain
+tenure, and death no infrequent visitor, at Our Lady of the Snows. This,
+at least, was what was told me. But if they die easily, they must live
+healthily in the meantime, for they seemed all firm of flesh and high in
+colour; and the only morbid sign that I could observe, an unusual
+brilliancy of eye, was one that served rather to increase the general
+impression of vivacity and strength.</p>
+
+<p>Those with whom I spoke were singularly sweet-tempered, with what I can
+only call a holy cheerfulness in air and conversation. There is a note,
+in the direction<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> to visitors, telling them not to be offended at the
+curt speech of those who wait upon them, since it is proper to monks to
+speak little. The note might have been spared; to a man the hospitallers
+were all brimming with innocent talk, and, in my experience of the
+monastery, it was easier to begin than to break off a conversation. With
+the exception of Father Michael, who was a man of the world, they showed
+themselves full of kind and healthy interest in all sorts of
+subjects&mdash;in politics, in voyages, in my sleeping-sack&mdash;and not without
+a certain pleasure in the sound of their own voices.</p>
+
+<p>As for those who are restricted to silence, I can only wonder how they
+bear their solemn and cheerless isolation. And yet, apart from any view
+of mortification, I can see a certain policy, not only in the exclusion
+of women, but in this vow of silence. I have had some experience of lay
+phalansteries, of an artistic, not to say a bacchanalian, character; and
+seen more than one association easily formed and yet more easily
+dispersed. With a Cistercian rule, perhaps they might have lasted
+longer. In the neighbourhood of women it is but a touch-and-go
+association that can be formed among defenceless men; the stronger
+electricity is sure to triumph; the dreams of boyhood, the schemes of
+youth, are abandoned after an interview of ten minutes, and the arts and
+sciences, and professional male jollity, deserted at once for two sweet
+eyes and a caressing accent. And next after this, the tongue is the
+great divider.</p>
+
+<p>I am almost ashamed to pursue this worldly criticism of a religious
+rule; but there is yet another point in which the Trappist order appeals
+to me as a model of wisdom. By two in the morning the clapper goes upon
+the bell, and so on, hour by hour, and sometimes quarter by quarter,
+till eight, the hour of rest; so infinitesimally is the day divided
+among different occupations. The man who keeps rabbits, for example,
+hurries from his hutches to the chapel, the chapter-room, or the
+refectory, all day long: every hour he has an office to sing, a duty to
+per<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>form; from two, when he rises in the dark, till eight, when he
+returns to receive the comfortable gift of sleep, he is upon his feet
+and occupied with manifold and changing business. I know many persons,
+worth several thousands in the year, who are not so fortunate in the
+disposal of their lives. Into how many houses would not the note of the
+monastery bell, dividing the day into manageable portions, bring peace
+of mind and healthful activity of body! We speak of hardships, but the
+true hardship is to be a dull fool, and permitted to mismanage life in
+our own dull and foolish manner.</p>
+
+<p>From this point of view, we may perhaps better understand the monk's
+existence. A long novitiate and every proof of constancy of mind and
+strength of body is required before admission to the order; but I could
+not find that many were discouraged. In the photographer's studio, which
+figures so strangely among the outbuildings, my eye was attracted by the
+portrait of a young fellow in the uniform of a private of foot. This was
+one of the novices, who came of the age for service, and marched and
+drilled and mounted guard for the proper time among the garrison of
+Algiers. Here was a man who had surely seen both sides of life before
+deciding; yet as soon as he was set free from service he returned to
+finish his novitiate.</p>
+
+<p>This austere rule entitles a man to heaven as by right. When the
+Trappist sickens, he quits not his habit; he lies in the bed of death as
+he has prayed and laboured in his frugal and silent existence; and when
+the Liberator comes, at the very moment, even before they have carried
+him in his robe to lie his little last in the chapel among continual
+chantings, joy-bells break forth, as if for a marriage, from the slated
+belfry, and proclaim throughout the neighbourhood that another soul has
+gone to God.</p>
+
+<p>At night, under the conduct of my kind Irishman, I took my place in the
+gallery to hear compline and <i>Salve Regina</i>, with which the Cistercians
+bring every day to a conclusion. There were none of those circumstances<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>
+which strike the Protestant as childish or as tawdry in the public
+offices of Rome. A stern simplicity, heightened by the romance of the
+surroundings, spoke directly to the heart. I recall the whitewashed
+chapel, the hooded figures in the choir, the lights alternately occluded
+and revealed, the strong manly singing, the silence that ensued, the
+sight of cowled heads bowed in prayer, and then the clear trenchant
+beating of the bell breaking in to show that the last office was over
+and the hour of sleep had come; and when I remember, I am not surprised
+that I made my escape into the court with somewhat whirling fancies, and
+stood like a man bewildered in the windy, starry night.</p>
+
+<p>But I was weary; and when I had quieted my spirits with Elizabeth
+Seton's memoirs&mdash;a dull work&mdash;the cold and the raving of the wind among
+the pines (for my room was on that side of the monastery which adjoins
+the woods) disposed me readily to slumber. I was awakened at black
+midnight, as it seemed, though it was really two in the morning, by the
+first stroke upon the bell. All the brothers were then hurrying to the
+chapel; the dead in life, at this untimely hour, were already beginning
+the uncomforted labours of their day. The dead in life&mdash;there was a
+chill reflection. And the words of a French song came back into my
+memory, telling of the best of our mixed existence:</p>
+
+
+<center>"Que t'as de belles filles,</center>
+<center>Girofl&eacute;!</center>
+<center>Girofla!</center>
+<center>Que t'as de belles filles,</center>
+<center><i>L'Amour les comptera!</i>"</center>
+
+
+<p>And I blessed God that I was free to wander, free to hope, and free to
+love.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE BOARDERS</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>But there was another side to my residence at Our Lady of the Snows. At
+this late season there were not many boarders; and yet I was not alone
+in the public part of the monastery. This itself is hard by the gate,
+with a small dining-room on the ground floor and a whole corridor of
+cells similar to mine upstairs. I have stupidly forgotten the board for
+a regular <i>retraitant</i>; but it was somewhere between three and five
+francs a day, and I think most probably the first. Chance visitors like
+myself might give what they chose as a free-will offering, but nothing
+was demanded. I may mention that when I was going away Father Michael
+refused twenty francs as excessive. I explained the reasoning which led
+me to offer him so much; but even then, from a curious point of honour,
+he would not accept it with his own hand. "I have no right to refuse for
+the monastery," he explained, "but I should prefer if you would give it
+to one of the brothers."</p>
+
+<p>I had dined alone, because I arrived late; but at supper I found two
+other guests. One was a country parish priest, who had walked over that
+morning from the seat of his cure near Mende to enjoy four days of
+solitude and prayer. He was a grenadier in person, with the hale colour
+and circular wrinkles of a peasant; and as he complained much of how he
+had been impeded by his skirts upon the march, I have a vivid fancy
+portrait of him, striding along, upright, big-boned, with kilted
+cassock, through the bleak hills of G&eacute;vaudan. The other was a short,
+grizzling, thick-set man, from forty-five to fifty, dressed in tweed
+with a knitted spencer, and the red<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> ribbon of a decoration in his
+button-hole. This last was a hard person to classify. He was an old
+soldier, who had seen service and risen to the rank of commandant; and
+he retained some of the brisk decisive manners of the camp. On the other
+hand, as soon as his resignation was accepted, he had come to Our Lady
+of the Snows as a boarder, and, after a brief experience of its ways,
+had decided to remain as a novice. Already the new life was beginning to
+modify his appearance; already he had acquired somewhat of the quiet and
+smiling air of the brethren; and he was as yet neither an officer nor a
+Trappist, but partook of the character of each. And certainly here was a
+man in an interesting nick of life. Out of the noise of cannon and
+trumpets, he was in the act of passing into this still country bordering
+on the grave, where men sleep nightly in their grave-clothes, and, like
+phantoms, communicate by signs.</p>
+
+<p>At supper we talked politics. I make it my business, when I am in
+France, to preach political good-will and moderation, and to dwell on
+the example of Poland, much as some alarmists in England dwell on the
+example of Carthage. The priest and the commandant assured me of their
+sympathy with all I said, and made a heavy sighing over the bitterness
+of contemporary feeling.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, you cannot say anything to a man with which he does not absolutely
+agree," said I, "but he flies up at you in a temper."</p>
+
+<p>They both declared that such a state of things was antichristian.</p>
+
+<p>While we were thus agreeing, what should my tongue stumble upon but a
+word in praise of Gambetta's moderation? The old soldier's countenance
+was instantly suffused with blood; with the palms of his hands he beat
+the table like a naughty child.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Comment, monsieur?</i>" he shouted. "<i>Comment?</i> Gambetta moderate? Will
+you dare to justify these words?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But the priest had not forgotten the tenor of our talk. And suddenly, in
+the height of his fury, the old soldier found a warning look directed on
+his face; the absurdity of his behaviour was brought home to him in a
+flash; and the storm came to an abrupt end, without another word.</p>
+
+<p>It was only in the morning, over our coffee (Friday, September 27th),
+that this couple found out I was a heretic. I suppose I had misled them
+by some admiring expressions as to the monastic life around us; and it
+was only by a point-blank question that the truth came out. I had been
+tolerantly used both by simple Father Apollinaris and astute Father
+Michael; and the good Irish deacon, when he heard of my religious
+weakness, had only patted me upon the shoulder and said, "You must be a
+Catholic and come to heaven." But I was now among a different sect of
+orthodox. These two men were bitter and upright and narrow, like the
+worst of Scotsmen, and indeed, upon my heart, I fancy they were worse.
+The priest snorted aloud like a battle-horse.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Et vous pr&eacute;tendez mourir dans cette esp&egrave;ce de croyance?</i>" he demanded;
+and there is no type used by mortal printers large enough to qualify his
+accent.</p>
+
+<p>I humbly indicated that I had no design of changing.</p>
+
+<p>But he could not away with such a monstrous attitude. "No, no," he
+cried; "you must change. You have come here, God has led you here, and
+you must embrace the opportunity."</p>
+
+<p>I made a slip in policy; I appealed to the family affections, though I
+was speaking to a priest and a soldier, two classes of men
+circumstantially divorced from the kind and homely ties of life.</p>
+
+<p>"Your father and mother?" cried the priest. "Very well; you will convert
+them in their turn when you go home."</p>
+
+<p>I think I see my father's face! I would rather tackle<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> the G&aelig;tulian lion
+in his den than embark on such an enterprise against the family
+theologian.</p>
+
+<p>But now the hunt was up; priest and soldier were in full cry for my
+conversion; and the Work of the Propagation of the Faith, for which the
+people of Cheylard subscribed forty-eight francs ten centimes during
+1877, was being gallantly pursued against myself. It was an odd but most
+effective proselytizing. They never sought to convince me in argument,
+where I might have attempted some defence; but took it for granted that
+I was both ashamed and terrified at my position, and urged me solely on
+the point of time. Now, they said, when God had led me to Our Lady of
+the Snows, now was the appointed hour.</p>
+
+<p>"Do not be withheld by false shame," observed the priest, for my
+encouragement.</p>
+
+<p>For one who feels very similarly to all sects of religion, and who has
+never been able, even for a moment, to weigh seriously the merit of this
+or that creed on the eternal side of things, however much he may see to
+praise or blame upon the secular and temporal side, the situation thus
+created was both unfair and painful. I committed my second fault in
+tact, and tried to plead that it was all the same thing in the end, and
+we were all drawing near by different sides to the same kind and
+undiscriminating Friend and Father. That, as it seems to lay spirits,
+would be the only gospel worthy of the name. But different men think
+differently; and this revolutionary aspiration brought down the priest
+with all the terrors of the law. He launched into harrowing details of
+hell. The damned, he said&mdash;on the authority of a little book which he
+had read not a week before, and which, to add conviction to conviction,
+he had fully intended to bring along with him in his pocket&mdash;were to
+occupy the same attitude through all eternity in the midst of dismal
+tortures. And as he thus expatiated, he grew in nobility of aspect with
+his enthusiasm.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>As a result the pair concluded that I should seek out the Prior, since
+the Abbot was from home, and lay my case immediately before him.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>C'est mon conseil comme ancien militaire</i>," observed the commandant;
+"<i>et celui de monsieur comme pr&ecirc;tre.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Oui</i>," added the <i>cur&eacute;</i>, sententiously nodding; "<i>comme ancien
+militaire</i>&mdash;<i>et comme pr&ecirc;tre.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>At this moment, whilst I was somewhat embarrassed how to answer, in came
+one of the monks, a little brown fellow, as lively as a grig, and with
+an Italian accent, who threw himself at once into the contention, but in
+a milder and more persuasive vein, as befitted one of these pleasant
+brethren. Look at <i>him</i>, he said. The rule was very hard; he would have
+dearly liked to stay in his own country, Italy&mdash;it was well known how
+beautiful it was, the beautiful Italy; but then there were no Trappists
+in Italy; and he had a soul to save; and here he was.</p>
+
+<p>I am afraid I must be at bottom, what a cheerful Indian critic has
+dubbed me, "a faddling hedonist," for this description of the brother's
+motives gave me somewhat of a shock. I should have preferred to think he
+had chosen the life for its own sake, and not for ulterior purposes; and
+this shows how profoundly I was out of sympathy with these good
+Trappists, even when I was doing my best to sympathize. But to the cur&eacute;
+the argument seemed decisive.</p>
+
+<p>"Hear that!" he cried. "And I have seen a marquis here, a marquis, a
+marquis"&mdash;he repeated the holy word three times over&mdash;"and other persons
+high in society; and generals. And here, at your side, is this
+gentleman, who has been so many years in armies&mdash;decorated, an old
+warrior. And here he is, ready to dedicate himself to God."</p>
+
+<p>I was by this time so thoroughly embarrassed that I pled cold feet, and
+made my escape from the apartment. It was a furious windy morning, with
+a sky much cleared, and long and potent intervals of sunshine; and I
+wandered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> until dinner in the wild country towards the east, sorely
+staggered and beaten upon by the gale, but rewarded with some striking
+views.</p>
+
+<p>At dinner the Work of the Propagation of the Faith was recommenced, and
+on this occasion still more distastefully to me. The priest asked me
+many questions as to the contemptible faith of my fathers, and received
+my replies with a kind of ecclesiastical titter.</p>
+
+<p>"Your sect," he said once; "for I think you will admit it would be doing
+it too much honour to call it a religion."</p>
+
+<p>"As you please, monsieur," said I. " <i>La parole est &agrave; vous."</i></p>
+
+<p>At length I grew annoyed beyond endurance; and although he was on his
+own ground, and, what is more to the purpose, an old man, and so holding
+a claim upon my toleration, I could not avoid a protest against this
+uncivil usage. He was sadly discountenanced.</p>
+
+<p>"I assure you," he said, "I have no inclination to laugh in my heart. I
+have no other feeling but interest in your soul."</p>
+
+<p>And there ended my conversion. Honest man! he was no dangerous deceiver;
+but a country parson, full of zeal and faith. Long may he tread G&eacute;vaudan
+with his kilted skirts&mdash;a man strong to walk and strong to comfort his
+parishioners in death! I daresay he would beat bravely through a
+snowstorm where his duty called him; and it is not always the most
+faithful believer who makes the cunningest apostle.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>UPPER G&Eacute;VAUDAN</h2>
+<center><i>(Continued)</i></center><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8"><i>The bed was made, the room was fit,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i8"><i>By punctual eve the stars were lit;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i8"><i>The air was still, the water ran;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i8"><i>No need there was for maid or man,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i8"><i>When we put up, my ass and I,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i8"><i>At God's green caravanserai.</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i22"><span class="smcap">Old Play.<br /></span></span>
+</div></div>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<h2>ACROSS THE GOULET</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>
+
+<p>The wind fell during dinner, and the sky remained clear; so it was under
+better auspices that I loaded Modestine before the monastery gate. My
+Irish friend accompanied me so far on the way. As we came through the
+wood, there was P&egrave;re Apollinaire hauling his barrow; and he too quitted
+his labours to go with me for perhaps a hundred yards, holding my hand
+between both of his in front of him. I parted first from one and then
+from the other with unfeigned regret, but yet with the glee of the
+traveller who shakes off the dust of one stage before hurrying forth
+upon another. Then Modestine and I mounted the course of the Allier,
+which here led us back into G&eacute;vaudan towards its sources in the forest
+of Mercoire. It was but an inconsiderable burn before we left its
+guidance. Thence, over a hill, our way lay through a naked plateau,
+until we reached Chasserad&egrave;s at sundown.</p>
+
+<p>The company in the inn kitchen that night were all men employed in
+survey for one of the projected railways. They were intelligent and
+conversible, and we decided the future of France over hot wine, until
+the state of the clock frightened us to rest. There were four beds in
+the little upstairs room; and we slept six. But I had a bed to myself,
+and persuaded them to leave the window open.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>H&eacute;, bourgeois; il est cinq heures!</i>" was the cry that wakened me in
+the morning (Saturday, September 28th). The room was full of a
+transparent darkness, which dimly showed me the other three beds and the
+five different nightcaps on the pillows. But out of the window the dawn
+was growing ruddy in a long belt over the hill-tops, and day was about
+to flood the plateau. The hour was inspiriting; and there seemed a
+promise of calm weather,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> which was perfectly fulfilled. I was soon
+under way with Modestine. The road lay for a while over the plateau, and
+then descended through a precipitous village into the valley of the
+Chassezac. This stream ran among green meadows, well hidden from the
+world by its steep banks; the broom was in flower, and here and there
+was a hamlet sending up its smoke.</p>
+
+<p>At last the path crossed the Chassezac upon a bridge, and, forsaking
+this deep hollow, set itself to cross the mountain of La Goulet. It
+wound up through Lestampes by upland fields and woods of beech and
+birch, and with every corner brought me into an acquaintance with some
+new interest. Even in the gully of the Chassezac my ear had been struck
+by a noise like that of a great bass bell ringing at the distance of
+many miles; but this, as I continued to mount and draw nearer to it,
+seemed to change in character, and I found at length that it came from
+some one leading flocks afield to the note of a rural horn. The narrow
+street of Lestampes stood full of sheep, from wall to wall&mdash;black sheep
+and white, bleating with one accord like the birds in spring, and each
+one accompanying himself upon the sheep-bell round his neck. It made a
+pathetic concert, all in treble. A little higher, and I passed a pair of
+men in a tree with pruning-hooks, and one of them was singing the music
+of a <i>bourr&eacute;e.</i> Still further, and when I was already threading the
+birches, the crowing of cocks came cheerfully up to my ears, and along
+with that the voice of a flute discoursing a deliberate and plaintive
+air from one of the upland villages. I pictured to myself some grizzled,
+apple-cheeked, country schoolmaster fluting in his bit of a garden in
+the clear autumn sunshine. All these beautiful and interesting sounds
+filled my heart with an unwonted expectation; and it appeared to me
+that, once past this range which I was mounting, I should descend into
+the garden of the world. Nor was I deceived, for I was now done with
+rains and winds and a bleak country. The first part of my journey ended<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>
+here; and this was like an induction of sweet sounds into the other and
+more beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>There are other degrees of <i>feyness</i>, as of punishment, besides the
+capital; and I was now led by my good spirits into an adventure which I
+relate in the interest of future donkey-drivers. The road zigzagged so
+widely on the hillside, that I chose a short cut by map and compass, and
+struck through the dwarf woods to catch the road again upon a higher
+level. It was my one serious conflict with Modestine. She would none of
+my short cut; she turned in my face; she backed, she reared; she, whom I
+had hitherto imagined to be dumb, actually brayed with a loud hoarse
+flourish, like a cock crowing for the dawn. I plied the goad with one
+hand; with the other, so steep was the ascent, I had to hold on the
+pack-saddle. Half a dozen times she was nearly over backwards on the top
+of me; half a dozen times, from sheer weariness of spirit, I was nearly
+giving it up, and leading her down again to follow the road. But I took
+the thing as a wager, and fought it through. I was surprised, as I went
+on my way again, by what appeared to be chill rain-drops falling on my
+hand, and more than once looked up in wonder at the cloudless sky. But
+it was only sweat which came dropping from my brow.</p>
+
+<p>Over the summit of the Goulet there was no marked road&mdash;only upright
+stones posted from space to space to guide the drovers. The turf
+underfoot was springy and well scented. I had no company but a lark or
+two, and met but one bullock-cart between Lestampes and Bleymard. In
+front of me I saw a shallow valley, and beyond that the range of the
+Loz&egrave;re, sparsely wooded and well enough modeled in the flanks, but
+straight and dull in outline. There was scarce a sign of culture; only
+about Bleymard, the white high-road from Villefort to Mende traversed a
+range of meadows, set with spiry poplars, and sounding from side to side
+with the bells of flocks and herds.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>A NIGHT AMONG THE PINES</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>From Bleymard after dinner, although it was already late, I set out to
+scale a portion of the Loz&egrave;re. An ill-marked stony drove-road guided me
+forward; and I met nearly half a dozen bullock-carts descending from the
+woods, each laden with a whole pine-tree for the winter's firing. At the
+top of the woods, which do not climb very high upon this cold ridge, I
+struck leftward by a path among the pines, until I hit on a dell of
+green turf, where a streamlet made a little spout over some stones to
+serve me for a water-tap. "In a more sacred or sequestered bower ... nor
+nymph nor faunus haunted." The trees were not old, but they grew thickly
+round the glade: there was no outlook, except north-eastward upon
+distant hill-tops, or straight upward to the sky; and the encampment
+felt secure and private like a room. By the time I had made my
+arrangements and fed Modestine, the day was already beginning to
+decline. I buckled myself to the knees into my sack and made a hearty
+meal; and as soon as the sun went down I pulled my cap over my eyes and
+fell asleep.</p>
+
+<p>Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof: but in the open world it
+passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are
+marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal
+death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and
+living slumber to the man who sleeps afield. All night long he can hear
+Nature breathing deeply and freely; even as she takes her rest, she
+turns and smiles; and there is one stirring hour unknown to those who
+dwell in houses, when a wakeful influence goes abroad<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> over the sleeping
+hemisphere, and all the outdoor world are on their feet. It is then that
+the cock first crows, not this time to announce the dawn, but like a
+cheerful watchman speeding the course of night. Cattle awake on the
+meadows; sheep break their fast on dewy hillsides, and change to a new
+lair among the ferns; and houseless men, who have lain down with the
+fowls, open their dim eyes and behold the beauty of the night.</p>
+
+<p>At what inaudible summons, at what gentle touch of Nature, are all these
+sleepers thus recalled in the same hour to life? Do the stars rain down
+an influence, or do we share some thrill of mother earth below our
+resting bodies? Even shepherds and old country-folk, who are the deepest
+read in these arcana, have not a guess as to the means or purpose of
+this nightly resurrection. Towards two in the morning they declare the
+thing takes place, and neither know nor inquire further. And at least it
+is a pleasant incident. We are disturbed in our slumber, only, like the
+luxurious Montaigne, "that we may the better and more sensibly relish
+it." We have a moment to look up on the stars. And there is a special
+pleasure for some minds in the reflection that we share the impulse with
+all outdoor creatures in our neighbourhood, that we have escaped out of
+the Bastille of civilization, and are become, for the time being, a mere
+kindly animal and a sheep of Nature's flock.</p>
+
+<p>When that hour came to me among the pines, I wakened thirsty. My tin was
+standing by me half full of water. I emptied it at a draught; and
+feeling broad awake after this internal cold aspersion, sat upright to
+make a cigarette. The stars were clear, coloured, and jewel-like, but
+not frosty. A faint silvery vapour stood for the Milky Way. All around
+me the black fir-points stood upright and stock-still. By the whiteness
+of the pack-saddle, I could see Modestine walking round and round at the
+length of her tether; I could hear her steadily munching at the sward;
+but there was not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> another sound, save the indescribable quiet talk of
+the runnel over the stones. I lay lazily smoking and studying the colour
+of the sky, as we call the void of space, from where it showed a reddish
+grey behind the pines to where it showed a glossy blue-black between the
+stars. As if to be more like a pedlar, I wear a silver ring. This I
+could see faintly shining as I raised or lowered the cigarette; and at
+each whiff the inside of my hand was illuminated, and became for a
+second the highest light in the landscape.</p>
+
+<p>A faint wind, more like a moving coolness than a stream of air, passed
+down the glade from time to time; so that even in my great chamber the
+air was being renewed all night long. I thought with horror of the inn
+at Chasserad&egrave;s and the congregated nightcaps; with horror of the
+nocturnal prowesses of clerks and students, of hot theatres and
+pass-keys and close rooms. I have not often enjoyed a more serene
+possession of myself, nor felt more independent of material aids. The
+outer world, from which we cower into our houses, seemed after all a
+gentle habitable place; and night after night a man's bed, it seemed,
+was laid and waiting for him in the fields, where God keeps an open
+house. I thought I had rediscovered one of those truths which are
+revealed to savages and hid from political economists; at the least, I
+had discovered a new pleasure for myself. And yet even while I was
+exulting in my solitude I became aware of a strange lack. I wished a
+companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but
+ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than
+solitude, and which rightly understood, is solitude made perfect. And to
+live out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most
+complete and free.</p>
+
+<p>As I thus lay, between content and longing, a faint noise stole towards
+me through the pines. I thought, at first, it was the crowing of cocks
+or the barking of dogs at some very distant farm; but steadily and
+gradually<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> it took articulate shape in my ears, until I became aware
+that a passenger was going by upon the high-road in the valley, and
+singing loudly as he went. There was more of good-will than grace in his
+performance; but he trolled with ample lungs; and the sound of his voice
+took hold upon the hillside and set the air shaking in the leafy glens.
+I have heard people passing by night in sleeping cities; some of them
+sang; one, I remember, played loudly on the bagpipes. I have heard the
+rattle of a cart or carriage spring up suddenly after hours of
+stillness, and pass, for some minutes, within the range of my hearing as
+I lay abed. There is a romance about all who are abroad in the black
+hours, and with something of a thrill we try to guess their business.
+But here the romance was double: first, this glad passenger, lit
+internally with wine, who sent up his voice in music through the night;
+and then I, on the other hand, buckled into my sack, and smoking alone
+in the pine-woods between four and five thousand feet towards the stars.</p>
+
+<p>When I awoke again (Sunday, 29th September), many of the stars had
+disappeared; only the stronger companions of the night still burned
+visibly overhead; and away towards the east I saw a faint haze of light
+upon the horizon, such as had been the Milky Way when I was last awake.
+Day was at hand. I lit my lantern, and by its glow-worm light put on my
+boots and gaiters; then I broke up some bread for Modestine, filled my
+can at the water-tap, and lit my spirit-lamp to boil myself some
+chocolate. The blue darkness lay long in the glade where I had so
+sweetly slumbered; but soon there was a broad streak of orange melting
+into gold along the mountain-tops of Vivarais. A solemn glee possessed
+my mind at this gradual and lovely coming in of day. I heard the runnel
+with delight; I looked round me for something beautiful and unexpected;
+but the still black pine-trees, the hollow glade, the munching ass,
+remained unchanged in figure. Nothing had altered but the light,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> and
+that, indeed, shed over all a spirit of life and of breathing peace, and
+moved me to a strange exhilaration.</p>
+
+<p>I drank my water-chocolate, which was hot if it was not rich, and
+strolled here and there, and up and down about the glade. While I was
+thus delaying, a gush of steady wind, as long as a heavy sigh, poured
+direct out of the quarter of the morning. It was cold, and set me
+sneezing. The trees near at hand tossed their black plumes in its
+passage; and I could see the thin distant spires of pine along the edge
+of the hill rock slightly to and fro against the golden east. Ten
+minutes later, the sunlight spread at a gallop along the hillside,
+scattering shadows and sparkles, and the day had come completely.</p>
+
+<p>I hastened to prepare my pack, and tackle the steep ascent that lay
+before me; but I had something on my mind. It was only a fancy; yet a
+fancy will sometimes be importunate. I had been most hospitably received
+and punctually served in my green caravanserai. The room was airy, the
+water excellent, and the dawn had called me to a moment. I say nothing
+of the tapestries or the inimitable ceiling, nor yet of the view which I
+commanded from the windows; but I felt I was in some one's debt for all
+this liberal entertainment. And so it pleased me, in a half-laughing
+way, to leave pieces of money on the turf as I went along, until I had
+left enough for my night's lodging. I trust they did not fall to some
+rich and churlish drover.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE COUNTRY OF THE CAMISARDS</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>
+
+<blockquote><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>We travelled in the print of olden wars;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i10"><i>Yet all the land was green;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i10"><i>And love we found, and peace,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i10"><i>Where fire and war had been.</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>They pass and smile, the children of the sword&mdash;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i10"><i>No more the sword they wield;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i10"><i>And O, how deep the corn</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i10"><i>Along the battlefield!</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i22">W. P. BANNATYNE.<br /></span>
+</div></div></blockquote>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<h2>ACROSS THE LOZ&Egrave;RE</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>The track that I had followed in the evening soon died out, and I
+continued to follow over a bald turf ascent a row of stone pillars, such
+as had conducted me across the Goulet. It was already warm. I tied my
+jacket on the pack, and walked in my knitted waistcoat. Modestine
+herself was in high spirits, and broke of her own accord, for the first
+time in my experience, into a jolting trot that sent the oats swashing
+in the pocket of my coat. The view, back upon the northern G&eacute;vaudan,
+extended with every step; scarce a tree, scarce a house, appeared upon
+the fields of wild hill that ran north, east, and west, all blue and
+gold in the haze and sunlight of the morning. A multitude of little
+birds kept sweeping and twittering about my path; they perched on the
+stone pillars, they pecked and strutted on the turf, and I saw them
+circle in volleys in the blue air, and show, from time to time,
+translucent flickering wings between the sun and me.</p>
+
+<p>Almost from the first moment of my march, a faint large noise, like a
+distant surf, had filled my ears. Sometimes I was tempted to think it
+the voice of a neighbouring waterfall, and sometimes a subjective result
+of the utter stillness of the hill. But as I continued to advance, the
+noise increased, and became like the hissing of an enormous tea urn, and
+at the same time breaths of cool air began to reach me from the
+direction of the summit. At length I understood. It was blowing stiffly
+from the south upon the other slope of the Loz&egrave;re, and every step that I
+took I was drawing nearer to the wind.</p>
+
+<p>Although it had been long desired, it was quite unexpectedly at last
+that my eyes rose above the summit.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> A step that seemed no way more
+decisive than many other steps that had preceded it&mdash;and, "like stout
+Cortez when, with eagle eyes, he stared at the Pacific," I took
+possession, in my own name, of a new quarter of the world. For behold,
+instead of the gross turf rampart I had been mounting for so long, a
+view into the hazy air of heaven, and a land of intricate blue hills
+below my feet.</p>
+
+<p>The Loz&egrave;re lies nearly east and west, cutting G&eacute;vaudan into two unequal
+parts; its highest point, this Pic de Finiels, on which I was then
+standing, rises upwards of five thousand six hundred feet above the sea,
+and in clear weather commands a view over all lower Languedoc to the
+Mediterranean Sea. I have spoken with people who either pretended or
+believed that they had seen, from the Pic de Finiels, white ships
+sailing by Montpellier and Cette. Behind was the upland northern country
+through which my way had lain, peopled by a dull race, without wood,
+without much grandeur of hill-form, and famous in the past for little
+besides wolves. But in front of me, half veiled in sunny haze, lay a new
+G&eacute;vaudan, rich, picturesque, illustrious for stirring events. Speaking
+largely, I was in the Cevennes at Monastier, and during all my journey;
+but there is a strict and local sense in which only this confused and
+shaggy country at my feet has any title to the name, and in this sense
+the peasantry employ the word. These are the Cevennes with an emphasis:
+the Cevennes of the Cevennes. In that undecipherable labyrinth of hills,
+a war of bandits, a war of wild beasts, raged for two years between the
+Grand Monarch with all his troops and marshals on the one hand, and a
+few thousand Protestant mountaineers upon the other. A hundred and
+eighty years ago, the Camisards held a station even on the Loz&egrave;re, where
+I stood; they had an organization, arsenals, a military and religious
+hierarchy; their affairs were "the discourse of every coffee-house" in
+London; England sent fleets in their support; their leaders prophesied
+and murdered;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> with colours and drums, and the singing of old French
+Psalms, their bands sometimes affronted daylight, marched before walled
+cities, and dispersed the generals of the king; and sometimes at night,
+or in masquerade, possessed themselves of strong castles, and avenged
+treachery upon their allies and cruelty upon their foes. There, a
+hundred and eighty years ago, was the chivalrous Roland, "Count and Lord
+Roland, generalissimo of the Protestants in France," grave, silent,
+imperious, pock-marked ex-dragoon, whom a lady followed in his
+wanderings out of love. There was Cavalier, a baker's apprentice with a
+genius for war, elected brigadier of Camisards at seventeen, to die at
+fifty-five the English Governor of Jersey. There again was Castanet, a
+partisan leader in a voluminous peruke and with a taste for
+controversial divinity. Strange generals, who moved apart to take
+counsel with the God of Hosts, and fled or offered battle, set sentinels
+or slept in an unguarded camp, as the Spirit whispered to their hearts!
+And there, to follow these and other leaders, was the rank and file of
+prophets and disciples, bold, patient, indefatigable, hardy to run upon
+the mountains, cheering their rough life with psalms, eager to fight,
+eager to pray, listening devoutly to the oracles of brain-sick children,
+and mystically putting a grain of wheat among the pewter balls with
+which they charged their muskets.</p>
+
+<p>I had travelled hitherto through a dull district, and in the track of
+nothing more notable than the child-eating Beast of G&eacute;vaudan, the
+Napol&eacute;on Bonaparte of wolves. But now I was to go down into the scene of
+a romantic chapter&mdash;or, better, a romantic footnote&mdash;in the history of
+the world. What was left of all this bygone dust and heroism? I was told
+that Protestantism still survived in this head seat of Protestant
+resistance; so much the priest himself had told me in the monastery
+parlour. But I had yet to learn if it were a bare survival, or a lively
+and generous tradition. Again, if in the northern<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> Cevennes the people
+are narrow in religious judgments, and more filled with zeal than
+charity, what was I to look for in this land of persecution and
+reprisal&mdash;in a land where the tyranny of the Church produced the
+Camisard rebellion, and the terror of the Camisards threw the Catholic
+peasantry into legalized revolt upon the other side, so that Camisard
+and Florentin skulked for each other's lives among the mountains?</p>
+
+<p>Just on the brow of the hill, where I paused to look before me, the
+series of stone pillars came abruptly to an end; and only a little
+below, a sort of track appeared and began to go down a break-neck slope,
+turning like a corkscrew as it went. It led into a valley between
+falling hills, stubbly with rocks like a reaped field of corn, and
+floored farther down with green meadows. I followed the track with
+precipitation; the steepness of the slope, the continual agile turning
+of the line of the descent, and the old unwearied hope of finding
+something new in a new country, all conspired to lend me wings. Yet a
+little lower and a stream began, collecting itself together out of many
+fountains, and soon making a glad noise among the hills. Sometimes it
+would cross the track in a bit of waterfall, with a pool, in which
+Modestine refreshed her feet.</p>
+
+<p>The whole descent is like a dream to me, so rapidly was it accomplished.
+I had scarcely left the summit ere the valley had closed round my path,
+and the sun beat upon me, walking in a stagnant lowland atmosphere. The
+track became a road, and went up and down in easy undulations. I passed
+cabin after cabin, but all seemed deserted; and I saw not a human
+creature, nor heard any sound except that of the stream. I was, however,
+in a different country from the day before. The stony skeleton of the
+world was here vigorously displayed to sun and air. The slopes were
+steep and changeful. Oak-trees clung along the hills, well grown,
+wealthy in leaf, and touched by the autumn with strong and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> luminous
+colours. Here and there another stream would fall in from the right or
+the left, down a gorge of snow-white and tumultuary boulders. The river
+in the bottom (for it was rapidly growing a river, collecting on all
+hands as it trotted on its way) here foamed a while in desperate rapids,
+and there lay in pools of the most enchanting sea-green shot with watery
+browns. As far as I have gone, I have never seen a river of so changeful
+and delicate a hue; crystal was not more clear, the meadows were not by
+half so green; and at every pool I saw I felt a thrill of longing to be
+out of these hot, dusty, and material garments, and bathe my naked body
+in the mountain air and water. All the time as I went on I never forgot
+it was the Sabbath; the stillness was a perpetual reminder; and I heard
+in spirit the church-bells clamouring all over Europe, and the psalms of
+a thousand churches.</p>
+
+<p>At length a human sound struck upon my ear&mdash;a cry strangely modulated
+between pathos and derision; and looking across the valley, I saw a
+little urchin sitting in a meadow, with his hands about his knees, and
+dwarfed to almost comical smallness by the distance. But the rogue had
+picked me out as I went down the road, from oak wood on to oak wood,
+driving Modestine; and he made me the compliments of the new country in
+this tremulous high-pitched salutation. And as all noises are lovely and
+natural at a sufficient distance, this also, coming through so much
+clean hill air and crossing all the green valley, sounded pleasant to my
+ear, and seemed a thing rustic, like the oaks or the river.</p>
+
+<p>A little after, the stream that I was following fell into the Tarn at
+Pont de Montvert of bloody memory.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>PONT DE MONTVERT</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>One of the first things I encountered in Pont de Montvert was, if I
+remember rightly, the Protestant temple; but this was but the type of
+other novelties. A subtle atmosphere distinguishes a town in England
+from a town in France, or even in Scotland. At Carlisle you can see you
+are in the one country; at Dumfries, thirty miles away, you are as sure
+that you are in the other. I should find it difficult to tell in what
+particulars Pont de Montvert differed from Monastier or Langogne, or
+even Bleymard; but the difference existed, and spoke eloquently to the
+eyes. The place, with its houses, its lanes, its glaring riverbed, wore
+an indescribable air of the South.</p>
+
+<p>All was Sunday bustle in the streets and in the public-houses, as all
+had been Sabbath peace among the mountains. There must have been near a
+score of us at dinner by eleven before noon; and after I had eaten and
+drunken, and sat writing up my journal, I suppose as many more came
+dropping in one after another, or by twos and threes. In crossing the
+Loz&egrave;re I had not only come among new natural features, but moved into
+the territory of a different race. These people, as they hurriedly
+despatched their viands in an intricate sword-play of knives, questioned
+and answered me with a degree of intelligence which excelled all that I
+had met, except among the railway folk at Chasserad&egrave;s. They had open
+telling faces, and were lively both in speech and manner. They not only
+entered thoroughly into the spirit of my little trip, but more than one
+declared, if he were rich enough, he would like to set forth on such
+another.</p>
+
+<p>Even physically there was a pleasant change. I had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> not seen a pretty
+woman since I left Monastier, and there but one. Now of the three who
+sat down with me to dinner, one was certainly not beautiful&mdash;a poor
+timid thing of forty, quite troubled at this roaring <i>table d'h&ocirc;te</i>,
+whom I squired and helped to wine, and pledged and tried generally to
+encourage, with quite a contrary effect; but the other two, both
+married, were both more handsome than the average of women. And
+Clarisse? What shall I say of Clarisse? She waited the table with a
+heavy placable nonchalance, like a performing cow; her great grey eyes
+were steeped in amorous languor; her features, although fleshy, were of
+an original and accurate design; her mouth had a curl; her nostril spoke
+of dainty pride; her cheek fell into strange and interesting lines. It
+was a face capable of strong emotion, and, with training, it offered the
+promise of delicate sentiment. It seemed pitiful to see so good a model
+left to country admirers and a country way of thought. Beauty should at
+least have touched society; then, in a moment, it throws off a weight
+that lay upon it, it becomes conscious of itself, it puts on an
+elegance, learns a gait and a carriage of the head, and, in a moment,
+<i>patet dea.</i> Before I left I assured Clarisse of my hearty admiration.
+She took it like milk, without embarrassment or wonder, merely looking
+at me steadily with her great eyes; and I own the result upon myself was
+some confusion. If Clarisse could read English, I should not dare to add
+that her figure was unworthy of her face. Hers was a case for stays; but
+that may perhaps grow better as she gets up in years.</p>
+
+<p>Pont de Montvert, or Greenhill Bridge, as we might say at home, is a
+place memorable in the story of the Camisards. It was here that the war
+broke out; here that those southern Covenanters slew their Archbishop
+Sharpe. The persecution on the one hand, the febrile enthusiasm on the
+other, are almost equally difficult to understand in these quiet modern
+days, and with our easy modern beliefs and disbeliefs. The Protestants
+were one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> and all beside their right minds with zeal and sorrow. They
+were all prophets and prophetesses. Children at the breast would exhort
+their parents to good works. "A child of fifteen months at Quissac spoke
+from its mother's arms, agitated and sobbing, distinctly and with a loud
+voice." Marshal Villars has seen a town where all the women "seemed
+possessed by the devil," and had trembling fits, and uttered prophecies
+publicly upon the streets. A prophetess of Vivarais was hanged at
+Montpellier because blood flowed from her eyes and nose, and she
+declared that she was weeping tears of blood for the misfortunes of the
+Protestants. And it was not only women and children. Stalwart dangerous
+fellows, used to swing the sickle or to wield the forest axe, were
+likewise shaken with strange paroxysms, and spoke oracles with sobs and
+streaming tears. A persecution unsurpassed in violence had lasted near a
+score of years, and this was the result upon the persecuted; hanging,
+burning, breaking on the wheel, had been in vain; the dragoons had left
+their hoofmarks over all the countryside; there were men rowing in the
+galleys, and women pining in the prisons of the Church; and not a
+thought was changed in the heart of any upright Protestant.</p>
+
+<p>Now the head and forefront of the persecution&mdash;after Lamoignon de
+B&acirc;vile&mdash;Fran&ccedil;ois de Langlade du Chayla (pronounce Ch&eacute;&iuml;la), Archpriest of
+the Cevennes and Inspector of Missions in the same country, had a house
+in which he sometimes dwelt in the town of Pont de Montvert. He was a
+conscientious person, who seems to have been intended by nature for a
+pirate, and now fifty-five, an age by which a man has learned all the
+moderation of which he is capable. A missionary in his youth in China,
+he there suffered martyrdom, was left for dead, and only succoured and
+brought back to life by the charity of a pariah. We must suppose the
+pariah devoid of second-sight, and not purposely malicious in this act.
+Such an experience, it might be thought, would have cured a man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> of the
+desire to persecute; but the human spirit is a thing strangely put
+together; and, having been a Christian martyr, Du Chayla became a
+Christian persecutor. The Work of the Propagation of the Faith went
+roundly forward in his hands. His house in Pont de Montvert served him
+as a prison. There he closed the hands of his prisoners upon live coal,
+and plucked out the hairs of their beards, to convince them that they
+were deceived in their opinions. And yet had not he himself tried and
+proved the inefficacy of these carnal arguments among the Buddhists in
+China?</p>
+
+<p>Not only was life made intolerable in Languedoc, but flight was rigidly
+forbidden. One Massip, a muleteer, and well acquainted with the
+mountain-paths, had already guided several troops of fugitives in safety
+to Geneva; and on him, with another convoy, consisting mostly of women
+dressed as men, Du Chayla, in an evil hour for himself, laid his hands.
+The Sunday following, there was a conventicle of Protestants in the
+woods of Altefage upon Mount Bouges; where there stood up one
+S&eacute;guier&mdash;Spirit S&eacute;guier, as his companions called him&mdash;a wool-carder,
+tall, black-faced, and toothless, but a man full of prophecy. He
+declared, in the name of God, that the time for submission had gone by,
+and they must betake themselves to arms for the deliverance of their
+brethren and the destruction of the priests.</p>
+
+<p>The next night, 24th July 1702, a sound disturbed the Inspector of
+Missions as he sat in his prison-house at Pont de Montvert: the voices
+of many men upraised in psalmody drew nearer and nearer through the
+town. It was ten at night; he had his court about him, priests,
+soldiers, and servants, to the number of twelve or fifteen; and now
+dreading the insolence of a conventicle below his very windows, he
+ordered forth his soldiers to report. But the psalm-singers were already
+at his door, fifty strong, led by the inspired S&eacute;guier, and breathing
+death. To their summons, the archpriest made answer like a stout old<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>
+persecutor, and bade his garrison fire upon the mob. One Camisard (for,
+according to some, it was in this night's work that they came by the
+name) fell at this discharge: his comrades burst in the door with
+hatchets and a beam of wood, overran the lower story of the house, set
+free the prisoners, and finding one of them in the <i>vine</i>, a sort of
+Scavenger's Daughter of the place and period, redoubled in fury against
+Du Chayla, and sought by repeated assaults to carry the upper floors.
+But he, on his side, had given absolution to his men, and they bravely
+held the staircase.</p>
+
+<p>"Children of God," cried the prophet, "hold your hands. Let us burn the
+house, with the priest and the satellites of Baal."</p>
+
+<p>The fire caught readily. Out of an upper window Du Chayla and his men
+lowered themselves into the garden by means of knotted sheets; some
+escaped across the river under the bullets of the insurgents; but the
+archpriest himself fell, broke his thigh, and could only crawl into the
+hedge. What were his reflections as this second martyrdom drew near? A
+poor, brave, besotted, hateful man, who had done his duty resolutely
+according to his light both in the Cevennes and China. He found at least
+one telling word to say in his defence; for when the roof fell in and
+the upbursting flames discovered his retreat, and they came and dragged
+him to the public place of the town, raging and calling him damned&mdash;"If
+I be damned," said he, "why should you also damn yourselves?"</p>
+
+<p>Here was a good reason for the last; but in the course of his
+inspectorship he had given many stronger which all told in a contrary
+direction; and these he was now to hear. One by one, S&eacute;guier first, the
+Camisards drew near and stabbed him. "This," they said, "is for my
+father broken on the wheel. This for my brother in the galleys. That for
+my mother or my sister imprisoned in your cursed convents." Each gave
+his blow and his reason; and then all kneeled and sang psalms around the
+body till the dawn. With the dawn, still singing, they defiled away
+towards Fru<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>g&egrave;res, farther up the Tarn, to pursue the work of vengeance,
+leaving Du Chayla's prison-house in ruins, and his body pierced with
+two-and-fifty wounds upon the public place.</p>
+
+<p>'Tis a wild night's work, with its accompaniment of psalms; and it seems
+as if a psalm must always have a sound of threatening in that town upon
+the Tarn. But the story does not end, even so far as concerns Pont de
+Montvert, with the departure of the Camisards. The career of S&eacute;guier was
+brief and bloody. Two more priests and a whole family at Ladev&egrave;ze, from
+the father to the servants, fell by his hand or by his orders; and yet
+he was but a day or two at large, and restrained all the time by the
+presence of the soldiery. Taken at length by a famous soldier of
+fortune, Captain Poul, he appeared unmoved before his judges.</p>
+
+<p>"Your name?" they asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Pierre S&eacute;guier."</p>
+
+<p>"Why are you called Spirit?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because the Spirit of the Lord is with me."</p>
+
+<p>"Your domicile?"</p>
+
+<p>"Lately in the desert, and soon in heaven."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you no remorse for your crimes?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have committed none. <i>My soul is like a garden full of shelter and of
+fountains".</i>"</p>
+
+<p>At Pont de Montvert, on the 12th of August, he had his right hand
+stricken from his body, and was burned alive. And his soul was like a
+garden? So perhaps was the soul of Du Chayla, the Christian martyr. And
+perhaps if you could read in my soul, or I could read in yours, our own
+composure might seem little less surprising.</p>
+
+<p>Du Chayla's house still stands, with a new roof, beside one of the
+bridges of the town; and if you are curious you may see the
+terrace-garden into which he dropped.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>IN THE VALLEY OF THE TARN</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>A new road leads from Pont de Montvert to Florac by the valley of the
+Tarn; a smooth sandy ledge, it runs about half-way between the summit of
+the cliffs and the river in the bottom of the valley; and I went in and
+out, as I followed it, from bays of shadow into promontories of
+afternoon sun. This was a pass like that of Killiecrankie; a deep
+turning gully in the hills, with the Tarn making a wonderful hoarse
+uproar far below, and craggy summits standing in the sunshine high
+above. A thin fringe of ash trees ran about the hill-tops, like ivy on a
+ruin; but, on the lower slopes, and far up every glen, the Spanish
+chestnut trees stood each four-square to heaven under its tented
+foliage. Some were planted, each on its own terrace no larger than a
+bed; some, trusting in their roots, found strength to grow and prosper
+and be straight and large upon the rapid slopes of the valley; others,
+where there was a margin to the river, stood marshaled in a line and
+mighty like cedars of Lebanon. Yet even where they grew most thickly
+they were not to be thought of as a wood, but as a herd of stalwart
+individuals; and the dome of each tree stood forth separate and large,
+and as it were a little bill, from among the domes of its companions.
+They gave forth a faint sweet perfume which pervaded the air of the
+afternoon; autumn had put tints of gold and tarnish in the green; and
+the sun so shone through and kindled the broad foliage, that each
+chestnut was relieved against another, not in shadow, but in light. A
+humble sketcher here laid down his pencil in despair.</p>
+
+<p>I wish I could convey a notion of the growth of these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> noble trees; of
+how they strike out boughs like the oak, and trail sprays of drooping
+foliage like the willow; of how they stand on upright fluted columns
+like the pillars of a church; or like the olive, from the most shattered
+hole can put out smooth and youthful shoots, and begin a new life upon
+the ruins of the old. Thus they partake of the nature of many different
+trees; and even their prickly top-knots, seen near at hand against the
+sky, have a certain palm-like air that impresses the imagination. But
+their individuality, although compounded of so many elements, is but the
+richer and the more original. And to look down upon a level filled with
+these knolls of foliage, or to see a clan of old unconquerable chestnuts
+cluster "like herded elephants" upon the spur of a mountain, is to rise
+to higher thoughts of the powers that are in Nature.</p>
+
+<p>Between Modestine's laggard humour and the beauty of the scene, we made
+little progress all that afternoon; and at last finding the sun,
+although still far from setting, was already beginning to desert the
+narrow valley of the Tarn, I began to cast about for a place to camp in.
+This was not easy to find; the terraces were too narrow, and the ground,
+where it was unterraced, was usually too steep for a man to lie upon. I
+should have slipped all night, and awakened towards morning with my feet
+or my head in the river.</p>
+
+<p>After perhaps a mile, I saw, some sixty feet above the road, a little
+plateau large enough to hold my sack, and securely parapeted by the
+trunk of an aged and enormous chestnut. Thither, with infinite trouble,
+I goaded and kicked the reluctant Modestine, and there I hastened to
+unload her. There was only room for myself upon the plateau, and I had
+to go nearly as high again before I found so much as standing-room for
+the ass. It was on a heap of rolling stones, on an artificial terrace,
+certainly not five feet square in all. Here I tied her to a chestnut,
+and having given her corn and bread and made a pile of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> chestnut-leaves,
+of which I found her greedy, I descended once more to my own encampment.</p>
+
+<p>The position was unpleasantly exposed. One or two carts went by upon the
+road; and as long as daylight lasted I concealed myself, for all the
+world like a hunted Camisard, behind my fortification of vast chestnut
+trunk; for I was passionately afraid of discovery and the visit of
+jocular persons in the night. Moreover, I saw that I must be early
+awake; for these chestnut gardens had been the scene of industry no
+further gone than on the day before. The slope was strewn with lopped
+branches, and here and there a great package of leaves was propped
+against a trunk; for even the leaves are serviceable, and the peasants
+use them in winter by way of fodder for their animals. I picked a meal
+in fear and trembling, half lying down to hide myself from the road; and
+I daresay I was as much concerned as if I had been a scout from Joani's
+band above upon the Loz&egrave;re, or from Salomon's across the Tarn, in the
+old times of psalm-singing and blood. Or indeed, perhaps more; for the
+Camisards had a remarkable confidence in God; and a tale comes back into
+my memory of how the Count of G&eacute;vaudan, riding with a party of dragoons
+and a notary at his saddlebow to enforce the oath of fidelity in all the
+country hamlets, entered a valley in the woods, and found Cavalier and
+his men at dinner, gaily seated on the grass, and their hats crowned
+with box-tree garlands, while fifteen women washed their linen in the
+stream. Such was a field festival in 1703; at that date Antony Watteau
+would be painting similar subjects.</p>
+
+<p>This was a very different camp from that of the night before in the cool
+and silent pine-woods. It was warm and even stifling in the valley. The
+shrill song of frogs, like the tremolo note of a whistle with a pea in
+it, rang up from the riverside before the sun was down. In the growing
+dusk, faint rustlings began to run to and fro among the fallen leaves;
+from time to time a faint chirping or cheeping noise would fall upon my
+ear; and from time<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> to time I thought I could see the movement of
+something swift and indistinct between the chestnuts. A profusion of
+large ants swarmed upon the ground; bats whisked by, and mosquitoes
+droned overhead. The long boughs with their bunches of leaves hung
+against the sky like garlands; and those immediately above and around me
+had somewhat the air of a trellis which should have been wrecked and
+half overthrown in a gale of wind.</p>
+
+<p>Sleep for a long time fled my eyelids; and just as I was beginning to
+feel quiet stealing over my limbs, and settling densely on my mind, a
+noise at my head startled me broad awake again, and, I will frankly
+confess it, brought my heart into my mouth. It was such a noise as a
+person would make scratching loudly with a finger-nail; it came from
+under the knapsack which served me for a pillow, and it was thrice
+repeated before I had time to sit up and turn about. Nothing was to be
+seen, nothing more was to be heard, but a few of these mysterious
+rustlings far and near, and the ceaseless accompaniment of the river and
+the frogs. I learned next day that the chestnut gardens are infested by
+rats; rustling, chirping, and scraping were probably all due to these;
+but the puzzle, for the moment, was insoluble, and I had to compose
+myself for sleep as best I could, in wondering uncertainty about my
+neighbours.</p>
+
+<p>I was wakened in the grey of the morning (Monday, 30th September) by the
+sound of footsteps not far off upon the stones, and, opening my eyes, I
+beheld a peasant going by among the chestnuts by a footpath that I had
+not hitherto observed. He turned his head neither to the right nor to
+the left, and disappeared in a few strides among the foliage. Here was
+an escape! But it was plainly more than time to be moving. The peasantry
+were abroad; scarce less terrible to me in my nondescript position than
+the soldiers of Captain Poul to an undaunted Camisard. I fed Modestine
+with what haste I could; but as I was returning to my sack, I saw a man
+and a boy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> come down the hillside in a direction crossing mine. They
+unintelligibly hailed me, and I replied with inarticulate but cheerful
+sounds, and hurried forward to get into my gaiters.</p>
+
+<p>The pair, who seemed to be father and son, came slowly up to the
+plateau, and stood close beside me for some time in silence. The bed was
+open, and I saw with regret my revolver lying patently disclosed on the
+blue wool. At last, after they had looked me all over, and the silence
+had grown laughably embarrassing, the man demanded in what seemed
+unfriendly tones:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You have slept here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said I. "As you see."</p>
+
+<p>"Why?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"My faith," I answered lightly, "I was tired."</p>
+
+<p>He next inquired where I was going, and what I had had for dinner; and
+then, without the least transition, "<i>C'est bien,"</i> he added, "come
+along." And he and his son, without another word, turned oil to the next
+chestnut-tree but one, which they set to pruning. The thing had passed
+off more simply than I hoped. He was a grave, respectable man; and his
+unfriendly voice did not imply that he thought he was speaking to a
+criminal, but merely to an inferior.</p>
+
+<p>I was soon on the road, nibbling a cake of chocolate and seriously
+occupied with a case of conscience. Was I to pay for my night's lodging?
+I had slept ill, the bed was full of fleas in the shape of ants, there
+was no water in the room, the very dawn had neglected to call me in the
+morning. I might have missed a train, had there been any in the
+neighbourhood to catch. Clearly, I was dissatisfied with my
+entertainment; and I decided I should not pay unless I met a beggar.</p>
+
+<p>The valley looked even lovelier by morning; and soon the road descended
+to the level of the river. Here, in a place where many straight and
+prosperous chestnuts stood together, making an aisle upon a swarded
+terrace, I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> made my morning toilette in the water of the Tarn. It was
+marvelously clear, thrillingly cool; the soap-suds disappeared as if by
+magic in the swift current, and the white boulders gave one a model for
+cleanliness. To wash in one of God's rivers in the open air seems to me
+a sort of cheerful solemnity or semi-pagan act of worship. To dabble
+among dishes in a bedroom may perhaps make clean the body; but the
+imagination takes no share in such a cleansing. I went on with a light
+and peaceful heart, and sang psalms to the spiritual ear as I advanced.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly up came an old woman, who point-blank demanded alms.</p>
+
+<p>"Good," thought I; "here comes the waiter with the bill."</p>
+
+<p>And I paid for my night's lodging on the spot. Take it how you please,
+but this was the first and the last beggar that I met with during all my
+tour.</p>
+
+<p>A step or two farther I was overtaken by an old man in a brown nightcap,
+clear-eyed, weather-beaten, with a faint excited smile. A little girl
+followed him, driving two sheep and a goat; but she kept in our wake,
+while the old man walked beside me and talked about the morning and the
+valley. It was not much past six; and for healthy people who have slept
+enough that is an hour of expansion and of open and trustful talk.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Connaissez-vous le Seigneur?</i>" he said at length.</p>
+
+<p>I asked him what Seigneur he meant; but he only repeated the question
+with more emphasis and a look in his eyes denoting hope and interest.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah," said I, pointing upwards, "I understand you now. Yes, I know Him;
+He is the best of acquaintances."</p>
+
+<p>The old man said he was delighted. "Hold," he added, striking his bosom;
+"it makes me happy here." There were a few who knew the Lord in these
+valleys, he went on to tell me; not many, but a few. "Many are called,"
+he quoted, "and few chosen."</p>
+
+<p>"My father," said I, "it is not easy to say who know<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> the Lord; and it
+is none of our business. Protestants and Catholics, and even those who
+worship stones, may know Him and be known by Him; for He has made all."</p>
+
+<p>I did not know I was so good a preacher.</p>
+
+<p>The old man assured me he thought as I did, and repeated his expressions
+of pleasure at meeting me. "We are so few," he said. "They call us
+Moravians here; but down in the Department of Gard, where there are also
+a good number, they are called Derbists, after an English pastor."</p>
+
+<p>I began to understand that I was figuring, in questionable taste, as a
+member of some sect to me unknown; but I was more pleased with the
+pleasure of my companion than embarrassed by my own equivocal position.
+Indeed, I can see no dishonesty in not avowing a difference; and
+especially in these high matters, where we have all a sufficient
+assurance that, whoever may be in the wrong, we ourselves are not
+completely in the right. The truth is much talked about; but this old
+man in a brown nightcap showed himself so simple, sweet and friendly,
+that I am not unwilling to profess myself his convert. He was, as a
+matter of fact, a Plymouth Brother. Of what that involves in the way of
+doctrine I have no idea nor the time to inform myself; but I know right
+well that we are all embarked upon a troublesome world, the children of
+one Father, striving in many essential points to do and to become the
+same. And although it was somewhat in a mistake that he shook hands with
+me so often and showed himself so ready to receive my words, that was a
+mistake of the truth-finding sort. For charity begins blindfold; and
+only through a series of similar misapprehensions rises at length into a
+settled principle of love and patience, and a firm belief in all our
+fellow-men. If I deceived this good old man, in the like manner I would
+willingly go on to deceive others. And if ever at length, out of our
+separate and sad ways, we should all come<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> together into one common
+house, I have a hope, to which I cling dearly, that my mountain Plymouth
+Brother will hasten to shake hands with me again.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, talking like Christian and Faithful by the way, he and I came down
+upon a hamlet by the Tarn. It was but a humble place, called La Vern&egrave;de,
+with less than a dozen houses, and a Protestant chapel on a knoll. Here
+he dwelt; and here, at the inn, I ordered my breakfast. The inn was kept
+by an agreeable young man, a stone-breaker on the road, and his sister, a
+pretty and engaging girl. The village schoolmaster dropped in to speak
+with the stranger. And these were all Protestants&mdash;a fact which pleased
+me more than I should have expected; and, what pleased me still more,
+they seemed all upright and simple people. The Plymouth Brother hung
+round me with a sort of yearning interest, and returned at least thrice
+to make sure I was enjoying my meal. His behaviour touched me deeply at
+the time, and even now moves me in recollection. He feared to intrude,
+but he would not willingly forego one moment of my society; and he
+seemed never weary of shaking me by the hand.</p>
+
+<p>When all the rest had drifted off to their day's work, I sat for near
+half an hour with the young mistress of the house, who talked pleasantly
+over her seam of the chestnut harvest, and the beauties of the Tarn, and
+old family affections, broken up when young folk go from home, yet still
+subsisting. Hers, I am sure, was a sweet nature, with a country
+plainness and much delicacy underneath; and he who takes her to his
+heart will doubtless be a fortunate young man.</p>
+
+<p>The valley below La Vern&egrave;de pleased me more and more as I went forward.
+Now the hills approached from either hand, naked and crumbling, and
+walled in the river between cliffs; and now the valley widened and
+became green. The road led me past the old castle of Miral on a steep;
+past a battlemented monastery, long since broken up and turned into a
+church and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> parsonage; and past a cluster of black roofs, the village of
+Cocur&egrave;s, sitting among vineyards and meadows and orchards thick with red
+apples, and where, along the highway, they were knocking down walnuts
+from the roadside trees, and gathering them in sacks and baskets. The
+hills, however much the vale might open, were still tall and bare, with
+cliffy battlements and here and there a pointed summit; and the Tarn
+still rattled through the stones with a mountain noise. I had been led,
+by bagmen of a picturesque turn of mind, to expect a horrific country
+after the heart of Byron; but to my Scottish eyes it seemed smiling and
+plentiful, as the weather still gave an impression of high summer to my
+Scottish body; although the chestnuts were already picked out by the
+autumn, and the poplars, that here began to mingle with them, had turned
+into pale gold against the approach of winter.</p>
+
+<p>There was something in this landscape, smiling although wild, that
+explained to me the spirit of the Southern Covenanters. Those who took
+to the hills for conscience' sake in Scotland had all gloomy and
+bedevilled thoughts; for once that they received God's comfort they
+would be twice engaged with Satan; but the Camisards had only bright and
+supporting visions. They dealt much more in blood, both given and taken;
+yet I find no obsession of the Evil One in their records. With a light
+conscience, they pursued their life in these rough times and
+circumstances. The soul of S&eacute;guier, let us not forget, was like a
+garden. They knew they were on God's side, with a knowledge that has no
+parallel among the Scots; for the Scots, although they might be certain
+of the cause, could never rest confident of the person.</p>
+
+<p>"We flew," says one old Camisard, "when we heard the sound of
+psalm-singing, we flew as if with wings. We felt within us an animating
+ardour, a transporting desire. The feeling cannot be expressed in words.
+It is a thing that must have been experienced to be under<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>stood. However
+weary we might be, we thought no more of our weariness, and grew light
+so soon as the psalms fell upon our ears."</p>
+
+<p>The valley of the Tarn and the people whom I met at La Vern&egrave;de not only
+explain to me this passage, but the twenty years of suffering which
+those, who were so stiff and so bloody when once they betook themselves
+to war, endured with the meekness of children and the constancy of
+saints and peasants.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>FLORAC</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>On a branch of the Tarn stands Florac, the seat of a sub-prefecture with
+an old castle, an alley of planes, many quaint street-corners, and a
+live fountain welling from the hill. It is notable, besides, for
+handsome women, and as one of the two capitals, Alais being the other,
+of the country of the Camisards.</p>
+
+<p>The landlord of the inn took me, after I had eaten, to an adjoining
+caf&eacute;, where I, or rather my journey, became the topic of the afternoon.
+Every one had some suggestion for my guidance; and the sub-prefectorial
+map was fetched from the sub-prefecture itself, and much thumbed among
+coffee-cups and glasses of liqueur. Most of these kind advisers were
+Protestant, though I observed that Protestant and Catholic intermingled
+in a very easy manner; and it surprised me to see what a lively memory
+still subsisted of the religious war. Among the hills of the south-west,
+by Mauchline, Cumnock, or Carsphairn, in isolated farms or in the manse,
+serious Presbyterian people still recall the days of the great
+persecution, and the graves of local martyrs are still piously regarded.
+But in towns and among the so-called better classes, I fear that these
+old doings have become an idle tale. If you met a mixed company in the
+King's Arms at Wigtown, it is not likely that the talk would run on
+Covenanters. Nay, at Muirkirk of Glenluce, I found the beadle's wife had
+not so much as heard of Prophet Peden. But these C&eacute;venols were proud of
+their ancestors in quite another sense; the war was their chosen topic;
+its exploits were their own patent of nobility; and where a man or a
+race has had but one adventure, and that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> heroic, we must expect and
+pardon some prolixity of reference. They told me the country was still
+full of legends hitherto uncollected; I heard from them about Cavalier's
+descendants&mdash;not direct descendants, be it understood, but only cousins
+or nephews&mdash;who were still prosperous people in the scene of the
+boy-general's exploits; and one farmer had seen the bones of old
+combatants dug up into the air of an afternoon in the nineteenth
+century, in a field where the ancestors had fought, and the
+great-grandchildren were peaceably ditching.</p>
+
+<p>Later in the day one of the Protestant pastors was so good as to visit
+me: a young man, intelligent and polite, with whom I passed an hour or
+two in talk. Florac, he told me, is part Protestant, part Catholic; and
+the difference in religion is usually doubled by a difference in
+politics. You may judge of my surprise, coming as I did from such a
+babbling purgatorial Poland of a place as Monastier, when I learned that
+the population lived together on very quiet terms; and there was even an
+exchange of hospitalities between households thus doubly separated.
+Black Camisard and White Camisard, militiaman and Miquelet and dragoon,
+Protestant prophet and Catholic cadet of the White Cross, they had all
+been sabring and shooting, burning, pillaging, and murdering, their
+hearts hot with indignant passion; and here, after a hundred and seventy
+years, Protestant is still Protestant, Catholic still Catholic, in
+mutual toleration and mild amity of life. But the race of man, like that
+indomitable nature whence it sprang, has medicating virtues of its own;
+the years and seasons bring various harvests; the sun returns after the
+rain; and mankind outlives secular animosities, as a single man awakens
+from the passions of a day. We judge our ancestors from a more divine
+position; and the dust being a little laid with several centuries, we
+can see both sides adorned with human virtues and fighting with a show
+of right.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span></p><p>I have never thought it easy to be just, and find it daily even harder
+than I thought. I own I met these Protestants with delight and a sense
+of coming home. I was accustomed to speak their language, in another and
+deeper sense of the word than that which distinguishes between French
+and English; for the true Babel is a divergence upon morals. And hence I
+could hold more free communication with the Protestants, and judge them
+more justly, than the Catholics. Father Apollinaris may pair off with my
+mountain Plymouth Brother as two guileless and devout old men; yet I ask
+myself if I had as ready a feeling for the virtues of the Trappist; or,
+had I been a Catholic, if I should have felt so warmly to the dissenter
+of La Vern&egrave;de. With the first I was on terms of mere forbearance; but
+with the other, although only on a misunderstanding and by keeping on
+selected points, it was still possible to hold converse and exchange
+some honest thoughts. In this world of imperfection we gladly welcome
+even partial intimacies. And if we find but one to whom we can speak out
+of our heart freely, with whom we can walk in love and simplicity
+without dissimulation, we have no ground of quarrel with the world or
+God.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>IN THE VALLEY OF THE MIMENTE</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>On Tuesday, 1st October, we left Florac late in the afternoon, a tired
+donkey and tired donkey-driver. A little way up the Tarnon, a covered
+bridge of wood introduced us into the valley of the Mimente. Steep rocky
+red mountains overhung the stream; great oaks and chestnuts grew upon
+the slopes or in stony terraces; here and there was a red field of
+millet or a few apple trees studded with red apples; and the road passed
+hard by two black hamlets, one with an old castle atop to please the
+heart of the tourist.</p>
+
+<p>It was difficult here again to find a spot fit for my encampment. Even
+under the oaks and chestnuts the ground had not only a very rapid slope,
+but was heaped with loose stones; and where there was no timber the
+hills descended to the stream in a red precipice tufted with heather.
+The sun had left the highest peak in front of me, and the valley was
+full of the lowing sound of herdsmen's horns as they recalled the flocks
+into the stable, when I spied a bight of meadow some way below the
+roadway in an angle of the river. Thither I descended, and, tying
+Modestine provisionally to a tree, proceeded to investigate the
+neighbourhood. A grey pearly evening shadow filled the glen; objects at
+a little distance grew indistinct and melted bafflingly into each other;
+and the darkness was rising steadily like an exhalation. I approached a
+great oak which grew in the meadow, hard by the river's brink; when to
+my disgust the voices of children fell upon my ear, and I beheld a house
+round the angle on the other bank. I had half a mind to pack and be gone
+again, but the growing darkness moved me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> to remain. I had only to make
+no noise until the night was fairly come, and trust to the dawn to call
+me early in the morning. But it was hard to be annoyed by neighbours in
+such a great hotel.</p>
+
+<p>A hollow underneath the oak was my bed. Before I had fed Modestine and
+arranged my sack, three stars were already brightly shining, and the
+others were beginning dimly to appear. I slipped down to the river,
+which looked very black among its rocks, to fill my can; and dined with
+a good appetite in the dark, for I scrupled to light a lantern while so
+near a house. The moon, which I had seen a pallid crescent all
+afternoon, faintly illuminated the summit of the hills, but not a ray
+fell into the bottom of the glen where I was lying. The oak rose before
+me like a pillar of darkness; and overhead the heartsome stars were set
+in the face of the night. No one knows the stars who has not slept, as
+the French happily put it, <i>&agrave; la belle &eacute;toile.</i> He may know all their
+names and distances and magnitudes, and yet be ignorant of what alone
+concerns mankind,&mdash;their serene and gladsome influence on the mind. The
+greater part of poetry is about the stars; and very justly, for they are
+themselves the most classical of poets. These same far-away worlds,
+sprinkled like tapers or shaken together like a diamond dust upon the
+sky, had looked not otherwise to Roland or Cavalier, when, in the words
+of the latter, they had "no other tent but the sky, and no other bed
+than my mother earth."</p>
+
+<p>All night a strong wind blew up the valley, and the acorns fell
+pattering over me from the oak. Yet on this first night of October, the
+air was as mild as May, and I slept with the fur thrown back.</p>
+
+<p>I was much disturbed by the barking of a dog, an animal that I fear more
+than any wolf. A dog is vastly braver, and is besides supported by the
+sense of duty. If you kill a wolf, you meet with encouragement and
+praise; but if you kill a dog, the sacred rights of property and the
+domestic affections come clamouring round you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> for redress. At the end
+of a fagging day, the sharp, cruel note of a dog's bark is in itself a
+keen annoyance; and to a tramp like myself, he represents the sedentary
+and respectable world in its most hostile form. There is something of
+the clergyman or the lawyer about this engaging animal; and it he were
+not amenable to stones, the boldest man would shrink from travelling
+afoot. I respect dogs much in the domestic circle; but on the highway,
+or sleeping afield, I both detest and fear them.</p>
+
+<p>I was wakened next morning (Wednesday, October 2nd) by the same dog&mdash;for
+I knew his bark&mdash;making a charge down the bank, and then, seeing me sit
+up, retreating again with great alacrity. The stars were not yet quite
+extinguished. The heaven was of that enchanting mild grey-blue of the
+early morn. A still clear light began to fall, and the trees on the
+hillside were outlined sharply against the sky. The wind had veered more
+to the north, and no longer reached me in the glen; but as I was going
+on with my preparations, it drove a white cloud very swiftly over the
+hill-top; and looking up, I was surprised to see the cloud dyed with
+gold. In these high regions of the air the sun was already shining as at
+noon. If only the clouds travelled high enough, we should see the same
+thing all night long. For it is always daylight in the fields of space.</p>
+
+<p>As I began to go up the valley, a draught of wind came down it out of
+the seat of the sunrise, although the clouds continued to run overhead
+in an almost contrary direction. A few steps farther, and I saw a whole
+hillside gilded with the sun; and still a little beyond, between two
+peaks, a centre of dazzling brilliancy appeared floating in the sky, and
+I was once more face to face with the big bonfire that occupies the
+kernel of our system.</p>
+
+<p>I met but one human being that forenoon, a dark military-looking
+wayfarer, who carried a game-bag on a baldric; but he made a remark that
+seems worthy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> of record. For when I asked him if he were Protestant or
+Catholic&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said he, "I make no shame of my religion. I am a Catholic."</p>
+
+<p>He made no shame of it! The phrase is a piece of natural statistics; for
+it is the language of one in a minority. I thought with a smile of
+B&acirc;vile and his dragoons, and how you may ride rough-shod over a religion
+for a century, and leave it only the more lively for the friction.
+Ireland is still Catholic; the Cevennes still Protestant. It is not a
+basketful of law-papers, nor the hoofs and pistol-butts of a regiment of
+horse, that can change one tittle of a ploughman's thoughts. Outdoor
+rustic people have not many ideas, but such as they have are hardy
+plants, and thrive flourishingly in persecution. One who has grown a
+long while in the sweat of laborious noons, and under the stars at
+night, a frequenter of hills and forests, an old honest countryman, has,
+in the end, a sense of communion with the powers of the universe, and
+amicable relations towards his God. Like my mountain Plymouth Brother,
+he knows the Lord. His religion does not repose upon a choice of logic;
+it is the poetry of the man's experience, the philosophy of the history
+of his life. God, like a great power, like a great shining sun, has
+appeared to this simple fellow in the course of years, and become the
+ground and essence of his least reflections; and you may change creeds
+and dogma by authority, or proclaim a new religion with the sound of
+trumpets, if you will; but here is a man who has his own thoughts, and
+will stubbornly adhere to them in good and evil. He is a Catholic, a
+Protestant, or a Plymouth Brother, in the same indefeasible sense that a
+man is not a woman, or a woman not a man. For he could not vary from his
+faith, unless he could eradicate all memory of the past, and, in a
+strict and not a conventional meaning, change his mind.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>I was now drawing near to Cassagnas, a cluster of black roofs upon the
+hillside, in this wild valley, among chestnut gardens, and looked upon
+in the clear air by many rocky peaks. The road along the Mimente is yet
+new, nor have the mountaineers recovered their surprise when the first
+cart arrived at Cassagnas. But although it lay thus apart from the
+current of men's business, this hamlet had already made a figure in the
+history of France. Hard by, in caverns of the mountain, was one of the
+five arsenals of the Camisards; where they laid up clothes and corn and
+arms against necessity, forged bayonets and sabres, and made themselves
+gunpowder with willow charcoal and saltpetre boiled in kettles. To the
+same caves, amid this multifarious industry, the sick and wounded were
+brought up to heal; and there they were visited by the two surgeons,
+Chabrier and Tavan, and secretly nursed by women of the neighbourhood.</p>
+
+<p>Of the five legions into which the Camisards were divided, it was the
+oldest and the most obscure that had its magazines by Cassagnas. This
+was the band of Spirit S&eacute;guier; men who had joined their voices with his
+in the 68th Psalm as they marched down by night on the archpriest of the
+Cevennes. S&eacute;guier, promoted to heaven, was succeeded by Salomon Couderc,
+whom Cavalier treats in his memoirs as chaplain-general to the whole
+army of the Camisards. He was a prophet; a great reader of the heart,
+who admitted people to the sacrament, or refused them, by "intentively
+viewing every man" between the eyes; and had the most of the Scriptures
+off by rote. And this was surely happy; since in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> a surprise in August
+1703, he lost his mule, his portfolios, and his Bible. It is only
+strange that they were not surprised more often and more effectually;
+for this legion of Cassagnas was truly patriarchal in its theory of war,
+and camped without sentries, leaving that duty to the angels of the God
+for whom they fought. This is a token, not only of their faith, but of
+the trackless country where they harboured. M. de Caladon, taking a
+stroll one fine day, walked without warning into their midst, as he
+might have walked into "a flock of sheep in a plain," and found some
+asleep and some awake and psalm-singing. A traitor had need of no
+recommendation to insinuate himself among their ranks, beyond "his
+faculty of singing psalms"; and even the prophet Salomon "took him into
+a particular friendship." Thus, among their intricate hills, the rustic
+troop subsisted; and history can attribute few exploits to them but
+sacraments and ecstasies.</p>
+
+<p>People of this tough and simple stock will not, as I have just been
+saying, prove variable in religion; nor will they get nearer to apostasy
+than a mere external conformity like that of Naaman in the house of
+Rimmon. When Louis XVI., in the words of the edict, "convinced by the
+uselessness of a century of persecutions, and rather from necessity than
+sympathy," granted at last a royal grace of toleration, Cassagnas was
+still Protestant; and to a man, it is so to this day. There is, indeed,
+one family that is not Protestant, but neither is it Catholic. It is
+that of a Catholic <i>cur&eacute;</i> in revolt, who has taken to his bosom a
+schoolmistress. And his conduct, it is worth noting, is disapproved by
+the Protestant villagers.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a bad idea for a man," said one, "to go back from his
+engagements."</p>
+
+<p>The villagers whom I saw seemed intelligent after a countrified fashion,
+and were all plain and dignified in manner. As a Protestant myself, I
+was well looked upon, and my acquaintance with history gained me
+further<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> respect. For we had something not unlike a religious
+controversy at table, a gendarme and a merchant with whom I dined being
+both strangers to the place, and Catholics. The young men of the house
+stood round and supported me; and the whole discussion was tolerantly
+conducted, and surprised a man brought up among the infinitesimal and
+contentious differences of Scotland. The merchant, indeed, grew a little
+warm, and was far less pleased than some others with my historical
+acquirements. But the gendarme was mighty easy over it all.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a bad idea for a man to change," said he; and the remark was
+generally applauded.</p>
+
+<p>That was not the opinion of the priest and soldier at Our Lady of the
+Snows. But this is a different race; and perhaps the same
+great-heartedness that upheld them to resist, now enables them to differ
+in a kind spirit. For courage respects courage; but where a faith has
+been trodden out, we may look for a mean and narrow population. The true
+work of Bruce and Wallace was the union of the nations; not that they
+should stand apart a while longer, skirmishing upon their borders; but
+that, when the time came, they might unite with self-respect.</p>
+
+<p>The merchant was much interested in my journey, and thought it dangerous
+to sleep afield.</p>
+
+<p>"There are the wolves," said he; "and then it is known you are an
+Englishman. The English have always long purses, and it might very well
+enter into some one's head to deal you an ill blow some night."</p>
+
+<p>I told him I was not much afraid of such accidents; and at any rate
+judged it unwise to dwell upon alarms or consider small perils in the
+arrangement of life. Life itself, I submitted, was a far too risky
+business as a whole to make each additional particular of danger worth
+regard. "Something," said I, "might burst in your inside any day of the
+week, and there would be an end of you, if you were locked in your room
+with three turns of the key."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Cependant</i>," said he, "<i>coucher dehors</i>!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"God," said I, "is everywhere."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Cependant, coucher dehors!</i>" he repeated, and his voice was eloquent
+of terror.</p>
+
+<p>He was the only person, in all my voyage, who saw anything hardy in so
+simple a proceeding; although many considered it superfluous. Only one,
+on the other hand, professed much delight in the idea; and that was my
+Plymouth Brother, who cried out, when I told him I sometimes preferred
+sleeping under the stars to a close and noisy alehouse, "Now I see that
+you know the Lord!"</p>
+
+<p>The merchant asked me for one of my cards as I was leaving, for he said
+I should be something to talk of in the future, and desired me to make a
+note of his request and reason; a desire with which I have thus
+complied.</p>
+
+<p>A little after two I struck across the Mimente, and took a rugged path
+southward up a hillside covered with loose stones and tufts of heather.
+At the top, as is the habit of the country, the path disappeared; and I
+left my she-ass munching heather, and went forward alone to seek a road.</p>
+
+<p>I was now on the separation of two vast watersheds; behind me all the
+streams were bound for the Garonne and the Western Ocean; before me was
+the basin of the Rhone. Hence, as from the Loz&egrave;re, you can see in clear
+weather the shining of the Gulf of Lyons; and perhaps from here the
+soldiers of Salomon may have watched for the topsails of Sir Cloudesley
+Shovel, and the long-promised aid from England. You may take this ridge
+as lying in the heart of the country of the Camisards; four of the five
+legions camped all round it and almost within view&mdash;Salomon and Joani to
+the north, Castanet and Roland to the south; and when Julien had
+finished his famous work, the devastation of the High Cevennes, which
+lasted all through October and November, 1703, and during which four
+hundred and sixty villages and hamlets were, with fire and pickaxe,
+utterly subverted, a man standing on this eminence would have looked<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>
+forth upon a silent, smokeless, and dispeopled land. Time and man's
+activity have now repaired these ruins; Cassagnas is once more roofed
+and sending up domestic smoke; and in the chestnut gardens, in low and
+leafy corners, many a prosperous farmer returns, when the day's work is
+done, to his children and bright hearth. And still it was perhaps the
+wildest view of all my journey. Peak upon peak, chain upon chain of
+hills ran surging southward, channeled and sculptured by the winter
+streams, feathered from head to foot with chestnuts, and here and there
+breaking out into a coronal of cliffs. The sun, which was still far from
+setting, sent a drift of misty gold across the hill-tops, but the
+valleys were already plunged in a profound and quiet shadow.</p>
+
+<p>A very old shepherd, hobbling on a pair of sticks, and wearing a black
+cap of liberty, as if in honour of his nearness to the grave, directed
+me to the road for St. Germain de Calberte. There was something solemn
+in the isolation of this infirm and ancient creature. Where he dwelt,
+how he got upon this high ridge, or how he proposed to get down again,
+were more than I could fancy. Not far off upon my right was the famous
+Plan de Font Morte, where Poul with his Armenian sabre slashed down the
+Camisards of S&eacute;guier. This, methought, might be some Rip van Winkle of
+the war, who had lost his comrades, fleeing before Poul, and wandered
+ever since upon the mountains. It might be news to him that Cavalier had
+surrendered, or Roland had fallen fighting with his back against an
+olive. And while I was thus working on my fancy, I heard him hailing in
+broken tones, and saw him waving me to come back with one of his two
+sticks. I had already got some way past him; but, leaving Modestine once
+more, retraced my steps.</p>
+
+<p>Alas, it was a very commonplace affair. The old gentleman had forgot to
+ask the pedlar what he sold, and wished to remedy this neglect.</p>
+
+<p>I told him sternly, "Nothing."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Nothing?" cried he.</p>
+
+<p>I repeated "Nothing," and made off.</p>
+
+<p>It's odd to think of, but perhaps I thus became as inexplicable to the
+old man as he had been to me.</p>
+
+<p>The road lay under chestnuts, and though I saw a hamlet or two below me
+in the vale, and many lone houses of the chestnut farmers, it was a very
+solitary march all afternoon; and the evening began early underneath the
+trees. But I heard the voice of a woman singing some sad, old, endless
+ballad not far off. It seemed to be about love and a <i>bel amoureux</i>, her
+handsome sweetheart; and I wished I could have taken up the strain and
+answered her, as I went on upon my invisible woodland way, weaving, like
+Pippa in the poem, my own thoughts with hers. What could I have told
+her? Little enough; and yet all the heart requires. How the world gives
+and takes away, and brings sweethearts near only to separate them again
+into distant and strange lands; but to love is the great amulet which
+makes the world a garden; and "hope, which comes to all," outwears the
+accidents of life, and reaches with tremulous hand beyond the grave and
+death. Easy to say: yea, but also, by God's mercy, both easy and
+grateful to believe!</p>
+
+<p>We struck at last into a wide white high-road carpeted with noiseless
+dust. The night had come; the moon had been shining for a long while
+upon the opposite mountain; when on turning a corner my donkey and I
+issued ourselves into her light. I had emptied out my brandy at Florac,
+for I could bear the stuff no longer, and replaced it with some generous
+and scented Volnay; and now I drank to the moon's sacred majesty upon
+the road. It was but a couple of mouthfuls; yet I became thenceforth
+unconscious of my limbs, and my blood flowed with luxury. Even Modestine
+was inspired by this purified nocturnal sunshine, and bestirred her
+little hoofs as to a livelier measure. The road wound and descended
+swiftly among masses of chestnuts. Hot dust rose from our feet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> and
+flowed away. Our two shadows&mdash;mine deformed with the knapsack, hers
+comically bestridden by the pack&mdash;now lay before us clearly outlined on
+the road, and now, as we turned a corner, went off into the ghostly
+distance, and sailed along the mountain like clouds. From time to time a
+warm wind rustled down the valley, and set all the chestnuts dangling
+their bunches of foliage and fruit; the ear was filled with whispering
+music, and the shadows danced in tune. And next moment the breeze had
+gone by, and in all the valley nothing moved except our travelling feet.
+On the opposite slope, the monstrous ribs and gullies of the mountain
+were faintly designed in the moonshine; and high overhead, in some lone
+house, there burned one lighted window, one square spark of red in the
+huge field of sad nocturnal colouring.</p>
+
+<p>At a certain point, as I went downward, turning many acute angles, the
+moon disappeared behind the hill; and I pursued my way in great
+darkness, until another turning shot me without preparation into St.
+Germain de Calberte. The place was asleep and silent, and buried in
+opaque night. Only from a single open door, some lamplight escaped upon
+the road to show me that I was come among men's habitations. The two
+last gossips of the evening, still talking by a garden wall, directed me
+to the inn. The landlady was getting her chicks to bed; the fire was
+already out, and had, not without grumbling, to be rekindled; half an
+hour later, and I must have gone supperless to roost.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE LAST DAY</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>When I awoke (Thursday, 2nd October), and, hearing a great flourishing
+of cocks and chuckling of contented hens, betook me to the window of the
+clean and comfortable room where I had slept the night, I looked forth
+on a sunshiny morning in a deep vale of chestnut gardens. It was still
+early, and the cockcrows, and the slanting lights, and the long shadows,
+encouraged me to be out and look round me.</p>
+
+<p>St. Germain de Calberte is a great parish nine leagues round about. At
+the period of the wars, and immediately before the devastation, it was
+inhabited by two hundred and seventy-five families, of which only nine
+were Catholic; and it took the <i>cur&eacute;</i> seventeen September days to go
+from house to house on horseback for a census. But the place itself,
+although capital of a canton, is scarce larger than a hamlet. It lies
+terraced across a steep slope in the midst of mighty chestnuts. The
+Protestant chapel stands below upon a shoulder; in the midst of the town
+is the quaint old Catholic church.</p>
+
+<p>It was here that poor Du Chayla, the Christian martyr, kept his library
+and held a court of missionaries; here he had built his tomb, thinking
+to lie among a grateful population whom he had redeemed from error; and
+hither on the morrow of his death they brought the body, pierced with
+two-and-fifty wounds, to be interred. Clad in his priestly robes, he was
+laid out in state in the church. The <i>cur&eacute;</i>, taking his text from Second
+Samuel, twentieth chapter and twelfth verse, "And Amasa wallowed in his
+blood in the highway," preached a rousing sermon, and exhorted his
+brethren to die each at his post, like their unhappy and illustrious
+superior. In the midst of this eloquence there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> came a breeze that
+Spirit S&eacute;guier was near at hand; and behold! all the assembly took to
+their horses' heels, some east, some west, and the <i>cur&eacute;</i> himself as far
+as Alais.</p>
+
+<p>Strange was the position of this little Catholic metropolis, a
+thimbleful of Rome, in such a wild and contrary neighbourhood. On the
+one hand, the legion of Salomon overlooked it from Cassagnas; on the
+other, it was cut off from assistance by the legion of Roland at Mialet.
+The <i>cur&eacute;</i>, Louvrelenil, although he took a panic at the arch-priest's
+funeral, and so hurriedly decamped to Alais, stood well by his isolated
+pulpit, and thence uttered fulminations against the crimes of the
+Protestants. Salomon besieged the village for an hour and a half, but
+was beaten back. The militiamen, on guard before the <i>cur&eacute;'s</i> door,
+could be heard, in the black hours, singing Protestant psalms and
+holding friendly talk with the insurgents. And in the morning, although
+not a shot had been fired, there would not be a round of powder in their
+flasks. Where was it gone? All handed over to the Camisards for a
+consideration. Untrusty guardians for an isolated priest!</p>
+
+<p>That these continual stirs were once busy in St. Germain de Calberte,
+the imagination with difficulty receives; all is now so quiet, the pulse
+of human life now beats so low and still in this hamlet of the
+mountains. Boys followed me a great way off, like a timid sort of
+lion-hunters; and people turned round to have a second look, or came out
+of their houses, as I went by. My passage was the first event, you would
+have fancied, since the Camisards. There was nothing rude or forward in
+this observation; it was but a pleased and wondering scrutiny, like that
+of oxen or the human infant; yet it wearied my spirits, and soon drove
+me from the street.</p>
+
+<p>I took refuge on the terraces, which are here greenly carpeted with
+sward, and tried to imitate with a pencil the inimitable attitudes of
+the chestnuts as they bear up their canopy of leaves. Ever and again a
+little wind went by, and the nuts dropped all around me, with a light
+and dull<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> sound, upon the sward. The noise was as of a thin fall of
+great hailstones; but there went with it a cheerful human sentiment of
+an approaching harvest and farmers rejoicing in their gains. Looking up,
+I could see the brown nut peering through the husk, which was already
+gaping; and between the stems the eye embraced an amphitheatre of hill,
+sunlit and green with leaves.</p>
+
+<p>I have not often enjoyed a place more deeply. I moved in an atmosphere
+of pleasure, and felt light and quiet and content. But perhaps it was
+not the place alone that so disposed my spirit. Perhaps some one was
+thinking of me in another country; or perhaps some thought of my own had
+come and gone unnoticed, and yet done me good. For some thoughts, which
+sure would be the most beautiful, vanish before we can rightly scan
+their features; as though a god, travelling by our green highways,
+should but ope the door, give one smiling look into the house, and go
+again for ever. Was it Apollo, or Mercury, or Love with folded wings?
+Who shall say? But we go the lighter about our business, and feel peace
+and pleasure in our hearts.</p>
+
+<p>I dined with a pair of Catholics. They agreed in the condemnation of a
+young man, a Catholic, who had married a Protestant girl and gone over
+to the religion of his wife. A Protestant born they could understand and
+respect: indeed, they seemed to be of the mind of an old Catholic woman,
+who told me that same day there was no difference between the two sects,
+save that "wrong was more wrong for the Catholic," who had more light
+and guidance; but this of a man's desertion filled them with contempt.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a bad idea for a man to change," said one.</p>
+
+<p>It may have been accidental, but you see how this phrase pursued me; and
+for myself, I believe it is the current philosophy in these parts. I
+have some difficulty in imagining a better. It's not only a great flight
+of confidence for a man to change his creed and go out of his family for
+heaven's sake; but the odds are&mdash;nay, and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> hope is&mdash;that, with all
+this great transition in the eyes of man, he has not changed himself a
+hairbreadth to the eyes of God. Honour to those who do so, for the
+wrench is sore. But it argues something narrow, whether of strength or
+weakness, whether of the prophet or the fool, in those who can take a
+sufficient interest in such infinitesimal and human operations, or who
+can quit a friendship for a doubtful process of the mind. And I think I
+should not leave my old creed for another, changing only words for other
+words; but by some brave reading, embrace it in spirit and truth, and
+find wrong as wrong for me as for the best of other communions.</p>
+
+<p>The phylloxera was in the neighbourhood; and instead of wine we drank at
+dinner a more economical juice of the grape&mdash;La Parisienne, they call
+it. It is made by putting the fruit whole into a cask with water; one by
+one the berries ferment and burst; what is drunk during the day is
+supplied at night in water; so, with ever another pitcher from the well,
+and ever another grape exploding and giving out its strength, one cask
+of Parisienne may last a family till spring. It is, as the reader will
+anticipate, a feeble beverage, but very pleasant to the taste.</p>
+
+<p>What with dinner and coffee, it was long past three before I left St.
+Germain de Calberte. I went down beside the Gardon of Mialet, a great
+glaring watercourse devoid of water, and through St. Etienne de Vall&eacute;e
+Fran&ccedil;aise, or Val Francesque, as they used to call it; and towards
+evening began to ascend the hill of St. Pierre. It was a long and steep
+ascent. Behind me an empty carriage returning to St. Jean du Gard kept
+hard upon my tracks, and near the summit overtook me. The driver, like
+the rest of the world, was sure I was a pedlar; but, unlike others, he
+was sure of what I had to sell. He had noticed the blue wool which hung
+out of my pack at either end; and from this he had decided, beyond my
+power to alter his decision, that I dealt in blue wool collars, such as
+decorate the neck of the French draught-horse.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I had hurried to the topmost powers of Modestine, for I dearly desired
+to see the view upon the other side before the day had faded. But it was
+night when I reached the summit; the moon was riding high and clear; and
+only a few grey streaks of twilight lingered in the west. A yawning
+valley, gulfed in blackness, lay like a hole in created nature at my
+feet; but the outline of the hills was sharp against the sky. There was
+Mount Aigoal, the stronghold of Castanet. And Castanet, not only as an
+active undertaking leader, deserves some mention among Camisards; for
+there is a spray of rose among his laurel; and he showed how, even in a
+public tragedy, love will have its way. In the high tide of war he
+married, in his mountain citadel, a young and pretty lass called
+Mariette. There were great rejoicings; and the bridegroom released
+five-and-twenty prisoners in honour of the glad event. Seven months
+afterwards, Mariette, the Princess of the Cevennes, as they called her
+in derision, fell into the hands of the authorities, where it was like
+to have gone hard with her. But Castanet was a man of execution, and
+loved his wife. He fell on Valleraugue, and got a lady there for a
+hostage; and for the first and last time in that war there was an
+exchange of prisoners. Their daughter, pledge of some starry night upon
+Mount Aigoal, has left descendants to this day.</p>
+
+<p>Modestine and I&mdash;it was our last meal together&mdash;had a snack upon the top
+of St. Pierre, I on a heap of stones, she standing by me in the
+moonlight and decorously eating bread out of my hand. The poor brute
+would eat more heartily in this manner; for she had a sort of affection
+for me, which I was soon to betray.</p>
+
+<p>It was a long descent upon St. Jean du Gard, and we met no one but a
+carter, visible afar off by the glint of the moon on his extinguished
+lantern.</p>
+
+<p>Before ten o'clock we had got in and were at supper; fifteen miles and a
+stiff hill in little beyond six hours!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>FAREWELL, MODESTINE!</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>On examination, on the morning of October 3rd, Modestine was pronounced
+unfit for travel. She would need at least two days' repose, according to
+the ostler; but I was now eager to reach Alais for my letters; and,
+being in a civilized country of stage-coaches, I determined to sell my
+lady friend and be off by the diligence that afternoon. Our yesterday's
+march, with the testimony of the driver who had pursued us up the long
+hill of St. Pierre, spread a favourable notion of my donkey's
+capabilities. Intending purchasers were aware of an unrivaled
+opportunity. Before ten I had an offer of twenty-five francs; and before
+noon, after a desperate engagement, I sold her, saddle and all, for
+five-and-thirty. The pecuniary gain is not obvious, but I had bought
+freedom into the bargain.</p>
+
+<p>St. Jean du Gard is a large place, and largely Protestant. The maire, a
+Protestant, asked me to help him in a small matter which is itself
+characteristic of the country. The young women of the Cevennes profit by
+the common religion and the difference of the language to go largely as
+governesses into England; and here was one, a native of Mialet,
+struggling with English circulars from two different agencies in London.
+I gave what help I could; and volunteered some advice, which struck me
+as being excellent.</p>
+
+<p>One thing more I note. The phylloxera has ravaged the vineyards in this
+neighbourhood; and in the early morning, under some chestnuts by the
+river, I found a party of men working with a cider-press. I could not at
+first make out what they were after, and asked one fellow to explain.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Making cider," he said. "<i>Oui, c'est comme &ccedil;a. Comme dans le nord!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>There was a ring of sarcasm in his voice: the country was going to the
+devil.</p>
+
+<p>It was not until I was fairly seated by the driver, and rattling through
+a rocky valley with dwarf olives, that I became aware of my bereavement.
+I had lost Modestine. Up to that moment I had thought I hated her; but
+now she was gone,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i14">"And O!<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">The difference to me!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>For twelve days we had been fast companions; we had travelled upwards of
+a hundred and twenty miles, crossed several respectable ridges, and
+jogged along with our six legs by many a rocky and many a boggy by-road.
+After the first day, although sometimes I was hurt and distant in
+manner, I still kept my patience; and as for her, poor soul! she had
+come to regard me as a god. She loved to eat out of my hand. She was
+patient, elegant in form, the colour of an ideal mouse, and inimitably
+small. Her faults were those of her race and sex; her virtues were her
+own. Farewell, and if for ever&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Father Adam wept when he sold her to me; after I had sold her in my
+turn, I was tempted to follow his example; and being alone with a
+stage-driver and four or five agreeable young men, I did not hesitate to
+yield to my emotion.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>
+<a name="A_MOUNTAIN_TOWN_IN_FRANCE" id="A_MOUNTAIN_TOWN_IN_FRANCE"></a><h2>A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE</h2>
+
+<h4>A FRAGMENT</h4>
+
+<h5>1879</h5>
+
+    <center><i>Originally intended to serve as the opening chapter of</i></center>
+    <center><i>"Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes"</i></center>
+<br />
+
+<p>Le Monastier is the chief place of a hilly canton in Haute Loire, the
+ancient Velay. As the name betokens, the town is of monastic origin; and
+it still contains a towered bulk of monastery and a church of some
+architectural pretensions, the seat of an archpriest and several vicars.
+It stands on the side of a hill above the river Gazeille, about fifteen
+miles from Le Puy, up a steep road where the wolves sometimes pursue the
+diligence in winter. The road, which is bound for Vivarais, passes
+through the town from end to end in a single narrow street; there you
+may see the fountain where women fill their pitchers; there also some
+old houses with carved doors and pediments and ornamental work in iron.
+For Monastier, like Maybole in Ayrshire, was a sort of country capital,
+where the local aristocracy had their town mansions for the winter; and
+there is a certain baron still alive and, I am told, extremely penitent,
+who found means to ruin himself by high living in this village on the
+hills. He certainly has claims to be considered the most remarkable
+spendthrift on record. How he set about it, in a place where there are
+no luxuries for sale, and where the board at the best inn comes to
+little more than a shilling a day, is a problem for the wise. His son,
+ruined as the family was, went as far as Paris to sow his wild oats; and
+so the cases of father and son mark an epoch in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> history of
+centralization in France. Not until the latter had got into the train
+was the work of Richelieu complete.</p>
+
+<p>It is a people of lace-makers. The women sit in the streets by groups of
+five or six; and the noise of the bobbins is audible from one group to
+another. Now and then you will hear one woman clattering off prayers for
+the edification of the others at their work. They wear gaudy shawls,
+white caps with a gay ribbon about the head, and sometimes a black felt
+brigand hat above the cap; and so they give the street colour and
+brightness and a foreign air. A while ago, when England largely supplied
+herself from this district with the lace called <i>torchon</i>, it was not
+unusual to earn five francs a day; and five francs in Monastier is worth
+a pound in London. Now, from a change in the market, it takes a clever
+and industrious workwoman to earn from three to four in the week, or
+less than an eighth of what she made easily a few years ago. The tide of
+prosperity came and went, as with our northern pitmen, and left nobody
+the richer. The women bravely squandered their gains, kept the men in
+idleness, and gave themselves up, as I was told, to sweethearting and a
+merry life. From week's end to week's end it was one continuous gala in
+Monastier; people spent the day in the wine-shops, and the drum or the
+bagpipes led on the <i>bourr&eacute;es</i> up to ten at night. Now these dancing
+days are over. "<i>Il n'y a plus de jeunesse,</i>" said Victor the gar&ccedil;on. I
+hear of no great advance in what are thought the essentials of morality;
+but the <i>bourr&eacute;e</i>, with its rambling, sweet, interminable music, and
+alert and rustic figures, has fallen into disuse, and is mostly
+remembered as a custom of the past. Only on the occasion of the fair
+shall you hear a drum discreetly rattling in a wine-shop or perhaps one
+of the company singing the measure while the others dance. I am sorry at
+the change, and marvel once more at the complicated scheme of things
+upon this earth, and how a turn of fashion in England can silence so
+much mountain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> merriment in France. The lace-makers themselves have not
+entirely forgiven our countrywomen; and I think they take a special
+pleasure in the legend of the northern quarter of the town, called
+L'Anglade, because there the English free-lances were arrested and
+driven back by the potency of a little Virgin Mary on the wall.</p>
+
+<p>From time to time a market is held, and the town has a season of
+revival; cattle and pigs are stabled in the streets; and pickpockets
+have been known to come all the way from Lyons for the occasion. Every
+Sunday the country folk throng in with daylight to buy apples, to attend
+mass, and to visit one of the wine-shops, of which there are no fewer
+than fifty in this little town. Sunday wear for the men is a green
+tail-coat of some coarse sort of drugget, and usually a complete suit to
+match. I have never set eyes on such degrading raiment. Here it clings,
+there bulges; and the human body, with its agreeable and lively lines,
+is turned into a mockery and laughing-stock. Another piece of Sunday
+business with the peasants is to take their ailments to the chemist for
+advice. It is as much a matter for Sunday as church-going. I have seen a
+woman who had been unable to speak since the Monday before, wheezing,
+catching her breath, endlessly and painfully coughing; and yet she had
+waited upwards of a hundred hours before coming to seek help, and had
+the week been twice as long, she would have waited still. There was a
+canonical day for consultation; such was the ancestral habit, to which a
+respectable lady must study to conform.</p>
+
+<p>Two conveyances go daily to Le Puy, but they rival each other in polite
+concessions rather than in speed. Each will wait an hour or two hours
+cheerfully while an old lady does her marketing or a gentleman finishes
+the papers in a caf&eacute;. The <i>Courrier</i>(such is the name of one) should
+leave Le Puy by two in the afternoon on the return voyage, and arrive at
+Monastier in good time for a six o'clock dinner. But the driver dares
+not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> disoblige his customers. He will postpone his departure again and
+again, hour after hour; and I have known the sun to go down on his
+delay. These purely personal favours, this consideration of men's
+fancies, rather than the hands of a mechanical clock, as marking the
+advance of the abstraction, time, makes a more humorous business of
+stage-coaching than we are used to see it.</p>
+
+<p>As far as the eye can reach, one swelling line of hill-top rises and
+falls behind another; and if you climb an eminence, it is only to see
+new and farther ranges behind these. Many little rivers run from all
+sides in cliffy valleys; and one of them, a few miles from Monastier,
+bears the great name of Loire. The mean level of the country is a little
+more than three thousand feet above the sea, which makes the atmosphere
+proportionally brisk and wholesome. There is little timber except pines,
+and the greater part of the country lies in moorland pasture. The
+country is wild and tumbled rather than commanding; an upland rather
+than a mountain district; and the most striking as well as the most
+agreeable scenery lies low beside the rivers. There, indeed, you will
+find many corners that take the fancy; such as made the English noble
+choose his grave by a Swiss streamlet, where Nature is at her freshest,
+and looks as young as on the seventh morning. Such a place is the course
+of the Gazeille, where it waters the common of Monastier and thence
+downward till it joins the Loire; a place to hear birds singing; a place
+for lovers to frequent. The name of the river was perhaps suggested by
+the sound of its passage over the stones; for it is a great warbler, and
+at night, after I was in bed in Monastier, I could hear it go singing
+down the valley till I fell asleep.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole, this is a Scottish landscape, although not so noble as the
+best in Scotland; and by an odd coincidence the population is, in its
+way, as Scottish as the country. They have abrupt, uncouth, Fifeshire
+manners, and accost you, as if you were trespassing,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> with an "<i>O&ugrave;'st-ce
+que vous allez?</i>" only translatable into the Lowland "Whau'r ye gaun?"
+They keep the Scottish Sabbath. There is no labour done on that day but
+to drive in and out the various pigs and sheep and cattle that make so
+pleasant a tinkling in the meadows. The lace-makers have disappeared
+from the street. Not to attend mass would involve social degradation;
+and you may find people reading Sunday books, in particular a sort of
+Catholic <i>Monthly Visitor</i> on the doings of Our Lady of Lourdes. I
+remember one Sunday, when I was walking in the country, that I fell on a
+hamlet and found all the inhabitants, from the patriarch to the baby,
+gathered in the shadow of a gable at prayer. One strapping lass stood
+with her back to the wall and did the solo part, the rest chiming in
+devoutly. Not far off, a lad lay flat on his face asleep among some
+straw, to represent the worldly element.</p>
+
+<p>Again, this people is eager to proselytize; and the postmaster's
+daughter used to argue with me by the half-hour about my heresy, until
+she grew quite flushed. I have heard the reverse process going on
+between a Scots-woman and a French girl; and the arguments in the two
+cases were identical. Each apostle based her claim on the superior
+virtue and attainments of her clergy, and clinched the business with a
+threat of hell-fire. "<i>Pas bong pr&ecirc;tres ici</i>," said the Presbyterian,
+"<i>bong pr&ecirc;tres en &Eacute;cosse.</i>" And the postmaster's daughter, taking up the
+same weapon, plied me, so to speak, with the butt of it instead of the
+bayonet. We are a hopeful race, it seems, and easily persuaded for our
+good. One cheerful circumstance I note in these guerrilla missions, that
+each side relies on hell, and Protestant and Catholic alike address
+themselves to a supposed misgiving in their adversary's heart. And I
+call it cheerful, for faith is a more supporting quality than
+imagination.</p>
+
+<p>Here, as in Scotland, many peasant families boast a son in holy orders.
+And here also, the young men have a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> tendency to emigrate. It is
+certainly not poverty that drives them to the great cities or across the
+seas, for many peasant families, I was told, have a fortune of at least
+40,000 francs. The lads go forth pricked with the spirit of adventure
+and the desire to rise in life, and leave their homespun elders
+grumbling and wondering over the event. Once, at a village called
+Laussonne, I met one of these disappointed parents: a drake who had
+fathered a wild swan and seen it take wing and disappear. The wild swan
+in question was now an apothecary in Brazil. He had flown by way of
+Bordeaux, and first landed in America, bare-headed and barefoot, and
+with a single halfpenny in his pocket. And now he was an apothecary!
+Such a wonderful thing is an adventurous life! I thought he might as
+well have stayed at home; but you never can tell wherein a man's life
+consists, nor in what he sets his pleasure: one to drink, another to
+marry, a third to write scurrilous articles and be repeatedly caned in
+public, and now this fourth, perhaps, to be an apothecary in Brazil. As
+for his old father, he could conceive no reason for the lad's behaviour.
+"I had always bread for him," he said; "he ran away to annoy me. He
+loved to annoy me. He had no gratitude." But at heart he was swelling
+with pride over his travelled offspring, and he produced a letter out of
+his pocket, where, as he said, it was rotting, a mere lump of paper
+rags, and waved it gloriously in the air. "This comes from America," he
+cried, "six thousand leagues away!" And the wine-shop audience looked
+upon it with a certain thrill.</p>
+
+<p>I soon became a popular figure, and was known for miles in the country.
+<i>O&ugrave;'st-ce que vous allez?</i> was changed for me into <i>Quoi, vous rentrez
+au Monastier ce soir?</i> and in the town itself every urchin seemed to
+know my name, although no living creature could pronounce it. There was
+one particular group of lace-makers who brought out a chair for me
+whenever I went by, and detained me from my walk to gossip. They were
+filled with curiosity about<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> England, its language, its religion, the
+dress of the women, and were never weary of seeing the Queen's head on
+English postage-stamps, or seeking for French words in English Journals.
+The language, in particular, filled them with surprise.</p>
+
+<p>"Do they speak <i>patois</i> in England?" I was once asked; and when I told
+them not, "Ah, then, French?" said they.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no," I said, "not French."</p>
+
+<p>"Then," they concluded, "they speak <i>patois.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>You must obviously either speak French or <i>patois.</i> Talk of the force of
+logic&mdash;here it was in all its weakness. I gave up the point, but
+proceeding to give illustrations of ray native jargon, I was met with a
+new mortification. Of all <i>patois</i> they declared that mine was the most
+preposterous and the most jocose in sound. At each new word there was a
+new explosion of laughter, and some of the younger ones were glad to
+rise from their chairs and stamp about the street in ecstasy; and I
+looked on upon their mirth in a faint and slightly disagreeable
+bewilderment. "Bread," which sounds a commonplace, plain-sailing
+monosyllable in England, was the word that most delighted these good
+ladies of Monastier; it seemed to them frolicsome and racy, like a page
+of Pickwick; and they all got it carefully by heart, as a stand-by, I
+presume, for winter evenings. I have tried it since then with every sort
+of accent and inflection, but I seem to lack the sense of humour.</p>
+
+<p>They were of all ages: children at their first web of lace, a stripling
+girl with a bashful but encouraging play of eyes, solid married women,
+and grandmothers, some on the top of their age and some falling towards
+decrepitude. One and all were pleasant and natural, ready to laugh and
+ready with a certain quiet solemnity when that was called for by the
+subject of our talk. Life, since the fall in wages, had begun to appear
+to them with a more serious air. The stripling girl would sometimes
+laugh at me in a provo<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>cative and not unadmiring manner, if I judge
+aright; and one of the grandmothers, who was my great friend of the
+party, gave me many a sharp word of judgment on my sketches, my heresy,
+or even my arguments, and gave them with a wry mouth and a humorous
+twinkle in her eye that were eminently Scottish. But the rest used me
+with a certain reverence, as something come from afar and not entirely
+human. Nothing would put them at their ease but the irresistible gaiety
+of my native tongue. Between the old lady and myself I think there was a
+real attachment. She was never weary of sitting to me for her portrait,
+in her best cap and brigand hat, and with all her wrinkles tidily
+composed, and though she never failed to repudiate the result, she would
+always insist upon another trial. It was as good as a play to see her
+sitting in judgment over the last. "No, no," she would say, "that is not
+it. I am old, to be sure, but I am better-looking than that. We must try
+again." When I was about to leave she bade me good-bye for this life in
+a somewhat touching manner. We should not meet again, she said; it was a
+long farewell, and she was sorry. But life is so full of crooks, old
+lady, that who knows? I have said good-bye to people for greater
+distances and times, and, please God, I mean to see them yet again.</p>
+
+<p>One thing was notable about these women, from the youngest to the
+oldest, and with hardly an exception. In spite of their piety, they
+could twang off an oath with Sir Toby Belch in person. There was nothing
+so high or so low, in heaven or earth or in the human body, but a woman
+of this neighbourhood would whip out the name of it, fair and square, by
+way of conversational adornment. My landlady, who was pretty and young,
+dressed like a lady and avoided <i>patois</i> like a weakness, commonly
+addressed her child in the language of a drunken bully. And of all the
+swearers that I ever heard, commend me to an old lady in Gondet, a
+village of the Loire. I was making a sketch, and her curse was not yet
+ended when I had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> finished it and took my departure. It is true she had
+a right to be angry; for here was her son, a hulking fellow, visibly the
+worse for drink before the day was well begun. But it was strange to
+hear her unwearying flow of oaths and obscenities, endless like a river,
+and now and then rising to a passionate shrillness, in the clear and
+silent air of the morning. In city slums, the thing might have passed
+unnoticed; but in a country valley, and from a plain and honest
+countrywoman, this beastliness of speech surprised the ear.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Conductor</i>, as he is called, <i>of Roads and Bridges</i> was my
+principal companion. He was generally intelligent, and could have spoken
+more or less falsetto on any of the trite topics; but it was his
+specialty to have a generous taste in eating. This was what was most
+indigenous in the man; it was here he was an artist; and I found in his
+company what I had long suspected, that enthusiasm and special knowledge
+are the great social qualities, and what they are about, whether white
+sauce or Shakespeare's plays, an altogether secondary question.</p>
+
+<p>I used to accompany the <i>Conductor</i> on his professional rounds, and grew
+to believe myself an expert in the business. I thought I could make an
+entry in a stone-breaker's time-book, or order manure off the wayside
+with any living engineer in France. Gondet was one of the places we
+visited together; and Laussonne, where I met the apothecary's father,
+was another. There, at Laussonne, George Sand spent a day while she was
+gathering materials for the "Marquis de Villemer"; and I have spoken
+with an old man, who was then a child running about the inn kitchen, and
+who still remembers her with a sort of reverence. It appears that he
+spoke French imperfectly; for this reason George Sand chose him for
+companion, and whenever he let slip a broad and picturesque phrase in
+<i>patois</i>, she would make him repeat it again and again till it was
+graven in her memory. The word for a frog particularly pleased her
+fancy; and it would be curious to know if she afterwards<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> employed it in
+her works. The peasants, who knew nothing of letters and had never so
+much as heard of local colour, could not explain her chattering with
+this backward child; and to them she seemed a very homely lady and far
+from beautiful: the most famous man-killer of the age appealed so little
+to Velaisian swine-herds!</p>
+
+<p>On my first engineering excursion, which lay up by Crouzials towards
+Mount M&eacute;zenc and the borders of Ard&egrave;che, I began an improving
+acquaintance with the foreman road-mender. He was in great glee at
+having me with him, passed me off among his subalterns as the
+supervising engineer, and insisted on what he called "the gallantry " of
+paying for my breakfast in a roadside wine-shop. On the whole, he was a
+man of great weather-wisdom, some spirits, and a social temper. But I am
+afraid he was superstitious. When he was nine years old, he had seen one
+night a company of <i>bourgeois et dames qui faisaient la man&egrave;ge avec des
+chaises</i>, and concluded that he was in the presence of a witches'
+Sabbath. I suppose, but venture with timidity on the suggestion, that
+this may have been a romantic and nocturnal picnic party. Again, coming
+from Pradelles with his brother, they saw a great empty cart drawn by
+six enormous horses before them on the road. The driver cried aloud and
+filled the mountains with the cracking of his whip. He never seemed to
+go faster than a walk, yet it was impossible to overtake him; and at
+length, at the corner of a hill, the whole equipage disappeared bodily
+into the night. At the time, people said it was the devil <i>qui s'amusait
+&agrave; faire &ccedil;a.</i></p>
+
+<p>I suggested there was nothing more likely, as he must have some
+amusement.</p>
+
+<p>The foreman said it was odd, but there was less of that sort of thing
+than formerly. "<i>C'est difficile</i>," he added, "<i>&agrave; expliquer.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>When we were well up on the moors and the <i>Conductor</i> was trying some
+road-metal with the gauge&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Hark!" said the foreman, "do you hear nothing?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We listened, and the wind, which was blowing chilly out of the east,
+brought a faint, tangled jangling to our ears.</p>
+
+<p>"It is the flocks of Vivarais," said he.</p>
+
+<p>For every summer, the flocks out of all Ard&egrave;che are brought up to
+pasture on these grassy plateaux.</p>
+
+<p>Here and there a little private flock was being tended by a girl, one
+spinning with a distaff, another seated on a wall and intently making
+lace. This last, when we addressed her, leaped up in a panic and put out
+her arms, like a person swimming, to keep us at a distance, and it was
+some seconds before we could persuade her of the honesty of our
+intentions.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Conductor</i> told me of another herdswoman from whom he had once
+asked his road while he was yet new to the country, and who fled from
+him, driving her beasts before her, until he had given up the
+information in despair. A tale of old lawlessness may yet be read in
+these uncouth timidities.</p>
+
+<p>The winter in these uplands is a dangerous and melancholy time. Houses
+are snowed up, and wayfarers lost in a flurry within hail of their own
+fireside. No man ventures abroad without meat and a bottle of wine,
+which he replenishes at every wine-shop; and even thus equipped he takes
+the road with terror. All day the family sits about the fire in a foul
+and airless hovel, and equally without work or diversion. The father may
+carve a rude piece of furniture, but that is all that will be done until
+the spring sets in again, and along with it the labours of the field. It
+is not for nothing that you find a clock in the meanest of these
+mountain habitations. A clock and an almanack, you would fancy, were
+indispensable in such a life....</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="EDINBURGH" id="EDINBURGH"></a>EDINBURGH</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span>
+<h3>PICTURESQUE NOTES</h3>
+<h3>EDINBURGH</h3><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>
+
+<hr style="width: 35%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h4>INTRODUCTORY</h4>
+
+
+<p>The ancient and famous metropolis of the North sits overlooking a windy
+estuary from the slope and summit of three hills. No situation could be
+more commanding for the head city of a kingdom; none better chosen for
+noble prospects. From her tall precipice and terraced gardens she looks
+far and wide on the sea and broad champaigns. To the east you may catch
+at sunset the spark of the May lighthouse, where the Firth expands into
+the German Ocean; and away to the west, over all the carse of Stirling,
+you can see the first snows upon Ben Ledi.</p>
+
+<p>But Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest
+climates under heaven. She is liable to be beaten upon by all the winds
+that blow, to be drenched with rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs out
+of the east, and powdered with the snow as it comes flying southward
+from the Highland hills. The weather is raw and boisterous in winter,
+shifty and ungenial in summer, and a downright meteorological purgatory
+in the spring. The delicate die early, and I, as a survivor, among bleak
+winds and plumping rain, have been sometimes tempted to envy them their
+fate. For all who love shelter and the blessings of the sun, who hate
+dark weather and perpetual tilting against squalls, there could scarcely
+be found a more unhomely and harassing place of residence. Many such
+aspire angrily after that Somewhere else of the imagination, where all
+troubles are supposed to end. They lean over the great<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> bridge which
+joins the New Town with the Old&mdash;that windiest spot, or high altar, in
+this northern temple of the winds&mdash;and watch the trains smoking out from
+under them and vanishing into the tunnel on a voyage to brighter skies.
+Happy the passengers who shake off the dust of Edinburgh, and have heard
+for the last time the cry of the east wind among her chimney-tops! And
+yet the place establishes an interest in people's hearts; go where they
+will, they find no city of the same distinction; go where they will,
+they take a pride in their old home.</p>
+
+<p>Venice, it has been said, differs from all other cities in the sentiment
+which she inspires. The rest may have admirers; she only, a famous fair
+one, counts lovers in her train. And indeed, even by her kindest
+friends, Edinburgh is not considered in a similar sense. These like her
+for many reasons, not any one of which is satisfactory in itself. They
+like her whimsically, if you will, and somewhat as a virtuoso dotes upon
+his cabinet. Her attraction is romantic in the narrowest meaning of the
+term. Beautiful as she is, she is not so much beautiful as interesting.
+She is pre-eminently Gothic, and all the more so since she has set
+herself off with some Greek airs, and erected classic temples on her
+crags. In a word, and above all, she is a curiosity. The Palace of
+Holyrood has been left aside in the growth of Edinburgh, and stands grey
+and silent in a workman's quarter, and among breweries and gas works. It
+is a house of many memories. Great people of yore, kings and queens,
+buffoons, and grave ambassadors, played their stately farce for
+centuries in Holyrood. Wars have been plotted, dancing has lasted deep
+into the night, murder has been done in its chambers. There Prince
+Charlie held his phantom lev&eacute;es, and in a very gallant manner
+represented a fallen dynasty for some hours. Now, all these things of
+clay are mingled with the dust, the king's crown itself is shown for
+sixpence to the vulgar; but the stone palace has outlived these changes.
+For fifty weeks together, it is no more than a show for tourists<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> and a
+museum of old furniture; but on the fifty-first, behold the palace
+reawakened and mimicking its past. The Lord Commissioner, a kind of
+stage sovereign, sits among stage courtiers; a coach and six and
+clattering escort come and go before the gate; at night, the windows are
+lighted up, and its near neighbours, the workmen, may dance in their own
+houses to the palace music. And in this the palace is typical. There is
+a spark among the embers; from time to time the old volcano smokes.
+Edinburgh has but partly abdicated, and still wears, in parody, her
+metropolitan trappings. Half a capital and half a country town, the
+whole city leads a double existence; it has long trances of the one and
+flashes of the other; like the king of the Black Isles, it is half alive
+and half a monumental marble. There are armed men and cannon in the
+citadel overhead; you may see the troops Marshalled on the high parade;
+and at night after the early winter evenfall, and in the morning before
+the laggard winter dawn, the wind carries abroad over Edinburgh the
+sound of drums and bugles. Grave judges sit bewigged in what was once
+the scene of imperial deliberations. Close by in the High Street perhaps
+the trumpets may sound about the stroke of noon; and you see a troop of
+citizens in tawdry masquerade; tabard above, heather-mixture trouser
+below, and the men themselves trudging in the mud among unsympathetic
+bystanders. The grooms of a well-appointed circus tread the streets with
+a better presence. And yet these are the Heralds and Pursuivants of
+Scotland, who are about to proclaim a new law of the United Kingdom
+before two score boys, and thieves, and hackney-coachmen. Meanwhile
+every hour the bell of the University rings out over the hum of the
+streets, and every hour a double tide of students, coming and going,
+fills the deep archways. And lastly, one night in the spring-time&mdash;or
+say one morning rather, at the peep of day&mdash;late folk may hear the
+voices of many men singing a psalm in unison from a church on one side
+of the old High Street, and a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> little after, or perhaps a little before,
+the sound of many men singing a psalm in unison from another church on
+the opposite side of the way. There will be something in the words about
+the dew of Hermon, and how goodly it is to see brethren dwelling
+together in unity. And the late folk will tell themselves that all this
+singing denotes the conclusion of two yearly ecclesiastical
+parliaments&mdash;the parliaments of Churches which are brothers in many
+admirable virtues, but not specially like brothers in this particular of
+a tolerant and peaceful life.</p>
+
+<p>Again, meditative people will find a charm in a certain consonancy
+between the aspect of the city and its odd and stirring history. Few
+places, if any, offer a more barbaric display of contrasts to the eye.
+In the very midst stands one of the most satisfactory crags in nature&mdash;a
+Bass Rock upon dry land, rooted in a garden, shaken by passing trains,
+carrying a crown of battlements and turrets, and describing its warlike
+shadow over the liveliest and brightest thoroughfare of the new town.
+From their smoky beehives, ten stories high, the unwashed look down upon
+the open squares and gardens of the wealthy; and gay people sunning
+themselves along Princes Street, with its mile of commercial palaces all
+beflagged upon some great occasion, see, across a gardened valley set
+with statues, where the washings of the old town flutter in the breeze
+at its high windows. And then, upon all sides, what a clashing of
+architecture! In this one valley, where the life of the town goes most
+busily forward, there may be seen, shown one above and behind another by
+the accidents of the ground, buildings in almost every style upon the
+globe. Egyptian and Greek temples, Venetian palaces and Gothic spires,
+are huddled one over another in a most admired disorder; while, above
+all, the brute mass of the Castle and the summit of Arthur's Seat look
+down upon these imitations with a becoming dignity, as the works of
+Nature may look down upon the monuments of Art. But Nature is a more
+indiscriminate patroness than we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> imagine, and in no way frightened of a
+strong effect. The birds roost as willingly among the Corinthian
+capitals as in the crannies of the crag; the same atmosphere and
+daylight close the eternal rock and yesterday's imitation portico; and
+as the soft northern sunshine throws out everything into a glorified
+distinctness&mdash;or easterly mists, coming up with the blue evening, fuse
+all these incongruous features into one, and the lamps begin to glitter
+along the street, and faint lights to burn in the high windows across
+the valley&mdash;the feeling grows upon you that this also is a piece of
+nature in the most intimate sense; that this profusion of
+eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock, is not a
+drop-scene in a theatre, but a city in the world of every-day reality,
+connected by railway and telegraph-wire with all the capitals of Europe,
+and inhabited by citizens of the familiar type, who keep ledgers, and
+attend church, and have sold their immortal portion to a daily paper. By
+all the canons of romance, the place demands to be half deserted and
+leaning towards decay; birds we might admit in profusion, the play of
+the sun and winds, and a few gypsies encamped in the chief thoroughfare;
+but these citizens, with their cabs and tramways, their trains and
+posters, are altogether out of key. Chartered tourists, they make free
+with historic localities, and rear their young among the most
+picturesque sites with a grand human indifference. To see them thronging
+by, in their neat clothes and conscious moral rectitude, and with a
+little air of possession that verges on the absurd, is not the least
+striking feature of the place.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>And the story of the town is as eccentric as its appearance. For
+centuries it was a capital thatched with heather, and more than once, in
+the evil days of English invasion, it has gone up in flame to heaven, a
+beacon to ships at sea. It was the jousting-ground of jealous nobles,
+not only on Greenside or by the King's Stables, where set tournaments
+were fought to the sound of trumpets and under the authority of the
+royal presence, but in every alley where there was room to cross swords,
+and in the main street, where popular tumult under the Blue Blanket
+alternated with the brawls of outlandish clansmen and retainers. Down in
+the Palace John Knox reproved his queen in the accents of modern
+democracy. In the town, in one of those little shops plastered like so
+many swallows' nests among the buttresses of the old Cathedral, that
+familiar autocrat, James VI., would gladly share a bottle of wine with
+George Heriot the goldsmith. Up on the Pentland Hills, that so quietly
+look down on the Castle with the city lying in waves around it, those
+mad and dismal fanatics, the Sweet Singers, haggard from long exposure
+on the moors, sat day and night with "tearful psalms" to see Edinburgh
+consumed with fire from heaven, like another Sodom or Gomorrah. There,
+in the Grassmarket, stiff-necked, covenanting heroes offered up the
+often unnecessary, but not less honourable, sacrifice of their lives,
+and bade eloquent farewell to sun, moon, and stars, and earthly
+friendships, or died silent to the roll of drums. Down by yon outlet
+rode Grahame of Claverhouse and his thirty dragoons, with the town
+beating to arms behind their horses' tails&mdash;a sorry handful thus riding
+for their lives, but with a man at the head who was to return in a
+different temper, make a dash<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> that staggered Scotland to the heart, and
+die happily in the thick of fight. There Aikenhead was hanged for a
+piece of boyish incredulity; there, a few years afterwards, David Hume
+ruined Philosophy and Faith, an undisturbed and well-reputed citizen;
+and thither, in yet a few years more, Burns came from the plough-tail,
+as to an academy of gilt unbelief and artificial letters. There, when
+the great exodus was made across the valley, and the new town began to
+spread abroad its draughty parallelograms and rear its long frontage on
+the opposing hill, there was such a flitting, such a change of domicile
+and dweller, as was never excelled in the history of cities: the cobbler
+succeeded the earl; the beggar ensconced himself by the judge's chimney;
+what had been a palace was used as a pauper refuge; and great mansions
+were so parceled out among the least and lowest in society, that the
+hearth-stone of the old proprietor was thought large enough to be
+partitioned off into a bedroom by the new.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> These sentences have, I hear, given offence in my native
+town; and a proportionable pleasure to our rivals of Glasgow. I confess
+the news caused me both pain and merriment. May I remark, as a balm for
+wounded fellow-townsmen, that there is nothing deadly in my accusations?
+Small blame to them if they keep ledgers: 'tis an excellent business
+habit. Church-going is not, that ever I heard, a subject of reproach;
+decency of linen is a mark of prosperous affairs, and conscious moral
+rectitude one of the tokens of good living. It is not their fault if the
+city calls for something more specious by the way of inhabitants. A man
+in a frock-coat looks out of place upon an Alp or Pyramid, although he
+has the virtues of a Peabody and the talents of a Bentham. And let them
+console themselves&mdash;they do as well as anybody else; the population of
+(let us say) Chicago would cut quite as rueful a figure on the same
+romantic stage. To the Glasgow people I would say only one word, but
+that is of gold: <i>I have not yet written a book about Glasgow.</i></p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>
+
+<h4>OLD TOWN: THE LANDS</h4>
+
+
+<p>The Old Town, it is pretended, is the chief characteristic, and, from a
+picturesque point of view, the liver-wing of Edinburgh. It is one of the
+most common forms of depreciation to throw cold water on the whole by
+adroit over-commendation of a part, since everything worth judging,
+whether it be a man, a work of art, or only a fine city, must be judged
+upon its merits as a whole. The Old Town depends for much of its effect
+on the new quarters that lie around it, on the sufficiency of its
+situation, and on the hills that back it up. If you were to set it
+somewhere else by itself, it would look remarkably like Stirling in a
+bolder and loftier edition. The point is to see this embellished
+Stirling planted in the midst of a large, active, and fantastic modern
+city; for there the two react in a picturesque sense, and the one is
+the making of the other.</p>
+
+<p>The Old Town occupies a sloping ridge or tail of diluvial matter,
+protected, in some subsidence of the waters, by the Castle cliffs which
+fortify it to the west. On the one side of it and the other the new
+towns of the south and of the north occupy their lower, broader, and
+more gentle hill-tops. Thus, the quarter of the Castle overtops the
+whole city and keeps an open view to sea and land. It dominates for
+miles on every side; and people on the decks of ships, or ploughing in
+quiet country places over in Fife, can see the banner on the Castle
+battlements, and the smoke of the Old Town blowing abroad over the
+subjacent country. A city that is set upon a hill. It was, I suppose,
+from this distant aspect that she got her nickname of <i>Auld Reekie.</i>
+Perhaps it was given her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> by people who had never crossed her doors: day
+after day, from their various rustic Pisgahs, they had seen the pile of
+building on the hill-top, and the long plume of smoke over the plain; so
+it appeared to them; so it had appeared to their fathers tilling the
+same field; and as that was all they knew of the place, it could be all
+expressed in these two words.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, even on a nearer view, the Old Town is properly smoked; and
+though it is well washed with rain all the year round, it has a grim and
+sooty aspect among its younger suburbs. It grew, under the law that
+regulates the growth of walled cities in precarious situations:, not in
+extent, but in height and density. Public buildings were forced,
+wherever there was room for them, into the midst of thoroughfares;
+thoroughfares were diminished into lanes; houses sprang up story after
+story, neighbour mounting upon neighbour's shoulder, as in some Black
+Hole of Calcutta, until the population slept fourteen or fifteen deep in
+a vertical direction. The tallest of these lands, as they are locally
+termed, have long since been burnt out; but to this day it is not
+uncommon to see eight or ten windows at a flight; and the cliff of
+building which hangs imminent over Waverley Bridge would still put many
+natural precipices to shame. The cellars are already high above the
+gazer's head, planted on the steep hillside; as for the garret, all the
+furniture may be in the pawnshop, but it commands a famous prospect to
+the Highland hills. The poor man may roost up there in the centre of
+Edinburgh, and yet have a peep of the green country from his window; he
+shall see the quarters of the well-to-do fathoms underneath, with their
+broad squares and gardens; he shall have nothing overhead but a few
+spires, the stone top-gallants of the city; and perhaps the wind may
+reach him with a rustic pureness, and bring a smack of the sea, or of
+flowering lilacs in the spring.</p>
+
+<p>It is almost the correct literary sentiment to deplore the revolutionary
+improvements of Mr. Chambers and his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> following. It is easy to be a
+conservator of the discomforts of others; indeed, it is only our good
+qualities we find it irksome to,conserve. Assuredly, in driving streets
+through the black labyrinth, a few curious old corners have been swept
+away, and some associations turned out of house and home. But what
+slices of sunlight, what breaths of clean air, have been let in! And
+what a picturesque world remains untouched! You go under dark arches,
+and down dark stairs and alleys. The way is so narrow that you can lay a
+hand on either wall; so steep that, in greasy winter weather, the
+pavement is almost as treacherous as ice. Washing dangles above washing
+from the windows; the houses bulge outwards upon flimsy brackets; you
+see a bit of sculpture in a dark corner; at the top of all, a gable and
+a few crowsteps are printed on the sky. Here, you come into a court
+where the children are at play and the grown people sit upon their
+doorsteps, and perhaps a church spire shows itself above the roofs.
+Here, in the narrowest of the entry, you find a great old mansion still
+erect, with some insignia of its former state&mdash;some scutcheon, some holy
+or courageous motto, on the lintel. The local antiquary points out where
+famous and well-born people had their lodging; and as you look up, out
+pops the head of a slatternly woman from the countess's window. The
+Bedouins camp within Pharaoh's palace walls, and the old war-ship is
+given over to the rats. We are already a far way from the days when
+powdered heads were plentiful in these alleys, with jolly, port-wine
+faces underneath. Even in the chief thoroughfares Irish washings flutter
+at the windows, and the pavements are encumbered with loiterers.</p>
+
+<p>These loiterers are a true character of the scene. Some shrewd Scotch
+workmen may have paused on their way to a job, debating Church affairs
+and politics with their tools upon their arm. But the most part are of a
+different order&mdash;skulking jail-birds; unkempt, barefoot children;
+big-mouthed, robust women, in a sort of uniform of striped<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> flannel
+petticoat and short tartan shawl: among these, a few supervising
+constables and a dismal sprinkling of mutineers and broken men from
+higher ranks in society, with some mark of better days upon them, like a
+brand. In a place no larger than Edinburgh, and where the traffic is
+mostly centred in five or six chief streets, the same face comes often
+under the notice of an idle stroller. In fact, from this point of view,
+Edinburgh is not so much a small city as the largest of small towns. It
+is scarce possible to avoid observing your neighbours; and I never yet
+heard of any one who tried. It has been my fortune, in this anonymous
+accidental way, to watch more than one of these downward travellers for
+some stages on the road to ruin. One man must have been upwards of sixty
+before I first observed him, and he made then a decent, personable
+figure in broadcloth of the best. For three years he kept
+falling&mdash;grease coming and buttons going from the square-skirted coat,
+the face puffing and pimpling, the shoulders growing bowed, the hair
+falling scant and grey upon his head; and the last that ever I saw of
+him, he was standing at the mouth of an entry with several men in
+moleskin, three parts drunk, and his old black raiment daubed with mud.
+I fancy that I still can hear him laugh. There was something
+heart-breaking in this gradual declension at so advanced an age; you
+would have thought a man of sixty out of the reach of these calamities;
+you would have thought that he was niched by that time into a safe place
+in life, whence he could pass quietly and honourably into the grave.</p>
+
+<p>One of the earliest marks of these <i>d&eacute;gringolades</i> is, that the victim
+begins to disappear from the New Town thoroughfares, and takes to the
+High Street, like a wounded animal to the woods. And such an one is the
+type of the quarter. It also has fallen socially. A scutcheon over the
+door somewhat jars in sentiment where there is a washing at every
+window. The old man, when I saw him last, wore the coat in which he had
+played the gentleman<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> three years before; and that was just what gave
+him so pre-eminent an air of wretchedness.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that the over-population was at least as dense in the epoch
+of lords and ladies, and that nowadays some customs which made
+Edinburgh notorious of yore have been fortunately pretermitted. But an
+aggregation of comfort is not distasteful like an aggregation of the
+reverse. Nobody cares how many lords and ladies, and divines and
+lawyers, may have been crowded into these houses in the past&mdash;perhaps
+the more the merrier. The glasses clink around the china punch-bowl,
+some one touches the virginals, there are peacocks' feathers on the
+chimney, and the tapers burn clear and pale in the red firelight. That
+is not an ugly picture in itself, nor will it become ugly upon
+repetition. All the better if the like were going on in every second
+room; the <i>land</i> would only look the more inviting. Times are changed.
+In one house, perhaps, twoscore families herd together; and, perhaps,
+not one of them is wholly out of the reach of want. The great hotel is
+given over to discomfort from the foundation to the chimney-tops;
+everywhere a pinching, narrow habit, scanty meals, and an air of
+sluttishness and dirt. In the first room there is a birth, in another a
+death, in a third a sordid drinking-bout, and the detective and the
+Bible-reader cross upon the stairs. High words are audible from dwelling
+to dwelling, and children have a strange experience from the first; only
+a robust soul, you would think, could grow up in such conditions without
+hurt. And even if God tempers His dispensations to the young, and all
+the ill does not arise that our apprehensions may forecast, the sight of
+such a way of living is disquieting to people who are more happily
+circumstanced. Social inequality is nowhere more ostentatious than at
+Edinburgh. I have mentioned already how, to the stroller along Princes
+Street, the High Street callously exhibits its back garrets. It is true,
+there is a garden between. And although nothing could be more glaring by
+way of contrast, some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span>times the opposition is more immediate; sometimes
+the thing lies in a nutshell, and there is not so much as a blade of
+grass between the rich and poor. To look over the South Bridge and see
+the Cowgate below full of crying hawkers, is to view one rank of society
+from another in the twinkling of an eye.</p>
+
+<p>One night I went along the Cowgate after every one was abed but the
+policeman, and stopped by hazard before a tall <i>land.</i> The moon touched
+upon its chimneys, and shone blankly on the upper windows; there was no
+light anywhere in the great bulk of building; but as I stood there it
+seemed to me that I could hear quite a body of quiet sounds from the
+interior; doubtless there were many clocks ticking, and people snoring
+on their backs. And thus, as I fancied, the dense life within made
+itself faintly audible in my ears, family after family contributing its
+quota to the general hum, and the whole pile beating in tune to its
+time-pieces, like a great disordered heart. Perhaps it was little more
+than a fancy altogether, but it was strangely impressive at the time,
+and gave me an imaginative measure of the disproportion between the
+quantity of living flesh and the trifling walls that separated and
+contained it.</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing fanciful, at least, but every circumstance of terror
+and reality, in the fall of the <i>land</i> in the High Street. The building
+had grown rotten to the core; the entry underneath had suddenly closed
+up so that the scavenger's barrow could not pass; cracks and
+reverberations sounded through the house at night; the inhabitants of
+the huge old human bee-hive discussed their peril when they encountered
+on the stair; some had even left their dwellings in a panic of fear, and
+returned to them again in a fit of economy or self-respect; when, in the
+black hours of a Sunday morning, the whole structure ran together with a
+hideous uproar and tumbled story upon story to the ground. The physical
+shock was felt far and near; and the moral shock travelled with the
+morning milkmaid into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> all the suburbs. The church-bells never sounded
+more dismally over Edinburgh than that grey forenoon. Death had made a
+brave harvest; and, like Samson, by pulling down one roof destroyed many
+a home. None who saw it can have forgotten the aspect of the gable: here
+it was plastered, there papered, according to the rooms; here the kettle
+still stood on the hob, high overhead; and there a cheap picture of the
+Queen was pasted over the chimney, So, by this disaster, you had a
+glimpse into the life of thirty families, all suddenly cut off from the
+revolving years. The <i>land</i> had fallen; and with the <i>land</i> how much!
+Far in the country, people saw a gap in the city ranks, and the sun
+looked through between the chimneys in an unwonted place. And all over
+the world, in London, in Canada, in New Zealand, fancy what a multitude
+of people could exclaim with truth: "The house that I was born in fell
+last night!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER III</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span>
+
+<h4>THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE</h4>
+
+
+<p>Time has wrought its changes most notably around the precinct of St.
+Giles's Church. The church itself, if it were not for the spire, would
+be unrecognizable; the <i>Krames</i> are all gone, not a shop is left to
+shelter in its buttresses; and zealous magistrates and a misguided
+architect have shorn the design of manhood, and left it poor, naked, and
+pitifully pretentious. As St. Giles's must have had in former days a
+rich and quaint appearance now forgotten, so the neighbourhood was
+bustling, sunless, and romantic. It was here that the town was most
+overbuilt; but the overbuilding has been all rooted out, and not only a
+free fairway left along the High Street with an open space on either
+side of the church, but a great porthole, knocked in the main line of
+the <i>lands</i>, gives an outlook to the north and the New Town.</p>
+
+<p>There is a silly story of a subterranean passage between the Castle and
+Holyrood, and a bold Highland piper who volunteered to explore its
+windings. He made his entrance by the upper end, playing a strathspey;
+the curious footed it after him down the street, following his descent
+by the sound of the chanter from below; until all of a sudden, about the
+level of St. Giles's, the music came abruptly to an end, and the people
+in the street stood at fault with hands uplifted. Whether he was choked
+with gases, or perished in a quag, or was removed bodily by the Evil
+One, remains a point of doubt; but the piper has never again been seen
+or heard of from that day to this. Perhaps he wandered down into the
+land of Thomas the Rhymer, and some day, when it is least expected, may
+take a thought<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> to revisit the sunlit upper world. That will be a
+strange moment for the cabmen on the stance beside St. Giles's, when
+they hear the drone of his pipes reascending from the bowels of the
+earth below their horses' feet.</p>
+
+<p>But it is not only pipers who have vanished, many a solid bulk of
+masonry has been likewise spirited into the air. Here, for example, is
+the shape of a heart let into the causeway. This was the site of the
+Tolbooth, the Heart of Midlothian, a place old in story and name-father
+to a noble book. The walls are now down in the dust; there is no more
+<i>squalor carceris</i> for merry debtors, no more cage for the old,
+acknowledged prison-breaker; but the sun and the wind play freely over
+the foundations of the jail. Nor is this the only memorial that the
+pavement keeps of former days. The ancient burying-ground of Edinburgh
+lay behind St. Giles's Church, running downhill to the Cowgate and
+covering the site of the present Parliament House. It has disappeared as
+utterly as the prison or the Luckenbooths; and for those ignorant of its
+history, I know only one token that remains. In the Parliament Close,
+trodden daily underfoot by advocates, two letters and a date mark the
+resting-place of the man who made Scotland over again in his own image,
+the indefatigable, undissuadable John Knox. He sleeps within call of the
+church that so often echoed to his preaching.</p>
+
+<p>Hard by the reformer, a bandy-legged and garlanded Charles Second, made
+of lead, bestrides a tun-bellied charger. The King has his back turned,
+and, as you look, seems to be trotting clumsily away from such a
+dangerous neighbour. Often, for hours together, these two will be alone
+in the close, for it lies out of the way of all but legal traffic. On
+one side the south wall of the church, on the other the arcades of the
+Parliament House, inclose this irregular bight of causeway and describe
+their shadows on it in the sun. At either end, from round St. Giles's
+buttresses, you command a look into the High Street with its motley
+passengers; but the stream goes by east<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> and west, and leaves the
+Parliament Close to Charles the Second and the birds. Once in a while, a
+patient crowd may be seen loitering there all day, some eating fruit,
+some reading a newspaper; and to judge by their quiet demeanour, you
+would think they were waiting for a distribution of soup-tickets. The
+fact is far otherwise; within in the Justiciary Court a man is upon
+trial for his life, and these are some of the curious for whom the
+gallery was found too narrow. Towards afternoon, if the prisoner is
+unpopular, there will be a round of hisses when he is brought forth.
+Once in a while, too, an advocate in wig and gown, hand upon mouth, full
+of pregnant nods, sweeps to and fro in the arcade listening to an agent;
+and at certain regular hours a whole tide of lawyers hurries across the
+space.</p>
+
+<p>The Parliament Close has been the scene of marking incidents in Scottish
+history. Thus, when the Bishops were ejected from the Convention in
+1688, "all fourteen of them gathered together with pale faces and stood
+in a cloud in the Parliament Close": poor episcopal personages who were
+done with fair weather for life! Some of the west-country Societarians
+standing by, who would have "rejoiced more than in great sums" to be at
+their hanging, hustled them so rudely that they knocked their heads
+together. It was not magnanimous behaviour to dethroned enemies; but
+one, at least, of the Societarians had groaned in the <i>boots</i>, and they
+had all seen their dear friends upon the scaffold. Again, at the "woeful
+Union," it was here that people crowded to escort their favourite from
+the last of Scottish parliaments: people flushed with nationality, as
+Boswell would have said, ready for riotous acts, and fresh from throwing
+stones at the author of "Robinson Crusoe" as he looked out of window.</p>
+
+<p>One of the pious in the seventeenth century, going to pass his <i>trials</i>
+(examinations as we now say) for the Scottish Bar, beheld the Parliament
+Close open and had a vision of the mouth of Hell. This, and small
+wonder,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> was the means of his conversion. Nor was the vision unsuitable
+to the locality; for after an hospital, what uglier piece is there in
+civilization than a court of law? Hither come envy, malice, and all
+uncharitableness to wrestle it out in public tourney; crimes, broken
+fortunes, severed households, the knave and his victim, gravitate to
+this low building with the arcade. To how many has not St. Giles's bell
+told the first hour after ruin? I think I see them pause to count the
+strokes, and wander on again into the moving High Street, stunned and
+sick at heart.</p>
+
+<p>A pair of swing doors gives admittance to a hall with a carved roof,
+hung with legal portraits, adorned with legal statuary, lighted by
+windows of painted glass, and warmed by three vast fires. This the
+<i>Salle des pas perdus</i> of the Scottish Bar. Here, by a ferocious custom,
+idle youths must promenade from ten till two. From end to end, singly or
+in pairs or trios, the gowns and wigs go back and forward. Through a hum
+of talk and footfalls, the piping tones of a Macer announce a fresh
+cause and call upon the names of those concerned. Intelligent men have
+been walking here daily for ten or twenty years without a rag of
+business or a shilling of reward. In process of time, they may perhaps
+be made the Sheriff-Substitute and Fountain of Justice at Lerwick or
+Tobermory. There is nothing required, you would say, but a little
+patience and a taste for exercise and bad air. To breathe dust and
+bombazine, to feed the mind on cackling gossip, to hear three parts of a
+case and drink a glass of sherry, to long with indescribable longings
+for the hour when a man may slip out of his travesty and devote himself
+to golf for the rest of the afternoon, and to do this day by day and
+year after year, may seem so small a thing to the inexperienced! But
+those who have made the experiment are of a different way of thinking,
+and count it the most arduous form of idleness.</p>
+
+<p>More swing doors open into pigeon-holes where Judges<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> of the First
+Appeal sit singly, and halls of audience where the supreme Lords sit by
+three or four. Here, you may see Scott's place within the bar, where he
+wrote many a page of Waverley novels to the drone of judicial
+proceeding. You will hear a good deal of shrewdness, and, as their
+Lordships do not altogether disdain pleasantry, a fair proportion of dry
+fun. The broadest of broad Scotch is now banished from the bench; but
+the courts still retain a certain national flavour. We have a solemn
+enjoyable way of lingering on a case. We treat law as a fine art, and
+relish and digest a good distinction. There is no hurry: point after
+point must be rightly examined and reduced to principle; judge after
+judge must utter forth his <i>obiter dicta</i> to delighted brethren.</p>
+
+<p>Besides the courts, there are installed under the same roof no less than
+three libraries: two of no mean order; confused and semi-subterranean,
+full of stairs and galleries; where you may see the most
+studious-looking wigs fishing out novels by lantern light, in the very
+place where the old Privy Council tortured Covenanters. As the
+Parliament House is built upon a slope, although it presents only one
+story to the north, it measures half-a-dozen at least upon the south;
+and range after range of vaults extend below the libraries. Few places
+are more characteristic of this hilly capital. You descend one stone
+stair after another, and wander, by the flicker of a match, in a
+labyrinth of stone cellars. Now, you pass below the Outer Hall and hear
+overhead, brisk but ghostly, the interminable pattering of legal feet.
+Now, you come upon a strong door with a wicket: on the other side are
+the cells of the police office and the trap-stair that gives admittance
+to the dock in the Justiciary Court. Many a foot that has gone up there
+lightly enough, has been dead-heavy in the descent. Many a man's life
+has been argued away from him during long hours in the court above. But
+just now that tragic stage is empty and silent like a church on a
+week-day, with the bench all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> sheeted up and nothing moving but the
+sunbeams on the wall. A little farther and you strike upon a room, not
+empty like the rest, but crowded with <i>productions</i> from bygone criminal
+cases: a grim lumber: lethal weapons, poisoned organs in a jar, a door
+with a shot hole through the panel, behind which a man fell dead. I
+cannot fancy why they should preserve them, unless it were against the
+Judgment Day. At length, as you continue to descend, you see a peep of
+yellow gaslight and hear a jostling, whispering noise ahead; next moment
+you turn a corner, and there, in a whitewashed passage, is a machinery
+belt industriously turning on its wheels. You would think the engine had
+grown there of its own accord, like a cellar fungus, and would soon spin
+itself out and fill the vaults from end to end with its mysterious
+labours. In truth, it is only some gear of the steam ventilator; and you
+will find the engineers at hand, and may step out of their door into the
+sunlight. For all this while, you have not been descending towards the
+earth's centre, but only to the bottom of the hill and the foundations
+of the Parliament House; low down, to be sure, but still under the open
+heaven and in a field of grass. The daylight shines garishly on the back
+windows of the Irish quarter; on broken shutters, wry gables, old
+palsied houses on the brink of ruin, a crumbling human pig-sty fit for
+human pigs. There are few signs of life, besides a scanty washing or a
+face at a window: the dwellers are abroad, but they will return at night
+and stagger to their pallets.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span>
+
+<h4>LEGENDS</h4>
+
+
+<p>The character of a place is often most perfectly expressed in its
+associations. An event strikes root and grows into a legend, when it has
+happened amongst congenial surroundings. Ugly actions, above all in ugly
+places, have the true romantic quality, and become an undying property
+of their scene. To a man like Scott, the different appearances of nature
+seemed each to contain its own legend ready made, which it was his to
+call forth: in such or such a place, only such or such events ought with
+propriety to happen; and in this spirit he made the "Lady of the Lake"
+for Ben Venue, the "Heart of Midlothian" for Edinburgh, and the
+"Pirate," so indifferently written but so romantically conceived, for
+the desolate islands and roaring tideways of the North. The common run
+of mankind have, from generation to generation, an instinct almost as
+delicate as that of Scott; but where he created new things, they only
+forget what is unsuitable among the old; and by survival of the fittest,
+a body of tradition becomes a work of art. So, in the low dens and
+high-flying garrets of Edinburgh, people may go back upon dark passages
+in the town's adventures, and chill their marrow with winter's tales
+about the fire: tales that are singularly apposite and characteristic,
+not only of the old life, but of the very constitution of built nature
+in that part, and singularly well qualified to add horror to horror,
+when the wind pipes around the tall <i>lands</i>, and hoots adown arched
+passages, and the far-spread wilderness of city lamps keeps quavering
+and flaring in the gusts.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Here, it is the tale of Begbie the bank-porter, stricken to the heart at
+a blow and left in his blood within a step or two of the crowded High
+Street. There, people hush their voices over Burke and Hare; over drugs
+and violated graves, and the resurrection-men smothering their victims
+with their knees. Here, again, the fame of Deacon Brodie is kept piously
+fresh. A great man in his day was the Deacon; well seen in good society,
+crafty with his hands as a cabinet-maker, and one who could sing a song
+with taste. Many a citizen was proud to welcome the Deacon to supper,
+and dismissed him with regret at a timeous hour, who would have been
+vastly disconcerted had he known how soon, and in what guise, his
+visitor returned. Many stories are told of this redoubtable Edinburgh
+burglar, but the one I have in my mind most vividly gives the key of all
+the rest. A friend of Brodie's, nested some way towards heaven in one of
+these great <i>lands</i>, had told him of a projected visit to the country,
+and afterwards, detained by some affairs, put it off and stayed the
+night in town. The good man had lain some time awake; it was far on in
+the small hours by the Tron bell; when suddenly there came a creak, a
+jar, a faint light. Softly he clambered out of bed and up to a false
+window which looked upon another room, and there, by the glimmer of a
+thieves' lantern, was his good friend the Deacon in a mask. It is
+characteristic of the town and the town's manners that this little
+episode should have been quietly tided over, and quite a good time
+elapsed before a great robbery, an escape, a Bow Street runner, a
+cock-fight, an apprehension in a cupboard in Amsterdam, and a last step
+into the air off his own greatly improved gallows drop, brought the
+career of Deacon William Brodie to an end. But still, by the mind's eye,
+he may be seen, a man harassed below a mountain of duplicity, slinking
+from a magistrate's supper-room to a thieves' ken, and pickeering among
+the closes by the flicker of a dark lamp.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Or where the Deacon is out of favour, perhaps some memory lingers of the
+great plagues, and of fatal houses still unsafe to enter within the
+memory of man. For in time of pestilence the discipline had been sharp
+and sudden, and what we now call "stamping out contagion" was carried on
+with deadly rigour. The officials, in their gowns of grey, with a white
+St. Andrew's cross on back and breast, and white cloth carried before
+them on a staff, perambulated the city, adding the terror of man's
+justice to the fear of God's visitation. The dead they buried on the
+Borough Muir; the living who had concealed the sickness were drowned, if
+they were women, in the Quarry Holes, and if they were men, were hanged
+and gibbeted at their own doors; and wherever the evil had passed,
+furniture was destroyed and houses closed. And the most bogeyish part of
+the story is about such houses. Two generations back they still stood
+dark and empty; people avoided them as they passed by; the boldest
+schoolboy only shouted through the key-hole and made off; for within, it
+was supposed, the plague lay ambushed like a basilisk, ready to flow
+forth and spread blain and pustule through the city. What a terrible
+next-door neighbour for superstitious citizens! A rat scampering within
+would send a shudder through the stoutest heart. Here, if you like, was
+a sanitary parable, addressed by our uncleanly forefathers to their own
+neglect.</p>
+
+<p>And then we have Major Weir; for although even his house is now
+demolished, old Edinburgh cannot clear herself of his unholy memory. He
+and his sister lived together in an odour of sour piety. She was a
+marvelous spinster; he had a rare gift of supplication, and was known
+among devout admirers by the name of Angelical Thomas. "He was a tall,
+black man, and ordinarily looked down to the ground; a grim countenance,
+and a big nose. His garb was still a cloak, and somewhat dark, and he
+never went without his staff." How it came about that Angelical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> Thomas
+was burned in company with his staff, and his sister in gentler manner
+hanged, and whether these two were simply religious maniacs of the more
+furious order, or had real as well as imaginary sins upon their
+old-world shoulders, are points happily beyond the reach of our
+intention. At least, it is suitable enough that out of this
+superstitious city some such example should have been put forth: the
+outcome and fine flower of dark and vehement religion. And at least the
+facts struck the public fancy and brought forth a remarkable family of
+myths. It would appear that the Major's staff went upon his errands, and
+even ran before him with a lantern on dark nights. Gigantic females,
+"stentoriously laughing and gaping with tehees of laughter" at
+unseasonable hours of night and morning, haunted the purlieus of his
+abode. His house fell under such a load of infamy that no one dared to
+sleep in it, until municipal improvement leveled the structure with the
+ground. And my father has often been told in the nursery how the devil's
+coach, drawn by six coal-black horses with fiery eyes, would drive at
+night into the West Bow, and belated people might see the dead Major
+through the glasses.</p>
+
+<p>Another legend is that of the two maiden sisters. A legend I am afraid
+it may be, in the most discreditable meaning of the term; or perhaps
+something worse&mdash;a mere yesterday's fiction. But it is a story of some
+vitality, and is worthy of a place in the Edinburgh kalendar. This pair
+inhabited a single room; from the facts, it must have been
+double-bedded; and it may have been of some dimensions; but when all is
+said, it was a single room. Here our two spinsters fell out&mdash;on some
+point of controversial divinity belike: but fell out so bitterly that
+there was never a word spoken between them, black or white, from that
+day forward. You would have thought they would separate: but no; whether
+from lack of means, or the Scottish fear of scandal, they continued to
+keep house together where they were. A chalk line drawn upon the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> floor
+separated their two domains; it bisected the doorway and the fireplace,
+so that each could go out and in, and do her cooking, without violating
+the territory of the other. So, for years, they co-existed in a hateful
+silence; their meals, their ablutions, their friendly visitors, exposed
+to an unfriendly scrutiny; and at night, in the dark watches, each could
+hear the breathing of her enemy. Never did four walls look down upon an
+uglier spectacle than these sisters rivaling in unsisterliness. Here is
+a canvas for Hawthorne to have turned into a cabinet picture&mdash;he had a
+Puritanic vein, which would have fitted him to treat this Puritanic
+horror; he could have shown them to us in their sicknesses and at their
+hideous twin devotions, thumbing a pair of great Bibles, or praying
+aloud for each other's penitence with marrowy emphasis; now each, with
+kilted petticoat, at her own corner of the fire on some tempestuous
+evening; now sitting each at her window, looking out upon the summer
+landscape sloping far below them towards the firth, and the field-paths
+where they had wandered hand in hand; or, as age and infirmity grew upon
+them and prolonged their toilettes, and their hands began to tremble and
+their heads to nod involuntarily, growing only the more steeled in
+enmity with years; until one fine day, at a word, a look, a visit, or
+the approach of death, their hearts would melt and the chalk boundary be
+overstepped for ever.</p>
+
+<p>Alas! to those who know the ecclesiastical history of the race&mdash;the most
+perverse and melancholy in man's annals&mdash;this will seem only a figure of
+much that is typical of Scotland and her high-seated capital above the
+Forth&mdash;a figure so grimly realistic that it may pass with strangers for
+a caricature. We are wonderful patient haters for conscience' sake up
+here in the North. I spoke, in the first of these papers, of the
+Parliaments of the Established and Free Churches, and how they can hear
+each other singing psalms across the street. There is but a street
+between them in space, but a shadow between them in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> principle; and yet
+there they sit, enchanted, and in damnatory accents pray for each
+other's growth in grace. It would be well if there were no more than
+two; but the sects in Scotland form a large family of sisters, and the
+chalk lines are thickly drawn, and run through the midst of many private
+homes. Edinburgh is a city of churches, as though it were a place of
+pilgrimage. You will see four within a stone-cast at the head of the
+West Bow. Some are crowded to the doors; some are empty like monuments;
+and yet you will ever find new ones in the building. Hence that
+surprising clamour of church bells that suddenly breaks out upon the
+Sabbath morning, from Trinity and the sea-skirts to Morningside on the
+borders of the hills. I have heard the chimes of Oxford playing their
+symphony in a golden autumn morning, and beautiful it was to hear. But
+in Edinburgh all manner of loud bells join, or rather disjoin, in one
+swelling, brutal babblement of noise. Now one overtakes another, and now
+lags behind it; now five or six all strike on the pained tympanum at the
+same punctual instant of time, and make together a dismal chord of
+discord; and now for a second all seem to have conspired to hold their
+peace. Indeed, there are not many uproars in this world more dismal than
+that of the Sabbath bells in Edinburgh: a harsh ecclesiastical tocsin;
+the outcry of incongruous orthodoxies, calling on every separate
+conventicler to put up a protest, each in his own synagogue, against
+"right-hand extremes and left-hand defections." And surely there are few
+worse extremes than this extremity of zeal; and few more deplorable
+defections than this disloyalty to Christian love. Shakespeare wrote a
+comedy of "Much Ado about Nothing." The Scottish nation made a fantastic
+tragedy on the same subject. And it is for the success of this
+remarkable piece that these bells are sounded every Sabbath morning on
+the hills above the Forth. How many of them might rest silent in the
+steeple, how many of these ugly churches might be demolished and turned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span>
+once more into useful building material, if people who think almost
+exactly the same thoughts about religion would condescend to worship God
+under the same roof! But there are the chalk lines. And which is to
+pocket pride, and speak the foremost word?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER V</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>
+
+<h4>GREYFRIARS</h4>
+
+
+<p>It was Queen Mary who threw open the gardens of the Grey Friars: a new
+and semi-rural cemetery in those days, although it has grown an
+antiquity in its turn and been superseded by half-a-dozen others. The
+Friars must have had a pleasant time on summer evenings; for their
+gardens were situated to a wish, with the tall Castle and the tallest of
+the Castle crags in front. Even now, it is one of our famous Edinburgh
+points of view; and strangers are led thither to see, by yet another
+instance, how strangely the city lies upon her hills. The enclosure is
+of an irregular shape; the double church of Old and New Greyfriars
+stands on the level at the top; a few thorns are dotted here and there,
+and the ground falls by terrace and steep slope towards the north. The
+open shows many slabs and table tombstones; and all round the margin,
+the place is girt by an array of aristocratic mausoleums appallingly
+adorned. Setting aside the tombs of Roubilliac, which belong to the
+heroic order of graveyard art, we Scotch stand, to my fancy, highest
+among nations in the matter of grimly illustrating death. We seem to
+love for their own sake the emblems of time and the great change; and
+even around country churches you will find a wonderful exhibition of
+skulls, and crossbones, and noseless angels, and trumpets pealing for
+the Judgment Day. Every mason was a pedestrian Holbein: he had a deep
+consciousness of death, and loved to put its terrors pithily before the
+churchyard loiterer; he was brimful of rough hints upon mortality, and
+any dead farmer was seized upon to be a text. The classical examples of
+this art are in Greyfriars. In their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> time, these were doubtless costly
+monuments, and reckoned of a very elegant proportion by contemporaries;
+and now, when the elegance is not so apparent, the significance remains.
+You may perhaps look with a smile on the profusion of Latin
+mottoes&mdash;some crawling endwise up the shaft of a pillar, some issuing on
+a scroll from angels' trumpets&mdash;on the emblematic horrors, the figures
+rising headless from the grave, and all the traditional ingenuities in
+which it pleased our fathers to set forth their sorrow for the dead and
+their sense of earthly mutability. But it is not a hearty sort of mirth.
+Each ornament may have been executed by the merriest apprentice,
+whistling as he plied the mallet; but the original meaning of each, and
+the combined effect of so many of them in this quiet enclosure, is
+serious to the point of melancholy.</p>
+
+<p>Round a great part of the circuit, houses of a low class present their
+backs to the churchyard. Only a few inches separate the living from the
+dead. Here, a window is partly blocked up by the pediment of a tomb;
+there, where the street falls far below the level of the graves, a
+chimney has been trained up the back of a monument, and a red pot looks
+vulgarly over from behind. A damp smell of the graveyard finds its way
+into houses where workmen sit at meat. Domestic life on a small scale
+goes forward visibly at the windows. The very solitude and stillness of
+the enclosure, which lies apart from the town's traffic, serves to
+accentuate the contrast. As you walk upon the graves, you see children
+scattering crumbs to feed the sparrows; you hear people singing or
+washing dishes, or the sound of tears and castigation; the linen on a
+clothes-pole flaps against funereal sculpture; or perhaps the cat slips
+over the lintel and descends on a memorial urn. And as there is nothing
+else astir, these incongruous sights and noises take hold on the
+attention and exaggerate the sadness of the place.</p>
+
+<p>Greyfriars is continually overrun by cats. I have seen one afternoon, as
+many as thirteen of them seated on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> grass beside old Milne, the
+Master Builder, all sleek and fat, and complacently blinking, as if they
+had fed upon strange meats. Old Milne was chanting with the saints, as
+we may hope, and cared little for the company about his grave; but I
+confess the spectacle had an ugly side for me; and I was glad to step
+forward and raise my eyes to where the Castle and the roofs of the Old
+Town, and the spire of the Assembly Hall, stood deployed against the sky
+with the colourless precision of engraving. An open outlook is to be
+desired from a churchyard, and a sight of the sky and some of the
+world's beauty relieves a mind from morbid thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>I shall never forget one visit. It was a grey, dropping day; the grass
+was strung with rain-drops; and the people in the houses kept hanging
+out their shirts and petticoats and angrily taking them in again, as the
+weather turned from wet to fair and back again. A gravedigger, and a
+friend of his, a gardener from the country, accompanied me into one
+after another of the cells and little courtyards in which it gratified
+the wealthy of old days to enclose their old bones from neighbourhood.
+In one, under a sort of shrine, we found a forlorn human effigy, very
+realistically executed down to the detail of his ribbed stockings, and
+holding in his hand a ticket with the date of his demise. He looked most
+pitiful and ridiculous, shut up by himself in his aristocratic precinct,
+like a bad old boy or an inferior forgotten deity under a new
+dispensation; the burdocks grew familiarly about his feet, the rain
+dripped all round him; and the world maintained the most entire
+indifference as to who he was or whither he had gone. In another, a
+vaulted tomb, handsome externally but horrible inside with damp and
+cobwebs, there were three mounds of black earth and an uncovered
+thigh-bone. This was the place of interment, it appeared, of a family
+with whom the gardener had been long in service. He was among old
+acquaintances. "This'll be Miss Marg'et's," said he, giving the bone a
+friendly kick. "The auld &mdash;&mdash; !" I have always an uncomfortable feeling in
+a graveyard, at sight of so many<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> tombs to perpetuate memories best
+forgotten; but I never had the impression so strongly as that day.
+People had been at some expense in both these cases: to provoke a
+melancholy feeling of derision in the one, and an insulting epithet in
+the other. The proper inscription for the most part of mankind, I began
+to think, is the cynical jeer, <i>cras tibi.</i> That, if anything, will stop
+the mouth of a carper; since it both admits the worst and carries the
+war triumphantly into the enemy's camp.</p>
+
+<p>Greyfriars is a place of many associations. There was one window in a
+house at the lower end, now demolished, which was pointed out to me by
+the gravedigger as a spot of legendary interest. Burke, the
+resurrection-man, infamous for so many murders at five shillings a head,
+used to sit thereat, with pipe and nightcap, to watch burials going
+forward on the green. In a tomb higher up, which must then have been but
+newly finished, John Knox, according to the same informant, had taken
+refuge in a turmoil of the Reformation. Behind the church is the haunted
+mausoleum of Sir George Mackenzie: Bloody Mackenzie, Lord Advocate in
+the Covenanting troubles and author of some pleasing sentiments on
+toleration. Here, in the last century, an old Heriot's Hospital boy once
+harboured from the pursuit of the police. The Hospital is next door to
+Greyfriars&mdash;a courtly building among lawns, where, on Founder's Day, you
+may see a multitude of children playing Kiss-in-the-Ring and Round the
+Mulberry-bush. Thus, when the fugitive had managed to conceal himself in
+the tomb, his old schoolmates had a hundred opportunities to bring him
+food; and there he lay in safety till a ship was found to smuggle him
+abroad. But his must have been indeed a heart of brass, to lie all day
+and night alone with the dead persecutor; and other lads were far from
+emulating him in courage. When a man's soul is certainly in hell, his
+body will scarce lie quiet in a tomb, however costly; some time or other
+the door must open, and the reprobate come forth in the abhorred<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span>
+garments of the grave. It was thought a high piece of prowess to knock
+at the Lord Advocate's mausoleum and challenge him to appear. "Bluidy
+Mackenzie, come oot if ye daur!" sang the foolhardy urchins. But Sir
+George had other affairs on hand; and the author of an essay on
+toleration continues to sleep peacefully among the many whom he so
+intolerantly helped to slay.</p>
+
+<p>For this <i>infelix campus</i>, as it is dubbed in one of its own
+inscriptions&mdash;an inscription over which Dr. Johnson passed a critical
+eye&mdash;is in many ways sacred to the memory of the men whom Mackenzie
+persecuted. It was here, on the flat tombstones, that the Covenant was
+signed by an enthusiastic people. In the long arm of the churchyard that
+extends to Lauriston, the prisoners from Bothwell Bridge&mdash;fed on bread
+and water, and guarded, life for life, by vigilant marksmen&mdash;lay five
+months looking for the scaffold or the plantations. And while the good
+work was going forward in the Grassmarket, idlers in Greyfriars might
+have heard the throb of the military drums that drowned the voices of
+the martyrs. Nor is this all: for down in the corner farthest from Sir
+George, there stands a monument, dedicated, in uncouth Covenanting
+verse, to all who lost their lives in that contention. There is no
+moorsman shot in a snow shower beside Irongray or Co'monell; there is
+not one of the two hundred who were drowned off the Orkneys; nor so much
+as a poor, over-driven, Covenanting slave in the American plantations;
+but can lay claim to a share in that memorial, and, if such things
+interest just men among the shades, can boast he has a monument on earth
+as well as Julius Caesar or the Pharaohs. Where they may all lie, I know
+not. Far-scattered bones, indeed! But if the reader cares to learn how
+some of them&mdash;or some part of some of them&mdash;found their way at length to
+such honourable sepulture, let him listen to the words of one who was
+their comrade in life and their apologist when they were dead. Some of
+the insane controversial matter I omit, as well as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> some digressions,
+but leave the rest in Patrick Walker's language and orthography:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The never to be forgotten Mr. <i>James Renwlck</i> told me, that he was
+    Witness to their Public Murder at the <i>Gallowlee</i>, between <i>Leith</i>
+    and <i>Edinburgh</i>, when he saw the Hangman hash and hagg off all their
+    Five heads, with <i>Patrick Foreman's</i> Right Hand: Their Bodies were
+    all buried at the Gallows Foot: their Heads, with <i>Patrick's</i> Hand,
+    were brought and put upon five Pikes on the <i>Pleasaunce-Port</i>....
+    Mr. <i>Renwick</i> told me that it was the first public Action that his
+    Hand was at, to conveen Friends, and lift their murthered Bodies,
+    and carried them to the West Churchyard of <i>Edinburgh</i>,"&mdash;not
+    Greyfriars, this time,&mdash;"and buried them there. Then they came about
+    the City ... and took down these Five Heads and that Hand; and Day
+    being come, they went quickly up the <i>Pleasaunce</i>; and when they
+    came to <i>Lauristoun</i> Yards, upon the South-side of the City, they
+    durst not venture, being so light, to go and bury their Heads with
+    their Bodies, which they designed; it being present death, if any of
+    them had been found. <i>Alexander Tweedie</i>, a Friend, being with them,
+    who at that Time was Gardner in these Yards, concluded to bury them
+    in his Yard, being in a Box (wrapped in Linen), where they lay 45
+    Years except 3 Days, being executed upon the 10th of <i>October</i> 1681,
+    and found the 7th Day of <i>October</i> 1726. That Piece of Ground lay
+    for some years unlaboured; and trenching it, the Gardner found them,
+    which affrighted him; the Box was consumed. Mr. <i>Schaw</i>, the Owner
+    of these Yards, caused lift them, and lay them upon a Table in his
+    Summer-house: Mr. <i>Schaw's</i> mother was so kind, as to cut out a
+    Linen-cloth and cover them. They lay Twelve Days there, where all
+    had Access to see them. <i>Alexander Tweedie</i>, the foresaid Gardner,
+    said, when dying, There was a Treasure hid in his Yard, but neither
+    Gold nor Silver. <i>Daniel Tweedie</i>, his Son, came along with me to
+    that Yard, and told me that his Father planted a white Rose-bush
+    above them, and farther down the Yard a red Rose-bush, which were
+    more fruitful than any other Bush in the Yard.... Many came"&mdash;to see
+    the heads&mdash;"out of Curiosity; yet I rejoiced to see so many
+    concerned grave Men and Women favouring the Dust of our Martyrs.
+    There were Six of us concluded to bury them upon the Nineteenth Day
+    of <i>October</i> 1726, and every one of us to acquaint Friends of the
+    Day and Hour, being <i>Wednesday</i>, the Day of the Week on which most
+    of them were executed, and at 4 of the Clock at Night, being the
+    Hour that most of them went to their resting Graves. We caused make
+    a compleat Coffin for them in Black, with four Yards of fine Linen,
+    the way that our Martyrs Corps were managed.... Accordingly we kept
+    the aforesaid Day and Hour, and doubled the Linen, and laid the Half
+    of it below them, their nether Jaws being parted from their Heads;
+    but being young Men, their Teeth remained. All were Witness to the
+    Holes in each of their Heads, which the Hangman broke with his
+    Hammer; and according to the Bigness of their Sculls, we laid the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span>Jaws to them, and drew the other Half of the Linen above them, and
+    stufft the Coffin with Shavings. Some prest hard to go thorow the
+    chief Parts of the City as was done at the Revolution; but this we
+    refused, considering that it looked airy and frothy, to make such
+    Show of them, and inconsistent with the solid serious Observing of
+    such an affecting, surprizing unheard-of Dispensation: But took the
+    ordinary Way of other Burials from that Place, to wit, we went east
+    the Back of the Wall, and in at <i>Bristo-Port</i>, and down the Way to
+    the Head of the <i>Cowgate</i>, and turned up to the Churchyard, where
+    they were interred closs to the Martyrs Tomb, with the greatest
+    Multitude of People Old and Young, Men and Women, Ministers and
+    others, that ever I saw together."</p></div>
+
+<p>And so there they were at last, in "their resting graves." So long as
+men do their duty, even if it be greatly in a misapprehension, they will
+be leading pattern lives; and whether or not they come to lie beside a
+martyrs' monument, we may be sure they will find a safe haven somewhere
+in the providence of God. It is not well to think of death, unless we
+temper the thought with that of heroes who despised it. Upon what
+ground, is of small account; if it be only the bishop who was burned for
+his faith in the antipodes, his memory lightens the heart and makes us
+walk undisturbed among graves. And so the martyrs' monument is a
+wholesome heartsome spot in the field of the dead; and as we look upon
+it, a brave influence comes to us from the land of those who have won
+their discharge and, in another phrase of Patrick Walker's, got "cleanly
+off the stage."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span>
+
+<h4>NEW TOWN: TOWN AND COUNTRY</h4>
+
+
+<p>It is as much a matter of course to decry the New Town as to exalt the
+Old; and the most celebrated authorities have picked out this quarter as
+the very emblem of what is condemnable in architecture. Much may be
+said, much indeed has been said, upon the text; but to the
+unsophisticated, who call anything pleasing if it only pleases them, the
+New Town of Edinburgh seems, in itself, not only gay and airy, but
+highly picturesque. An old skipper, invincibly ignorant of all theories
+of the sublime and beautiful, once propounded as his most radiant notion
+for Paradise: "The new town of Edinburgh, with the wind the matter of a
+point free." He has now gone to that sphere where all good tars are
+promised pleasant weather in the song, and perhaps his thoughts fly
+somewhat higher. But there are bright and temperate days&mdash;with soft air
+coming from the inland hills, military music sounding bravely from the
+hollow of the gardens, the flags all waving on the palaces of Princes
+Street&mdash;when I have seen the town through a sort of glory, and shaken
+hands in sentiment with the old sailor. And indeed, for a man who has
+been much tumbled round Orcadian skerries, what scene could be more
+agreeable to witness? On such a day, the valley wears a surprising air
+of festival. It seems (I do not know how else to put my meaning) as if
+it were a trifle too good to be true. It is what Paris ought to be. It
+has the scenic quality that would best set off a life of unthinking,
+open-air diversion. It was meant by nature for the realization of the
+society of comic operas. And you can imagine, if the climate were but
+towardly, how all the world and his wife would flock into these gardens
+in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> cool of the evening, to hear cheerful music, to sip pleasant
+drinks, to see the moon rise from behind Arthur's Seat and shine upon
+the spires and monuments and the green tree-tops in the valley. Alas!
+and the next morning the rain is splashing on the window, and the
+passengers flee along Princes Street before the galloping squalls.</p>
+
+<p>It cannot be denied that the original design was faulty and
+short-sighted, and did not fully profit by the capabilities of the
+situation. The architect was essentially a town bird, and he laid out
+the modern city with a view to street scenery, and to street scenery
+alone. The country did not enter into his plan; he had never lifted his
+eyes to the hills. If he had so chosen, every street upon the northern
+slope might have been a noble terrace and commanded an extensive and
+beautiful view. But the space has been too closely built; many of the
+houses front the wrong way, intent, like the Man with the Muck-Rake, on
+what is not worth observation, and standing discourteously back-foremost
+in the ranks; and in a word, it is too often only from attic windows, or
+here and there at a crossing, that you can get a look beyond the city
+upon its diversified surroundings. But perhaps it is all the more
+surprising, to come suddenly on a corner, and see a perspective of a
+mile or more of falling street, and beyond that woods and villas, and a
+blue arm of sea, and the hills upon the farther side.</p>
+
+<p>Fergusson, our Edinburgh poet, Burns's model, once saw a butterfly at
+the Town Cross; and the sight inspired him with a worthless little ode.
+This painted countryman, the dandy of the rose garden, looked far abroad
+in such a humming neighbourhood; and you can fancy what moral
+considerations a youthful poet would supply. But the incident, in a
+fanciful sort of way, is characteristic of the place. Into no other city
+does the sight of the country enter so far; if you do not meet a
+butterfly, you shall certainly catch a glimpse of far-away trees upon
+your walk; and the place is full of theatre tricks in the way of
+scenery. You peep under an arch, you descend stairs<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> that look as if
+they would land you in a cellar, you turn to the back window of a grimy
+tenement in a lane:&mdash;and behold! you are face-to-face with distant and
+bright prospects. You turn a corner, and there is the sun going down
+into the Highland hills. You look down an alley, and see ships tacking
+for the Baltic.</p>
+
+<p>For the country people to see Edinburgh on her hill-tops is one thing;
+it is another for the citizen, from the thick of his affairs, to
+overlook the country. It should be a genial and ameliorating influence
+in life; it should prompt good thoughts and remind him of Nature's
+unconcern: that he can watch from day to day, as he trots officeward,
+how the Spring green brightens in the wood or the field grows black
+under a moving ploughshare. I have been tempted, in this connection, to
+deplore the slender faculties of the human race, with its penny-whistle
+of a voice, its dull ears, and its narrow range of sight. If you could
+see as people are to see in heaven, if you had eyes such as you can
+fancy for a superior race, if you could take clear note of the objects
+of vision, not only a few yards, but a few miles from where you
+stand:&mdash;think how agreeably your sight would be entertained, how
+pleasantly your thoughts would be diversified, as you walked the
+Edinburgh streets! For you might pause, in some business perplexity, in
+the midst of the city traffic, and perhaps catch the eye of a shepherd
+as he sat down to breathe upon a heathery shoulder of the Pentlands; or
+perhaps some urchin, clambering in a country elm, would put aside the
+leaves and show you his flushed and rustic visage; or a fisher racing
+seawards, with the tiller under his elbow, and the sail sounding in the
+wind, would fling you a salutation from between Anst'er and the May.</p>
+
+<p>To be old is not the same thing as to be picturesque; nor because the
+Old Town bears a strange physiognomy, does it at all follow that the New
+Town shall look commonplace. Indeed, apart from antique houses, it is
+curious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> how much description would apply commonly to either. The same
+sudden accidents of ground, a similar dominating site above the plain,
+and the same superposition of one rank of society over another, are to
+be observed in both. Thus, the broad and comely approach to Princes
+Street from the east, lined with hotels and public offices, makes a leap
+over the gorge of the Low Calton; if you cast a glance over the parapet,
+you look direct into that sunless and disreputable confluent of Leith
+Street; and the same tall houses open upon both thoroughfares. This is
+only the New Town passing overhead above its own cellars; walking, so to
+speak, over its own children, as is the way of cities and the human
+race. But at the Dean Bridge, you may behold a spectacle of a more novel
+order. The river runs at the bottom of a deep valley, among rocks and
+between gardens; the crest of either bank is occupied by some of the
+most commodious streets and crescents in the modern city; and a handsome
+bridge unites the two summits. Over this, every afternoon, private
+carriages go spinning by, and ladies with card cases pass to and fro
+about the duties of society. And yet down below, you may still see, with
+its mills and foaming weir, the little rural village of Dean. Modern
+improvement has gone overhead on its high-level viaduct; and the
+extended city has cleanly overleapt, and left unaltered, what was once
+the summer retreat of its comfortable citizens. Every town embraces
+hamlets in its growth; Edinburgh herself has embraced a good few; but it
+is strange to see one still surviving&mdash;and to see it some hundreds of
+feet below your path. Is it Torre del Greco that is built above buried
+Herculaneum? Herculaneum was dead at least; but the sun still shines
+upon the roofs of Dean; the smoke still rises thriftily from its
+chimneys; the dusty miller comes to his door, looks at the gurgling
+water, hearkens to the turning wheel and the birds about the shed, and
+perhaps whistles an air of his own to enrich the symphony&mdash;for all the
+world as if Edinburgh were still the old Edinburgh<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> on the Castle Hill,
+and Dean were still the quietest of hamlets buried a mile or so in the
+green country.</p>
+
+<p>It is not so long ago since magisterial David Hume lent the authority of
+his example to the exodus from the Old Town, and took up his new abode
+in a street which is still (so oddly may a jest become perpetuated)
+known as Saint David Street. Nor is the town so large but a holiday
+schoolboy may harry a bird's nest within half a mile of his own door.
+There are places that still smell of the plough in memory's nostrils.
+Here, one had heard a blackbird on a hawthorn; there, another was taken
+on summer evenings to eat strawberries and cream; and you have seen a
+waving wheatfield on the site of your present residence. The memories of
+an Edinburgh boy are but partly memories of the town. I look back with
+delight on many an escalade of garden walls; many a ramble among lilacs
+full of piping birds; many an exploration in obscure quarters that were
+neither town nor country; and I think that both for my companions and
+myself, there was a special interest, a point of romance, and a
+sentiment as of foreign travel, when we hit in our excursions on the
+butt-end of some former hamlet, and found a few rustic cottages embedded
+among streets and squares. The tunnel to the Scotland Street Station,
+the sight of the trains shooting out of its dark maw with the two guards
+upon the brake, the thought of its length and the many ponderous
+edifices and open thoroughfares above, were certainly things of
+paramount impressiveness to a young mind. It was a subterranean passage,
+although of a larger bore than we were accustomed to in Ainsworth's
+novels; and these two words, "subterranean passage," were in themselves
+an irresistible attraction, and seemed to bring us nearer in spirit to
+the heroes we loved and the black rascals we secretly aspired to
+imitate. To scale the Castle Rock from West Princes Street Gardens, and
+lay a triumphal hand against the rampart itself, was to taste a high
+order of romantic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span> pleasure. And there are other sights and exploits
+which crowd back upon my mind under a very strong illumination of
+remembered pleasure. But the effect of not one of them all will compare
+with the discoverer's joy, and the sense of old Time and his slow
+changes on the face of this earth, with which I explored such corners as
+Cannon-mills or Water Lane, or the nugget of cottages at Broughton
+Market. They were more rural than the open country, and gave a greater
+impression of antiquity than the oldest <i>land</i> upon the High Street.
+They too, like Fergusson's butterfly, had a quaint air of having
+wandered far from their own place; they looked abashed and homely, with
+their gables and their creeping plants, their outside stairs and running
+null-streams; there were corners that smelt like the end of the country
+garden where I spent my Aprils; and the people stood to gossip at their
+doors, as they might have done in Colinton or Cramond.</p>
+
+<p>In a great measure we may, and shall, eradicate this haunting flavour of
+the country. The last elm is dead in Elm Row; and the villas and the
+workmen's quarters spread apace on all the borders of the city. We can
+cut down the trees; we can bury the grass under dead paving-stones; we
+can drive brisk streets through all our sleepy quarters; and we may
+forget the stories and the play-grounds of our boyhood. But we have some
+possessions that not even the infuriate zeal of builders can utterly
+abolish and destroy. Nothing can abolish the hills, unless it be a
+cataclysm of nature, which shall subvert Edinburgh Castle itself and lay
+all her florid structures in the dust. And as long as we have the hills
+and the Firth, we have a famous heritage to leave our children. Our
+windows, at no expense to us, are mostly artfully stained to represent a
+landscape. And when the Spring comes round, and the hawthorn begins to
+flower, and the meadows to smell of young grass, even in the thickest of
+our streets, the country hill-tops find out a young man's eyes, and set
+his heart beating for travel and pure air.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span>
+
+<h4>THE VILLA QUARTERS</h4>
+
+
+<p>Mr. Ruskin's denunciation of the New Town of Edinburgh includes, as I
+have heard it repeated, nearly all the stone and lime we have to show.
+Many, however, find a grand air and something settled and imposing in
+the better parts; and upon many, as I have said, the confusion of styles
+induces an agreeable stimulation of the mind. But upon the subject of
+our recent villa architecture, I am frankly ready to mingle my tears
+with Mr. Ruskin's, and it is a subject which makes one envious of his
+large declamatory and controversial eloquence.</p>
+
+<p>Day by day, one new villa, one new object of offence, is added to
+another; all around Newington and Morningside, the dismalest structures
+keep springing up like mushrooms; the pleasant hills are loaded with
+them, each impudently squatted in its garden, each roofed and carrying
+chimneys like a house. And yet a glance of an eye discovers their true
+character. They are not houses; for they were not designed with a view
+to human habitation, and the internal arrangements are, as they tell me,
+fantastically unsuited to the needs of man. They are not buildings; for
+you can scarcely say a thing is built where every measurement is in
+clamant disproportion with its neighbour. They belong to no style to
+art, only to a form of business much to be regretted.</p>
+
+<p>Why should it be cheaper to erect a structure where the size of the
+windows bears no rational relation to the size of the front? Is there
+any profit in a misplaced chimney-stalk? Does a hard-working, greedy
+builder gain more on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> a monstrosity than on a decent cottage of equal
+plainness? Frankly, we should say, No. Bricks may be omitted, and green
+timber employed, in the construction of even a very elegant design; and
+there is no reason why a chimney should be made to vent, because it is
+so situated as to look comely from without. On the other hand, there is
+a noble way of being ugly: a high-aspiring fiasco like the fall of
+Lucifer. There are daring and gaudy buildings that manage to be
+offensive, without being contemptible; and we know that "fools rush in
+where angels fear to tread." But to aim at making a commonplace villa,
+and to make it insufferably ugly in each particular; to attempt the
+homeliest achievement and to attain the bottom of derided failure; not
+to have any theory but profit, and yet, at an equal expense, to outstrip
+all competitors in the art of conceiving and rendering permanent
+deformity; and to do this in what is, by nature, one of the most
+agreeable neighbourhoods in Britain:&mdash;what are we to say, but that this
+also is a distinction, hard to earn although not greatly worshipful?</p>
+
+<p>Indifferent buildings give pain to the sensitive; but these things
+offend the plainest taste. It is a danger which threatens the amenity of
+the town; and as this eruption keeps spreading on our borders, we have
+ever the farther to walk among unpleasant sights, before we gain the
+country air. If the population of Edinburgh were a living, autonomous
+body, it would arise like one man and make night hideous with arson; the
+builders and their accomplices would be driven to work, like the Jews of
+yore, with the trowel in one hand and the defensive cutlass in the
+other; and as soon as one of these masonic wonders had been consummated,
+right-minded iconoclasts should fall thereon and make an end of it at
+once.</p>
+
+<p>Possibly these words may meet the eye of a builder or two. It is no use
+asking them to employ an architect; for that would be to touch them in a
+delicate quarter, and its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> use would largely depend on what architect
+they were minded to call in. But let them get any architect in the world
+to point out any reasonably well-proportioned villa not his own design;
+and let them reproduce that model to satiety.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span>
+
+<h4>THE CALTON HILL</h4>
+
+
+<p>The east of New Edinburgh is guarded by a craggy hill, of no great
+elevation, which the town embraces. The old London road runs on one side
+of it; while the New Approach, leaving it on the other hand, completes
+the circuit. You mount by stairs in a cutting of the rock to find
+yourself in a field of monuments. Dugald Stewart has the honours of
+situation and architecture; Burns is memorialized lower down upon a
+spur; Lord Nelson, as befits a sailor, gives his name to the top-gallant
+of the Calton Hill. This latter erection has been differently and yet,
+in both cases, aptly compared to a telescope and a butterchurn;
+comparisons apart, it ranks among the vilest of men's handiworks. But
+the chief feature is an unfinished range of columns, "the Modern Ruin"
+as it has been called, an imposing object from far and near, and giving
+Edinburgh, even from the sea, that false air of a modern Athens which
+has earned for her so many slighting speeches. It was meant to be a
+National Monument; and its present state is a very suitable monument to
+certain national characteristics. The old Observatory&mdash;a quaint brown
+building on the edge of the steep&mdash;and the New Observatory&mdash;a classical
+edifice with a dome&mdash;occupy the central portion of the summit. All these
+are scattered on a green turf, browsed over by some sheep.</p>
+
+<p>The scene suggests reflections on fame and on man's injustice to the
+dead. You see Dugald Stewart rather more handsomely commemorated than
+Burns. Immediately below, in the Canongate churchyard, lies Robert<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span>
+Fergusson, Burns's master in his art, who died insane while yet a
+stripling; and if Dugald Stewart has been somewhat too boisterously
+acclaimed, the Edinburgh poet, on the other hand, is most unrighteously
+forgotten. The votaries of Burns, a crew too common in all ranks in
+Scotland, and more remarkable for number than discretion, eagerly
+suppress all mention of the lad who handed to him the poetic impulse,
+and, up to the time when he grew famous, continued to influence him in
+his manner and the choice of subjects. Burns himself not only
+acknowledged his debt in a fragment of autobiography, but erected a tomb
+over the grave in Canongate churchyard. This was worthy of an artist,
+but it was done in vain; and although I think I have read nearly all the
+biographies of Burns, I cannot remember one in which the modesty of
+nature was not violated, or where Fergusson was not sacrificed to the
+credit of his follower's originality. There is a kind of gaping
+admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have
+a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author
+without disparaging all others. They are indeed mistaken if they think
+to please the great originals; and whoever puts Fergusson right with
+fame cannot do better than dedicate his labours to the memory of Burns,
+who will be the best delighted of the dead.</p>
+
+<p>Of all places for a view, this Calton Hill is perhaps the best; since
+you can see the Castle, which you lose from the Castle, and Arthur's
+Seat, which you cannot see from Arthur's Seat. It is the place to stroll
+on one of those days of sunshine and east wind which are so common in
+our more than temperate summer. The breeze comes off the sea, with a
+little of the freshness, and that touch of chill, peculiar to the
+quarter, which is delightful to certain very ruddy organizations and
+greatly the reverse to the majority of mankind. It brings with it a
+faint, floating haze, a cunning decolouriser, although not thick enough
+to obscure outlines near at hand. But the haze<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> lies more thickly to
+windward at the far end of Musselburgh Bay; and over the Links of
+Aberlady and Berwick Law and the hump of the Bass Rock it assumes the
+aspect of a bank of thin sea fog.</p>
+
+<p>Immediately underneath upon the south, you command the yards of the High
+School, and the towers and courts of the new Jail&mdash;a large place,
+castellated to the extent of folly, standing by itself on the edge of a
+steep cliff, and often joyfully hailed by tourists as the Castle. In the
+one, you may perhaps see female prisoners taking exercise like a string
+of nuns; in the other, schoolboys running at play and their shadows
+keeping step with them. From the bottom of the valley, a gigantic
+chimney rises almost to the level of the eye, a taller and a shapelier
+edifice than Nelson's Monument. Look a little farther, and there is
+Holyrood Palace, with its Gothic frontal and ruined abbey, and the red
+sentry pacing smartly to and fro before the door like a mechanical
+figure in a panorama. By way of an outpost, you can single out the
+little peak-roofed lodge, over which Rizzio's murderers made their
+escape, and where Queen Mary herself, according to gossip, bathed in
+white wine to entertain her loveliness. Behind and overhead, lie the
+Queen's Park, from Muschat's Cairn to Dumbiedykes, St. Margaret's Loch,
+and the long wall of Salisbury Crags; and thence, by knoll and rocky
+bulwark and precipitous slope, the eye rises to the top of Arthur's
+Seat, a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold design.
+This upon your left. Upon the right, the roofs and spires of the Old
+Town climb one above another to where the citadel prints its broad bulk
+and jagged crown of bastions on the western sky.&mdash;Perhaps it is now one
+in the afternoon; and at the same instant of time, a ball rises to the
+summit of Nelson's flagstaff close at hand, and, far away, a puff of
+smoke followed by a report bursts from the half-moon battery at the
+Castle. This is the time-gun by which people set their watches, as far
+as the sea coast<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> or in hill farms upon the Pentlands.&mdash;To complete the
+view, the eye enfilades Princes Street, black with traffic, and has a
+broad look over the valley between the Old Town and the New: here, full
+of railway trains and stepped over by the high North Bridge upon its
+many columns, and there, green with trees and gardens.</p>
+
+<p>On the north, the Calton Hill is neither so abrupt in itself nor has it
+so exceptional an outlook; and yet even here it commands a striking
+prospect. A gully separates it from the New Town. This is Greenside,
+where witches were burned and tournaments held in former days. Down that
+almost precipitous bank, Bothwell launched his horse, and so first, as
+they say, attracted the bright eyes of Mary. It is now tessellated with
+sheets and blankets out to dry, and the sound of people beating carpets
+is rarely absent. Beyond all this, the suburbs run out to Leith; Leith
+camps on the seaside with her forest of masts; Leith roads are full of
+ships at anchor; the sun picks out the white pharos upon Inchkeith
+Island: the Firth extends on either hand from the Ferry to the May; the
+towns of Fifeshire sit, each in its bank of blowing smoke, along the
+opposite coast; and the hills inclose the view, except to the farthest
+east, where the haze of the horizon rests upon the open sea. There lies
+the road to Norway: a dear road for Sir Patrick Spens and his Scots
+Lords; and yonder smoke on the hither side of Largo Law is Aberdour,
+from whence they sailed to seek a queen for Scotland.</p>
+
+<div style="margin-left: 8em;"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"O lang, lang, may the ladies sit,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Wi' their fans into their hand,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or e'er they see Sir Patrick Spens<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Come sailing to the land!"<br /></span>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>The sight of the sea, even from a city, will bring thoughts of storm and
+sea disaster. The sailors' wives of Leith and the fisherwomen of
+Cockenzie, not sitting languorously with fans, but crowding to the tail
+of the harbour with a shawl about their ears, may still look<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> vainly for
+brave Scotsmen who will return no more, or boats that have gone on their
+last fishing. Since Sir Patrick sailed from Aberdour, what a multitude
+have gone down in the North Sea! Yonder is Auldhame, where the London
+smack went ashore and wreckers cut the rings from ladies' fingers; and a
+few miles round Fife Ness is the fatal Inchcape, now a star of guidance;
+and the lee shore to the east of the Inchcape is that Forfarshire coast
+where Mucklebackit sorrowed for his son.</p>
+
+<p>These are the main features of the scene roughly sketched. How they are
+all tilted by the inclination of the ground, how each stands out in
+delicate relief against the rest, what manifold detail, and play of sun
+and shadow, animate and accentuate the picture, is a matter for a person
+on the spot, and turning swiftly on his heels, to grasp and bind
+together in one comprehensive look. It is the character of such a
+prospect, to be full of change and of things moving. The multiplicity
+embarrasses the eye; and the mind, among so much, suffers itself to grow
+absorbed with single points. You remark a tree in a hedgerow, or follow
+a cart along a country road. You turn to the city, and see children,
+dwarfed by distance into pygmies, at play about suburban doorsteps; you
+have a glimpse upon a thoroughfare where people are densely moving; you
+note ridge after ridge of chimney-stacks running downhill one behind
+another, and church spires rising bravely from the sea of roofs. At one
+of the innumerable windows, you watch a figure moving; on one of the
+multitude of roofs, you watch clambering chimney-sweeps. The wind takes
+a run and scatters the smoke; bells are heard, far and near, faint and
+loud, to tell the hour; or perhaps a bird goes dipping evenly over the
+housetops, like a gull across the waves. And here you are in the
+meantime, on this pastoral hillside, among nibbling sheep and looked
+upon by monumental buildings.</p>
+
+<p>Return thither on some clear, dark, moonless night, with a ring of frost
+in the air, and only a star or two set<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span> sparsely in the vault of heaven;
+and you will find a sight as stimulating as the hoariest summit of the
+Alps. The solitude seems perfect; the patient astronomer, flat on his
+back under the Observatory dome and spying heaven's secrets, is your
+only neighbour; and yet from all round you there come up the dull hum of
+the city, the tramp of countless people marching out of time, the rattle
+of carriages and the continuous jingle of the tramway bells. An hour or
+so before, the gas was turned on; lamplighters scoured the city; in
+every house, from kitchen to attic, the windows kindled and gleamed
+forth into the dusk. And so now, although the town lies blue and
+darkling on her hills, innumerable spots of the bright element shine far
+and near along the pavements and upon the high fa&ccedil;ades. Moving lights of
+the railway pass and re-pass below the stationary lights upon the
+bridge. Lights burn in the Jail. Lights burn high up in the tall <i>lands</i>
+and on the Castle turrets; they burn low down in Greenside or along the
+Park. They run out one beyond the other into the dark country. They walk
+in a procession down to Leith, and shine singly far along Leith Pier.
+Thus, the plan of the city and her suburbs is mapped out upon the ground
+of blackness, as when a child pricks a drawing full of pinholes and
+exposes it before a candle; not the darkest night of winter can conceal
+her high station and fanciful design; every evening in the year she
+proceeds to illuminate herself in honour of her own beauty; and as if to
+complete the scheme&mdash;or rather as if some prodigal Pharaoh were
+beginning to extend to the adjacent sea and country&mdash;half-way over to
+Fife, there is an outpost of light upon Inchkeith, and far to seaward,
+yet another on the May.</p>
+
+<p>And while you are looking, across upon the Castle Hill, the drums and
+bugles begin to recall the scattered garrison; the air thrills with the
+sound; the bugles sing aloud; and the last rising flourish mounts and
+melts into the darkness like a star: a martial swan-song, fitly rounding
+in the labours of the day.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span>
+
+<h4>WINTER AND NEW YEAR</h4>
+
+
+<p>The Scots dialect is singularly rich in terms of reproach against the
+winter wind. <i>Snell</i>, <i>blae</i>, <i>nirly</i>, and <i>scowthering</i>, are four of
+these significant vocables; they are all words that carry a shiver with
+them; and for my part as I see them aligned before me on the page, I am
+persuaded that a big wind comes tearing over the Firth from Burntisland
+and the northern hills; I think I can hear it howl in the chimney, and
+as I set my face northwards, feel its smarting kisses on my cheek. Even
+in the names of places there is often a desolate, inhospitable sound;
+and I remember two from the near neighbourhood of Edinburgh, Cauldhame
+and Blaw-weary, that would promise but starving comfort to their
+inhabitants. The inclemency of heaven, which has thus endowed the
+language of Scotland with words, has also largely modified the spirit of
+its poetry. Both poverty and a northern climate teach men the love of
+the hearth and the sentiment of the family; and the latter, in its own
+right, inclines a poet to the praise of strong waters. In Scotland, all
+our singers have a stave or two for blazing fires and stout
+potations:&mdash;to get indoors out of the wind and to swallow something hot
+to the stomach, are benefits so easily appreciated where they dwelt!</p>
+
+<p>And this is not only so in country districts where the shepherd must
+wade in the snow all day after his flock, but in Edinburgh itself, and
+nowhere more apparently stated than in the works of our Edinburgh poet,
+Fergusson. He was a delicate youth, I take it, and willingly slunk from
+the robustious winter to an inn fireside. Love<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span> was absent from his
+life, or only present, if you prefer, in such a form that even the least
+serious of Burns's amourettes was ennobling by comparison; and so there
+is nothing to temper the sentiment of indoor revelry which pervades the
+poor boy's verses. Although it is characteristic of his native town, and
+the manners of its youth to the present day, this spirit has perhaps
+done something to restrict his popularity. He recalls a supper-party
+pleasantry with something akin to tenderness; and sounds the praises of
+the act of drinking as if it were virtuous, or at least witty, in
+itself. The kindly jar, the warm atmosphere of tavern parlours, and the
+revelry of lawyers' clerks, do not offer by themselves the materials of
+rich existence. It was not choice, so much as an external fate, that
+kept Fergusson in this round of sordid pleasures. A Scot of poetic
+temperament, and without religious exaltation, drops as if by nature
+into the public-house. The picture may not be pleasing; but what else is
+a man to do in this dog's weather?</p>
+
+<p>To none but those who have themselves suffered the thing in the body,
+can the gloom and depression of our Edinburgh winters be brought home.
+For some constitutions there is something almost physically disgusting
+in the bleak ugliness of easterly weather; the wind wearies, the sickly
+sky depresses them; and they turn back from their walk to avoid the
+aspect of the unrefulgent sun going down among perturbed and pallid
+mists. The days are so short that a man does much of his business, and
+certainly all his pleasure, by the haggard glare of gas lamps. The roads
+are as heavy as a fallow. People go by, so drenched and draggle-tailed
+that I have often wondered how they found the heart to undress. And
+meantime the wind whistles through the town as if it were an open
+meadow; and if you lie awake all night, you hear it shrieking and raving
+overhead with a noise of shipwrecks and of falling houses. In a word,
+life is so unsightly that there are times when the heart<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span> turns sick in
+a man's inside; and the look of a tavern, or the thought of the warm,
+firelit study, is like the touch of land to one who has been long
+struggling with the seas.</p>
+
+<p>As the weather hardens towards frost, the world begins to improve for
+Edinburgh people. We enjoy superb, sub-arctic sunsets, with the profile
+of the city stamped in indigo upon a sky of luminous green. The wind may
+still be cold, but there is a briskness in the air that stirs good
+blood. People do not all look equally sour and downcast. They fall into
+two divisions: one, the knight of the blue face and hollow paunch, whom
+Winter has gotten by the vitals; the other well lined with New-year's
+fare, conscious of the touch of cold on his periphery, but stepping
+through it by the glow of his internal fires. Such an one I remember,
+triply cased in grease, whom no extremity of temperature could vanquish.
+"Well," would be his jovial salutation, "here's a sneezer!" And the look
+of these warm fellows is tonic, and upholds their drooping
+fellow-townsmen. There is yet another class who do not depend on
+corporal advantages, but support the winter in virtue of a brave and
+merry heart. One shivering evening, cold enough for frost but with too
+high a wind, and a little past sundown, when the lamps were beginning to
+enlarge their circles in the growing dusk, a brace of barefoot lassies
+were seen coming eastward in the teeth of the wind. If the one was as
+much as nine, the other was certainly not more than seven. They were
+miserably clad; and the pavement was so cold, you would have thought no
+one could lay a naked foot on it unflinching. Yet they came along
+waltzing, if you please, while the elder sang a tune to give them music.
+The person who saw this, and whose heart was full of bitterness at the
+moment, pocketed a reproof which has been of use to him ever since, and
+which he now hands on, with his good wishes, to the reader.</p>
+
+<p>At length, Edinburgh, with her satellite hills and all the sloping
+country, is sheeted up in white. If it has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span> happened in the dark hours,
+nurses pluck their children out of bed and run with them to some
+commanding window, whence they may see the change that has been worked
+upon earth's face. "A' the hills are covered wi' snaw," they sing, "and
+Winter's noo come fairly!" And the children, marveling at the silence
+and the white landscape, find a spell appropriate to the season in the
+words. The reverberation of the snow increases the pale daylight, and
+brings all objects nearer the eye. The Pentlands are smooth and
+glittering, with here and there the black ribbon of a dry-stone dyke,
+and here and there, if there be wind, a cloud of blowing snow upon a
+shoulder. The Firth seems a leaden creek, that a man might almost jump
+across, between well-powdered Lothian and well-powdered Fife. And the
+effect is not, as in other cities, a thing of half a day; the streets
+are soon trodden black, but the country keeps its virgin white; and you
+have only to lift your eyes and look over miles of country snow. An
+indescribable cheerfulness breathes about the city; and the well-fed
+heart sits lightly and beats gaily in the bosom. It is New-year's
+weather.</p>
+
+<p>New-year's Day, the great national festival, is a time of family
+expansions and of deep carousal. Sometimes, by a sore stroke of fate for
+this Calvinistic people, the year's anniversary falls upon a Sunday,
+when the public-houses are inexorably closed, when singing and even
+whistling is banished from our homes and highways, and the oldest toper
+feels called upon to go to church. Thus pulled about, as if between two
+loyalties, the Scots have to decide many nice cases of conscience, and
+ride the marches narrowly between the weekly and the annual observance.
+A party of convivial musicians, next door to a friend of mine, hung
+suspended in this manner on the brink of their diversions. From ten
+o'clock on Sunday night, my friend heard them tuning their instruments;
+and as the hour of liberty drew near, each must have had his music open,
+his bow in readiness across the fiddle,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span> his foot already raised to mark
+the time, and his nerves braced for execution; for hardly had the
+twelfth stroke sounded from the earliest steeple, before they had
+launched forth into a secular bravura.</p>
+
+<p>Currant-loaf is now popular eating in all households. For weeks before
+the great morning, confectioners display stacks of Scots bun&mdash;a dense,
+black substance, inimical to life&mdash;and full moons of shortbread adorned
+with mottoes of peel or sugar-plum, in honour of the season and the
+family affections. "Frae Auld Reekie," "A guid New Year to ye a'," "For
+the Auld Folk at Hame," are among the most favoured of these devices.
+Can you not see the carrier, after half-a-day's journey on pinching
+hill-roads, draw up before a cottage in Teviotdale, or perhaps in Manor
+Glen among the rowans, and the old people receiving the parcel with
+moist eyes and a prayer for Jock or Jean in the city? For at this
+season, on the threshold of another year of calamity and stubborn
+conflict, men feel a need to draw closer the links that unite them; they
+reckon the number of their friends, like allies before a war; and the
+prayers grow longer in the morning as the absent are recommended by name
+into God's keeping.</p>
+
+<p>On the day itself, the shops are all shut as on a Sunday; only taverns,
+toyshops, and other holiday magazines, keep open doors. Everyone looks
+for his handsel. The postmen and the lamplighters have left, at every
+house in their districts, a copy of vernacular verses, asking and
+thanking in a breath; and it is characteristic of Scotland that these
+verses may have sometimes a touch of reality in detail of sentiment and
+a measure of strength in the handling. All over the town, you may see
+comforter'd schoolboys hastening to squander their half-crowns. There
+are an infinity of visits to be paid; all the world is in the street,
+except the daintier classes; the sacramental greeting is heard upon all
+sides; Auld Lang Syne is much in people's mouths; and whisky and
+short<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span>bread are staple articles of consumption. From an early hour a
+stranger will be impressed by the number of drunken men; and by
+afternoon drunkenness has spread to the women. With some classes of
+society, it is as much a matter of duty to drink hard on New-year's Day
+as to go to church on Sunday. Some have been saving their wages for
+perhaps a month to do the season honour. Many carry a whisky-bottle in
+their pocket, which they will press with embarrassing effusion on a
+perfect stranger. It is not expedient to risk one's body in a cab, or
+not, at least, until after a prolonged study of the driver. The streets,
+which are thronged from end to end, become a place for delicate
+pilotage. Singly or arm-in-arm, some speechless, others noisy and
+quarrelsome, the votaries of the New Year go meandering in and out and
+cannoning one against another; and now and again, one falls, and lies as
+he has fallen. Before night, so many have gone to bed or the police
+office, that the streets seem almost clearer. And as <i>guisards</i> and
+<i>first-footers</i> are now not much seen except in country places, when
+once the New Year has been rung in and proclaimed at the Tron railings,
+the festivities begin to find their way indoors and something like quiet
+returns upon the town. But think, in these piled <i>lands</i>, of all the
+senseless snorers, all the broken heads and empty pockets!</p>
+
+<p>Of old, Edinburgh University was the scene of heroic snowballing; and
+one riot obtained the epic honours of military intervention. But the
+great generation, I am afraid, is at an end; and even during my own
+college days, the spirit appreciably declined. Skating and sliding, on
+the other hand, are honoured more and more; and curling, being a
+creature of the national genius, is little likely to be disregarded. The
+patriotism that leads a man to eat Scots bun will scarcely desert him at
+the curling pond. Edinburgh, with its long, steep pavements, is the
+proper home of sliders; many a happy urchin can slide the whole way to
+school; and the profession of errand-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span>boy is transformed into a holiday
+amusement. As for skating, there is scarce any city so handsomely
+provided. Duddingston Loch lies under the abrupt southern side of
+Arthur's Seat; in summer, a shield of blue, with swans sailing from the
+reeds; in winter, a field of ringing ice. The village church sits above
+it on a green promontory; and the village smoke rises from among goodly
+trees. At the church gates is the historical <i>jougs</i>, a place of penance
+for the neck of detected sinners, and the historical <i>louping-on stane</i>,
+from which Dutch-built lairds and farmers climbed into the saddle. Here
+Prince Charlie slept before the battle of Prestonpans; and here Deacon
+Brodie, or one of his gang, stole a plough coulter before the burglary
+in Chessel's Court. On the opposite side of the loch, the ground rises
+to Craigmillar Castle, a place friendly to Stuart Mariolaters. It is
+worth a climb, even in summer, to look down upon the loch from Arthur's
+Seat; but it is tenfold more so on a day of skating. The surface is
+thick with people moving easily and swiftly and leaning over at a
+thousand graceful inclinations; the crowd opens and closes, and keeps
+moving through itself like water; and the ice rings to half a mile away,
+with the flying steel. As night draws on, the single figures melt into
+the dusk, until only an obscure stir and coming and going of black
+clusters is visible upon the loch. A little longer, and the first torch
+is kindled and begins to flit rapidly across the ice in a ring of yellow
+reflection, and this is followed by another and another, until the whole
+field is full of skimming lights.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER X</h2><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span>
+
+<h4>TO THE PENTLAND HILLS</h4>
+
+
+<p>On three sides of Edinburgh, the country slopes downward from the city,
+here to the sea, there to the fat farms of Haddington, there to the
+mineral fields of Linlithgow. On the south alone, it keeps rising, until
+it not only out-tops the Castle, but looks down on Arthur's Seat. The
+character of the neighbourhood is pretty strongly marked by a scarcity
+of hedges; by many stone walls of varying height; by a fair amount of
+timber, some of it well grown, but apt to be of a bushy, northern
+profile and poor in foliage; by here and there a little river, Esk or
+Leith or Almond, busily journeying in the bottom of its glen; and from
+almost every point, by a peep of the sea or the hills. There is no lack
+of variety, and yet most of the elements are common to all parts; and
+the southern district is alone distinguished by considerable summits and
+a wide view.</p>
+
+<p>From Boroughmuirhead, where the Scottish army encamped before Flodden,
+the road descends a long hill, at the bottom of which, and just as it is
+preparing to mount up on the other side, it passes a toll-bar and issues
+at once into the open country. Even as I write these words, they are
+becoming antiquated in the progress of events, and the chisels are
+tinkling on a new row of houses. The builders have at length adventured
+beyond the toll which held them in respect so long, and proceed to
+career in these fresh pastures like a herd of colts turned loose. As
+Lord Beaconsfield proposed to hang an architect by way of stimulation, a
+man, looking on these doomed meads, imagines a similar example to deter
+the builders;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span> for it seems as if it must come to an open fight at last
+to preserve a corner of green country unbedevilled. And here,
+appropriately enough, there stood in old days a crow-haunted gibbet,
+with two bodies hanged in chains. I used to be shown, when a child, a
+flat stone in the roadway to which the gibbet had been fixed. People of
+a willing fancy were persuaded, and sought to persuade others, that this
+stone was never dry. And no wonder, they would add, for the two men had
+only stolen fourpence between them.</p>
+
+<p>For about two miles the road climbs upwards, a long hot walk in summer
+time. You reach the summit at a place where four ways meet, beside the
+toll of Fairmilehead. The spot is breezy and agreeable both in name and
+aspect. The hills are close by across a valley: Kirk Yetton, with its
+long, upright scars visible as far as Fife, and Allermuir the tallest on
+this side: with wood and tilled field running high up on their borders,
+and haunches all moulded into innumerable glens and shelvings and
+variegated with heather and fern. The air comes briskly and sweetly off
+the hills, pure from the elevation, and rustically scented by the upland
+plants; and even at the toll, you may hear the curlew calling on its
+mate. At certain seasons, when the gulls desert their surfy forelands,
+the birds of sea and mountain hunt and scream together in the same field
+by Fairmilehead. The winged, wild things intermix their wheelings, the
+sea-birds skim the tree-tops and fish among the furrows of the plough.
+These little craft of air are at home in all the world, so long as they
+cruise in their own element; and like sailors, ask but food and water
+from the shores they coast.</p>
+
+<p>Below, over a stream, the road passes Bow Bridge, now a dairy-farm, but
+once a distillery of whisky. It chanced, some time in the past century,
+that the distiller was on terms of good-fellowship with the visiting
+officer of excise. The latter was of an easy, friendly disposition, and
+a master of convivial arts. Now and again, he had to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span> walk out of
+Edinburgh to measure the distiller's stock; and although it was
+agreeable to find his business lead him in a friend's direction, it was
+unfortunate that the friend should be a loser by his visits.
+Accordingly, when he got about the level of Fairmilehead, the gauger
+would take his flute, without which he never travelled, from his pocket,
+fit it together, and set manfully to playing, as if for his own
+delectation and inspired by the beauty of the scene. His favourite air,
+it seems, was "Over the Hills and Far Away." At the first note, the
+distiller pricked his ears. A flute at Fairmilehead? and playing, "Over
+the Hills and Far Away"? This must be his friendly enemy, the gauger.
+Instantly, horses were harnessed, and sundry barrels of whisky were got
+upon a cart, driven at a gallop round Hill End, and buried in the mossy
+glen behind Kirk Yetton. In the same breath, you may be sure, a fat fowl
+was put to the fire, and the whitest napery prepared for the back
+parlour. A little after, the gauger, having had his fill of music for
+the moment, came strolling down with the most innocent air imaginable,
+and found the good people at Bow Bridge taken entirely unawares by his
+arrival, but none the less glad to see him. The distiller's liquor and
+the gauger's flute would combine to speed the moments of digestion; and
+when both were somewhat mellow, they would wind up the evening with
+"Over the Hills and Far Away," to an accompaniment of knowing glances.
+And at least there is a smuggling story, with original and half-idyllic
+features.</p>
+
+<p>A little farther, the road to the right passes an upright stone in a
+field. The country people call it General Kay's monument. According to
+them, an officer of that name had perished there in battle at some
+indistinct period before the beginning of history. The date is
+reassuring; for I think cautious writers are silent on the General's
+exploits. But the stone is connected with one of those remarkable
+tenures of land which linger on into the modern world from Feudalism.
+Whenever the reigning<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> sovereign passes by, a certain landed proprietor
+is held bound to climb on to the top, trumpet in hand, and sound a
+flourish according to the measure of his knowledge in that art. Happily
+for a respectable family, crowned heads have no great business in the
+Pentland Hills. But the story lends a character of comicality to the
+stone; and the passer-by will sometimes chuckle to himself.</p>
+
+<p>The district is dear to the superstitious. Hard by, at the back-gate of
+Comiston, a belated carter beheld a lady in white, "with the most
+beautiful, clear shoes upon her feet," who looked upon him in a very
+ghastly manner, and then vanished; and just in front is the Hunters'
+Tryst, once a roadside inn, and not so long ago haunted by the devil in
+person. Satan led the inhabitants a pitiful existence. He shook the four
+corners of the building with lamentable outcries, beat at the doors and
+windows, over-threw crockery in the dead hours of the morning, and
+danced unholy dances on the roof. Every kind of spiritual disinfectant
+was put in requisition; chosen ministers were summoned out of Edinburgh
+and prayed by the hour; pious neighbours sat up all night making a noise
+of psalmody; but Satan minded them no more than the wind about the
+hill-tops; and it was only after years of persecution, that he left the
+Hunters' Tryst in peace to occupy himself with the remainder of mankind.
+What with General Kay, and the white lady, and this singular visitation,
+the neighbourhood offers great facilities to the makers of sun-myths;
+and without exactly casting in one's lot with that disenchanting school
+of writers, one cannot help hearing a good deal of the winter wind in
+the last story. "That nicht," says Burns, in one of his happiest
+moments,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">"That nicht a child might understand<br /></span>
+<span class="i10">The deil had business on his hand."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And if people sit up all night in lone places on the hills, with Bibles
+and tremulous psalms, they will be apt to hear<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span> some of the most
+fiendish noises in the world: the wind will beat on doors and dance upon
+roofs for them, and make the hills howl around their cottage with a
+clamour like the Judgment Day.</p>
+
+<p>The road goes down through another valley, and then finally begins to
+scale the main slope of the Pentlands. A bouquet of old trees stands
+round a white farmhouse; and from a neighbouring dell, you can see smoke
+rising and leaves ruffling in the breeze. Straight above, the hills
+climb a thousand feet into the air. The neighbourhood, about the time of
+lambs, is clamorous with the bleating of flocks; and you will be
+awakened, in the grey of early summer mornings, by the barking of a dog
+or the voice of a shepherd shouting to the echoes. This, with the hamlet
+lying behind unseen, is Swanston.</p>
+
+<p>The place in the dell is immediately connected with the city. Long ago,
+this sheltered field was purchased by the Edinburgh magistrates for the
+sake of the springs that rise or gather there. After they had built
+their water-house and laid their pipes, it occurred to them that the
+place was suitable for junketing. Once entertained, with jovial
+magistrates and public funds, the idea led speedily to accomplishment;
+and Edinburgh could soon boast of a municipal Pleasure House. The dell
+was turned into a garden; and on the knoll that shelters it from the
+plain and the sea winds, they built a cottage looking to the hills. They
+brought crockets and gargoyles from old St. Giles's, which they were
+then restoring, and disposed them on the gables and over the door and
+about the garden; and the quarry which had supplied them with building
+material, they draped with clematis and carpeted with beds of roses. So
+much for the pleasure of the eye; for creature comfort, they made a
+capacious cellar in the hillside and fitted it with bins of the hewn
+stone. In process of time, the trees grew higher and gave shade to the
+cottage, and the evergreens sprang up and turned the dell into a
+thicket. There, purple magistrates relaxed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> themselves from the pursuit
+of municipal ambition; cocked hats paraded soberly about the garden and
+in and out among the hollies; authoritative canes drew ciphering upon
+the path; and at night, from high up on the hills, a shepherd saw
+lighted windows through the foliage and heard the voice of city
+dignitaries raised in song.</p>
+
+<p>The farm is older. It was first a grange of Whitekirk Abbey, tilled and
+inhabited by rosy friars. Thence, after the Reformation, it passed into
+the hands of a true-blue Protestant family. During the Covenanting
+troubles, when a night conventicle was held upon the Pentlands, the farm
+doors stood hospitably open till the morning; the dresser was laden with
+cheese and bannocks, milk and brandy; and the worshipers kept lipping
+down from the hill between two exercises, as couples visit the
+supper-room between two dances of a modern ball. In the Forty-Five, some
+foraging Highlanders from Prince Charlie's army fell upon Swanston in
+the dawn. The great-grandfather of the late farmer was then a little
+child; him they awakened by plucking the blankets from his bed, and he
+remembered, when he was an old man, their truculent looks and uncouth
+speech. The churn stood full of cream in the dairy, and with this they
+made their brose in high delight. "It was braw brose," said one of them.
+At last they made off, laden like camels with their booty; and Swanston
+Farm has lain out of the way of history from that time forward. I do not
+know what may be yet in store for it. On dark days, when the mist runs
+low upon the hill, the house has a gloomy air as if suitable for private
+tragedy. But in hot July, you can fancy nothing more perfect than the
+garden, laid out in alleys and arbours and bright, old-fashioned
+flower-plots, and ending in a miniature ravine, all trellis-work and
+moss and tinkling waterfall, and housed from the sun under fathoms of
+broad foliage.</p>
+
+<p>The hamlet behind is one of the least considerable of hamlets, and
+consists of a few cottages on a green<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span> beside a burn. Some of them (a
+strange thing in Scotland) are models of internal neatness; the beds
+adorned with patchwork, the shelves arrayed with willow-pattern plates,
+the floors and tables bright with scrubbing or pipeclay, and the very
+kettle polished like silver. It is the sign of a contented old age in
+country places, where there is little matter for gossip and no street
+sights. Housework becomes an art; and at evening, when the cottage
+interior shines and twinkles in the glow of the fire, the housewife
+folds her hands and contemplates her finished picture; the snow and the
+wind may do their worst, she has made herself a pleasant corner in the
+world. The city might be a thousand miles away: and yet it was close by
+that Mr. Bough painted the distant view of Edinburgh which has been
+engraved for this collection:<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> and you have only to look at the cut,
+to see how near it is at hand. But hills and hill people are not easily
+sophisticated; and if you walk out here on a summer Sunday, it is as
+like as not the shepherd may set his dogs upon you. But keep an unmoved
+countenance; they look formidable at the charge, but their hearts are in
+the right place; and they will only bark and sprawl about you on the
+grass, unmindful of their master's excitations.</p>
+
+<p>Kirk Yetton forms the north-eastern angle of the range; thence, the
+Pentlands trend off to south and west. From the summit you look over a
+great expanse of champaign sloping to the sea and behold a large variety
+of distant hills. There are the hills of Fife, the hills of Peebles, the
+Lammermoors, and the Ochils, more or less mountainous in outline, more
+or less blue with distance. Of the Pentlands themselves, you see a field
+of wild heathery peaks with a pond gleaming in the midst; and to that
+side the view is as desolate as if you were looking into Galloway or
+Applecross. To turn to the other, is like a piece of travel. Far out in
+the lowlands Edinburgh shows herself, making a great smoke on clear
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span>days and spreading her suburbs about her for miles; the Castle rises
+darkly in the midst; and close by, Arthur's Seat makes a bold figure in
+the landscape. All around, cultivated fields, and woods, and smoking
+villages, and white country roads, diversify the uneven surface of the
+land. Trains crawl slowly abroad upon the railway lines; little ships
+are tacking in the Firth; the shadow of a mountainous cloud, as large as
+a parish, travels before the wind; the wind itself ruffles the wood and
+standing corn, and sends pulses of varying colour across the landscape.
+So you sit, like Jupiter on Olympus, and look down from afar upon men's
+life. The city is as silent as a city of the dead: from all its humming
+thoroughfares, not a voice, not a footfall, reaches you upon the hill.
+The sea surf, the cries of ploughmen, the streams and the mill-wheels,
+the birds and the wind, keep up an animated concert through the plain;
+from farm to farm, dogs and crowing cocks contend together in defiance;
+and yet from this Olympian station, except for the whispering rumour of
+a train, the world has fallen into a dead silence and the business of
+town and country grown voiceless in your ears. A crying hill-bird, the
+bleat of a sheep, a wind singing in the dry grass, seem not so much to
+interrupt, as to accompany, the stillness; but to the spiritual ear, the
+whole scene makes a music at once human and rural, and discourses
+pleasant reflections on the destiny of man. The spiry habitable city,
+ships, the divided fields, and browsing herds, and the straight
+highways, tell visibly of man's active and comfortable ways; and you may
+be never so laggard and never so unimpressionable, but there is
+something in the view that spirits up your blood and puts you in the
+vein for cheerful labour.</p>
+
+<p>Immediately below is Fairmilehead, a spot of roof and a smoking chimney,
+where two roads, no thicker than packthread, intersect beside a hanging
+wood. If you are fanciful, you will be reminded of the gauger in the
+story. And the thought of this old exciseman, who once lipped<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 391]</a></span> and
+fingered on his pipe and uttered clear notes from it in the mountain
+air, and the words of the song he affected, carry your mind "Over the
+hills and far away" to distant countries; and you have a vision of
+Edinburgh not, as you see her, in the midst of a little neighbourhood,
+but as a boss upon the round world with all Europe and the deep sea for
+her surroundings. For every place is a centre to the earth, whence
+highways radiate or ships set sail for foreign ports; the limit of a
+parish is not more imaginary than the frontier of an empire; and as a
+man sitting at home in his cabinet and swiftly writing books, so a city
+sends abroad an influence and a portrait of herself. There is no
+Edinburgh emigrant, far or near, from China to Peru, but he or she
+carries some lively pictures of the mind, some sunset behind the Castle
+cliffs, some snow scene, some maze of city lamps, indelible in the
+memory and delightful to study in the intervals of toil. For any such,
+if this book fall in their way, here are a few more home pictures. It
+would be pleasant if they should recognise a house where they had dwelt,
+or a walk that they had taken.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Reference to an etching in original edition.</p></div>
+
+<h5>END OF VOL. I.</h5>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson -
+Swanston Edition, by Robert Louis Stevenson
+
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@@ -0,0 +1,11548 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson -
+Swanston Edition, by Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition
+       Vol. 1 (of 25)
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+Commentator: Andrew Lang
+
+Release Date: June 6, 2007 [EBook #21686]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORKS OF R.L. STEVENSON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Marcia Brooks and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WORKS OF
+
+ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+
+SWANSTON EDITION
+
+VOLUME I
+
+
+_Of this SWANSTON EDITION in Twenty-five
+Volumes of the Works of ROBERT LOUIS
+STEVENSON Two Thousand and Sixty Copies
+have been printed, of which only Two Thousand
+Copies are for sale._
+
+_This is No. 1678_
+
+[Illustration: AN INLAND VOYAGE TITLE-PAGE DESIGNED BY MR. WALTER CRANE]
+
+THE WORKS OF
+ROBERT LOUIS
+STEVENSON
+
+
+WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
+ANDREW LANG
+
+
+VOLUME ONE
+
+
+LONDON: PUBLISHED BY CHATTO AND
+WINDUS: IN ASSOCIATION WITH CASSELL
+AND COMPANY LIMITED: WILLIAM
+HEINEMANN: AND LONGMANS GREEN
+AND COMPANY MDCCCCXI
+
+ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                               PAGE
+INTRODUCTION TO THE SWANSTON EDITION             ix
+
+
+AN INLAND VOYAGE
+
+
+ANTWERP TO BOOM                                   7
+
+ON THE WILLEBROEK CANAL                          11
+
+THE ROYAL SPORT NAUTIQUE                         16
+
+AT MAUBEUGE                                      21
+
+ON THE SAMBRE CANALISED: TO QUARTES              26
+
+PONT-SUR-SAMBRE:
+  WE ARE PEDLARS                                 31
+  THE TRAVELLING MERCHANT                        36
+
+ON THE SAMBRE CANALISED: TO LANDRECIES           41
+
+AT LANDRECIES                                    46
+
+SAMBRE AND OISE CANAL: CANAL BOATS               50
+
+THE OISE IN FLOOD                                55
+
+ORIGNY SAINTE-BENOITE:
+  A BY-DAY                                       62
+  THE COMPANY AT TABLE                           68
+
+DOWN THE OISE: TO MOY                            74
+
+LA FERE OF CURSED MEMORY                         79
+
+DOWN THE OISE: THROUGH THE GOLDEN VALLEY         84
+
+NOYON CATHEDRAL                                  86
+
+DOWN THE OISE: TO COMPIEGNE                      91
+
+AT COMPIEGNE                                     94
+
+CHANGED TIMES                                    99
+
+DOWN THE OISE: CHURCH INTERIORS                 105
+
+PRECY AND THE MARIONNETTES                      111
+
+BACK TO THE WORLD                               120
+
+EPILOGUE                                        122
+
+
+
+
+TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY IN THE CEVENNES
+
+
+VELAY
+
+THE DONKEY, THE PACK, AND THE PACK-SADDLE       143
+
+THE GREEN DONKEY-DRIVER                         149
+
+I HAVE A GOAD                                   158
+
+
+UPPER  GEVAUDAN
+
+A CAMP IN THE DARK                              167
+
+CHEYLARD AND LUC                                177
+
+
+OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS
+
+FATHER APOLLINARIS                              183
+
+THE MONKS                                       188
+
+THE BOARDERS                                    195
+
+
+UPPER  GEVAUDAN  (_continued_)
+
+ACROSS THE GOULET                               203
+
+A NIGHT AMONG THE PINES                         206
+
+
+THE COUNTRY OF THE CAMISARDS
+
+ACROSS THE LOZERE                               213
+
+PONT DE MONTVERT                                218
+
+IN THE VALLEY OF THE TARN                       224
+
+FLORAC                                          234
+
+IN THE VALLEY OF THE MIMENTE                    237
+
+THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY                        241
+
+THE LAST DAY                                    248
+
+FAREWELL, MODESTINE!                            253
+
+
+
+
+A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE                       257
+
+
+EDINBURGH:
+
+CHAPTER
+
+   I. INTRODUCTORY                              271
+
+  II. OLD TOWN: THE LANDS                       278
+
+ III. THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE                      285
+
+  IV. LEGENDS                                   291
+
+   V. GREYFRIARS                                298
+
+  VI. NEW TOWN: TOWN AND COUNTRY                305
+
+ VII. THE VILLA QUARTERS                        311
+
+VIII. THE CALTON HILL                           314
+
+  IX. WINTER AND NEW YEAR                       320
+
+   X. TO THE PENTLAND HILLS                     327
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION TO THE SWANSTON EDITION
+
+
+So much has been written on R. L. Stevenson, as a boy, a man, and a man
+of letters, so much has been written both by himself and others, that I
+can hope to add nothing essential to the world's knowledge of his
+character and appreciation of his genius. What is essential has been
+said, once for all, by Sir Sidney Colvin in "Notes and Introductions" to
+R. L. S.'s "Letters to His Family and Friends." I can but contribute the
+personal views of one who knew, loved, and esteemed his junior that is
+already a classic; but who never was of the inner circle of his
+intimates. We shared, however, a common appreciation of his genius, for
+he was not so dull as to suppose, or so absurd as to pretend to suppose,
+that much of his work was not excellent. His tale "Thrawn Janet" "is
+good," he says in a letter, with less vigour than but with as much truth
+as Thackeray exclaiming "that's genius," when he describes Becky's
+admiration of Rawdon's treatment of Lord Steyne, in the affray in Curzon
+Street. About the work of other men and novelists, or poets, we were
+almost invariably of the same mind; we were of one mind about the great
+Charles Gordon. "He was filled," too, "with enthusiasm for Joan of Arc,"
+says his biographer, "a devotion, and also a cool headed admiration,
+which he never lost." In a letter he quotes Byron as having said that
+Jeanne "was a fanatical strumpet," and he cries shame on the noble
+poet. He projected an essay on the Blessed Maid, which is not in "the
+veniable part of things lost."
+
+Thus we were so much of the same sentiments, in so many ways, that I can
+hope to speak with sympathy, if not always with complete understanding,
+of Stevenson. Like a true Scot, he was interested in his ancestry, his
+heredity; regarding Robert Fergusson, the young Scottish poet, who died
+so young, in an asylum, as his spiritual forefather, and hoping to
+attach himself to a branch of the Royal Clan Alpine, the MacGregors, as
+the root of the Stevensons. Of Fergusson, he had, in early youth, the
+waywardness, the liking for taverns and tavern talk, the half-rueful
+appreciation of the old closes and wynds of Old Edinburgh, a touch of
+the recklessness and more than all the pictorial power which, in
+Fergusson, Burns so magnanimously admired.
+
+But genealogical research shows that Stevenson drew nothing from the
+dispossessed MacGregors, a clan greatly wronged, from Robert Bruce's
+day, and greatly given to wronging others. Alan Breck did not like "the
+Gregara," apart from their courage, and in Alan's day they were not
+consistent walkers.
+
+Stevenson, as far as one can learn, had no Celtic blood; none, at least,
+of traceable infusion: he was more purely Lowland than Sir Walter Scott.
+His paternal line could be traced back to a West Country Stevenson of
+1675; probably a tenant farmer, who was contemporary with the Whig
+rising at Bothwell Bridge, with the murder of Archbishop Sharp, with
+Claverhouse, and Sir George Mackenzie, called "the bluidy Advocate." An
+earnest student of Mr. Wodrow's "History of the Sufferings," Louis did
+not find "James Stevenson in Nether Carsewell" among the many martyrs
+who live in the _Libre d'Or_ of the Remnant. But he had "a Covenanting
+childhood;" his father, Mr. Thomas Stevenson, was loyal to the positions
+of John Knox (the theological positions); and, brought up in these,
+Louis had a taste, when the tenets of Calvin ceased to convince his
+reason, of what non-Covenanters endured at the hands of the godly in
+their day of power.
+
+Every little Presbyterian, fifty years ago, was compelled to be familiar
+with the Genevan creed, as expressed in "The Shorter Catechism," but
+most little Presbyterians regarded that document as a necessary but
+unintelligible evil--the sorrow that haunted the Sabbath. I knew it by
+rote, Effectual Calling and all, but did not perceive that it possessed
+either meaning or actuality. Nobody was so unkind as to interpret the
+significance of the questions and answers; but somebody did interpret
+them for Stevenson, or his early genius enabled him to discover what it
+is all about, as he told me once, and it seems that the tendency of the
+theology is terribly depressing. A happier though more or less
+theological influence on his childhood he found in the adventures and
+sufferings of the Covenanters. It is curious (and shows how much early
+education can do) that he never was a little Royalist: always his heart,
+like Lockhart's, which is no less strange, was with the true blue
+Remnant. I can remember no proof that he was fascinated by the greatness
+of Montrose.
+
+As is well known, at about the age of sixteen he perverted a romance of
+his own making, "Hackston of Rathillet" (a fanatic of Fife), into a
+treatise: "The Pentland Rising, a Page of History," published in 1866.
+One would rather have possessed the romance.
+
+Stevenson came from the Balfours of Pilrig, and was of gentle blood, on
+the spindle side. An ancestress of his mother was a granddaughter of Sir
+Gilbert Elliot (as a "law lord," or judge, Lord Minto), and so he could
+say: "I have shaken a spear in the debatable land, and shouted the
+slogan of the Elliots": perhaps "And wha dares meddle wi' me!" In "Weir
+of Hermiston" he returns to "the auld bauld Elliots" with zest. He was
+not, perhaps, aware that, through some remote ancestress on the spindle
+side, he "came of Harden's line," so that he and I had a common forebear
+with Sir Walter Scott, and were hundredth cousins of each other, if we
+reckon in the primitive manner by female descent. Of these Border
+ancestors, Louis inherited the courage; he was a fearless person, but
+one would not trace his genius to "The Bard of Rule," an Elliot named
+"Sweet Milk" who was slain in a duel by another minstrel, about 1627.
+
+Genius is untraceable; the granite intellect of Louis's great
+engineering forefathers, the Stevensons, was not, like his, tuneful:
+though his father was imaginative, diverting himself with daydreams; and
+his uncle, Alan Stevenson, the builder of Skerryvore, yielded to the
+fascinations of the religious Muse. A volume of verse was the pledge of
+this dalliance. His mother, who gave him her gay indifference to
+discomfort and readiness for travel, also read to him, in his childhood,
+much good literature; for not till he was eight years of age was he an
+unreluctant reader--which is strange. The whole record of his life, from
+his eighteenth month, is a chronicle of fever and ill-health, borne
+always with heroic fortitude. His dear nurse, Alison Cunningham, seems
+to have been a kind of festive Cameronian. Her recitation of hymns was,
+though she hated "the playhouse," "grand and dramatic." There is a hymn,
+"Jehovah Tsidkenu," in which he rejoiced; and no wonder, for the refrain
+"Jehovah Tsidkenu was nothing to me," moves with the galloping
+hoof-beats of
+
+    "'Tis up wi' the bonnets o' Bonny Dundee!"
+
+I have, however, ascertained that this theological piece is not sung to
+the tune, "The cavalry canter of Bonny Dundee." When the experiment is
+made, the results are unspeakably strange.
+
+It need not be said, Stevenson has told us in verse and prose, that in
+childhood "his whole vocation was endless imitation." He was the hunter
+and the pirate and the king--throwing his fancy very seriously into each
+of his _roles_, though visualizing never passed with him, as with some
+children it does, into actual hallucination. He had none of the
+invisible playmates that, to some children, are visible and real. He was
+less successful than Shelley in seeing apparitions: but the dreams which
+he communicated to Mr. Frederic Myers were curious illustrations of his
+subconscious activities--his Brownies, as he called them. They told him
+stories of which he could not foresee the end; one led up to a love
+affair forbidden even by exogamous law (with male descent and the
+sub-class system), and thus a fine plot was ruined.
+
+Throughout life, he always played his part, as in childhood, with full
+conscious and picturesque effect, as did the great Montrose and the
+English Admirals, in whom he notes this dramatic trait. He was not a
+_poseur_; he was merely sensitively conscious of himself and of life as
+an art. As a little boy with curls and a velvet tunic, he read
+"Ministering Children," and yearned to be a ministering child. An
+opportunity seemed to present itself; the class of boys called "keelies"
+by the more comfortable boys in Edinburgh, used to play in the street
+under the windows of his father's house. One lame boy, a baker's son,
+could only look on. Here was a chance to minister! Louis, with a beating
+heart, walked out on his angelic mission.
+
+"Little boy, would you like to play with me?" he asked.
+
+"You go to ----!" was the answer of the independent son of the hardy
+baker.
+
+It is difficult to pass from the enchanted childhood of this eternal
+child, with its imaginative playing at everything, broken only by fevers
+whereof the dreams were the nightmares of unconscious genius. He has
+told of all this as only he could tell it.
+
+As a boy, despite his interrupted education, he laid the foundations of
+a knowledge of French and German, acquired Latin, and was not like that
+other boy who, _Euclide viso, cohorruit et evasit._ He was a
+mathematician! He never played cricket, I deeply regret to say, and his
+early love of football deserted him. He was no golfer, and a good day's
+trout-fishing, during which he neglected to kill each trout as it was
+taken, caused remorse, and made him abandon the contemplative boy's
+recreation. Boating, riding, and walking were his exercises. He read the
+good books that never lose their charm--Scott, Dumas, Shakespeare, "The
+Arabian Nights"; when very young he was delighted with "The Book of
+Snobs"; he also read Mayne Reid and "Ballantyne the Brave," and any
+story that contained _Skeltica_, cloaks, swords, wigs on the green,
+pirates and great adventures. He lived in literature, for Romance.
+
+His doings at Edinburgh University, and as a budding engineer, he has
+chronicled; he took part in snowball rows, in the debates of the
+Speculative Society, and in private dramatic performances, organized by
+his senior and friend, Professor Fleeming Jenkin. To "dress up" in old
+costumes always pleased him. He happened to praise the acting of a girl
+of fourteen, who, in her family circle, said, "Perhaps when I am old,
+like the lady in Ronsard, I will say 'R. L. Stevenson sang of me.'" His
+gambols "with the wild Prince and Poins" are not unrecorded. These were
+his Fergussonian years. Perhaps he might have expressed Burns's esteem
+for the "class of men called black-guards," as far as their
+unconventionality is concerned. He saw a great deal of life in many
+varieties; like Scott in Liddesdale, "he was making himsel' a' the
+time." With his cousin R. A. M. Stevenson, Walter Ferrier, Mr. Charles
+Baxter, and Sir Walter Simpson (a good golfer and not a bad bat), he
+performed "acts of Libbelism," and discussed all things in the universe.
+He was wildly gay, and profoundly serious, he had the earnestness of the
+Covenanter in forming speculations more or less unorthodox. It is
+needless to dwell on the strain caused by his theological ideals and
+those of a loving but sternly Calvinistic sire, to whom his love was
+ever loyal.
+
+These things bred melancholy, of necessity, and melancholy was purged by
+an almost unexampled interest, not in literature alone, but in the
+technique of style, and the construction of sentences and periods. Few
+of his confessions are better known than those on his apprenticeship in
+style to the great authors of the past. He gave himself up to the
+schools of Hazlitt, Lamb, Wordsworth, Sir Thomas Browne, Defoe,
+Hawthorne, Montaigne, Baudelaire, William Morris, and Obermann (De
+Senancour).
+
+This he did when he was aged about eighteen, when other lads are trying
+to write Latin prose like Cicero, or Livy, or Tacitus (Tacitus is the
+easiest to ape, in a way), and Latin verse like Ovid, or Horace, or
+Virgil. This they do because it is "part of the curricoolum," as the
+Scottish baronet said, of school and college. But I do not remember
+anecdotes of other boys with a genius for English prose who set
+themselves to acquire style before they deemed that they had anything in
+particular to say.
+
+In English essays at college a young fellow may be told by his tutor not
+to imitate Carlyle or Macaulay: the attempt to repeat the tones of
+Thackeray is most incident to youth. But to aim, like Stevenson while a
+student of Edinburgh University, at "the choice of the essential note
+and the right word," in exercises written for his own improvement, is a
+thing so original that it keeps me wondering. Like most of us, I have
+always thought, with Mr. Froude, when asked how he acquired his style,
+that a man sits down and says what he has to say, and there is an end of
+it. We must not write like Clarendon now, even if we could; our
+sentences must be brief. It would be affectation to write like Sir
+Thomas Browne, if we could; or like de Quincey; and nobody can write
+like Mr. Ruskin, when he is simple, or like the late Master of Balliol,
+Mr. Jowett.
+
+How far and how early Stevenson succeeded in the pursuit of style may be
+seen in his "Juvenilia": for example, in the essay on the Old Gardener.
+But one is inclined to think that he succeeded because he had a very
+keen natural perception of all things, was a most minute observer, knew
+what told in the matter of words, in fact, had a genius of his own; and
+that these graces came to him, though he says that they did not, by
+nature. He tells us how often he wrote and rewrote some of his
+chapters, some of his books. His _prima cura_ we have not seen; perhaps
+it was as good as his most polished copy. "Prince Otto" has even seemed
+to me, in places, over-written. He now and then ran near the rock of
+preciosity, though he very seldom piled up his barque on that reef. His
+style is, to the right reader, a perpetual feast, "a dreiping roast,"
+and his style cannot be parodied. I never saw a parody that came within
+a league of the jest it aimed at, save one burlesque of the deliberately
+stilted manner of his "New Arabian Nights." This triumph was achieved by
+Mr. Walter Pollock.
+
+Stevenson's manner was too appropriate to his matter for parody: for
+nobody could reproduce his matter and the vividness of his
+visualization. When his characters were Scots, Lowlanders or
+Highlanders, it seems to me that their style has no rival except in the
+talk of Sir Walter's countrymen. A minute student who knew Stevenson,
+has told me that he once suggested "chafts," where Louis had written
+"cheeks" or "jaws," and that the emendation was accepted, but his Scots
+always use "the right word," and never (in prose) say "tae" for "to," I
+think. Theirs is the good Scots.
+
+Perhaps I am biased in my doubt concerning the usefulness of his
+persistence in re-writing, by my regret that he destroyed so many of his
+romances, as not worthy of him. "King's chaff is better than other
+folk's corn" says our proverb. In his day, I bored him by pressing him
+to write more, and more rapidly; he never could have been commonplace,
+he never could have been less than excellent. But his conscience was
+adamant: no man was less of an improviser, as, fortunately, Scott was;
+had he _not_ been, there would not be so many Waverley Novels.
+
+Stevenson was hard on Scott, who wrote much as he himself did in
+boyhood. "I forgot to say," remarks the early Stevensonian hero, after
+describing a day full of adventures with Red Indians, "that I had made
+love to a beautiful girl." There is a faint resemblance to this
+over-sight in a long sentence of "Guy Mannering," which Stevenson
+criticized; but "Guy Mannering" was written in about six weeks, "to
+refresh the machine." Fastidious himself, conscientious almost to a
+fault in style, Stevenson's joy was in the romances of Xavier de
+Montepin and Fortune du Boisgobey, names which suggest
+
+    "Old crusading knights austere,
+    That bore King Louis company."
+
+When Dumas and Scott, and perhaps Mrs. Radcliffe, had been read too
+recently, Louis went to Fortune and Xavier, and, doubtless, to the
+father of them, Gaboriau. None of these benefactors of the race was a
+student of style, but they gave him what Thackeray liked, stories "hot,
+_with_," as he says, briefly but adequately.
+
+All of us are led, like that ancient people Israel, like all humanity,
+by a way we know not, and a path we do not understand. If some
+benevolent genie, who understood Stevenson's qualities and genius, could
+have directed his career, how would that spirit have educated him?
+
+For some reason not intelligible he was put on an allowance of five
+shillings weekly, for his _menus plaisirs_, till he was twenty-three
+years of age. He never was an expensive man (except in giving, wherein
+he knew no stint); his favourite velvet coats, his yellow shoes, his
+black shirts, with a necktie of a scrap of carpet, he said (I failed to
+guess its nature), were not extravagant. (The last occasion on which I
+saw him in the legendary velvet coat was also the only moment in which I
+viewed the author of his being. The circumstances were of the wildest
+comedy, but the tale can never be told; though in all respects it
+redounds to the credit of everybody concerned. Not one of us let a laugh
+out of himself.)
+
+But a young man in his position likes to do many harmless things which
+cannot be done on five shillings a week, and so he sought the haunts of
+"thieves and chimney sweeps!" he says, and wrote sonnets in those shy
+retreats, which are known, perhaps, in Scotland, as "shebeens." Why
+"shebeens"? Is the word Gaelic misspelled? Cases of "shebeening" are
+tried before the Edinburgh magistrates, and as "my circle was being
+continually changed by the action of the police magistrates" (he says)
+conceivably his was a shebeening circle.
+
+Another lad of his age, some eighty years earlier, was partial, like
+him, to taverns and old clothes. "They be good enough for drinking in,"
+said Walter Scott, when Erskine, or some other friend, ventured to
+remonstrate. Scott, like Stevenson, knew queer people, knew beggars--but
+had not one of them shaken hands with Prince Charles? Certainly, after
+Scott met Green Mantle, and sheltered her, as she came from church,
+under his umbrella (a piece of furniture which Stevenson can never have
+possessed), he left off his old clothes, and went into the best company.
+But R. L. S. did not delight in the good company of his native town; nor
+did he suffer gladly the conventional raiment of the evening hours.
+Green Mantle there was none, as far as we learn. He was not popular with
+the young Scots of his age, his biographer says so candidly; candidly
+have they said as much to me, yet they were good fellows.
+
+From childhood he had enjoyed all the indulgences of an only son, and an
+invalid; now he was "brought up short," and there were the religious
+disputes with a sire to whom he was devoted. The climate of his own
+romantic town (the worst in the world) was his foe; the wandering spirit
+in his blood called him to the south and the sun; he tells of months in
+which he had no mortal to whom he could speak freely, his cousin Bob
+being absent; he was unhappy; he was out of his _milieu_.
+
+What would the genie have done for him? Neither of the English
+Universities would have been to his taste; the rebel in him would have
+kicked at morning chapel, lectures, cap and gown, Proctors, the talk of
+"oars" and "bats"; manifestly Balliol was not the place for R. L. S.,
+though he might have been happy with his contemporary John Churton
+Collins. He, I remember--even to the velvet coat--was like Stevenson,
+and was a rebel. Grant Allen, too, would have been his contemporary--the
+only man in Oxford who took to Herbert Spencer, whom Stevenson also read
+with much edification.
+
+Yet it is clear that Stevenson should not have been domiciled in the
+paternal mansion of Heriot Row. The genie might have transported him to
+a German University, perhaps to Heidelberg.
+
+_Dis aliter visum_, and the result, for us, is his matchless book on
+Edinburgh. To see a copy thereof is to take it up, and read through it
+again; it is better at every reading.
+
+In 1871 he broke to his father the news that the profession of
+engineering was not for him. The Scottish Bar (1874-1875) was not more
+attractive, and in 1873 his meeting with Mr. (now Sir) Sidney Colvin
+(then Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge, and already well known
+as a critic), and with a lady, Mrs. Sitwell, to whom many of his most
+carefully written early letters are addressed, probably sealed Stevenson
+into the profession of literature.
+
+He has left this note on his prospects:
+
+     I think now, this 5th or 6th of April, 1873, that I can see my
+     future life. I think it will run stiller and stiller year by year; a
+     very quiet, desultorily studious existence. If God only gives me
+     tolerable health, I think now I shall be very happy; work and
+     science calm the mind and stop gnawing in the brain; and as I am
+     glad to say that I do now recognise that I shall never be a great
+     man, I may set myself peacefully on a smaller journey; not without
+     hope of coming to the inn before nightfall.
+
+
+                   O dass mein Leben
+        Nach diesem Ziel ein ewig Wandeln sey!
+
+              DESIDERATA
+
+          I. Good Health
+         II. 2 to 3 hundred a year
+        III. O du lieber Gott, _friends_!
+                  AMEN
+
+                     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+
+He wrote an article, this born wayfarer, on "Roads," which was accepted
+by P. G. Hamerton for the "Portfolio," but in November, 1873, "nervous
+exhaustion, with a threatening of phthisis," caused him to be "Ordered
+South" to Mentone--a lonely exile. Here he was joined by Mr. Colvin, and
+in Mr. Colvin's rooms, for I also was "ordered South," I first met this
+surprising figure. Our schooldays had just overlapped; he was a "gyte"
+(a child in the lowest form; "class" we called it), when I was in the
+highest, but I had never seen him, nor heard of him.
+
+In some rhymes of his later years, when Count Nerli was painting his
+portrait, Louis wrote:
+
+    "Oh, will he paint me the way I like, and as bonny as a girlie,
+    Or will he make me an ugly tyke; and be d---- to Mr. Nerli?"
+
+When first we met, he really was "as bonny as a girlie"; with his oval
+face, his flushed cheeks, his brown eyes, large and radiant, and his
+hair of a length more romantic than conventional. He wore a wide blue
+cloak, with a grace which hovered between that of an Italian poet and an
+early pirate.
+
+It was impossible not to discover, in a short conversation, that he was
+very clever, but, as a girl said once of her first meeting with another
+girl, "We looked at each other with horny eyes of disapproval." I
+thought that he was affecting the poet, and in me he found a donnish
+affectation of the British sportsman. He said later that I complained,
+concerning Monsieur Paul de St. Victor, that he was "no sportsman,"
+though his style was effulgent.
+
+We seldom met again, unhappily, for I was then with a family in whose
+company he would have been happy: all young, all kind, simple, and
+beautiful, and all doomed. Stevenson was then seriously ill, certainly a
+short walk fatigued him.
+
+The next news I had of him was in his essay, "Ordered South," concerning
+the emotions, apathies, and pleasures, on that then fairy coast, of a
+young man who thinks that his days are numbered. After reading this
+paper, I was absolutely convinced that, among the writers of our
+generation, Stevenson was first, like Eclipse, and the rest nowhere.
+There was nobody to be spoken of in his company as a writer. It was not
+his style alone--Pater's style had bewitched me in his first book--but
+it was the life that underlay the style of Stevenson.
+
+He came home, and found peace at home, and a less inadequate allowance,
+and he put up a brazen plate, "R. L. Stevenson, Advocate," on the door in
+Heriot Row. But his practice was a jest. Some senior men sought his
+society, his old friends were with him; his articles were welcomed by
+Mr. Leslie Stephen in "The Cornhill Magazine," and were eagerly expected
+by a few. Directed by Mr. Stephen, he found Mr. Henley in the Edinburgh
+Infirmary, and that friendship began which was of such considerable
+influence in his life and work.
+
+Mr. Henley's "maimed strength," his impeded vigour, even his blond
+upstanding hair and "beard all tangled," his uncomplaining fortitude
+under the most cruel trials, and the candid freshness of his
+conversation on men and books, won Stevenson's heart.
+
+In London, Stevenson appeared now and again at the Savile Club, then
+tenanting a rather gloomy little house in Savile Row. The members were
+mostly connected with science, literature, journalism, and the stage,
+and Stevenson became intimate with many of them, especially with the
+staff and the sub-editor (in those days) of "The Saturday Review," Mr.
+Walter Pollock; and with Mr. Saintsbury, Mr. Traill, Mr. Charles
+Brookfield, Sir Walter Besant; a little later with Mr. Edmund Gosse, who
+was by much his favourite in this little society. In addition to the
+chaff of the "Saturday" reviewers, he enjoyed the talk of Prof.
+Robertson Smith, Prof. W. H. Clifford, and Prof. Fleeming Jenkin.
+
+Stevenson never wrote, to my knowledge, in "The Saturday Review";
+journalism never "set his genius." For one reason among many, his manner
+was by far too personal in those days of unsigned contributions. He
+needed money, he wished to be financially independent, but, in the
+Press, his independence could not be all that he desired. He did not
+wield the ready, punctual pen of him whom Lockhart most invidiously
+calls "the bronzed and mother-naked gentleman of the Press."
+
+His conversation at luncheon, and after luncheon, in the Club was the
+delight of all, but, for various reasons, I was seldom present. I do
+remember an afternoon when I had him all to myself, but that was later.
+He poured out stories of his American wanderings, including a tale of a
+murderous lonely inn, kept by Scots, whose genius tended to
+assassination. He knew nothing of their exploits at home, but, then or
+afterwards, I heard of them from a boatman on Loch Awe. Their mother was
+a witch!
+
+At this period Stevenson was much in Paris, and alone, or with his
+cousin Bob dwelt at Barbizon and other forest haunts of painters. The
+chronicle of these merry days is written in the early chapters of "The
+Wrecker."
+
+In literature he was "finding himself," in his Essays, but the world did
+not find him easily or early.
+
+History much attracted him, as it did Thackeray, who said, "I like
+history, it is so gentlemanly." But it can only be written by gentlemen
+of independent means. Stevenson's favourite period was that of the
+France of the fifteenth century, and he studied later some aspects of
+that time in essays on Charles d'Orleans, in his admirable picture of
+Villon as a man and poet, and especially in "A Lodging for the Night,"
+and "The Sieur de Maletroit's Door," shut on a windy night in the month
+after the Maid failed at Paris (September, 1429).
+
+These unexcelled short stories really revealed Stevenson as the
+narrator, his path lay clear before him. But even his friends were then
+divided in opinion; some preferring his essays, and his two books of
+sentimental travel, "An Inland Voyage" (1878) and "Travels with a
+Donkey" (1879). These were, indeed, admirable in style, humour,
+description, and incident, but the creative imagination in the stories
+of Villon's night and of the Sieur de Maletroit's door, the painting of
+character, the romance, the vividness, were worth many such volumes.
+They were well received by the Press, these sketches of travel, but, as
+Monsieur Got says in his "Journal" (1857), "Les succes des delicats
+sont, meme quand ils s'etablissent, trop lents a s'etablir. La foule
+s'est tellement democratisee qu'il n'a pas de salut si l'on ne frappe
+brutalement." The needful brutality was not employed till Stevenson
+"knocked them" with "Jekyll and Hyde."
+
+"The world is so full of a number of things," that a few essays, two or
+three short stories in a magazine, a little book of sketches in prose,
+may be masterpieces in their three several ways, but they escape the
+notice of all but a few amateurs. Mr. Kipling's knock was much more
+insistent; he could not be unheard. It was not by essays on Burns and
+Knox, however independently done, that Stevenson could make his mark.
+
+Concerning these heroes, Scotland has a vision of her own, and no man
+must undo it; no man must tell, about Knox, facts ignored by Professors
+of Church History. Indeed, to study Knox afresh demands research for
+which Stevenson had not the opportunity. The Covenanting side of his
+nature appeared in his study of the moral aspect of Burns; his feet of
+clay. It is agreed that we must veil the feet of clay. As Lockhart says,
+Scott infuriated Mr. Alexander Peterkin by remarking that Burns "was not
+chivalrous." Stevenson went further, and annoyed the Peterkins of his
+day. His task required courage: it was not found wanting.
+
+In 1877, Stevenson had a new, if very narrow, opening. A friend of his
+at Edinburgh University, a young Mr. Caldwell Brown (so Stevenson named
+him to me; his real name seems to have been Glasgow Brown), came to the
+great metropolis to found a Conservative weekly journal. "London" was
+its name, but Edinburgh was its nature, and base, if a base it had. The
+editor was "in the air"; he knew nothing of his business and its
+difficulties; nothing of what the Conservative public, with sixpences to
+spend, was likely to want. He approached some of Stevenson's friends,
+and he gave the Conservative party scores of lively _ballades,
+villanelles_, and _rondeaux_. They were brilliant. Stevenson would not
+tell me the author's name; he proved to be Mr. Henley, who came to town,
+and, on the death of Mr. Brown, edited this unread periodical. There
+were "Society" notes, although Mr. Henley's haunts were not those of
+that kind of society, and one occasional contributor ventured to
+remonstrate about the chatter on the "professional beauties" of that
+distant day.
+
+The "New Arabian Nights," with all their humour, and horror, all their
+intellectual high spirits, and reckless absurdity, were poured by
+Stevenson into this outcast flutterer of a Tory paper, to the great joy
+of some of the very irregular contributors. (It was an honest
+flutterer--its contributors received their wages.)
+
+Then "London" died, and then seriousness enough came into the life of
+our Arabian author. In August, 1879, he disappeared; he went to America
+to marry the lady whom he had first met at Fontainebleau, whom he wedded
+at San Francisco (1880), and loved with all his heart.
+
+Reconciled to his father, he returned to Scotland. His health had been
+anew impaired by troubles and privations, and the rest of his life in
+the Old World was occupied by a series of maladies, vain roamings in
+search of climate, and hard work constantly interrupted.
+
+From his early childhood onwards, an army of maladies surrounded him,
+invested him, cut him off if, in an hour of health, he ventured on any
+sally; but they never overcame his invincible resolution. He was, as one
+of his favourite old authors says about I forget what emperor, "an
+entertainer of fortune by the day," making the most of every sunny hour,
+and the best of every hour passed under the shadow of imminent death. I
+remember that, soon after his marriage, he was staying in London at the
+house of a friend. Going to see him, I noted in him a somewhat anxious
+look, and I did not wonder at it! Mr. Henley was seated in a great
+chair, the whole of his face, from the eyes downwards, muffled in a huge
+crimson silk pocket handkerchief, of which the point covered his aureate
+beard.
+
+The room was a large room, and as Louis flitted about it, _more suo_, he
+managed to tell me privily that Henley had a very bad cold, and that he
+himself caught every cold which came within a limited radius. He _did_
+catch that cold, I heard, and when once such an invader entered his
+system, nobody knew what the end of it might be. His lungs usually
+suffered; hemorrhage was frequent and often alarming. In one of these
+accesses, unable to speak, he wrote, "Do not be frightened. If this is
+the end it is an easy one."
+
+Many scraps written by him in circumstances like these used to exist;
+some of them, though brief, were rich in the simple eloquence of
+indignation.
+
+Almost no climate did him any good: in 1880-1881, he chiefly suffered at
+Davos, and in the tempests of September, in Braemar. At Davos he had few
+consolations except the society of Mr. J. A. Symonds (the Opalstein of
+his essay on "Talk and Talkers") and his family. He was still attached
+to the indigent Muse of History: meditating a "History of the
+Highlands," and another book on that much trampled topic, the Union of
+1707. When one thinks of the commercial statistics necessary to the
+student of the Union--to take that grim aspect of it alone--_enfin_, "I
+have been there, and would not go." In the nature of things the History
+of the Union would have become a romance, with that impudent,
+entertaining rogue, Ker of Kersland, and his bewildered Cameronians, for
+the heroes: with Hamilton the waverer, and the dark, sardonic Lockhart
+of Carnwath, and Daniel Defoe as the English looker-on. The study of
+Highland history led to the reading of the Trial of James of the Glens,
+and the vain hunt for Alan Breck, and so to "Kidnapped."
+
+Stevenson felt and described the exhilaration of Alpine mornings, but
+his style was as sensitive as his bronchial apparatus, and he declares
+that when he tried to write, the style suffered from "yeasty inflation,"
+while his nights were haunted by the nightmares of his childhood.
+
+The next change carried him to a cottage near Pitlochry, whence he wrote
+that he was engaged in the composition of "crawlers." The first and best
+of these, "Thrawn Janet," was (with his "Tod Lapraik" in "Kidnapped")
+the only pendant to Scott's "Wandering Willie's Tale," in the northern
+vernacular. The tale has a limited circle; no Southern can appreciate
+all its merits, the thing is so absolutely and essentially Scots;
+especially the atmosphere. He said that it was "true for a hill parish
+in Scotland in old days, not true for mankind and the world." So it is
+fortunate to be a native of a hill parish in Scotland!
+
+"The Merry Men," as "a fantasia or vision of the sea," is excellent; the
+poor negro never was, to myself, "convincing." However, knowing
+Stevenson's taste in art, I designed for him, in Skeltic taste, an
+illustration (coloured) of the negro pursuing the wicked uncle (in the
+philabeg) over the crests of Ben Mor, Mull.
+
+Descending from these heights, Stevenson, like every bookish Scot,
+"ettled at" a professorial chair--that of "History and Constitutional
+Law," in the University of Edinburgh.
+
+The election was in the winter, the legist and historian occupied the
+autumn in composing the first half of "Treasure Island" (originally "The
+Sea Cook").
+
+Everyone knows the story: how, playing with his stepson, Stevenson drew
+a map of an island--an island like a _dragon seyant_; considered the
+caves and hills and streams, and thought of the place as a haunt of
+these serviceable pirates, who always dumped down their hard-earned swag
+on distant and on deadly shores, which they carefully abstained from
+revisiting. The legends of Captain Kidd's _caches_ have long haunted the
+imagination; the idea of Hidden Treasure has its eternal charm, and the
+story thereof was told, once for all, by Poe. Soon after "Treasure
+Island" appeared there was a real treasure hunt. The deposit, so I was
+informed, was "put down by a Fin," and Mr. Rider Haggard and I were
+actually paying (at least Mr. Haggard sent me a cheque) for shares in
+this alluring enterprise, when I learned that the Fin (or Finn? a native
+of Finland), had looted the church plate of some Spanish cathedral in
+America. Knowing this, I returned his cheque to Mr. Haggard; happily,
+for the isle was the playroom of young earthquakes, which had upset the
+soil and the landmarks to such a degree that the gentleman adventurer
+returned--_bredouille_! I hope Stevenson had nothing on.
+
+In the Highland cottage, during the rain eternal, he amused himself with
+writing his story, as Shelley, Byron, Polidori, and Mary Godwin had
+diverted themselves in Swiss wet weather, with their ghost stories,
+"Frankenstein," and Byron's good opening of a romance of a vampire.
+
+Visitors came--Mr. Colvin, Mr. Gosse, and Dr. Japp--they liked the tale
+as chapter by chapter was read aloud, and it was offered to a penny
+periodical for boys. A much better market might easily have been found;
+indeed, Stevenson "wasted his mercies." He was paid like the humblest of
+unknown scribblers; not even illustrations were given to the obscure
+romance running in dim inner pages of the periodical, and it appears
+that, as Theophile Gautier's editor said about one of _his_ narratives,
+"the _abonne_ was bored with the style."
+
+It was an audacious thing for a man of Louis's health, and intermittent
+inspiration, to send in half the "copy," meaning to send the rest later
+from Davos. He might not be able, physically, to write--the inspiration
+might vanish--and there was John Addington Symonds, eager for him to
+write on the "Characters" of Theophrastus! He might as well have
+written, or better, on the "Characters" of Sir Thomas Overbury, which
+are rather less remote from the ken of the British public than those of
+the Greek.
+
+If any young man or woman, not in possession of independent means, reads
+these lines of mine, let him or her take warning, and deserting history,
+morals, the essay, biography, and shunning anthropology as they would
+kippered sturgeon or the devil, cleave only to fiction!
+
+Biography also allured Stevenson--his literary tastes were nearly his
+ruin; he wanted, at Davos, to write a "Life of Hazlitt," and at
+Bournemouth a biography of Arthur, Duke of Wellington. But time and
+strength were lacking; nor have we R. L. S.'s mature opinion of the
+strategy and tactics of the victor of Assaye. The Muse of piratical
+enterprise returned, and "Treasure Island" reached its haven, with no
+applause, in the paper for boys.
+
+In the following May, Messrs. Cassell proposed to publish "Treasure
+Island" in book form, being spirited up, I suppose, by Mr. Henley, who
+was editing for them "The Magazine of Art," in which Stevenson wrote two
+or three articles. (I remember that a letter of my own to "The Editor,"
+as Mr. Henley had proudly signed himself, came automatically into the
+hands of the General Editor, a clergyman, if I do not err, and that my
+observations on the Art of Savages, lighting on the wrong sort of
+ground, sprang up and nearly choked Mr. Henley.) Stevenson was already
+the victim of the Yankee pirate, whose industry, at least, made his
+name, though wrongly spelled, known to the community which later paid
+him so well for his work, and displayed for him an enthusiasm of
+affectionate admiration.
+
+In 1884 he worked at the often rewritten "Prince Otto," and did a
+pot-boiler--"The Black Arrow"--which pleased the boy public of the paper
+much better than "Treasure Island." His time, from January, 1883, to
+May, 1884, was passed at Hyeres. In the end of November, "Treasure
+Island" was published in book form, and was warmly welcomed by the Press
+and by such friends of the author as retained, at least in letters, any
+smack of youth. It was forced, as far as "You must read it, please,"
+even on the friends of the friends, and so on in successive waves, yet
+it did not reach a wide circle: five or six thousand copies were sold in
+the first year. That is failure in the eyes of many of our novelists
+whose style does not bore the unfastidious _abonne_. Stevenson, in
+writing an article for a magazine on his "First Book," chose "Treasure
+Island," for books other than novels do not count as books. He spoke of
+terror as the motive and interest of the tale; the dread for each and
+all of a mutiny headed by his ruthless favourite, John Silver. Indeed,
+terror, whether caused by the eccentric furies of Mr. William Bones,
+mariner, or of the awful blind Pew with his tapping staff, runs through
+the volume as the dominant motive. But there is so much else: the many
+landscapes, so various and so vivid; the humour of the Doctor and the
+Squire, the variety of the seamen's characters; the Man of the Island,
+with his craving for a piece of cheese; above all, John Silver. He is
+terrible, this coldly cruel, crafty, and masterful Odysseus of the
+Pacific. His creator liked him, but I could have seen Silver withering
+on the wuddie at Execution Dock, or suspended from a yardarm, without
+shedding the tears of sensibility. "A pirate is rather a beast than
+otherwise," says a young critic in "The Human Boy," and I cannot get
+over Silver gloating on the prospect of torturing Trelawny. At all
+events, he is an original creation, and a miraculous portent in a boy's
+book.
+
+Fiercer attacks of illness in various forms drove Stevenson to
+Bournemouth; he was engaged, when he had the strength, on those plays
+(in collaboration with Mr. Henley) which prove that he had not the
+mysterious gift of writing for the stage. "I hope Mr. Henley wrote most
+of it," said a lady, as she left the theatre where she had seen "Deacon
+Brodie" played. Had Deacon Brodie been Archdeacon Brodie, there would
+have been more piquancy in the contrast of his "double life."
+
+This idea of the double life of each man had long haunted Stevenson. He
+told me once that he meant to write a story "about a fellow who was two
+fellows," which did not, when thus stated, seem a fortunate idea.
+However, happily, he continued to think of Hyde and Jekyll, yet knew not
+how to manage them. One night, after eating bread and jam freely, he had
+a nightmare; he saw Hyde, pursued, take refuge in a closet, swallow "the
+mixture as before"--the mysterious powder or potion--and change horribly
+into Jekyll.
+
+He set to work at once, and in three feverish days completed the first
+draft of his parable. In this the Hyde aspect was only Jekyll's
+unassuming disguise, adopted at hours when he wished to be a little gay.
+Stevenson burned his first draft, and rewrote the whole in three days.
+
+He knew, it seems, that the magical powder was an error. One sees how
+the thing could be managed otherwise, with a slight strain on the
+resources of psychical research. But in no way could the story have
+attained "the probable impossible," which Aristotle preferred to "the
+improbable possible."
+
+Stevenson sent the manuscript to my friend Mr. Charles Longman, who, in
+turn, sent it to me. I began to read it one night, in the security of a
+modest London drawing-room, and, naturally, it fascinated me from the
+first page. Then I came to a certain page, which produced such an
+emotion that I threw the manuscript on a chair, and scuttled
+apprehensively to the safety of bed. Later, a kinsman, who seldom read a
+book, told me that, living alone in a great Highland house, he had
+thrown down the printed book at the same passage, and made the same
+inglorious retreat. Anyone who knows the book, knows what the passage
+is.
+
+The story was produced in a paper-covered volume costing a shilling, and
+was little heeded till a reviewer in _The Times_ "caught this great
+stupid public by the ear," as Thackeray said.
+
+The clergy of all denominations did the rest. As they had preached on
+"Pamela," a hundred and forty years earlier, so they called the
+attention of their flocks to Hyde and to Jekyll. "Who are Hyde and
+Jekyll, my brethren? _You_ are Hyde and Jekyll. _I_ am Jekyll and Hyde;
+each of us is Jekyll, and, alas, _each of us is Hyde_!"
+
+Stevenson had long ago "found himself"; now he was found by the public.
+The names of his two rascally heroes (Dr. Jekyll is even less of a
+gentleman than Hyde) became proverbial.
+
+The gruesome parable occupied an interval in the making of what I
+suppose is his masterpiece--"Kidnapped." The story centres on the Appin
+Murder of 1751, about which he had made inquiries in the neighbourhood
+of Rannoch, where Alan Breck skulked after the shooting of Campbell of
+Glenure in the hanging wood south of Ballachulish. Stevenson could not
+learn who "the other man" was--the real murderer in the romance. I know,
+but respect the Celtic secret. The fatal gun was found, very many years
+after the deed, by an old woman, in a hollow tree, and it was _not_ the
+gun of James Stewart.
+
+(I have a friend whose great-great-grandfather was standing beside James
+of the Glens, watching the digging of potatoes. A horse was heard
+approaching at such a pace that James said, "Whoever the rider is, the
+horse is not his own." As he galloped past, the rider shouted: "Glenure
+is shot!" "Who did it I don't know, but I am the man that will hang for
+it," said James, too truly.)
+
+Of "Kidnapped," Stevenson said (as Thackeray said of Henry Esmond and
+Lady Castlewood, as Scott says of Dugald Dalgetty) that, in this book
+alone of his, "the characters took the bit in their teeth," at a certain
+point. "It was they who spoke, it was they who wrote the remainder of
+the story."
+
+They are spontaneous, they are living. Balfour, in the _scenario_ of the
+tale, was to have been kidnapped and carried to the American
+plantations. But he and Alan "went their ain gait." At the end, you can
+see the pen drop from the weary fingers; they left half-told the story
+of Alan, to be continued in "Catriona."
+
+A love of Jacobite times, and of Alan Breck's country, Lochaber,
+Glencoe, Mamore, may bias me; but in "Kidnapped" Stevenson appears to me
+to reach the height of his genius in designing character and landscape;
+in humour, dialogue, and creative power. As in his preceding stories,
+there is hardly the flutter of a petticoat, but the tale, like Prince
+Charles at Holyrood, can point to a Highland man of the sword, and say,
+"These are my beauties." I remember that Mr. Matthew Arnold admired the
+story greatly, and _he_ had no Jacobite or local bias.
+
+In May, 1887, Stevenson lost his father, and paid his last visit to his
+native country.
+
+It was during this period, in 1886 probably, that I, for the first time,
+saw Stevenson confined to bed in one of his frequent illnesses, and
+then, also, I saw him for the last time. So emaciated was he (we need
+not dwell on what seemed that "last face of Hippocrates"), that we could
+not believe there remained for him some crowded years of life and
+comparatively healthy and joy-bestowing energy. If the ocean was
+henceforth to roll between us, at least he said that we were always best
+friends when furthest apart; though, indeed, we were never so intimate
+as to be otherwise than friendly. It was never the man that I knew best;
+but the genius that I delighted in, "on this side idolatry." Always, in
+verse or in prose, in Scots or in English, he made one reader happy; by
+a kind of pre-established harmony of taste which might not have
+prevailed in the intercourse of every day's life.
+
+In August, 1887, Stevenson left England for ever, arriving at New York
+as a lion, hunted by reporters, whom, no doubt, he received with the
+majestic courtesy of his own Prince of Bohemia. Two versions of Jekyll
+and Hyde were being acted; all this was very unlike the calm
+indifference of his native land. It seems that in Jekyll, as "Terryfled"
+(in Scott's phrase), there is a "love interest"; love is alien to Dr.
+Jekyll, as to the shepherd before he found that Love was a dweller on
+the rocks. The Terryfication was, at least, an advertisement. To
+advertise himself, in the modern way, Stevenson was not competent. He
+never was interviewed as a Celebrity at Home, as far as I am aware.
+Indeed, he loved not society papers, and lit a bonfire and danced a
+dance around it in his garden, when some editor of a journal of that
+sort was committed to prison. His name is not mentioned, but Stevenson
+and I had against him a grudge of very old standing.
+
+Dollars in sufficient profusion were offered for his works, and in the
+Adirondack Hills, beside a frozen river in the starlit night, he dreamed
+of "a story of many years and countries, of the sea and the land,
+savagery and civilization." He thought of that old Indian marvel, the
+suspended life of the buried fakir, over whose grave the corn is sown
+and grown. He thought of an evil genius on whom this method should be
+tried in frozen Canadian earth. Thus, what seems like the far-fetched
+idea of a wearied fancy in "The Master of Ballantrae" was, from the
+first, of the essence of that bitter romance. The new conception fitted
+in with a tale, already dreamed of on the Perthshire moors, about the
+dark adventurous years of the Jacobite eclipse. The Prince was hidden in
+a convent of Paris, or flashing for a moment in the Mall, or cruising, a
+dingy bearded wanderer, in Germany or the Netherlands; while his
+followers were serving under French colours, under Montcalm or
+Lally-Tolendal. Men who had charged side by side at Gledsmuir and
+Culloden, might meet as foes in Canada or Hindostan. There is matter
+enough, in 1750-1765, for scores of romances, but who now can write
+them? But the Master did not now begin his deeds of bale. Stevenson's
+stepson, Mr. Osbourne, then very young, himself wrote "The Finsbury
+Tontine; or The Game of Bluff," and I was informed at the time by
+Stevenson's devoted admirer, Mr. McClure, that the book was completed by
+Mr. Osbourne for the Press. Then Stevenson took up the manuscript, and,
+as Mr. Osbourne says, "forced the thing to live as it had never lived
+before." Indeed, the style of "The Wrong Box" throughout, is Louis's
+style in such romantic farces as "The New Arabian Nights," a manner of
+his own creation.
+
+I seem to remember that I saw the finished manuscript, or perhaps an
+early copy of the book, and I did not care for it. Mr. Kipling rather
+surprised me by finding it so very amusing. Mr. Osbourne says that the
+story "still retains (it seems to me) a sense of failure," and that the
+public does not relish it. For my own part, on later re-readings, the
+little farce has made me laugh hysterically at the sorrows of Mr.
+William Pitman, that mild drawing-master, caught up and whirled away
+into adventures worthy of the great Fortune du Boisgobey. The scene in
+which he is described as the American Broadwood, a person inured to a
+simple patriarchal life, a being of violent passions; with the immortal
+John in the character of the Great Vance; and that joy for ever, Uncle
+Joseph, with his deathless thirst for popular information and
+instruction--these personages, this "educated insolence," never cease to
+amuse. Uncle Joseph is no caricature. But the world likes its
+sensational novels to be written with becoming seriousness; in short,
+"The Wrong Box" is aimed at a small but devoted circle of admirers.
+
+People constantly ask men who have collaborated how they do the
+business? As a rule, so some French collaborator says, "some one is the
+dupe, and he is the man of genius." This was not true, too notably, in
+the case of Alexandre Dumas, nor was it true in Stevenson's case. As a
+rule, one man does the work, and the other looks on, but, again, this
+was not the way in which Stevenson and Mr. Osbourne worked. They first
+talked over the book together, and ideas were struck out in the
+encounter of minds. This practice may, very probably, prove unfruitful,
+or even injurious, to many writers; they are confused rather than
+assisted. After or during the course of the conversations (when he had
+an ally), after reflection, when he had not, Stevenson used to write out
+a series of chapter headings. One, I remember, was "The Master of
+Ballantrae to the Rescue," an incident in a tale which he began about
+the obscure adventures of Prince Charles in 1749-1750. "Ballantrae to
+the Rescue"--the sound was promising, but I do not know who was to be
+obliged by the Master.
+
+After the list of chapters was completed, Mr. Osbourne used to write the
+first draft, "to break the ground," and then each wrote and rewrote, an
+indefinite number of times. The style, the general effect produced, are
+the style and the effect of Stevenson. "He liked the comradeship." More
+care was taken than on a novel of which I and another were greatly
+guilty. My partner represented Mr. Nicholas Wogan as rubbing his hands
+after a bullet at Fontenoy (as history and I made quite clear) had
+deprived Mr. Wogan of one of his arms. There is no such error in the
+"Iliad," despite the unnumbered multitude of collaborators detected by
+the Higher Criticism.
+
+In June, 1888, Stevenson sailed out on the Pacific in search of health,
+and followed the shining shadow through the isles and seas till he made
+his last home at Samoa. It was a three years' cruise among "summer isles
+of Eden." Perhaps no book of Stevenson's is less popular than his
+narrative of storm and calm, of beachcombers and brown Polynesian
+princes. The scenery is too exotic for the general taste. The joy and
+sorrow of Stevenson was to find a society "in much the same
+convulsionary and transitional state" as the Highlands and Islands after
+1745. He was always haunted, and in popularity retarded, by History. He
+wanted to know about details of savage custom and of superstitious
+belief, a taste very far from being universal even in the most highly
+cultivated circles, where Folklore is a name of fear. He found among the
+natives such fatal Polynesian fairy ladies as they of Glenfinlas, on
+whom Scott wrote the ballad. He found a medicine-man who hypnotized him
+from behind his back, which nobody at home had been able to do before
+his face. He exchanged stories with the clansmen--Scots for Polynesian;
+they were much the same in character and incident. He had found, in
+Polynesia, the way out of our own present. He met a Polynesian Queen--a
+Mary Stuart or a Helen of Troy grown old. "She had been passed from
+chief to chief; she had been fought for and taken in war"; a "Queen of
+Cannibals, tattooed from head to foot." Now she had reached the Elysian
+plain and a windless age, living in religion, as it were: "she passes
+all her days with the sisters."
+
+She was not a white woman: none of these people, so courteous and kind,
+were white, were up-to-date. In London and New York amateurs did not
+want to be told about them in Stevenson's "Letters from the South
+Seas." Stevenson "collected songs and legends": fortunately he also
+worked at "The Master of Ballantrae," in spite of frequent illnesses,
+and many perils of the sea. "The Master of Ballantrae" was finished at
+Honolulu; the closing chapters are the work of a weary pen.
+
+He had made tryst with an evil genius that was essential to the
+conception of the book, and with a hideous tale of fraternal hatred,
+told by a constitutional coward. Everything is under the shadow of
+thunder and lit by lightning. A glimpse of Allan Breck, and the
+babblings of the Chevalier Bourke, are the only relief. But the life is
+as clearly seen as life in Stevenson's books always is, for example when
+the guinea is thrown through the stained window pane, or the old
+serving-man holds the candle to light the duel of brothers who are born
+foes; or as in the final scenes of desperate wanderings in the company
+of murderers through Canadian snows. But the book, as Sir Henry Yule
+said, is "as grim as the road to Lucknow"--as it was intended to be.
+
+A fresh cruise, in the following year, bettered his health, and brought
+him the anecdote of a mystery of the sea which was the germ of "The
+Wrecker." He saw Samoa, and bought land there--Vailima--the last and
+best of his resting-places; and here he was joined, in 1891, by his
+intrepid mother. He was now a lord of land, a householder in his
+unpretentious Abbotsford, and "a great chief" among the natives,
+distracted as they were by a king _de facto_, and a king over the water,
+with the sonorous names of Malietoa and Mataafa. Samoan politics, the
+strifes of Germany, England, and the States, were labyrinthine: their
+chronicle is written in his "Footnote to History." My conjectures as to
+the romantic side of his dealings with the rightful king are vague and
+need not be recorded. "You can be in a new conspiracy every day," said
+an Irishman with zest, but conspiracies are better things in fiction
+than in real life; and Stevenson had no personal ambitions, and, withal,
+as much common sense as Shelley displayed in certain late events of his
+life. He turned to the half-finished "Wrecker" and completed it.
+
+When the story began to appear in "Scribner's Magazine" it seemed full
+of vivacity and promise. The opening scenes in the Pacific were like
+Paradise, as the author said, to dwellers in Brixton, or other purlieus
+of London. The financial school at which Loudon Dodd was educated in
+Stock Exchange flutters was rather less convincing than any dream of
+Paradise, but none the less amusing. At home in Edinburgh, with the old
+Scottish master of jerry-building and of "plinths," the atmosphere was
+truly Scots, tea-coseys and all, while the reminiscences of Paris and
+Fontainebleau, and the _grandeurs et miseres_ of "the young
+Americo-Parisienne sculptor" were perfectly fresh to the world, though
+some of the anecdotes were known to Stevenson's intimates. Mr. James
+Pinkerton is a laudable creation, with his loyalty, his innocence, his
+total ignorance and complete lack of taste, and his scampers too near
+the wind of commercial probity. The spirit of hustle incarnate in a man
+otherwise so innocent, the ideals caught from heaven knows what American
+works for the young, and the inspired patriotism, the blundering
+enthusiastic affection, make the early Pinkerton a study as original as
+it is entertaining.
+
+The sale by auction of the wreck, which, by arrangement, is to be
+Pinkerton's prey, the mysterious opposition of the other bidder, so
+determined to win an object apparently so worthless, is no less
+thrilling than the sale of the fur coat in Boisgobey's "Crime de
+l'Opera." But the reader knows why the fur coat is so much desired,
+whereas I remember being driven so wild by curiosity about the value of
+the wreck that I wrote to Louis, desiring to learn the secret. He would
+not divulge it, and when, after the voyage to the island and the
+excitement of knocking the wreck to pieces were over--when the secret
+came out, it was neither pleasant nor probable. That a mild British
+amateur of water-colour drawing should have taken part in a massacre of
+men, shot painfully with cheap revolvers, was an example of "the
+possible improbable," and much more of a tax on belief than the
+transformation of Dr. Jekyll. When I mildly urged this criticism, I
+learned, by return of post, from a correspondent usually as dilatory as
+Wordsworth, that I was a stay-at-home person ignorant of the world, and
+of life as it is lived by full-blooded men on the high seas. That was
+very true, but the amateur in water-colour was also a mild kind of good
+being. "What would I have done with the crew who were such compromising
+witnesses, and were butchered?" I would have marooned them.
+
+"The Beach of Falesa" is a revelation of unfamiliar life and character,
+and one is attached to the little brown heroine. There was to have been
+"a supernatural element," better, probably, than the device of the
+AEolian harps hung in the thicket. "I have got the smell and the look of
+the thing a good deal," he said, and he had got the style of his rough
+English narrator, who was, as he told the missionary, "what you call a
+sinner, what I call a sweep," but repented in time.
+
+A period of many projects followed; one, "The Young Chevalier," had a
+germ in "The Letter of Henry Goring" (1749-1750), with which I brought
+him acquainted, not knowing then that it was merely a romance by the
+prolific Eliza Heywood. It was in this tale that the Master of
+Ballantrae was to come to the rescue, and I think that a Scottish
+assassin (who lurks obscure in real history) and Mandrin, the famed
+French robber, were to appear, but only a chapter is published among
+other fragments. As it stands, Prince Charles's eyes are alternately
+blue and brown; brown was their actual colour--they were like
+Stevenson's own.
+
+Fortunately, the "Chevalier" was deserted for the continuation of
+"Kidnapped," a sequel which is as good as, or, thanks to the two
+heroines, Catriona and Barbara Grant, is even better than, the original.
+To think of it is to wish to take it from the shelf and read it again.
+It is all excellent, from the scenes where Alan is hiding under a
+haystack (suggested by an adventure of the Chevalier Johnstone after
+Culloden), and the first meeting with that good daughter of Clan Alpine
+and of James Mor, onwards.
+
+Stevenson excited a good deal of odium among fiery Celts by his
+scoundrel Master of Lovat. There is no reason, as far as I am aware, to
+suppose that Simon was a scoundrel, but, as a figure in fiction, he is
+very firmly drawn. The abortive duel of Balfour with the Highland
+Ensign, who conceives high esteem of "Palfour," is in the author's best
+manner, as are the days of prison in that "unco place, the Bass," and he
+was justly proud of the wizard tale of Tod Lapraik. The bristling
+demeanour of Alan Breck and James Mor (a very gallant but distinctly
+unfortunate son of Rob Roy), seems a correct picture. Indeed, James Mor
+was correctly divined, probably from letters of his published in Scott's
+"Rob Roy." It does not appear that Stevenson ever saw a number of
+James's letters in the character of a spy (a spy who appears to be
+carefully bamboozling his employers), which exist in the Newcastle MSS.
+in the British Museum. But the James of these letters is the James of
+"Catriona." The scenes with the advocates of James of the Glens, at
+Inveraray, read as if they had been recorded in shorthand, at the
+moment. David himself is, of course, the Lowland prig he is meant to be,
+but Catriona, at last, was a moving heroine, though Stevenson, justly,
+preferred to her the beautiful Miss Grant, and entirely overcame the
+difficulty of making us realise her beauty. The Princess, in "Prince
+Otto," is a fair shadow, compared to Miss Grant, and Stevenson at last
+convinced most readers that if he had omitted the interest of womanhood,
+it was not from incompetence--though it may have been from diffidence.
+
+At this time we used to receive letters from him not infrequently; he
+sent me the "Luck of Apemama," which he sacrilegiously purchased from
+its holder. This fetish, the palladium of the island, was in one point
+remarkable--a very ordinary shell in a perfectly new box of native make.
+Why it was thought "great medicine" and ignorantly worshipped, the
+pale-face student of magic and religion could not understand. However,
+it was the Luck of the island, and when it crossed the sea to Europe a
+pestilence of measles fell on the native population. There was no
+manifest connection of cause and effect.
+
+Stevenson's letters to me were merely such notes as he might have
+written had we both been living within the four-mile radius; usually
+notes about books which he needed, always brightened with a quip and
+some original application of slang. Occasionally there were rhymes. One
+was about a lady:
+
+    "Who beckled, beckled, beckled gaily."
+
+Another had the refrain:
+
+    "The dibs that take the islands
+    Are the dollars of Peru."
+
+One long and lively piece was on the Achaean hero of a fantastic romance
+by Mr. Rider Haggard and myself: the Ithacan, the Stormer of the City.
+Stevenson exclaimed:
+
+    "Ye wily auld blackguard,
+    How far ye hae staggered,
+    Frae Homer to Haggard
+    And Lang."
+
+How variously excellent he was as a letter-writer the readers of his
+correspondence know, and how vast, considering his labours and his
+health, that correspondence is! Often it is freakish, often it is
+serious, but except in some epistles of the period of his
+apprenticeship, it is never written as if he anticipated the publisher
+and the editor. Good examples are his letters to a reviewer, who,
+criticizing him without knowing him, wrote as if he were either an
+insensible athletic optimist, or a sufferer who was a _poseur_. "The
+fact is, consciously or not, you doubt my honesty.... _Any brave man may
+make out_ a life which shall be happy for himself, and, by so being,
+beneficent to those about him. And if he fail, why should I hear him
+weeping?" Why, indeed? Think of Mr. Carlyle! "Did I groan loud, or did I
+groan low, Wackford?" said Mr. Squeers. Mr. Carlyle groaned loud,
+sometimes with fair reason. Stevenson did not groan at all. If he
+posed, if his silence was a pose, it was heroic. But his intellectual
+high spirits were almost invincible. If he had a pen in his hand, the
+_follet_ of Moliere rode it. Mr. Thomas Emmett, that famous Yorkshire
+cricketer, has spoken words of gold: "I was always happy as long as I
+was bowling." Stevenson, I think, was almost always happy when he was
+writing, when the instrument of his art was in his fingers.
+
+Consider the deliberate and self-conscious glumness; the willful making
+the worst of things (in themselves pretty bad, I admit), that mark the
+novels of eminent moderns who thrive on their inexpensive pessimism, and
+have a name as _Psychologues! Ohe, les Psychologues_! Does anyone
+suppose that Stevenson could not have dipped his pencil in squalor and
+gloom, and psychology, and "oppositions of science falsely so-called,"
+as St. Paul, in the spirit of prophecy, remarks? "Ugliness is only the
+prose of horror," he said. "It is when you are not able to write
+'Macbeth' that you write 'Therese Raquin' ... In any case, and under any
+fashion, the great man produces beauty, terror, and mirth, and the
+little man produces----" We know what he produces, and though his books
+may be praised as if the little man were a Sophocles up to date, he and
+his works are a weariness to think upon. In them is neither beauty,
+mirth, nor terror, except the terror of illimitable ennui.
+
+None the less, I believe that the little men of woe are happy; are
+enjoying themselves, while they are writing, while they are doing their
+best to make the public comfortably miserable. If these authors were as
+candid as Stevenson they would admit that they enjoy their "merry days
+of desolation," and that the world is not such a bad place for them,
+after all. But perhaps before this truth can be accepted and confessed
+by these eminent practitioners in pessimism, a gleam of humour must
+arise on their darkness--and that is past praying for. There is a burden
+of a Scots song which, perhaps, may have sung itself in the ear of
+Louis, when life was at its darkest:
+
+    _"And werena my heart licht I wad die!"_
+
+Having finished "Catriona," at about the age that Scott had when he
+wrote his first novel, "Waverley," Stevenson thought of "Weir of
+Hermiston," ("I thought of Mr. Pickwick," says Dickens with admirable
+simplicity), and fell to that work furiously, as was his wont when a
+great theme dawned on him. But soon, as usual, came the cold fit; his
+inspirations being intermittent for some untraced reason, physical or
+psychological. Possibly he foresaw the practical difficulty of his
+initial idea: that the Roman Father should sit on the bench of Scottish
+Themis and try his own son on a capital charge. This would not have been
+permitted to occur in Scotland, even when "the Fifteen" were first
+constituted into a Court. If humane emotions did not forbid, it must
+have been clear that no Scottish judge (they were not "kinless loons")
+would have permitted his son to be found guilty. Conceivably this
+damping circumstance occurred to Stevenson. He dropped, for a while, the
+hanging judge, and began "St. Ives" as a short story. It was now that,
+early in 1893, under an attack of hemorrhage, Stevenson dictated his
+tale to his stepdaughter, on his fingers, in the gesture alphabet of the
+dumb. Perhaps this feat is as marvelous as Scott's dictating "The Bride
+of Lammermoor," _in tormentis_, to Will Laidlaw.
+
+We see how his maladies hung on Stevenson's flank, even in Samoa, where
+his health had so remarkably improved, and permitted to him unwonted
+activities. After a visit to Sydney, he took up "The Ebb-Tide" in
+collaboration with Mr. Osbourne, whose draft of the first chapters he
+warmly applauded. It is not one of his central successes. His pencil was
+dipped in moral gloom, but even to the odious Cockney scoundrel, Huish,
+his Shakespearian tolerance accorded the virtue of indomitable courage.
+He could not help filling the book full with his abundant vitality and
+his keen observation of the islands and the beachcombers. The thing, to
+use an obsolete piece of slang, is _vecu_. There were other projects,
+many of them, which dawned rosily, and faded into the grey; and there
+was the rich and copious correspondence dated from Vailima. His friends,
+no doubt, hearing of his good health, now and then, hoped to see his
+face again; the grouse on the hills of home were calling their eternal
+_Come back! come back!_
+
+Stevenson, who himself could live contentedly on so little, was the most
+open-handed of men, the most liberal and cheerful of givers; and whether
+to Samoans in distressful times, or to others who sought his aid, his
+purse was never closed; while his hospitality was like Sir Walter's.
+Probably, in his hour of greatest success, he never was among "the best
+sellers." But any financial anxieties which may have beset him were
+assuaged, and his heart was greatly held up, by the success of the
+beautiful "Edinburgh Edition" of his works, conceived and carried out by
+the energy of his friend of old Edinburgh days, Mr. Charles Baxter.
+
+His latest work was "Weir of Hermiston"; the plenitude of his genius
+shines in every page. He himself thought that this was his best work;
+so far as we can judge by the considerable fragment that exists, he
+was in the right. There is nothing immature, nothing here of the boy;
+he is approaching, in his tale, a fateful point of passion and
+disaster; his characters, especially the elder woman, the nurse, are
+entirely human, with no touch of caprice; they all live their separate
+lives in our memories. Then the end came. One moment of bewildered
+consciousness--then unconsciousness and death. He had written to me,
+some months before, a letter full of apprehensions of the fate of
+Scott and Swift; whether warned by some monitory experience, or
+whether he had merely chanced to be thinking of the two great men who
+outlived themselves. To him death had come almost as a friend in the
+fullness of his powers; there was no touch of weakness or decay, and
+he was mourned like a king by his Samoans, by his family, by all who
+had known him, and by many thousands who had never seen his face.
+There was mourning at home in Scotland (where we hoped against hope
+that the news was untrue), in England, in Europe, in America, in
+Australia and the Isles. He who had been such "a friendly writer," who
+had created for us so many friends in his characters, had made more
+friends for himself, friends more and more various in age, race,
+tastes, character, and temper, than any British writer, perhaps, since
+Dickens. He was taken from us untimely; broken was our strong hope in
+the future gifts of his genius, and there was a pain that does not
+attend the peaceful passing, in the fullness of years and wisdom and
+honour, of an immortal like Tennyson.
+
+Any attempt by a contemporary to "place" Stevenson, to give him his
+"class" in English literature, would be a folly. The future must judge
+for itself, and, if we may estimate the taste of the future by that of
+the present, the reading public will not often look behind the most
+recent publications of its own day. But _les delicats_ will look back on
+Stevenson as they now look back on Fielding, who, to my simple thinking,
+remains unsurpassed as a novelist; and as they turn to Lamb and Hazlitt
+as essayists. The poet is, of course, at his best immortal--time cannot
+stale _Beowulf_, or the nameless lyrists of the fourteenth century, or
+Chaucer, or Spenser, and so with the rest, _la mort n'y mord_. But it is
+as a writer of prose that Stevenson must be remembered. If he is not the
+master British essayist of the later nineteenth century, I really cannot
+imagine who is to be preferred to him. His vivacity, vitality, his
+original reflections on life, his personal and fascinating style, claim
+for him the crown. Nobody, perhaps, places him beside Lamb, and he would
+not have dreamed of being equaled in renown with Hazlitt, while he is,
+I conceive, more generally sympathetic than Mr. Pater, whose place is
+apart, whose province is entirely his own. When we think of Stevenson as
+a novelist, there is this conspicuous drawback, that he never did write
+a novel on characters and conditions in the mid-stream of the life that
+was contemporary with himself. He does not compete, therefore, with
+Thackeray and Dickens, Mr. Hardy and Mr. Meredith, but Scott is also no
+competitor.
+
+"St. Ronan's Well" is Scott's only novel that deals with precisely
+contemporary life, and "St. Ronan's Well" is a kind of backwater; the
+story of a remote contemporary watering-place, of local squireens, and
+of a tragedy, mangled in deference to James Ballantyne. Scott did not
+often care to trust himself out of the last echoes of "the pipes that
+played for Charlie," and though his knowledge of contemporary life was
+infinitely wider than Stevenson's, we see many good reasons for his
+abstention from use of his knowledge. For example, it is obvious that he
+could not attempt a romance of the War in the Peninsula, and of life in
+London, let us say, while Wellington was holding Torres Vedras. Even
+among Stevenson's abandoned projects, there is not, I think, one which
+deals with English society in the 'eighties. His health and his fugitive
+life imposed on him those limitations against which his taste did not
+rebel, for his taste led him to the past, and to adventure in a present
+not English, but exotic. He is not in the same field, so to speak, as
+Richardson and Fielding, Dickens and Thackeray, Mr. Hardy and Mr.
+Meredith; and their field, the great living world of their time, is what
+the general reader wants the novelist to deal with as he best may.
+
+Shakespeare, to be sure, wrote no drama on Elizabethan times in England;
+we must go to Heywood and Ben Jonson for the drama of his contemporary
+world. Many circumstances caused Stevenson, when at his best, to be a
+historical novelist, and he is, since Scott and Thackeray, the best
+historical novelist whom we have.
+
+Add to all this his notable eminence in tales of shorter scope; in
+essays, whether on life or on literature, so various and original, so
+graceful and so strong; add the fantasies of his fables, and remember
+that almost all he did is good--and we must, I think, give to Stevenson
+a very high place in the literature of his century.
+
+Of his verse I have hitherto said nothing, and I do not think that if he
+had written verse alone, his place would have been highly distinguished.
+His "Child's Garden of Verse" is a little masterpiece in a _genre_ of
+his own invention. His verses in Scots are full of humour, and he had a
+complete mastery of the old Northern English of the Lowlands. His more
+serious poems often contain ideas and the expression of moods which he
+handled better, I think, in his prose. Even the story of "Ticonderoga" I
+would rather have received from him in prose than in his ballad measure.
+Possibly I am prejudiced a little by his willfulness in giving to a
+Cameron the part of the generous hero; true to his word, in spite of the
+desire to avenge a brother, and of the thrice-repeated monition of the
+dead. It is not that I grudge any glory to the children of Lochiel, a
+clan, in General Wolfe's opinion, the bravest where all were brave, a
+clan of constant and boundless loyalty. But in Stevenson's own note to
+his poem, the Cameron "swears by his sword and Ben Cruachan," and
+"Cruachan" is a slogan of the Campbells. The hero, as a matter of fact,
+was a Campbell of Inverawe. "Between the name of _Cameron_ and that of
+_Campbell_ the Muse will never hesitate," says Stevenson. One name means
+"Wry mouth," the other "Crooked nose"; so far, the Muse has a poor
+choice! But the tale is a tale of the Campbells, of Clan Diarmaid, and
+the Muse must adhere to the historic truth.
+
+This essay must not close on a difference of opinion concerning
+historical events--a jarring note.
+
+There are points enough in Stevenson's character and opinions which I
+have not touched; such as his religious views. He never mentioned the
+topic of religion in my hearing; it is to his printed words that the
+reader must turn, and he cannot but perceive that Stevenson's was a
+deeply religious nature. With his faith, whatever its tenets may have
+been, was implicated his uneasily active conscience; his sense of duty.
+This appears to have directed his life; and was practically the same
+thing as his sense of honour. Honour, I conceive, is, in a phrase of
+Aristotle's, duty "with a bloom on it."
+
+Readers of his Letters, and of his Biography by his cousin, Mr. Balfour;
+readers of his essays, and of his novels, must see that he was keenly
+interested in cases of conscience; in the right course to steer in an
+apparent conflict of duties. To say that his theory of the right course,
+in a hypothetical instance, was always the same as my own would be to
+abuse the confidence of the reader. As Preston-grange observes: "I would
+never charge myself with Mr. David's conscience; and if you could cast
+some part of it (as you went by) in a moss bog, you would find yourself
+to ride much easier without it"; and _not_, perhaps, always in the wrong
+direction. There is a case of conscience in "The Wrecker," something
+about opium-smuggling, and the conscience of Mr. Loudon Dodd (a truly
+Balfourian character), which I have studied, aided by other casuists,
+for a summer's day. We never could agree as to what the case really was,
+as to what was the moral issue.
+
+Casuistry may not be my strong point. I have found myself between no
+less authorities than a Chancellor of England and a learned Jesuit, both
+of whom, I thought, would certainly accept my view of a very unusual
+case of conduct. A certain cleric, in his ecclesiastical duties,
+happened to overhear an automatically uttered remark by another person;
+who never meant to speak or to be overheard. The cleric acted on this
+information, with results distressing to a pair of true lovers. I
+maintained that he did wrong. "There was no appeal," I said, "to the
+umpire. Nobody in the field asked 'How's that?'" But the Chancellor and
+the learned Jesuit backed the clergyman.
+
+Now, I never knew for certain how "Mr. David's conscience" would decide,
+but I think he would have been with me on this occasion, and with the
+Rules of the Game.
+
+There was a very pleasant trait in Stevenson's character which, perhaps,
+does not display itself in most of his writings; his great affection for
+children. In "A Child's Garden of Verse," delightful as it is, and not
+to be read without "a great inclination to cry," the child is himself,
+the child "that is gone." But, in an early letter, he writes: "Kids is
+what is the matter with me ... Children are too good to be true." He had
+a natural infatuation, so to say, for children as children, which many
+men of the pen overcome with no apparent difficulty. He could not
+overcome it; little boys and girls were his delight, and he was theirs.
+At Molokai, the Leper Island, he played croquet with the little girls;
+refusing to wear gloves, lest he should remind them of their condition.
+Sensitive and weak in body as he was, Nelson was not more fearless. It
+was equally characteristic of another quality of his, the open hand,
+that he gave a grand piano to these leper children.
+
+He says:
+
+    "But the nearest friends are the auldest friends,
+    And the grave's the place to seek them."
+
+Among the nearest and the oldest friends of his I never was, but to few
+friends, nearer and older, does my _desiderium_ go back so frequently;
+simply because almost every day brings something newly learned or known,
+which would have appealed most to his unequaled breadth of knowledge
+and interest and sympathy.
+
+ANDREW LANG.
+
+
+
+
+AN INLAND VOYAGE
+
+
+    "Thus sang they in the English boat."
+
+    MARVELL.
+
+
+
+_TO_
+
+_SIR WALTER GRINDLAY SIMPSON, BART._
+
+
+_My dear "Cigarette,"_
+
+_It was enough that you should have shared so liberally in the rains and
+portages of our voyage; that you should have had so hard a paddle to
+recover the derelict "Arethusa" on the flooded Oise: and that you should
+thenceforth have piloted a mere wreck of mankind to Origny
+Sainte-Benoite and a supper so eagerly desired. It was perhaps more than
+enough, as you once somewhat piteously complained, that I should have
+set down all the strong language to you, and kept the appropriate
+reflections for myself. I could not in decency expose you to share the
+disgrace of another and more public shipwreck. But now that this voyage
+of ours is going into a cheap edition, that peril, we shall hope, is at
+an end, and I may put your name on the burgee._
+
+_But I cannot pause till I have lamented the fate of our two ships. That,
+sir, was not a fortunate day when we projected the possession of a canal
+barge; it was not a fortunate day when we shared our daydream with the
+most hopeful of daydreamers. For a while, indeed, the world looked
+smilingly. The barge was procured and christened, and as the "Eleven
+Thousand Virgins of Cologne," lay for some months, the admired of all
+admirers, in a pleasant river and under the walls of an ancient town. M.
+Mattras, the accomplished carpenter of Moret, had made her a centre of
+emulous labour; and you will not have forgotten the amount of sweet
+champagne consumed in the inn at the bridge end, to give zeal to the
+workmen and speed to the work. On the financial aspect I would_ _not
+willingly dwell. The "Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne" rotted in the
+stream where she was beautified. She felt not the impulse of the breeze;
+she was never harnessed to the patent track-horse. And when at length
+she was sold, by the indignant carpenter of Moret, there were sold along
+with her the "Arethusa" and the "Cigarette", she of cedar, she, as we
+knew so keenly on a portage, of solid-hearted English oak. Now these
+historic vessels fly the tricolour and are known by new and alien
+names._
+
+_R. L. S._
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
+
+
+To equip so small a book with a preface is, I am half afraid, to sin
+against proportion. But a preface is more than an author can resist, for
+it is the reward of his labours. When the foundation-stone is laid, the
+architect appears with his plans, and struts for an hour before the
+public eye. So with the writer in his preface: he may have never a word
+to say, but he must show himself for a moment in the portico, hat in
+hand, and with an urbane demeanour.
+
+It is best, in such circumstances, to represent a delicate shade of
+manner between humility and superiority: as if the book had been written
+by someone else, and you had merely run over it and inserted what was
+good. But for my part I have not yet learned the trick to that
+perfection; I am not yet able to dissemble the warmth of my sentiments
+towards a reader; and if I meet him on the threshold, it is to invite
+him in with country cordiality.
+
+To say truth, I had no sooner finished reading this little book in
+proof, than I was seized upon by a distressing apprehension. It occurred
+to me that I might not only be the first to read these pages, but the
+last as well; that I might have pioneered this very smiling tract of
+country all in vain, and find not a soul to follow in my steps. The more
+I thought, the more I disliked the notion; until the distaste grew into
+a sort of panic terror, and I rushed into this Preface, which is no more
+than an advertisement for readers.
+
+What am I to say for my book? Caleb and Joshua brought back from
+Palestine a formidable bunch of grapes; alas! my book produces naught so
+nourishing; and for the matter of that, we live in an age when people
+prefer a definition to any quantity of fruit.
+
+I wonder, would a negative be found enticing? for, from the negative
+point of view, I flatter myself this volume has a certain stamp.
+Although it runs to considerably upwards of two hundred pages, it
+contains not a single reference to the imbecility of God's universe, nor
+so much as a single hint that I could have made a better one myself.--I
+really do not know where my head can have been. I seem to have forgotten
+all that makes it glorious to be man.--'Tis an omission that renders the
+book philosophically unimportant; but I am in hopes the eccentricity may
+please in frivolous circles.
+
+To the friend who accompanied me I owe many thanks already, indeed I
+wish I owed him nothing else; but at this moment I feel towards him an
+almost exaggerated tenderness. He, at least, will become my reader:--if
+it were only to follow his own travels alongside of mine.
+
+R. L. S.
+
+
+
+
+AN INLAND VOYAGE
+
+ANTWERP TO BOOM
+
+
+We made a great stir in Antwerp Docks. A stevedore and a lot of dock
+porters took up the two canoes, and ran with them for the slip. A crowd
+of children followed cheering. The _Cigarette_ went off in a splash and
+a bubble of small breaking water. Next moment the _Arethusa_ was after
+her. A steamer was coming down, men on the paddle-box shouted hoarse
+warnings, the stevedore and his porters were bawling from the quay. But
+in a stroke or two the canoes were away out in the middle of the
+Scheldt, and all steamers, and stevedores, and other long-shore vanities
+were left behind.
+
+The sun shone brightly; the tide was making--four jolly miles an hour;
+the wind blew steadily, with occasional squalls. For my part, I had
+never been in a canoe under sail in my life; and my first experiment out
+in the middle of this big river was not made without some trepidation.
+What would happen when the wind first caught my little canvas? I suppose
+it was almost as trying a venture into the regions of the unknown as to
+publish a first book, or to marry. But my doubts were not of long
+duration; and in five minutes you will not be surprised to learn that I
+had tied my sheet.
+
+I own I was a little struck by this circumstance myself; of course, in
+company with the rest of my fellow-men, I had always tied the sheet in a
+sailing-boat; but in so little and crank a concern as a canoe, and with
+these charging squalls, I was not prepared to find myself follow the
+same principle; and it inspired me with some contemptuous views of our
+regard for life. It is certainly easier to smoke with the sheet
+fastened; but I had never before weighed a comfortable pipe of tobacco
+against an obvious risk, and gravely elected for the comfortable pipe.
+It is a commonplace, that we cannot answer for ourselves before we have
+been tried. But it is not so common a reflection, and surely more
+consoling, that we usually find ourselves a great deal braver and better
+than we thought. I believe this is every one's experience: but an
+apprehension that they may belie themselves in the future prevents
+mankind from trumpeting this cheerful sentiment abroad. I wish
+sincerely, for it would have saved me much trouble, there had been some
+one to put me in a good heart about life when I was younger; to tell me
+how dangers are most portentous on a distant sight; and how the good in
+a man's spirit will not suffer itself to be overlaid, and rarely or
+never deserts him in the hour of need. But we are all for tootling on
+the sentimental flute in literature; and not a man among us will go to
+the head of the march to sound the heady drums.
+
+It was agreeable upon the river. A barge or two went past laden with
+hay. Reeds and willows bordered the stream; and cattle and grey
+venerable horses came and hung their mild heads over the embankment.
+Here and there was a pleasant village among trees, with a noisy
+shipping-yard; here and there a villa in a lawn. The wind served us well
+up the Scheldt and thereafter up the Rupel, and we were running pretty
+free when we began to sight the brickyards of Boom, lying for a long way
+on the right bank of the river. The left bank was still green and
+pastoral, with alleys of trees along the embankment, and here and there
+a flight of steps to serve a ferry, where perhaps there sat a woman with
+her elbows on her knees, or an old gentleman with a staff and silver
+spectacles. But Boom and its brickyards grew smokier and shabbier with
+every minute; until a great church with a clock, and a wooden bridge
+over the river, indicated the central quarters of the town.
+
+Boom is not a nice place, and is only remarkable for one thing: that the
+majority of the inhabitants have a private opinion that they can speak
+English, which is not justified by fact. This gave a kind of haziness to
+our intercourse. As for the Hotel de la Navigation, I think it is the
+worst feature of the place. It boasts of a sanded parlour, with a bar at
+one end, looking on the street; and another sanded parlour, darker and
+colder, with an empty bird-cage and a tricolor subscription box by way
+of sole adornment, where we made shift to dine in the company of three
+uncommunicative engineer apprentices and a silent bagman. The food, as
+usual in Belgium, was of a nondescript occasional character; indeed, I
+have never been able to detect anything in the nature of a meal among
+this pleasing people; they seem to peck and trifle with viands all day
+long in an amateur spirit: tentatively French, truly German, and somehow
+falling between the two.
+
+The empty bird-cage, swept and garnished, and with no trace of the old
+piping favourite, save where two wires had been pushed apart to hold its
+lump of sugar, carried with it a sort of graveyard cheer. The engineer
+apprentices would have nothing to say to us, nor indeed to the bagman;
+but talked low and sparingly to one another, or raked us in the gaslight
+with a gleam of spectacles. For though handsome lads, they were all (in
+the Scots phrase) barnacled.
+
+There was an English maid in the hotel, who had been long enough out of
+England to pick up all sorts of funny foreign idioms, and all sorts of
+curious foreign ways, which need not here be specified. She spoke to us
+very fluently in her jargon, asked us information as to the manners of
+the present day in England, and obligingly corrected us when we
+attempted to answer. But as we were dealing with a woman, perhaps our
+information was not so much thrown away as it appeared. The sex likes to
+pick up knowledge and yet preserve its superiority. It is good policy,
+and almost necessary in the circumstances. If a man finds a woman admire
+him, were it only for his acquaintance with geography, he will begin at
+once to build upon the admiration. It is only by unintermittent snubbing
+that the pretty ones can keep us in our place. Men, as Miss Howe or Miss
+Harlowe would have said, "are such _encroachers_." For my part, I am
+body and soul with the women; and after a well-married couple, there is
+nothing so beautiful in the world as the myth of the divine huntress. It
+is no use for a man to take to the woods; we know him; St. Anthony tried
+the same thing long ago, and had a pitiful time of it by all accounts.
+But there is this about some women, which overtops the best gymnosophist
+among men, that they suffice to themselves, and can walk in a high and
+cold zone without the countenance of any trousered being. I declare,
+although the reverse of a professed ascetic, I am more obliged to women
+for this ideal than I should be to the majority of them, or indeed to
+any but one, for a spontaneous kiss. There is nothing so encouraging as
+the spectacle of self-sufficiency. And when I think of the slim and
+lovely maidens, running the woods all night to the note of Diana's horn;
+moving among the old oaks, as fancy-free as they; things of the forest
+and the starlight, not touched by the commotion of man's hot and turbid
+life--although there are plenty other ideals that I should prefer--I
+find my heart beat at the thought of this one. 'Tis to fail in life, but
+to fail with what a grace! That is not lost which is not regretted. And
+where--here slips out the male--where would be much of the glory of
+inspiring love, if there were no contempt to overcome?
+
+
+
+
+ON THE WILLEBROEK CANAL
+
+
+Next morning, when we set forth on the Willebroek Canal, the rain began
+heavy and chill. The water of the canal stood at about the drinking
+temperature of tea; and under this cold aspersion the surface was
+covered with steam. The exhilaration of departure, and the easy motion
+of the boats under each stroke of the paddles, supported us through this
+misfortune while it lasted; and when the cloud passed and the sun came
+out again, our spirits went up above the range of stay-at-home humours.
+A good breeze rustled and shivered in the rows of trees that bordered
+the canal. The leaves flickered in and out of the light in tumultuous
+masses. It seemed sailing weather to eye and ear; but down between the
+banks, the wind reached us only in faint and desultory puffs. There was
+hardly enough to steer by. Progress was intermittent and unsatisfactory.
+A jocular person, of marine antecedents, hailed us from the tow-path
+with a "_C'est vite, mais c'est long_."
+
+The canal was busy enough. Every now and then we met or overtook a long
+string of boats, with great green tillers; high sterns with a window on
+either side of the rudder, and perhaps a jug or a flower-pot in one of
+the windows; a dinghy following behind; a woman busied about the day's
+dinner, and a handful of children. These barges were all tied one behind
+the other with tow ropes, to the number of twenty-five or thirty; and
+the line was headed and kept in motion by a steamer of strange
+construction. It had neither paddle-wheel nor screw; but by some gear
+not rightly comprehensible to the unmechanical mind, it fetched up over
+its bow a small bright chain which lay along the bottom of the canal,
+and paying it out again over the stern, dragged itself forward, link by
+link, with its whole retinue of loaded skows. Until one had found out
+the key to the enigma, there was something solemn and uncomfortable in
+the progress of one of these trains, as it moved gently along the water
+with nothing to mark its advance but an eddy alongside dying away into
+the wake.
+
+Of all the creatures of commercial enterprise, a canal barge is by far
+the most delightful to consider. It may spread its sails, and then you
+see it sailing high above the tree-tops and the windmill, sailing on the
+aqueduct, sailing through the green corn-lands: the most picturesque of
+things amphibious. Or the horse plods along at a foot-pace, as if there
+were no such thing as business in the world; and the man dreaming at the
+tiller sees the same spire on the horizon all day long. It is a mystery
+how things ever get to their destination at this rate; and to see the
+barges waiting their turn at a lock affords a fine lesson of how easily
+the world may be taken. There should be many contented spirits on board,
+for such a life is both to travel and to stay at home.
+
+The chimney smokes for dinner as you go along; the banks of the canal
+slowly unroll their scenery to contemplative eyes; the barge floats by
+great forests and through great cities with their public buildings and
+their lamps at night; and for the barge, in his floating home,
+"travelling abed," it is merely as if he were listening to another man's
+story or turning the leaves of a picture-book in which he had no
+concern. He may take his afternoon walk in some foreign country on the
+banks of the canal, and then come home to dinner at his own fireside.
+
+There is not enough exercise in such a life for any high measure of
+health; but a high measure of health is only necessary for unhealthy
+people. The slug of a fellow, who is never ill nor well, has a quiet
+time of it in life, and dies all the easier.
+
+I am sure I would rather be a barge than occupy any position under
+heaven that required attendance at an office. There are few callings, I
+should say, where a man gives up less of his liberty in return for
+regular meals. The barge is on shipboard--he is master in his own
+ship--he can land whenever he will--he can never be kept beating off a
+lee-shore a whole frosty night when the sheets are as hard as iron; and,
+so far as I can make out, time stands as nearly still with him as is
+compatible with the return of bed-time or the dinner-hour. It is not
+easy to see why a barge should ever die.
+
+Half-way between Willebroek and Villevorde, in a beautiful reach of
+canal like a squire's avenue, we went ashore to lunch. There were two
+eggs, a junk of bread, and a bottle of wine on board the _Arethusa_; and
+two eggs and an Etna cooking apparatus on board the _Cigarette_. The
+master of the latter boat smashed one of the eggs in the course of
+disembarkation; but observing pleasantly that it might still be cooked
+_a la papier_, he dropped it into the Etna, in its covering of Flemish
+newspaper. We landed in a blink of fine weather; but we had not been two
+minutes ashore before the wind freshened into half a gale, and the rain
+began to patter on our shoulders. We sat as close about the Etna as we
+could. The spirits burned with great ostentation; the grass caught flame
+every minute or two, and had to be trodden out; and before long, there
+were several burnt fingers of the party. But the solid quantity of
+cookery accomplished was out of proportion with so much display; and
+when we desisted, after two applications of the fire, the sound egg was
+little more than loo-warm; and as for _a la papier_, it was a cold and
+sordid _fricassee_ of printer's ink and broken egg-shell. We made shift
+to roast the other two, by putting them close to the burning spirits;
+and that with better success. And then we uncorked the bottle of wine,
+and sat down in a ditch with our canoe aprons over our knees. It rained
+smartly. Discomfort, when it is honestly uncomfortable and makes no
+nauseous pretensions to the contrary, is a vastly humorous business; and
+people well steeped and stupefied in the open air are in a good vein for
+laughter. From this point of view, even egg _a la papier_ offered by way
+of food may pass muster as a sort of accessory to the fun. But this
+manner of jest, although it may be taken in good part, does not invite
+repetition; and from that time forward, the Etna voyaged like a
+gentleman in the locker of the _Cigarette_.
+
+It is almost unnecessary to mention that when lunch was over and we got
+aboard again and made sail, the wind promptly died away. The rest of the
+journey to Villevorde, we still spread our canvas to the unfavouring
+air; and with now and then a puff, and now and then a spell of paddling,
+drifted along from lock to lock, between the orderly trees.
+
+It was a fine, green, fat landscape; or rather a mere green water-lane,
+going on from village to village. Things had a settled look, as in
+places long lived in. Crop-headed children spat upon us from the bridges
+as we went below, with a true conservative feeling. But even more
+conservative were the fishermen, intent upon their floats, who let us go
+by without one glance. They perched upon sterlings and buttresses and
+along the slope of the embankment, gently occupied. They were
+indifferent, like pieces of dead nature. They did not move any more than
+if they had been fishing in an old Dutch print. The leaves fluttered,
+the water lapped, but they continued in one stay like so many churches
+established by law. You might have trepanned every one of their innocent
+heads, and found no more than so much coiled fishing-line below their
+skulls. I do not care for your stalwart fellows in india-rubber
+stockings breasting up mountain torrents with a salmon rod; but I do
+dearly love the class of man who plies his unfruitful art, for ever and
+a day, by still and depopulated waters.
+
+At the last lock, just beyond Villevorde, there was a lock-mistress who
+spoke French comprehensibly, and told us we were still a couple of
+leagues from Brussels. At the same place the rain began again. It fell
+in straight, parallel lines; and the surface of the canal was thrown up
+into an infinity of little crystal fountains. There were no beds to be
+had in the neighbourhood. Nothing for it but to lay the sails aside and
+address ourselves to steady paddling in the rain.
+
+Beautiful country houses, with clocks and long lines of shuttered
+windows, and fine old trees standing in groves and avenues, gave a rich
+and sombre aspect in the rain and the deepening dusk to the shores of
+the canal. I seem to have seen something of the same effect in
+engravings: opulent landscapes, deserted and overhung with the passage
+of storm. And throughout we had the escort of a hooded cart, which
+trotted shabbily along the tow-path, and kept at an almost uniform
+distance in our wake.
+
+
+
+
+THE ROYAL SPORT NAUTIQUE
+
+
+The rain took off near Laeken. But the sun was already down; the air was
+chill; and we had scarcely a dry stitch between the pair of us. Nay, now
+we found ourselves near the end of the Allee Verte, and on the very
+threshold of Brussels, we were confronted by a serious difficulty. The
+shores were closely lined by canal boats waiting their turn at the lock.
+Nowhere was there any convenient landing-place; nowhere so much as a
+stable-yard to leave the canoes in for the night. We scrambled ashore
+and entered an _estaminet_ where some sorry fellows were drinking with
+the landlord. The landlord was pretty round with us; he knew of no
+coach-house or stable-yard, nothing of the sort; and seeing we had come
+with no mind to drink, he did not conceal his impatience to be rid of
+us. One of the sorry fellows came to the rescue. Somewhere in the corner
+of the basin there was a slip, he informed us, and something else
+besides, not very clearly defined by him, but hopefully construed by his
+hearers.
+
+Sure enough there was the slip in the corner of the basin, and at the
+top of it two nice-looking lads in boating clothes. The _Arethusa_
+addressed himself to these. One of them said there would be no
+difficulty about a night's lodging for our boats; and the other, taking
+a cigarette from his lips, inquired if they were made by Searle and Son.
+The name was quite an introduction. Half a dozen other young men came
+out of a boat-house bearing the superscription ROYAL SPORT NAUTIQUE, and
+joined in the talk. They were all very polite, voluble, and
+enthusiastic; and their discourse was interlarded with English boating
+terms, and the names of English boat-builders and English clubs. I do
+not know, to my shame, any spot in my native land where I should have
+been so warmly received by the same number of people. We were English
+boating-men, and the Belgian boating-men fell upon our necks. I wonder
+if French Huguenots were as cordially greeted by English Protestants
+when they came across the Channel out of great tribulation. But, after
+all, what religion knits people so closely as a common sport?
+
+The canoes were carried into the boat-house; they were washed down for
+us by the Club servants, the sails were hung out to dry, and everything
+made as snug and tidy as a picture. And in the meanwhile we were led
+upstairs by our new-found brethren, for so more than one of them stated
+the relationship, and made free of their lavatory. This one lent us
+soap, that one a towel, a third and fourth helped us to undo our bags.
+And all the time such questions, such assurances of respect and
+sympathy! I declare I never knew what glory was before.
+
+"Yes, yes; the _Royal Sport Nautique_ is the oldest club in Belgium."
+
+"We number two hundred."
+
+"We"--this is not a substantive speech, but an abstract of many
+speeches, the impression left upon my mind after a great deal of talk;
+and very youthful, pleasant, natural, and patriotic it seems to me to
+be--"We have gained all races, except those where we were cheated by the
+French."
+
+"You must leave all your wet things to be dried."
+
+"O! _entre freres!_ In any boat-house in England we should find the
+same." (I cordially hope they might.)
+
+"_En Angleterre, vous employez des sliding-seats, n'est-ce pas?_"
+
+"We are all employed in commerce during the day; but in the evening,
+_voyez-vous, nous sommes serieux_."
+
+These were the words. They were all employed over the frivolous
+mercantile concerns of Belgium during the day; but in the evening they
+found some hours for the serious concerns of life. I may have a wrong
+idea of wisdom, but I think that was a very wise remark. People
+connected with literature and philosophy are busy all their days in
+getting rid of second-hand notions and false standards. It is their
+profession, in the sweat of their brows, by dogged thinking, to recover
+their old fresh view of life, and distinguish what they really and
+originally like, from what they have only learned to tolerate perforce.
+And these Royal Nautical Sportsmen had the distinction still quite
+legible in their hearts. They had still those clean perceptions of what
+is nice and nasty, what is interesting and what is dull, which envious
+old gentlemen refer to as illusions. The nightmare illusion of middle
+age, the bear's hug of custom gradually squeezing the life out of a
+man's soul, had not yet begun for these happy-starred young Belgians.
+They still knew that the interest they took in their business was a
+trifling affair compared to their spontaneous, long-suffering affection
+for nautical sports. To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying
+Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept
+your soul alive. Such a man may be generous; he may be honest in
+something more than the commercial sense; he may love his friends with
+an elective, personal sympathy, and not accept them as an adjunct of the
+station to which he has been called. He may be a man, in short, acting
+on his own instincts, keeping in his own shape that God made him in; and
+not a mere crank in the social engine-house, welded on principles that
+he does not understand, and for purposes that he does not care for.
+
+For will any one dare to tell me that business is more entertaining than
+fooling among boats? He must have never seen a boat, or never seen an
+office, who says so. And for certain the one is a great deal better for
+the health. There should be nothing so much a man's business as his
+amusements. Nothing but money-grubbing can be put forward to the
+contrary; no one but
+
+    Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell
+    From Heaven,
+
+durst risk a word in answer. It is but a lying cant that would represent
+the merchant and the banker as people disinterestedly toiling for
+mankind, and then most useful when they are most absorbed in their
+transactions; for the man is more important than his services. And when
+my Royal Nautical Sportsman shall have so far fallen from his hopeful
+youth that he cannot pluck up an enthusiasm over anything but his
+ledger, I venture to doubt whether he will be near so nice a fellow, and
+whether he would welcome, with so good a grace, a couple of drenched
+Englishmen paddling into Brussels in the dusk.
+
+When we had changed our wet clothes and drunk a glass of pale ale to the
+Club's prosperity, one of their number escorted us to an hotel. He would
+not join us at our dinner, but he had no objection to a glass of wine.
+Enthusiasm is very wearing; and I begin to understand why prophets were
+unpopular in Judea, where they were best known. For three stricken
+hours did this excellent young man sit beside us to dilate on boats and
+boat-races; and before he left, he was kind enough to order our bedroom
+candles.
+
+We endeavoured now and again to change the subject; but the diversion
+did not last a moment: the Royal Nautical Sportsman bridled, shied,
+answered the question, and then breasted once more into the swelling
+tide of his subject. I call it his subject; but I think it was he who
+was subjected. The _Arethusa_, who holds all racing as a creature of the
+devil, found himself in a pitiful dilemma. He durst not own his
+ignorance, for the honour of Old England, and spoke away about English
+clubs and English oarsmen whose fame had never before come to his ears.
+Several times, and, once above all, on the question of sliding-seats,
+he was within an ace of exposure. As for the _Cigarette_, who has rowed
+races in the heat of his blood, but now disowns these slips of his
+wanton youth, his case was still more desperate; for the Royal Nautical
+proposed that he should take an oar in one of their eights on the
+morrow, to compare the English with the Belgian stroke. I could see my
+friend perspiring in his chair whenever that particular topic came up.
+And there was yet another proposal which had the same effect on both of
+us. It appeared that the champion canoeist of Europe (as well as most
+other champions) was a Royal Nautical Sportsman. And if we would only
+wait until the Sunday, this infernal paddler would be so condescending
+as to accompany us on our next stage. Neither of us had the least desire
+to drive the coursers of the sun against Apollo.
+
+When the young man was gone, we countermanded our candles, and ordered
+some brandy and water. The great billows had gone over our head. The
+Royal Nautical Sportsmen were as nice young fellows as a man would wish
+to see, but they were a trifle too young and a thought too nautical for
+us. We began to see that we were old and cynical; we liked ease and the
+agreeable rambling of the human mind about this and the other subject;
+we did not want to disgrace our native land by messing an eight, or
+toiling pitifully in the wake of the champion canoeist. In short, we had
+recourse to flight. It seemed ungrateful, but we tried to make that good
+on a card loaded with sincere compliments. And indeed it was no time for
+scruples; we seemed to feel the hot breath of the champion on our
+necks.
+
+
+
+
+AT MAUBEUGE
+
+
+Partly from the terror we had of our good friends the Royal Nauticals,
+partly from the fact that there were no fewer than fifty-five locks
+between Brussels and Charleroi, we concluded that we should travel by
+train across the frontier, boats and all. Fifty-five locks in a day's
+journey was pretty well tantamount to trudging the whole distance on
+foot, with the canoes upon our shoulders, an object of astonishment to
+the trees on the canal side, and of honest derision to all
+right-thinking children.
+
+To pass the frontier even in a train is a difficult matter for the
+_Arethusa_. He is somehow or other a marked man for the official eye.
+Wherever he journeys there are the officers gathered together. Treaties
+are solemnly signed, foreign ministers, ambassadors, and consuls sit
+throned in state from China to Peru, and the Union Jack flutters on all
+the winds of heaven. Under these safeguards, portly clergymen,
+schoolmistresses, gentlemen in grey tweed suits, and all the ruck and
+rabble of British touristry pour unhindered, "Murray" in hand, over the
+railways of the Continent, and yet the slim person of the _Arethusa_ is
+taken in the meshes, while these great fish go on their way rejoicing.
+If he travels without a passport, he is cast, without any figure about
+the matter, into noisome dungeons: if his papers are in order, he is
+suffered to go his way indeed, but not until he has been humiliated by a
+general incredulity. He is a born British subject, yet he has never
+succeeded in persuading a single official of his nationality. He
+flatters himself he is indifferent honest; yet he is rarely taken for
+anything better than a spy, and there is no absurd and disreputable
+means of livelihood but has been attributed to him in some heat of
+official or popular distrust....
+
+For the life of me I cannot understand it. I, too, have been knolled to
+church, and sat at good men's feasts; but I bear no mark of it. I am as
+strange as a Jack Indian to their official spectacles. I might come from
+any part of the globe, it seems, except from where I do. My ancestors
+have laboured in vain, and the glorious Constitution cannot protect me
+in my walks abroad. It is a great thing, believe me, to present a good
+normal type of the nation you belong to.
+
+Nobody else was asked for his papers on the way to Maubeuge; but I was,
+and although I clung to my rights, I had to choose at last between
+accepting the humiliation and being left behind by the train. I was
+sorry to give way; but I wanted to get to Maubeuge.
+
+Maubeuge is a fortified town, with a very good inn, the _Grand Cerf_. It
+seemed to be inhabited principally by soldiers and bagmen; at least,
+these were all that we saw, except the hotel servants. We had to stay
+there some time, for the canoes were in no hurry to follow us, and at
+last stuck hopelessly in the custom-house until we went back to liberate
+them. There was nothing to do, nothing to see. We had good meals, which
+was a great matter; but that was all.
+
+The _Cigarette_ was nearly taken up upon a charge of drawing the
+fortifications: a feat of which he was hopelessly incapable. And
+besides, as I suppose each belligerent nation has a plan of the other's
+fortified places already, these precautions are of the nature of
+shutting the stable door after the steed is away. But I have no doubt
+they help to keep up a good spirit at home. It is a great thing if you
+can persuade people that they are somehow or other partakers in a
+mystery. It makes them feel bigger. Even the Freemasons, who have been
+shown up to satiety, preserve a kind of pride; and not a grocer among
+them, however honest, harmless, and empty-headed he may feel himself to
+be at bottom, but comes home from one of their _coenacula_ with a
+portentous significance for himself.
+
+It is an odd thing, how happily two people, if there are two, can live
+in a place where they have no acquaintance. I think the spectacle of a
+whole life in which you have no part paralysis personal desire. You are
+content to become a mere spectator. The baker stands in his door; the
+colonel with his three medals goes by to the _cafe_ at night; the troops
+drum and trumpet and man the ramparts, as bold as so many lions. It
+would task language to say how placidly you behold all this. In a place
+where you have taken some root, you are provoked out of your
+indifference; you have a hand in the game; your friends are fighting
+with the army. But in a strange town, not small enough to grow too soon
+familiar, nor so large as to have laid itself out for travellers, you
+stand so far apart from the business that you positively forget it would
+be possible to go nearer; you have so little human interest around you,
+that you do not remember yourself to be a man. Perhaps, in a very short
+time, you would be one no longer. Gymnosophists go into a wood, with all
+nature seething around them, with romance on every side; it would be
+much more to the purpose if they took up their abode in a dull country
+town, where they should see just so much of humanity as to keep them
+from desiring more, and only the stale externals of man's life. These
+externals are as dead to us as so many formalities, and speak a dead
+language in our eyes and ears. They have no more meaning than an oath or
+a salutation. We are so much accustomed to see married couples going to
+church of a Sunday that we have clean forgotten what they represent; and
+novelists are driven to rehabilitate adultery, no less, when they wish
+to show us what a beautiful thing it is for a man and a woman to live
+for each other.
+
+One person in Maubeuge, however, showed me something more than his
+outside. That was the driver of the hotel omnibus: a mean enough looking
+little man, as well as I can remember; but with a spark of something
+human in his soul. He had heard of our little journey, and came to me at
+once in envious sympathy. How he longed to travel! he told me. How he
+longed to be somewhere else, and see the round world before he went into
+the grave! "Here I am," said he. "I drive to the station. Well. And then
+I drive back again to the hotel. And so on every day, and all the week
+round. My God, is that life?" I could not say I thought it was--for him.
+He pressed me to tell him where I had been, and where I hoped to go; and
+as he listened, I declare the fellow sighed. Might not this have been a
+brave African traveller, or gone to the Indies after Drake? But it is an
+evil age for the gypsily inclined among men. He who can sit squarest on
+a three-legged stool, he it is who has the wealth and glory.
+
+I wonder if my friend is still driving the omnibus for the _Grand Cerf_?
+Not very likely, I believe; for I think he was on the eve of mutiny when
+we passed through, and perhaps our passage determined him for good.
+Better a thousand times that he should be a tramp, and mend pots and
+pans by the wayside, and sleep under trees, and see the dawn and the
+sunset every day above a new horizon. I think I hear you say that it is
+a respectable position to drive an omnibus? Very well. What right has
+he, who likes it not, to keep those who would like it dearly out of this
+respectable position? Suppose a dish were not to my taste, and you told
+me that it was a favourite amongst the rest of the company, what should
+I conclude from that? Not to finish the dish against my stomach, I
+suppose.
+
+Respectability is a very good thing in its way, but it does not rise
+superior to all considerations. I would not for a moment venture to hint
+that it was a matter of taste; but I think I will go as far as this:
+that if a position is admittedly unkind, uncomfortable, unnecessary, and
+superfluously useless, although it were as respectable as the Church of
+England, the sooner a man is out of it, the better for himself, and all
+concerned.
+
+
+
+
+ON THE SAMBRE CANALISED
+
+TO QUARTES
+
+
+About three in the afternoon the whole establishment of the _Grand Cerf_
+accompanied us to the water's edge. The man of the omnibus was there
+with haggard eyes. Poor cage-bird! Do I not remember the time when I
+myself haunted the station, to watch train after train carry its
+complement of freemen into the night, and read the names of distant
+places on the time-bills with indescribable longings?
+
+We were not clear of the fortifications before the rain began. The wind
+was contrary, and blew in furious gusts; nor were the aspects of nature
+any more clement than the doings of the sky. For we passed through a
+stretch of blighted country, sparsely covered with brush, but handsomely
+enough diversified with factory chimneys. We landed in a soiled meadow
+among some pollards, and there smoked a pipe in a flaw of fair weather.
+But the wind blew so hard, we could get little else to smoke. There were
+no natural objects in the neighbourhood, but some sordid workshops. A
+group of children headed by a tall girl stood and watched us from a
+little distance all the time we stayed. I heartily wonder what they
+thought of us.
+
+At Hautmont, the lock was almost impassable; the landing-place being
+steep and high, and the launch at a long distance. Near a dozen grimy
+workmen lent us a hand. They refused any reward; and, what is much
+better, refused it handsomely, without conveying any sense of insult.
+"It is a way we have in our countryside," said they. And a very
+becoming way it is. In Scotland, where also you will get services for
+nothing, the good people reject your money as if you had been trying to
+corrupt a voter. When people take the trouble to do dignified acts, it
+is worth while to take a little more, and allow the dignity to be common
+to all concerned. But in our brave Saxon countries, where we plod
+threescore years and ten in the mud, and the wind keeps singing in our
+ears from birth to burial, we do our good and bad with a high hand, and
+almost offensively; and make even our alms a witness-bearing and an act
+of war against the wrong.
+
+After Hautmont, the sun came forth again and the wind went down; and a
+little paddling took us beyond the ironworks and through a delectable
+land. The river wound among low hills, so that sometimes the sun was at
+our backs, and sometimes it stood right ahead, and the river before us
+was one sheet of intolerable glory. On either hand, meadows and orchards
+bordered, with a margin of sedge and water flowers, upon the river. The
+hedges were of great height, woven about the trunks of hedgerow elms;
+and the fields, as they were often very small, looked like a series of
+bowers along the stream. There was never any prospect; sometimes a
+hill-top with its trees would look over the nearest hedgerow, just to
+make a middle distance for the sky; but that was all. The heaven was
+bare of clouds. The atmosphere, after the rain, was of enchanting
+purity. The river doubled among the hillocks, a shining strip of mirror
+glass; and the dip of the paddles set the flowers shaking along the
+brink.
+
+In the meadows wandered black and white cattle fantastically marked. One
+beast, with a white head and the rest of the body glossy black, came to
+the edge to drink, and stood gravely twitching his ears at me as I went
+by, like some sort of preposterous clergyman in a play. A moment after I
+heard a loud plunge, and, turning my head, saw the clergyman struggling
+to shore. The bank had given way under his feet.
+
+Besides the cattle, we saw no living things except a few birds and a
+great many fishermen. These sat along the edges of the meadows,
+sometimes with one rod, sometimes with as many as half a score. They
+seemed stupefied with contentment; and when we induced them to exchange
+a few words with us about the weather, their voices sounded quiet and
+far away. There was a strange diversity of opinion among them as to the
+kind of fish for which they set their lures; although they were all
+agreed in this, that the river was abundantly supplied. Where it was
+plain that no two of them had ever caught the same kind of fish, we
+could not help suspecting that perhaps not any one of them had ever
+caught a fish at all. I hope, since the afternoon was so lovely, that
+they were one and all rewarded; and that a silver booty went home in
+every basket for the pot. Some of my friends would cry shame on me for
+this; but I prefer a man, were he only an angler, to the bravest pair of
+gills in all God's waters. I do not affect fishes unless when cooked in
+sauce; whereas an angler is an important piece of river scenery, and
+hence deserves some recognition among canoeists. He can always tell you
+where you are after a mild fashion; and his quiet presence serves to
+accentuate the solitude and stillness, and remind you of the glittering
+citizens below your boat.
+
+The Sambre turned so industriously to and fro among his little hills,
+that it was past six before we drew near the lock at Quartes. There were
+some children on the tow-path, with whom the _Cigarette_ fell into a
+chaffing talk as they ran along beside us. It was in vain that I warned
+him. In vain I told him, in English, that boys were the most dangerous
+creatures; and if once you began with them, it was safe to end in a
+shower of stones. For my own part, whenever anything was addressed to
+me, I smiled gently and shook my head as though I were an inoffensive
+person inadequately acquainted with French. For indeed I have had such
+experience at home, that I would sooner meet many wild animals than a
+troop of healthy urchins.
+
+But I was doing injustice to these peaceable young Hainaulters. When the
+_Cigarette_ went off to make inquiries, I got out upon the bank to smoke
+a pipe and superintend the boats, and became at once the centre of much
+amiable curiosity. The children had been joined by this time by a young
+woman and a mild lad who had lost an arm; and this gave me more
+security. When I let slip my first word or so in French, a little girl
+nodded her head with a comical grown-up air. "Ah, you see," she said,
+"he understands well enough now; he was just making believe." And the
+little group laughed together very good-naturedly.
+
+They were much impressed when they heard we came from England; and the
+little girl proffered the information that England was an island "and a
+far way from here--_bien loin d'ici_."
+
+"Ay, you may say that,--a far way from here," said the lad with one arm.
+
+I was as nearly home-sick as ever I was in my life; they seemed to make
+it such an incalculable distance to the place where I first saw the day.
+
+They admired the canoes very much. And I observed one piece of delicacy
+in these children, which is worthy of record. They had been deafening us
+for the last hundred yards with petitions for a sail; ay, and they
+deafened us to the same tune next morning when we came to start; but
+then, when the canoes were lying empty, there was no word of any such
+petition. Delicacy? or perhaps a bit of fear for the water in so crank a
+vessel? I hate cynicism a great deal worse than I do the devil; unless
+perhaps the two were the same thing! And yet 'tis a good tonic; the cold
+tub and bath-towel of the sentiments; and positively necessary to life
+in cases of advanced sensibility.
+
+From the boats they turned to my costume. They could not make enough of
+my red sash; and my knife filled them with awe.
+
+"They make them like that in England," said the boy with one arm. I was
+glad he did not know how badly we make them in England nowadays. "They
+are for people who go away to sea," he added, "and to defend one's life
+against great fish."
+
+I felt I was becoming a more and more romantic figure to the little
+group at every word. And so I suppose I was. Even my pipe, although it
+was an ordinary French clay, pretty well "trousered," as they call it,
+would have a rarity in their eyes, as a thing coming from so far away.
+And if my feathers were not very fine in themselves, they were all from
+over seas. One thing in my outfit, however, tickled them out of all
+politeness; and that was the bemired condition of my canvas shoes. I
+suppose they were sure the mud at any rate was a home product. The
+little girl (who was the genius of the party) displayed her own sabots
+in competition; and I wish you could have seen how gracefully and
+merrily she did it.
+
+The young woman's milk-can, a great amphora of hammered brass, stood
+some way off upon the sward. I was glad of an opportunity to divert
+public attention from myself, and return some of the compliments I had
+received. So I admired it cordially both for form and colour, telling
+them, and very truly, that it was as beautiful as gold. They were not
+surprised. The things were plainly the boast of the countryside. And the
+children expatiated on the costliness of these amphorae, which sell
+sometimes as high as thirty francs apiece; told me how they were carried
+on donkeys, one on either side of the saddle, a brave caparison in
+themselves; and how they were to be seen all over the district, and at
+the larger farms in great number and of great size.
+
+
+
+
+PONT-SUR-SAMBRE
+
+WE ARE PEDLARS
+
+
+The _Cigarette_ returned with good news. There were beds to be had some
+ten minutes' walk from where we were, at a place called Pont. We stowed
+the canoes in a granary, and asked among the children for a guide. The
+circle at once widened round us, and our offers of reward were received
+in dispiriting silence. We were plainly a pair of Bluebeards to the
+children; they might speak to us in public places, and where they had
+the advantage of numbers; but it was another thing to venture off alone
+with two uncouth and legendary characters, who had dropped from the
+clouds upon their hamlet this quiet afternoon, sashed and be-knived, and
+with a flavour of great voyages. The owner of the granary came to our
+assistance, singled out one little fellow and threatened him with
+corporalities; or I suspect we should have had to find the way for
+ourselves. As it was, he was more frightened at the granary man than the
+strangers, having perhaps had some experience of the former. But I fancy
+his little heart must have been going at a fine rate; for he kept
+trotting at a respectful distance in front, and looking back at us with
+scared eyes. Not otherwise may the children of the young world have
+guided Jove or one of his Olympian compeers on an adventure.
+
+A miry lane led us up from Quartes with its church and bickering
+windmill. The hinds were trudging homewards from the fields. A brisk
+little woman passed us by. She was seated across a donkey between a pair
+of glittering milk-cans; and, as she went, she kicked jauntily with her
+heels upon the donkey's side, and scattered shrill remarks among the
+wayfarers. It was notable that none of the tired men took the trouble to
+reply. Our conductor soon led us out of the lane and across country. The
+sun had gone down, but the west in front of us was one lake of level
+gold. The path wandered a while in the open, and then passed under a
+trellis like a bower indefinitely prolonged. On either hand were shadowy
+orchards; cottages lay low among the leaves, and sent their smoke to
+heaven; every here and there, in an opening, appeared the great gold
+face of the west.
+
+I never saw the _Cigarette_ in such an idyllic frame of mind. He waxed
+positively lyrical in praise of country scenes. I was little less
+exhilarated myself; the mild air of the evening, the shadows, the rich
+lights and the silence, made a symphonious accompaniment about our walk;
+and we both determined to avoid towns for the future and sleep in
+hamlets.
+
+At last the path went between two houses, and turned the party out into
+a wide muddy high-road, bordered, as far as the eye could reach on
+either hand, by an unsightly village. The houses stood well back,
+leaving a ribbon of waste land on either side of the road, where there
+were stacks of firewood, carts, barrows, rubbish-heaps, and a little
+doubtful grass. Away on the left, a gaunt tower stood in the middle of
+the street. What it had been in past ages I know not: probably a hold in
+time of war; but nowadays it bore an illegible dial-plate in its upper
+parts, and near the bottom an iron letter-box.
+
+The inn to which we had been recommended at Quartes was full, or else
+the landlady did not like our looks. I ought to say, that with our long,
+damp india-rubber bags, we presented rather a doubtful type of
+civilization: like rag-and-bone men, the _Cigarette_ imagined. "These
+gentlemen are pedlars?--_Ces messieurs sont des marchands?_"--asked the
+landlady. And then, without waiting for an answer, which I suppose she
+thought superfluous in so plain a case, recommended us to a butcher who
+lived hard by the tower, and took in travellers to lodge.
+
+Thither went we. But the butcher was flitting, and all his beds were
+taken down. Or else he didn't like our look. As a parting shot, we had
+"These gentlemen are pedlars?"
+
+It began to grow dark in earnest. We could no longer distinguish the
+faces of the people who passed us by with an inarticulate good-evening.
+And the householders of Pont seemed very economical with their oil; for
+we saw not a single window lighted in all that long village. I believe
+it is the longest village in the world; but I daresay in our predicament
+every pace counted three times over. We were much cast down when we came
+to the last auberge; and looking in at the dark door, asked timidly if
+we could sleep there for the night. A female voice assented in no very
+friendly tones. We clapped the bags down and found our way to chairs.
+
+The place was in total darkness, save a red glow in the chinks and
+ventilators of the stove. But now the landlady lit a lamp to see her new
+guests; I suppose the darkness was what saved us another expulsion; for
+I cannot say she looked gratified at our appearance. We were in a large
+bare apartment, adorned with two allegorical prints of Music and
+Painting, and a copy of the law against public drunkenness. On one side,
+there was a bit of a bar, with some half-a-dozen bottles. Two labourers
+sat waiting supper, in attitudes of extreme weariness; a plain-looking
+lass bustled about with a sleepy child of two; and the landlady began to
+derange the pots upon the stove and set some beefsteak to grill.
+
+"These gentlemen are pedlars?" she asked sharply. And that was all the
+conversation forthcoming. We began to think we might be pedlars after
+all. I never knew a population with so narrow a range of conjecture as
+the innkeepers of Pont-sur-Sambre. But manners and bearing have not a
+wider currency than bank-notes. You have only to get far enough out of
+your beat, and all your accomplished airs will go for nothing. These
+Hainaulters could see no difference between us and the average pedlar.
+Indeed, we had some grounds for reflection while the steak was getting
+ready, to see how perfectly they accepted us at their own valuation, and
+how our best politeness and best efforts at entertainment seemed to fit
+quite suitably with the character of packmen. At least it seemed a good
+account of the profession in France, that even before such judges we
+could not beat them at our own weapons.
+
+At last we were called to table. The two hinds (and one of them looked
+sadly worn and white in the face, as though sick with over-work and
+under-feeding) supped off a single plate of some sort of bread-berry,
+some potatoes in their jackets, a small cup of coffee sweetened with
+sugar-candy, and one tumbler of swipes. The landlady, her son, and the
+lass aforesaid, took the same. Our meal was quite a banquet by
+comparison. We had some beefsteak, not so tender as it might have been,
+some of the potatoes, some cheese, an extra glass of the swipes, and
+white sugar in our coffee.
+
+You see what it is to be a gentleman--I beg your pardon, what it is to
+be a pedlar. It had not before occurred to me that a pedlar was a great
+man in a labourer's alehouse; but now that I had to enact the part for
+an evening I found that so it was. He has in his hedge quarters somewhat
+the same pre-eminency as the man who takes a private parlour in a hotel.
+The more you look into it, the more infinite are the class distinctions
+among men; and possibly, by a happy dispensation, there is no one at all
+at the bottom of the scale; no one but can find some superiority over
+somebody else, to keep up his pride withal.
+
+We were displeased enough with our fare. Particularly the _Cigarette_,
+for I tried to make believe that I was amused with the adventure, tough
+beefsteak and all. According to the Lucretian maxim, our steak should
+have been flavoured by the look of the other people's bread-berry. But
+we did not find it so in practice. You may have a head-knowledge that
+other people live more poorly than yourself, but it is not agreeable--I
+was going to say, it is against the etiquette of the universe--to sit at
+the same table and pick your own superior diet from among their crusts.
+I had not seen such a thing done since the greedy boy at school with his
+birthday cake. It was odious enough to witness, I could remember; and I
+had never thought to play the part myself. But there again you see what
+it is to be a pedlar.
+
+There is no doubt that the poorer classes in our country are much more
+charitably disposed than their superiors in wealth. And I fancy it must
+arise a great deal from the comparative indistinction of the easy and
+the not so easy in these ranks. A workman or a pedlar cannot shutter
+himself off from his less comfortable neighbours. If he treats himself
+to a luxury he must do it in the face of a dozen who cannot. And what
+should more directly lead to charitable thoughts?.... Thus the poor man,
+camping out in life, sees it as it is, and knows that every mouthful he
+puts in his belly has been wrenched out of the fingers of the hungry.
+
+But at a certain stage of prosperity, as in a balloon ascent, the
+fortunate person passes through a zone of clouds, and sublunary matters
+are thenceforward hidden from his view. He sees nothing but the heavenly
+bodies, all in admirable order, and positively as good as new. He finds
+himself surrounded in the most touching manner by the attentions of
+Providence, and compares himself involuntarily with the lilies and the
+skylarks. He does not precisely sing, of course; but then he looks so
+unassuming in his open landau! If all the world dined at one table, this
+philosophy would meet with some rude knocks.
+
+
+
+
+PONT-SUR-SAMBRE
+
+THE TRAVELLING MERCHANT
+
+
+Like the lackeys in Moliere's farce, when the true nobleman broke in on
+their high life below stairs, we were destined to be confronted with a
+real pedlar. To make the lesson still more poignant for fallen gentlemen
+like us, he was a pedlar of infinitely more consideration than the sort
+of scurvy fellows we were taken for: like a lion among mice, or a ship
+of war bearing down upon two cock-boats. Indeed, he did not deserve the
+name of pedlar at all: he was a travelling merchant.
+
+I suppose it was about half-past eight when this worthy, Monsieur Hector
+Gilliard of Maubeuge, turned up at the alehouse door in a tilt cart
+drawn by a donkey, and cried cheerily on the inhabitants. He was a lean,
+nervous flibbertigibbet of a man, with something the look of an actor,
+and something the look of a horse-jockey. He had evidently prospered
+without any of the favours of education; for he adhered with stern
+simplicity to the masculine gender, and in the course of the evening
+passed off some fancy futures in a very florid style of architecture.
+With him came his wife, a comely young woman with her hair tied in a
+yellow kerchief, and their son, a little fellow of four, in a blouse and
+military _kepi_. It was notable that the child was many degrees better
+dressed than either of the parents. We were informed he was already at a
+boarding-school; but the holidays having just commenced, he was off to
+spend them with his parents on a cruise. An enchanting holiday
+occupation, was it not, to travel all day with father and mother in the
+tilt cart full of countless treasures; the green country rattling by on
+either side, and the children in all the villages contemplating him with
+envy and wonder? It is better fun, during the holidays, to be the son of
+a travelling merchant than son and heir to the greatest cotton-spinner
+in creation. And as for being a reigning prince--indeed I never saw one
+if it was not Master Gilliard!
+
+While M. Hector and the son of the house were putting up the donkey, and
+getting all the valuables under lock and key, the landlady warmed up the
+remains of our beefsteak, and fried the cold potatoes in slices, and
+Madame Gilliard set herself to waken the boy, who had come far that day,
+and was peevish and dazzled by the light. He was no sooner awake than he
+began to prepare himself for supper by eating galette, unripe pears, and
+cold potatoes--with, so far as I could judge, positive benefit to his
+appetite.
+
+The landlady, fired with motherly emulation, awoke her own little girl;
+and the two children were confronted. Master Gilliard looked at her for
+a moment, very much as a dog looks at his own reflection in a mirror
+before he turns away. He was at that time absorbed in the galette. His
+mother seemed crestfallen that he should display so little inclination
+towards the other sex; and expressed her disappointment with some
+candour and a very proper reference to the influence of years.
+
+Sure enough a time will come when he will pay more attention to the
+girls, and think a great deal less of his mother: let us hope she will
+like it as well as she seemed to fancy. But it is odd enough: the very
+women who profess most contempt for mankind as a sex, seem to find even
+its ugliest particulars rather lively and high-minded in their own sons.
+
+The little girl looked longer and with more interest, probably because
+she was in her own house, while he was a traveller and accustomed to
+strange sights. And besides there was no galette in the case with her.
+
+All the time of supper, there was nothing spoken of but my young lord.
+The two parents were both absurdly fond of their child. Monsieur kept
+insisting on his sagacity: how he knew all the children at school by
+name; and when this utterly failed on trial, how he was cautious and
+exact to a strange degree, and, if asked anything, he would sit and
+think--and think, and if he did not know it, "my faith, he wouldn't tell
+you at all--_ma foi, il ne vous le dira pas_": which is certainly a very
+high degree of caution. At intervals, M. Hector would appeal to his
+wife, with his mouth full of beefsteak, as to the little fellow's age at
+such or such a time when he had said or done something memorable; and I
+noticed that Madame usually pooh-poohed these inquiries. She herself was
+not boastful in her vein, but she never had her fill of caressing the
+child; and she seemed to take a gentle pleasure in recalling all that
+was fortunate in his little existence. No schoolboy could have talked
+more of the holidays which were just beginning and less of the black
+school-time which must inevitably follow after. She showed, with a pride
+perhaps partly mercantile in origin, his pockets preposterously swollen
+with tops and whistles and string. When she called at a house in the way
+of business, it appeared he kept her company; and whenever a sale was
+made, received a sou out of the profit. Indeed they spoiled him vastly,
+these two good people. But they had an eye to his manners for all that,
+and reproved him for some little faults in breeding, which occurred from
+time to time during supper.
+
+On the whole, I was not much hurt at being taken for a pedlar. I might
+think that I ate with greater delicacy, or that my mistakes in French
+belonged to a different order; but it was plain that these distinctions
+would be thrown away upon the landlady and the two labourers. In all
+essential things we and the Gilliards cut very much the same figure in
+the alehouse kitchen. M. Hector was more at home, indeed, and took a
+higher tone with the world; but that was explicable on the ground of
+his driving a donkey-cart, while we poor bodies tramped afoot. I daresay
+the rest of the company thought us dying with envy, though in no ill
+sense, to be as far up in the profession as the new arrival.
+
+And of one thing I am sure: that every one thawed and became more
+humanized and conversible as soon as these innocent people appeared upon
+the scene. I would not very readily trust the travelling merchant with
+any extravagant sum of money; but I am sure his heart was in the right
+place. In this mixed world, if you can find one or two sensible places
+in a man--above all, if you should find a whole family living together
+on such pleasant terms,--you may surely be satisfied, and take the rest
+for granted; or, what is a great deal better, boldly make up your mind
+that you can do perfectly well without the rest, and that ten thousand
+bad traits cannot make a single good one any the less good.
+
+It was getting late. M. Hector lit a stable lantern and went off to his
+cart for some arrangements; and my young gentleman proceeded to divest
+himself of the better part of his raiment, and play gymnastics on his
+mother's lap, and thence on to the floor, with accompaniment of
+laughter.
+
+"Are you going to sleep alone?" asked the servant lass.
+
+"There's little fear of that," says Master Gilliard.
+
+"You sleep alone at school," objected his mother. "Come, come, you must
+be a man."
+
+But he protested that school was a different matter from the holidays;
+that there were dormitories at school; and silenced the discussion with
+kisses: his mother smiling, no one better pleased than she.
+
+There certainly was, as he phrased it, very little fear that he should
+sleep alone; for there was but one bed for the trio. We, on our part,
+had firmly protested against one man's accommodation for two; and we had
+a double-bedded pen in the loft of the house, furnished, beside the
+beds, with exactly three hat-pegs and one table. There was not so much
+as a glass of water. But the window would open, by good fortune.
+
+Some time before I fell asleep the loft was full of the sound of mighty
+snoring: the Gilliards, and the labourers, and the people of the inn,
+all at it, I suppose, with one consent. The young moon outside shone
+very clearly over Pont-sur-Sambre, and down upon the alehouse where all
+we pedlars were abed.
+
+
+
+
+ON THE SAMBRE CANALISED
+
+TO LANDRECIES
+
+
+In the morning, when we came downstairs, the landlady pointed out to us
+two pails of water behind the street-door. "_Voila de l'eau pour vous
+debarbouiller_," says she. And so there we made a shift to wash
+ourselves, while Madame Gilliard brushed the family boots on the outer
+doorstep, and M. Hector, whistling cheerily, arranged some small goods
+for the day's campaign in a portable chest of drawers, which formed a
+part of his baggage. Meanwhile the child was letting off Waterloo
+crackers all over the floor.
+
+I wonder, by-the-bye, what they call Waterloo crackers in France;
+perhaps Austerlitz crackers. There is a great deal in the point of view.
+Do you remember the Frenchman who, travelling by way of Southampton, was
+put down in Waterloo Station, and had to drive across Waterloo Bridge?
+He had a mind to go home again, it seems.
+
+Pont itself is on the river, but whereas it is ten minutes' walk from
+Quartes by dry land, it is six weary kilometres by water. We left our
+bags at the inn, and walked to our canoes through the wet orchards
+unencumbered. Some of the children were there to see us off, but we were
+no longer the mysterious beings of the night before. A departure is much
+less romantic than an unexplained arrival in the golden evening.
+Although we might be greatly taken at a ghost's first appearance, we
+should behold him vanish with comparative equanimity.
+
+The good folk of the inn at Pont, when we called there for the bags,
+were overcome with marveling. At sight of these two dainty little
+boats, with a fluttering Union Jack on each, and all the varnish shining
+from the sponge, they began to perceive that they had entertained angels
+unawares. The landlady stood upon the bridge, probably lamenting she had
+charged so little; the son ran to and fro, and called out the neighbours
+to enjoy the sight; and we paddled away from quite a crowd of rapt
+observers. These gentlemen pedlars, indeed! Now you see their quality
+too late.
+
+The whole day was showery, with occasional drenching plumps. We were
+soaked to the skin, then partially dried in the sun, then soaked once
+more. But there were some calm intervals, and one notably, when we were
+skirting the forest of Mormal, a sinister name to the ear, but a place
+most gratifying to sight and smell. It looked solemn along the
+riverside, drooping its boughs into the water, and piling them up aloft
+into a wall of leaves. What is a forest but a city of nature's own, full
+of hardy and innocuous living things, where there is nothing dead and
+nothing made with the hands, but the citizens themselves are the houses
+and public monuments? There is nothing so much alive, and yet so quiet,
+as a woodland; and a pair of people, swinging past in canoes, feel very
+small and bustling by comparison.
+
+And surely of all smells in the world, the smell of many trees is the
+sweetest and most fortifying. The sea has a rude, pistolling sort of
+odour, that takes you in the nostrils like snuff, and carries with it a
+fine sentiment of open water and tall ships; but the smell of a forest,
+which comes nearest to this in tonic quality, surpasses it by many
+degrees in the quality of softness. Again, the smell of the sea has
+little variety, but the smell of a forest is infinitely changeful; it
+varies with the hour of the day, not in strength merely, but in
+character; and the different sorts of trees, as you go from one zone of
+the wood to another, seem to live among different kinds of atmosphere.
+Usually the resin of the fir predominates. But some woods are more
+coquettish in their habits; and the breath of the forest of Mormal, as
+it came aboard upon us that showery afternoon, was perfumed with nothing
+less delicate than sweetbrier.
+
+I wish our way had always lain among woods. Trees are the most civil
+society. An old oak that has been growing where he stands since before
+the Reformation, taller than many spires, more stately than the greater
+part of mountains, and yet a living thing, liable to sicknesses and
+death, like you and me: is not that in itself a speaking lesson in
+history? But acres on acres full of such patriarchs contiguously rooted,
+their green tops billowing in the wind, their stalwart younglings
+pushing up about their knees: a whole forest, healthy and beautiful,
+giving colour to the light, giving perfume to the air: what is this but
+the most imposing piece in nature's repertory? Heine wished to lie like
+Merlin under the oaks of Broceliande. I should not be satisfied with one
+tree; but if the wood grew together like a banyan grove, I would be
+buried under the tap-root of the whole; my parts should circulate from
+oak to oak; and my consciousness should be diffused abroad in all the
+forest, and give a common heart to that assembly of green spires, so
+that it also might rejoice in its own loveliness and dignity. I think I
+feel a thousand squirrels leaping from bough to bough in my vast
+mausoleum; and the birds and the winds merrily coursing over its uneven,
+leafy surface.
+
+Alas! the forest of Mormal is only a little bit of a wood, and it was
+but for a little way that we skirted by its boundaries. And the rest of
+the time the rain kept coming in squirts and the wind in squalls, until
+one's heart grew weary of such fitful, scolding weather. It was odd how
+the showers began when we had to carry the boats over a lock, and must
+expose our legs. They always did. This is a sort of thing that readily
+begets a personal feeling against nature. There seems no reason why the
+shower should not come five minutes before or five minutes after,
+unless you suppose an intention to affront you. The _Cigarette_ had a
+mackintosh which put him more or less above these contrarieties. But I
+had to bear the brunt uncovered. I began to remember that nature was a
+woman. My companion, in a rosier temper, listened with great
+satisfaction to my Jeremiads, and ironically concurred. He instanced, as
+a cognate matter, the action of the tides, "which," said he, "was
+altogether designed for the confusion of canoeists, except in so far as
+it was calculated to minister to a barren vanity on the part of the
+moon."
+
+At the last lock, some little way out of Landrecies, I refused to go any
+farther; and sat in a drift of rain by the side of the bank to have a
+reviving pipe. A vivacious old man, whom I take to have been the devil,
+drew near and questioned me about our journey. In the fullness of my
+heart I laid bare our plans before him. He said it was the silliest
+enterprise that ever he heard of. Why, did I not know, he asked me, that
+it was nothing but locks, locks, locks, the whole way? not to mention
+that, at this season of the year, we should find the Oise quite dry?
+"Get into a train, my little young man," said he, "and go you away home
+to your parents." I was so astounded at the man's malice that I could
+only stare at him in silence. A tree would never have spoken to me like
+this. At last I got out with some words. We had come from Antwerp
+already, I told him, which was a good long way; and we should do the
+rest in spite of him. Yes, I said, if there were no other reason, I
+would do it now, just because he had dared to say we could not. The
+pleasant old gentleman looked at me sneeringly, made an allusion to my
+canoe, and marched off, waggling his head.
+
+I was still inwardly fuming, when up came a pair of young fellows, who
+imagined I was the _Cigarette's_ servant, on a comparison, I suppose, of
+my bare jersey with the other's mackintosh, and asked me many questions
+about my place and my master's character. I said he was a good enough
+fellow, but had this absurd voyage on the head. "O no, no," said one,
+"you must not say that; it is not absurd; it is very courageous of him."
+I believe these were a couple of angels sent to give me heart again. It
+was truly fortifying to reproduce all the old man's insinuations, as if
+they were original to me in my character of a malcontent footman, and
+have them brushed away like so many flies by these admirable young men.
+
+When I recounted this affair to the _Cigarette_, "They must have a
+curious idea of how English servants behave," says he, dryly, "for you
+treated me like a brute beast at the lock."
+
+I was a good deal mortified; but my temper had suffered, it is a fact.
+
+
+
+
+AT LANDRECIES
+
+
+At Landrecies the rain still fell and the wind still blew; but we found
+a double-bedded room with plenty of furniture, real water-jugs with real
+water in them, and dinner: a real dinner, not innocent of real wine.
+After having been a pedlar for one night, and a butt for the elements
+during the whole of the next day, these comfortable circumstances fell
+on my heart like sunshine. There was an English fruiterer at dinner,
+travelling with a Belgian fruiterer; in the evening at the _cafe_ we
+watched our compatriot drop a good deal of money at corks, and I don't
+know why, but this pleased us.
+
+It turned out we were to see more of Landrecies than we expected; for
+the weather next day was simply bedlamite. It is not the place one would
+have chosen for a day's rest; for it consists almost entirely of
+fortifications. Within the ramparts a few blocks of houses, a long row
+of barracks, and a church, figure, with what countenance they may, as
+the town. There seems to be no trade; and a shopkeeper from whom I
+bought a sixpenny flint-and-steel was so much affected that he filled my
+pockets with spare flints into the bargain. The only public buildings
+that had any interest for us were the hotel and the _cafe_. But we
+visited the church. There lies Marshal Clarke. But as neither of us had
+ever heard of that military hero, we bore the associations of the spot
+with fortitude.
+
+In all garrison towns, guard-calls and _reveilles_, and such like, make
+a fine romantic interlude in civic business. Bugles, and drums, and
+fifes are of themselves most excellent things in nature; and when they
+carry the mind to marching armies, and the picturesque vicissitudes of
+war, they stir up something proud in the heart. But in a shadow of a
+town like Landrecies, with little else moving, these points of war made
+a proportionate commotion. Indeed, they were the only things to
+remember. It was just the place to hear the round going by at night in
+the darkness, with the solid tramp of men marching, and the startling
+reverberations of the drum. It reminded you that even this place was a
+point in the great warfaring system of Europe, and might on some future
+day be ringed about with cannon smoke and thunder, and make itself a
+name among strong towns.
+
+The drum, at any rate, from its martial voice and notable physiological
+effect--nay, even from its cumbrous and comical shape,--stands alone
+among the instruments of noise. And if it be true, as I have heard it
+said, that drums are covered with asses' skin, what a picturesque irony
+is there in that! As if this long-suffering animal's hide had not been
+sufficiently belaboured during life, now by Lyonnese costermongers, now
+by presumptuous Hebrew prophets, it must be stripped from his poor
+hinder quarters after death, stretched on a drum, and beaten night after
+night round the streets of every garrison town in Europe. And up the
+heights of Alma and Spicheren, and wherever death has his red flag
+a-flying, and sounds his own potent tuck upon the cannons, there also
+must the drummer-boy, hurrying with white face over fallen comrades,
+batter and bemaul this slip of skin from the loins of peaceable donkeys.
+
+Generally a man is never more uselessly employed than when he is at this
+trick of bastinadoing asses' hide. We know what effect it has in life,
+and how your dull ass will not mend his pace with beating. But in this
+state of mummy and melancholy survival of itself, when the hollow skin
+reverberates to the drummer's wrist, and each dub-a-dub goes direct to a
+man's heart, and puts madness there, and that disposition of the pulses
+which we, in our big way of talking nickname Heroism:--is there not
+something in the nature of a revenge upon the donkey's persecutors? Of
+old, he might say, you drubbed me up hill and down dale, and I must
+endure; but now that I am dead, those dull thwacks that were scarcely
+audible in country lanes have become stirring music in front of the
+brigade; and for every blow that you lay on my old great-coat you will
+see a comrade stumble and fall.
+
+Not long after the drums had passed the _cafe_ the _Cigarette_ and the
+_Arethusa_ began to grow sleepy, and set out for the hotel, which was
+only a door or two away. But although we had been somewhat indifferent
+to Landrecies, Landrecies had not been indifferent to us. All day, we
+learned, people had been running out between the squalls to visit our
+two boats. Hundreds of persons, so said report, although it fitted ill
+with our idea of the town--hundreds of persons had inspected them where
+they lay in a coal-shed. We were becoming lions in Landrecies, who had
+been only pedlars the night before in Pont.
+
+And now, when we left the _cafe_, we were pursued and overtaken at
+the hotel door by no less a person than the _Juge de Paix:_ a
+functionary, as far as I can make out, of the character of a Scots
+Sheriff-Substitute. He gave us his card and invited us to sup with
+him on the spot, very neatly, very gracefully, as Frenchmen can do
+these things. It was for the credit of Landrecies, said he; and
+although we knew very well how little credit we could do the place,
+we must have been churlish fellows to refuse an invitation so
+politely introduced.
+
+The house of the Judge was close by; it was a well-appointed bachelor's
+establishment, with a curious collection of old brass warming-pans upon
+the walls. Some of these were most elaborately carved. It seemed a
+picturesque idea for a collector. You could not help thinking how many
+nightcaps had wagged over these warming-pans in past generations; what
+jests may have been made and kisses taken, while they were in service;
+and how often they had been uselessly paraded in the bed of death. If
+they could only speak, at what absurd, indecorous, and tragical scenes
+had they not been present!
+
+The wine was excellent. When we made the Judge our compliments upon a
+bottle, "I do not give it you as my worst," said he. I wonder when
+Englishmen will learn these hospitable graces. They are worth learning;
+they set off life, and make ordinary moments ornamental.
+
+There were two other Landrecienses present. One was the collector of
+something or other, I forget what; the other, we were told, was the
+principal notary of the place. So it happened that we all five more or
+less followed the law. At this rate, the talk was pretty certain to
+become technical. The _Cigarette_ expounded the Poor Laws very
+magisterially. And a little later I found myself laying down the Scots
+Law of Illegitimacy, of which I am glad to say I know nothing. The
+collector and the notary, who were both married men, accused the Judge,
+who was a bachelor, of having started the subject. He deprecated the
+charge, with a conscious, pleased air, just like all the men I have ever
+seen, be they French or English. How strange that we should all, in our
+unguarded moments, rather like to be thought a bit of a rogue with the
+women!
+
+As the evening went on, the wine grew more to my taste; the spirits
+proved better than the wine; the company was genial. This was the
+highest water mark of popular favour on the whole cruise. After all,
+being in a Judge's house, was there not something semi-official in the
+tribute? And so, remembering what a great country France is, we did full
+justice to our entertainment. Landrecies had been a long while asleep
+before we returned to the hotel; and the sentries on the ramparts were
+already looking for daybreak.
+
+
+
+
+SAMBRE AND OISE CANAL
+
+CANAL BOATS
+
+
+Next day we made a late start in the rain. The Judge politely escorted
+us to the end of the lock under an umbrella. We had now brought
+ourselves to a pitch of humility in the matter of weather not often
+attained except in the Scottish Highlands. A rag of blue sky or a
+glimpse of sunshine set our hearts singing; and when the rain was not
+heavy, we counted the day almost fair.
+
+Long lines of barges lay one after another along the canal, many of them
+looking mighty spruce and ship-shape in their jerkin of Archangel tar
+picked out with white and green. Some carried gay iron railings, and
+quite a parterre of flower-pots. Children played on the decks, as
+heedless of the rain as if they had been brought up on Loch Carron side;
+men fished over the gunwale, some of them under umbrellas; women did
+their washing; and every barge boasted its mongrel cur by way of
+watch-dog. Each one barked furiously at the canoes, running alongside
+until he had got to the end of his own ship, and so passing on the word
+to the dog aboard the next. We must have seen something like a hundred
+of these embarkations in the course of that day's paddle, ranged one
+after another like the houses in a street; and from not one of them were
+we disappointed of this accompaniment. It was like visiting a menagerie,
+the _Cigarette_ remarked.
+
+These little cities by the canal side had a very odd effect upon the
+mind. They seemed, with their flower-pots and smoking chimneys, their
+washings and dinners, a rooted piece of nature in the scene; and yet if
+only the canal below were to open, one junk after another would hoist
+sail or harness horses and swim away into all parts of France; and the
+impromptu hamlet would separate, house by house, to the four winds. The
+children who played together to-day by the Sambre and Oise Canal, each
+at his own father's threshold, when and where might they next meet?
+
+For some time past the subject of barges had occupied a great deal of
+our talk, and we had projected an old age on the canals of Europe. It
+was to be the most leisurely of progresses, now on a swift river at the
+tail of a steam-boat, now waiting horses for days together on some
+inconsiderable junction. We should be seen pottering on deck in all the
+dignity of years, our white beards falling into our laps. We were ever
+to be busied among paint-pots; so that there should be no white fresher,
+and no green more emerald than ours, in all the navy of the canals.
+There should be books in the cabin, and tobacco-jars, and some old
+Burgundy as red as a November sunset and as odorous as a violet in
+April. There should be a flageolet, whence the _Cigarette_, with cunning
+touch, should draw melting music under the stars; or perhaps, laying
+that aside, upraise his voice--somewhat thinner than of yore, and with
+here and there a quaver, or call it a natural grace-note--in rich and
+solemn psalmody.
+
+All this, simmering in my mind, set me wishing to go aboard one of these
+ideal houses of lounging, I had plenty to choose from, as I coasted one
+after another, and the dogs bayed at me for a vagrant. At last I saw a
+nice old man and his wife looking at me with some interest, so I gave
+them good-day and pulled up alongside. I began with a remark upon their
+dog, which had somewhat the look of a pointer; thence I slid into a
+compliment on Madame's flowers, and thence into a word in praise of
+their way of life.
+
+If you ventured on such an experiment in England you would get a slap in
+the face at once. The life would be shown to be a vile one, not without
+a side shot at your better fortune. Now, what I like so much in France
+is the clear unflinching recognition by everybody of his own luck. They
+all know on which side their bread is buttered, and take a pleasure in
+showing it to others, which is surely the better part of religion. And
+they scorn to make a poor mouth over their poverty, which I take to be
+the better part of manliness. I have heard a woman, in quite a better
+position at home, with a good bit of money in hand, refer to her own
+child with a horrid whine as "a poor man's child." I would not say such
+a thing to the Duke of Westminster. And the French are full of this
+spirit of independence. Perhaps it is the result of republican
+institutions, as they call them. Much more likely it is because there
+are so few people really poor that the whiners are not enough to keep
+each other in countenance.
+
+The people on the barge were delighted to hear that I admired their
+state. They understood perfectly well, they told me, how Monsieur envied
+them. Without doubt Monsieur was rich; and in that case he might make a
+canal boat as pretty as a villa--_joli comme un chateau_. And with that
+they invited me on board their own water villa. They apologized for
+their cabin; they had not been rich enough to make it as it ought to be.
+
+"The fire should have been here, at this side," explained the husband.
+"Then one might have a writing-table in the middle--books--and"
+(comprehensively) "all. It would be quite coquettish--_ca serait
+tout-a-fait coquet_." And he looked about him as though the improvements
+were already made. It was plainly not the first time that he had thus
+beautified his cabin in imagination; and when next he makes a hit, I
+should expect to see the writing-table in the middle.
+
+Madame had three birds in a cage. They were no great thing, she
+explained. Fine birds were so dear. They had sought to get a
+_Hollandais_ last winter in Rouen (Rouen? thought I; and is this whole
+mansion, with its dogs and birds and smoking chimneys, so far a
+traveller as that? and as homely an object among the cliffs and orchards
+of the Seine as on the green plains of Sambre?)--they had sought to get
+a _Hollandais_ last winter in Rouen; but these cost fifteen francs
+apiece--picture it--fifteen francs!
+
+"_Pour un tout petit oiseau_--For quite a little bird," added the
+husband.
+
+As I continued to admire, the apologetics died away, and the good people
+began to brag of their barge, and their happy condition in life, as if
+they had been Emperor and Empress of the Indies. It was, in the Scots
+phrase, a good hearing, and put me in good humour with the world. If
+people knew what an inspiriting thing it is to hear a man boasting, so
+long as he boasts of what he really has, I believe they would do it more
+freely and with a better grace.
+
+They began to ask about our voyage. You should have seen how they
+sympathized. They seemed half ready to give up their barge and follow
+us. But these _canaletti_ are only gypsies semi-domesticated. The
+semi-domestication came out in rather a pretty form. Suddenly Madame's
+brow darkened. "_Cependant_," she began, and then stopped; and then
+began again by asking me if I were single.
+
+"Yes," said I.
+
+"And your friend who went by just now?"
+
+He also was unmarried.
+
+O then--all was well. She could not have wives left alone at home; but
+since there were no wives in the question, we were doing the best we
+could.
+
+"To see about one in the world," said the husband, "_il n'y a que
+ca_--there is nothing else worth while. A man, look you, who sticks in
+his own village like a bear," he went on, "--very well, he sees
+nothing. And then death is the end of all. And he has seen nothing."
+
+Madame reminded her husband of an Englishman who had come up this canal
+in a steamer.
+
+"Perhaps Mr. Moens in the _Ytene_," I suggested.
+
+"That's it," assented the husband. "He had his wife and family with him,
+and servants. He came ashore at all the locks and asked the name of the
+villages, whether from boatmen or lock-keepers; and then he wrote, wrote
+them down. Oh, he wrote enormously! I suppose it was a wager."
+
+A wager was a common enough explanation for our own exploits, but it
+seemed an original reason for taking notes.
+
+
+
+
+THE OISE IN FLOOD
+
+
+Before nine next morning the two canoes were installed on a light
+country cart at Etreux: and we were soon following them along the side
+of a pleasant valley full of hop-gardens and poplars. Agreeable villages
+lay here and there on the slope of the hill; notably, Tupigny, with the
+hop-poles hanging their garlands in the very street, and the houses
+clustered with grapes. There was a faint enthusiasm on our passage;
+weavers put their heads to the windows; children cried out in ecstasy at
+sight of the two "boaties"--_barquettes_; and bloused pedestrians, who
+were acquainted with our charioteer, jested with him on the nature of
+his freight.
+
+We had a shower or two, but light and flying. The air was clean and
+sweet among all these green fields and green things growing. There was
+not a touch of autumn in the weather. And when, at Vadencourt, we
+launched from a little lawn opposite a mill, the sun broke forth and set
+all the leaves shining in the valley of the Oise.
+
+The river was swollen with the long rains. From Vadencourt all the way
+to Origny, it ran with ever-quickening speed, taking fresh heart at each
+mile, and racing as though it already smelt the sea. The water was
+yellow and turbulent, swung with an angry eddy among half-submerged
+willows, and made an angry clatter along stony shores. The course kept
+turning and turning in a narrow and well-timbered valley. Now the river
+would approach the side, and run griding along the chalky base of the
+hill, and show us a few open colza-fields among the trees. Now it would
+skirt the garden-walls of houses, where we might catch a glimpse through
+a doorway, and see a priest pacing in the chequered sunlight. Again,
+the foliage closed so thickly in front that there seemed to be no issue;
+only a thicket of willows, overtopped by elms and poplars, under which
+the river ran flush and fleet, and where a kingfisher flew past like a
+piece of the blue sky. On these different manifestations the sun poured
+its clear and catholic looks. The shadows lay as solid on the swift
+surface of the stream as on the stable meadows. The light sparkled
+golden in the dancing poplar leaves, and brought the hills in communion
+with our eyes. And all the while the river never stopped running or took
+breath; and the reeds along the whole valley stood shivering from top to
+toe.
+
+There should be some myth (but if there is, I know it not) founded on
+the shivering of the reeds. There are not many things in nature more
+striking to man's eye. It is such an eloquent pantomime of terror; and
+to see such a number of terrified creatures taking sanctuary in every
+nook along the shore is enough to infect a silly human with alarm.
+Perhaps they are only a-cold, and no wonder, standing waist-deep in the
+stream. Or perhaps they have never got accustomed to the speed and fury
+of the river's flux, or the miracle of its continuous body. Pan once
+played upon their forefathers; and so, by the hands of his river, he
+still plays upon these later generations down all the valley of the
+Oise; and plays the same air, both sweet and shrill, to tell us of the
+beauty and the terror of the world.
+
+The canoe was like a leaf in the current. It took it up and shook it,
+and carried it masterfully away, like a Centaur carrying off a nymph. To
+keep some command on our direction required hard and diligent plying of
+the paddle. The river was in such a hurry for the sea! Every drop of
+water ran in a panic, like as many people in a frightened crowd. But
+what crowd was ever so numerous, or so single-minded? All the objects of
+sight went by at a dance measure; the eyesight raced with the racing
+river; the exigencies of every moment kept the pegs screwed so tight
+that our being quivered like a well-tuned instrument, and the blood
+shook oft its lethargy, and trotted through all the highways and byways
+of the veins and arteries, and in and out of the heart, as if
+circulation were but a holiday journey, and not the daily moil of
+threescore years and ten. The reeds might nod their heads in warning,
+and with tremulous gestures tell how the river was as cruel as it was
+strong and cold, and how death lurked in the eddy underneath the
+willows. But the reeds had to stand where they were, and those who stand
+still are always timid advisers. As for us, we could have shouted aloud.
+If this lively and beautiful river were, indeed, a thing of death's
+contrivance, the old ashen rogue had famously outwitted himself with us.
+I was living three to the minute. I was scoring points against him every
+stroke of my paddle, every turn of the stream, I have rarely had better
+profit of my life.
+
+For I think we may look upon our little private war with death somewhat
+in this light. If a man knows he will sooner or later be robbed upon a
+journey, he will have a bottle of the best in every inn, and look upon
+all his extravagances as so much gained upon the thieves. And, above
+all, where instead of simply spending, he makes a profitable investment
+for some of his money, when it will be out of risk of loss. So every bit
+of brisk living, and, above all, when it is healthful, is just so much
+gained upon the wholesale filcher, death. We shall have the less in our
+pockets, the more in our stomach, when he cries stand and deliver. A
+swift stream is a favourite artifice of his, and one that brings him in
+a comfortable thing per annum; but when he and I come to settle our
+accounts, I shall whistle in his face for these hours upon the upper
+Oise.
+
+Towards afternoon we got fairly drunken with the sunshine and the
+exhilaration of the pace. We could no longer contain ourselves and our
+content. The canoes were too small for us; we must be out and stretch
+ourselves on shore. And so in a green meadow we bestowed our limbs on
+the grass, and smoked deifying tobacco and proclaimed the world
+excellent. It was the last good hour of the day, and I dwell upon it
+with extreme complacency.
+
+On one side of the valley, high up on the chalky summit of the hill, a
+ploughman with his team appeared and disappeared at regular intervals.
+At each revelation he stood still for a few seconds against the sky: for
+all the world (as the _Cigarette_ declared) like a toy Burns who should
+have just ploughed up the Mountain Daisy. He was the only living thing
+within view, unless we are to count the river.
+
+On the other side of the valley a group of red roofs and a belfry showed
+among the foliage. Thence some inspired bell-ringer made the afternoon
+musical on a chime of bells. There was something very sweet and taking
+in the air he played; and we thought we had never heard bells speak so
+intelligibly or sing so melodiously as these. It must have been to some
+such measure that the spinners and the young maids sang "Come away,
+Death," in the Shakespearian Illyria. There is so often a threatening
+note, something blatant and metallic, in the voice of bells, that I
+believe we have fully more pain than pleasure from hearing them; but
+these, as they sounded abroad, now high, now low, now with a plaintive
+cadence that caught the ear like the burthen of a popular song, were
+always moderate and tunable, and seemed to fall in with the spirit of
+still, rustic places, like the noise of a waterfall or the babble of a
+rookery in spring. I could have asked the bell-ringer for his blessing,
+good, sedate old man, who swung the rope so gently to the time of his
+meditations. I could have blessed the priest or the heritors, or whoever
+may be concerned with such affairs in France, who had left these sweet
+old bells to gladden the afternoon, and not held meetings, and made
+collections, and had their names repeatedly printed in the local paper,
+to rig up a peal of brand-new, brazen, Birmingham-hearted substitutes,
+who should bombard their sides to the provocation of a brand-new
+bell-ringer, and fill the echoes of the valley with terror and riot.
+
+At last the bells ceased, and with their note the sun withdrew. The
+piece was at an end; shadow and silence possessed the valley of the
+Oise. We took to the paddle with glad hearts, like people who have sat
+out a noble performance and returned to work. The river was more
+dangerous here; it ran swifter, the eddies were more sudden and violent.
+All the way down we had had our fill of difficulties. Sometimes it was a
+weir which could be shot, sometimes one so shallow and full of stakes
+that we must withdraw the boats from the water and carry them round. But
+the chief sort of obstacle was a consequence of the late high winds.
+Every two or three hundred yards a tree had fallen across the river, and
+usually involved more than another in its fall. Often there was free
+water at the end, and we could steer round the leafy promontory and hear
+the water sucking and bubbling among the twigs. Often, again, when the
+tree reached from bank to bank, there was room by lying close to shoot
+through underneath, canoe and all. Sometimes it was necessary to get out
+upon the trunk itself and pull the boats across; and sometimes, when the
+stream was too impetuous for this, there was nothing for it but to land
+and "carry over." This made a fine series of accidents in the day's
+career, and kept us aware of ourselves.
+
+Shortly after our re-embarkation, while I was leading by a long way, and
+still full of a noble, exulting spirit in honour of the sun, the swift
+pace, and the church bells, the river made one of its leonine pounces
+round a corner, and I was aware of another fallen tree within a
+stone-cast. I had my back-board down in a trice, and aimed for a place
+where the trunk seemed high enough above the water, and the branches
+not too thick to let me slip below. When a man has just vowed eternal
+brotherhood with the universe, he is not in a temper to take great
+determinations coolly, and this, which might have been a very important
+determination for me, had not been taken under a happy star. The tree
+caught me about the chest, and while I was yet struggling to make less
+of myself and get through, the river took the matter out of my hands,
+and bereaved me of my boat. The _Arethusa_ swung round broadside on,
+leaned over, ejected so much of me as still remained on board, and, thus
+disencumbered, whipped under the tree, righted, and went merrily away
+down stream.
+
+I do not know how long it was before I scrambled on to the tree to which
+I was left clinging, but it was longer than I cared about. My thoughts
+were of a grave and almost sombre character, but I still clung to my
+paddle. The stream ran away with my heels as fast as I could pull up my
+shoulders, and I seemed, by the weight, to have all the water of the
+Oise in my trousers-pockets. You can never know, till you try it, what a
+dead pull a river makes against a man. Death himself had me by the
+heels, for this was his last ambuscado, and he must now join personally
+in the fray. And still I held to my paddle. At last I dragged myself on
+to my stomach on the trunk, and lay there a breathless sop, with a
+mingled sense of humour and injustice. A poor figure I must have
+presented to Burns upon the hill-top with his team. But there was the
+paddle in my hand. On my tomb, if ever I have one, I mean to get these
+words inscribed: "He clung to his paddle."
+
+The _Cigarette_ had gone past a while before; for, as I might have
+observed, if I had been a little less pleased with the universe at the
+moment, there was a clear way round the tree-top at the farther side. He
+had offered his services to haul me out, but as I was then already on my
+elbows I had declined and sent him down stream after the truant
+_Arethusa_. The stream was too rapid for a man to mount with one canoe,
+let alone two, upon his hands. So I crawled along the trunk to shore,
+and proceeded down the meadows by the riverside. I was so cold that my
+heart was sore. I had now an idea of my own why the reeds so bitterly
+shivered. I could have given any of them a lesson. The _Cigarette_
+remarked facetiously that he thought I was "taking exercise" as I drew
+near, until he made out for certain that I was only twittering with
+cold. I had a rub down with a towel, and donned a dry suit from the
+india-rubber bag. But I was not my own man again for the rest of the
+voyage. I had a queasy sense that I wore my last dry clothes upon my
+body. The struggle had tired me; and perhaps, whether I knew it or not,
+I was a little dashed in spirit. The devouring element in the universe
+had leaped out against me, in this green valley quickened by a running
+stream. The bells were all very pretty in their way, but I had heard
+some of the hollow notes of Pan's music. Would the wicked river drag me
+down by the heels, indeed? and look so beautiful all the time? Nature's
+good-humour was only skin-deep after all.
+
+There was still a long way to go by the winding course of the stream,
+and darkness had fallen, and a late bell was ringing in Origny
+Sainte-Benoite, when we arrived.
+
+
+
+
+ORIGNY SAINTE-BENOITE
+
+A BY-DAY
+
+
+The next day was Sunday, and the church bells had little rest; indeed, I
+do not think I remember anywhere else so great a choice of services as
+were here offered to the devout. And while the bells made merry in the
+sunshine, all the world with his dog was out shooting among the beets
+and colza.
+
+In the morning a hawker and his wife went down the street at a
+foot-pace, singing to a very slow, lamentable music, "_O France, mes
+amours_." It brought everybody to the door; and when our landlady called
+in the man to buy the words, he had not a copy of them left. She was not
+the first nor the second who had been taken with the song. There is
+something very pathetic in the love of the French people, since the war,
+for dismal patriotic music-making. I have watched a forester from Alsace
+while someone was singing "_Les malheurs de la France_," at a baptismal
+party in the neighbourhood of Fontainebleau. He arose from the table and
+took his son aside, close by where I was standing. "Listen, listen," he
+said, bearing on the boy's shoulder, "and remember this, my son." A
+little after he went out into the garden suddenly, and I could hear him
+sobbing in the darkness.
+
+The humiliation of their arms and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine made a
+sore pull on the endurance of this sensitive people; and their hearts
+are still hot, not so much against Germany as against the Empire. In
+what other country will you find a patriotic ditty bring all the world
+into the street? But affliction heightens love; and we shall never know
+we are Englishmen until we have lost India. Independent America is still
+the cross of my existence; I cannot think of Farmer George without
+abhorrence; and I never feel more warmly to my own land than when I see
+the Stars and Stripes, and remember what our empire might have been.
+
+The hawker's little book, which I purchased, was a curious mixture. Side
+by side with the flippant, rowdy nonsense of the Paris music-halls,
+there were many pastoral pieces, not without a touch of poetry, I
+thought, and instinct with the brave independence of the poorer class in
+France. There you might read how the wood-cutter gloried in his axe, and
+the gardener scorned to be ashamed of his spade. It was not very well
+written, this poetry of labour, but the pluck of the sentiment redeemed
+what was weak or wordy in the expression. The martial and the patriotic
+pieces, on the other hand, were tearful, womanish productions one and
+all. The poet had passed under the Caudine Forks; he sang for an army
+visiting the tomb of its old renown, with arms reversed; and sang not of
+victory, but of death. There was a number in the hawker's collection
+called "Conscrits Francais," which may rank among the most dissuasive
+war-lyrics on record. It would not be possible to fight at all in such a
+spirit. The bravest conscript would turn pale if such a ditty were
+struck up beside him on the morning of battle; and whole regiments would
+pile their arms to its tune.
+
+If Fletcher of Saltoun is in the right about the influence of national
+songs, you would say France was come to a poor pass. But the thing will
+work its own cure, and a sound-hearted and courageous people weary at
+length of sniveling over their disasters. Already Paul Deroulede has
+written some manly military verses. There is not much of the
+trumpet-note in them, perhaps, to stir a man's heart in his bosom; they
+lack the lyrical elation, and move slowly; but they are written in a
+grave, honourable, stoical spirit, which should carry soldiers far in a
+good cause. One feels as if one would like to trust Deroulede with
+something. It will be happy if he can so far inoculate his
+fellow-countrymen that they may be trusted with their own future. And in
+the meantime, here is an antidote to "French Conscripts" and much other
+doleful versification.
+
+We had left the boats over-night in the custody of one whom we shall
+call Carnival. I did not properly catch his name, and perhaps that was
+not unfortunate for him, as I am not in a position to hand him down with
+honour to posterity. To this person's premises we strolled in the course
+of the day, and found quite a little deputation inspecting the canoes.
+There was a stout gentleman with a knowledge of the river, which he
+seemed eager to impart. There was a very elegant young gentleman in a
+black coat, with a smattering of English, who led the talk at once to
+the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. And then there were three handsome
+girls from fifteen to twenty; and an old gentleman in a blouse, with no
+teeth to speak of, and a strong country accent. Quite the pick of
+Origny, I should suppose.
+
+The _Cigarette_ had some mysteries to perform with his rigging in the
+coach-house, so I was left to do the parade single-handed. I found
+myself very much of a hero whether I would or not. The girls were full
+of little shudderings over the dangers of our journey. And I thought it
+would be ungallant not to take my cue from the ladies. My mishap of
+yesterday, told in an off-hand way, produced a deep sensation. It was
+Othello over again, with no less than three Desdemonas and a sprinkling
+of sympathetic senators in the background. Never were the canoes more
+flattered, or flattered more adroitly.
+
+"It is like a violin!" cried one of the girls in an ecstasy.
+
+"I thank you for the word, mademoiselle," said I. "All the more since
+there are people who call out to me that it is like a coffin."
+
+"Oh I but it is really like a violin. It is finished like a violin," she
+went on.
+
+"And polished like a violin," added a senator.
+
+"One has only to stretch the cords," concluded another, "and then
+tum-tumty-tum"--he imitated the result with spirit.
+
+Was not this a graceful little ovation? Where this people finds the
+secret of its pretty speeches, I cannot imagine; unless the secret
+should be no other than a sincere desire to please! But then no disgrace
+is attached in France to saying a thing neatly; whereas in England to
+talk like a book is to give in one's resignation to society.
+
+The old gentleman in the blouse stole into the coach-house, and somewhat
+irrelevantly informed the _Cigarette_ that he was the father of the
+three girls and four more: quite an exploit for a Frenchman.
+
+"You are very fortunate," answered the _Cigarette_ politely.
+
+And the old gentleman, having apparently gained his point, stole away
+again.
+
+We all got very friendly together. The girls proposed to start with us
+on the morrow, if you please! And, jesting apart, every one was anxious
+to know the hour of our departure. Now, when you are going to crawl into
+your canoe from a bad launch, a crowd, however friendly, is undesirable;
+and so we told them not before twelve, and mentally determined to be off
+by ten at latest.
+
+Towards evening we went abroad again to post some letters. It was cool
+and pleasant; the long village was quite empty, except for one or two
+urchins who followed us as they might have followed a menagerie; the
+hills and the tree-tops looked in from all sides through the clear air;
+and the bells were chiming for yet another service.
+
+Suddenly we sighted the three girls standing, with a fourth sister, in
+front of a shop on the wide selvage of the roadway. We had been very
+merry with them a little while ago, to be sure. But what was the
+etiquette of Origny? Had it been a country road, of course we should
+have spoken to them; but here, under the eyes of all the gossips, ought
+we to do even as much as bow? I consulted the _Cigarette_.
+
+"Look," said he.
+
+I looked. There were the four girls on the same spot; but now four backs
+were turned to us, very upright and conscious. Corporal Modesty had
+given the word of command, and the well-disciplined picket had gone
+right-about-face like a single person. They maintained this formation
+all the while we were in sight; but we heard them tittering among
+themselves, and the girl whom we had not met laughed with open mouth,
+and even looked over her shoulder at the enemy. I wonder was it
+altogether modesty after all? or in part a sort of country provocation?
+
+As we were returning to the inn, we beheld something floating in the
+ample field of golden evening sky, above the chalk cliffs and the trees
+that grow along their summit. It was too high up, too large, and too
+steady for a kite; and as it was dark, it could not be a star. For
+although a star were as black as ink and as rugged as a walnut, so amply
+does the sun bathe heaven with radiance, that it would sparkle like a
+point of light for us. The village was dotted with people with their
+heads in air; and the children were in a bustle all along the street and
+far up the straight road that climbs the hill, where we could still see
+them running in loose knots. It was a balloon, we learned, which had
+left St. Quentin at half-past five that evening. Mighty composedly the
+majority of the grown people took it. But we were English, and were soon
+running up the hill with the best. Being travellers ourselves in a small
+way, we would fain have seen these other travellers alight.
+
+The spectacle was over by the time we gained the top of the hill. All
+the gold had withered out of the sky, and the balloon had disappeared.
+Whither? I ask myself; caught up into the seventh heaven? or come safely
+to land somewhere in that blue uneven distance, into which the roadway
+dipped and melted before our eyes? Probably the aeronauts were already
+warming themselves at a farm chimney, for they say it is cold in these
+unhomely regions of the air. The night fell swiftly. Roadside trees and
+disappointed sightseers, returning though the meadows, stood out in
+black against a margin of low red sunset. It was cheerfuller to face the
+other way, and so down the hill we went, with a full moon, the colour of
+a melon, swinging high above the wooded valley, and the white cliffs
+behind us faintly reddened by the fire of the chalk kilns.
+
+The lamps were lighted, and the salads were being made in Origny
+Sainte-Benoite by the river.
+
+
+
+
+ORIGNY SAINTE-BENOITE
+
+THE COMPANY AT TABLE
+
+
+Although we came late for dinner, the company at table treated us to
+sparkling wine. "That is how we are in France," said one. "Those who sit
+down with us are our friends." And the rest applauded.
+
+They were three altogether, and an odd trio to pass the Sunday with.
+
+Two of them were guests like ourselves, both men of the north. One
+ruddy, and of a full habit of body, with copious black hair and beard,
+the intrepid hunter of France, who thought nothing so small, not even a
+lark or a minnow, but he might vindicate his prowess by its capture. For
+such a great, healthy man, his hair flourishing like Samson's, his
+arteries running buckets of red blood, to boast of these infinitesimal
+exploits, produced a feeling of disproportion in the world, as when a
+steam-hammer is set to cracking nuts. The other was a quiet, subdued
+person, blond and lymphatic and sad, with something the look of a Dane:
+"_Tristes tetes de Danois!_" as Gaston Lafenestre used to say.
+
+I must not let that name go by without a word for the best of all good
+fellows now gone down into the dust. We shall never again see Gaston in
+his forest costume--he was Gaston with all the world, in affection, not
+in disrespect--nor hear him wake the echoes of Fontainebleau with the
+woodland horn. Never again shall his kind smile put peace among all
+races of artistic men, and make the Englishman at home in France. Never
+more shall the sheep, who were not more innocent at heart than he, sit
+all unconsciously for his industrious pencil. He died too early, at the
+very moment when he was beginning to put forth fresh sprouts, and
+blossom into something worthy of himself; and yet none who knew him will
+think he lived in vain. I never knew a man so little, for whom yet I had
+so much affection; and I find it a good test of others, how much they
+had learned to understand and value him. His was indeed a good influence
+in life while he was still among us; he had a fresh laugh, it did you
+good to see him; and however sad he may have been at heart, he always
+bore a bold and cheerful countenance, and took fortune's worst as it
+were the showers of spring. But now his mother sits alone by the side of
+Fontainebleau woods, where he gathered mushrooms in his hardy and
+penurious youth.
+
+Many of his pictures found their way across the Channel: besides those
+which were stolen, when a dastardly Yankee left him alone in London with
+two English pence, and perhaps twice as many words of English. If any
+one who reads these lines should have a scene of sheep, in the manner of
+Jacques, with this fine creature's signature, let him tell himself that
+one of the kindest and bravest of men has lent a hand to decorate his
+lodging. There may be better pictures in the National Gallery; but not a
+painter among the generations had a better heart. Precious in the sight
+of the Lord of humanity, the Psalms tell us, is the death of his saints.
+It had need to be precious; for it is very costly, when by the stroke, a
+mother is left desolate, and the peace-maker, and _peace-looker_, of a
+whole society is laid in the ground with Caesar and the Twelve Apostles.
+
+There is something lacking among the oaks of Fontainebleau; and when the
+dessert comes in at Barbizon, people look to the door for a figure that
+is gone.
+
+The third of our companions at Origny was no less a person than the
+landlady's husband: not properly the landlord, since he worked himself
+in a factory during the day, and came to his own house at evening as a
+guest: a man worn to skin and bone by perpetual excitement, with baldish
+head, sharp features, and swift, shining eyes. On Saturday, describing
+some paltry adventure at a duck-hunt, he broke a plate into a score of
+fragments. Whenever he made a remark, he would look all round the table
+with his chin raised, and a spark of green light in either eye, seeking
+approval. His wife appeared now and again in the doorway of the room,
+where she was superintending dinner, with a "Henri, you forget
+yourself," or a "Henri, you can surely talk without making such a
+noise." Indeed, that was what the honest fellow could not do. On the
+most trifling matter his eyes kindled, his fist visited the table, and
+his voice rolled abroad in changeful thunder. I never saw such a petard
+of a man; I think the devil was in him. He had two favourite
+expressions--"it is logical," or illogical, as the case might be; and
+this other, thrown out with a certain bravado, as a man might unfurl a
+banner, at the beginning of many a long and sonorous story: "I am a
+proletarian, you see." Indeed, we saw it very well. God forbid that ever
+I should find him handling a gun in Paris streets! That will not be a
+good moment for the general public.
+
+I thought his two phrases very much represented the good and evil of his
+class, and to some extent of his country. It is a strong thing to say
+what one is, and not be ashamed of it; even although it be in doubtful
+taste to repeat the statement too often in one evening. I should not
+admire it in a duke, of course; but as times go, the trait is honourable
+in a workman. On the other hand, it is not at all a strong thing to put
+one's reliance upon logic; and our own logic particularly, for it is
+generally wrong. We never know where we are to end, if once we begin
+following words or doctors. There is an upright stock in a man's own
+heart, that is trustier than any syllogism; and the eyes, and the
+sympathies and appetites, know a thing or two that have never yet been
+stated in controversy. Reasons are as plentiful as blackberries; and,
+like fisticuffs, they serve impartially with all sides. Doctrines do not
+stand or fall by their proofs, and are only logical in so far as they
+are cleverly put. An able controversialist no more than an able general
+demonstrates the justice of his cause. But France is all gone wandering
+after one or two big words; it will take some time before they can be
+satisfied that they are no more than words, however big; and when once
+that is done, they will perhaps find logic less diverting.
+
+The conversation opened with details of the day's shooting. When all the
+sportsmen of a village shoot over the village territory _pro indiviso_,
+it is plain that many questions of etiquette and priority must arise.
+
+"Here now," cried the landlord, brandishing a plate, "here is a field of
+beet-root. Well. Here am I then. I advance, do I not? _Eh bien!
+sacristi_," and the statement, waxing louder, rolls off into a
+reverberation of oaths, the speaker glaring about for sympathy, and
+everybody nodding his head to him in the name of peace.
+
+The ruddy Northman told some tales of his own prowess in keeping order:
+notably one of a Marquis.
+
+"Marquis," I said, "if you take another step I fire upon you. You have
+committed a dirtiness, Marquis."
+
+Whereupon, it appeared, the Marquis touched his cap and withdrew.
+
+The landlord applauded noisily. "It was well done," he said. "He did all
+that he could. He admitted he was wrong." And then oath upon oath. He
+was no marquis-lover either, but he had a sense of justice in him, this
+proletarian host of ours.
+
+From the matter of hunting, the talk veered into a general comparison of
+Paris and the country. The proletarian beat the table like a drum in
+praise of Paris. "What is Paris? Paris is the cream of France. There are
+no Parisians: it is you and I and everybody who are Parisians. A man has
+eighty chances per cent to get on in the world in Paris." And he drew
+a vivid sketch of the workman in a den no bigger than a dog-hutch,
+making articles that were to go all over the world. "_Eh bien, quoi,
+c'est magnifique, ca!_" cried he.
+
+The sad Northman interfered in praise of a peasant's life; he thought
+Paris bad for men and women; "centralization," said he----
+
+But the landlord was at his throat in a moment. It was all logical, he
+showed him, and all magnificent. "What a spectacle! What a glance for an
+eye!" And the dishes reeled upon the table under a cannonade of blows.
+
+Seeking to make peace, I threw in a word in praise of the liberty of
+opinion in France. I could hardly have shot more amiss. There was an
+instant silence, and a great wagging of significant heads. They did not
+fancy the subject, it was plain; but they gave me to understand that the
+sad Northman was a martyr on account of his views. "Ask him a bit," said
+they. "Just ask him."
+
+"Yes, sir," said he, in his quiet way, answering me, although I had not
+spoken, "I am afraid there is less liberty of opinion in France than you
+may imagine." And with that he dropped his eyes, and seemed to consider
+the subject at an end.
+
+Our curiosity was mightily excited at this. How, or why, or when, was
+this lymphatic bagman martyred? We concluded at once it was on some
+religious question, and brushed up our memories of the Inquisition,
+which were principally drawn from Poe's horrid story, and the sermon in
+"Tristram Shandy," I believe.
+
+On the morrow we had an opportunity of going further into the question;
+for when we rose very early to avoid a sympathizing deputation at our
+departure, we found the hero up before us. He was breaking his fast on
+white wine and raw onions, in order to keep up the character of martyr,
+I conclude. We had a long conversation, and made out what we wanted in
+spite of his reserve. But here was a truly curious circumstance. It
+seems possible for two Scotsmen and a Frenchman to discuss during a
+long half-hour, and each nationality have a different idea in view
+throughout. It was not till the very end that we discovered his heresy
+had been political, or that he suspected our mistake. The terms and
+spirit in which he spoke of his political beliefs were, in our eyes,
+suited to religious beliefs. And _vice versa_.
+
+Nothing could be more characteristic of the two countries. Politics are
+the religion of France; as Nanty Ewart would have said, "A d----d bad
+religion"; while we, at home, keep most of our bitterness for little
+differences about a hymn-book, or a Hebrew word which perhaps neither of
+the parties can translate. And perhaps the misconception is typical of
+many others that may never be cleared up: not only between people of
+different race, but between those of different sex.
+
+As for our friend's martyrdom, he was a Communist, or perhaps only a
+Communard, which is a very different thing; and had lost one or more
+situations in consequence. I think he had also been rejected in
+marriage; but perhaps he had a sentimental way of considering business
+which deceived me. He was a mild, gentle creature, anyway; and I hope he
+has got a better situation, and married a more suitable wife since
+then.
+
+
+
+
+DOWN THE OISE
+
+TO MOY
+
+
+Carnival notoriously cheated us at first. Finding us easy in our ways,
+he regretted having let us oil so cheaply; and taking me aside, told me
+a cock-and-bull story with the moral of another five francs for the
+narrator. The thing was palpably absurd; but I paid up, and at once
+dropped all friendliness of manner, and kept him in his place as an
+inferior with freezing British dignity. He saw in a moment that he had
+gone too far, and killed a willing horse; his face fell; I am sure he
+would have refunded if he could only have thought of a decent pretext.
+He wished me to drink with him, but I would none of his drinks. He grew
+pathetically tender in his professions; but I walked beside him in
+silence or answered him in stately courtesies; and when we got to the
+landing-place, passed the word in English slang to the _Cigarette_.
+
+In spite of the false scent we had thrown out the day before, there must
+have been fifty people about the bridge. We were as pleasant as we could
+be with all but Carnival. We said good-bye, shaking hands with the old
+gentleman who knew the river and the young gentleman who had a
+smattering of English; but never a word for Carnival. Poor Carnival!
+here was a humiliation. He who had been so much identified with the
+canoes, who had given orders in our name, who had shown off the boats
+and even the boatmen like a private exhibition of his own, to be now so
+publicly shamed by the lions of his caravan! I never saw anybody look
+more crestfallen than he. He hung in the background, coming timidly
+forward ever and again as he thought he saw some symptom of a relenting
+humour, and falling hurriedly back when he encountered a cold stare. Let
+us hope it will be a lesson to him.
+
+I would not have mentioned Carnival's peccadillo had not the thing been
+so uncommon in France. This, for instance, was the only case of
+dishonesty or even sharp practice in our whole voyage. We talk very much
+about our honesty in England. It is a good rule to be on your guard
+wherever you hear great professions about a very little piece of virtue.
+If the English could only hear how they are spoken of abroad they might
+confine themselves for a while to remedying the fact; and perhaps even
+when that was done, give us fewer of their airs.
+
+The young ladies, the graces of Origny, were not present at our start,
+but when we got round to the second bridge, behold, it was black with
+sightseers! We were loudly cheered, and for a good way below young lads
+and lasses ran along the bank, still cheering. What with current and
+paddling, we were flashing along like swallows. It was no joke to keep
+up with us upon the woody shore. But the girls picked up their skirts as
+if they were sure they had good ankles, and followed until their breath
+was out. The last to weary were the three graces and a couple of
+companions; and just as they too had had enough, the foremost of the
+three leaped upon a tree-stump and kissed her hand to the canoeists. Not
+Diana herself, although this was more of a Venus after all, could have
+done a graceful thing more gracefully. "Come back again!" she cried; and
+all the others echoed her; and the hills about Origny repeated the
+words, "Come back." But the river had us round an angle in a twinkling,
+and we were alone with the green trees and running water.
+
+Come back? There is no coming back, young ladies, on the impetuous
+stream of life.
+
+    "The merchant bows unto the seaman's star,
+    The ploughman from the sun his season takes."
+
+And we must all set our pocket-watches by the clock of fate. There is a
+headlong, forthright tide, that bears away man with his fancies like a
+straw, and runs fast in time and space. It is full of curves like this,
+your winding river of the Oise; and lingers and returns in pleasant
+pastorals; and yet, rightly thought upon, never returns at all. For
+though it should revisit the same acre of meadow in the same hour, it
+will have made an ample sweep between-whiles; many little streams will
+have fallen in; many exhalations risen towards the sun; and even
+although it were the same acre, it will no more be the same river of
+Oise. And thus, O graces of Origny, although the wandering fortune of my
+life should carry me back again to where you await death's whistle by
+the river, that will not be the old I who walks the street; and those
+wives and mothers, say, will those be you?
+
+There was never any mistake about the Oise, as a matter of fact. In
+these upper reaches it was still in a prodigious hurry for the sea. It
+ran so fast and merrily, through all the windings of its channel, that I
+strained my thumb, fighting with the rapids, and had to paddle all the
+rest of the way with one hand turned up. Sometimes it had to serve
+mills; and being still a little river, ran very dry and shallow in the
+meanwhile. We had to put our legs out of the boat, and shove ourselves
+off the sand of the bottom with our feet. And still it went on its way
+singing among the poplars, and making a green valley in the world. After
+a good woman, and a good book, and tobacco, there is nothing so
+agreeable on earth as a river. I forgave it its attempt on my life;
+which was after all one part owing to the unruly winds of heaven that
+had blown down the tree, one part to my own mismanagement, and only a
+third part to the river itself, and that not out of malice, but from its
+great preoccupation over its business of getting to the sea. A difficult
+business, too; for the detours it had to make are not to be counted. The
+geographers seem to have given up the attempt; for I found no map
+represent the infinite contortion of its course. A fact will say more
+than any of them. After we had been some hours, three if I mistake not,
+flitting by the trees at this smooth, break-neck gallop, when we came
+upon a hamlet and asked where we were, we had got no farther than four
+kilometres (say two miles and a half) from Origny. If it were not for
+the honour of the thing (in the Scots saying), we might almost as well
+have been standing still.
+
+We lunched on a meadow inside a parallelogram of poplars. The leaves
+danced and prattled in the wind all round about us. The river hurried on
+meanwhile, and seemed to chide at our delay. Little we cared. The river
+knew where it was going; not so we: the less our hurry, where we found
+good quarters and a pleasant theatre for a pipe. At that hour,
+stockbrokers were shouting in Paris Bourse for two or three per cent;
+but we minded them as little as the sliding stream, and sacrificed a
+hecatomb of minutes to the gods of tobacco and digestion. Hurry is the
+resource of the faithless. Where a man can trust his own heart, and
+those of his friends, to-morrow is as good as to-day. And if he die in
+the meanwhile, why then, there he dies, and the question is solved.
+
+We had to take to the canal in the course of the afternoon; because,
+where it crossed the river, there was, not a bridge, but a siphon. If it
+had not been for an excited fellow on the bank, we should have paddled
+right into the siphon, and thenceforward not paddled any more. We met a
+man, a gentleman, on the tow-path, who was much interested in our
+cruise. And I was witness to a strange seizure of lying suffered by the
+_Cigarette:_ who, because his knife came from Norway, narrated all sorts
+of adventures in that country, where he has never been. He was quite
+feverish at the end, and pleaded demoniacal possession.
+
+Moy (pronounce Moy) was a pleasant little village, gathered round a
+chateau in a moat. The air was perfumed with hemp from neighbouring
+fields. At the Golden Sheep we found excellent entertainment. German
+shells from the siege of La Fere, Nuernberg figures, gold-fish in a bowl,
+and all manner of knick-knacks, embellished the public room. The
+landlady was a stout, plain, short-sighted, motherly body, with
+something not far short of a genius for cookery. She had a guess of her
+excellence herself. After every dish was sent in, she would come and
+look on at the dinner for a while, with puckered, blinking eyes. "_C'est
+bon, n'est-ce pas?_" she would say; and when she had received a proper
+answer, she disappeared into the kitchen. That common French dish,
+partridge and cabbages, became a new thing in my eyes at the Golden
+Sheep; and many subsequent dinners have bitterly disappointed me in
+consequence. Sweet was our rest in the Golden Sheep at Moy.
+
+
+
+
+LA FERE OF CURSED MEMORY
+
+
+We lingered in Moy a good part of the day, for we were fond of being
+philosophical, and scorned long journeys and early starts on principle.
+The place, moreover, invited to repose. People in elaborate shooting
+costumes sallied from the chateau with guns and game-bags; and this was
+a pleasure in itself, to remain behind while these elegant
+pleasure-seekers took the first of the morning. In this way, all the
+world may be an aristocrat, and play the duke among marquises, and the
+reigning monarch among dukes, if he will only outvie them in
+tranquility. An imperturbable demeanour comes from perfect patience.
+Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or
+misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a
+thunderstorm.
+
+We made a very short day of it to La Fere; but the dusk was falling, and
+a small rain had begun before we stowed the boats. La Fere is a
+fortified town in a plain, and has two belts of rampart. Between the
+first and the second extends a region of waste land and cultivated
+patches. Here and there along the wayside were posters forbidding
+trespass in the name of military engineering. At last, a second gateway
+admitted us to the town itself. Lighted windows looked gladsome, whiffs
+of comfortable cookery came abroad upon the air. The town was full of
+the military reserve, out for the French Autumn Manoeuvres, and the
+reservists walked speedily and wore their formidable great-coats. It was
+a fine night to be within doors over dinner, and hear the rain upon the
+windows.
+
+The _Cigarette_ and I could not sufficiently congratulate each other on
+the prospect, for we had been told there was a capital inn at La Fere.
+Such a dinner as we were going to eat! such beds as we were to sleep
+in!--and all the while the rain raining on houseless folk over all the
+poplared countryside! It made our mouths water. The inn bore the name of
+some woodland animal, stag, or hart, or hind, I forget which. But I
+shall never forget how spacious and how eminently habitable it looked as
+we drew near. The carriage entry was lighted up, not by intention, but
+from the mere superfluity of fire and candle in the house. A rattle of
+many dishes came to our ears; we sighted a great field of tablecloth;
+the kitchen glowed like a forge and smelt like a garden of things to
+eat.
+
+Into this, the inmost shrine and physiological heart of a hostelry, with
+all its furnaces in action, and all its dressers charged with viands,
+you are now to suppose us making our triumphal entry, a pair of damp
+rag-and-bone men, each with a limp india-rubber bag upon his arm. I do
+not believe I have a sound view of that kitchen; I saw it through a sort
+of glory: but it seemed to me crowded with the snowy caps of cookmen,
+who all turned round from their saucepans and looked at us with
+surprise. There was no doubt about the landlady, however: there she was,
+heading her army, a flushed, angry woman, full of affairs. Her I asked
+politely--too politely, thinks the _Cigarette_--if we could have beds:
+she surveying us coldly from head to foot.
+
+"You will find beds in the suburb," she remarked. "We are too busy for
+the like of you."
+
+If we could make an entrance, change our clothes, and order a bottle of
+wine, I felt sure we could put things right; so said I: "If we cannot
+sleep, we may at least dine,"--and was for depositing my bag.
+
+What a terrible convulsion of nature was that which followed in the
+landlady's face! She made a run at us, and stamped her foot.
+
+"Out with you--out of the door!" she screeched. "_Sortez! sortez! sortez
+par la porte!_"
+
+I do not know how it happened, but next moment we were out in the rain
+and darkness, and I was cursing before the carriage entry like a
+disappointed mendicant. Where were the boating men of Belgium? where the
+Judge and his good wines? and where the graces of Origny? Black, black
+was the night after the firelit kitchen; but what was that to the
+blackness in our heart? This was not the first time that I have been
+refused a lodging. Often and often have I planned what I should do if
+such a misadventure happened to me again. And nothing is easier to plan.
+But to put in execution, with the heart boiling at the indignity? Try
+it; try it only once; and tell me what you did.
+
+It is all very fine to talk about tramps and morality. Six hours of
+police surveillance (such as I have had), or one brutal rejection from
+an inn-door, change your views upon the subject like a course of
+lectures. As long as you keep in the upper regions, with all the world
+bowing to you as you go, social arrangements have a very handsome air;
+but once get under the wheels, and you wish society were at the devil. I
+will give most respectable men a fortnight of such a life, and then I
+will offer them twopence for what remains of their morality.
+
+For my part, when I was turned out of the Stag, or the Hind, or whatever
+it was, I would have set the temple of Diana on fire if it had been
+handy. There was no crime complete enough to express my disapproval of
+human institutions. As for the _Cigarette_, I never knew a man so
+altered. "We have been taken for pedlars again," said he. "Good God,
+what it must be to be a pedlar in reality!" He particularized a
+complaint for every joint in the landlady's body. Timon was a
+philanthropist alongside of him. And then, when he was at the top of his
+maledictory bent, he would suddenly break away and begin whimperingly to
+commiserate the poor. "I hope to God," he said,--and I trust the prayer
+was answered,--"that I shall never be uncivil to a pedlar." Was this the
+imperturbable _Cigarette_? This, this was he. O change beyond report,
+thought, or belief!
+
+Meantime the heaven wept upon our heads; and the windows grew brighter
+as the night increased in darkness. We trudged in and out of La Fere
+streets; we saw shops, and private houses where people were copiously
+dining; we saw stables where carters' nags had plenty of fodder and
+clean straw; we saw no end of reservists, who were very sorry for
+themselves this wet night, I doubt not, and yearned for their country
+homes; but had they not each man his place in La Fere barracks? And we,
+what had we?
+
+There seemed to be no other inn in the whole town. People gave us
+directions, which we followed as best we could, generally with the
+effect of bringing us out again upon the scene of our disgrace. We were
+very sad people indeed by the time we had gone all over La Fere; and the
+_Cigarette_ had already made up his mind to lie under a poplar and sup
+off a loaf of bread. But right at the other end, the house next the
+town-gate was full of light and bustle. "_Bazin, aubergiste, loge a
+pied_," was the sign. "_A la Croix de Malte_." There were we received.
+
+The room was full of noisy reservists drinking and smoking; and we were
+very glad indeed when the drums and bugles began to go about the
+streets, and one and all had to snatch shakoes and be off for the
+barracks.
+
+Bazin was a tall man, running to fat: soft-spoken, with a delicate,
+gentle face. We asked him to share our wine; but he excused himself,
+having pledged reservists all day long. This was a very different type
+of the workman-innkeeper from the bawling disputatious fellow at Origny.
+He also loved Paris, where he had worked as a decorative painter in his
+youth. There were such opportunities for self-instruction there, he
+said. And if any one has read Zola's description of the workman's
+marriage-party visiting the Louvre, they would do well to have heard
+Bazin by way of antidote. He had delighted in the museums in his youth.
+"One sees there little miracles of work," he said; "that is what makes a
+good workman; it kindles a spark." We asked him how he managed in La
+Fere. "I am married," he said, "and I have my pretty children. But
+frankly, it is no life at all. From morning to night I pledge a pack of
+good enough fellows who know nothing."
+
+It faired as the night went on, and the moon came out of the clouds. We
+sat in front of the door, talking softly with Bazin. At the guardhouse
+opposite, the guard was being for ever turned out, as trains of field
+artillery kept clanking in out of the night, or patrols of horsemen
+trotted by in their cloaks. Madame Bazin came out after a while; she was
+tired with her day's work, I suppose; and she nestled up to her husband
+and laid her head upon his breast. He had his arm about her, and kept
+gently patting her on the shoulder. I think Bazin was right, and he was
+really married. Of how few people can the same be said!
+
+Little did the Bazins know how much they served us. We were charged for
+candles, for food and drink, and for the beds we slept in. But there was
+nothing in the bill for the husband's pleasant talk; nor for the pretty
+spectacle of their married life. And there was yet another item
+uncharged. For these people's politeness really set us up again in our
+own esteem. We had a thirst for consideration; the sense of insult was
+still hot in our spirits; and civil usage seemed to restore us to our
+position in the world.
+
+How little we pay our way in life! Although we have our purses
+continually in our hand, the better part of service goes still
+unrewarded. But I like to fancy that a grateful spirit gives as good as
+it gets. Perhaps the Bazins knew how much I liked them? perhaps they
+also were healed of some slights by the thanks that I gave them in my
+manner?
+
+
+
+
+DOWN THE OISE
+
+THROUGH THE GOLDEN VALLEY
+
+
+Below La Fere the river runs through a piece of open pastoral country;
+green, opulent, loved by breeders; called the Golden Valley. In wide
+sweeps, and with a swift and equable gallop, the ceaseless stream of
+water visits and makes green the fields. Kine, and horses, and little
+humorous donkeys, browse together in the meadows, and come down in
+troops to the riverside to drink. They make a strange feature in the
+landscape; above all when they are startled, and you see them galloping
+to and fro with their incongruous forms and faces. It gives a feeling as
+of great, unfenced pampas, and the herds of wandering nations. There
+were hills in the distance upon either hand; and on one side, the river
+sometimes bordered on the wooded spurs of Coucy and St. Gobain.
+
+The artillery were practicing at La Fere, and soon the cannon of heaven
+joined in that loud play. Two continents of cloud met and exchanged
+salvos overhead; while all round the horizon we could see sunshine and
+clear air upon the hills. What with the guns and the thunder, the herds
+were all frightened in the Golden Valley. We could see them tossing
+their heads, and running to and fro in timorous indecision; and when
+they had made up their minds, and the donkey followed the horse, and the
+cow was after the donkey, we could hear their hooves thundering abroad
+over the meadows. It had a martial sound, like cavalry charges. And
+altogether, as far as the ears are concerned, we had a very rousing
+battle-piece performed for our amusement.
+
+At last the guns and the thunder dropped off; the sun shone on the wet
+meadows; the air was scented with the breath of rejoicing trees and
+grass; and the river kept unweariedly carrying us on at its best pace.
+There was a manufacturing district about Chauny, and after that the
+banks grew so high that they hid the adjacent country, and we could see
+nothing but clay sides, and one willow after another. Only, here and
+there, we passed by a village or a ferry, and some wondering child upon
+the bank would stare after us until we turned the corner. I daresay we
+continued to paddle in that child's dreams for many a night after.
+
+Sun and shower alternated like day and night, making the hours longer by
+their variety. When the showers were heavy, I could feel each drop
+striking through my jersey to my warm skin; and the accumulation of
+small shocks put me nearly beside myself. I decided I should buy a
+mackintosh at Noyon. It is nothing to get wet; but the misery of these
+individual pricks of cold all over my body at the same instant of time
+made me flail the water with my paddle like a madman. The _Cigarette_
+was greatly amused by these ebullitions. It gave him something else to
+look at besides clay banks and willows.
+
+All the time, the river stole away like a thief in straight places, or
+swung round corners with an eddy; the willows nodded, and were
+undermined all day long; the clay banks tumbled in; the Oise, which had
+been so many centuries making the Golden Valley, seemed to have changed
+its fancy, and to be bent upon undoing its performance. What a number of
+things a river does, by simply following Gravity in the innocence of its
+heart!
+
+
+
+
+NOYON CATHEDRAL
+
+
+Noyon stands about a mile from the river, in a little plain surrounded
+by wooded hills, and entirely covers an eminence with its tile roofs,
+surmounted by a long, straight-backed cathedral with two stiff towers.
+As we got into the town, the tile roofs seemed to tumble uphill one upon
+another, in the oddest disorder; but for all their scrambling, they did
+not attain above the knees of the cathedral, which stood, upright and
+solemn, over all. As the streets drew near to this presiding genius,
+through the market-place under the Hotel de Ville, they grew emptier and
+more composed. Blank walls and shuttered windows were turned to the
+great edifice, and grass grew on the white causeway. "Put off thy shoes
+from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground."
+The Hotel du Nord, nevertheless, lights its secular tapers within a
+stone-cast of the church; and we had the superb east-end before our eyes
+all morning from the window of our bedroom. I have seldom looked on the
+east-end of a church with more complete sympathy. As it flanges out in
+three wide terraces and settles down broadly on the earth, it looks like
+the poop of some great old battle-ship. Hollow-backed buttresses carry
+vases, which figure for the stern lanterns. There is a roll in the
+ground, and the towers just appear above the pitch of the roof, as
+though the good ship were bowing lazily over an Atlantic swell. At any
+moment it might be a hundred feet away from you, climbing the next
+billow. At any moment a window might open, and some old admiral thrust
+forth a cocked hat, and proceed to take an observation. The old
+admirals sail the sea no longer; the old ships of battle are all broken
+up, and live only in pictures; but this, that was a church before ever
+they were thought upon, is still a church, and makes as brave an
+appearance by the Oise. The cathedral and the river are probably the two
+oldest things for miles around; and certainly they have both a grand old
+age.
+
+The Sacristan took us to the top of one of the towers, and showed us the
+five bells hanging in their loft. From above, the town was a tessellated
+pavement of roofs and gardens; the old line of rampart was plainly
+traceable; and the Sacristan pointed out to us, far across the plain, in
+a bit of gleaming sky between two clouds, the towers of Chateau Coucy.
+
+I find I never weary of great churches. It is my favourite kind of
+mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made
+a cathedral: a thing as single and specious as a statue to the first
+glance, and yet, on examination, as lively and interesting as a forest
+in detail. The height of spires cannot be taken by trigonometry; they
+measure absurdly short, but how tall they are to the admiring eye! And
+where we have so many elegant proportions, growing one out of the other,
+and all together into one, it seems as if proportion transcended itself,
+and became something different and more imposing. I could never fathom
+how a man dares to lift up his voice to preach in a cathedral. What is
+he to say that will not be an anti-climax? For though I have heard a
+considerable variety of sermons, I never yet heard one that was so
+expressive as a cathedral. 'Tis the best preacher itself, and preaches
+day and night; not only telling you of man's art and aspirations in the
+past, but convicting your own soul of ardent sympathies; or rather, like
+all good preachers, it sets you preaching to yourself;--and every man is
+his own doctor of divinity in the last resort.
+
+As I sat outside of the hotel in the course of the afternoon, the sweet
+groaning thunder of the organ floated out of the church like a summons.
+I was not averse, liking the theatre so well, to sit out an act or two
+of the play, but I could never rightly make out the nature of the
+service I beheld. Four or five priests and as many choristers were
+singing _Miserere_ before the high altar when I went in. There was no
+congregation but a few old women on chairs and old men kneeling on the
+pavement. After a while a long train of young girls, walking two and
+two, each with a lighted taper in her hand, and all dressed in black
+with a white veil, came from behind the altar, and began to descend the
+nave; the four first carrying a Virgin and child upon a table. The
+priests and choristers arose from their knees and followed after,
+singing "Ave Mary" as they went. In this order they made the circuit of
+the cathedral, passing twice before me where I leaned against a pillar.
+The priest who seemed of most consequence was a strange, down-looking
+old man. He kept mumbling prayers with his lips; but as he looked upon
+me darkling, it did not seem as if prayer were uppermost in his heart.
+Two others, who bore the burthen of the chant, were stout, brutal,
+military-looking men of forty, with bold, over-fed eyes; they sang with
+some lustiness, and trolled forth "Ave Mary" like a garrison catch. The
+little girls were timid and grave. As they footed slowly up the aisle,
+each one took a moment's glance at the Englishman; and the big nun who
+played marshal fairly stared him out of countenance. As for the
+choristers, from first to last they misbehaved as only boys can
+misbehave; and cruelly marred the performance with their antics.
+
+I understood a great deal of the spirit of what went on. Indeed it would
+be difficult not to understand the _Miserere_, which I take to be the
+composition of an atheist. If it ever be a good thing to take such
+despondency to heart, the _Miserere_ is the right music, and a cathedral
+a fit scene. So far I am at one with the Catholics:--an odd name for
+them, after all? But why, in God's name, these holiday choristers? why
+these priests who steal wandering looks about the congregation while
+they feign to be at prayer? why this fat nun, who rudely arranges her
+procession and shakes delinquent virgins by the elbow? why this
+spitting, and snuffing, and forgetting of keys, and the thousand and one
+little misadventures that disturb a frame of mind laboriously edified
+with chants and organings? In any playhouse reverend fathers may see
+what can be done with a little art, and how, to move high sentiments, it
+is necessary to drill the supernumeraries and have every stool in its
+proper place.
+
+One other circumstance distressed me. I could bear a _Miserere_ myself,
+having had a good deal of open-air exercise of late; but I wished the
+old people somewhere else. It was neither the right sort of music nor
+the right sort of divinity for men and women who have come through most
+accidents by this time, and probably have an opinion of their own upon
+the tragic element in life. A person up in years can generally do his
+own _Miserere_ for himself; although I notice that such an one often
+prefers _Jubilate Deo_ for his ordinary singing. On the whole, the most
+religious exercise for the aged is probably to recall their own
+experience; so many friends dead, so many hopes disappointed, so many
+slips and stumbles, and withal so many bright days and smiling
+providences; there is surely the matter of a very eloquent sermon in all
+this.
+
+On the whole, I was greatly solemnized. In the little pictorial map of
+our whole Inland Voyage, which my fancy still preserves, and sometimes
+unrolls for the amusement of odd moments, Noyon cathedral figures on a
+most preposterous scale, and must be nearly as large as a department. I
+can still see the faces of the priests as if they were at my elbow, and
+hear _Ave Maria, ora pro nobis_, sounding through the church. All Noyon
+is blotted out for me by these superior memories; and I do not care to
+say more about the place. It was but a stack of brown roofs at the
+best, where I believe people live very reputably in a quiet way; but the
+shadow of the church falls upon it when the sun is low, and the five
+bells are heard in all quarters, telling that the organ has begun. If
+ever I join the Church of Rome, I shall stipulate to be Bishop of Noyon
+on the Oise.
+
+
+
+
+DOWN THE OISE
+
+TO COMPIEGNE
+
+
+The most patient people grow weary at last with being continually wetted
+with rain; except of course in the Scottish Highlands, where there are
+not enough fine intervals to point the difference. That was like to be
+our case, the day we left Noyon. I remember nothing of the voyage; it
+was nothing but clay banks and willows, and rain; incessant, pitiless,
+beating rain; until we stopped to lunch at a little inn at Pimprez,
+where the canal ran very near the river. We were so sadly drenched that
+the landlady lit a few sticks in the chimney for our comfort; there we
+sat in a steam of vapour, lamenting our concerns. The husband donned a
+game-bag and strode out to shoot; the wife sat in a far corner watching
+us. I think we were worth looking at. We grumbled over the misfortune of
+La Fere; we forecast other La Feres in the future;--although things went
+better with the _Cigarette_ for spokesman; he had more aplomb altogether
+than I; and a dull, positive way of approaching a landlady that carried
+off the india-rubber bags. Talking of La Fere put us talking of the
+reservists.
+
+"Reservery," said he, "seems a pretty mean way to spend one's autumn
+holiday."
+
+"About as mean," returned I dejectedly, "as canoeing."
+
+"These gentlemen travel for their pleasure?" asked the landlady, with
+unconscious irony.
+
+It was too much. The scales fell from our eyes. Another wet day, it was
+determined, and we put the boats into the train.
+
+The weather took the hint. That was our last wetting. The afternoon
+faired up: grand clouds still voyaged in the sky, but now singly, and
+with a depth of blue around their path; and a sunset in the daintiest
+rose and gold inaugurated a thick night of stars and a month of unbroken
+weather. At the same time, the river began to give us a better outlook
+into the country. The banks were not so high, the willows disappeared
+from along the margin, and pleasant hills stood all along its course and
+marked their profile on the sky.
+
+In a little while the canal, coming to its last lock, began to discharge
+its water-houses on the Oise; so that we had no lack of company to fear.
+Here were all our old friends; the _Deo Gratias_ of Conde and the _Four
+Sons of Aymon_ journeyed cheerily down stream along with us; we
+exchanged waterside pleasantries with the steersman perched among the
+lumber, or the driver hoarse with bawling to his horses; and the
+children came and looked over the side as we paddled by. We had never
+known all this while how much we missed them; but it gave us a fillip to
+see the smoke from their chimneys.
+
+A little below this junction we made another meeting of yet more
+account. For there we were joined by the Aisne, already a far-travelled
+river and fresh out of Champagne. Here ended the adolescence of the
+Oise; this was his marriage-day; thenceforward he had a stately,
+brimming march, conscious of his own dignity and sundry dams. He became
+a tranquil feature in the scene. The trees and towns saw themselves in
+him, as in a mirror. He carried the canoes lightly on his broad breast;
+there was no need to work hard against an eddy: but idleness became the
+order of the day, and mere straightforward dipping of the paddle, now on
+this side, now on that, without intelligence or effort. Truly we were
+coming into halcyon weather upon all accounts, and were floated towards
+the sea like gentlemen.
+
+We made Compiegne as the sun was going down: a fine profile of a town
+above the river. Over the bridge, a regiment was parading to the drum.
+People loitered on the quay, some fishing, some looking idly at the
+stream. And as the two boats shot in along the water, we could see them
+pointing them out and speaking one to another. We landed at a floating
+lavatory, where the washerwomen were still beating the clothes.
+
+
+
+
+AT COMPIEGNE
+
+
+We put up at a big, bustling hotel in Compiegne, where nobody observed
+our presence.
+
+Reservery and general _militarismus_ (as the Germans call it) were
+rampant. A camp of conical white tents without the town looked like a
+leaf out of a picture Bible; sword-belts decorated the walls of the
+_cafes_, and the streets kept sounding all day long with military music.
+It was not possible to be an Englishman and avoid a feeling of elation;
+for the men who followed the drums were small, and walked shabbily. Each
+man inclined at his own angle, and jolted to his own convenience, as he
+went. There was nothing of the superb gait with which a regiment of tall
+Highlanders moves behind its music, solemn and inevitable, like a
+natural phenomenon. Who that has seen it can forget the drum-major
+pacing in front, the drummers' tiger-skins, the pipers' swinging plaids,
+the strange elastic rhythm of the whole regiment footing it in time--and
+the bang of the drum, when the brasses cease, and the shrill pipes take
+up the martial story in their place?
+
+A girl, at school in France, began to describe one of our regiments on
+parade to her French schoolmates, and as she went on, she told me, the
+recollection grew so vivid, she became so proud to be the countrywoman
+of such soldiers, and so sorry to be in another country, that her voice
+failed her and she burst into tears. I have never forgotten that girl;
+and I think she very nearly deserves a statue. To call her a young lady,
+with all its niminy associations, would be to offer her an insult. She
+may rest assured of one thing: although she never should marry a heroic
+general, never see any great or immediate result of her life, she will
+not have lived in vain for her native land.
+
+But though French soldiers show to ill advantage on parade, on the march
+they are gay, alert, and willing like a troop of fox-hunters. I remember
+once seeing a company pass through the forest of Fontainebleau, on the
+Chailly road, between the Bas Breau and the Reine Blanche. One fellow
+walked a little before the rest, and sang a loud, audacious marching
+song. The rest bestirred their feet, and even swung their muskets in
+time. A young officer on horseback had hard ado to keep his countenance
+at the words. You never saw anything so cheerful and spontaneous as
+their gait; schoolboys do not look more eagerly at hare and hounds; and
+you would have thought it impossible to tire such willing marchers.
+
+My great delight in Compiegne was the town-hall. I doted upon the
+town-hall. It is a monument of Gothic insecurity, all turreted, and
+gargoyled, and slashed, and bedizened with half a score of architectural
+fancies. Some of the niches are gilt and painted; and in a great square
+panel in the centre, in black relief on a gilt ground, Louis XII. rides
+upon a pacing horse, with hand on hip and head thrown back. There is
+royal arrogance in every line of him; the stirruped foot projects
+insolently from the frame; the eye is hard and proud; the very horse
+seems to be treading with gratification over prostrate serfs, and to
+have the breath of the trumpet in his nostrils. So rides for ever, on
+the front of the town-hall, the good king Louis XII., the father of his
+people.
+
+Over the king's head, in the tall centre turret, appears the dial of a
+clock; and high above that, three little mechanical figures, each one
+with a hammer in his hand, whose business it is to chime out the hours
+and halves and quarters for the burgesses of Compiegne. The centre
+figure has a gilt breast-plate; the two others wear gilt trunk-hose;
+and they all three have elegant, flapping hats like cavaliers. As the
+quarter approaches, they turn their heads and look knowingly one to the
+other; and then, _kling_ go the three hammers on three little bells
+below. The hour follows, deep and sonorous, from the interior of the
+tower; and the gilded gentlemen rest from their labours with
+contentment.
+
+I had a great deal of healthy pleasure from their manoeuvres, and took
+good care to miss as few performances as possible; and I found that even
+the _Cigarette_, while he pretended to despise my enthusiasm, was more
+or less a devotee himself. There is something highly absurd in the
+exposition of such toys to the outrages of winter on a housetop. They
+would be more in keeping in a glass case before a Nuernberg clock. Above
+all, at night, when the children are abed, and even grown people are
+snoring under quilts, does it not seem impertinent to leave these
+ginger-bread figures winking and tinkling to the stars and the rolling
+moon? The gargoyles may fitly enough twist their ape-like heads; fitly
+enough may the potentate bestride his charger, like a centurion in an
+old German print of the _Via Dolorosa_; but the toys should be put away
+in a box among some cotton, until the sun rises, and the children are
+abroad again to be amused.
+
+In Compiegne post-office a great packet of letters awaited us; and the
+authorities were, for this occasion only, so polite as to hand them over
+upon application.
+
+In some ways, our journey may be said to end with this letter-bag at
+Compiegne. The spell was broken. We had partly come home from that
+moment.
+
+No one should have any correspondence on a journey; it is bad enough to
+have to write, but the receipt of letters is the death of all holiday
+feeling.
+
+"Out of my country and myself I go." I wish to take a dive among new
+conditions for a while, as into another element. I have nothing to do
+with my friends or my affections for the time; when I came away, I left
+my heart at home in a desk, or sent it forward with my portmanteau to
+await me at my destination. After my journey is over, I shall not fail
+to read your admirable letters with the attention they deserve. But I
+have paid all this money, look you, and paddled all these strokes, for
+no other purpose than to be abroad; and yet you keep me at home with
+your perpetual communications. You tug the string, and I feel that I am
+a tethered bird. You pursue me all over Europe with the little vexations
+that I came away to avoid. There is no discharge in the war of life, I
+am well aware; but shall there not be so much as a week's furlough?
+
+We were up by six, the day we were to leave. They had taken so little
+note of us that I hardly thought they would have condescended on a bill.
+But they did, with some smart particulars too, and we paid in a
+civilized manner to an uninterested clerk, and went out of that hotel,
+with the india-rubber bags, unremarked. No one cared to know about us.
+It is not possible to rise before a village; but Compiegne was so grown
+a town, that it took its ease in the morning, and we were up and away
+while it was still in dressing-gown and slippers. The streets were left
+to people washing doorsteps; nobody was in full dress but the cavaliers
+upon the town-hall; they were all washed with dew, spruce in their
+gilding, and full of intelligence and a sense of professional
+responsibility. _Kling_ went they on the bells for the half-past six as
+we went by. I took it kindly of them to make me this parting compliment;
+they never were in better form, not even at noon upon a Sunday.
+
+There was no one to see us off but the early washerwomen--early and
+late--who were already beating the linen in their floating lavatory on
+the river. They were very merry and matutinal in their ways; plunged
+their arms boldly in, and seemed not to feel the shock. It would be
+dispiriting to me, this early beginning and first cold dabble of a most
+dispiriting day's work. But I believe they would have been as unwilling
+to change days with us as we could be to change with them. They crowded
+to the door to watch us paddle away into the thin sunny mists upon the
+river; and shouted heartily alter us till we were through the bridge.
+
+
+
+
+CHANGED TIMES
+
+
+There is a sense in which those mists never rose from off our journey;
+and from that time forth they lie very densely in my note-book. As long
+as the Oise was a small rural river, it took us near by people's doors,
+and we could hold a conversation with natives in the riparian fields.
+But now that it had grown so wide, the life along shore passed us by at
+a distance. It was the same difference as between a great public highway
+and a country by-path that wanders in and out of cottage gardens. We now
+lay in towns, where nobody troubled us with questions; we had floated
+into civilized life, where people pass without salutation. In sparsely
+inhabited places, we make all we can of each encounter; but when it
+comes to a city, we keep to ourselves, and never speak unless we have
+trodden on a man's toes. In these waters we were no longer strange
+birds, and nobody supposed we had travelled farther than from the last
+town. I remember, when we came into L'Isle Adam, for instance, how we
+met dozens of pleasure-boats outing it for the afternoon, and there was
+nothing to distinguish the true voyager from the amateur, except,
+perhaps, the filthy condition of my sail. The company in one boat
+actually thought they recognized me for a neighbour. Was there ever
+anything more wounding? All the romance had come down to that. Now, on
+the upper Oise, where nothing sailed as a general thing but fish, a pair
+of canoeists could not be thus vulgarly explained away; we were strange
+and picturesque intruders; and out of people's wonder sprang a sort of
+light and passing intimacy all along our route. There is nothing but
+tit-for-tat in this world, though sometimes it be a little difficult to
+trace: for the scores are older than we ourselves, and there has never
+yet been a settling-day since things were. You get entertainment pretty
+much in proportion as you give. As long as we were a sort of odd
+wanderers, to be stared at and followed like a quack doctor or a
+caravan, we had no want of amusement in return; but as soon as we sank
+into commonplace ourselves, all whom we met were similarly disenchanted.
+And here is one reason of a dozen, why the world is dull to dull
+persons.
+
+In our earlier adventures there was generally something to do, and that
+quickened us. Even the showers of rain had a revivifying effect, and
+shook up the brain from torpor. But now, when the river no longer ran in
+a proper sense, only glided seaward with an even, out-right, but
+imperceptible speed, and when the sky smiled upon us day after day
+without variety, we began to slip into that golden doze of the mind
+which follows upon much exercise in the open air. I have stupefied
+myself in this way more than once; indeed, I dearly love the feeling;
+but I never had it to the same degree as when paddling down the Oise. It
+was the apotheosis of stupidity.
+
+We ceased reading entirely. Sometimes when I found a new paper, I took a
+particular pleasure in reading a single number of the current novel; but
+I never could bear more than three installments; and even the second was
+a disappointment. As soon as the tale became in any way perspicuous, it
+lost all merit in my eyes; only a single scene, or, as is the way with
+these _feuilletons_, half a scene, without antecedent or consequence,
+like a piece of a dream, had the knack of fixing my interest. The less I
+saw of the novel, the better I liked it: a pregnant reflection. But for
+the most part, as I said, we neither of us read anything in the world,
+and employed the very little while we were awake between bed and dinner
+in poring upon maps. I have always been fond of maps, and can voyage in
+an atlas with the greatest enjoyment. The names of places are
+singularly inviting; the contour of coasts and rivers is enthralling to
+the eye; and to hit, in a map, upon some place you have heard of before
+makes history a new possession. But we thumbed our charts on these
+evenings with the blankest unconcern. We cared not a fraction for this
+place or that. We stared at the sheet as children listen to their
+rattle; and read the names of towns or villages to forget them again at
+once. We had no romance in the matter; there was nobody so fancy-free.
+If you had taken the maps away while we were studying them most
+intently, it is a fair bet whether we might not have continued to study
+the table with the same delight.
+
+About one thing we were mightily taken up, and that was eating. I think
+I made a god of my belly. I remember dwelling in imagination upon this
+or that dish till my mouth watered; and long before we got in for the
+night my appetite was a clamant, instant annoyance. Sometimes we paddled
+alongside for a while, and whetted each other with gastronomical fancies
+as we went. Cake and sherry, a homely refection, but not within reach
+upon the Oise, trotted through my head for many a mile; and once, as we
+were approaching Verberie, the _Cigarette_ brought my heart into my
+mouth by the suggestion of oyster patties and Sauterne.
+
+I suppose none of us recognise the great part that is played in life by
+eating and drinking. The appetite is so imperious that we can stomach
+the least interesting viands, and pass off a dinner-hour thankfully
+enough on bread and water; just as there are men who must read
+something, if it were only "Bradshaw's Guide." But there is a romance
+about the matter after all. Probably the table has more devotees than
+love; and I am sure that food is much more generally entertaining than
+scenery. Do you give in, as Walt Whitman would say, that you are any the
+less immortal for that? The true materialism is to be ashamed of what we
+are. To detect the flavour of aean olive is no less a piece of human
+perfection than to find beauty in the colours of the sunset.
+
+Canoeing was easy work. To dip the paddle at the proper inclination, now
+right, now left; to keep the head down stream; to empty the little pool
+that gathered in the lap of the apron; to screw up the eyes against the
+glittering sparkles of sun upon the water; or now and again to pass
+below the whistling tow-rope of the _Deo Gratias_ of Conde, or the _Four
+Sons of Aymon_--there was not much art in that; certain silly muscles
+managed it between sleep and waking; and meanwhile the brain had a whole
+holiday, and went to sleep. We took in, at a glance, the larger features
+of the scene; and beheld, with half an eye, bloused fishers and dabbling
+washerwomen on the bank. Now and again we might be half-wakened by some
+church spire, by a leaping fish, or by a trail of river grass that clung
+about the paddle and had to be plucked off and thrown away. But these
+luminous intervals were only partially luminous. A little more of us was
+called into action, but never the whole. The central bureau of nerves,
+what in some moods we call Ourselves, enjoyed its holiday without
+disturbance, like a Government office. The great wheels of intelligence
+turned idly in the head, like fly-wheels, grinding no grist. I have gone
+on for half an hour at a time, counting my strokes and forgetting the
+hundreds. I flatter myself the beasts that perish could not underbid
+that, as a low form of consciousness. And what a pleasure it was! What a
+hearty, tolerant temper did it bring about! There is nothing captious
+about a man who has attained to this, the one possible apotheosis in
+life, the Apotheosis of Stupidity; and he begins to feel dignified and
+longaevous like a tree.
+
+There was one odd piece of practical metaphysics which accompanied what
+I may call the depth, if I must not call it the intensity, of my
+abstraction. What philosophers call _me_ and _not-me_, _ego_ and _non
+ego_, preoccupied me whether I would or no. There was less _me_ and
+more _not-me_ than I was accustomed to expect. I looked on upon somebody
+else, who managed the paddling; I was aware of somebody else's feet
+against the stretcher; my own body seemed to have no more intimate
+relation to me than the canoe, or the river, or the river banks. Nor
+this alone: something inside my mind, a part of my brain, a province of
+my proper being, had thrown off allegiance and set up for itself, or
+perhaps for the somebody else who did the paddling. I had dwindled into
+quite a little thing in a corner of myself. I was isolated in my own
+skull. Thoughts presented themselves unbidden; they were not my
+thoughts, they were plainly some one else's; and I considered them like
+a part of the landscape. I take it, in short, that I was about as near
+Nirvana as would be convenient in practical life; and if this be so, I
+make the Buddhists my sincere compliments; 'tis an agreeable state, not
+very consistent with mental brilliancy, not exactly profitable in a
+money point of view, but very calm, golden, and incurious, and one that
+sets a man superior to alarms. It may be best figured by supposing
+yourself to get dead drunk, and yet keep sober to enjoy it. I have a
+notion that open-air labourers must spend a large portion of their days
+in this ecstatic stupor, which explains their high composure and
+endurance. A pity to go to the expense of laudanum, when here is a
+better paradise for nothing!
+
+This frame of mind was the great exploit of our voyage, take it all in
+all. It was the farthest piece of travel accomplished. Indeed, it lies
+so far from beaten paths of language, that I despair of getting the
+reader into sympathy with the smiling, complacent idiocy of my
+condition; when ideas came and went like motes in a sunbeam; when trees
+and church spires along the bank surged up, from time to time into my
+notice, like solid objects through a rolling cloudland; when the
+rhythmical swish of boat and paddle in the water became a cradle-song to
+lull my thoughts asleep; when a piece of mud on the deck was sometimes
+an intolerable eyesore, and sometimes quite a companion for me, and the
+object of pleased consideration;--and all the time, with the river
+running and the shores changing upon either hand, I kept counting my
+strokes and forgetting the hundreds, the happiest animal in France.
+
+
+
+
+DOWN THE OISE
+
+CHURCH INTERIORS
+
+
+We made our first stage below Compiegne to Pont Sainte Maxence. I was
+abroad a little after six the next morning. The air was biting, and
+smelt of frost. In an open place a score of women wrangled together over
+the day's market; and the noise of their negotiation sounded thin and
+querulous like that of sparrows on a winter's morning. The rare
+passengers blew into their hands, and shuffled in their wooden shoes to
+set the blood agog. The streets were full of icy shadow, although the
+chimneys were smoking overhead in golden sunshine. If you wake early
+enough at this season of the year, you may get up in December to break
+your fast in June.
+
+I found my way to the church; for there is always something to see about
+a church, whether living worshipers or dead men's tombs; you find there
+the deadliest earnest, and the hollowest deceit; and even where it is
+not a piece of history, it will be certain to leak out some contemporary
+gossip. It was scarcely so cold in the church as it was without, but it
+looked colder. The white nave was positively arctic to the eye; and the
+tawdriness of a continental altar looked more forlorn than usual in the
+solitude and the bleak air. Two priests sat in the chancel, reading and
+waiting penitents; and out in the nave, one very old woman was engaged
+in her devotions. It was a wonder how she was able to pass her beads
+when healthy young people were breathing in their palms and slapping
+their chest; but though this concerned me, I was yet more dispirited by
+the nature of her exercises. She went from chair to chair, from altar
+to altar, circumnavigating the church. To each shrine she dedicated an
+equal number of beads and an equal length of time. Like a prudent
+capitalist with a somewhat cynical view of the commercial prospect, she
+desired to place her supplications in a great variety of heavenly
+securities. She would risk nothing on the credit of any single
+intercessor. Out of the whole company of saints and angels, not one but
+was to suppose himself her champion-elect against the Great Assize! I
+could only think of it as a dull, transparent jugglery, based upon
+unconscious unbelief.
+
+She was as dead an old woman as ever I saw; no more than bone and
+parchment, curiously put together. Her eyes, with which she interrogated
+mine, were vacant of sense. It depends on what you call seeing, whether
+you might not call her blind. Perhaps she had known love: perhaps borne
+children, suckled them and given them pet names. But now that was all
+gone by, and had left her neither happier nor wiser; and the best she
+could do with her mornings was to come up here into the cold church and
+juggle for a slice of heaven. It was not without a gulp that I escaped
+into the streets and the keen morning air. Morning? why, how tired of it
+she would be before night! and if she did not sleep, how then? It is
+fortunate that not many of us are brought up publicly to justify our
+lives at the bar of threescore years and ten; fortunate that such a
+number are knocked opportunely on the head in what they call the flower
+of their years, and go away to suffer for their follies in private
+somewhere else. Otherwise, between sick children and discontented old
+folk, we might be put out of all conceit of life.
+
+I had need of all my cerebral hygiene during that day's paddle: the old
+devotee stuck in my throat sorely. But I was soon in the seventh heaven
+of stupidity; and knew nothing but that somebody was paddling a canoe,
+while I was counting his strokes, and forgetting the hundreds. I used
+sometimes to be afraid I should remember the hundreds; which would have
+made a toil of a pleasure; but the terror was chimerical, they went out
+of my mind by enchantment, and I knew no more than the man in the moon
+about my only occupation.
+
+At Creil, where we stopped to lunch, we left the canoes in another
+floating lavatory, which, as it was high noon, was packed with
+washerwomen, red-handed and loud-voiced; and they and their broad jokes
+are about all I remember of the place. I could look up my history-books,
+if you were very anxious, and tell you a date or two; for it figured
+rather largely in the English wars. But I prefer to mention a girls'
+boarding-school, which had an interest for us because it was a girls'
+boarding-school, and because we imagined we had rather an interest for
+it. At least--there were the girls about the garden; and here were we on
+the river; and there was more than one handkerchief waved as we went by.
+It caused quite a stir in my heart; and yet how we should have wearied
+and despised each other, these girls and I, if we had been introduced at
+a croquet party! But this is a fashion I love: to kiss the hand or wave
+a handkerchief to people I shall never see again, to play with
+possibility, and knock in a peg for fancy to hang upon. It gives the
+traveller a jog, reminds him that he is not a traveller everywhere, and
+that his journey is no more than a siesta by the way on the real march
+of life.
+
+The church at Creil was a nondescript place in the inside, splashed with
+gaudy lights from the windows, and picked out with medallions of the
+Dolorous Way. But there was one oddity, in the way of an _ex voto_,
+which pleased me hugely: a faithful model of a canal boat, swung from
+the vault, with a written aspiration that God should conduct the _Saint
+Nicolas_ of Creil to a good haven. The thing was neatly executed, and
+would have made the delight of a party of boys on the waterside. But
+what tickled me was the gravity of the peril to be conjured. You might
+hang up the model of a sea-going ship, and welcome: one that is to
+plough a furrow round the world, and visit the tropic or the frosty
+poles, runs dangers that are well worth a candle and a mass. But the
+_Saint Nicolas_ of Creil, which was to be tugged for some ten years by
+patient draught-horses, in a weedy canal, with the poplars chattering
+overhead, and the skipper whistling at the tiller; which was to do all
+its errands in green inland places, and never get out of sight of a
+village belfry in all its cruising; why, you would have thought if
+anything could be done without the intervention of Providence, it would
+be that! But perhaps the skipper was a humorist: or perhaps a prophet,
+reminding people of the seriousness of life by this preposterous token.
+
+At Creil, as at Noyon, Saint Joseph seemed a favourite saint on the
+score of punctuality. Day and hour can be specified; and grateful people
+do not fail to specify them on a votive tablet, when prayers have been
+punctually and neatly answered. Whenever time is a consideration, Saint
+Joseph is the proper intermediary. I took a sort of pleasure in
+observing the vogue he had in France, for the good man plays a very
+small part in my religion at home. Yet I could not help fearing that,
+where the Saint is so much commended for exactitude, he will be expected
+to be very grateful for his tablet.
+
+This is foolishness to us Protestants; and not of great importance
+anyway. Whether people's gratitude for the good gifts that come to them
+be wisely conceived or dutifully expressed is a secondary matter after
+all, so long as they feel gratitude. The true ignorance is when a man
+does not know that he has received a good gift, or begins to imagine
+that he has got it for himself. The self-made man is the funniest
+wind-bag after all! There is a marked difference between decreeing light
+in chaos, and lighting the gas in a metropolitan back-parlour with a box
+of patent matches; and do what we will, there is always something made
+to our hand, if it were only our fingers.
+
+But there was something worse than foolishness placarded in Creil
+Church. The Association of the Living Rosary (of which I had never
+previously heard) is responsible for that. This Association was founded,
+according to the printed advertisement, by a brief of Pope Gregory
+Sixteenth, on the 17th of January, 1832: according to a coloured
+bas-relief, it seems to have been founded, sometime or other, by the
+Virgin giving one rosary to Saint Dominic, and the Infant Saviour giving
+another to Saint Catharine of Siena. Pope Gregory is not so imposing,
+but he is nearer hand. I could not distinctly make out whether the
+Association was entirely devotional, or had an eye to good works; at
+least it is highly organized: the names of fourteen matrons and misses
+were filled in for each week of the month as associates, with one other,
+generally a married woman, at the top for _zelatrice:_ the leader of the
+band. Indulgences, plenary and partial, follow on the performance of the
+duties of the Association. "The partial indulgences are attached to the
+recitation of the rosary." On "the recitation of the required
+_dizaine_," a partial indulgence promptly follows. When people serve the
+kingdom of heaven with a pass-book in their hands, I should always be
+afraid lest they should carry the same commercial spirit into their
+dealings with their fellow-men, which would make a sad and sordid
+business of this life.
+
+There is one more article, however, of happier import. "All these
+indulgences," it appeared, "are applicable to souls in purgatory." For
+God's sake, ye ladies of Creil, apply them all to the souls in purgatory
+without delay! Burns would take no hire for his last songs, preferring
+to serve his country out of unmixed love. Suppose you were to imitate
+the exciseman, mesdames, and even if the souls in purgatory were not
+greatly bettered, some souls in Creil upon the Oise would find
+themselves none the worse either here or hereafter.
+
+I cannot help wondering, as I transcribe these notes, whether a
+Protestant born and bred is in a fit state to understand these signs,
+and do them what justice they deserve; and I cannot help answering that
+he is not. They cannot look so merely ugly and mean to the faithful as
+they do to me. I see that as clearly as a proposition in Euclid. For
+these believers are neither weak nor wicked. They can put up their
+tablet commending Saint Joseph for his despatch, as if he were still a
+village carpenter; they can "recite the required _dizaine_," and
+metaphorically pocket the indulgence, as if they had done a job for
+Heaven; and then they can go out and look down unabashed upon this
+wonderful river flowing by, and up without confusion at the pin-point
+stars, which are themselves great worlds full of flowing rivers greater
+than the Oise. I see it as plainly, I say, as a proposition in Euclid,
+that my Protestant mind has missed the point, and that there goes with
+these deformities some higher and more religious spirit than I dream.
+
+I wonder if other people would make the same allowances for me! Like the
+ladies of Creil, having recited my rosary of toleration, I look for my
+indulgence on the spot.
+
+
+
+
+PRECY AND THE MARIONNETTES
+
+
+We made Precy about sundown. The plain is rich with tufts of poplar. In
+a wide, luminous curve, the Oise lay under the hillside. A faint mist
+began to rise and confound the different distances together. There was
+not a sound audible but that of the sheep-bells in some meadows by the
+river, and the creaking of a cart down the long road that descends the
+hill. The villas in their gardens, the shops along the street, all
+seemed to have been deserted the day before, and I felt inclined to walk
+discreetly as one feels in a silent forest. All of a sudden we came
+round a corner, and there, in a little green round the church, was a
+bevy of girls in Parisian costumes playing croquet. Their laughter, and
+the hollow sound of ball and mallet, made a cheery stir in the
+neighbourhood; and the look of these slim figures, all corseted and
+ribboned, produced an answerable disturbance in our hearts. We were
+within sniff of Paris, it seemed. And here were females of our own
+species playing croquet, just as if Precy had been a place in real life,
+instead of a stage in the fairyland of travel. For, to be frank, the
+peasant woman is scarcely to be counted as a woman at all, and after
+having passed by such a succession of people in petticoats digging and
+hoeing and making dinner, this company of coquettes under arms made
+quite a surprising feature in the landscape, and convinced us at once of
+being fallible males.
+
+The inn at Precy is the worst inn in France. Not even in Scotland have I
+found worse fare. It was kept by a brother and sister, neither of whom
+was out of their teens. The sister, so to speak, prepared a meal for us,
+and the brother, who had been tippling, came in and brought with him a
+tipsy butcher, to entertain us as we ate. We found pieces of loo-warm
+pork among the salad, and pieces of unknown yielding substance in the
+_ragout_. The butcher entertained us with pictures of Parisian life,
+with which he professed himself well acquainted; the brother sitting the
+while on the edge of the billiard table, toppling precariously, and
+sucking the stump of a cigar. In the midst of these diversions, bang
+went a drum past the house, and a hoarse voice began issuing a
+proclamation. It was a man with marionnettes announcing a performance
+for that evening.
+
+He had set up his caravan and lighted his candles on another part of the
+girls' croquet-green, under one of those open sheds which are so common
+in France to shelter markets; and he and his wife, by the time we
+strolled up there, were trying to keep order with the audience.
+
+It was the most absurd contention. The show-people had set out a certain
+number of benches, and all who sat upon them were to pay a couple of
+sous for the accommodation. They were always quite full--a bumper
+house--as long as nothing was going forward; but let the show-woman
+appear with an eye to a collection, and at the first rattle of her
+tambourine the audience slipped off the seats, and stood round on the
+outside with their hands in their pockets. It certainly would have tried
+an angel's temper. The showman roared from the proscenium; he had been
+all over France, and nowhere, nowhere, "not even on the borders of
+Germany," had he met with such misconduct. Such thieves and rogues and
+rascals, as he called them! And every now and again the wife issued on
+another round, and added her shrill quota to the tirade. I remarked
+here, as elsewhere, how far more copious is the female mind in the
+material of insult. The audience laughed in high good-humour over the
+man's declamations, but they bridled and cried aloud under the woman's
+pungent sallies. She picked out the sore points. She had the honour of
+the village at her mercy. Voices answered her angrily out of the crowd,
+and received a smarting retort for their trouble. A couple of old ladies
+beside me, who had duly paid for their seats, waxed very red and
+indignant, and discoursed to each other audibly about the impudence of
+these mountebanks; but as soon as the show-woman caught a whisper of
+this, she was down upon them with a swoop: if mesdames could persuade
+their neighbours to act with common honesty, the mountebanks, she
+assured them, would be polite enough: mesdames had probably had their
+bowl of soup, and perhaps a glass of wine that evening; the mountebanks
+also had a taste for soup, and did not choose to have their little
+earnings stolen from them before their eyes. Once, things came as far as
+a brief personal encounter between the showman and some lads, in which
+the former went down as readily as one of his own marionnettes to a peal
+of jeering laughter.
+
+I was a good deal astonished at this scene, because I am pretty well
+acquainted with the ways of French strollers, more or less artistic; and
+have always found them singularly pleasing. Any stroller must be dear to
+the right-thinking heart; if it were only as a living protest against
+offices and the mercantile spirit, and as something to remind us that
+life is not by necessity the kind of thing we generally make it. Even a
+German band, if you see it leaving town in the early morning for a
+campaign in country places, among trees and meadows, has a romantic
+flavour for the imagination. There is nobody, under thirty, so dead but
+his heart will stir a little at sight of a gypsies' camp. "We are not
+cotton-spinners all"--or, at least, not all through. There is some life
+in humanity yet: and youth will now and again find a brave word to say
+in dispraise of riches, and throw up a situation to go strolling with a
+knapsack.
+
+An Englishman has always special facilities for intercourse with French
+gymnasts; for England is the natural home of gymnasts. This or that
+fellow, in his tights and spangles, is sure to know a word or two of
+English, to have drunk English _aff-'n'-aff_, and perhaps performed in
+an English music-hall. He is a countryman of mine by profession. He
+leaps, like the Belgian boating men, to the notion that I must be an
+athlete myself.
+
+But the gymnast is not my favourite; he has little or no tincture of the
+artist in his composition; his soul is small and pedestrian, for the
+most part, since his profession makes no call upon it, and does not
+accustom him to high ideas. But if a man is only so much of an actor
+that he can stumble through a farce, he is made free of a new order of
+thoughts. He has something else to think about beside the money-box. He
+has a pride of his own, and, what is of far more importance, he has an
+aim before him that he can never quite attain. He has gone upon a
+pilgrimage that will last him his life long, because there is no end to
+it short of perfection. He will better upon himself a little day by day;
+or even if he has given up the attempt, he will always remember that
+once upon a time he had conceived this high ideal, that once upon a time
+he had fallen in love with a star. "'Tis better to have loved and lost."
+Although the moon should have nothing to say to Endymion, although he
+should settle down with Audrey and feed pigs, do you not think he would
+move with a better grace, and cherish higher thoughts to the end? The
+lout he meets at church never had a fancy above Audrey's snood; but
+there is a reminiscence in Endymion's heart that, like a spice, keeps it
+fresh and haughty.
+
+To be even one of the outskirters of art leaves a fine stamp on a man's
+countenance. I remember once dining with a party in the inn at Chateau
+Landon. Most of them were unmistakable bagmen; others well-to-do
+peasantry; but there was one young fellow in a blouse, whose face stood
+out from among the rest surprisingly. It looked more finished; more of
+the spirit looked out through it; it had a living, expressive air, and
+you could see that his eyes took things in. My companion and I wondered
+greatly who and what he could be. It was fair-time in Chateau Landon,
+and when we went along to the booths we had our question answered; for
+there was our friend busily fiddling for the peasants to caper to. He
+was a wandering violinist.
+
+A troop of strollers once came to the inn where I was staying, in the
+Department of Seine et Marne. There was a father and mother; two
+daughters, brazen, blowsy hussies, who sang and acted, without an idea
+of how to set about either; and a dark young man, like a tutor, a
+recalcitrant house-painter, who sang and acted not amiss. The mother was
+the genius of the party, so far as genius can be spoken of with regard
+to such a pack of incompetent humbugs; and her husband could not find
+words to express his admiration for her comic countryman. "You should
+see my old woman," said he, and nodded his beery countenance. One night
+they performed in the stable-yard, with flaring lamps--a wretched
+exhibition, coldly looked upon by a village audience. Next night, as
+soon as the lamps were lighted, there came a plump of rain, and they had
+to sweep away their baggage as fast as possible, and make off to the
+barn where they harboured, cold, wet, and supperless. In the morning, a
+dear friend of mine, who has as warm a heart for strollers as I have
+myself, made a little collection, and sent it by my hands to comfort
+them for their disappointment. I gave it to the father; he thanked me
+cordially, and we drank a cup together in the kitchen, talking of roads,
+and audiences, and hard times.
+
+When I was going, up got my old stroller, and off with his hat. "I am
+afraid," said he, "that Monsieur will think me altogether a beggar; but
+I have another demand to make upon him." I began to hate him on the
+spot. "We play again to-night," he went on. "Of course, I shall refuse
+to accept any more money from Monsieur and his friends, who have been
+already so liberal. But our programme of to-night is something truly
+creditable; and I cling to the idea that Monsieur will honour us with
+his presence." And then, with a shrug and a smile: "Monsieur
+understands--the vanity of an artist!" Save the mark! The vanity of an
+artist! That is the kind of thing that reconciles me to life: a ragged,
+tippling, incompetent old rogue, with the manners of a gentleman, and
+the vanity of an artist, to keep up his self-respect!
+
+But the man after my own heart is M. de Vauversin. It is nearly two
+years since I saw him first, and indeed I hope I may see him often
+again. Here is his first programme, as I found it on the
+breakfast-table, and have kept it ever since as a relic of bright
+days:--
+
+     _"Mesdames et Messieurs,_
+
+     _"Mademoiselle Ferrario et M. de Vauversin auront l'honneur de
+     chanter ce soir les morceaux suivants.
+
+     "Mademoiselle Ferrario chantera--Mignon--Oiseaux
+     legers--France--Des Francais dorment la--Le chateau bleu--Ou
+     voulez-vous aller?
+
+     "M. de Vauversin--Madame Fountaine et M. Robinet--Les plongeurs a
+     cheval--Le mari mecontent--Tais-toi, gamin--Mon voisin
+     l'original--Heureux comme ca--Comme on est trompe."_
+
+They made a stage at one end of the _salle-a-manger_. And what a sight
+it was to see M. de Vauversin, with a cigarette in his mouth, twanging a
+guitar, and following Mademoiselle Ferrario's eyes with the obedient,
+kindly look of a dog! The entertainment wound up with a tombola, or
+auction of lottery tickets: an admirable amusement, with all the
+excitement of gambling, and no hope of gain to make you ashamed of your
+eagerness; for there all is loss; you make haste to be out of pocket; it
+is a competition who shall lose most money for the benefit of M. de
+Vauversin and Mademoiselle Ferrario.
+
+M. de Vauversin is a small man, with a great head of black hair, a
+vivacious and engaging air, and a smile that would be delightful if he
+had better teeth. He was once an actor in the Chatelet; but he
+contracted a nervous affection from the heat and glare of the
+footlights, which unfitted him for the stage. At this crisis
+Mademoiselle Ferrario, otherwise Mademoiselle Rita of the Alcazar,
+agreed to share his wandering fortunes. "I could never forget the
+generosity of that lady," said he. He wears trousers so tight that it
+has long been a problem to all who knew him how he manages to get in and
+out of them. He sketches a little in water-colours; he writes verses; he
+is the most patient of fishermen, and spent long days at the bottom of
+the inn-garden fruitlessly dabbling a line in the clear river.
+
+You should hear him recounting his experiences over a bottle of wine;
+such a pleasant vein of talk as he has, with a ready smile at his own
+mishaps, and every now and then a sudden gravity, like a man who should
+hear the surf roar while he was telling the perils of the deep. For it
+was no longer ago than last night, perhaps, that the receipts only
+amounted to a franc and a half, to cover three francs of railway fare
+and two of board and lodging. The Maire, a man worth a million of money,
+sat in the front seat, repeatedly applauding Mlle. Ferrario, and yet
+gave no more than three _sous_ the whole evening. Local authorities look
+with such an evil eye upon the strolling artist. Alas! I know it well,
+who have been myself taken for one, and pitilessly incarcerated on the
+strength of the misapprehension. Once M. de Vauversin visited a
+commissary of police for permission to sing. The commissary, who was
+smoking at his ease, politely doffed his hat upon the singer's entrance.
+"Mr. Commissary," he began, "I am an artist." And on went the
+commissary's hat again. No courtesy for the companions of Apollo! "They
+are as degraded as that," said M. de Vauversin, with a sweep of his
+cigarette.
+
+But what pleased me most was one outbreak of his, when we had been
+talking all the evening of the rubs, indignities, and pinchings of his
+wandering life. Someone said, it would be better to have a million of
+money down, and Mlle. Ferrario admitted that she would prefer that
+mightily. "_Eh bien, moi non_;--not I," cried De Vauversin, striking the
+table with his hand. "If anyone is a failure in the world, is it not I?
+I had an art, in which I have done things well--as well as some--better
+perhaps than others; and now it is closed against me. I must go about
+the country gathering coppers and singing nonsense. Do you think I
+regret my life? Do you think I would rather be a fat burgess, like a
+calf? Not I! I have had moments when I have been applauded on the
+boards: I think nothing of that; but I have known in my own mind
+sometimes, when I had not a clap from the whole house, that I had found
+a true intonation, or an exact and speaking gesture; and then,
+messieurs, I have known what pleasure was, what it was to do a thing
+well, what it was to be an artist. And to know what art is, is to have
+an interest for ever, such as no burgess can find in his petty concerns.
+_Tenez, messieurs, je vais vous le dire_--it is like a religion."
+
+Such, making some allowance for the tricks of memory and the
+inaccuracies of translation, was the profession of faith of M. de
+Vauversin. I have given him his own name, lest any other wanderer should
+come across him, with his guitar and cigarette, and Mademoiselle
+Ferrario; for should not all the world delight to honour this
+unfortunate and loyal follower of the Muses? May Apollo send him rhymes
+hitherto undreamed of; may the river be no longer scanty of her silver
+fishes to his lure; may the cold not pinch him on long winter rides, nor
+the village jack-in-office affront him with unseemly manners; and may he
+never miss Mademoiselle Ferrario from his side, to follow with his
+dutiful eyes and accompany on the guitar!
+
+The marionnettes made a very dismal entertainment. They performed a
+piece, called _Pyramus and Thisbe_, in five mortal acts, and all written
+in Alexandrines fully as long as the performers. One marionnette was the
+king; another the wicked counselor; a third, credited with exceptional
+beauty, represented Thisbe; and then there were guards, and obdurate
+fathers, and walking gentlemen. Nothing particular took place during the
+two or three acts that I sat out; but you will be pleased to learn that
+the unities were properly respected, and the whole piece, with one
+exception, moved in harmony with classical rules. That exception was the
+comic countryman, a lean marionnette in wooden shoes, who spoke in prose
+and in a broad _patois_ much appreciated by the audience. He took
+unconstitutional liberties with the person of his sovereign; kicked his
+fellow-marionnettes in the mouth with his wooden shoes, and whenever
+none of the versifying suitors were about, made love to Thisbe on his
+own account in comic prose.
+
+This fellow's evolutions, and the little prologue, in which the showman
+made a humorous eulogium of his troop, praising their indifference to
+applause and hisses, and their single devotion to their art, were the
+only circumstances in the whole affair that you could fancy would so
+much as raise a smile. But the villagers of Precy seemed delighted.
+Indeed, so long as a thing is an exhibition, and you pay to see it, it
+is nearly certain to amuse. If we were charged so much a head for
+sunsets, or if God sent round a drum before the hawthorns came in
+flower, what a work should we not make about their beauty! But these
+things, like good companions, stupid people early cease to observe; and
+the Abstract Bagman tittups past in his spring gig, and is positively
+not aware of the flowers along the lane, or the scenery of the weather
+overhead.
+
+
+
+
+BACK TO THE WORLD
+
+
+Of the next two days' sail little remains in my mind, and nothing
+whatever in my note-book. The river streamed on steadily through
+pleasant riverside landscapes. Washerwomen in blue dresses, fishers in
+blue blouses, diversified the green banks; and the relation of the two
+colours was like that of the flower and the leaf in the forget-me-not. A
+symphony in forget-me-not; I think Theophile Gautier might thus have
+characterized that two days' panorama. The sky was blue and cloudless,
+and the sliding surface of the river held up, in smooth places, a mirror
+to the heaven and the shores. The washerwomen hailed us laughingly, and
+the noise of trees and water made an accompaniment to our dozing
+thoughts, as we fleeted down the stream.
+
+The great volume, the indefatigable purpose of the river, held the mind
+in chain. It seemed now so sure of its end, so strong and easy in its
+gait, like a grown man full of determination. The surf was roaring for
+it on the sands of Havre.
+
+For my own part, slipping along this moving thoroughfare in my
+fiddle-case of a canoe, I also was beginning to grow aweary for my
+ocean. To the civilized man, there must come, sooner or later, a desire
+for civilization. I was weary of dipping the paddle; I was weary of
+living on the skirts of life; I wished to be in the thick of it once
+more; I wished to get to work; I wished to meet people who understood my
+own speech, and could meet with me on equal terms, as a man and no
+longer as a curiosity.
+
+And so a letter at Pontoise decided us, and we drew up our keels for the
+last time out of that river of Oise that had faithfully piloted them,
+through rain and sunshine, for so long. For so many miles had this fleet
+and footless beast of burthen charioted our fortunes, that we turned our
+back upon it with a sense of separation. We had made a long detour out
+of the world, but now we were back in the familiar places, where life
+itself makes all the running, and we are carried to meet adventure
+without a stroke of the paddle. Now we were to return, like the voyager
+in the play, and see what rearrangements fortune had perfected the while
+in our surroundings; what surprises stood ready made for us at home; and
+whither and how far the world had voyaged in our absence. You may paddle
+all day long; but it is when you come back at nightfall, and look in at
+the familiar room, that you find Love or Death awaiting you beside the
+stove; and the most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek.
+
+
+
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+
+The country where they journeyed, that green, breezy valley of the
+Loing, is one very attractive to cheerful and solitary people. The
+weather was superb; all night it thundered and lightened, and the rain
+fell in sheets; by day, the heavens were cloudless, the sun fervent, the
+air vigorous and pure. They walked separate; the _Cigarette_ plodding
+behind with some philosophy, the lean _Arethusa_ posting on ahead. Thus
+each enjoyed his own reflections by the way; each had perhaps time to
+tire of them before he met his comrade at the designated inn; and the
+pleasures of society and solitude combined to fill the day. The
+_Arethusa_ carried in his knapsack the works of Charles of Orleans, and
+employed some of the hours of travel in the concoction of English
+roundels. In this path he must thus have preceded Mr. Lang, Mr. Dobson,
+Mr. Henley, and all contemporary roundeleers; but, for good reasons, he
+will be the last to publish the result. The _Cigarette_ walked burthened
+with a volume of Michelet. And both these books, it will be seen, played
+a part in the subsequent adventure.
+
+The _Arethusa_ was unwisely dressed. He is no precisian in attire; but
+by all accounts he was never so ill-inspired as on that tramp; having
+set forth, indeed, upon a moment's notice, from the most unfashionable
+spot in Europe, Barbizon. On his head he wore a smoking-cap of Indian
+work, the gold lace pitifully frayed and tarnished. A flannel shirt of
+an agreeable dark hue, which the satirical called black; a light tweed
+coat made by a good English tailor; ready-made cheap linen trousers and
+leathern gaiters completed his array. In person, he is exceptionally
+lean; and his face is not, like those of happier mortals, a certificate.
+For years he could not pass a frontier, or visit a bank, without
+suspicion; the police everywhere, but in his native city, looked askance
+upon him; and (although I am sure it will not be credited) he is
+actually denied admittance to the casino of Monte Carlo. If you will
+imagine him dressed as above, stooping under his knapsack, walking
+nearly five miles an hour with the folds of the ready-made trousers
+fluttering about his spindle shanks, and still looking eagerly round him
+as if in terror of pursuit--the figure, when realized, is far from
+reassuring. When Villon journeyed (perhaps by the same pleasant valley)
+to his exile at Roussillon, I wonder if he had not something of the same
+appearance. Something of the same preoccupation he had beyond a doubt,
+for he too must have tinkered verses as he walked, with more success
+than his successor. And if he had anything like the same inspiring
+weather, the same nights of uproar, men in armour rolling and resounding
+down the stairs of heaven, the rain hissing on the village streets, the
+wild bull's-eye of the storm flashing all night long into the bare
+inn-chamber--the same sweet return of day, the same unfathomable blue of
+noon, the same high-coloured, halcyon eves--and above all, if he had
+anything like as good a comrade, anything like as keen a relish for what
+he saw, and what he ate, and the rivers that he bathed in, and the
+rubbish that he wrote, I would exchange estates to-day with the poor
+exile, and count myself a gainer.
+
+But there was another point of similarity between the two journeys, for
+which the _Arethusa_ was to pay dear: both were gone upon in days of
+incomplete security. It was not long after the Franco-Prussian war.
+Swiftly as men forget, that countryside was still alive with tales of
+uhlans and outlying sentries, and hairbreadth 'scapes from the
+ignominious cord, and pleasant momentary friendships between invader and
+invaded. A year, at the most two years, later you might have tramped
+all that country over and not heard one anecdote. And a year or two
+later, you would--if you were a rather ill-looking young man in
+nondescript array--have gone your rounds in greater safety; for along
+with more interesting matter, the Prussian spy would have somewhat faded
+from men's imaginations.
+
+For all that, our voyager had got beyond Chateau Renard before he was
+conscious of arousing wonder. On the road between that place and
+Chatillon-sur-Loing, however, he encountered a rural postman; they fell
+together in talk, and spoke of a variety of subjects; but through one
+and all, the postman was still visibly preoccupied, and his eyes were
+faithful to the _Arethusa's_ knapsack. At last, with mysterious
+roguishness, he inquired what it contained, and on being answered, shook
+his head with kindly incredulity. "_Non_," said he, "_non, vous avez des
+portraits_." And then with a languishing appeal, "_Voyons_, show me the
+portraits!" It was some little time before the _Arethusa_, with a shout
+of laughter, recognized his drift. By portraits he meant indecent
+photographs; and in the _Arethusa_, an austere and rising author, he
+thought to have identified a pornographic _colporteur_. When
+country-folk in France have made up their minds as to a person's
+calling, argument is fruitless. Along all the rest of the way, the
+postman piped and fluted meltingly to get a sight of the collection; now
+he would upbraid, now he would reason--"_Voyons_, I will tell nobody";
+then he tried corruption, and insisted on paying for a glass of wine;
+and at last, when their ways separated--"_Non_," said he, "_ce n'est pas
+bien de votre part. O non, ce n'est pas bien_." And shaking his head
+with quite a sentimental sense of injury, he departed unrefreshed.
+
+On certain little difficulties encountered by the _Arethusa_ at
+Chatillon-sur-Loing, I have not space to dwell; another Chatillon, of
+grislier memory, looms too near at hand. But the next day, in a certain
+hamlet called La Jussiere, he stopped to drink a glass of syrup in a
+very poor, bare drinking-shop. The hostess, a comely woman, suckling a
+child, examined the traveller with kindly and pitying eyes. "You are not
+of this Department?" she asked. The _Arethusa_ told her he was English.
+"Ah!" she said, surprised. "We have no English. We have many Italians,
+however, and they do very well; they do not complain of the people of
+hereabouts. An Englishman may do very well also; it will be something
+new." Here was a dark saying, over which the _Arethusa_ pondered as he
+drank his grenadine; but when he rose and asked what was to pay, the
+light came upon him in a flash. "_O, pour vous_," replied the landlady,
+"a halfpenny!" _Pour vous_? By heaven, she took him for a beggar! He
+paid his halfpenny, feeling that it were ungracious to correct her. But
+when he was forth again upon the road, he became vexed in spirit. The
+conscience is no gentleman, he is a rabbinical fellow; and his
+conscience told him he had stolen the syrup.
+
+That night the travellers slept in Gien; the next day they passed the
+river and set forth (severally, as their custom was) on a short stage
+through the green plain upon the Berry side, to Chatillon-sur-Loire. It
+was the first day of the shooting; and the air rang with the report of
+fire-arms and the admiring cries of sportsmen. Overhead the birds were
+in consternation, wheeling in clouds, settling and re-arising. And yet
+with all this bustle on either hand, the road itself lay solitary. The
+_Arethusa_ smoked a pipe beside a milestone, and I remember he laid down
+very exactly all he was to do at Chatillon: how he was to enjoy a cold
+plunge, to change his shirt, and to await the _Cigarette's_ arrival, in
+sublime inaction, by the margin of the Loire. Fired by these ideas, he
+pushed the more rapidly forward, and came, early in the afternoon, and
+in a breathing heat, to the entering-in of that ill-fated town. Childe
+Roland to the dark tower came.
+
+A polite gendarme threw his shadow on the path.
+
+"_Monsieur est voyageur_?" he asked.
+
+And the _Arethusa_, strong in his innocence, forgetful of his vile
+attire, replied--I had almost said with gaiety: "So it would appear."
+
+"His papers are in order?" said the gendarme. And when the _Arethusa_,
+with a slight change of voice, admitted he had none, he was informed
+(politely enough) that he must appear before the Commissary.
+
+The Commissary sat at a table in his bedroom, stripped to the shirt and
+trousers, but still copiously perspiring; and when he turned upon the
+prisoner a large meaningless countenance, that was (like Bardolph's)
+"all whelks and bubuckles," the dullest might have been prepared for
+grief. Here was a stupid man, sleepy with the heat and fretful at the
+interruption, whom neither appeal nor argument could reach.
+
+_The Commissary:_ "You have no papers?"
+
+_The Arethusa:_ "Not here."
+
+_The Commissary:_ "Why?"
+
+_The Arethusa:_ "I have left them behind in my valise."
+
+_The Commissary:_ "You know, however, that it is forbidden to circulate
+without papers?"
+
+_The Arethusa:_ "Pardon me: I am convinced of the contrary. I am here on
+my rights as an English subject by international treaty."
+
+_The Commissary (with scorn):_ "You call yourself an Englishman?"
+
+_The Arethusa:_ "I do."
+
+_The Commissary:_ "Humph.--What is your trade?"
+
+_The Arethusa:_ "I am a Scottish Advocate."
+
+_The Commissary (with singular annoyance):_ "A Scottish Advocate! Do
+you then pretend to support yourself by that in this Department?"
+
+The _Arethusa_ modestly disclaimed the pretension. The Commissary had
+scored a point.
+
+_The Commissary:_ "Why, then, do you travel?"
+
+_The Arethusa:_ "I travel for pleasure."
+
+_The Commissary (pointing to the knapsack, and with sublime
+incredulity):_ "_Avec ca? Voyez-vous, je suis un homme intelligent!_"
+(With that? Look here, I am a person of intelligence!)
+
+The culprit remaining silent under this home-thrust, the Commissary
+relished his triumph for a while, and then demanded (like the postman,
+but with what different expectations!) to see the contents of the
+knapsack. And here the _Arethusa_, not yet sufficiently awake to his
+position, fell into a grave mistake. There was little or no furniture in
+the room except the Commissary's chair and table; and to facilitate
+matters, the _Arethusa_ (with all the innocence on earth) leant the
+knapsack on a corner of the bed. The Commissary fairly bounded from his
+seat; his face and neck flushed past purple, almost into blue; and he
+screamed to lay the desecrating object on the floor.
+
+The knapsack proved to contain a change of shirts, of shoes, of socks,
+and of linen trousers, a small dressing-case, a piece of soap in one of
+the shoes, two volumes of the _Collection Jannet_ lettered "Poesies de
+Charles d'Orleans," a map, and a version-book containing divers notes in
+prose and the remarkable English roundels of the voyager, still to this
+day unpublished: the Commissary of Chatillon is the only living man who
+has clapped an eye on these artistic trifles. He turned the assortment
+over with a contumelious finger; it was plain from his daintiness that
+he regarded the _Arethusa_ and all his belongings as the very temple of
+infection. Still there was nothing suspicious about the map, nothing
+really criminal except the roundels; as for Charles of Orleans, to the
+ignorant mind of the prisoner, he seemed as good as a certificate; and
+it was supposed the farce was nearly over.
+
+The inquisitor resumed his seat.
+
+_The Commissary (after a pause):_ "_Eh bien, je vais_ _vous dire ce que
+vous etes. Vous etes allemand el vous venez chanter a la foire._" (Well,
+then, I will tell you what you are. You are a German, and have come to
+sing at the fair.)
+
+_The Arethusa:_ "Would you like to hear me sing? I believe I could
+convince you of the contrary."
+
+_The Commissary:_ "_Pas de plaisanterie, monsieur_!"
+
+_The Arethusa:_ "Well, sir, oblige me at least by looking at this book.
+Here, I open it with my eyes shut. Read one of these songs--read this
+one--and tell me, you who are a man of intelligence, if it would be
+possible to sing it at a fair?"
+
+_The Commissary (critically):_ "_Mais oui. Tres bien._"
+
+_The Arethusa:_ "_Comment, monsieur!_ What! But do you not observe it is
+antique? It is difficult to understand, even for you and me; but for the
+audience at a fair, it would be meaningless."
+
+_The Commissary (taking a pen):_ "_Enfin, il faut en finir._ What is
+your name?"
+
+_The Arethusa (speaking with the swallowing vivacity of the English):_
+"Robert-Louis-Stev'ns'n."
+
+_The Commissary (aghast):_ "_He! Quoi?_"
+
+_The Arethusa (perceiving and improving his advantage):_
+"Rob'rt-Lou's-Stev'ns'n."
+
+_The Commissary (after several conflicts with his pen):_ "_Eh bien, il
+faut se passer du nom. Ca ne s'ecrit pas._" (Well, we must do without
+the name: it is unspellable.)
+
+The above is a rough summary of this momentous conversation, in which I
+have been chiefly careful to preserve the plums of the Commissary; but
+the remainder of the scene, perhaps because of his rising anger, has
+left but little definite in the memory of the _Arethusa_. The Commissary
+was not, I think, a practiced literary man; no sooner, at least, had he
+taken pen in hand and embarked on the composition of the
+_proces-verbal_, than he became distinctly more uncivil, and began to
+show a predilection for that simplest of all forms of repartee: "You
+lie." Several times the _Arethusa_ let it pass, and then suddenly
+flared up, refused to accept more insults or to answer further
+questions, defied the Commissary to do his worst, and promised him, if
+he did, that he should bitterly repent it. Perhaps if he had worn this
+proud front from the first, instead of beginning with a sense of
+entertainment and then going on to argue, the thing might have turned
+otherwise; for even at this eleventh hour the Commissary was visibly
+staggered. But it was too late; he had been challenged; the
+_proces-verbal_ was begun; and he again squared his elbows over his
+writing, and the _Arethusa_ was led forth a prisoner.
+
+A step or two down the hot road stood the gendarmerie. Thither was our
+unfortunate conducted, and there he was bidden to empty forth the
+contents of his pockets. A handkerchief, a pen, a pencil, a pipe and
+tobacco, matches, and some ten francs of change: that was all. Not a
+file, not a cipher, not a scrap of writing whether to identify or to
+condemn. The very gendarme was appalled before such destitution.
+
+"I regret," he said, "that I arrested you, for I see that you are no
+_voyou_." And he promised him every indulgence.
+
+The _Arethusa_, thus encouraged, asked for his pipe. That he was told
+was impossible, but if he chewed, he might have some tobacco. He did not
+chew, however, and asked instead to have his handkerchief.
+
+"_Non_," said the gendarme. "_Nous avons eu des histoires de gens qui se
+sont pendus._" (No, we have had histories of people who hanged
+themselves.)
+
+"What!" cried the _Arethusa_. "And is it for that you refuse me my
+handkerchief? But see how much more easily I could hang myself in my
+trousers!"
+
+The man was struck by the novelty of the idea, but he stuck to his
+colours, and only continued to repeat vague offers of service.
+
+"At least," said the _Arethusa_, "be sure that you arrest my comrade; he
+will follow me ere long on the same road, and you can tell him by the
+sack upon his shoulders."
+
+This promised, the prisoner was led round into the back court of the
+building, a cellar door was opened, he was motioned down the stair, and
+bolts grated and chains clanged behind his descending person.
+
+The philosophic and still more the imaginative mind is apt to suppose
+itself prepared for any mortal accident. Prison, among other ills, was
+one that had been often faced by the undaunted _Arethusa_. Even as he
+went down the stairs, he was telling himself that here was a famous
+occasion for a roundel, and that like the committed linnets of the
+tuneful cavalier, he too would make his prison musical. I will tell the
+truth at once: the roundel was never written, or it should be printed in
+this place, to raise a smile. Two reasons interfered: the first moral,
+the second physical.
+
+It is one of the curiosities of human nature, that although all men are
+liars, they can none of them bear to be told so of themselves. To get
+and take the lie with equanimity is a stretch beyond the stoic; and the
+_Arethusa_, who had been surfeited upon that insult, was blazing
+inwardly with a white heat of smothered wrath. But the physical had also
+its part. The cellar in which he was confined was some feet underground,
+and it was only lighted by an unglazed, narrow aperture high up in the
+wall, and smothered in the leaves of a green vine. The walls were of
+naked masonry, the floor of bare earth; by way of furniture there was an
+earthenware basin, a water-jug, and a wooden bedstead with a blue-grey
+cloak for bedding. To be taken from the hot air of a summer's afternoon,
+the reverberation of the road and the stir of rapid exercise, and
+plunged into the gloom and damp of this receptacle for vagabonds, struck
+an instant chill upon the _Arethusa's_ blood. Now see in how small a
+matter a hardship may consist: the floor was exceedingly uneven under
+foot, with the very spade-marks, I suppose, of the labourers who dug the
+foundations of the barrack; and what with the poor twilight and the
+irregular surface, walking was impossible. The caged author resisted
+for a good while, but the chill of the place struck deeper and deeper;
+and at length, with such reluctance as you may fancy, he was driven to
+climb upon the bed and wrap himself in the public covering. There, then,
+he lay upon the verge of shivering, plunged in semi-darkness, wound in a
+garment whose touch he dreaded like the plague, and (in a spirit far
+removed from resignation) telling the roll of the insults he had just
+received. These are not circumstances favourable to the muse.
+
+Meantime (to look at the upper surface where the sun was still shining
+and the guns of sportsmen were still noisy through the tufted plain) the
+_Cigarette_ was drawing near at his more philosophic pace. In those days
+of liberty and health he was the constant partner of the _Arethusa_, and
+had ample opportunity to share in that gentleman's disfavour with the
+police. Many a bitter bowl had he partaken of with that disastrous
+comrade. He was himself a man born to float easily through life, his
+face and manner artfully recommending him to all. There was but one
+suspicious circumstance he could not carry off, and that was his
+companion. He will not readily forget the Commissary in what is
+ironically called the free town of Frankfort-on-the-Main; nor the
+Franco-Belgian frontier; nor the inn at La Fere; last, but not least, he
+is pretty certain to remember Chatillon-sur-Loire.
+
+At the town entry, the gendarme culled him like a wayside flower; and a
+moment later two persons in a high state of surprise were confronted in
+the Commissary's office. For if the _Cigarette_ was surprised to be
+arrested, the Commissary was no less taken aback by the appearance and
+appointments of his captive. Here was a man about whom there could be no
+mistake: a man of an unquestionable and unassailable manner, in
+apple-pie order, dressed not with neatness merely but elegance, ready
+with his passport at a word, and well supplied with money: a man the
+Commissary would have doffed his hat to on chance upon the highway; and
+this _beau cavalier_ unblushingly claimed the _Arethusa_ for his
+comrade! The conclusion of the interview was foregone; of its humours I
+remember only one. "Baronet?" demanded the magistrate, glancing up from
+the passport. "_Alors, monsieur, vous etes le fils d'un baron?_" And
+when the _Cigarette_ (his one mistake throughout the interview) denied
+the soft impeachment, "_Alors_," from the Commissary, "_ce n'est pas
+voire passeport!_" But these were ineffectual thunders; he never dreamed
+of laying hands upon the _Cigarette_; presently he fell into a mood of
+unrestrained admiration, gloating over the contents of the knapsack,
+commending our friend's tailor. Ah! what an honoured guest was the
+Commissary entertaining! What suitable clothes he wore for the warm
+weather! What beautiful maps, what an attractive work of history he
+carried in his knapsack! You are to understand there was now but one
+point of difference between them: what was to be done with the
+_Arethusa_? the _Cigarette_ demanding his release, the Commissary still
+claiming him as the dungeon's own. Now it chanced that the _Cigarette_
+had passed some years of his life in Egypt, where he had made
+acquaintance with two very bad things, cholera morbus and pashas; and in
+the eye of the Commissary, as he fingered the volume of Michelet, it
+seemed to our traveller there was something Turkish. I pass over this
+lightly; it is highly possible there was some misunderstanding, highly
+possible that the Commissary (charmed with his visitor) supposed the
+attraction to be mutual, and took for an act of growing friendship what
+the _Cigarette_ himself regarded as a bribe. And at any rate, was there
+ever a bribe more singular than an odd volume of Michelet's history! The
+work was promised him for the morrow, before our departure; and
+presently after, either because he had his price, or to show that he was
+not the man to be behind in friendly offices, "_Eh bien_," he said, "_je
+suppose qu'il faut lacher votre camarade_." And he tore up that feast of
+humour, the unfinished _proces-verbal_. Ah, if he had only torn up
+instead the _Arethusa's_ roundels! There are many works burnt at
+Alexandria, there are many treasured in the British Museum, that I could
+better spare than the _proces-verbal_ of Chatillon. Poor bubuckled
+Commissary! I begin to be sorry that he never had his Michelet:
+perceiving in him fine human traits, a broad-based stupidity, a gusto in
+his magisterial functions, a taste for letters, a ready admiration for
+the admirable. And if he did not admire the _Arethusa_, he was not alone
+in that.
+
+To the imprisoned one, shivering under the public covering, there came
+suddenly a noise of bolts and chains. He sprang to his feet, ready to
+welcome a companion in calamity; and instead of that, the door was flung
+wide, the friendly gendarme appeared above in the strong daylight, and
+with a magnificent gesture (being probably a student of the
+drama)--"_Vous etes libre_!" he said. None too soon for the _Arethusa_.
+I doubt if he had been half an hour imprisoned; but by the watch in a
+man's brain (which was the only watch he carried) he should have been
+eight times longer; and he passed forth with ecstasy up the cellar
+stairs into the healing warmth of the afternoon sun; and the breath of
+the earth came as sweet as a cow's into his nostril; and he heard again
+(and could have laughed for pleasure) the concord of delicate noises
+that we call the hum of life.
+
+And here it might be thought that my history ended; but not so, this was
+an act-drop and not the curtain. Upon what followed in front of the
+barrack, since there was a lady in the case, I scruple to expatiate. The
+wife of the Marechal-des-logis was a handsome woman, and yet the
+_Arethusa_ was not sorry to be gone from her society. Something of her
+image, cool as a peach on that hot afternoon, still lingers in his
+memory: yet more of her conversation. "You have there a very fine
+parlour," said the poor gentleman. "Ah!" said Madame la Marechale
+(des-logis), "you are very well acquainted with such parlours!" And you
+should have seen with what a hard and scornful eye she measured the
+vagabond before her! I do not think he ever hated the Commissary; but
+before that interview was at an end, he hated Madame la Marechale. His
+passion (as I am led to understand by one who was present) stood
+confessed in a burning eye, a pale cheek, and a trembling utterance;
+Madame, meanwhile tasting the joys of the matador, goading him with
+barbed words and staring him coldly down.
+
+It was certainly good to be away from this lady, and better still to sit
+down to an excellent dinner in the inn. Here, too, the despised
+travellers scraped acquaintance with their next neighbour, a gentleman
+of these parts, returned from the day's sport, who had the good taste to
+find pleasure in their society. The dinner at an end, the gentleman
+proposed the acquaintance should be ripened in the _cafe_.
+
+The _cafe_ was crowded with sportsmen conclamantly explaining to each
+other and the world the smallness of their bags. About the centre of the
+room the _Cigarette_ and the _Arethusa_ sat with their new acquaintance;
+a trio very well pleased, for the travellers (after their late
+experience) were greedy of consideration, and their sportsman rejoiced
+in a pair of patient listeners. Suddenly the glass door flew open with a
+crash; the Marechal-des-logis appeared in the interval, gorgeously
+belted and befrogged, entered with salutation, strode up the room with a
+clang of spurs and weapons, and disappeared through a door at the far
+end. Close at his heels followed the _Arethusa's_ gendarme of the
+afternoon, imitating, with a nice shade of difference, the imperial
+bearing of his chief; only, as he passed, he struck lightly with his
+open hand on the shoulder of his late captive, and with that ringing,
+dramatic utterance of which he had the secret--"_Suivez!_" said he.
+
+The arrest of the members, the oath of the Tennis Court, the signing of
+the Declaration of Independence, Mark Antony's oration, all the brave
+scenes of history, I conceive as having been not unlike that evening in
+the _cafe_ at Chatillon. Terror breathed upon the assembly. A moment
+later, when the _Arethusa_ had followed his recaptors into the farther
+part of the house, the _Cigarette_ found himself alone with his coffee
+in a ring of empty chairs and tables, all the lusty sportsmen huddled
+into corners, all their clamorous voices hushed in whispering, all their
+eyes shooting at him furtively as at a leper.
+
+And the _Arethusa_? Well, he had a long, sometimes a trying, interview
+in the back kitchen. The Marechal-des-logis, who was a very handsome
+man, and I believe both intelligent and honest, had no clear opinion on
+the case. He thought the Commissary had done wrong, but he did not wish
+to get his subordinates into trouble; and he proposed this, that, and
+the other, to all of which the _Arethusa_ (with a growing sense of his
+position) demurred.
+
+"In short," suggested the _Arethusa_, "you want to wash your hands of
+further responsibility? Well, then, let me go to Paris."
+
+The Marechal-des-logis looked at his watch.
+
+"You may leave," said he, "by the ten o'clock train for Paris."
+
+And at noon the next day the travellers were telling their misadventure
+in the dining-room at Siron's.
+
+
+
+
+TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY
+
+IN THE CEVENNES
+
+
+_My dear Sidney Colvin,_
+
+_The journey which this little book is to describe was very agreeable and
+fortunate for me. After an uncouth beginning, I had the best of luck to
+the end. But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the
+wilderness of this world--all, too, travellers with a donkey; and the
+best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate
+voyager who finds many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They are the
+end and the reward of life. They keep us worthy of ourselves; and when
+we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent.
+
+Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of
+him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private
+messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped for
+them in every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays
+the postage. Yet though the letter is directed to all, we have an old
+and kindly custom of addressing it on the outside to one. Of what shall
+a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends? And so, my dear
+Sidney Colvin, it is with pride that I sign myself
+
+Affectionately yours,
+
+R. L. S._
+
+
+
+
+VELAY
+
+     _Many are the mighty things, and naught
+     is more mighty than man.... He
+     masters by his devices the tenant of the
+     fields._
+
+            SOPHOCLES.
+
+     _Who hath loosed the bands of the wild ass?_
+
+              JOB.
+
+
+TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY
+
+THE DONKEY, THE PACK, AND THE PACK-SADDLE
+
+
+In a little place called Le Monastier, in a pleasant highland valley
+fifteen miles from Le Puy, I spent about a month of fine days. Monastier
+is notable for the making of lace, for drunkenness, for freedom of
+language, and for unparalleled political dissension. There are adherents
+of each of the four French parties--Legitimists, Orleanists,
+Imperialists, and Republicans--in this little mountain-town; and they
+all hate, loathe, decry, and calumniate each other. Except for business
+purposes, or to give each other the lie in a tavern brawl, they have
+laid aside even the civility of speech. 'Tis a mere mountain Poland. In
+the midst of this Babylon I found myself a rallying-point; every one was
+anxious to be kind and helpful to the stranger. This was not merely from
+the natural hospitality of mountain people, nor even from the surprise
+with which I was regarded as a man living of his own free will in Le
+Monastier, when he might just as well have lived anywhere else in this
+big world; it arose a good deal from my projected excursion southward
+through the Cevennes. A traveller of my sort was a thing hitherto
+unheard-of in that district. I was looked upon with contempt, like a man
+who should project a journey to the moon, but yet with a respectful
+interest, like one setting forth for the inclement Pole. All were ready
+to help in my preparations; a crowd of sympathizers supported me at the
+critical moment of a bargain; not a step was taken but was heralded by
+glasses round and celebrated by a dinner or a breakfast.
+
+It was already hard upon October before I was ready to set forth, and at
+the high altitudes over which my road lay there was no Indian summer to
+be looked for. I was determined, if not to camp out, at least to have
+the means of camping out in my possession; for there is nothing more
+harassing to an easy mind than the necessity of reaching shelter by
+dusk, and the hospitality of a village inn is not always to be reckoned
+sure by those who trudge on foot. A tent, above all, for a solitary
+traveller, is troublesome to pitch and troublesome to strike again; and
+even on the march it forms a conspicuous feature in your baggage. A
+sleeping-sack, on the other hand, is always ready--you have only to get
+into it; it serves a double purpose--a bed by night, a portmanteau by
+day; and it does not advertise your intention of camping out to every
+curious passer-by. This is a huge point. If a camp is not secret, it is
+but a troubled resting-place; you become a public character; the
+convivial rustic visits your bedside after an early supper; and you must
+sleep with one eye open, and be up before the day. I decided on a
+sleeping-sack; and after repeated visits to Le Puy, and a deal of high
+living for myself and my advisers, a sleeping-sack was designed,
+constructed, and triumphantly brought home.
+
+This child of my invention was nearly six feet square, exclusive of two
+triangular flaps to serve as a pillow by night and as the top and bottom
+of the sack by day. I call it "the sack," but it was never a sack by
+more than courtesy: only a sort of long roll or sausage, green
+waterproof cart-cloth without and blue sheep's fur within. It was
+commodious as a valise, warm and dry for a bed. There was luxurious
+turning room for one; and at a pinch the thing might serve for two. I
+could bury myself in it up to the neck; for my head I trusted to a fur
+cap, with a hood to fold down over my ears, and a band to pass under my
+nose like a respirator; and in case of heavy rain I proposed to make
+myself a little tent, or tentlet, with my waterproof coat, three stones,
+and a bent branch.
+
+It will readily be conceived that I could not carry this huge package on
+my own, merely human, shoulders. It remained to choose a beast of
+burden. Now, a horse is a fine lady among animals--flighty, timid,
+delicate in eating, of tender health; he is too valuable and too restive
+to be left alone, so that you are chained to your brute as to a fellow
+galley-slave; a dangerous road puts him out of his wits; in short, he's
+an uncertain and exacting ally, and adds thirty-fold to the troubles of
+the voyager. What I required was something cheap and small and hardy,
+and of a stolid and peaceful temper; and all these requisites pointed to
+a donkey.
+
+There dwelt an old man in Monastier, of rather unsound intellect
+according to some, much followed by street-boys, and known to fame as
+Father Adam. Father Adam had a cart, and to draw the cart a diminutive
+she-ass, not much bigger than a dog, the colour of a mouse, with a
+kindly eye and a determined under-jaw. There was something neat and
+high-bred, a quakerish elegance, about the rogue that hit my fancy on
+the spot. Our first interview was in Monastier market-place. To prove
+her good temper, one child after another was set upon her back to ride,
+and one after another went head over heels into the air; until a want of
+confidence began to reign in youthful bosoms, and the experiment was
+discontinued from a dearth of subjects. I was already backed by a
+deputation of my friends; but as if this were not enough, all the buyers
+and sellers came round and helped me in the bargain; and the ass and I
+and Father Adam were the centre of a hubbub for near half an hour. At
+length she passed into my service for the consideration of sixty-five
+francs and a glass of brandy. The sack had already cost eighty francs
+and two glasses of beer; so that Modestine, as I instantly baptized her,
+was upon all accounts the cheaper article. Indeed, that was as it
+should be; for she was only an appurtenance of my mattress, or
+self-acting bedstead on four castors.
+
+I had a last interview with Father Adam in a billiard-room at the
+witching hour of dawn, when I administered the brandy. He professed
+himself greatly touched by the separation, and declared he had often
+bought white bread for the donkey when he had been content with black
+bread for himself; but this, according to the best authorities, must
+have been a flight of fancy. He had a name in the village for brutally
+misusing the ass; yet it is certain that he shed a tear, and the tear
+made a clean mark down one cheek.
+
+By the advice of a fallacious local saddler, a leather pad was made for
+me with rings to fasten on my bundle; and I thoughtfully completed my
+kit and arranged my toilette. By way of armoury and utensils, I took a
+revolver, a little spirit-lamp and pan, a lantern and some halfpenny
+candles, a jack-knife and a large leather flask. The main cargo
+consisted of two entire changes of warm clothing--besides my travelling
+wear of country velveteen, pilot-coat, and knitted spencer--some books,
+and my railway-rug, which, being also in the form of a bag, made me a
+double castle for cold nights. The permanent larder was represented by
+cakes of chocolate and tins of Bologna sausage. All this, except what I
+carried about my person, was easily stowed into the sheepskin bag; and
+by good fortune I threw in my empty knapsack, rather for convenience of
+carriage than from any thought that I should want it on my journey. For
+more immediate needs I took a leg of cold mutton, a bottle of
+Beaujolais, an empty bottle to carry milk, an egg-beater, and a
+considerable quantity of black bread and white, like Father Adam, for
+myself and donkey, only in my scheme of things the destinations were
+reversed.
+
+Monastrians, of all shades of thought in politics, had agreed in
+threatening me with many ludicrous misadventures, and with sudden death
+in many surprising forms. Cold, wolves, robbers, above all the
+nocturnal practical joker, were daily and eloquently forced on my
+attention. Yet in these vaticinations, the true, patent danger was left
+out. Like Christian, it was from my pack I suffered by the way. Before
+telling my own mishaps, let me, in two words, relate the lesson of my
+experience. If the pack is well strapped at the ends, and hung at full
+length--not doubled, for your life--across the pack-saddle, the
+traveller is safe. The saddle will certainly not fit, such is the
+imperfection of our transitory life; it will assuredly topple and tend
+to overset; but there are stones on every roadside, and a man soon
+learns the art of correcting any tendency to overbalance with a
+well-adjusted stone.
+
+On the day of my departure I was up a little after five; by six, we
+began to load the donkey; and ten minutes after my hopes were in the
+dust. The pad would not stay on Modestine's back for half a moment. I
+returned it to its maker, with whom I had so contumelious a passage that
+the street outside was crowded from wall to wall with gossips looking on
+and listening. The pad changed hands with much vivacity; perhaps it
+would be more descriptive to say that we threw it at each other's heads;
+and, at any rate, we were very warm and unfriendly, and spoke with a
+deal of freedom.
+
+I had a common donkey pack-saddle--a _barde_, as they call it--fitted
+upon Modestine; and once more loaded her with my effects. The doubled
+sack, my pilot-coat (for it was warm, and I was to walk in my
+waistcoat), a great bar of black bread, and an open basket containing
+the white bread, the mutton, and the bottles, were all corded together
+in a very elaborate system of knots, and I looked on the result with
+fatuous content. In such a monstrous deck-cargo, all poised above the
+donkey's shoulders, with nothing below to balance, on a brand-new
+pack-saddle that had not yet been worn to fit the animal, and fastened
+with brand-new girths that might be expected to stretch and slacken by
+the way, even a very careless traveller should have seen disaster
+brewing. That elaborate system of knots, again, was the work of too many
+sympathizers to be very artfully designed. It is true they tightened the
+cords with a will; as many as three at a time would have a foot against
+Modestine's quarters, and be hauling with clenched teeth; but I learned
+afterwards that one thoughtful person, without any exercise of force,
+can make a more solid job than half a dozen heated and enthusiastic
+grooms. I was then but a novice; even after the misadventure of the pad
+nothing could disturb my security, and I went forth from the stable-door
+as an ox goeth to the slaughter.
+
+
+
+
+THE GREEN DONKEY-DRIVER
+
+
+The bell of Monastier was just striking nine as I got quit of these
+preliminary troubles and descended the hill through the common. As long
+as I was within sight of the windows, a secret shame and the fear of
+some laughable defeat withheld me from tampering with Modestine. She
+tripped along upon her four small hoofs with a sober daintiness of gait;
+from time to time she shook her ears or her tail; and she looked so
+small under the bundle that my mind misgave me. We got across the ford
+without difficulty--there was no doubt about the matter, she was
+docility itself--and once on the other bank, where the road begins to
+mount through pine woods, I took in my right hand the unhallowed staff,
+and with a quaking spirit applied it to the donkey. Modestine brisked up
+her pace for perhaps three steps, and then relapsed into her former
+minuet. Another application had the same effect, and so with the third.
+I am worthy the name of an Englishman, and it goes against my conscience
+to lay my hand rudely on a female. I desisted, and looked her all over
+from head to foot; the poor brute's knees were trembling and her
+breathing was distressed; it was plain that she could go no faster on a
+hill. God forbid, thought I, that I should brutalize this innocent
+creature; let her go at her own pace, and let me patiently follow.
+
+What that pace was there is no word mean enough to describe; it was
+something as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run; it
+kept me hanging on each foot for an incredible length of time; in five
+minutes it exhausted the spirit and set up a fever in all the muscles of
+the leg. And yet I had to keep close at hand and measure my advance
+exactly upon hers; for if I dropped a few yards into the rear, or went
+on a few yards ahead, Modestine came instantly to a halt and began to
+browse. The thought that this was to last from here to Alais nearly
+broke my heart. Of all conceivable journeys this promised to be the most
+tedious. I tried to tell myself it was a lovely day; I tried to charm my
+foreboding spirit with tobacco; but I had a vision ever present to me of
+the long, long roads, up hill and down dale, and a pair of figures ever
+infinitesimally moving, foot by foot, a yard to the minute, and, like
+things enchanted in a nightmare, approaching no nearer to the goal.
+
+In the meantime there came up behind us a tall peasant, perhaps forty
+years of age, of an ironical snuffy countenance, and arrayed in the
+green tail-coat of the country. He overtook us hand over hand, and
+stopped to consider our pitiful advance.
+
+"Your donkey," says he, "is very old?"
+
+I told him, I believed not.
+
+Then, he supposed, we had come far.
+
+I told him, we had but newly left Monastier.
+
+"_Et vous marchez comme ca!_" cried he; and, throwing back his head, he
+laughed long and heartily. I watched him, half prepared to feel
+offended, until he had satisfied his mirth; and then, "You must have no
+pity on these animals," said he; and, plucking a switch out of a
+thicket, he began to lace Modestine about the stern-works, uttering a
+cry. The rogue pricked up her ears and broke into a good round pace,
+which she kept up without flagging, and without exhibiting the least
+symptom of distress, as long as the peasant kept beside us. Her former
+panting and shaking had been, I regret to say, a piece of comedy.
+
+My _deus ex machina_, before he left me, supplied some excellent, if
+inhumane, advice; presented me with the switch, which he declared she
+would feel more tenderly than my cane; and finally taught me the true
+cry or masonic word of donkey-drivers, "Proot!" All the time, he
+regarded me with a comical, incredulous air, which was embarrassing to
+confront; and smiled over my donkey-driving, as I might have smiled over
+his orthography, or his green tail-coat. But it was not my turn for the
+moment.
+
+I was proud of my new lore, and thought I had learned the art to
+perfection. And certainly Modestine did wonders for the rest of the
+forenoon, and I had a breathing space to look about me. It was Sabbath;
+the mountain-fields were all vacant in the sunshine; and as we came down
+through St. Martin de Frugeres, the church was crowded to the door,
+there were people kneeling without upon the steps, and the sound of the
+priest's chanting came forth out of the dim interior. It gave me a home
+feeling on the spot; for I am a countryman of the Sabbath, so to speak,
+and all Sabbath observances, like a Scottish accent, strike in me mixed
+feelings, grateful and the reverse. It is only a traveller, hurrying by
+like a person from another planet, who can rightly enjoy the peace and
+beauty of the great ascetic feast. The sight of the resting country does
+his spirit good. There is something better than music in the wide,
+unusual silence; and it disposes him to amiable thoughts, like the sound
+of a little river or the warmth of sunlight.
+
+In this pleasant humour I came down the hill to where Goudet stands in a
+green end of a valley, with Chateau Beaufort opposite upon a rocky
+steep, and the stream, as clear as crystal, lying in a deep pool between
+them. Above and below, you may hear it wimpling over the stones, an
+amiable stripling of a river, which it seems absurd to call the Loire.
+On all sides, Goudet is shut in by mountains; rocky footpaths,
+practicable at best for donkeys, join it to the outer world of France;
+and the men and women drink and swear, in their green corner, or look up
+at the snow-clad peaks in winter from the threshold of their homes, in
+an isolation, you would think, like that of Homer's Cyclops. But it is
+not so; the postman reaches Goudet with the letter-bag; the aspiring
+youth of Goudet are within a day's walk of the railway at Le Puy; and
+here in the inn you may find an engraved portrait of the host's nephew,
+Regis Senac, "Professor of Fencing and Champion of the two Americas," a
+distinction gained by him, along with the sum of five hundred dollars,
+at Tammany Hall, New York, on the 10th April 1876.
+
+I hurried over my midday meal, and was early forth again. But, alas, as
+we climbed the interminable hill upon the other side, "Proot!" seemed to
+have lost its virtue. I prooted like a lion, I prooted mellifluously
+like a sucking-dove; but Modestine would be neither softened nor
+intimidated. She held doggedly to her pace; nothing but a blow would
+move her, and that only for a second. I must follow at her heels,
+incessantly belabouring. A moment's pause in this ignoble toil, and she
+relapsed into her own private gait. I think I never heard of any one in
+as mean a situation. I must reach the lake of Bouchet, where I meant to
+camp, before sundown, and, to have even a hope of this, I must instantly
+maltreat this uncomplaining animal. The sound of my own blows sickened
+me. Once, when I looked at her, she had a faint resemblance to a lady of
+my acquaintance who formerly loaded me with kindness; and this increased
+my horror of my cruelty.
+
+To make matters worse, we encountered another donkey, ranging at will
+upon the roadside; and this other donkey chanced to be a gentleman. He
+and Modestine met nickering for joy, and I had to separate the pair and
+beat down their young romance with a renewed and feverish bastinado. If
+the other donkey had had the heart of a male under his hide, he would
+have fallen upon me tooth and hoof; and this was a kind of
+consolation--he was plainly unworthy of Modestine's affection. But the
+incident saddened me, as did everything that spoke of my donkey's sex.
+
+It was blazing hot up the valley, windless, with vehement sun upon my
+shoulders; and I had to labour so consistently with my stick that the
+sweat ran into my eyes. Every five minutes, too, the pack, the basket,
+and the pilot-coat would take an ugly slew to one side or the other; and
+I had to stop Modestine, just when I had got her to a tolerable pace of
+about two miles an hour, to tug, push, shoulder, and readjust the load.
+And at last, in the village of Ussel, saddle and all, the whole
+hypothec, turned round and grovelled in the dust below the donkey's
+belly. She, none better pleased, incontinently drew up and seemed to
+smile, and a party of one man, two women, and two children came up, and,
+standing round me in a half circle, encouraged her by their example.
+
+I had the devil's own trouble to get the thing righted; and the instant
+I had done so, without hesitation, it toppled and fell down upon the
+other side. Judge if I was hot! And yet not a hand was offered to assist
+me. The man, indeed, told me I ought to have a package of a different
+shape. I suggested, if he knew nothing better to the point in my
+predicament, he might hold his tongue. And the good-natured dog agreed
+with me smilingly. It was the most despicable fix. I must plainly
+content myself with the pack for Modestine, and take the following items
+for my own share of the portage: a cane, a quart flask, a pilot-jacket
+heavily weighted in the pockets, two pounds of black bread, and an open
+basket full of meats and bottles. I believe I may say I am not devoid of
+greatness of soul; for I did not recoil from this infamous burden. I
+disposed it, Heaven knows how, so as to be mildly portable, and then
+proceeded to steer Modestine through the village. She tried, as was
+indeed her invariable habit, to enter every house and every courtyard in
+the whole length; and, encumbered as I was, without a hand to help
+myself, no words can render an idea of my difficulties. A priest, with
+six or seven others, was examining a church in process of repair, and he
+and his acolytes laughed loudly as they saw my plight. I remembered
+having laughed myself when I had seen good men struggling with adversity
+in the person of a jackass, and the recollection filled me with
+penitence. That was in my old light days, before this trouble came upon
+me. God knows at least that I shall never laugh again, thought I. But
+oh, what a cruel thing is a farce to those engaged in it!
+
+A little out of the village, Modestine, filled with the demon, set her
+heart upon a by-road, and positively refused to leave it. I dropped all
+my bundles, and, I am ashamed to say, struck the poor sinner twice
+across the face. It was pitiful to see her lift her head with shut eyes,
+as if waiting for another blow. I came very near crying, but I did a
+wiser thing than that, and sat squarely down by the roadside to consider
+my situation under the cheerful influence of tobacco and a nip of
+brandy. Modestine, in the meanwhile, munched some black bread with a
+contrite hypocritical air. It was plain that I must make a sacrifice to
+the gods of shipwreck. I threw away the empty bottle destined to carry
+milk; I threw away my own white bread, and, disdaining to act by general
+average, kept the black bread for Modestine; lastly, I threw away the
+cold leg of mutton and the egg-whisk, although this last was dear to my
+heart. Thus I found room for everything in the basket, and even stowed
+the boating-coat on the top. By means of an end of cord I slung it under
+one arm, and although the cord cut my shoulder, and the jacket hung
+almost to the ground, it was with a heart greatly lightened that I set
+forth again.
+
+I I had now an arm free to thrash Modestine, and cruelly I chastised
+her. If I were to reach the lake-side before dark she must bestir her
+little shanks to some tune. Already the sun had gone down into a
+windy-looking mist; and although there were still a few streaks of gold
+far off to the east on the hills and the black fir-woods, all was cold
+and grey about our onward path. An infinity of little country by-roads
+led hither and thither among the fields. It was the most pointless
+labyrinth. I could see my destination overhead, or rather the peak that
+dominates it, but choose as I pleased, the roads always ended by turning
+away from it, and sneaking back towards the valley, or northward along
+the margin of the hills. The failing light, the waning colour, the
+naked, unhomely, stony country through which I was travelling, threw me
+into some despondency. I promise you, the stick was not idle; I think
+every decent step that Modestine took must have cost me at least two
+emphatic blows. There was not another sound in the neighbourhood but
+that of my unwearying bastinado.
+
+Suddenly, in the midst of my toils, the load once more bit the dust,
+and, as by enchantment, all the cords were simultaneously loosened, and
+the road scattered with my dear possessions. The packing was to begin
+again from the beginning; and as I had to invent a new and better
+system, I do not doubt but I lost half an hour. It began to be dusk in
+earnest as I reached a wilderness of turf and stones. It had the air of
+being a road which should lead everywhere at the same time; and I was
+falling into something not unlike despair when I saw two figures
+stalking towards me over the stones. They walked one behind the other
+like tramps, but their pace was remarkable. The son led the way, a tall,
+ill-made, sombre, Scottish-looking man; the mother followed, all in her
+Sunday's best, with an elegantly embroidered ribbon to her cap, and a
+new felt hat atop, and proffering, as she strode along with kilted
+petticoats, a string of obscene and blasphemous oaths.
+
+I hailed the son, and asked him my direction. He pointed loosely west
+and north-west, muttered an inaudible comment, and, without slackening
+his pace for an instant, stalked on, as he was going, right athwart my
+path. The mother followed without so much as raising her head. I shouted
+and shouted after them, but they continued to scale the hillside, and
+turned a deaf ear to my outcries. At last, leaving Modestine by herself,
+I was constrained to run after them, hailing the while. They stopped as
+I drew near, the mother still cursing; and I could see she was a
+handsome, motherly, respectable-looking woman. The son once more
+answered me roughly and inaudibly, and was for setting out again. But
+this time I simply collared the mother, who was nearest me, and,
+apologizing for my violence, declared that I could not let them go until
+they had put me on my road. They were neither of them offended--rather
+mollified than otherwise; told me I had only to follow them; and then
+the mother asked me what I wanted by the lake at such an hour. I
+replied, in the Scottish manner, by inquiring if she had far to go
+herself. She told me, with another oath, that she had an hour and a
+half's road before her. And then, without salutation, the pair strode
+forward again up the hillside in the gathering dusk.
+
+I returned for Modestine, pushed her briskly forward, and, after a sharp
+ascent of twenty minutes, reached the edge of a plateau. The view,
+looking back on my day's journey, was both wild and sad. Mount Mezenc
+and the peaks beyond St. Julien stood out in trenchant gloom against a
+cold glitter in the east; and the intervening field of hills had fallen
+together into one broad wash of shadow, except here and there the
+outline of a wooded sugar-loaf in black, here and there a white,
+irregular patch to represent a cultivated farm, and here and there a
+blot where the Loire, the Gazeille, or the Laussonne wandered in a
+gorge.
+
+Soon we were on a high-road, and surprise seized on my mind as I beheld
+a village of some magnitude close at hand; for I had been told that the
+neighbourhood of the lake was uninhabited except by trout. The road
+smoked in the twilight with children driving home cattle from the
+fields; and a pair of mounted stride-legged women, hat and cap and all,
+dashed past me at a hammering trot from the canton where they had been
+to church and market. I asked one of the children where I was. At
+Bouchet St. Nicholas, he told me. Thither, about a mile south of my
+destination, and on the other side of a respectable summit, had these
+confused roads and treacherous peasantry conducted me. My shoulder was
+cut, so that it hurt sharply; my arm ached like tooth-ache from
+perpetual beating; I gave up the lake and my design to camp, and asked
+for the _auberge_.
+
+
+
+
+I HAVE A GOAD
+
+
+The _auberge_ of Bouchet St. Nicholas was among the least pretentious I
+have ever visited; but I saw many more of the like upon my journey.
+Indeed, it was typical of these French highlands. Imagine a cottage of
+two stories, with a bench before the door; the stable and kitchen in a
+suite, so that Modestine and I could hear each other dining; furniture
+of the plainest, earthen floors, a single bed-chamber for travellers,
+and that without any convenience but beds. In the kitchen cooking and
+eating go forward side by side, and the family sleep at night. Any one
+who has a fancy to wash must do so in public at the common table. The
+food is sometimes spare; hard fish and omelette have been my portion
+more than once; the wine is of the smallest, the brandy abominable to
+man; and the visit of a fat sow, grouting under the table and rubbing
+against your legs, is no impossible accompaniment to dinner.
+
+But the people of the inn, in nine cases out of ten, show themselves
+friendly and considerate. As soon as you cross the doors you cease to be
+a stranger; and although these peasantry are rude and forbidding on the
+highway, they show a tincture of kind breeding when you share their
+hearth. At Bouchet, for instance, I uncorked my bottle of Beaujolais,
+and asked the host to join me. He would take but little.
+
+"I am an amateur of such wine, do you see?" he said, "and I am capable
+of leaving you not enough."
+
+In these hedge-inns the traveller is expected to eat with his own knife;
+unless he ask, no other will be supplied: with a glass, a whang of
+bread, and an iron fork, the table is completely laid. My knife was
+cordially admired by the landlord of Bouchet, and the spring filled him
+with wonder.
+
+"I should never have guessed that," he said. "I would bet," he added,
+weighing it in his hand, "that this cost you not less than five francs."
+
+When I told him it had cost me twenty, his jaw dropped.
+
+He was a mild, handsome, sensible, friendly old man, astonishingly
+ignorant. His wife, who was not so pleasant in her manners, knew how to
+read, although I do not suppose she ever did so. She had a share of
+brains, and spoke with a cutting emphasis, like one who ruled the roast.
+
+"My man knows nothing," she said, with an angry nod; "he is like the
+beasts."
+
+And the old gentleman signified acquiescence with his head. There was no
+contempt on her part, and no shame on his; the facts were accepted
+loyally, and no more about the matter.
+
+I was tightly cross-examined about my journey; and the lady understood
+in a moment, and sketched out what I should put into my book when I got
+home. "Whether people harvest or not in such or such a place; if there
+were forests; studies of manners; what, for example, I and the master of
+the house say to you; the beauties of Nature, and all that." And she
+interrogated me with a look.
+
+"It is just that," said I.
+
+"You see," she added to her husband, "I understood that."
+
+They were both much interested by the story of my misadventures.
+
+"In the morning," said the husband, "I will make you something better
+than your cane. Such a beast as that feels nothing; it is in the
+proverb--_dur comme un ane_; you might beat her insensible with a
+cudgel, and yet you would arrive nowhere."
+
+Something better! I little knew what he was offering.
+
+The sleeping-room was furnished with two beds. I had one; and I will own
+I was a little abashed to find a young man and his wife and child in the
+act of mounting into the other. This was my first experience of the
+sort; and if I am always to feel equally silly and extraneous, I pray
+God it be my last as well. I kept my eyes to myself, and know nothing of
+the woman except that she had beautiful arms, and seemed no whit
+embarrassed by my appearance. As a matter of fact, the situation was
+more trying to me than to the pair. A pair keep each other in
+countenance; it is the single gentleman who has to blush. But I could
+not help attributing my sentiments to the husband, and sought to
+conciliate his tolerance with a cup of brandy from my flask. He told me
+that he was a cooper of Alais travelling to St. Etienne in search of
+work, and that in his spare moments he followed the fatal calling of a
+maker of matches. Me he readily enough divined to be a brandy merchant.
+
+I was up first in the morning (Monday, September 23rd), and hastened my
+toilette guiltily, so as to leave a clear field for madam, the cooper's
+wife. I drank a bowl of milk, and set off to explore the neighbourhood
+of Bouchet. It was perishing cold, a grey, windy, wintry morning; misty
+clouds flew fast and low; the wind piped over the naked platform; and
+the only speck of colour was away behind Mount Mezenc and the eastern
+hills, where the sky still wore the orange of the dawn.
+
+It was five in the morning, and four thousand feet above the sea; and I
+had to bury my hands in my pockets and trot. People were trooping out to
+the labours of the field by twos and threes, and all turned round to
+stare upon the stranger. I had seen them coming back last night, I saw
+them going afield again; and there was the life of Bouchet in a
+nutshell.
+
+When I came back to the inn for a bit of breakfast, the landlady was in
+the kitchen combing out her daughter's hair; and I made her my
+compliments upon its beauty.
+
+"Oh, no," said the mother; "it is not so beautiful as it ought to be.
+Look, it is too fine."
+
+Thus does a wise peasantry console itself under adverse physical
+circumstances, and, by a startling democratic process, the defects of
+the majority decide the type of beauty.
+
+"And where," said I, "is monsieur?"
+
+"The master of the house is upstairs," she answered, "making you a
+goad."
+
+Blessed be the man who invented goads! Blessed the innkeeper of Bouchet
+St. Nicholas, who introduced me to their use! This plain wand, with an
+eighth of an inch of pin, was indeed a sceptre when he put it in my
+hands. Thenceforward Modestine was my slave. A prick, and she passed the
+most inviting stable-door. A prick, and she broke forth into a gallant
+little trotlet that devoured the miles. It was not a remarkable speed,
+when all was said; and we took four hours to cover ten miles at the best
+of it. But what a heavenly change since yesterday! No more wielding of
+the ugly cudgel; no more flailing with an aching arm; no more broadsword
+exercise, but a discreet and gentlemanly fence. And what although now
+and then a drop of blood should appear on Modestine's mouse-coloured
+wedge-like rump? I should have preferred it otherwise, indeed; but
+yesterday's exploits had purged my heart of all humanity. The perverse
+little devil, since she would not be taken with kindness, must even go
+with pricking.
+
+It was bleak and bitter cold, and, except a cavalcade of stride-legged
+ladies and a pair of post-runners, the road was dead solitary all the
+way to Pradelles. I scarce remember an incident but one. A handsome foal
+with a bell about his neck came charging up to us upon a stretch of
+common, sniffed the air martially as one about to do great deeds, and,
+suddenly thinking otherwise in his green young heart, put about and
+galloped off as he had come, the bell tinkling in the wind. For a long
+while afterwards I saw his noble attitude as he drew up, and heard the
+note of his bell; and when I struck the high-road, the song of the
+telegraph-wires seemed to continue the same music.
+
+Pradelles stands on a hillside, high above the Allier, surrounded by
+rich meadows. They were cutting aftermath on all sides, which gave the
+neighbourhood, this gusty autumn morning, an untimely smell of hay. On
+the opposite bank of the Allier the land kept mounting for miles to the
+horizon: a tanned and sallow autumn landscape, with black blots of
+fir-wood and white roads wandering through the hills. Over all this the
+clouds shed a uniform and purplish shadow, sad and somewhat menacing,
+exaggerating height and distance, and throwing into still higher relief
+the twisted ribbons of the highway. It was a cheerless prospect, but one
+stimulating to a traveller. For I was now upon the limit of Velay, and
+all that I beheld lay in another county--wild Gevaudan, mountainous,
+uncultivated, and but recently disforested from terror of the wolves.
+
+Wolves, alas! like bandits, seem to flee the traveler's advance, and
+you may trudge through all our comfortable Europe and not meet with an
+adventure worth the name. But here, if anywhere, a man was on the
+frontiers of hope. For this was the land of the ever-memorable BEAST,
+the Napoleon Bonaparte of wolves. What a career was his! He lived ten
+months at free quarters in Gevaudan and Vivarais; he ate women and
+children and "shepherdesses celebrated for their beauty"; he pursued
+armed horsemen; he has been seen at broad noonday chasing a post-chaise
+and outrider along the king's high-road, and chaise and outrider fleeing
+before him at the gallop. He was placarded like a political offender,
+and ten thousand francs were offered for his head. And yet, when he was
+shot and sent to Versailles, behold! a common wolf, and even small for
+that. "Though I could reach from pole to pole," sang Alexander Pope; the
+Little Corporal shook Europe; and if all wolves had been as this wolf
+they would have changed the history of man. M. Elie Berthet has made him
+the hero of a novel, which I have read, and do not wish to read again.
+
+I hurried over my lunch, and was proof against the landlady's desire
+that I should visit our Lady of Pradelles, "who performed many miracles,
+although she was of wood," and before three-quarters of an hour I was
+goading Modestine down the deep descent that leads to Langogne on the
+Allier. On both sides of the road, in big dusty fields, farmers were
+preparing for next spring. Every fifty yards a yoke of great-necked
+stolid oxen were patiently haling at the plough. I saw one of these mild
+formidable servants of the glebe, who took a sudden interest in
+Modestine and me. The furrow down which he was journeying lay at an
+angle to the road, and his head was solidly fixed to the yoke like those
+of caryatides below a ponderous cornice; but he screwed round his big
+honest eyes and followed us with a ruminating look, until his master
+bade him turn the plough and proceed to reascend the field. From all
+these furrowing ploughshares, from the feet of oxen, from a labourer
+here and there who was breaking the dry clods with a hoe, the wind
+carried away a thin dust like so much smoke. It was a fine, busy,
+breathing, rustic landscape; and as I continued to descend, the
+highlands of Gevaudan kept mounting in front of me against the sky.
+
+I had crossed the Loire the day before; now I was to cross the Allier;
+so near are these two confluents in their youth. Just at the bridge of
+Langogne, as the long-promised rain was beginning to fall, a lassie of
+some seven or eight addressed me in the sacramental phrase, "_D'ou
+'st-ce-que vous venez?_" She did it with so high an air that she set me
+laughing, and this cut her to the quick. She was evidently one who
+reckoned on respect, and stood looking after me in silent dudgeon, as I
+crossed the bridge and entered the county of Gevaudan.
+
+
+
+
+UPPER GEVAUDAN
+
+     _The way also here was very wearisome
+     through dirt and slabbiness; nor was
+     there on all this ground so much as one
+     inn or victualling-house wherein to
+     refresh the feebler sort._
+
+                      PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.
+
+
+A CAMP IN THE DARK
+
+
+The next day (Tuesday, September 24th) it was two o'clock in the
+afternoon before I got my journal written up and my knapsack repaired,
+for I was determined to carry my knapsack in the future, and have no
+more ado with baskets; and half an hour afterwards I set out for Le
+Cheylard l'Eveque, a place on the borders of the forest of Mercoire. A
+man, I was told, should walk there in an hour and a half; and I thought
+it scarce too ambitious to suppose that a man encumbered with a donkey
+might cover the same distance in four hours.
+
+All the way up the long hill from Langogne it rained and hailed
+alternately; the wind kept freshening steadily, although slowly;
+plentiful hurrying clouds--some, dragging veils of straight rain-shower,
+others massed and luminous as though promising snow--careered out of the
+north and followed me along my way. I was soon out of the cultivated
+basin of the Allier, and away from the ploughing oxen and such-like
+sights of the country. Moor, heathery marsh, tracts of rock and pines,
+woods of birch all jewelled with the autumn yellow, here and there a few
+naked cottages and bleak fields,--these were the characters of the
+country. Hill and valley followed valley and hill; the little green and
+stony cattle-tracks wandered in and out of one another, split into three
+or four, died away in marshy hollows, and began again sporadically on
+hillsides or at the borders of a wood.
+
+There was no direct road to Cheylard, and it was no easy affair to make
+a passage in this uneven country and through this intermittent labyrinth
+of tracks. It must have been about four when I struck Sagnerousse, and
+went on my way rejoicing in a sure point of departure. Two hours
+afterwards, the dusk rapidly falling, in a lull of the wind, I issued
+from a fir-wood where I had long been wandering, and found, not the
+looked-for village, but another marish bottom among rough-and-tumble
+hills. For some time past I had heard the ringing of cattle-bells ahead;
+and now, as I came out of the skirts of the wood, I saw near upon a
+dozen cows, and perhaps as many more black figures, which I conjectured
+to be children, although the mist had almost unrecognisably exaggerated
+their forms. These were all silently following each other round and
+round in a circle, now taking hands, now breaking up with chains and
+reverences. A dance of children appeals to very innocent and lively
+thoughts; but, at nightfall on the marshes, the thing was eerie and
+fantastic to behold. Even I, who am well enough read in Herbert Spencer,
+felt a sort of silence fall for an instant on my mind. The next, I was
+pricking Modestine forward, and guiding her like an unruly ship through
+the open. In a path, she went doggedly ahead of her own accord, as
+before a fair wind; but once on the turf or among heather, and the brute
+became demented. The tendency of lost travellers to go round in a circle
+was developed in her to the degree of passion, and it took all the
+steering I had in me to keep even a decently straight course through a
+single field.
+
+While I was thus desperately tacking through the bog, children and
+cattle began to disperse, until only a pair of girls remained behind.
+From these I sought direction on my path. The peasantry in general were
+but little disposed to counsel a wayfarer. One old devil simply retired
+into his house, and barricaded the door on my approach; and I might beat
+and shout myself hoarse, he turned a deaf ear. Another, having given me
+a direction which, as I found afterwards, I had misunderstood,
+complacently watched me going wrong without adding a sign. He did not
+care a stalk of parsley if I wandered all night upon the hills! As for
+these two girls, they were a pair of impudent sly sluts, with not a
+thought but mischief. One put out her tongue at me, the other bade me
+follow the cows, and they both giggled and joggled each other's elbows.
+The Beast of Gevaudan ate about a hundred children of this district; I
+began to think of him with sympathy.
+
+Leaving the girls, I pushed on through the bog, and got into another
+wood and upon a well-marked road. It grew darker and darker. Modestine,
+suddenly beginning to smell mischief, bettered the pace of her own
+accord, and from that time forward gave me no trouble. It was the first
+sign of intelligence I had occasion to remark in her. At the same time,
+the wind freshened into half a gale, and another heavy discharge of rain
+came flying up out of the north. At the other side of the wood I sighted
+some red windows in the dusk. This was the hamlet of Fouzilhic; three
+houses on a hillside, near a wood of birches. Here I found a delightful
+old man, who came a little way with me in the rain to put me safely on
+the road for Cheylard. He would hear of no reward, but shook his hands
+above his head almost as if in menace, and refused volubly and shrilly
+in unmitigated _patois_.
+
+All seemed right at last. My thoughts began to turn upon dinner and a
+fireside, and my heart was agreeably softened in my bosom. Alas, and I
+was on the brink of new and greater miseries! Suddenly, at a single
+swoop, the night fell. I have been abroad in many a black night, but
+never in a blacker. A glimmer of rocks, a glimmer of the track where it
+was well beaten, a certain fleecy density, or night within night, for a
+tree--this was all that I could discriminate. The sky was simply
+darkness overhead; even the flying clouds pursued their way invisibly to
+human eyesight. I could not distinguish my hand at arm's-length from the
+track, nor my goad, at the same distance, from the meadows or the sky.
+
+Soon the road that I was following split, after the fashion of the
+country, into three or four in a piece of rocky meadow. Since Modestine
+had shown such a fancy for beaten roads, I tried her instinct in this
+predicament. But the instinct of an ass is what might be expected from
+the name; in half a minute she was clambering round and round among some
+boulders, as lost a donkey as you would wish to see. I should have
+camped long before had I been properly provided; but as this was to be
+so short a stage, I had brought no wine, no bread for myself, and little
+over a pound for my lady friend. Add to this, that I and Modestine were
+both handsomely wetted by the showers. But now, if I could have found
+some water, I should have camped at once in spite of all. Water,
+however, being entirely absent, except in the form of rain, I determined
+to return to Fouzilhic, and ask a guide a little farther on my way--"a
+little farther lend thy guiding hand."
+
+The thing was easy to decide, hard to accomplish. In this sensible
+roaring blackness I was sure of nothing but the direction of the wind.
+To this I set my face; the road had disappeared, and I went across
+country, now in marshy opens, now baffled by walls unscalable to
+Modestine, until I came once more in sight of some red windows. This
+time they were differently disposed. It was not Fouzilhic, but
+Fouzilhac, a hamlet little distant from the other in space, but worlds
+away in the spirit of its inhabitants. I tied Modestine to a gate, and
+groped forward, stumbling among rocks, plunging mid-leg in bog, until I
+gained the entrance of the village. In the first lighted house there was
+a woman who would not open to me. She could do nothing, she cried to me
+through the door, being alone and lame; but if I would apply at the next
+house there was a man who could help me if he had a mind.
+
+They came to the next door in force, a man, two women, and a girl, and
+brought a pair of lanterns to examine the wayfarer. The man was not
+ill-looking, but had a shifty smile. He leaned against the doorpost,
+and heard me state my case. All I asked was a guide as far as Cheylard.
+
+"_C'est que, voyez-vous, il fait noir_," said he.
+
+I told him that was just my reason for requiring help.
+
+"I understand that," said he, looking uncomfortable; "_mais--c'est--de
+la peine_."
+
+I was willing to pay, I said. He shook his head. I rose as high as ten
+francs; but he continued to shake his head. "Name your own price then,"
+said I.
+
+"_Ce n'est pas ca_," he said at length, and with evident difficulty;
+"but I am not going to cross the door--_mais je ne sortirai pas de la
+porte_."
+
+I grew a little warm, and asked him what he proposed that I should do.
+
+"Where are you going beyond Cheylard?" he asked by way of answer.
+
+"That is no affair of yours," I returned, for I was not going to indulge
+his bestial curiosity; "it changes nothing in my present predicament."
+
+"_C'est vrai, ca_," he acknowledged, with a laugh; "_oui, c'est vrai. Et
+d'ou venez-vous?_"
+
+A better man than I might have felt nettled.
+
+"Oh," said I, "I am not going to answer any of your questions, so you
+may spare yourself the trouble of putting them. I am late enough
+already; I want help. If you will not guide me yourself, at least help
+me to find some one else who will."
+
+"Hold on," he cried suddenly. "Was it not you who passed in the meadow
+while it was still day?"
+
+"Yes, yes," said the girl, whom I had not hitherto recognized; "it was
+monsieur; I told him to follow the cow."
+
+"As for you, mademoiselle," said I, "you are a _farceuse_."
+
+"And," added the man, "what the devil have you done to be still here?"
+
+What the devil, indeed! But there I was. "The great thing," said I, "is
+to make an end of it," and once more proposed that he should help me to
+find a guide.
+
+"_C'est que_," he said again, "_c'est que_--_il fait noir_."
+
+"Very well," said I; "take one of your lanterns."
+
+"No," he cried, drawing a thought backward, and again entrenching
+himself behind one of his former phrases; "I will not cross the door."
+
+I looked at him. I saw unaffected terror struggling on his face with
+unaffected shame; he was smiling pitifully and wetting his lip with his
+tongue, like a detected schoolboy. I drew a brief picture of my state,
+and asked him what I was to do.
+
+"I don't know," he said; "I will not cross the door."
+
+Here was the Beast of Gevaudan, and no mistake.
+
+"Sir," said I, with my most commanding manners, "you are a coward."
+
+And with that I turned my back upon the family party, who hastened to
+retire within their fortifications; and the famous door was closed
+again, but not till I had overheard the sound of laughter. _Filia
+barbara pater barbarior._ Let me say it in the plural: the Beasts of
+Gevaudan.
+
+The lanterns had somewhat dazzled me, and I ploughed distressfully among
+stones and rubbish-heaps. All the other houses in the village were both
+dark and silent; and though I knocked at here and there a door, my
+knocking was unanswered. It was a bad business; I gave up Fouzilhac with
+my curses. The rain had stopped, and the wind, which still kept rising,
+began to dry my coat and trousers. "Very well," thought I, "water or no
+water, I must camp." But the first thing was to return to Modestine. I
+am pretty sure I was twenty minutes groping for my lady in the dark; and
+if it had not been for the unkindly services of the bog, into which I
+once more stumbled, I might have still been groping for her at the dawn.
+My next business was to gain the shelter of a wood, for the wind was
+cold as well as boisterous. How, in this well-wooded district, I should
+have been so long in finding one, is another of the insoluble mysteries
+of this day's adventures; but I will take my oath that I put near an
+hour to the discovery.
+
+At last black trees began to show upon my left, and, suddenly crossing
+the road, made a cave of unmitigated blackness right in front. I call it
+a cave without exaggeration; to pass below that arch of leaves was like
+entering a dungeon. I felt about until my hand encountered a stout
+branch, and to this I tied Modestine, a haggard, drenched, desponding
+donkey. Then I lowered my pack, laid it along the wall on the margin of
+the road, and unbuckled the straps. I knew well enough where the lantern
+was, but where were the candles? I groped and groped among the tumbled
+articles, and, while I was thus groping, suddenly I touched the
+spirit-lamp. Salvation! This would serve my turn as well. The wind
+roared unwearyingly among the trees; I could hear the boughs tossing and
+the leaves churning through half a mile of forest; yet the scene of my
+encampment was not only as black as the pit, but admirably sheltered. At
+the second match the wick caught flame. The light was both livid and
+shifting; but it cut me off from the universe, and doubled the darkness
+of the surrounding night.
+
+I tied Modestine more conveniently for herself, and broke up half the
+black bread for her supper, reserving the other half against the
+morning. Then I gathered what I should want within reach, took off my
+wet boots and gaiters, which I wrapped in my waterproof, arranged my
+knapsack for a pillow under the flap of my sleeping-bag, insinuated my
+limbs into the interior, and buckled myself in like a _bambino_. I
+opened a tin of Bologna sausage, and broke a cake of chocolate, and that
+was all I had to eat. It may sound offensive, but I ate them together,
+bite by bite, by way of bread and meat. All I had to wash down this
+revolting mixture was neat brandy: a revolting beverage in itself. But
+I was rare and hungry; ate well, and smoked one of the best cigarettes
+in my experience. Then I put a stone in my straw hat, pulled the flap of
+my fur cap over my neck and eyes, put my revolver ready to my hand, and
+snuggled well down among the sheepskins.
+
+I questioned at first if I were sleepy, for I felt my heart beating
+faster than usual, as if with an agreeable excitement to which my mind
+remained a stranger. But as soon as my eyelids touched, that subtle glue
+leaped between them, and they would no more come separate. The wind
+among the trees was my lullaby. Sometimes it sounded for minutes
+together with a steady, even rush, not rising nor abating; and again it
+would swell and burst like a great crashing breaker, and the trees would
+patter me all over with big drops from the rain of the afternoon. Night
+after night, in my own bedroom in the country, I have given ear to this
+perturbing concert of the wind among the woods, but whether it was a
+difference in the trees, or the lie of the ground, or because I was
+myself outside and in the midst of it, the fact remains that the wind
+sang to a different tune among these woods of Gevaudan. I hearkened and
+hearkened; and meanwhile sleep took gradual possession of my body and
+subdued my thoughts and senses; but still my last waking effort was to
+listen and distinguish, and my last conscious state was one of wonder at
+the foreign clamour in my ears.
+
+Twice in the course of the dark hours--once when a stone galled me
+underneath the sack, and again when the poor patient Modestine, growing
+angry, pawed and stamped upon the road--I was recalled for a brief while
+to consciousness, and saw a star or two overhead, and the lace-like edge
+of the foliage against the sky. When I awoke for the third time
+(Wednesday, September 25th), the world was flooded with a blue light,
+the mother of the dawn. I saw the leaves labouring in the wind and the
+ribbon of the road; and, on turning my head, there was Modestine tied
+to a beech, and standing half across the path in an attitude of
+inimitable patience. I closed my eyes again, and set to thinking over
+the experience of the night. I was surprised to find how easy and
+pleasant it had been, even in this tempestuous weather. The stone which
+annoyed me would not have been there had I not been forced to camp
+blindfold in the opaque night; and I had felt no other inconvenience
+except when my feet encountered the lantern or the second volume of
+Peyrat's "Pastors of the Desert" among the mixed contents of my
+sleeping-bag; nay, more, I had felt not a touch of cold, and awakened
+with unusually lightsome and clear sensations.
+
+With that I shook myself, got once more into my boots and gaiters, and,
+breaking up the rest of the bread for Modestine, strolled about to see
+in what part of the world I had awakened. Ulysses, left on Ithaca, and
+with a mind unsettled by the goddess, was not more pleasantly astray. I
+have been after an adventure all my life, a pure dispassionate
+adventure, such as befell early and heroic voyagers; and thus to be
+found by morning in a random woodside nook in Gevaudan--not knowing
+north from south, as strange to my surroundings as the first man upon
+the earth, an inland castaway--was to find a fraction of my daydreams
+realized. I was on the skirts of a little wood of birch, sprinkled with
+a few beeches; behind, it adjoined another wood of fir; and in front, it
+broke up and went down in open order into a shallow and meadowy dale.
+All around there were bare hill-tops, some near, some far away, as the
+perspective closed or opened, but none apparently much higher than the
+rest. The wind huddled the trees. The golden specks of autumn in the
+birches tossed shiveringly. Overhead the sky was full of strings and
+shreds of vapour, flying, vanishing, reappearing, and turning about an
+axis like tumblers, as the wind hounded them through heaven. It was wild
+weather and famishing cold. I ate some chocolate, swallowed a mouthful
+of brandy, and smoked a cigarette before the cold should have time to
+disable my fingers. And by the time I had got all this done, and had
+made my pack and bound it on the pack-saddle, the day was tiptoe on the
+threshold of the east. We had not gone many steps along the lane, before
+the sun, still invisible to me, sent a glow of gold over some cloud
+mountains that lay ranged along the eastern sky.
+
+The wind had us on the stern, and hurried us bitingly forward. I
+buttoned myself into my coat, and walked on in a pleasant frame of mind
+with all men, when suddenly, at a corner, there was Fouzilhic once more
+in front of me. Nor only that, but there was the old gentleman who had
+escorted me so far the night before, running out of his house at sight
+of me, with hands upraised in horror.
+
+"My poor boy!" he cried, "what does this mean?"
+
+I told him what had happened. He beat his old hands like clappers in a
+mill, to think how lightly he had let me go; but when he heard of the
+man of Fouzilhac, anger and depression seized upon his mind.
+
+"This time, at least," said he, "there shall be no mistake."
+
+And he limped along, for he was very rheumatic, for about half a mile,
+and until I was almost within sight of Cheylard, the destination I had
+hunted for so long.
+
+
+
+
+CHEYLARD AND LUC
+
+
+Candidly, it seemed little worthy of all this searching. A few broken
+ends of village, with no particular street, but a succession of open
+places heaped with logs and fagots; a couple of tilted crosses, a shrine
+to Our Lady of all Graces on the summit of a little hill; and all this,
+upon a rattling highland river, in the corner of a naked valley. What
+went ye out for to see? thought I to myself. But the place had a life of
+its own. I found a board commemorating the liberalities of Cheylard for
+the past year, hung up, like a banner, in the diminutive and tottering
+church. In 1877, it appeared, the inhabitants subscribed forty-eight
+francs ten centimes for the "Work of the Propagation of the Faith." Some
+of this, I could not help hoping, would be applied to my native land.
+Cheylard scrapes together halfpence for the darkened souls in Edinburgh,
+while Balquhidder and Dunrossness bemoan the ignorance of Rome. Thus, to
+the high entertainment of the angels, do we pelt each other with
+evangelists, like schoolboys bickering in the snow.
+
+The inn was again singularly unpretentious. The whole furniture of a not
+ill-to-do family was in the kitchen: the beds, the cradle, the clothes,
+the plate-rack, the meal-chest, and the photograph of the parish priest.
+There were five children, one of whom was set to its morning prayers at
+the stair-foot soon after my arrival, and a sixth would ere long be
+forthcoming. I was kindly received by these good folk. They were much
+interested in my misadventure. The wood in which I had slept belonged to
+them; the man of Fouzilhac they thought a monster of iniquity, and
+counseled me warmly to summon him at law--"because I might have died."
+The good wife was horror-stricken to see me drink over a pint of
+uncreamed milk.
+
+"You will do yourself an evil," she said. "Permit me to boil it for
+you."
+
+After I had begun the morning on this delightful liquor, she having an
+infinity of things to arrange, I was permitted, nay requested, to make a
+bowl of chocolate for myself. My boots and gaiters were hung up to dry,
+and, seeing me trying to write my journal on my knee, the eldest
+daughter let down a hinged table in the chimney-corner for my
+convenience. Here I wrote, drank my chocolate, and finally ate an
+omelette before I left. The table was thick with dust; for, as they
+explained, it was not used except in winter weather. I had a clear look
+up the vent, through brown agglomerations of soot and blue vapour, to
+the sky; and whenever a handful of twigs was thrown on to the fire, my
+legs were scorched by the blaze.
+
+The husband had begun life as a muleteer, and when I came to charge
+Modestine showed himself full of the prudence of his art. "You will have
+to change this package," said he; "it ought to be in two parts, and then
+you might have double the weight."
+
+I explained that I wanted no more weight; and for no donkey hitherto
+created would I cut my sleeping-bag in two.
+
+"It fatigues her, however," said the innkeeper; "it fatigues her greatly
+on the march. Look."
+
+Alas, there were her two forelegs no better than raw beef on the inside,
+and blood was running from under her tail. They told me when I started,
+and I was ready to believe it, that before a few days I should come to
+love Modestine like a dog. Three days had passed, we had shared some
+misadventures, and my heart was still as cold as a potato towards my
+beast of burden. She was pretty enough to look at; but then she had
+given proof of dead stupidity, redeemed indeed by patience, but
+aggravated by flashes of sorry and ill-judged light-heartedness. And I
+own this new discovery seemed another point against her. What the devil
+was the good of a she-ass if she could not carry a sleeping-bag and a
+few necessaries? I saw the end of the fable rapidly approaching, when I
+should have to carry Modestine. AEsop was the man to know the world! I
+assure you I set out with heavy thoughts upon my short day's march.
+
+It was not only heavy thoughts about Modestine that weighted me upon the
+way; it was a leaden business altogether. For first, the wind blew so
+rudely that I had to hold on the pack with one hand from Cheylard to
+Luc; and second, my road lay through one of the most beggarly countries
+in the world. It was like the worst of the Scottish Highlands, only
+worse; cold, naked, and ignoble, scant of wood, scant of heather, scant
+of life. A road and some fences broke the unvarying waste, and the line
+of the road was marked by upright pillars, to serve in time of snow.
+
+Why any one should desire to visit either Luc or Cheylard is more than
+my much-inventing spirit can suppose. For my part, I travel not to go
+anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to
+move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come
+down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite
+underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life,
+and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing
+that must be worked for. To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a
+gale out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that
+serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so
+exacting, who can annoy himself about the future?
+
+I came out at length above the Allier. A more unsightly prospect at this
+season of the year it would be hard to fancy. Shelving hills rose round
+it on all sides, here dabbled with wood and fields, there rising to
+peaks alternately naked and hairy with pines. The colour throughout was
+black or ashen, and came to a point in the ruins of the castle of Luc,
+which pricked up impudently from below my feet, carrying on a pinnacle a
+tall white statue of Our Lady, which, I heard with interest, weighed
+fifty quintals, and was to be dedicated on the 6th of October. Through
+this sorry landscape trickled the Allier and a tributary of nearly equal
+size, which came down to join it through a broad nude valley in
+Vivarais. The weather had somewhat lightened, and the clouds massed in
+squadron; but the fierce wind still hunted them through heaven, and cast
+great ungainly splashes of shadow and sunlight over the scene.
+
+Luc itself was a straggling double file of houses wedged between hill
+and river. It had no beauty, nor was there any notable feature, save the
+old castle overhead with its fifty quintals of brand-new Madonna. But
+the inn was clean and large. The kitchen, with its two box-beds hung
+with clean check curtains, with its wide stone chimney, its
+chimney-shelf four yards long and garnished with lanterns and religious
+statuettes, its array of chests and pair of ticking clocks, was the very
+model of what a kitchen ought to be; a melodrama kitchen, suitable for
+bandits or noblemen in disguise. Nor was the scene disgraced by the
+landlady, a handsome, silent, dark old woman, clothed and hooded in
+black like a nun. Even the public bedroom had a character of its own,
+with the long deal tables and benches, where fifty might have dined, set
+out as for a harvest-home, and the three box-beds along the wall. In one
+of these, lying on straw and covered with a pair of table-napkins, did I
+do penance all night long in goose-flesh and chattering teeth, and sigh,
+from time to time as I awakened, for my sheepskin sack and the lee of
+some great wood.
+
+
+
+
+OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS
+
+                    _I behold
+    The House, the Brotherhood austere--
+    And what am I, that I am here?_
+
+                   MATTHEW ARNOLD.
+
+
+FATHER APOLLONARIS
+
+
+Next morning (Thursday, 26th September) I took the road in a new order.
+The sack was no longer doubled, but hung at full length across the
+saddle, a green sausage six feet long with a tuft of blue wool hanging
+out of either end. It was more picturesque, it spared the donkey, and,
+as I began to see, it would ensure stability, blow high, blow low. But
+it was not without a pang that I had so decided. For although I had
+purchased a new cord, and made all as fast as I was able, I was yet
+jealously uneasy lest the flaps should tumble out and scatter my effects
+along the line of march.
+
+My way lay up the bald valley of the river, along the march of Vivarais
+and Gevaudan. The hills of Gevaudan on the right were a little more
+naked, if anything, than those of Vivarais upon the left, and the former
+had a monopoly of a low dotty underwood that grew thickly in the gorges
+and died out in solitary burrs upon the shoulders and the summits. Black
+bricks of fir-wood were plastered here and there upon both sides, and
+here and there were cultivated fields. A railway ran beside the river;
+the only bit of railway in Gevaudan, although there are many proposals
+afoot and surveys being made, and even, as they tell me, a station
+standing ready built in Mende. A year or two hence and this may be
+another world. The desert is beleaguered. Now may some Languedocian
+Wordsworth turn the sonnet into _patois:_ "Mountains and vales and
+floods, heard YE that whistle?"
+
+At a place called La Bastide I was directed to leave the river, and
+follow a road that mounted on the left among the hills of Vivarais, the
+modern Ardeche; for I was now come within a little way of my strange
+destination, the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of the Snows. The sun
+came out as I left the shelter of a pine-wood, and I beheld suddenly a
+fine wild landscape to the south. High rocky hills, as blue as sapphire,
+closed the view, and between these lay ridge upon ridge, heathery,
+craggy, the sun glittering on veins of rock, the underwood clambering in
+the hollows, as rude as God made them at the first. There was not a sign
+of man's hand in all the prospect; and indeed not a trace of his
+passage, save where generation after generation had walked in twisted
+footpaths, in and out among the beeches, and up and down upon the
+channeled slopes. The mists, which had hitherto beset me, were now
+broken into clouds, and fled swiftly and shone brightly in the sun. I
+drew a long breath. It was grateful to come, after so long, upon a scene
+of some attraction for the human heart. I own I like definite form in
+what my eyes are to rest upon; and if landscapes were sold, like the
+sheets of characters of my boyhood, one penny plain and twopence
+coloured, I should go the length of twopence every day of my life.
+
+But if things had grown better to the south, it was still desolate and
+inclement near at hand. A spidery cross on every hill-top marked the
+neighbourhood of a religious house; and a quarter of a mile beyond, the
+outlook southward opening out and growing bolder with every step, a
+white statue of the Virgin at the corner of a young plantation directed
+the traveller to Our Lady of the Snows. Here, then, I struck leftward,
+and pursued my way, driving my secular donkey before me, and creaking in
+my secular boots and gaiters, towards the asylum of silence.
+
+I had not gone very far ere the wind brought to me the clanging of a
+bell, and somehow, I can scarce tell why, my heart sank within me at the
+sound. I have rarely approached anything with more unaffected terror
+than the monastery of Our Lady of the Snows. This it is to have had a
+Protestant education. And suddenly, on turning a corner, fear took hold
+on me from head to foot--slavish, superstitious fear; and though I did
+not stop in my advance, yet I went on slowly, like a man who should have
+passed a bourne unnoticed, and strayed into the country of the dead. For
+there, upon the narrow new-made road, between the stripling pines, was a
+mediaeval friar, fighting with a barrowful of turfs. Every Sunday of my
+childhood I used to study the Hermits of Marco Sadeler--enchanting
+prints, full of wood and field and mediaeval landscapes, as large as a
+county, for the imagination to go a-travelling in; and here, sure
+enough, was one of Marco Sadeler's heroes. He was robed in white like
+any spectre, and the hood falling back, in the instancy of his
+contention with the barrow, disclosed a pate as bald and yellow as a
+skull. He might have been buried any time these thousand years, and all
+the lively parts of him resolved into earth and broken up with the
+farmer's harrow.
+
+I was troubled besides in my mind as to etiquette. Durst I address a
+person who was under a vow of silence? Clearly not. But drawing near, I
+doffed my cap to him with a far-away superstitious reverence. He nodded
+back, and cheerfully addressed me. Was I going to the monastery? Who was
+I? An Englishman? Ah, an Irishman, then?
+
+"No," I said, "a Scotsman."
+
+A Scotsman? Ah, he had never seen a Scotsman before. And he looked me
+all over, his good, honest, brawny countenance shining with interest, as
+a boy might look upon a lion or an alligator. From him I learned with
+disgust that I could not be received at Our Lady of the Snows; I might
+get a meal, perhaps, but that was all. And then, as our talk ran on, and
+it turned out that I was not a pedlar, but a literary man, who drew
+landscapes and was going to write a book, he changed his manner of
+thinking as to my reception (for I fear they respect persons even in a
+Trappist monastery), and told me I must be sure to ask for the Father
+Prior, and state my case to him in full. On second thoughts he
+determined to go down with me himself; he thought he could manage for me
+better. Might he say that I was a geographer?
+
+No; I thought, in the interests of truth, he positively might not.
+
+"Very well, then" (with disappointment), "an author."
+
+It appeared he had been in a seminary with six young Irishmen, all
+priests, long since, who had received newspapers and kept him informed
+of the state of ecclesiastical affairs in England. And he asked me
+eagerly after Dr. Pusey, for whose conversion the good man had continued
+ever since to pray night and morning.
+
+"I thought he was very near the truth," he said; "and he will reach it
+yet; there is so much virtue in prayer."
+
+He must be a stiff, ungodly Protestant who can take anything but
+pleasure in this kind and hopeful story. While he was thus near the
+subject, the good father asked me if I were a Christian; and when he
+found I was not, or not after his way, he glossed it over with great
+good-will.
+
+The road which we were following, and which this stalwart father had
+made with his own two hands within the space of a year, came to a
+corner, and showed us some white buildings a little farther on beyond
+the wood. At the same time, the bell once more sounded abroad. We were
+hard upon the monastery. Father Apollinaris (for that was my companion's
+name) stopped me.
+
+"I must not speak to you down there," he said. "Ask for the Brother
+Porter, and all will be well. But try to see me as you go out again
+through the wood, where I may speak to you. I am charmed to have made
+your acquaintance."
+
+And then suddenly raising his arms, flapping his fingers, and crying out
+twice, "I must not speak! I must not speak!" he ran away in front of me,
+and disappeared into the monastery door.
+
+I own this somewhat ghastly eccentricity went a good way to revive my
+terrors. But where one was so good and simple, why should not all be
+alike? I took heart of grace, and went forward to the gate as fast as
+Modestine, who seemed to have a disaffection for monasteries, would
+permit. It was the first door, in my acquaintance of her, which she had
+not shown an indecent haste to enter. I summoned the place in form,
+though with a quaking heart. Father Michael, the Father Hospitaller, and
+a pair of brown-robed brothers came to the gate and spoke with me a
+while. I think my sack was the great attraction; it had already beguiled
+the heart of poor Apollinaris, who had charged me on my life to show it
+to the Father Prior. But whether it was my address, or the sack, or the
+idea speedily published among that part of the brotherhood who attend on
+strangers that I was not a pedlar after all, I found no difficulty as to
+my reception. Modestine was led away by a layman to the stables, and I
+and my pack were received into Our Lady of the Snows.
+
+
+
+
+THE MONKS
+
+
+Father Michael, a pleasant, fresh-faced, smiling man, perhaps of
+thirty-five, took me to the pantry, and gave me a glass of liqueur to
+stay me until dinner. We had some talk, or rather I should say he
+listened to my prattle indulgently enough, but with an abstracted air,
+like a spirit with a thing of clay. And truly, when I remember that I
+descanted principally on my appetite, and that it must have been by that
+time more than eighteen hours since Father Michael had so much as broken
+bread, I can well understand that he would find an earthly savour in my
+conversation. But his manner, though superior, was exquisitely gracious;
+and I find I have a lurking curiosity as to Father Michael's past.
+
+The whet administered, I was left alone for a little in the monastery
+garden. This is no more than the main court, laid out in sandy paths and
+beds of parti-coloured dahlias, and with a fountain and a black statue
+of the Virgin in the centre. The buildings stand around it four-square,
+bleak, as yet unseasoned by the years and weather, and with no other
+features than a belfry and a pair of slated gables. Brothers in white,
+brothers in brown, passed silently along the sanded alleys; and when I
+first came out, three hooded monks were kneeling on the terrace at their
+prayers. A naked hill commands the monastery upon one side, and the wood
+commands it on the other. It lies exposed to wind; the snow falls off
+and on from October to May, and sometimes lies six weeks on end; but if
+they stood in Eden with a climate like heaven's, the buildings
+themselves would offer the same wintry and cheerless aspect; and for my
+part, on this wild September day, before I was called to dinner, I felt
+chilly in and out.
+
+When I had eaten well and heartily, Brother Ambrose, a hearty
+conversible Frenchman (for all those who wait on strangers have the
+liberty to speak), led me to a little room in that part of the building
+which is set apart for _MM. les retraitants_. It was clean and
+whitewashed, and furnished with strict necessaries, a crucifix, a bust
+of the late Pope, the "Imitation" in French, a book of religious
+meditations, and the "Life of Elizabeth Seton"--evangelist, it would
+appear, of North America and of New England in particular. As far as my
+experience goes, there is a fair field for some more evangelisation in
+these quarters; but think of Cotton Mather! I should like to give him a
+reading of this little work in heaven, where I hope he dwells; but
+perhaps he knows all that already, and much more; and perhaps he and
+Mrs. Seton are the dearest friends, and gladly unite their voices in the
+everlasting psalm. Over the table, to conclude the inventory of the
+room, hung a set of regulations for _MM. les retraitants:_ what services
+they should attend, when they were to tell their beads or meditate, and
+when they were to rise and go to rest. At the foot was a notable N. B.:
+"_Le temps libre est employe a l'examen de conscience, a la confession,
+a faire de bonnes resolutions,"_ etc. To make good resolutions, indeed!
+You might talk as fruitfully of making the hair grow on your head.
+
+I had scarce explored my niche when Brother Ambrose returned. An English
+boarder, it appeared, would like to speak with me. I professed my
+willingness, and the friar ushered in a fresh, young, little Irishman of
+fifty, a deacon of the Church, arrayed in strict canonicals, and wearing
+on his head what, in default of knowledge, I can only call the
+ecclesiastical shako. He had lived seven years in retreat at a convent
+of nuns in Belgium, and now five at Our Lady of the Snows; he never saw
+an English newspaper; he spoke French imperfectly, and had he spoken it
+like a native, there was not much chance of conversation where he dwelt.
+With this, he was a man eminently sociable, greedy of news, and
+simple-minded like a child. If I was pleased to have a guide about the
+monastery, he was no less delighted to see an English face and hear an
+English tongue.
+
+He showed me his own room, where he passed his time among breviaries,
+Hebrew Bibles, and the Waverley Novels. Thence he led me to the
+cloisters, into the chapter-house, through the vestry, where the
+brothers' gowns and broad straw hats were hanging up, each with his
+religious name upon a board--names full of legendary suavity and
+interest, such as Basil, Hilarion, Raphael, or Pacifique; into the
+library, where were all the works of Veuillot and Chateaubriand, and the
+"Odes et Ballades," if you please, and even Moliere, to say nothing of
+innumerable fathers and a great variety of local and general historians.
+Thence my good Irishman took me round the workshops, where brothers bake
+bread, and make cart-wheels, and take photographs; where one
+superintends a collection of curiosities, and another a gallery of
+rabbits. For in a Trappist monastery each monk has an occupation of his
+own choice, apart from his religious duties and the general labours of
+the house. Each must sing in the choir, if he has a voice and ear, and
+join in the haymaking if he has a hand to stir; but in his private
+hours, although he must be occupied, he may be occupied on what he
+likes. Thus I was told that one brother was engaged with literature;
+while Father Apollinaris busies himself in making roads, and the Abbot
+employs himself in binding books. It is not so long since this Abbot was
+consecrated, by the way; and on that occasion, by a special grace, his
+mother was permitted to enter the chapel and witness the ceremony of
+consecration. A proud day for her to have a son a mitred abbot; it makes
+you glad to think they let her in.
+
+In all these journeyings to and fro, many silent fathers and brethren
+fell in our way. Usually they paid no more regard to our passage than if
+we had been a cloud; but sometimes the good deacon had a permission to
+ask of them, and it was granted by a peculiar movement of the hands,
+almost like that of a dog's paws in swimming, or refused by the usual
+negative signs, and in either case with lowered eyelids and a certain
+air of contrition, as of a man who was steering very close to evil.
+
+The monks, by special grace of their Abbot, were still taking two meals
+a day; but it was already time for their grand fast, which begins
+somewhere in September and lasts till Easter, and during which they eat
+but once in the twenty-four hours, and that at two in the afternoon,
+twelve hours after they have begun the toil and vigil of the day. Their
+meals are scanty, but even of these they eat sparingly; and though each
+is allowed a small carafe of wine, many refrain from this indulgence.
+Without doubt, the most of mankind grossly over-eat themselves; our
+meals serve not only for support, but as a hearty and natural diversion
+from the labour of life. Yet, though excess may be hurtful, I should
+have thought this Trappist regimen defective. And I am astonished, as I
+look back, at the freshness of face and cheerfulness of manner of all
+whom I beheld. A happier nor a healthier company I should scarce suppose
+that I have ever seen. As a matter of fact, on this bleak upland, and
+with the incessant occupation of the monks, life is of an uncertain
+tenure, and death no infrequent visitor, at Our Lady of the Snows. This,
+at least, was what was told me. But if they die easily, they must live
+healthily in the meantime, for they seemed all firm of flesh and high in
+colour; and the only morbid sign that I could observe, an unusual
+brilliancy of eye, was one that served rather to increase the general
+impression of vivacity and strength.
+
+Those with whom I spoke were singularly sweet-tempered, with what I can
+only call a holy cheerfulness in air and conversation. There is a note,
+in the direction to visitors, telling them not to be offended at the
+curt speech of those who wait upon them, since it is proper to monks to
+speak little. The note might have been spared; to a man the hospitallers
+were all brimming with innocent talk, and, in my experience of the
+monastery, it was easier to begin than to break off a conversation. With
+the exception of Father Michael, who was a man of the world, they showed
+themselves full of kind and healthy interest in all sorts of
+subjects--in politics, in voyages, in my sleeping-sack--and not without
+a certain pleasure in the sound of their own voices.
+
+As for those who are restricted to silence, I can only wonder how they
+bear their solemn and cheerless isolation. And yet, apart from any view
+of mortification, I can see a certain policy, not only in the exclusion
+of women, but in this vow of silence. I have had some experience of lay
+phalansteries, of an artistic, not to say a bacchanalian, character; and
+seen more than one association easily formed and yet more easily
+dispersed. With a Cistercian rule, perhaps they might have lasted
+longer. In the neighbourhood of women it is but a touch-and-go
+association that can be formed among defenceless men; the stronger
+electricity is sure to triumph; the dreams of boyhood, the schemes of
+youth, are abandoned after an interview of ten minutes, and the arts and
+sciences, and professional male jollity, deserted at once for two sweet
+eyes and a caressing accent. And next after this, the tongue is the
+great divider.
+
+I am almost ashamed to pursue this worldly criticism of a religious
+rule; but there is yet another point in which the Trappist order appeals
+to me as a model of wisdom. By two in the morning the clapper goes upon
+the bell, and so on, hour by hour, and sometimes quarter by quarter,
+till eight, the hour of rest; so infinitesimally is the day divided
+among different occupations. The man who keeps rabbits, for example,
+hurries from his hutches to the chapel, the chapter-room, or the
+refectory, all day long: every hour he has an office to sing, a duty to
+perform; from two, when he rises in the dark, till eight, when he
+returns to receive the comfortable gift of sleep, he is upon his feet
+and occupied with manifold and changing business. I know many persons,
+worth several thousands in the year, who are not so fortunate in the
+disposal of their lives. Into how many houses would not the note of the
+monastery bell, dividing the day into manageable portions, bring peace
+of mind and healthful activity of body! We speak of hardships, but the
+true hardship is to be a dull fool, and permitted to mismanage life in
+our own dull and foolish manner.
+
+From this point of view, we may perhaps better understand the monk's
+existence. A long novitiate and every proof of constancy of mind and
+strength of body is required before admission to the order; but I could
+not find that many were discouraged. In the photographer's studio, which
+figures so strangely among the outbuildings, my eye was attracted by the
+portrait of a young fellow in the uniform of a private of foot. This was
+one of the novices, who came of the age for service, and marched and
+drilled and mounted guard for the proper time among the garrison of
+Algiers. Here was a man who had surely seen both sides of life before
+deciding; yet as soon as he was set free from service he returned to
+finish his novitiate.
+
+This austere rule entitles a man to heaven as by right. When the
+Trappist sickens, he quits not his habit; he lies in the bed of death as
+he has prayed and laboured in his frugal and silent existence; and when
+the Liberator comes, at the very moment, even before they have carried
+him in his robe to lie his little last in the chapel among continual
+chantings, joy-bells break forth, as if for a marriage, from the slated
+belfry, and proclaim throughout the neighbourhood that another soul has
+gone to God.
+
+At night, under the conduct of my kind Irishman, I took my place in the
+gallery to hear compline and _Salve Regina_, with which the Cistercians
+bring every day to a conclusion. There were none of those circumstances
+which strike the Protestant as childish or as tawdry in the public
+offices of Rome. A stern simplicity, heightened by the romance of the
+surroundings, spoke directly to the heart. I recall the whitewashed
+chapel, the hooded figures in the choir, the lights alternately occluded
+and revealed, the strong manly singing, the silence that ensued, the
+sight of cowled heads bowed in prayer, and then the clear trenchant
+beating of the bell breaking in to show that the last office was over
+and the hour of sleep had come; and when I remember, I am not surprised
+that I made my escape into the court with somewhat whirling fancies, and
+stood like a man bewildered in the windy, starry night.
+
+But I was weary; and when I had quieted my spirits with Elizabeth
+Seton's memoirs--a dull work--the cold and the raving of the wind among
+the pines (for my room was on that side of the monastery which adjoins
+the woods) disposed me readily to slumber. I was awakened at black
+midnight, as it seemed, though it was really two in the morning, by the
+first stroke upon the bell. All the brothers were then hurrying to the
+chapel; the dead in life, at this untimely hour, were already beginning
+the uncomforted labours of their day. The dead in life--there was a
+chill reflection. And the words of a French song came back into my
+memory, telling of the best of our mixed existence:
+
+    "Que t'as de belles filles,
+            Girofle!
+            Girofla!
+    Que t'as de belles filles,
+    _L'Amour les comptera!_"
+
+And I blessed God that I was free to wander, free to hope, and free to
+love.
+
+
+
+
+THE BOARDERS
+
+
+But there was another side to my residence at Our Lady of the Snows. At
+this late season there were not many boarders; and yet I was not alone
+in the public part of the monastery. This itself is hard by the gate,
+with a small dining-room on the ground floor and a whole corridor of
+cells similar to mine upstairs. I have stupidly forgotten the board for
+a regular _retraitant_; but it was somewhere between three and five
+francs a day, and I think most probably the first. Chance visitors like
+myself might give what they chose as a free-will offering, but nothing
+was demanded. I may mention that when I was going away Father Michael
+refused twenty francs as excessive. I explained the reasoning which led
+me to offer him so much; but even then, from a curious point of honour,
+he would not accept it with his own hand. "I have no right to refuse for
+the monastery," he explained, "but I should prefer if you would give it
+to one of the brothers."
+
+I had dined alone, because I arrived late; but at supper I found two
+other guests. One was a country parish priest, who had walked over that
+morning from the seat of his cure near Mende to enjoy four days of
+solitude and prayer. He was a grenadier in person, with the hale colour
+and circular wrinkles of a peasant; and as he complained much of how he
+had been impeded by his skirts upon the march, I have a vivid fancy
+portrait of him, striding along, upright, big-boned, with kilted
+cassock, through the bleak hills of Gevaudan. The other was a short,
+grizzling, thick-set man, from forty-five to fifty, dressed in tweed
+with a knitted spencer, and the red ribbon of a decoration in his
+button-hole. This last was a hard person to classify. He was an old
+soldier, who had seen service and risen to the rank of commandant; and
+he retained some of the brisk decisive manners of the camp. On the other
+hand, as soon as his resignation was accepted, he had come to Our Lady
+of the Snows as a boarder, and, after a brief experience of its ways,
+had decided to remain as a novice. Already the new life was beginning to
+modify his appearance; already he had acquired somewhat of the quiet and
+smiling air of the brethren; and he was as yet neither an officer nor a
+Trappist, but partook of the character of each. And certainly here was a
+man in an interesting nick of life. Out of the noise of cannon and
+trumpets, he was in the act of passing into this still country bordering
+on the grave, where men sleep nightly in their grave-clothes, and, like
+phantoms, communicate by signs.
+
+At supper we talked politics. I make it my business, when I am in
+France, to preach political good-will and moderation, and to dwell on
+the example of Poland, much as some alarmists in England dwell on the
+example of Carthage. The priest and the commandant assured me of their
+sympathy with all I said, and made a heavy sighing over the bitterness
+of contemporary feeling.
+
+"Why, you cannot say anything to a man with which he does not absolutely
+agree," said I, "but he flies up at you in a temper."
+
+They both declared that such a state of things was antichristian.
+
+While we were thus agreeing, what should my tongue stumble upon but a
+word in praise of Gambetta's moderation? The old soldier's countenance
+was instantly suffused with blood; with the palms of his hands he beat
+the table like a naughty child.
+
+"_Comment, monsieur?_" he shouted. "_Comment?_ Gambetta moderate? Will
+you dare to justify these words?"
+
+But the priest had not forgotten the tenor of our talk. And suddenly, in
+the height of his fury, the old soldier found a warning look directed on
+his face; the absurdity of his behaviour was brought home to him in a
+flash; and the storm came to an abrupt end, without another word.
+
+It was only in the morning, over our coffee (Friday, September 27th),
+that this couple found out I was a heretic. I suppose I had misled them
+by some admiring expressions as to the monastic life around us; and it
+was only by a point-blank question that the truth came out. I had been
+tolerantly used both by simple Father Apollinaris and astute Father
+Michael; and the good Irish deacon, when he heard of my religious
+weakness, had only patted me upon the shoulder and said, "You must be a
+Catholic and come to heaven." But I was now among a different sect of
+orthodox. These two men were bitter and upright and narrow, like the
+worst of Scotsmen, and indeed, upon my heart, I fancy they were worse.
+The priest snorted aloud like a battle-horse.
+
+"_Et vous pretendez mourir dans cette espece de croyance?_" he demanded;
+and there is no type used by mortal printers large enough to qualify his
+accent.
+
+I humbly indicated that I had no design of changing.
+
+But he could not away with such a monstrous attitude. "No, no," he
+cried; "you must change. You have come here, God has led you here, and
+you must embrace the opportunity."
+
+I made a slip in policy; I appealed to the family affections, though I
+was speaking to a priest and a soldier, two classes of men
+circumstantially divorced from the kind and homely ties of life.
+
+"Your father and mother?" cried the priest. "Very well; you will convert
+them in their turn when you go home."
+
+I think I see my father's face! I would rather tackle the Gaetulian lion
+in his den than embark on such an enterprise against the family
+theologian.
+
+But now the hunt was up; priest and soldier were in full cry for my
+conversion; and the Work of the Propagation of the Faith, for which the
+people of Cheylard subscribed forty-eight francs ten centimes during
+1877, was being gallantly pursued against myself. It was an odd but most
+effective proselytizing. They never sought to convince me in argument,
+where I might have attempted some defence; but took it for granted that
+I was both ashamed and terrified at my position, and urged me solely on
+the point of time. Now, they said, when God had led me to Our Lady of
+the Snows, now was the appointed hour.
+
+"Do not be withheld by false shame," observed the priest, for my
+encouragement.
+
+For one who feels very similarly to all sects of religion, and who has
+never been able, even for a moment, to weigh seriously the merit of this
+or that creed on the eternal side of things, however much he may see to
+praise or blame upon the secular and temporal side, the situation thus
+created was both unfair and painful. I committed my second fault in
+tact, and tried to plead that it was all the same thing in the end, and
+we were all drawing near by different sides to the same kind and
+undiscriminating Friend and Father. That, as it seems to lay spirits,
+would be the only gospel worthy of the name. But different men think
+differently; and this revolutionary aspiration brought down the priest
+with all the terrors of the law. He launched into harrowing details of
+hell. The damned, he said--on the authority of a little book which he
+had read not a week before, and which, to add conviction to conviction,
+he had fully intended to bring along with him in his pocket--were to
+occupy the same attitude through all eternity in the midst of dismal
+tortures. And as he thus expatiated, he grew in nobility of aspect with
+his enthusiasm.
+
+As a result the pair concluded that I should seek out the Prior, since
+the Abbot was from home, and lay my case immediately before him.
+
+"_C'est mon conseil comme ancien militaire_," observed the commandant;
+"_et celui de monsieur comme pretre_."
+
+"_Oui_," added the _cure_, sententiously nodding; "_comme ancien
+militaire_--_et comme pretre_."
+
+At this moment, whilst I was somewhat embarrassed how to answer, in came
+one of the monks, a little brown fellow, as lively as a grig, and with
+an Italian accent, who threw himself at once into the contention, but in
+a milder and more persuasive vein, as befitted one of these pleasant
+brethren. Look at _him_, he said. The rule was very hard; he would have
+dearly liked to stay in his own country, Italy--it was well known how
+beautiful it was, the beautiful Italy; but then there were no Trappists
+in Italy; and he had a soul to save; and here he was.
+
+I am afraid I must be at bottom, what a cheerful Indian critic has
+dubbed me, "a faddling hedonist," for this description of the brother's
+motives gave me somewhat of a shock. I should have preferred to think he
+had chosen the life for its own sake, and not for ulterior purposes; and
+this shows how profoundly I was out of sympathy with these good
+Trappists, even when I was doing my best to sympathize. But to the cure
+the argument seemed decisive.
+
+"Hear that!" he cried. "And I have seen a marquis here, a marquis, a
+marquis"--he repeated the holy word three times over--"and other persons
+high in society; and generals. And here, at your side, is this
+gentleman, who has been so many years in armies--decorated, an old
+warrior. And here he is, ready to dedicate himself to God."
+
+I was by this time so thoroughly embarrassed that I pled cold feet, and
+made my escape from the apartment. It was a furious windy morning, with
+a sky much cleared, and long and potent intervals of sunshine; and I
+wandered until dinner in the wild country towards the east, sorely
+staggered and beaten upon by the gale, but rewarded with some striking
+views.
+
+At dinner the Work of the Propagation of the Faith was recommenced, and
+on this occasion still more distastefully to me. The priest asked me
+many questions as to the contemptible faith of my fathers, and received
+my replies with a kind of ecclesiastical titter.
+
+"Your sect," he said once; "for I think you will admit it would be doing
+it too much honour to call it a religion."
+
+"As you please, monsieur," said I. "_La parole est a vous."_
+
+At length I grew annoyed beyond endurance; and although he was on his
+own ground, and, what is more to the purpose, an old man, and so holding
+a claim upon my toleration, I could not avoid a protest against this
+uncivil usage. He was sadly discountenanced.
+
+"I assure you," he said, "I have no inclination to laugh in my heart. I
+have no other feeling but interest in your soul."
+
+And there ended my conversion. Honest man! he was no dangerous deceiver;
+but a country parson, full of zeal and faith. Long may he tread Gevaudan
+with his kilted skirts--a man strong to walk and strong to comfort his
+parishioners in death! I daresay he would beat bravely through a
+snowstorm where his duty called him; and it is not always the most
+faithful believer who makes the cunningest apostle.
+
+
+
+
+UPPER GEVAUDAN
+_(Continued)_
+
+    _The bed was made, the room was fit,
+    By punctual eve the stars were lit;
+    The air was still, the water ran;
+    No need there was for maid or man,
+    When we put up, my ass and I,
+    At God's green caravanserai._
+                               OLD PLAY.
+
+
+ACROSS THE GOULET
+
+
+The wind fell during dinner, and the sky remained clear; so it was under
+better auspices that I loaded Modestine before the monastery gate. My
+Irish friend accompanied me so far on the way. As we came through the
+wood, there was Pere Apollinaire hauling his barrow; and he too quitted
+his labours to go with me for perhaps a hundred yards, holding my hand
+between both of his in front of him. I parted first from one and then
+from the other with unfeigned regret, but yet with the glee of the
+traveller who shakes off the dust of one stage before hurrying forth
+upon another. Then Modestine and I mounted the course of the Allier,
+which here led us back into Gevaudan towards its sources in the forest
+of Mercoire. It was but an inconsiderable burn before we left its
+guidance. Thence, over a hill, our way lay through a naked plateau,
+until we reached Chasserades at sundown.
+
+The company in the inn kitchen that night were all men employed in
+survey for one of the projected railways. They were intelligent and
+conversible, and we decided the future of France over hot wine, until
+the state of the clock frightened us to rest. There were four beds in
+the little upstairs room; and we slept six. But I had a bed to myself,
+and persuaded them to leave the window open.
+
+"_He, bourgeois; il est cinq heures!_" was the cry that wakened me in
+the morning (Saturday, September 28th). The room was full of a
+transparent darkness, which dimly showed me the other three beds and the
+five different nightcaps on the pillows. But out of the window the dawn
+was growing ruddy in a long belt over the hill-tops, and day was about
+to flood the plateau. The hour was inspiriting; and there seemed a
+promise of calm weather, which was perfectly fulfilled. I was soon
+under way with Modestine. The road lay for a while over the plateau, and
+then descended through a precipitous village into the valley of the
+Chassezac. This stream ran among green meadows, well hidden from the
+world by its steep banks; the broom was in flower, and here and there
+was a hamlet sending up its smoke.
+
+At last the path crossed the Chassezac upon a bridge, and, forsaking
+this deep hollow, set itself to cross the mountain of La Goulet. It
+wound up through Lestampes by upland fields and woods of beech and
+birch, and with every corner brought me into an acquaintance with some
+new interest. Even in the gully of the Chassezac my ear had been struck
+by a noise like that of a great bass bell ringing at the distance of
+many miles; but this, as I continued to mount and draw nearer to it,
+seemed to change in character, and I found at length that it came from
+some one leading flocks afield to the note of a rural horn. The narrow
+street of Lestampes stood full of sheep, from wall to wall--black sheep
+and white, bleating with one accord like the birds in spring, and each
+one accompanying himself upon the sheep-bell round his neck. It made a
+pathetic concert, all in treble. A little higher, and I passed a pair of
+men in a tree with pruning-hooks, and one of them was singing the music
+of a _bourree_. Still further, and when I was already threading the
+birches, the crowing of cocks came cheerfully up to my ears, and along
+with that the voice of a flute discoursing a deliberate and plaintive
+air from one of the upland villages. I pictured to myself some grizzled,
+apple-cheeked, country schoolmaster fluting in his bit of a garden in
+the clear autumn sunshine. All these beautiful and interesting sounds
+filled my heart with an unwonted expectation; and it appeared to me
+that, once past this range which I was mounting, I should descend into
+the garden of the world. Nor was I deceived, for I was now done with
+rains and winds and a bleak country. The first part of my journey ended
+here; and this was like an induction of sweet sounds into the other and
+more beautiful.
+
+There are other degrees of _feyness_, as of punishment, besides the
+capital; and I was now led by my good spirits into an adventure which I
+relate in the interest of future donkey-drivers. The road zigzagged so
+widely on the hillside, that I chose a short cut by map and compass, and
+struck through the dwarf woods to catch the road again upon a higher
+level. It was my one serious conflict with Modestine. She would none of
+my short cut; she turned in my face; she backed, she reared; she, whom I
+had hitherto imagined to be dumb, actually brayed with a loud hoarse
+flourish, like a cock crowing for the dawn. I plied the goad with one
+hand; with the other, so steep was the ascent, I had to hold on the
+pack-saddle. Half a dozen times she was nearly over backwards on the top
+of me; half a dozen times, from sheer weariness of spirit, I was nearly
+giving it up, and leading her down again to follow the road. But I took
+the thing as a wager, and fought it through. I was surprised, as I went
+on my way again, by what appeared to be chill rain-drops falling on my
+hand, and more than once looked up in wonder at the cloudless sky. But
+it was only sweat which came dropping from my brow.
+
+Over the summit of the Goulet there was no marked road--only upright
+stones posted from space to space to guide the drovers. The turf
+underfoot was springy and well scented. I had no company but a lark or
+two, and met but one bullock-cart between Lestampes and Bleymard. In
+front of me I saw a shallow valley, and beyond that the range of the
+Lozere, sparsely wooded and well enough modeled in the flanks, but
+straight and dull in outline. There was scarce a sign of culture; only
+about Bleymard, the white high-road from Villefort to Mende traversed a
+range of meadows, set with spiry poplars, and sounding from side to side
+with the bells of flocks and herds.
+
+
+
+
+A NIGHT AMONG THE PINES
+
+
+From Bleymard after dinner, although it was already late, I set out to
+scale a portion of the Lozere. An ill-marked stony drove-road guided me
+forward; and I met nearly half a dozen bullock-carts descending from the
+woods, each laden with a whole pine-tree for the winter's firing. At the
+top of the woods, which do not climb very high upon this cold ridge, I
+struck leftward by a path among the pines, until I hit on a dell of
+green turf, where a streamlet made a little spout over some stones to
+serve me for a water-tap. "In a more sacred or sequestered bower ... nor
+nymph nor faunus haunted." The trees were not old, but they grew thickly
+round the glade: there was no outlook, except north-eastward upon
+distant hill-tops, or straight upward to the sky; and the encampment
+felt secure and private like a room. By the time I had made my
+arrangements and fed Modestine, the day was already beginning to
+decline. I buckled myself to the knees into my sack and made a hearty
+meal; and as soon as the sun went down I pulled my cap over my eyes and
+fell asleep.
+
+Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof: but in the open world it
+passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are
+marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal
+death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and
+living slumber to the man who sleeps afield. All night long he can hear
+Nature breathing deeply and freely; even as she takes her rest, she
+turns and smiles; and there is one stirring hour unknown to those who
+dwell in houses, when a wakeful influence goes abroad over the sleeping
+hemisphere, and all the outdoor world are on their feet. It is then that
+the cock first crows, not this time to announce the dawn, but like a
+cheerful watchman speeding the course of night. Cattle awake on the
+meadows; sheep break their fast on dewy hillsides, and change to a new
+lair among the ferns; and houseless men, who have lain down with the
+fowls, open their dim eyes and behold the beauty of the night.
+
+At what inaudible summons, at what gentle touch of Nature, are all these
+sleepers thus recalled in the same hour to life? Do the stars rain down
+an influence, or do we share some thrill of mother earth below our
+resting bodies? Even shepherds and old country-folk, who are the deepest
+read in these arcana, have not a guess as to the means or purpose of
+this nightly resurrection. Towards two in the morning they declare the
+thing takes place, and neither know nor inquire further. And at least it
+is a pleasant incident. We are disturbed in our slumber, only, like the
+luxurious Montaigne, "that we may the better and more sensibly relish
+it." We have a moment to look up on the stars. And there is a special
+pleasure for some minds in the reflection that we share the impulse with
+all outdoor creatures in our neighbourhood, that we have escaped out of
+the Bastille of civilization, and are become, for the time being, a mere
+kindly animal and a sheep of Nature's flock.
+
+When that hour came to me among the pines, I wakened thirsty. My tin was
+standing by me half full of water. I emptied it at a draught; and
+feeling broad awake after this internal cold aspersion, sat upright to
+make a cigarette. The stars were clear, coloured, and jewel-like, but
+not frosty. A faint silvery vapour stood for the Milky Way. All around
+me the black fir-points stood upright and stock-still. By the whiteness
+of the pack-saddle, I could see Modestine walking round and round at the
+length of her tether; I could hear her steadily munching at the sward;
+but there was not another sound, save the indescribable quiet talk of
+the runnel over the stones. I lay lazily smoking and studying the colour
+of the sky, as we call the void of space, from where it showed a reddish
+grey behind the pines to where it showed a glossy blue-black between the
+stars. As if to be more like a pedlar, I wear a silver ring. This I
+could see faintly shining as I raised or lowered the cigarette; and at
+each whiff the inside of my hand was illuminated, and became for a
+second the highest light in the landscape.
+
+A faint wind, more like a moving coolness than a stream of air, passed
+down the glade from time to time; so that even in my great chamber the
+air was being renewed all night long. I thought with horror of the inn
+at Chasserades and the congregated nightcaps; with horror of the
+nocturnal prowesses of clerks and students, of hot theatres and
+pass-keys and close rooms. I have not often enjoyed a more serene
+possession of myself, nor felt more independent of material aids. The
+outer world, from which we cower into our houses, seemed after all a
+gentle habitable place; and night after night a man's bed, it seemed,
+was laid and waiting for him in the fields, where God keeps an open
+house. I thought I had rediscovered one of those truths which are
+revealed to savages and hid from political economists; at the least, I
+had discovered a new pleasure for myself. And yet even while I was
+exulting in my solitude I became aware of a strange lack. I wished a
+companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but
+ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than
+solitude, and which rightly understood, is solitude made perfect. And to
+live out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most
+complete and free.
+
+As I thus lay, between content and longing, a faint noise stole towards
+me through the pines. I thought, at first, it was the crowing of cocks
+or the barking of dogs at some very distant farm; but steadily and
+gradually it took articulate shape in my ears, until I became aware
+that a passenger was going by upon the high-road in the valley, and
+singing loudly as he went. There was more of good-will than grace in his
+performance; but he trolled with ample lungs; and the sound of his voice
+took hold upon the hillside and set the air shaking in the leafy glens.
+I have heard people passing by night in sleeping cities; some of them
+sang; one, I remember, played loudly on the bagpipes. I have heard the
+rattle of a cart or carriage spring up suddenly after hours of
+stillness, and pass, for some minutes, within the range of my hearing as
+I lay abed. There is a romance about all who are abroad in the black
+hours, and with something of a thrill we try to guess their business.
+But here the romance was double: first, this glad passenger, lit
+internally with wine, who sent up his voice in music through the night;
+and then I, on the other hand, buckled into my sack, and smoking alone
+in the pine-woods between four and five thousand feet towards the stars.
+
+When I awoke again (Sunday, 29th September), many of the stars had
+disappeared; only the stronger companions of the night still burned
+visibly overhead; and away towards the east I saw a faint haze of light
+upon the horizon, such as had been the Milky Way when I was last awake.
+Day was at hand. I lit my lantern, and by its glow-worm light put on my
+boots and gaiters; then I broke up some bread for Modestine, filled my
+can at the water-tap, and lit my spirit-lamp to boil myself some
+chocolate. The blue darkness lay long in the glade where I had so
+sweetly slumbered; but soon there was a broad streak of orange melting
+into gold along the mountain-tops of Vivarais. A solemn glee possessed
+my mind at this gradual and lovely coming in of day. I heard the runnel
+with delight; I looked round me for something beautiful and unexpected;
+but the still black pine-trees, the hollow glade, the munching ass,
+remained unchanged in figure. Nothing had altered but the light, and
+that, indeed, shed over all a spirit of life and of breathing peace, and
+moved me to a strange exhilaration.
+
+I drank my water-chocolate, which was hot if it was not rich, and
+strolled here and there, and up and down about the glade. While I was
+thus delaying, a gush of steady wind, as long as a heavy sigh, poured
+direct out of the quarter of the morning. It was cold, and set me
+sneezing. The trees near at hand tossed their black plumes in its
+passage; and I could see the thin distant spires of pine along the edge
+of the hill rock slightly to and fro against the golden east. Ten
+minutes later, the sunlight spread at a gallop along the hillside,
+scattering shadows and sparkles, and the day had come completely.
+
+I hastened to prepare my pack, and tackle the steep ascent that lay
+before me; but I had something on my mind. It was only a fancy; yet a
+fancy will sometimes be importunate. I had been most hospitably received
+and punctually served in my green caravanserai. The room was airy, the
+water excellent, and the dawn had called me to a moment. I say nothing
+of the tapestries or the inimitable ceiling, nor yet of the view which I
+commanded from the windows; but I felt I was in some one's debt for all
+this liberal entertainment. And so it pleased me, in a half-laughing
+way, to leave pieces of money on the turf as I went along, until I had
+left enough for my night's lodging. I trust they did not fall to some
+rich and churlish drover.
+
+
+
+
+THE COUNTRY OF THE CAMISARDS
+
+    _We travelled in the print of olden wars;
+              Yet all the land was green;
+              And love we found, and peace,
+              Where fire and war had been.
+    They pass and smile, the children of the sword--
+              No more the sword they wield;
+              And O, how deep the corn
+              Along the battlefield!_
+                                  W. P. BANNATYNE.
+
+ACROSS THE LOZERE
+
+
+The track that I had followed in the evening soon died out, and I
+continued to follow over a bald turf ascent a row of stone pillars, such
+as had conducted me across the Goulet. It was already warm. I tied my
+jacket on the pack, and walked in my knitted waistcoat. Modestine
+herself was in high spirits, and broke of her own accord, for the first
+time in my experience, into a jolting trot that sent the oats swashing
+in the pocket of my coat. The view, back upon the northern Gevaudan,
+extended with every step; scarce a tree, scarce a house, appeared upon
+the fields of wild hill that ran north, east, and west, all blue and
+gold in the haze and sunlight of the morning. A multitude of little
+birds kept sweeping and twittering about my path; they perched on the
+stone pillars, they pecked and strutted on the turf, and I saw them
+circle in volleys in the blue air, and show, from time to time,
+translucent flickering wings between the sun and me.
+
+Almost from the first moment of my march, a faint large noise, like a
+distant surf, had filled my ears. Sometimes I was tempted to think it
+the voice of a neighbouring waterfall, and sometimes a subjective result
+of the utter stillness of the hill. But as I continued to advance, the
+noise increased, and became like the hissing of an enormous tea urn, and
+at the same time breaths of cool air began to reach me from the
+direction of the summit. At length I understood. It was blowing stiffly
+from the south upon the other slope of the Lozere, and every step that I
+took I was drawing nearer to the wind.
+
+Although it had been long desired, it was quite unexpectedly at last
+that my eyes rose above the summit. A step that seemed no way more
+decisive than many other steps that had preceded it--and, "like stout
+Cortez when, with eagle eyes, he stared at the Pacific," I took
+possession, in my own name, of a new quarter of the world. For behold,
+instead of the gross turf rampart I had been mounting for so long, a
+view into the hazy air of heaven, and a land of intricate blue hills
+below my feet.
+
+The Lozere lies nearly east and west, cutting Gevaudan into two unequal
+parts; its highest point, this Pic de Finiels, on which I was then
+standing, rises upwards of five thousand six hundred feet above the sea,
+and in clear weather commands a view over all lower Languedoc to the
+Mediterranean Sea. I have spoken with people who either pretended or
+believed that they had seen, from the Pic de Finiels, white ships
+sailing by Montpellier and Cette. Behind was the upland northern country
+through which my way had lain, peopled by a dull race, without wood,
+without much grandeur of hill-form, and famous in the past for little
+besides wolves. But in front of me, half veiled in sunny haze, lay a new
+Gevaudan, rich, picturesque, illustrious for stirring events. Speaking
+largely, I was in the Cevennes at Monastier, and during all my journey;
+but there is a strict and local sense in which only this confused and
+shaggy country at my feet has any title to the name, and in this sense
+the peasantry employ the word. These are the Cevennes with an emphasis:
+the Cevennes of the Cevennes. In that undecipherable labyrinth of hills,
+a war of bandits, a war of wild beasts, raged for two years between the
+Grand Monarch with all his troops and marshals on the one hand, and a
+few thousand Protestant mountaineers upon the other. A hundred and
+eighty years ago, the Camisards held a station even on the Lozere, where
+I stood; they had an organization, arsenals, a military and religious
+hierarchy; their affairs were "the discourse of every coffee-house" in
+London; England sent fleets in their support; their leaders prophesied
+and murdered; with colours and drums, and the singing of old French
+Psalms, their bands sometimes affronted daylight, marched before walled
+cities, and dispersed the generals of the king; and sometimes at night,
+or in masquerade, possessed themselves of strong castles, and avenged
+treachery upon their allies and cruelty upon their foes. There, a
+hundred and eighty years ago, was the chivalrous Roland, "Count and Lord
+Roland, generalissimo of the Protestants in France," grave, silent,
+imperious, pock-marked ex-dragoon, whom a lady followed in his
+wanderings out of love. There was Cavalier, a baker's apprentice with a
+genius for war, elected brigadier of Camisards at seventeen, to die at
+fifty-five the English Governor of Jersey. There again was Castanet, a
+partisan leader in a voluminous peruke and with a taste for
+controversial divinity. Strange generals, who moved apart to take
+counsel with the God of Hosts, and fled or offered battle, set sentinels
+or slept in an unguarded camp, as the Spirit whispered to their hearts!
+And there, to follow these and other leaders, was the rank and file of
+prophets and disciples, bold, patient, indefatigable, hardy to run upon
+the mountains, cheering their rough life with psalms, eager to fight,
+eager to pray, listening devoutly to the oracles of brain-sick children,
+and mystically putting a grain of wheat among the pewter balls with
+which they charged their muskets.
+
+I had travelled hitherto through a dull district, and in the track of
+nothing more notable than the child-eating Beast of Gevaudan, the
+Napoleon Bonaparte of wolves. But now I was to go down into the scene of
+a romantic chapter--or, better, a romantic footnote--in the history of
+the world. What was left of all this bygone dust and heroism? I was told
+that Protestantism still survived in this head seat of Protestant
+resistance; so much the priest himself had told me in the monastery
+parlour. But I had yet to learn if it were a bare survival, or a lively
+and generous tradition. Again, if in the northern Cevennes the people
+are narrow in religious judgments, and more filled with zeal than
+charity, what was I to look for in this land of persecution and
+reprisal--in a land where the tyranny of the Church produced the
+Camisard rebellion, and the terror of the Camisards threw the Catholic
+peasantry into legalized revolt upon the other side, so that Camisard
+and Florentin skulked for each other's lives among the mountains?
+
+Just on the brow of the hill, where I paused to look before me, the
+series of stone pillars came abruptly to an end; and only a little
+below, a sort of track appeared and began to go down a break-neck slope,
+turning like a corkscrew as it went. It led into a valley between
+falling hills, stubbly with rocks like a reaped field of corn, and
+floored farther down with green meadows. I followed the track with
+precipitation; the steepness of the slope, the continual agile turning
+of the line of the descent, and the old unwearied hope of finding
+something new in a new country, all conspired to lend me wings. Yet a
+little lower and a stream began, collecting itself together out of many
+fountains, and soon making a glad noise among the hills. Sometimes it
+would cross the track in a bit of waterfall, with a pool, in which
+Modestine refreshed her feet.
+
+The whole descent is like a dream to me, so rapidly was it accomplished.
+I had scarcely left the summit ere the valley had closed round my path,
+and the sun beat upon me, walking in a stagnant lowland atmosphere. The
+track became a road, and went up and down in easy undulations. I passed
+cabin after cabin, but all seemed deserted; and I saw not a human
+creature, nor heard any sound except that of the stream. I was, however,
+in a different country from the day before. The stony skeleton of the
+world was here vigorously displayed to sun and air. The slopes were
+steep and changeful. Oak-trees clung along the hills, well grown,
+wealthy in leaf, and touched by the autumn with strong and luminous
+colours. Here and there another stream would fall in from the right or
+the left, down a gorge of snow-white and tumultuary boulders. The river
+in the bottom (for it was rapidly growing a river, collecting on all
+hands as it trotted on its way) here foamed a while in desperate rapids,
+and there lay in pools of the most enchanting sea-green shot with watery
+browns. As far as I have gone, I have never seen a river of so changeful
+and delicate a hue; crystal was not more clear, the meadows were not by
+half so green; and at every pool I saw I felt a thrill of longing to be
+out of these hot, dusty, and material garments, and bathe my naked body
+in the mountain air and water. All the time as I went on I never forgot
+it was the Sabbath; the stillness was a perpetual reminder; and I heard
+in spirit the church-bells clamouring all over Europe, and the psalms of
+a thousand churches.
+
+At length a human sound struck upon my ear--a cry strangely modulated
+between pathos and derision; and looking across the valley, I saw a
+little urchin sitting in a meadow, with his hands about his knees, and
+dwarfed to almost comical smallness by the distance. But the rogue had
+picked me out as I went down the road, from oak wood on to oak wood,
+driving Modestine; and he made me the compliments of the new country in
+this tremulous high-pitched salutation. And as all noises are lovely and
+natural at a sufficient distance, this also, coming through so much
+clean hill air and crossing all the green valley, sounded pleasant to my
+ear, and seemed a thing rustic, like the oaks or the river.
+
+A little after, the stream that I was following fell into the Tarn at
+Pont de Montvert of bloody memory.
+
+
+
+
+PONT DE MONTVERT
+
+
+One of the first things I encountered in Pont de Montvert was, if I
+remember rightly, the Protestant temple; but this was but the type of
+other novelties. A subtle atmosphere distinguishes a town in England
+from a town in France, or even in Scotland. At Carlisle you can see you
+are in the one country; at Dumfries, thirty miles away, you are as sure
+that you are in the other. I should find it difficult to tell in what
+particulars Pont de Montvert differed from Monastier or Langogne, or
+even Bleymard; but the difference existed, and spoke eloquently to the
+eyes. The place, with its houses, its lanes, its glaring riverbed, wore
+an indescribable air of the South.
+
+All was Sunday bustle in the streets and in the public-houses, as all
+had been Sabbath peace among the mountains. There must have been near a
+score of us at dinner by eleven before noon; and after I had eaten and
+drunken, and sat writing up my journal, I suppose as many more came
+dropping in one after another, or by twos and threes. In crossing the
+Lozere I had not only come among new natural features, but moved into
+the territory of a different race. These people, as they hurriedly
+despatched their viands in an intricate sword-play of knives, questioned
+and answered me with a degree of intelligence which excelled all that I
+had met, except among the railway folk at Chasserades. They had open
+telling faces, and were lively both in speech and manner. They not only
+entered thoroughly into the spirit of my little trip, but more than one
+declared, if he were rich enough, he would like to set forth on such
+another.
+
+Even physically there was a pleasant change. I had not seen a pretty
+woman since I left Monastier, and there but one. Now of the three who
+sat down with me to dinner, one was certainly not beautiful--a poor
+timid thing of forty, quite troubled at this roaring _table d'hote_,
+whom I squired and helped to wine, and pledged and tried generally to
+encourage, with quite a contrary effect; but the other two, both
+married, were both more handsome than the average of women. And
+Clarisse? What shall I say of Clarisse? She waited the table with a
+heavy placable nonchalance, like a performing cow; her great grey eyes
+were steeped in amorous languor; her features, although fleshy, were of
+an original and accurate design; her mouth had a curl; her nostril spoke
+of dainty pride; her cheek fell into strange and interesting lines. It
+was a face capable of strong emotion, and, with training, it offered the
+promise of delicate sentiment. It seemed pitiful to see so good a model
+left to country admirers and a country way of thought. Beauty should at
+least have touched society; then, in a moment, it throws off a weight
+that lay upon it, it becomes conscious of itself, it puts on an
+elegance, learns a gait and a carriage of the head, and, in a moment,
+_patet dea_. Before I left I assured Clarisse of my hearty admiration.
+She took it like milk, without embarrassment or wonder, merely looking
+at me steadily with her great eyes; and I own the result upon myself was
+some confusion. If Clarisse could read English, I should not dare to add
+that her figure was unworthy of her face. Hers was a case for stays; but
+that may perhaps grow better as she gets up in years.
+
+Pont de Montvert, or Greenhill Bridge, as we might say at home, is a
+place memorable in the story of the Camisards. It was here that the war
+broke out; here that those southern Covenanters slew their Archbishop
+Sharpe. The persecution on the one hand, the febrile enthusiasm on the
+other, are almost equally difficult to understand in these quiet modern
+days, and with our easy modern beliefs and disbeliefs. The Protestants
+were one and all beside their right minds with zeal and sorrow. They
+were all prophets and prophetesses. Children at the breast would exhort
+their parents to good works. "A child of fifteen months at Quissac spoke
+from its mother's arms, agitated and sobbing, distinctly and with a loud
+voice." Marshal Villars has seen a town where all the women "seemed
+possessed by the devil," and had trembling fits, and uttered prophecies
+publicly upon the streets. A prophetess of Vivarais was hanged at
+Montpellier because blood flowed from her eyes and nose, and she
+declared that she was weeping tears of blood for the misfortunes of the
+Protestants. And it was not only women and children. Stalwart dangerous
+fellows, used to swing the sickle or to wield the forest axe, were
+likewise shaken with strange paroxysms, and spoke oracles with sobs and
+streaming tears. A persecution unsurpassed in violence had lasted near a
+score of years, and this was the result upon the persecuted; hanging,
+burning, breaking on the wheel, had been in vain; the dragoons had left
+their hoofmarks over all the countryside; there were men rowing in the
+galleys, and women pining in the prisons of the Church; and not a
+thought was changed in the heart of any upright Protestant.
+
+Now the head and forefront of the persecution--after Lamoignon de
+Bavile--Francois de Langlade du Chayla (pronounce Cheila), Archpriest of
+the Cevennes and Inspector of Missions in the same country, had a house
+in which he sometimes dwelt in the town of Pont de Montvert. He was a
+conscientious person, who seems to have been intended by nature for a
+pirate, and now fifty-five, an age by which a man has learned all the
+moderation of which he is capable. A missionary in his youth in China,
+he there suffered martyrdom, was left for dead, and only succoured and
+brought back to life by the charity of a pariah. We must suppose the
+pariah devoid of second-sight, and not purposely malicious in this act.
+Such an experience, it might be thought, would have cured a man of the
+desire to persecute; but the human spirit is a thing strangely put
+together; and, having been a Christian martyr, Du Chayla became a
+Christian persecutor. The Work of the Propagation of the Faith went
+roundly forward in his hands. His house in Pont de Montvert served him
+as a prison. There he closed the hands of his prisoners upon live coal,
+and plucked out the hairs of their beards, to convince them that they
+were deceived in their opinions. And yet had not he himself tried and
+proved the inefficacy of these carnal arguments among the Buddhists in
+China?
+
+Not only was life made intolerable in Languedoc, but flight was rigidly
+forbidden. One Massip, a muleteer, and well acquainted with the
+mountain-paths, had already guided several troops of fugitives in safety
+to Geneva; and on him, with another convoy, consisting mostly of women
+dressed as men, Du Chayla, in an evil hour for himself, laid his hands.
+The Sunday following, there was a conventicle of Protestants in the
+woods of Altefage upon Mount Bouges; where there stood up one
+Seguier--Spirit Seguier, as his companions called him--a wool-carder,
+tall, black-faced, and toothless, but a man full of prophecy. He
+declared, in the name of God, that the time for submission had gone by,
+and they must betake themselves to arms for the deliverance of their
+brethren and the destruction of the priests.
+
+The next night, 24th July 1702, a sound disturbed the Inspector of
+Missions as he sat in his prison-house at Pont de Montvert: the voices
+of many men upraised in psalmody drew nearer and nearer through the
+town. It was ten at night; he had his court about him, priests,
+soldiers, and servants, to the number of twelve or fifteen; and now
+dreading the insolence of a conventicle below his very windows, he
+ordered forth his soldiers to report. But the psalm-singers were already
+at his door, fifty strong, led by the inspired Seguier, and breathing
+death. To their summons, the archpriest made answer like a stout old
+persecutor, and bade his garrison fire upon the mob. One Camisard (for,
+according to some, it was in this night's work that they came by the
+name) fell at this discharge: his comrades burst in the door with
+hatchets and a beam of wood, overran the lower story of the house, set
+free the prisoners, and finding one of them in the _vine_, a sort of
+Scavenger's Daughter of the place and period, redoubled in fury against
+Du Chayla, and sought by repeated assaults to carry the upper floors.
+But he, on his side, had given absolution to his men, and they bravely
+held the staircase.
+
+"Children of God," cried the prophet, "hold your hands. Let us burn the
+house, with the priest and the satellites of Baal."
+
+The fire caught readily. Out of an upper window Du Chayla and his men
+lowered themselves into the garden by means of knotted sheets; some
+escaped across the river under the bullets of the insurgents; but the
+archpriest himself fell, broke his thigh, and could only crawl into the
+hedge. What were his reflections as this second martyrdom drew near? A
+poor, brave, besotted, hateful man, who had done his duty resolutely
+according to his light both in the Cevennes and China. He found at least
+one telling word to say in his defence; for when the roof fell in and
+the upbursting flames discovered his retreat, and they came and dragged
+him to the public place of the town, raging and calling him damned--"If
+I be damned," said he, "why should you also damn yourselves?"
+
+Here was a good reason for the last; but in the course of his
+inspectorship he had given many stronger which all told in a contrary
+direction; and these he was now to hear. One by one, Seguier first, the
+Camisards drew near and stabbed him. "This," they said, "is for my
+father broken on the wheel. This for my brother in the galleys. That for
+my mother or my sister imprisoned in your cursed convents." Each gave
+his blow and his reason; and then all kneeled and sang psalms around the
+body till the dawn. With the dawn, still singing, they defiled away
+towards Frugeres, farther up the Tarn, to pursue the work of vengeance,
+leaving Du Chayla's prison-house in ruins, and his body pierced with
+two-and-fifty wounds upon the public place.
+
+'Tis a wild night's work, with its accompaniment of psalms; and it seems
+as if a psalm must always have a sound of threatening in that town upon
+the Tarn. But the story does not end, even so far as concerns Pont de
+Montvert, with the departure of the Camisards. The career of Seguier was
+brief and bloody. Two more priests and a whole family at Ladeveze, from
+the father to the servants, fell by his hand or by his orders; and yet
+he was but a day or two at large, and restrained all the time by the
+presence of the soldiery. Taken at length by a famous soldier of
+fortune, Captain Poul, he appeared unmoved before his judges.
+
+"Your name?" they asked.
+
+"Pierre Seguier."
+
+"Why are you called Spirit?"
+
+"Because the Spirit of the Lord is with me."
+
+"Your domicile?"
+
+"Lately in the desert, and soon in heaven."
+
+"Have you no remorse for your crimes?"
+
+"I have committed none. _My soul is like a garden full of shelter and of
+fountains._"
+
+At Pont de Montvert, on the 12th of August, he had his right hand
+stricken from his body, and was burned alive. And his soul was like a
+garden? So perhaps was the soul of Du Chayla, the Christian martyr. And
+perhaps if you could read in my soul, or I could read in yours, our own
+composure might seem little less surprising.
+
+Du Chayla's house still stands, with a new roof, beside one of the
+bridges of the town; and if you are curious you may see the
+terrace-garden into which he dropped.
+
+
+
+
+IN THE VALLEY OF THE TARN
+
+
+A new road leads from Pont de Montvert to Florac by the valley of the
+Tarn; a smooth sandy ledge, it runs about half-way between the summit of
+the cliffs and the river in the bottom of the valley; and I went in and
+out, as I followed it, from bays of shadow into promontories of
+afternoon sun. This was a pass like that of Killiecrankie; a deep
+turning gully in the hills, with the Tarn making a wonderful hoarse
+uproar far below, and craggy summits standing in the sunshine high
+above. A thin fringe of ash trees ran about the hill-tops, like ivy on a
+ruin; but, on the lower slopes, and far up every glen, the Spanish
+chestnut trees stood each four-square to heaven under its tented
+foliage. Some were planted, each on its own terrace no larger than a
+bed; some, trusting in their roots, found strength to grow and prosper
+and be straight and large upon the rapid slopes of the valley; others,
+where there was a margin to the river, stood marshaled in a line and
+mighty like cedars of Lebanon. Yet even where they grew most thickly
+they were not to be thought of as a wood, but as a herd of stalwart
+individuals; and the dome of each tree stood forth separate and large,
+and as it were a little bill, from among the domes of its companions.
+They gave forth a faint sweet perfume which pervaded the air of the
+afternoon; autumn had put tints of gold and tarnish in the green; and
+the sun so shone through and kindled the broad foliage, that each
+chestnut was relieved against another, not in shadow, but in light. A
+humble sketcher here laid down his pencil in despair.
+
+I wish I could convey a notion of the growth of these noble trees; of
+how they strike out boughs like the oak, and trail sprays of drooping
+foliage like the willow; of how they stand on upright fluted columns
+like the pillars of a church; or like the olive, from the most shattered
+hole can put out smooth and youthful shoots, and begin a new life upon
+the ruins of the old. Thus they partake of the nature of many different
+trees; and even their prickly top-knots, seen near at hand against the
+sky, have a certain palm-like air that impresses the imagination. But
+their individuality, although compounded of so many elements, is but the
+richer and the more original. And to look down upon a level filled with
+these knolls of foliage, or to see a clan of old unconquerable chestnuts
+cluster "like herded elephants" upon the spur of a mountain, is to rise
+to higher thoughts of the powers that are in Nature.
+
+Between Modestine's laggard humour and the beauty of the scene, we made
+little progress all that afternoon; and at last finding the sun,
+although still far from setting, was already beginning to desert the
+narrow valley of the Tarn, I began to cast about for a place to camp in.
+This was not easy to find; the terraces were too narrow, and the ground,
+where it was unterraced, was usually too steep for a man to lie upon. I
+should have slipped all night, and awakened towards morning with my feet
+or my head in the river.
+
+After perhaps a mile, I saw, some sixty feet above the road, a little
+plateau large enough to hold my sack, and securely parapeted by the
+trunk of an aged and enormous chestnut. Thither, with infinite trouble,
+I goaded and kicked the reluctant Modestine, and there I hastened to
+unload her. There was only room for myself upon the plateau, and I had
+to go nearly as high again before I found so much as standing-room for
+the ass. It was on a heap of rolling stones, on an artificial terrace,
+certainly not five feet square in all. Here I tied her to a chestnut,
+and having given her corn and bread and made a pile of chestnut-leaves,
+of which I found her greedy, I descended once more to my own encampment.
+
+The position was unpleasantly exposed. One or two carts went by upon the
+road; and as long as daylight lasted I concealed myself, for all the
+world like a hunted Camisard, behind my fortification of vast chestnut
+trunk; for I was passionately afraid of discovery and the visit of
+jocular persons in the night. Moreover, I saw that I must be early
+awake; for these chestnut gardens had been the scene of industry no
+further gone than on the day before. The slope was strewn with lopped
+branches, and here and there a great package of leaves was propped
+against a trunk; for even the leaves are serviceable, and the peasants
+use them in winter by way of fodder for their animals. I picked a meal
+in fear and trembling, half lying down to hide myself from the road; and
+I daresay I was as much concerned as if I had been a scout from Joani's
+band above upon the Lozere, or from Salomon's across the Tarn, in the
+old times of psalm-singing and blood. Or indeed, perhaps more; for the
+Camisards had a remarkable confidence in God; and a tale comes back into
+my memory of how the Count of Gevaudan, riding with a party of dragoons
+and a notary at his saddlebow to enforce the oath of fidelity in all the
+country hamlets, entered a valley in the woods, and found Cavalier and
+his men at dinner, gaily seated on the grass, and their hats crowned
+with box-tree garlands, while fifteen women washed their linen in the
+stream. Such was a field festival in 1703; at that date Antony Watteau
+would be painting similar subjects.
+
+This was a very different camp from that of the night before in the cool
+and silent pine-woods. It was warm and even stifling in the valley. The
+shrill song of frogs, like the tremolo note of a whistle with a pea in
+it, rang up from the riverside before the sun was down. In the growing
+dusk, faint rustlings began to run to and fro among the fallen leaves;
+from time to time a faint chirping or cheeping noise would fall upon my
+ear; and from time to time I thought I could see the movement of
+something swift and indistinct between the chestnuts. A profusion of
+large ants swarmed upon the ground; bats whisked by, and mosquitoes
+droned overhead. The long boughs with their bunches of leaves hung
+against the sky like garlands; and those immediately above and around me
+had somewhat the air of a trellis which should have been wrecked and
+half overthrown in a gale of wind.
+
+Sleep for a long time fled my eyelids; and just as I was beginning to
+feel quiet stealing over my limbs, and settling densely on my mind, a
+noise at my head startled me broad awake again, and, I will frankly
+confess it, brought my heart into my mouth. It was such a noise as a
+person would make scratching loudly with a finger-nail; it came from
+under the knapsack which served me for a pillow, and it was thrice
+repeated before I had time to sit up and turn about. Nothing was to be
+seen, nothing more was to be heard, but a few of these mysterious
+rustlings far and near, and the ceaseless accompaniment of the river and
+the frogs. I learned next day that the chestnut gardens are infested by
+rats; rustling, chirping, and scraping were probably all due to these;
+but the puzzle, for the moment, was insoluble, and I had to compose
+myself for sleep as best I could, in wondering uncertainty about my
+neighbours.
+
+I was wakened in the grey of the morning (Monday, 30th September) by the
+sound of footsteps not far off upon the stones, and, opening my eyes, I
+beheld a peasant going by among the chestnuts by a footpath that I had
+not hitherto observed. He turned his head neither to the right nor to
+the left, and disappeared in a few strides among the foliage. Here was
+an escape! But it was plainly more than time to be moving. The peasantry
+were abroad; scarce less terrible to me in my nondescript position than
+the soldiers of Captain Poul to an undaunted Camisard. I fed Modestine
+with what haste I could; but as I was returning to my sack, I saw a man
+and a boy come down the hillside in a direction crossing mine. They
+unintelligibly hailed me, and I replied with inarticulate but cheerful
+sounds, and hurried forward to get into my gaiters.
+
+The pair, who seemed to be father and son, came slowly up to the
+plateau, and stood close beside me for some time in silence. The bed was
+open, and I saw with regret my revolver lying patently disclosed on the
+blue wool. At last, after they had looked me all over, and the silence
+had grown laughably embarrassing, the man demanded in what seemed
+unfriendly tones:--
+
+"You have slept here?"
+
+"Yes," said I. "As you see."
+
+"Why?" he asked.
+
+"My faith," I answered lightly, "I was tired."
+
+He next inquired where I was going, and what I had had for dinner; and
+then, without the least transition, "_C'est bien,"_ he added, "come
+along." And he and his son, without another word, turned oil to the next
+chestnut-tree but one, which they set to pruning. The thing had passed
+off more simply than I hoped. He was a grave, respectable man; and his
+unfriendly voice did not imply that he thought he was speaking to a
+criminal, but merely to an inferior.
+
+I was soon on the road, nibbling a cake of chocolate and seriously
+occupied with a case of conscience. Was I to pay for my night's lodging?
+I had slept ill, the bed was full of fleas in the shape of ants, there
+was no water in the room, the very dawn had neglected to call me in the
+morning. I might have missed a train, had there been any in the
+neighbourhood to catch. Clearly, I was dissatisfied with my
+entertainment; and I decided I should not pay unless I met a beggar.
+
+The valley looked even lovelier by morning; and soon the road descended
+to the level of the river. Here, in a place where many straight and
+prosperous chestnuts stood together, making an aisle upon a swarded
+terrace, I made my morning toilette in the water of the Tarn. It was
+marvelously clear, thrillingly cool; the soap-suds disappeared as if by
+magic in the swift current, and the white boulders gave one a model for
+cleanliness. To wash in one of God's rivers in the open air seems to me
+a sort of cheerful solemnity or semi-pagan act of worship. To dabble
+among dishes in a bedroom may perhaps make clean the body; but the
+imagination takes no share in such a cleansing. I went on with a light
+and peaceful heart, and sang psalms to the spiritual ear as I advanced.
+
+Suddenly up came an old woman, who point-blank demanded alms.
+
+"Good," thought I; "here comes the waiter with the bill."
+
+And I paid for my night's lodging on the spot. Take it how you please,
+but this was the first and the last beggar that I met with during all my
+tour.
+
+A step or two farther I was overtaken by an old man in a brown nightcap,
+clear-eyed, weather-beaten, with a faint excited smile. A little girl
+followed him, driving two sheep and a goat; but she kept in our wake,
+while the old man walked beside me and talked about the morning and the
+valley. It was not much past six; and for healthy people who have slept
+enough that is an hour of expansion and of open and trustful talk.
+
+"_Connaissez-vous le Seigneur?_" he said at length.
+
+I asked him what Seigneur he meant; but he only repeated the question
+with more emphasis and a look in his eyes denoting hope and interest.
+
+"Ah," said I, pointing upwards, "I understand you now. Yes, I know Him;
+He is the best of acquaintances."
+
+The old man said he was delighted. "Hold," he added, striking his bosom;
+"it makes me happy here." There were a few who knew the Lord in these
+valleys, he went on to tell me; not many, but a few. "Many are called,"
+he quoted, "and few chosen."
+
+"My father," said I, "it is not easy to say who know the Lord; and it
+is none of our business. Protestants and Catholics, and even those who
+worship stones, may know Him and be known by Him; for He has made all."
+
+I did not know I was so good a preacher.
+
+The old man assured me he thought as I did, and repeated his expressions
+of pleasure at meeting me. "We are so few," he said. "They call us
+Moravians here; but down in the Department of Gard, where there are also
+a good number, they are called Derbists, after an English pastor."
+
+I began to understand that I was figuring, in questionable taste, as a
+member of some sect to me unknown; but I was more pleased with the
+pleasure of my companion than embarrassed by my own equivocal position.
+Indeed, I can see no dishonesty in not avowing a difference; and
+especially in these high matters, where we have all a sufficient
+assurance that, whoever may be in the wrong, we ourselves are not
+completely in the right. The truth is much talked about; but this old
+man in a brown nightcap showed himself so simple, sweet and friendly,
+that I am not unwilling to profess myself his convert. He was, as a
+matter of fact, a Plymouth Brother. Of what that involves in the way of
+doctrine I have no idea nor the time to inform myself; but I know right
+well that we are all embarked upon a troublesome world, the children of
+one Father, striving in many essential points to do and to become the
+same. And although it was somewhat in a mistake that he shook hands with
+me so often and showed himself so ready to receive my words, that was a
+mistake of the truth-finding sort. For charity begins blindfold; and
+only through a series of similar misapprehensions rises at length into a
+settled principle of love and patience, and a firm belief in all our
+fellow-men. If I deceived this good old man, in the like manner I would
+willingly go on to deceive others. And if ever at length, out of our
+separate and sad ways, we should all come together into one common
+house, I have a hope, to which I cling dearly, that my mountain Plymouth
+Brother will hasten to shake hands with me again.
+
+Thus, talking like Christian and Faithful by the way, he and I came down
+upon a hamlet by the Tarn. It was but a humble place, called La Vernede,
+with less than a dozen houses, and a Protestant chapel on a knoll. Here
+he dwelt; and here, at the inn, I ordered my breakfast. The inn was kept
+by an agreeable young man, a stone-breaker on the road, and his sister, a
+pretty and engaging girl. The village schoolmaster dropped in to speak
+with the stranger. And these were all Protestants--a fact which pleased
+me more than I should have expected; and, what pleased me still more,
+they seemed all upright and simple people. The Plymouth Brother hung
+round me with a sort of yearning interest, and returned at least thrice
+to make sure I was enjoying my meal. His behaviour touched me deeply at
+the time, and even now moves me in recollection. He feared to intrude,
+but he would not willingly forego one moment of my society; and he
+seemed never weary of shaking me by the hand.
+
+When all the rest had drifted off to their day's work, I sat for near
+half an hour with the young mistress of the house, who talked pleasantly
+over her seam of the chestnut harvest, and the beauties of the Tarn, and
+old family affections, broken up when young folk go from home, yet still
+subsisting. Hers, I am sure, was a sweet nature, with a country
+plainness and much delicacy underneath; and he who takes her to his
+heart will doubtless be a fortunate young man.
+
+The valley below La Vernede pleased me more and more as I went forward.
+Now the hills approached from either hand, naked and crumbling, and
+walled in the river between cliffs; and now the valley widened and
+became green. The road led me past the old castle of Miral on a steep;
+past a battlemented monastery, long since broken up and turned into a
+church and parsonage; and past a cluster of black roofs, the village of
+Cocures, sitting among vineyards and meadows and orchards thick with red
+apples, and where, along the highway, they were knocking down walnuts
+from the roadside trees, and gathering them in sacks and baskets. The
+hills, however much the vale might open, were still tall and bare, with
+cliffy battlements and here and there a pointed summit; and the Tarn
+still rattled through the stones with a mountain noise. I had been led,
+by bagmen of a picturesque turn of mind, to expect a horrific country
+after the heart of Byron; but to my Scottish eyes it seemed smiling and
+plentiful, as the weather still gave an impression of high summer to my
+Scottish body; although the chestnuts were already picked out by the
+autumn, and the poplars, that here began to mingle with them, had turned
+into pale gold against the approach of winter.
+
+There was something in this landscape, smiling although wild, that
+explained to me the spirit of the Southern Covenanters. Those who took
+to the hills for conscience' sake in Scotland had all gloomy and
+bedevilled thoughts; for once that they received God's comfort they
+would be twice engaged with Satan; but the Camisards had only bright and
+supporting visions. They dealt much more in blood, both given and taken;
+yet I find no obsession of the Evil One in their records. With a light
+conscience, they pursued their life in these rough times and
+circumstances. The soul of Seguier, let us not forget, was like a
+garden. They knew they were on God's side, with a knowledge that has no
+parallel among the Scots; for the Scots, although they might be certain
+of the cause, could never rest confident of the person.
+
+"We flew," says one old Camisard, "when we heard the sound of
+psalm-singing, we flew as if with wings. We felt within us an animating
+ardour, a transporting desire. The feeling cannot be expressed in words.
+It is a thing that must have been experienced to be understood. However
+weary we might be, we thought no more of our weariness, and grew light
+so soon as the psalms fell upon our ears."
+
+The valley of the Tarn and the people whom I met at La Vernede not only
+explain to me this passage, but the twenty years of suffering which
+those, who were so stiff and so bloody when once they betook themselves
+to war, endured with the meekness of children and the constancy of
+saints and peasants.
+
+
+
+
+FLORAC
+
+
+On a branch of the Tarn stands Florac, the seat of a sub-prefecture with
+an old castle, an alley of planes, many quaint street-corners, and a
+live fountain welling from the hill. It is notable, besides, for
+handsome women, and as one of the two capitals, Alais being the other,
+of the country of the Camisards.
+
+The landlord of the inn took me, after I had eaten, to an adjoining
+cafe, where I, or rather my journey, became the topic of the afternoon.
+Every one had some suggestion for my guidance; and the sub-prefectorial
+map was fetched from the sub-prefecture itself, and much thumbed among
+coffee-cups and glasses of liqueur. Most of these kind advisers were
+Protestant, though I observed that Protestant and Catholic intermingled
+in a very easy manner; and it surprised me to see what a lively memory
+still subsisted of the religious war. Among the hills of the south-west,
+by Mauchline, Cumnock, or Carsphairn, in isolated farms or in the manse,
+serious Presbyterian people still recall the days of the great
+persecution, and the graves of local martyrs are still piously regarded.
+But in towns and among the so-called better classes, I fear that these
+old doings have become an idle tale. If you met a mixed company in the
+King's Arms at Wigtown, it is not likely that the talk would run on
+Covenanters. Nay, at Muirkirk of Glenluce, I found the beadle's wife had
+not so much as heard of Prophet Peden. But these Cevenols were proud of
+their ancestors in quite another sense; the war was their chosen topic;
+its exploits were their own patent of nobility; and where a man or a
+race has had but one adventure, and that heroic, we must expect and
+pardon some prolixity of reference. They told me the country was still
+full of legends hitherto uncollected; I heard from them about Cavalier's
+descendants--not direct descendants, be it understood, but only cousins
+or nephews--who were still prosperous people in the scene of the
+boy-general's exploits; and one farmer had seen the bones of old
+combatants dug up into the air of an afternoon in the nineteenth
+century, in a field where the ancestors had fought, and the
+great-grandchildren were peaceably ditching.
+
+Later in the day one of the Protestant pastors was so good as to visit
+me: a young man, intelligent and polite, with whom I passed an hour or
+two in talk. Florac, he told me, is part Protestant, part Catholic; and
+the difference in religion is usually doubled by a difference in
+politics. You may judge of my surprise, coming as I did from such a
+babbling purgatorial Poland of a place as Monastier, when I learned that
+the population lived together on very quiet terms; and there was even an
+exchange of hospitalities between households thus doubly separated.
+Black Camisard and White Camisard, militiaman and Miquelet and dragoon,
+Protestant prophet and Catholic cadet of the White Cross, they had all
+been sabring and shooting, burning, pillaging, and murdering, their
+hearts hot with indignant passion; and here, after a hundred and seventy
+years, Protestant is still Protestant, Catholic still Catholic, in
+mutual toleration and mild amity of life. But the race of man, like that
+indomitable nature whence it sprang, has medicating virtues of its own;
+the years and seasons bring various harvests; the sun returns after the
+rain; and mankind outlives secular animosities, as a single man awakens
+from the passions of a day. We judge our ancestors from a more divine
+position; and the dust being a little laid with several centuries, we
+can see both sides adorned with human virtues and fighting with a show
+of right.
+
+I have never thought it easy to be just, and find it daily even harder
+than I thought. I own I met these Protestants with delight and a sense
+of coming home. I was accustomed to speak their language, in another and
+deeper sense of the word than that which distinguishes between French
+and English; for the true Babel is a divergence upon morals. And hence I
+could hold more free communication with the Protestants, and judge them
+more justly, than the Catholics. Father Apollinaris may pair off with my
+mountain Plymouth Brother as two guileless and devout old men; yet I ask
+myself if I had as ready a feeling for the virtues of the Trappist; or,
+had I been a Catholic, if I should have felt so warmly to the dissenter
+of La Vernede. With the first I was on terms of mere forbearance; but
+with the other, although only on a misunderstanding and by keeping on
+selected points, it was still possible to hold converse and exchange
+some honest thoughts. In this world of imperfection we gladly welcome
+even partial intimacies. And if we find but one to whom we can speak out
+of our heart freely, with whom we can walk in love and simplicity
+without dissimulation, we have no ground of quarrel with the world or
+God.
+
+
+
+
+IN THE VALLEY OF THE MIMENTE
+
+
+On Tuesday, 1st October, we left Florac late in the afternoon, a tired
+donkey and tired donkey-driver. A little way up the Tarnon, a covered
+bridge of wood introduced us into the valley of the Mimente. Steep rocky
+red mountains overhung the stream; great oaks and chestnuts grew upon
+the slopes or in stony terraces; here and there was a red field of
+millet or a few apple trees studded with red apples; and the road passed
+hard by two black hamlets, one with an old castle atop to please the
+heart of the tourist.
+
+It was difficult here again to find a spot fit for my encampment. Even
+under the oaks and chestnuts the ground had not only a very rapid slope,
+but was heaped with loose stones; and where there was no timber the
+hills descended to the stream in a red precipice tufted with heather.
+The sun had left the highest peak in front of me, and the valley was
+full of the lowing sound of herdsmen's horns as they recalled the flocks
+into the stable, when I spied a bight of meadow some way below the
+roadway in an angle of the river. Thither I descended, and, tying
+Modestine provisionally to a tree, proceeded to investigate the
+neighbourhood. A grey pearly evening shadow filled the glen; objects at
+a little distance grew indistinct and melted bafflingly into each other;
+and the darkness was rising steadily like an exhalation. I approached a
+great oak which grew in the meadow, hard by the river's brink; when to
+my disgust the voices of children fell upon my ear, and I beheld a house
+round the angle on the other bank. I had half a mind to pack and be gone
+again, but the growing darkness moved me to remain. I had only to make
+no noise until the night was fairly come, and trust to the dawn to call
+me early in the morning. But it was hard to be annoyed by neighbours in
+such a great hotel.
+
+A hollow underneath the oak was my bed. Before I had fed Modestine and
+arranged my sack, three stars were already brightly shining, and the
+others were beginning dimly to appear. I slipped down to the river,
+which looked very black among its rocks, to fill my can; and dined with
+a good appetite in the dark, for I scrupled to light a lantern while so
+near a house. The moon, which I had seen a pallid crescent all
+afternoon, faintly illuminated the summit of the hills, but not a ray
+fell into the bottom of the glen where I was lying. The oak rose before
+me like a pillar of darkness; and overhead the heartsome stars were set
+in the face of the night. No one knows the stars who has not slept, as
+the French happily put it, _a la belle etoile_. He may know all their
+names and distances and magnitudes, and yet be ignorant of what alone
+concerns mankind,--their serene and gladsome influence on the mind. The
+greater part of poetry is about the stars; and very justly, for they are
+themselves the most classical of poets. These same far-away worlds,
+sprinkled like tapers or shaken together like a diamond dust upon the
+sky, had looked not otherwise to Roland or Cavalier, when, in the words
+of the latter, they had "no other tent but the sky, and no other bed
+than my mother earth."
+
+All night a strong wind blew up the valley, and the acorns fell
+pattering over me from the oak. Yet on this first night of October, the
+air was as mild as May, and I slept with the fur thrown back.
+
+I was much disturbed by the barking of a dog, an animal that I fear more
+than any wolf. A dog is vastly braver, and is besides supported by the
+sense of duty. If you kill a wolf, you meet with encouragement and
+praise; but if you kill a dog, the sacred rights of property and the
+domestic affections come clamouring round you for redress. At the end
+of a fagging day, the sharp, cruel note of a dog's bark is in itself a
+keen annoyance; and to a tramp like myself, he represents the sedentary
+and respectable world in its most hostile form. There is something of
+the clergyman or the lawyer about this engaging animal; and it he were
+not amenable to stones, the boldest man would shrink from travelling
+afoot. I respect dogs much in the domestic circle; but on the highway,
+or sleeping afield, I both detest and fear them.
+
+I was wakened next morning (Wednesday, October 2nd) by the same dog--for
+I knew his bark--making a charge down the bank, and then, seeing me sit
+up, retreating again with great alacrity. The stars were not yet quite
+extinguished. The heaven was of that enchanting mild grey-blue of the
+early morn. A still clear light began to fall, and the trees on the
+hillside were outlined sharply against the sky. The wind had veered more
+to the north, and no longer reached me in the glen; but as I was going
+on with my preparations, it drove a white cloud very swiftly over the
+hill-top; and looking up, I was surprised to see the cloud dyed with
+gold. In these high regions of the air the sun was already shining as at
+noon. If only the clouds travelled high enough, we should see the same
+thing all night long. For it is always daylight in the fields of space.
+
+As I began to go up the valley, a draught of wind came down it out of
+the seat of the sunrise, although the clouds continued to run overhead
+in an almost contrary direction. A few steps farther, and I saw a whole
+hillside gilded with the sun; and still a little beyond, between two
+peaks, a centre of dazzling brilliancy appeared floating in the sky, and
+I was once more face to face with the big bonfire that occupies the
+kernel of our system.
+
+I met but one human being that forenoon, a dark military-looking
+wayfarer, who carried a game-bag on a baldric; but he made a remark that
+seems worthy of record. For when I asked him if he were Protestant or
+Catholic--
+
+"Oh," said he, "I make no shame of my religion. I am a Catholic."
+
+He made no shame of it! The phrase is a piece of natural statistics; for
+it is the language of one in a minority. I thought with a smile of
+Bavile and his dragoons, and how you may ride rough-shod over a religion
+for a century, and leave it only the more lively for the friction.
+Ireland is still Catholic; the Cevennes still Protestant. It is not a
+basketful of law-papers, nor the hoofs and pistol-butts of a regiment of
+horse, that can change one tittle of a ploughman's thoughts. Outdoor
+rustic people have not many ideas, but such as they have are hardy
+plants, and thrive flourishingly in persecution. One who has grown a
+long while in the sweat of laborious noons, and under the stars at
+night, a frequenter of hills and forests, an old honest countryman, has,
+in the end, a sense of communion with the powers of the universe, and
+amicable relations towards his God. Like my mountain Plymouth Brother,
+he knows the Lord. His religion does not repose upon a choice of logic;
+it is the poetry of the man's experience, the philosophy of the history
+of his life. God, like a great power, like a great shining sun, has
+appeared to this simple fellow in the course of years, and become the
+ground and essence of his least reflections; and you may change creeds
+and dogma by authority, or proclaim a new religion with the sound of
+trumpets, if you will; but here is a man who has his own thoughts, and
+will stubbornly adhere to them in good and evil. He is a Catholic, a
+Protestant, or a Plymouth Brother, in the same indefeasible sense that a
+man is not a woman, or a woman not a man. For he could not vary from his
+faith, unless he could eradicate all memory of the past, and, in a
+strict and not a conventional meaning, change his mind.
+
+
+
+
+THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
+
+
+I was now drawing near to Cassagnas, a cluster of black roofs upon the
+hillside, in this wild valley, among chestnut gardens, and looked upon
+in the clear air by many rocky peaks. The road along the Mimente is yet
+new, nor have the mountaineers recovered their surprise when the first
+cart arrived at Cassagnas. But although it lay thus apart from the
+current of men's business, this hamlet had already made a figure in the
+history of France. Hard by, in caverns of the mountain, was one of the
+five arsenals of the Camisards; where they laid up clothes and corn and
+arms against necessity, forged bayonets and sabres, and made themselves
+gunpowder with willow charcoal and saltpetre boiled in kettles. To the
+same caves, amid this multifarious industry, the sick and wounded were
+brought up to heal; and there they were visited by the two surgeons,
+Chabrier and Tavan, and secretly nursed by women of the neighbourhood.
+
+Of the five legions into which the Camisards were divided, it was the
+oldest and the most obscure that had its magazines by Cassagnas. This
+was the band of Spirit Seguier; men who had joined their voices with his
+in the 68th Psalm as they marched down by night on the archpriest of the
+Cevennes. Seguier, promoted to heaven, was succeeded by Salomon Couderc,
+whom Cavalier treats in his memoirs as chaplain-general to the whole
+army of the Camisards. He was a prophet; a great reader of the heart,
+who admitted people to the sacrament, or refused them, by "intentively
+viewing every man" between the eyes; and had the most of the Scriptures
+off by rote. And this was surely happy; since in a surprise in August
+1703, he lost his mule, his portfolios, and his Bible. It is only
+strange that they were not surprised more often and more effectually;
+for this legion of Cassagnas was truly patriarchal in its theory of war,
+and camped without sentries, leaving that duty to the angels of the God
+for whom they fought. This is a token, not only of their faith, but of
+the trackless country where they harboured. M. de Caladon, taking a
+stroll one fine day, walked without warning into their midst, as he
+might have walked into "a flock of sheep in a plain," and found some
+asleep and some awake and psalm-singing. A traitor had need of no
+recommendation to insinuate himself among their ranks, beyond "his
+faculty of singing psalms"; and even the prophet Salomon "took him into
+a particular friendship." Thus, among their intricate hills, the rustic
+troop subsisted; and history can attribute few exploits to them but
+sacraments and ecstasies.
+
+People of this tough and simple stock will not, as I have just been
+saying, prove variable in religion; nor will they get nearer to apostasy
+than a mere external conformity like that of Naaman in the house of
+Rimmon. When Louis XVI., in the words of the edict, "convinced by the
+uselessness of a century of persecutions, and rather from necessity than
+sympathy," granted at last a royal grace of toleration, Cassagnas was
+still Protestant; and to a man, it is so to this day. There is, indeed,
+one family that is not Protestant, but neither is it Catholic. It is
+that of a Catholic _cure_ in revolt, who has taken to his bosom a
+schoolmistress. And his conduct, it is worth noting, is disapproved by
+the Protestant villagers.
+
+"It is a bad idea for a man," said one, "to go back from his
+engagements."
+
+The villagers whom I saw seemed intelligent after a countrified fashion,
+and were all plain and dignified in manner. As a Protestant myself, I
+was well looked upon, and my acquaintance with history gained me
+further respect. For we had something not unlike a religious
+controversy at table, a gendarme and a merchant with whom I dined being
+both strangers to the place, and Catholics. The young men of the house
+stood round and supported me; and the whole discussion was tolerantly
+conducted, and surprised a man brought up among the infinitesimal and
+contentious differences of Scotland. The merchant, indeed, grew a little
+warm, and was far less pleased than some others with my historical
+acquirements. But the gendarme was mighty easy over it all.
+
+"It's a bad idea for a man to change," said he; and the remark was
+generally applauded.
+
+That was not the opinion of the priest and soldier at Our Lady of the
+Snows. But this is a different race; and perhaps the same
+great-heartedness that upheld them to resist, now enables them to differ
+in a kind spirit. For courage respects courage; but where a faith has
+been trodden out, we may look for a mean and narrow population. The true
+work of Bruce and Wallace was the union of the nations; not that they
+should stand apart a while longer, skirmishing upon their borders; but
+that, when the time came, they might unite with self-respect.
+
+The merchant was much interested in my journey, and thought it dangerous
+to sleep afield.
+
+"There are the wolves," said he; "and then it is known you are an
+Englishman. The English have always long purses, and it might very well
+enter into some one's head to deal you an ill blow some night."
+
+I told him I was not much afraid of such accidents; and at any rate
+judged it unwise to dwell upon alarms or consider small perils in the
+arrangement of life. Life itself, I submitted, was a far too risky
+business as a whole to make each additional particular of danger worth
+regard. "Something," said I, "might burst in your inside any day of the
+week, and there would be an end of you, if you were locked in your room
+with three turns of the key."
+
+"_Cependant_," said he, "_coucher dehors_!"
+
+"God," said I, "is everywhere."
+
+"_Cependant, coucher dehors!_" he repeated, and his voice was eloquent
+of terror.
+
+He was the only person, in all my voyage, who saw anything hardy in so
+simple a proceeding; although many considered it superfluous. Only one,
+on the other hand, professed much delight in the idea; and that was my
+Plymouth Brother, who cried out, when I told him I sometimes preferred
+sleeping under the stars to a close and noisy alehouse, "Now I see that
+you know the Lord!"
+
+The merchant asked me for one of my cards as I was leaving, for he said
+I should be something to talk of in the future, and desired me to make a
+note of his request and reason; a desire with which I have thus
+complied.
+
+A little after two I struck across the Mimente, and took a rugged path
+southward up a hillside covered with loose stones and tufts of heather.
+At the top, as is the habit of the country, the path disappeared; and I
+left my she-ass munching heather, and went forward alone to seek a road.
+
+I was now on the separation of two vast watersheds; behind me all the
+streams were bound for the Garonne and the Western Ocean; before me was
+the basin of the Rhone. Hence, as from the Lozere, you can see in clear
+weather the shining of the Gulf of Lyons; and perhaps from here the
+soldiers of Salomon may have watched for the topsails of Sir Cloudesley
+Shovel, and the long-promised aid from England. You may take this ridge
+as lying in the heart of the country of the Camisards; four of the five
+legions camped all round it and almost within view--Salomon and Joani to
+the north, Castanet and Roland to the south; and when Julien had
+finished his famous work, the devastation of the High Cevennes, which
+lasted all through October and November, 1703, and during which four
+hundred and sixty villages and hamlets were, with fire and pickaxe,
+utterly subverted, a man standing on this eminence would have looked
+forth upon a silent, smokeless, and dispeopled land. Time and man's
+activity have now repaired these ruins; Cassagnas is once more roofed
+and sending up domestic smoke; and in the chestnut gardens, in low and
+leafy corners, many a prosperous farmer returns, when the day's work is
+done, to his children and bright hearth. And still it was perhaps the
+wildest view of all my journey. Peak upon peak, chain upon chain of
+hills ran surging southward, channeled and sculptured by the winter
+streams, feathered from head to foot with chestnuts, and here and there
+breaking out into a coronal of cliffs. The sun, which was still far from
+setting, sent a drift of misty gold across the hill-tops, but the
+valleys were already plunged in a profound and quiet shadow.
+
+A very old shepherd, hobbling on a pair of sticks, and wearing a black
+cap of liberty, as if in honour of his nearness to the grave, directed
+me to the road for St. Germain de Calberte. There was something solemn
+in the isolation of this infirm and ancient creature. Where he dwelt,
+how he got upon this high ridge, or how he proposed to get down again,
+were more than I could fancy. Not far off upon my right was the famous
+Plan de Font Morte, where Poul with his Armenian sabre slashed down the
+Camisards of Seguier. This, methought, might be some Rip van Winkle of
+the war, who had lost his comrades, fleeing before Poul, and wandered
+ever since upon the mountains. It might be news to him that Cavalier had
+surrendered, or Roland had fallen fighting with his back against an
+olive. And while I was thus working on my fancy, I heard him hailing in
+broken tones, and saw him waving me to come back with one of his two
+sticks. I had already got some way past him; but, leaving Modestine once
+more, retraced my steps.
+
+Alas, it was a very commonplace affair. The old gentleman had forgot to
+ask the pedlar what he sold, and wished to remedy this neglect.
+
+I told him sternly, "Nothing."
+
+"Nothing?" cried he.
+
+I repeated "Nothing," and made off.
+
+It's odd to think of, but perhaps I thus became as inexplicable to the
+old man as he had been to me.
+
+The road lay under chestnuts, and though I saw a hamlet or two below me
+in the vale, and many lone houses of the chestnut farmers, it was a very
+solitary march all afternoon; and the evening began early underneath the
+trees. But I heard the voice of a woman singing some sad, old, endless
+ballad not far off. It seemed to be about love and a _bel amoureux_, her
+handsome sweetheart; and I wished I could have taken up the strain and
+answered her, as I went on upon my invisible woodland way, weaving, like
+Pippa in the poem, my own thoughts with hers. What could I have told
+her? Little enough; and yet all the heart requires. How the world gives
+and takes away, and brings sweethearts near only to separate them again
+into distant and strange lands; but to love is the great amulet which
+makes the world a garden; and "hope, which comes to all," outwears the
+accidents of life, and reaches with tremulous hand beyond the grave and
+death. Easy to say: yea, but also, by God's mercy, both easy and
+grateful to believe!
+
+We struck at last into a wide white high-road carpeted with noiseless
+dust. The night had come; the moon had been shining for a long while
+upon the opposite mountain; when on turning a corner my donkey and I
+issued ourselves into her light. I had emptied out my brandy at Florac,
+for I could bear the stuff no longer, and replaced it with some generous
+and scented Volnay; and now I drank to the moon's sacred majesty upon
+the road. It was but a couple of mouthfuls; yet I became thenceforth
+unconscious of my limbs, and my blood flowed with luxury. Even Modestine
+was inspired by this purified nocturnal sunshine, and bestirred her
+little hoofs as to a livelier measure. The road wound and descended
+swiftly among masses of chestnuts. Hot dust rose from our feet and
+flowed away. Our two shadows--mine deformed with the knapsack, hers
+comically bestridden by the pack--now lay before us clearly outlined on
+the road, and now, as we turned a corner, went off into the ghostly
+distance, and sailed along the mountain like clouds. From time to time a
+warm wind rustled down the valley, and set all the chestnuts dangling
+their bunches of foliage and fruit; the ear was filled with whispering
+music, and the shadows danced in tune. And next moment the breeze had
+gone by, and in all the valley nothing moved except our travelling feet.
+On the opposite slope, the monstrous ribs and gullies of the mountain
+were faintly designed in the moonshine; and high overhead, in some lone
+house, there burned one lighted window, one square spark of red in the
+huge field of sad nocturnal colouring.
+
+At a certain point, as I went downward, turning many acute angles, the
+moon disappeared behind the hill; and I pursued my way in great
+darkness, until another turning shot me without preparation into St.
+Germain de Calberte. The place was asleep and silent, and buried in
+opaque night. Only from a single open door, some lamplight escaped upon
+the road to show me that I was come among men's habitations. The two
+last gossips of the evening, still talking by a garden wall, directed me
+to the inn. The landlady was getting her chicks to bed; the fire was
+already out, and had, not without grumbling, to be rekindled; half an
+hour later, and I must have gone supperless to roost.
+
+
+
+
+THE LAST DAY
+
+
+When I awoke (Thursday, 2nd October), and, hearing a great flourishing
+of cocks and chuckling of contented hens, betook me to the window of the
+clean and comfortable room where I had slept the night, I looked forth
+on a sunshiny morning in a deep vale of chestnut gardens. It was still
+early, and the cockcrows, and the slanting lights, and the long shadows,
+encouraged me to be out and look round me.
+
+St. Germain de Calberte is a great parish nine leagues round about. At
+the period of the wars, and immediately before the devastation, it was
+inhabited by two hundred and seventy-five families, of which only nine
+were Catholic; and it took the _cure_ seventeen September days to go
+from house to house on horseback for a census. But the place itself,
+although capital of a canton, is scarce larger than a hamlet. It lies
+terraced across a steep slope in the midst of mighty chestnuts. The
+Protestant chapel stands below upon a shoulder; in the midst of the town
+is the quaint old Catholic church.
+
+It was here that poor Du Chayla, the Christian martyr, kept his library
+and held a court of missionaries; here he had built his tomb, thinking
+to lie among a grateful population whom he had redeemed from error; and
+hither on the morrow of his death they brought the body, pierced with
+two-and-fifty wounds, to be interred. Clad in his priestly robes, he was
+laid out in state in the church. The _cure_, taking his text from Second
+Samuel, twentieth chapter and twelfth verse, "And Amasa wallowed in his
+blood in the highway," preached a rousing sermon, and exhorted his
+brethren to die each at his post, like their unhappy and illustrious
+superior. In the midst of this eloquence there came a breeze that
+Spirit Seguier was near at hand; and behold! all the assembly took to
+their horses' heels, some east, some west, and the _cure_ himself as far
+as Alais.
+
+Strange was the position of this little Catholic metropolis, a
+thimbleful of Rome, in such a wild and contrary neighbourhood. On the
+one hand, the legion of Salomon overlooked it from Cassagnas; on the
+other, it was cut off from assistance by the legion of Roland at Mialet.
+The _cure_, Louvrelenil, although he took a panic at the arch-priest's
+funeral, and so hurriedly decamped to Alais, stood well by his isolated
+pulpit, and thence uttered fulminations against the crimes of the
+Protestants. Salomon besieged the village for an hour and a half, but
+was beaten back. The militiamen, on guard before the _cure's_ door,
+could be heard, in the black hours, singing Protestant psalms and
+holding friendly talk with the insurgents. And in the morning, although
+not a shot had been fired, there would not be a round of powder in their
+flasks. Where was it gone? All handed over to the Camisards for a
+consideration. Untrusty guardians for an isolated priest!
+
+That these continual stirs were once busy in St. Germain de Calberte,
+the imagination with difficulty receives; all is now so quiet, the pulse
+of human life now beats so low and still in this hamlet of the
+mountains. Boys followed me a great way off, like a timid sort of
+lion-hunters; and people turned round to have a second look, or came out
+of their houses, as I went by. My passage was the first event, you would
+have fancied, since the Camisards. There was nothing rude or forward in
+this observation; it was but a pleased and wondering scrutiny, like that
+of oxen or the human infant; yet it wearied my spirits, and soon drove
+me from the street.
+
+I took refuge on the terraces, which are here greenly carpeted with
+sward, and tried to imitate with a pencil the inimitable attitudes of
+the chestnuts as they bear up their canopy of leaves. Ever and again a
+little wind went by, and the nuts dropped all around me, with a light
+and dull sound, upon the sward. The noise was as of a thin fall of
+great hailstones; but there went with it a cheerful human sentiment of
+an approaching harvest and farmers rejoicing in their gains. Looking up,
+I could see the brown nut peering through the husk, which was already
+gaping; and between the stems the eye embraced an amphitheatre of hill,
+sunlit and green with leaves.
+
+I have not often enjoyed a place more deeply. I moved in an atmosphere
+of pleasure, and felt light and quiet and content. But perhaps it was
+not the place alone that so disposed my spirit. Perhaps some one was
+thinking of me in another country; or perhaps some thought of my own had
+come and gone unnoticed, and yet done me good. For some thoughts, which
+sure would be the most beautiful, vanish before we can rightly scan
+their features; as though a god, travelling by our green highways,
+should but ope the door, give one smiling look into the house, and go
+again for ever. Was it Apollo, or Mercury, or Love with folded wings?
+Who shall say? But we go the lighter about our business, and feel peace
+and pleasure in our hearts.
+
+I dined with a pair of Catholics. They agreed in the condemnation of a
+young man, a Catholic, who had married a Protestant girl and gone over
+to the religion of his wife. A Protestant born they could understand and
+respect: indeed, they seemed to be of the mind of an old Catholic woman,
+who told me that same day there was no difference between the two sects,
+save that "wrong was more wrong for the Catholic," who had more light
+and guidance; but this of a man's desertion filled them with contempt.
+
+"It's a bad idea for a man to change," said one.
+
+It may have been accidental, but you see how this phrase pursued me; and
+for myself, I believe it is the current philosophy in these parts. I
+have some difficulty in imagining a better. It's not only a great flight
+of confidence for a man to change his creed and go out of his family for
+heaven's sake; but the odds are--nay, and the hope is--that, with all
+this great transition in the eyes of man, he has not changed himself a
+hairbreadth to the eyes of God. Honour to those who do so, for the
+wrench is sore. But it argues something narrow, whether of strength or
+weakness, whether of the prophet or the fool, in those who can take a
+sufficient interest in such infinitesimal and human operations, or who
+can quit a friendship for a doubtful process of the mind. And I think I
+should not leave my old creed for another, changing only words for other
+words; but by some brave reading, embrace it in spirit and truth, and
+find wrong as wrong for me as for the best of other communions.
+
+The phylloxera was in the neighbourhood; and instead of wine we drank at
+dinner a more economical juice of the grape--La Parisienne, they call
+it. It is made by putting the fruit whole into a cask with water; one by
+one the berries ferment and burst; what is drunk during the day is
+supplied at night in water; so, with ever another pitcher from the well,
+and ever another grape exploding and giving out its strength, one cask
+of Parisienne may last a family till spring. It is, as the reader will
+anticipate, a feeble beverage, but very pleasant to the taste.
+
+What with dinner and coffee, it was long past three before I left St.
+Germain de Calberte. I went down beside the Gardon of Mialet, a great
+glaring watercourse devoid of water, and through St. Etienne de Vallee
+Francaise, or Val Francesque, as they used to call it; and towards
+evening began to ascend the hill of St. Pierre. It was a long and steep
+ascent. Behind me an empty carriage returning to St. Jean du Gard kept
+hard upon my tracks, and near the summit overtook me. The driver, like
+the rest of the world, was sure I was a pedlar; but, unlike others, he
+was sure of what I had to sell. He had noticed the blue wool which hung
+out of my pack at either end; and from this he had decided, beyond my
+power to alter his decision, that I dealt in blue wool collars, such as
+decorate the neck of the French draught-horse.
+
+I had hurried to the topmost powers of Modestine, for I dearly desired
+to see the view upon the other side before the day had faded. But it was
+night when I reached the summit; the moon was riding high and clear; and
+only a few grey streaks of twilight lingered in the west. A yawning
+valley, gulfed in blackness, lay like a hole in created nature at my
+feet; but the outline of the hills was sharp against the sky. There was
+Mount Aigoal, the stronghold of Castanet. And Castanet, not only as an
+active undertaking leader, deserves some mention among Camisards; for
+there is a spray of rose among his laurel; and he showed how, even in a
+public tragedy, love will have its way. In the high tide of war he
+married, in his mountain citadel, a young and pretty lass called
+Mariette. There were great rejoicings; and the bridegroom released
+five-and-twenty prisoners in honour of the glad event. Seven months
+afterwards, Mariette, the Princess of the Cevennes, as they called her
+in derision, fell into the hands of the authorities, where it was like
+to have gone hard with her. But Castanet was a man of execution, and
+loved his wife. He fell on Valleraugue, and got a lady there for a
+hostage; and for the first and last time in that war there was an
+exchange of prisoners. Their daughter, pledge of some starry night upon
+Mount Aigoal, has left descendants to this day.
+
+Modestine and I--it was our last meal together--had a snack upon the top
+of St. Pierre, I on a heap of stones, she standing by me in the
+moonlight and decorously eating bread out of my hand. The poor brute
+would eat more heartily in this manner; for she had a sort of affection
+for me, which I was soon to betray.
+
+It was a long descent upon St. Jean du Gard, and we met no one but a
+carter, visible afar off by the glint of the moon on his extinguished
+lantern.
+
+Before ten o'clock we had got in and were at supper; fifteen miles and a
+stiff hill in little beyond six hours!
+
+
+
+
+FAREWELL, MODESTINE!
+
+
+On examination, on the morning of October 3rd, Modestine was pronounced
+unfit for travel. She would need at least two days' repose, according to
+the ostler; but I was now eager to reach Alais for my letters; and,
+being in a civilized country of stage-coaches, I determined to sell my
+lady friend and be off by the diligence that afternoon. Our yesterday's
+march, with the testimony of the driver who had pursued us up the long
+hill of St. Pierre, spread a favourable notion of my donkey's
+capabilities. Intending purchasers were aware of an unrivaled
+opportunity. Before ten I had an offer of twenty-five francs; and before
+noon, after a desperate engagement, I sold her, saddle and all, for
+five-and-thirty. The pecuniary gain is not obvious, but I had bought
+freedom into the bargain.
+
+St. Jean du Gard is a large place, and largely Protestant. The maire, a
+Protestant, asked me to help him in a small matter which is itself
+characteristic of the country. The young women of the Cevennes profit by
+the common religion and the difference of the language to go largely as
+governesses into England; and here was one, a native of Mialet,
+struggling with English circulars from two different agencies in London.
+I gave what help I could; and volunteered some advice, which struck me
+as being excellent.
+
+One thing more I note. The phylloxera has ravaged the vineyards in this
+neighbourhood; and in the early morning, under some chestnuts by the
+river, I found a party of men working with a cider-press. I could not at
+first make out what they were after, and asked one fellow to explain.
+
+"Making cider," he said. "_Oui, c'est comme ca. Comme dans le nord!_"
+
+There was a ring of sarcasm in his voice: the country was going to the
+devil.
+
+It was not until I was fairly seated by the driver, and rattling through
+a rocky valley with dwarf olives, that I became aware of my bereavement.
+I had lost Modestine. Up to that moment I had thought I hated her; but
+now she was gone,
+
+                   "And O!
+    The difference to me!"
+
+For twelve days we had been fast companions; we had travelled upwards of
+a hundred and twenty miles, crossed several respectable ridges, and
+jogged along with our six legs by many a rocky and many a boggy by-road.
+After the first day, although sometimes I was hurt and distant in
+manner, I still kept my patience; and as for her, poor soul! she had
+come to regard me as a god. She loved to eat out of my hand. She was
+patient, elegant in form, the colour of an ideal mouse, and inimitably
+small. Her faults were those of her race and sex; her virtues were her
+own. Farewell, and if for ever--
+
+Father Adam wept when he sold her to me; after I had sold her in my
+turn, I was tempted to follow his example; and being alone with a
+stage-driver and four or five agreeable young men, I did not hesitate to
+yield to my emotion.
+
+
+
+
+A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE
+
+A FRAGMENT
+
+1879
+
+    _Originally intended to serve as the opening chapter of
+    "Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes"_
+
+
+Le Monastier is the chief place of a hilly canton in Haute Loire, the
+ancient Velay. As the name betokens, the town is of monastic origin; and
+it still contains a towered bulk of monastery and a church of some
+architectural pretensions, the seat of an archpriest and several vicars.
+It stands on the side of a hill above the river Gazeille, about fifteen
+miles from Le Puy, up a steep road where the wolves sometimes pursue the
+diligence in winter. The road, which is bound for Vivarais, passes
+through the town from end to end in a single narrow street; there you
+may see the fountain where women fill their pitchers; there also some
+old houses with carved doors and pediments and ornamental work in iron.
+For Monastier, like Maybole in Ayrshire, was a sort of country capital,
+where the local aristocracy had their town mansions for the winter; and
+there is a certain baron still alive and, I am told, extremely penitent,
+who found means to ruin himself by high living in this village on the
+hills. He certainly has claims to be considered the most remarkable
+spendthrift on record. How he set about it, in a place where there are
+no luxuries for sale, and where the board at the best inn comes to
+little more than a shilling a day, is a problem for the wise. His son,
+ruined as the family was, went as far as Paris to sow his wild oats; and
+so the cases of father and son mark an epoch in the history of
+centralization in France. Not until the latter had got into the train
+was the work of Richelieu complete.
+
+It is a people of lace-makers. The women sit in the streets by groups of
+five or six; and the noise of the bobbins is audible from one group to
+another. Now and then you will hear one woman clattering off prayers for
+the edification of the others at their work. They wear gaudy shawls,
+white caps with a gay ribbon about the head, and sometimes a black felt
+brigand hat above the cap; and so they give the street colour and
+brightness and a foreign air. A while ago, when England largely supplied
+herself from this district with the lace called _torchon_, it was not
+unusual to earn five francs a day; and five francs in Monastier is worth
+a pound in London. Now, from a change in the market, it takes a clever
+and industrious workwoman to earn from three to four in the week, or
+less than an eighth of what she made easily a few years ago. The tide of
+prosperity came and went, as with our northern pitmen, and left nobody
+the richer. The women bravely squandered their gains, kept the men in
+idleness, and gave themselves up, as I was told, to sweethearting and a
+merry life. From week's end to week's end it was one continuous gala in
+Monastier; people spent the day in the wine-shops, and the drum or the
+bagpipes led on the _bourrees_ up to ten at night. Now these dancing
+days are over. "_Il n'y a plus de jeunesse,_" said Victor the garcon. I
+hear of no great advance in what are thought the essentials of morality;
+but the _bourree_, with its rambling, sweet, interminable music, and
+alert and rustic figures, has fallen into disuse, and is mostly
+remembered as a custom of the past. Only on the occasion of the fair
+shall you hear a drum discreetly rattling in a wine-shop or perhaps one
+of the company singing the measure while the others dance. I am sorry at
+the change, and marvel once more at the complicated scheme of things
+upon this earth, and how a turn of fashion in England can silence so
+much mountain merriment in France. The lace-makers themselves have not
+entirely forgiven our countrywomen; and I think they take a special
+pleasure in the legend of the northern quarter of the town, called
+L'Anglade, because there the English free-lances were arrested and
+driven back by the potency of a little Virgin Mary on the wall.
+
+From time to time a market is held, and the town has a season of
+revival; cattle and pigs are stabled in the streets; and pickpockets
+have been known to come all the way from Lyons for the occasion. Every
+Sunday the country folk throng in with daylight to buy apples, to attend
+mass, and to visit one of the wine-shops, of which there are no fewer
+than fifty in this little town. Sunday wear for the men is a green
+tail-coat of some coarse sort of drugget, and usually a complete suit to
+match. I have never set eyes on such degrading raiment. Here it clings,
+there bulges; and the human body, with its agreeable and lively lines,
+is turned into a mockery and laughing-stock. Another piece of Sunday
+business with the peasants is to take their ailments to the chemist for
+advice. It is as much a matter for Sunday as church-going. I have seen a
+woman who had been unable to speak since the Monday before, wheezing,
+catching her breath, endlessly and painfully coughing; and yet she had
+waited upwards of a hundred hours before coming to seek help, and had
+the week been twice as long, she would have waited still. There was a
+canonical day for consultation; such was the ancestral habit, to which a
+respectable lady must study to conform.
+
+Two conveyances go daily to Le Puy, but they rival each other in polite
+concessions rather than in speed. Each will wait an hour or two hours
+cheerfully while an old lady does her marketing or a gentleman finishes
+the papers in a cafe. The _Courrier_(such is the name of one) should
+leave Le Puy by two in the afternoon on the return voyage, and arrive at
+Monastier in good time for a six o'clock dinner. But the driver dares
+not disoblige his customers. He will postpone his departure again and
+again, hour after hour; and I have known the sun to go down on his
+delay. These purely personal favours, this consideration of men's
+fancies, rather than the hands of a mechanical clock, as marking the
+advance of the abstraction, time, makes a more humorous business of
+stage-coaching than we are used to see it.
+
+As far as the eye can reach, one swelling line of hill-top rises and
+falls behind another; and if you climb an eminence, it is only to see
+new and farther ranges behind these. Many little rivers run from all
+sides in cliffy valleys; and one of them, a few miles from Monastier,
+bears the great name of Loire. The mean level of the country is a little
+more than three thousand feet above the sea, which makes the atmosphere
+proportionally brisk and wholesome. There is little timber except pines,
+and the greater part of the country lies in moorland pasture. The
+country is wild and tumbled rather than commanding; an upland rather
+than a mountain district; and the most striking as well as the most
+agreeable scenery lies low beside the rivers. There, indeed, you will
+find many corners that take the fancy; such as made the English noble
+choose his grave by a Swiss streamlet, where Nature is at her freshest,
+and looks as young as on the seventh morning. Such a place is the course
+of the Gazeille, where it waters the common of Monastier and thence
+downward till it joins the Loire; a place to hear birds singing; a place
+for lovers to frequent. The name of the river was perhaps suggested by
+the sound of its passage over the stones; for it is a great warbler, and
+at night, after I was in bed in Monastier, I could hear it go singing
+down the valley till I fell asleep.
+
+On the whole, this is a Scottish landscape, although not so noble as the
+best in Scotland; and by an odd coincidence the population is, in its
+way, as Scottish as the country. They have abrupt, uncouth, Fifeshire
+manners, and accost you, as if you were trespassing, with an "_Ou'st-ce
+que vous allez?_" only translatable into the Lowland "Whau'r ye gaun?"
+They keep the Scottish Sabbath. There is no labour done on that day but
+to drive in and out the various pigs and sheep and cattle that make so
+pleasant a tinkling in the meadows. The lace-makers have disappeared
+from the street. Not to attend mass would involve social degradation;
+and you may find people reading Sunday books, in particular a sort of
+Catholic _Monthly Visitor_ on the doings of Our Lady of Lourdes. I
+remember one Sunday, when I was walking in the country, that I fell on a
+hamlet and found all the inhabitants, from the patriarch to the baby,
+gathered in the shadow of a gable at prayer. One strapping lass stood
+with her back to the wall and did the solo part, the rest chiming in
+devoutly. Not far off, a lad lay flat on his face asleep among some
+straw, to represent the worldly element.
+
+Again, this people is eager to proselytize; and the postmaster's
+daughter used to argue with me by the half-hour about my heresy, until
+she grew quite flushed. I have heard the reverse process going on
+between a Scots-woman and a French girl; and the arguments in the two
+cases were identical. Each apostle based her claim on the superior
+virtue and attainments of her clergy, and clinched the business with a
+threat of hell-fire. "_Pas bong pretres ici_," said the Presbyterian,
+"_bong pretres en Ecosse_." And the postmaster's daughter, taking up the
+same weapon, plied me, so to speak, with the butt of it instead of the
+bayonet. We are a hopeful race, it seems, and easily persuaded for our
+good. One cheerful circumstance I note in these guerrilla missions, that
+each side relies on hell, and Protestant and Catholic alike address
+themselves to a supposed misgiving in their adversary's heart. And I
+call it cheerful, for faith is a more supporting quality than
+imagination.
+
+Here, as in Scotland, many peasant families boast a son in holy orders.
+And here also, the young men have a tendency to emigrate. It is
+certainly not poverty that drives them to the great cities or across the
+seas, for many peasant families, I was told, have a fortune of at least
+40,000 francs. The lads go forth pricked with the spirit of adventure
+and the desire to rise in life, and leave their homespun elders
+grumbling and wondering over the event. Once, at a village called
+Laussonne, I met one of these disappointed parents: a drake who had
+fathered a wild swan and seen it take wing and disappear. The wild swan
+in question was now an apothecary in Brazil. He had flown by way of
+Bordeaux, and first landed in America, bare-headed and barefoot, and
+with a single halfpenny in his pocket. And now he was an apothecary!
+Such a wonderful thing is an adventurous life! I thought he might as
+well have stayed at home; but you never can tell wherein a man's life
+consists, nor in what he sets his pleasure: one to drink, another to
+marry, a third to write scurrilous articles and be repeatedly caned in
+public, and now this fourth, perhaps, to be an apothecary in Brazil. As
+for his old father, he could conceive no reason for the lad's behaviour.
+"I had always bread for him," he said; "he ran away to annoy me. He
+loved to annoy me. He had no gratitude." But at heart he was swelling
+with pride over his travelled offspring, and he produced a letter out of
+his pocket, where, as he said, it was rotting, a mere lump of paper
+rags, and waved it gloriously in the air. "This comes from America," he
+cried, "six thousand leagues away!" And the wine-shop audience looked
+upon it with a certain thrill.
+
+I soon became a popular figure, and was known for miles in the country.
+_Ou'st-ce que vous allez?_ was changed for me into _Quoi, vous rentrez
+au Monastier ce soir?_ and in the town itself every urchin seemed to
+know my name, although no living creature could pronounce it. There was
+one particular group of lace-makers who brought out a chair for me
+whenever I went by, and detained me from my walk to gossip. They were
+filled with curiosity about England, its language, its religion, the
+dress of the women, and were never weary of seeing the Queen's head on
+English postage-stamps, or seeking for French words in English Journals.
+The language, in particular, filled them with surprise.
+
+"Do they speak _patois_ in England?" I was once asked; and when I told
+them not, "Ah, then, French?" said they.
+
+"No, no," I said, "not French."
+
+"Then," they concluded, "they speak _patois_."
+
+You must obviously either speak French or _patois_. Talk of the force of
+logic--here it was in all its weakness. I gave up the point, but
+proceeding to give illustrations of ray native jargon, I was met with a
+new mortification. Of all _patois_ they declared that mine was the most
+preposterous and the most jocose in sound. At each new word there was a
+new explosion of laughter, and some of the younger ones were glad to
+rise from their chairs and stamp about the street in ecstasy; and I
+looked on upon their mirth in a faint and slightly disagreeable
+bewilderment. "Bread," which sounds a commonplace, plain-sailing
+monosyllable in England, was the word that most delighted these good
+ladies of Monastier; it seemed to them frolicsome and racy, like a page
+of Pickwick; and they all got it carefully by heart, as a stand-by, I
+presume, for winter evenings. I have tried it since then with every sort
+of accent and inflection, but I seem to lack the sense of humour.
+
+They were of all ages: children at their first web of lace, a stripling
+girl with a bashful but encouraging play of eyes, solid married women,
+and grandmothers, some on the top of their age and some falling towards
+decrepitude. One and all were pleasant and natural, ready to laugh and
+ready with a certain quiet solemnity when that was called for by the
+subject of our talk. Life, since the fall in wages, had begun to appear
+to them with a more serious air. The stripling girl would sometimes
+laugh at me in a provocative and not unadmiring manner, if I judge
+aright; and one of the grandmothers, who was my great friend of the
+party, gave me many a sharp word of judgment on my sketches, my heresy,
+or even my arguments, and gave them with a wry mouth and a humorous
+twinkle in her eye that were eminently Scottish. But the rest used me
+with a certain reverence, as something come from afar and not entirely
+human. Nothing would put them at their ease but the irresistible gaiety
+of my native tongue. Between the old lady and myself I think there was a
+real attachment. She was never weary of sitting to me for her portrait,
+in her best cap and brigand hat, and with all her wrinkles tidily
+composed, and though she never failed to repudiate the result, she would
+always insist upon another trial. It was as good as a play to see her
+sitting in judgment over the last. "No, no," she would say, "that is not
+it. I am old, to be sure, but I am better-looking than that. We must try
+again." When I was about to leave she bade me good-bye for this life in
+a somewhat touching manner. We should not meet again, she said; it was a
+long farewell, and she was sorry. But life is so full of crooks, old
+lady, that who knows? I have said good-bye to people for greater
+distances and times, and, please God, I mean to see them yet again.
+
+One thing was notable about these women, from the youngest to the
+oldest, and with hardly an exception. In spite of their piety, they
+could twang off an oath with Sir Toby Belch in person. There was nothing
+so high or so low, in heaven or earth or in the human body, but a woman
+of this neighbourhood would whip out the name of it, fair and square, by
+way of conversational adornment. My landlady, who was pretty and young,
+dressed like a lady and avoided _patois_ like a weakness, commonly
+addressed her child in the language of a drunken bully. And of all the
+swearers that I ever heard, commend me to an old lady in Gondet, a
+village of the Loire. I was making a sketch, and her curse was not yet
+ended when I had finished it and took my departure. It is true she had
+a right to be angry; for here was her son, a hulking fellow, visibly the
+worse for drink before the day was well begun. But it was strange to
+hear her unwearying flow of oaths and obscenities, endless like a river,
+and now and then rising to a passionate shrillness, in the clear and
+silent air of the morning. In city slums, the thing might have passed
+unnoticed; but in a country valley, and from a plain and honest
+countrywoman, this beastliness of speech surprised the ear.
+
+The _Conductor_, as he is called, _of Roads and Bridges_ was my
+principal companion. He was generally intelligent, and could have spoken
+more or less falsetto on any of the trite topics; but it was his
+specialty to have a generous taste in eating. This was what was most
+indigenous in the man; it was here he was an artist; and I found in his
+company what I had long suspected, that enthusiasm and special knowledge
+are the great social qualities, and what they are about, whether white
+sauce or Shakespeare's plays, an altogether secondary question.
+
+I used to accompany the _Conductor_ on his professional rounds, and grew
+to believe myself an expert in the business. I thought I could make an
+entry in a stone-breaker's time-book, or order manure off the wayside
+with any living engineer in France. Gondet was one of the places we
+visited together; and Laussonne, where I met the apothecary's father,
+was another. There, at Laussonne, George Sand spent a day while she was
+gathering materials for the "Marquis de Villemer"; and I have spoken
+with an old man, who was then a child running about the inn kitchen, and
+who still remembers her with a sort of reverence. It appears that he
+spoke French imperfectly; for this reason George Sand chose him for
+companion, and whenever he let slip a broad and picturesque phrase in
+_patois_, she would make him repeat it again and again till it was
+graven in her memory. The word for a frog particularly pleased her
+fancy; and it would be curious to know if she afterwards employed it in
+her works. The peasants, who knew nothing of letters and had never so
+much as heard of local colour, could not explain her chattering with
+this backward child; and to them she seemed a very homely lady and far
+from beautiful: the most famous man-killer of the age appealed so little
+to Velaisian swine-herds!
+
+On my first engineering excursion, which lay up by Crouzials towards
+Mount Mezenc and the borders of Ardeche, I began an improving
+acquaintance with the foreman road-mender. He was in great glee at
+having me with him, passed me off among his subalterns as the
+supervising engineer, and insisted on what he called "the gallantry" of
+paying for my breakfast in a roadside wine-shop. On the whole, he was a
+man of great weather-wisdom, some spirits, and a social temper. But I am
+afraid he was superstitious. When he was nine years old, he had seen one
+night a company of _bourgeois et dames qui faisaient la manege avec des
+chaises_, and concluded that he was in the presence of a witches'
+Sabbath. I suppose, but venture with timidity on the suggestion, that
+this may have been a romantic and nocturnal picnic party. Again, coming
+from Pradelles with his brother, they saw a great empty cart drawn by
+six enormous horses before them on the road. The driver cried aloud and
+filled the mountains with the cracking of his whip. He never seemed to
+go faster than a walk, yet it was impossible to overtake him; and at
+length, at the corner of a hill, the whole equipage disappeared bodily
+into the night. At the time, people said it was the devil _qui s'amusait
+a faire ca_.
+
+I suggested there was nothing more likely, as he must have some
+amusement.
+
+The foreman said it was odd, but there was less of that sort of thing
+than formerly. "_C'est difficile_," he added, "_a expliquer_."
+
+When we were well up on the moors and the _Conductor_ was trying some
+road-metal with the gauge--
+
+"Hark!" said the foreman, "do you hear nothing?"
+
+We listened, and the wind, which was blowing chilly out of the east,
+brought a faint, tangled jangling to our ears.
+
+"It is the flocks of Vivarais," said he.
+
+For every summer, the flocks out of all Ardeche are brought up to
+pasture on these grassy plateaux.
+
+Here and there a little private flock was being tended by a girl, one
+spinning with a distaff, another seated on a wall and intently making
+lace. This last, when we addressed her, leaped up in a panic and put out
+her arms, like a person swimming, to keep us at a distance, and it was
+some seconds before we could persuade her of the honesty of our
+intentions.
+
+The _Conductor_ told me of another herdswoman from whom he had once
+asked his road while he was yet new to the country, and who fled from
+him, driving her beasts before her, until he had given up the
+information in despair. A tale of old lawlessness may yet be read in
+these uncouth timidities.
+
+The winter in these uplands is a dangerous and melancholy time. Houses
+are snowed up, and wayfarers lost in a flurry within hail of their own
+fireside. No man ventures abroad without meat and a bottle of wine,
+which he replenishes at every wine-shop; and even thus equipped he takes
+the road with terror. All day the family sits about the fire in a foul
+and airless hovel, and equally without work or diversion. The father may
+carve a rude piece of furniture, but that is all that will be done until
+the spring sets in again, and along with it the labours of the field. It
+is not for nothing that you find a clock in the meanest of these
+mountain habitations. A clock and an almanack, you would fancy, were
+indispensable in such a life....
+
+
+
+
+EDINBURGH
+PICTURESQUE NOTES
+EDINBURGH
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTORY
+
+
+The ancient and famous metropolis of the North sits overlooking a windy
+estuary from the slope and summit of three hills. No situation could be
+more commanding for the head city of a kingdom; none better chosen for
+noble prospects. From her tall precipice and terraced gardens she looks
+far and wide on the sea and broad champaigns. To the east you may catch
+at sunset the spark of the May lighthouse, where the Firth expands into
+the German Ocean; and away to the west, over all the carse of Stirling,
+you can see the first snows upon Ben Ledi.
+
+But Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest
+climates under heaven. She is liable to be beaten upon by all the winds
+that blow, to be drenched with rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs out
+of the east, and powdered with the snow as it comes flying southward
+from the Highland hills. The weather is raw and boisterous in winter,
+shifty and ungenial in summer, and a downright meteorological purgatory
+in the spring. The delicate die early, and I, as a survivor, among bleak
+winds and plumping rain, have been sometimes tempted to envy them their
+fate. For all who love shelter and the blessings of the sun, who hate
+dark weather and perpetual tilting against squalls, there could scarcely
+be found a more unhomely and harassing place of residence. Many such
+aspire angrily after that Somewhere else of the imagination, where all
+troubles are supposed to end. They lean over the great bridge which
+joins the New Town with the Old--that windiest spot, or high altar, in
+this northern temple of the winds--and watch the trains smoking out from
+under them and vanishing into the tunnel on a voyage to brighter skies.
+Happy the passengers who shake off the dust of Edinburgh, and have heard
+for the last time the cry of the east wind among her chimney-tops! And
+yet the place establishes an interest in people's hearts; go where they
+will, they find no city of the same distinction; go where they will,
+they take a pride in their old home.
+
+Venice, it has been said, differs from all other cities in the sentiment
+which she inspires. The rest may have admirers; she only, a famous fair
+one, counts lovers in her train. And indeed, even by her kindest
+friends, Edinburgh is not considered in a similar sense. These like her
+for many reasons, not any one of which is satisfactory in itself. They
+like her whimsically, if you will, and somewhat as a virtuoso dotes upon
+his cabinet. Her attraction is romantic in the narrowest meaning of the
+term. Beautiful as she is, she is not so much beautiful as interesting.
+She is pre-eminently Gothic, and all the more so since she has set
+herself off with some Greek airs, and erected classic temples on her
+crags. In a word, and above all, she is a curiosity. The Palace of
+Holyrood has been left aside in the growth of Edinburgh, and stands grey
+and silent in a workman's quarter, and among breweries and gas works. It
+is a house of many memories. Great people of yore, kings and queens,
+buffoons, and grave ambassadors, played their stately farce for
+centuries in Holyrood. Wars have been plotted, dancing has lasted deep
+into the night, murder has been done in its chambers. There Prince
+Charlie held his phantom levees, and in a very gallant manner
+represented a fallen dynasty for some hours. Now, all these things of
+clay are mingled with the dust, the king's crown itself is shown for
+sixpence to the vulgar; but the stone palace has outlived these changes.
+For fifty weeks together, it is no more than a show for tourists and a
+museum of old furniture; but on the fifty-first, behold the palace
+reawakened and mimicking its past. The Lord Commissioner, a kind of
+stage sovereign, sits among stage courtiers; a coach and six and
+clattering escort come and go before the gate; at night, the windows are
+lighted up, and its near neighbours, the workmen, may dance in their own
+houses to the palace music. And in this the palace is typical. There is
+a spark among the embers; from time to time the old volcano smokes.
+Edinburgh has but partly abdicated, and still wears, in parody, her
+metropolitan trappings. Half a capital and half a country town, the
+whole city leads a double existence; it has long trances of the one and
+flashes of the other; like the king of the Black Isles, it is half alive
+and half a monumental marble. There are armed men and cannon in the
+citadel overhead; you may see the troops Marshalled on the high parade;
+and at night after the early winter evenfall, and in the morning before
+the laggard winter dawn, the wind carries abroad over Edinburgh the
+sound of drums and bugles. Grave judges sit bewigged in what was once
+the scene of imperial deliberations. Close by in the High Street perhaps
+the trumpets may sound about the stroke of noon; and you see a troop of
+citizens in tawdry masquerade; tabard above, heather-mixture trouser
+below, and the men themselves trudging in the mud among unsympathetic
+bystanders. The grooms of a well-appointed circus tread the streets with
+a better presence. And yet these are the Heralds and Pursuivants of
+Scotland, who are about to proclaim a new law of the United Kingdom
+before two score boys, and thieves, and hackney-coachmen. Meanwhile
+every hour the bell of the University rings out over the hum of the
+streets, and every hour a double tide of students, coming and going,
+fills the deep archways. And lastly, one night in the spring-time--or
+say one morning rather, at the peep of day--late folk may hear the
+voices of many men singing a psalm in unison from a church on one side
+of the old High Street, and a little after, or perhaps a little before,
+the sound of many men singing a psalm in unison from another church on
+the opposite side of the way. There will be something in the words about
+the dew of Hermon, and how goodly it is to see brethren dwelling
+together in unity. And the late folk will tell themselves that all this
+singing denotes the conclusion of two yearly ecclesiastical
+parliaments--the parliaments of Churches which are brothers in many
+admirable virtues, but not specially like brothers in this particular of
+a tolerant and peaceful life.
+
+Again, meditative people will find a charm in a certain consonancy
+between the aspect of the city and its odd and stirring history. Few
+places, if any, offer a more barbaric display of contrasts to the eye.
+In the very midst stands one of the most satisfactory crags in nature--a
+Bass Rock upon dry land, rooted in a garden, shaken by passing trains,
+carrying a crown of battlements and turrets, and describing its warlike
+shadow over the liveliest and brightest thoroughfare of the new town.
+From their smoky beehives, ten stories high, the unwashed look down upon
+the open squares and gardens of the wealthy; and gay people sunning
+themselves along Princes Street, with its mile of commercial palaces all
+beflagged upon some great occasion, see, across a gardened valley set
+with statues, where the washings of the old town flutter in the breeze
+at its high windows. And then, upon all sides, what a clashing of
+architecture! In this one valley, where the life of the town goes most
+busily forward, there may be seen, shown one above and behind another by
+the accidents of the ground, buildings in almost every style upon the
+globe. Egyptian and Greek temples, Venetian palaces and Gothic spires,
+are huddled one over another in a most admired disorder; while, above
+all, the brute mass of the Castle and the summit of Arthur's Seat look
+down upon these imitations with a becoming dignity, as the works of
+Nature may look down upon the monuments of Art. But Nature is a more
+indiscriminate patroness than we imagine, and in no way frightened of a
+strong effect. The birds roost as willingly among the Corinthian
+capitals as in the crannies of the crag; the same atmosphere and
+daylight close the eternal rock and yesterday's imitation portico; and
+as the soft northern sunshine throws out everything into a glorified
+distinctness--or easterly mists, coming up with the blue evening, fuse
+all these incongruous features into one, and the lamps begin to glitter
+along the street, and faint lights to burn in the high windows across
+the valley--the feeling grows upon you that this also is a piece of
+nature in the most intimate sense; that this profusion of
+eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock, is not a
+drop-scene in a theatre, but a city in the world of every-day reality,
+connected by railway and telegraph-wire with all the capitals of Europe,
+and inhabited by citizens of the familiar type, who keep ledgers, and
+attend church, and have sold their immortal portion to a daily paper. By
+all the canons of romance, the place demands to be half deserted and
+leaning towards decay; birds we might admit in profusion, the play of
+the sun and winds, and a few gypsies encamped in the chief thoroughfare;
+but these citizens, with their cabs and tramways, their trains and
+posters, are altogether out of key. Chartered tourists, they make free
+with historic localities, and rear their young among the most
+picturesque sites with a grand human indifference. To see them thronging
+by, in their neat clothes and conscious moral rectitude, and with a
+little air of possession that verges on the absurd, is not the least
+striking feature of the place.[1]
+
+And the story of the town is as eccentric as its appearance. For
+centuries it was a capital thatched with heather, and more than once, in
+the evil days of English invasion, it has gone up in flame to heaven, a
+beacon to ships at sea. It was the jousting-ground of jealous nobles,
+not only on Greenside or by the King's Stables, where set tournaments
+were fought to the sound of trumpets and under the authority of the
+royal presence, but in every alley where there was room to cross swords,
+and in the main street, where popular tumult under the Blue Blanket
+alternated with the brawls of outlandish clansmen and retainers. Down in
+the Palace John Knox reproved his queen in the accents of modern
+democracy. In the town, in one of those little shops plastered like so
+many swallows' nests among the buttresses of the old Cathedral, that
+familiar autocrat, James VI., would gladly share a bottle of wine with
+George Heriot the goldsmith. Up on the Pentland Hills, that so quietly
+look down on the Castle with the city lying in waves around it, those
+mad and dismal fanatics, the Sweet Singers, haggard from long exposure
+on the moors, sat day and night with "tearful psalms" to see Edinburgh
+consumed with fire from heaven, like another Sodom or Gomorrah. There,
+in the Grassmarket, stiff-necked, covenanting heroes offered up the
+often unnecessary, but not less honourable, sacrifice of their lives,
+and bade eloquent farewell to sun, moon, and stars, and earthly
+friendships, or died silent to the roll of drums. Down by yon outlet
+rode Grahame of Claverhouse and his thirty dragoons, with the town
+beating to arms behind their horses' tails--a sorry handful thus riding
+for their lives, but with a man at the head who was to return in a
+different temper, make a dash that staggered Scotland to the heart, and
+die happily in the thick of fight. There Aikenhead was hanged for a
+piece of boyish incredulity; there, a few years afterwards, David Hume
+ruined Philosophy and Faith, an undisturbed and well-reputed citizen;
+and thither, in yet a few years more, Burns came from the plough-tail,
+as to an academy of gilt unbelief and artificial letters. There, when
+the great exodus was made across the valley, and the new town began to
+spread abroad its draughty parallelograms and rear its long frontage on
+the opposing hill, there was such a flitting, such a change of domicile
+and dweller, as was never excelled in the history of cities: the cobbler
+succeeded the earl; the beggar ensconced himself by the judge's chimney;
+what had been a palace was used as a pauper refuge; and great mansions
+were so parceled out among the least and lowest in society, that the
+hearth-stone of the old proprietor was thought large enough to be
+partitioned off into a bedroom by the new.
+
+[1] These sentences have, I hear, given offence in my native town; and a
+proportionable pleasure to our rivals of Glasgow. I confess the news
+caused me both pain and merriment. May I remark, as a balm for wounded
+fellow-townsmen, that there is nothing deadly in my accusations? Small
+blame to them if they keep ledgers: 'tis an excellent business habit.
+Church-going is not, that ever I heard, a subject of reproach; decency
+of linen is a mark of prosperous affairs, and conscious moral rectitude
+one of the tokens of good living. It is not their fault if the city
+calls for something more specious by the way of inhabitants. A man in a
+frock-coat looks out of place upon an Alp or Pyramid, although he has
+the virtues of a Peabody and the talents of a Bentham. And let them
+console themselves--they do as well as anybody else; the population of
+(let us say) Chicago would cut quite as rueful a figure on the same
+romantic stage. To the Glasgow people I would say only one word, but
+that is of gold: _I have not yet written a book about Glasgow._
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+OLD TOWN: THE LANDS
+
+
+The Old Town, it is pretended, is the chief characteristic, and, from a
+picturesque point of view, the liver-wing of Edinburgh. It is one of the
+most common forms of depreciation to throw cold water on the whole by
+adroit over-commendation of a part, since everything worth judging,
+whether it be a man, a work of art, or only a fine city, must be judged
+upon its merits as a whole. The Old Town depends for much of its effect
+on the new quarters that lie around it, on the sufficiency of its
+situation, and on the hills that back it up. If you were to set it
+somewhere else by itself, it would look remarkably like Stirling in a
+bolder and loftier edition. The point is to see this embellished
+Stirling planted in the midst of a large, active, and fantastic modern
+city; for there the two react in a picturesque sense, and the one is
+the making of the other.
+
+The Old Town occupies a sloping ridge or tail of diluvial matter,
+protected, in some subsidence of the waters, by the Castle cliffs which
+fortify it to the west. On the one side of it and the other the new
+towns of the south and of the north occupy their lower, broader, and
+more gentle hill-tops. Thus, the quarter of the Castle overtops the
+whole city and keeps an open view to sea and land. It dominates for
+miles on every side; and people on the decks of ships, or ploughing in
+quiet country places over in Fife, can see the banner on the Castle
+battlements, and the smoke of the Old Town blowing abroad over the
+subjacent country. A city that is set upon a hill. It was, I suppose,
+from this distant aspect that she got her nickname of _Auld Reekie_.
+Perhaps it was given her by people who had never crossed her doors: day
+after day, from their various rustic Pisgahs, they had seen the pile of
+building on the hill-top, and the long plume of smoke over the plain; so
+it appeared to them; so it had appeared to their fathers tilling the
+same field; and as that was all they knew of the place, it could be all
+expressed in these two words.
+
+Indeed, even on a nearer view, the Old Town is properly smoked; and
+though it is well washed with rain all the year round, it has a grim and
+sooty aspect among its younger suburbs. It grew, under the law that
+regulates the growth of walled cities in precarious situations: not in
+extent, but in height and density. Public buildings were forced,
+wherever there was room for them, into the midst of thoroughfares;
+thoroughfares were diminished into lanes; houses sprang up story after
+story, neighbour mounting upon neighbour's shoulder, as in some Black
+Hole of Calcutta, until the population slept fourteen or fifteen deep in
+a vertical direction. The tallest of these lands, as they are locally
+termed, have long since been burnt out; but to this day it is not
+uncommon to see eight or ten windows at a flight; and the cliff of
+building which hangs imminent over Waverley Bridge would still put many
+natural precipices to shame. The cellars are already high above the
+gazer's head, planted on the steep hillside; as for the garret, all the
+furniture may be in the pawnshop, but it commands a famous prospect to
+the Highland hills. The poor man may roost up there in the centre of
+Edinburgh, and yet have a peep of the green country from his window; he
+shall see the quarters of the well-to-do fathoms underneath, with their
+broad squares and gardens; he shall have nothing overhead but a few
+spires, the stone top-gallants of the city; and perhaps the wind may
+reach him with a rustic pureness, and bring a smack of the sea, or of
+flowering lilacs in the spring.
+
+It is almost the correct literary sentiment to deplore the revolutionary
+improvements of Mr. Chambers and his following. It is easy to be a
+conservator of the discomforts of others; indeed, it is only our good
+qualities we find it irksome to, conserve. Assuredly, in driving streets
+through the black labyrinth, a few curious old corners have been swept
+away, and some associations turned out of house and home. But what
+slices of sunlight, what breaths of clean air, have been let in! And
+what a picturesque world remains untouched! You go under dark arches,
+and down dark stairs and alleys. The way is so narrow that you can lay a
+hand on either wall; so steep that, in greasy winter weather, the
+pavement is almost as treacherous as ice. Washing dangles above washing
+from the windows; the houses bulge outwards upon flimsy brackets; you
+see a bit of sculpture in a dark corner; at the top of all, a gable and
+a few crowsteps are printed on the sky. Here, you come into a court
+where the children are at play and the grown people sit upon their
+doorsteps, and perhaps a church spire shows itself above the roofs.
+Here, in the narrowest of the entry, you find a great old mansion still
+erect, with some insignia of its former state--some scutcheon, some holy
+or courageous motto, on the lintel. The local antiquary points out where
+famous and well-born people had their lodging; and as you look up, out
+pops the head of a slatternly woman from the countess's window. The
+Bedouins camp within Pharaoh's palace walls, and the old war-ship is
+given over to the rats. We are already a far way from the days when
+powdered heads were plentiful in these alleys, with jolly, port-wine
+faces underneath. Even in the chief thoroughfares Irish washings flutter
+at the windows, and the pavements are encumbered with loiterers.
+
+These loiterers are a true character of the scene. Some shrewd Scotch
+workmen may have paused on their way to a job, debating Church affairs
+and politics with their tools upon their arm. But the most part are of a
+different order--skulking jail-birds; unkempt, barefoot children;
+big-mouthed, robust women, in a sort of uniform of striped flannel
+petticoat and short tartan shawl: among these, a few supervising
+constables and a dismal sprinkling of mutineers and broken men from
+higher ranks in society, with some mark of better days upon them, like a
+brand. In a place no larger than Edinburgh, and where the traffic is
+mostly centred in five or six chief streets, the same face comes often
+under the notice of an idle stroller. In fact, from this point of view,
+Edinburgh is not so much a small city as the largest of small towns. It
+is scarce possible to avoid observing your neighbours; and I never yet
+heard of any one who tried. It has been my fortune, in this anonymous
+accidental way, to watch more than one of these downward travellers for
+some stages on the road to ruin. One man must have been upwards of sixty
+before I first observed him, and he made then a decent, personable
+figure in broadcloth of the best. For three years he kept
+falling--grease coming and buttons going from the square-skirted coat,
+the face puffing and pimpling, the shoulders growing bowed, the hair
+falling scant and grey upon his head; and the last that ever I saw of
+him, he was standing at the mouth of an entry with several men in
+moleskin, three parts drunk, and his old black raiment daubed with mud.
+I fancy that I still can hear him laugh. There was something
+heart-breaking in this gradual declension at so advanced an age; you
+would have thought a man of sixty out of the reach of these calamities;
+you would have thought that he was niched by that time into a safe place
+in life, whence he could pass quietly and honourably into the grave.
+
+One of the earliest marks of these _degringolades_ is, that the victim
+begins to disappear from the New Town thoroughfares, and takes to the
+High Street, like a wounded animal to the woods. And such an one is the
+type of the quarter. It also has fallen socially. A scutcheon over the
+door somewhat jars in sentiment where there is a washing at every
+window. The old man, when I saw him last, wore the coat in which he had
+played the gentleman three years before; and that was just what gave
+him so pre-eminent an air of wretchedness.
+
+It is true that the over-population was at least as dense in the epoch
+of lords and ladies, and that nowadays some customs which made
+Edinburgh notorious of yore have been fortunately pretermitted. But an
+aggregation of comfort is not distasteful like an aggregation of the
+reverse. Nobody cares how many lords and ladies, and divines and
+lawyers, may have been crowded into these houses in the past--perhaps
+the more the merrier. The glasses clink around the china punch-bowl,
+some one touches the virginals, there are peacocks' feathers on the
+chimney, and the tapers burn clear and pale in the red firelight. That
+is not an ugly picture in itself, nor will it become ugly upon
+repetition. All the better if the like were going on in every second
+room; the _land_ would only look the more inviting. Times are changed.
+In one house, perhaps, twoscore families herd together; and, perhaps,
+not one of them is wholly out of the reach of want. The great hotel is
+given over to discomfort from the foundation to the chimney-tops;
+everywhere a pinching, narrow habit, scanty meals, and an air of
+sluttishness and dirt. In the first room there is a birth, in another a
+death, in a third a sordid drinking-bout, and the detective and the
+Bible-reader cross upon the stairs. High words are audible from dwelling
+to dwelling, and children have a strange experience from the first; only
+a robust soul, you would think, could grow up in such conditions without
+hurt. And even if God tempers His dispensations to the young, and all
+the ill does not arise that our apprehensions may forecast, the sight of
+such a way of living is disquieting to people who are more happily
+circumstanced. Social inequality is nowhere more ostentatious than at
+Edinburgh. I have mentioned already how, to the stroller along Princes
+Street, the High Street callously exhibits its back garrets. It is true,
+there is a garden between. And although nothing could be more glaring by
+way of contrast, sometimes the opposition is more immediate; sometimes
+the thing lies in a nutshell, and there is not so much as a blade of
+grass between the rich and poor. To look over the South Bridge and see
+the Cowgate below full of crying hawkers, is to view one rank of society
+from another in the twinkling of an eye.
+
+One night I went along the Cowgate after every one was abed but the
+policeman, and stopped by hazard before a tall _land_. The moon touched
+upon its chimneys, and shone blankly on the upper windows; there was no
+light anywhere in the great bulk of building; but as I stood there it
+seemed to me that I could hear quite a body of quiet sounds from the
+interior; doubtless there were many clocks ticking, and people snoring
+on their backs. And thus, as I fancied, the dense life within made
+itself faintly audible in my ears, family after family contributing its
+quota to the general hum, and the whole pile beating in tune to its
+time-pieces, like a great disordered heart. Perhaps it was little more
+than a fancy altogether, but it was strangely impressive at the time,
+and gave me an imaginative measure of the disproportion between the
+quantity of living flesh and the trifling walls that separated and
+contained it.
+
+There was nothing fanciful, at least, but every circumstance of terror
+and reality, in the fall of the _land_ in the High Street. The building
+had grown rotten to the core; the entry underneath had suddenly closed
+up so that the scavenger's barrow could not pass; cracks and
+reverberations sounded through the house at night; the inhabitants of
+the huge old human bee-hive discussed their peril when they encountered
+on the stair; some had even left their dwellings in a panic of fear, and
+returned to them again in a fit of economy or self-respect; when, in the
+black hours of a Sunday morning, the whole structure ran together with a
+hideous uproar and tumbled story upon story to the ground. The physical
+shock was felt far and near; and the moral shock travelled with the
+morning milkmaid into all the suburbs. The church-bells never sounded
+more dismally over Edinburgh than that grey forenoon. Death had made a
+brave harvest; and, like Samson, by pulling down one roof destroyed many
+a home. None who saw it can have forgotten the aspect of the gable: here
+it was plastered, there papered, according to the rooms; here the kettle
+still stood on the hob, high overhead; and there a cheap picture of the
+Queen was pasted over the chimney, So, by this disaster, you had a
+glimpse into the life of thirty families, all suddenly cut off from the
+revolving years. The _land_ had fallen; and with the _land_ how much!
+Far in the country, people saw a gap in the city ranks, and the sun
+looked through between the chimneys in an unwonted place. And all over
+the world, in London, in Canada, in New Zealand, fancy what a multitude
+of people could exclaim with truth: "The house that I was born in fell
+last night!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE
+
+
+Time has wrought its changes most notably around the precinct of St.
+Giles's Church. The church itself, if it were not for the spire, would
+be unrecognizable; the _Krames_ are all gone, not a shop is left to
+shelter in its buttresses; and zealous magistrates and a misguided
+architect have shorn the design of manhood, and left it poor, naked, and
+pitifully pretentious. As St. Giles's must have had in former days a
+rich and quaint appearance now forgotten, so the neighbourhood was
+bustling, sunless, and romantic. It was here that the town was most
+overbuilt; but the overbuilding has been all rooted out, and not only a
+free fairway left along the High Street with an open space on either
+side of the church, but a great porthole, knocked in the main line of
+the _lands_, gives an outlook to the north and the New Town.
+
+There is a silly story of a subterranean passage between the Castle and
+Holyrood, and a bold Highland piper who volunteered to explore its
+windings. He made his entrance by the upper end, playing a strathspey;
+the curious footed it after him down the street, following his descent
+by the sound of the chanter from below; until all of a sudden, about the
+level of St. Giles's, the music came abruptly to an end, and the people
+in the street stood at fault with hands uplifted. Whether he was choked
+with gases, or perished in a quag, or was removed bodily by the Evil
+One, remains a point of doubt; but the piper has never again been seen
+or heard of from that day to this. Perhaps he wandered down into the
+land of Thomas the Rhymer, and some day, when it is least expected, may
+take a thought to revisit the sunlit upper world. That will be a
+strange moment for the cabmen on the stance beside St. Giles's, when
+they hear the drone of his pipes reascending from the bowels of the
+earth below their horses' feet.
+
+But it is not only pipers who have vanished, many a solid bulk of
+masonry has been likewise spirited into the air. Here, for example, is
+the shape of a heart let into the causeway. This was the site of the
+Tolbooth, the Heart of Midlothian, a place old in story and name-father
+to a noble book. The walls are now down in the dust; there is no more
+_squalor carceris_ for merry debtors, no more cage for the old,
+acknowledged prison-breaker; but the sun and the wind play freely over
+the foundations of the jail. Nor is this the only memorial that the
+pavement keeps of former days. The ancient burying-ground of Edinburgh
+lay behind St. Giles's Church, running downhill to the Cowgate and
+covering the site of the present Parliament House. It has disappeared as
+utterly as the prison or the Luckenbooths; and for those ignorant of its
+history, I know only one token that remains. In the Parliament Close,
+trodden daily underfoot by advocates, two letters and a date mark the
+resting-place of the man who made Scotland over again in his own image,
+the indefatigable, undissuadable John Knox. He sleeps within call of the
+church that so often echoed to his preaching.
+
+Hard by the reformer, a bandy-legged and garlanded Charles Second, made
+of lead, bestrides a tun-bellied charger. The King has his back turned,
+and, as you look, seems to be trotting clumsily away from such a
+dangerous neighbour. Often, for hours together, these two will be alone
+in the close, for it lies out of the way of all but legal traffic. On
+one side the south wall of the church, on the other the arcades of the
+Parliament House, inclose this irregular bight of causeway and describe
+their shadows on it in the sun. At either end, from round St. Giles's
+buttresses, you command a look into the High Street with its motley
+passengers; but the stream goes by east and west, and leaves the
+Parliament Close to Charles the Second and the birds. Once in a while, a
+patient crowd may be seen loitering there all day, some eating fruit,
+some reading a newspaper; and to judge by their quiet demeanour, you
+would think they were waiting for a distribution of soup-tickets. The
+fact is far otherwise; within in the Justiciary Court a man is upon
+trial for his life, and these are some of the curious for whom the
+gallery was found too narrow. Towards afternoon, if the prisoner is
+unpopular, there will be a round of hisses when he is brought forth.
+Once in a while, too, an advocate in wig and gown, hand upon mouth, full
+of pregnant nods, sweeps to and fro in the arcade listening to an agent;
+and at certain regular hours a whole tide of lawyers hurries across the
+space.
+
+The Parliament Close has been the scene of marking incidents in Scottish
+history. Thus, when the Bishops were ejected from the Convention in
+1688, "all fourteen of them gathered together with pale faces and stood
+in a cloud in the Parliament Close": poor episcopal personages who were
+done with fair weather for life! Some of the west-country Societarians
+standing by, who would have "rejoiced more than in great sums" to be at
+their hanging, hustled them so rudely that they knocked their heads
+together. It was not magnanimous behaviour to dethroned enemies; but
+one, at least, of the Societarians had groaned in the _boots_, and they
+had all seen their dear friends upon the scaffold. Again, at the "woeful
+Union," it was here that people crowded to escort their favourite from
+the last of Scottish parliaments: people flushed with nationality, as
+Boswell would have said, ready for riotous acts, and fresh from throwing
+stones at the author of "Robinson Crusoe" as he looked out of window.
+
+One of the pious in the seventeenth century, going to pass his _trials_
+(examinations as we now say) for the Scottish Bar, beheld the Parliament
+Close open and had a vision of the mouth of Hell. This, and small
+wonder, was the means of his conversion. Nor was the vision unsuitable
+to the locality; for after an hospital, what uglier piece is there in
+civilization than a court of law? Hither come envy, malice, and all
+uncharitableness to wrestle it out in public tourney; crimes, broken
+fortunes, severed households, the knave and his victim, gravitate to
+this low building with the arcade. To how many has not St. Giles's bell
+told the first hour after ruin? I think I see them pause to count the
+strokes, and wander on again into the moving High Street, stunned and
+sick at heart.
+
+A pair of swing doors gives admittance to a hall with a carved roof,
+hung with legal portraits, adorned with legal statuary, lighted by
+windows of painted glass, and warmed by three vast fires. This the
+_Salle des pas perdus_ of the Scottish Bar. Here, by a ferocious custom,
+idle youths must promenade from ten till two. From end to end, singly or
+in pairs or trios, the gowns and wigs go back and forward. Through a hum
+of talk and footfalls, the piping tones of a Macer announce a fresh
+cause and call upon the names of those concerned. Intelligent men have
+been walking here daily for ten or twenty years without a rag of
+business or a shilling of reward. In process of time, they may perhaps
+be made the Sheriff-Substitute and Fountain of Justice at Lerwick or
+Tobermory. There is nothing required, you would say, but a little
+patience and a taste for exercise and bad air. To breathe dust and
+bombazine, to feed the mind on cackling gossip, to hear three parts of a
+case and drink a glass of sherry, to long with indescribable longings
+for the hour when a man may slip out of his travesty and devote himself
+to golf for the rest of the afternoon, and to do this day by day and
+year after year, may seem so small a thing to the inexperienced! But
+those who have made the experiment are of a different way of thinking,
+and count it the most arduous form of idleness.
+
+More swing doors open into pigeon-holes where Judges of the First
+Appeal sit singly, and halls of audience where the supreme Lords sit by
+three or four. Here, you may see Scott's place within the bar, where he
+wrote many a page of Waverley novels to the drone of judicial
+proceeding. You will hear a good deal of shrewdness, and, as their
+Lordships do not altogether disdain pleasantry, a fair proportion of dry
+fun. The broadest of broad Scotch is now banished from the bench; but
+the courts still retain a certain national flavour. We have a solemn
+enjoyable way of lingering on a case. We treat law as a fine art, and
+relish and digest a good distinction. There is no hurry: point after
+point must be rightly examined and reduced to principle; judge after
+judge must utter forth his _obiter dicta_ to delighted brethren.
+
+Besides the courts, there are installed under the same roof no less than
+three libraries: two of no mean order; confused and semi-subterranean,
+full of stairs and galleries; where you may see the most
+studious-looking wigs fishing out novels by lantern light, in the very
+place where the old Privy Council tortured Covenanters. As the
+Parliament House is built upon a slope, although it presents only one
+story to the north, it measures half-a-dozen at least upon the south;
+and range after range of vaults extend below the libraries. Few places
+are more characteristic of this hilly capital. You descend one stone
+stair after another, and wander, by the flicker of a match, in a
+labyrinth of stone cellars. Now, you pass below the Outer Hall and hear
+overhead, brisk but ghostly, the interminable pattering of legal feet.
+Now, you come upon a strong door with a wicket: on the other side are
+the cells of the police office and the trap-stair that gives admittance
+to the dock in the Justiciary Court. Many a foot that has gone up there
+lightly enough, has been dead-heavy in the descent. Many a man's life
+has been argued away from him during long hours in the court above. But
+just now that tragic stage is empty and silent like a church on a
+week-day, with the bench all sheeted up and nothing moving but the
+sunbeams on the wall. A little farther and you strike upon a room, not
+empty like the rest, but crowded with _productions_ from bygone criminal
+cases: a grim lumber: lethal weapons, poisoned organs in a jar, a door
+with a shot hole through the panel, behind which a man fell dead. I
+cannot fancy why they should preserve them, unless it were against the
+Judgment Day. At length, as you continue to descend, you see a peep of
+yellow gaslight and hear a jostling, whispering noise ahead; next moment
+you turn a corner, and there, in a whitewashed passage, is a machinery
+belt industriously turning on its wheels. You would think the engine had
+grown there of its own accord, like a cellar fungus, and would soon spin
+itself out and fill the vaults from end to end with its mysterious
+labours. In truth, it is only some gear of the steam ventilator; and you
+will find the engineers at hand, and may step out of their door into the
+sunlight. For all this while, you have not been descending towards the
+earth's centre, but only to the bottom of the hill and the foundations
+of the Parliament House; low down, to be sure, but still under the open
+heaven and in a field of grass. The daylight shines garishly on the back
+windows of the Irish quarter; on broken shutters, wry gables, old
+palsied houses on the brink of ruin, a crumbling human pig-sty fit for
+human pigs. There are few signs of life, besides a scanty washing or a
+face at a window: the dwellers are abroad, but they will return at night
+and stagger to their pallets.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+LEGENDS
+
+
+The character of a place is often most perfectly expressed in its
+associations. An event strikes root and grows into a legend, when it has
+happened amongst congenial surroundings. Ugly actions, above all in ugly
+places, have the true romantic quality, and become an undying property
+of their scene. To a man like Scott, the different appearances of nature
+seemed each to contain its own legend ready made, which it was his to
+call forth: in such or such a place, only such or such events ought with
+propriety to happen; and in this spirit he made the "Lady of the Lake"
+for Ben Venue, the "Heart of Midlothian" for Edinburgh, and the
+"Pirate," so indifferently written but so romantically conceived, for
+the desolate islands and roaring tideways of the North. The common run
+of mankind have, from generation to generation, an instinct almost as
+delicate as that of Scott; but where he created new things, they only
+forget what is unsuitable among the old; and by survival of the fittest,
+a body of tradition becomes a work of art. So, in the low dens and
+high-flying garrets of Edinburgh, people may go back upon dark passages
+in the town's adventures, and chill their marrow with winter's tales
+about the fire: tales that are singularly apposite and characteristic,
+not only of the old life, but of the very constitution of built nature
+in that part, and singularly well qualified to add horror to horror,
+when the wind pipes around the tall _lands_, and hoots adown arched
+passages, and the far-spread wilderness of city lamps keeps quavering
+and flaring in the gusts.
+
+Here, it is the tale of Begbie the bank-porter, stricken to the heart at
+a blow and left in his blood within a step or two of the crowded High
+Street. There, people hush their voices over Burke and Hare; over drugs
+and violated graves, and the resurrection-men smothering their victims
+with their knees. Here, again, the fame of Deacon Brodie is kept piously
+fresh. A great man in his day was the Deacon; well seen in good society,
+crafty with his hands as a cabinet-maker, and one who could sing a song
+with taste. Many a citizen was proud to welcome the Deacon to supper,
+and dismissed him with regret at a timeous hour, who would have been
+vastly disconcerted had he known how soon, and in what guise, his
+visitor returned. Many stories are told of this redoubtable Edinburgh
+burglar, but the one I have in my mind most vividly gives the key of all
+the rest. A friend of Brodie's, nested some way towards heaven in one of
+these great _lands_, had told him of a projected visit to the country,
+and afterwards, detained by some affairs, put it off and stayed the
+night in town. The good man had lain some time awake; it was far on in
+the small hours by the Tron bell; when suddenly there came a creak, a
+jar, a faint light. Softly he clambered out of bed and up to a false
+window which looked upon another room, and there, by the glimmer of a
+thieves' lantern, was his good friend the Deacon in a mask. It is
+characteristic of the town and the town's manners that this little
+episode should have been quietly tided over, and quite a good time
+elapsed before a great robbery, an escape, a Bow Street runner, a
+cock-fight, an apprehension in a cupboard in Amsterdam, and a last step
+into the air off his own greatly improved gallows drop, brought the
+career of Deacon William Brodie to an end. But still, by the mind's eye,
+he may be seen, a man harassed below a mountain of duplicity, slinking
+from a magistrate's supper-room to a thieves' ken, and pickeering among
+the closes by the flicker of a dark lamp.
+
+Or where the Deacon is out of favour, perhaps some memory lingers of the
+great plagues, and of fatal houses still unsafe to enter within the
+memory of man. For in time of pestilence the discipline had been sharp
+and sudden, and what we now call "stamping out contagion" was carried on
+with deadly rigour. The officials, in their gowns of grey, with a white
+St. Andrew's cross on back and breast, and white cloth carried before
+them on a staff, perambulated the city, adding the terror of man's
+justice to the fear of God's visitation. The dead they buried on the
+Borough Muir; the living who had concealed the sickness were drowned, if
+they were women, in the Quarry Holes, and if they were men, were hanged
+and gibbeted at their own doors; and wherever the evil had passed,
+furniture was destroyed and houses closed. And the most bogeyish part of
+the story is about such houses. Two generations back they still stood
+dark and empty; people avoided them as they passed by; the boldest
+schoolboy only shouted through the key-hole and made off; for within, it
+was supposed, the plague lay ambushed like a basilisk, ready to flow
+forth and spread blain and pustule through the city. What a terrible
+next-door neighbour for superstitious citizens! A rat scampering within
+would send a shudder through the stoutest heart. Here, if you like, was
+a sanitary parable, addressed by our uncleanly forefathers to their own
+neglect.
+
+And then we have Major Weir; for although even his house is now
+demolished, old Edinburgh cannot clear herself of his unholy memory. He
+and his sister lived together in an odour of sour piety. She was a
+marvelous spinster; he had a rare gift of supplication, and was known
+among devout admirers by the name of Angelical Thomas. "He was a tall,
+black man, and ordinarily looked down to the ground; a grim countenance,
+and a big nose. His garb was still a cloak, and somewhat dark, and he
+never went without his staff." How it came about that Angelical Thomas
+was burned in company with his staff, and his sister in gentler manner
+hanged, and whether these two were simply religious maniacs of the more
+furious order, or had real as well as imaginary sins upon their
+old-world shoulders, are points happily beyond the reach of our
+intention. At least, it is suitable enough that out of this
+superstitious city some such example should have been put forth: the
+outcome and fine flower of dark and vehement religion. And at least the
+facts struck the public fancy and brought forth a remarkable family of
+myths. It would appear that the Major's staff went upon his errands, and
+even ran before him with a lantern on dark nights. Gigantic females,
+"stentoriously laughing and gaping with tehees of laughter" at
+unseasonable hours of night and morning, haunted the purlieus of his
+abode. His house fell under such a load of infamy that no one dared to
+sleep in it, until municipal improvement leveled the structure with the
+ground. And my father has often been told in the nursery how the devil's
+coach, drawn by six coal-black horses with fiery eyes, would drive at
+night into the West Bow, and belated people might see the dead Major
+through the glasses.
+
+Another legend is that of the two maiden sisters. A legend I am afraid
+it may be, in the most discreditable meaning of the term; or perhaps
+something worse--a mere yesterday's fiction. But it is a story of some
+vitality, and is worthy of a place in the Edinburgh kalendar. This pair
+inhabited a single room; from the facts, it must have been
+double-bedded; and it may have been of some dimensions; but when all is
+said, it was a single room. Here our two spinsters fell out--on some
+point of controversial divinity belike: but fell out so bitterly that
+there was never a word spoken between them, black or white, from that
+day forward. You would have thought they would separate: but no; whether
+from lack of means, or the Scottish fear of scandal, they continued to
+keep house together where they were. A chalk line drawn upon the floor
+separated their two domains; it bisected the doorway and the fireplace,
+so that each could go out and in, and do her cooking, without violating
+the territory of the other. So, for years, they co-existed in a hateful
+silence; their meals, their ablutions, their friendly visitors, exposed
+to an unfriendly scrutiny; and at night, in the dark watches, each could
+hear the breathing of her enemy. Never did four walls look down upon an
+uglier spectacle than these sisters rivaling in unsisterliness. Here is
+a canvas for Hawthorne to have turned into a cabinet picture--he had a
+Puritanic vein, which would have fitted him to treat this Puritanic
+horror; he could have shown them to us in their sicknesses and at their
+hideous twin devotions, thumbing a pair of great Bibles, or praying
+aloud for each other's penitence with marrowy emphasis; now each, with
+kilted petticoat, at her own corner of the fire on some tempestuous
+evening; now sitting each at her window, looking out upon the summer
+landscape sloping far below them towards the firth, and the field-paths
+where they had wandered hand in hand; or, as age and infirmity grew upon
+them and prolonged their toilettes, and their hands began to tremble and
+their heads to nod involuntarily, growing only the more steeled in
+enmity with years; until one fine day, at a word, a look, a visit, or
+the approach of death, their hearts would melt and the chalk boundary be
+overstepped for ever.
+
+Alas! to those who know the ecclesiastical history of the race--the most
+perverse and melancholy in man's annals--this will seem only a figure of
+much that is typical of Scotland and her high-seated capital above the
+Forth--a figure so grimly realistic that it may pass with strangers for
+a caricature. We are wonderful patient haters for conscience' sake up
+here in the North. I spoke, in the first of these papers, of the
+Parliaments of the Established and Free Churches, and how they can hear
+each other singing psalms across the street. There is but a street
+between them in space, but a shadow between them in principle; and yet
+there they sit, enchanted, and in damnatory accents pray for each
+other's growth in grace. It would be well if there were no more than
+two; but the sects in Scotland form a large family of sisters, and the
+chalk lines are thickly drawn, and run through the midst of many private
+homes. Edinburgh is a city of churches, as though it were a place of
+pilgrimage. You will see four within a stone-cast at the head of the
+West Bow. Some are crowded to the doors; some are empty like monuments;
+and yet you will ever find new ones in the building. Hence that
+surprising clamour of church bells that suddenly breaks out upon the
+Sabbath morning, from Trinity and the sea-skirts to Morningside on the
+borders of the hills. I have heard the chimes of Oxford playing their
+symphony in a golden autumn morning, and beautiful it was to hear. But
+in Edinburgh all manner of loud bells join, or rather disjoin, in one
+swelling, brutal babblement of noise. Now one overtakes another, and now
+lags behind it; now five or six all strike on the pained tympanum at the
+same punctual instant of time, and make together a dismal chord of
+discord; and now for a second all seem to have conspired to hold their
+peace. Indeed, there are not many uproars in this world more dismal than
+that of the Sabbath bells in Edinburgh: a harsh ecclesiastical tocsin;
+the outcry of incongruous orthodoxies, calling on every separate
+conventicler to put up a protest, each in his own synagogue, against
+"right-hand extremes and left-hand defections." And surely there are few
+worse extremes than this extremity of zeal; and few more deplorable
+defections than this disloyalty to Christian love. Shakespeare wrote a
+comedy of "Much Ado about Nothing." The Scottish nation made a fantastic
+tragedy on the same subject. And it is for the success of this
+remarkable piece that these bells are sounded every Sabbath morning on
+the hills above the Forth. How many of them might rest silent in the
+steeple, how many of these ugly churches might be demolished and turned
+once more into useful building material, if people who think almost
+exactly the same thoughts about religion would condescend to worship God
+under the same roof! But there are the chalk lines. And which is to
+pocket pride, and speak the foremost word?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+GREYFRIARS
+
+
+It was Queen Mary who threw open the gardens of the Grey Friars: a new
+and semi-rural cemetery in those days, although it has grown an
+antiquity in its turn and been superseded by half-a-dozen others. The
+Friars must have had a pleasant time on summer evenings; for their
+gardens were situated to a wish, with the tall Castle and the tallest of
+the Castle crags in front. Even now, it is one of our famous Edinburgh
+points of view; and strangers are led thither to see, by yet another
+instance, how strangely the city lies upon her hills. The enclosure is
+of an irregular shape; the double church of Old and New Greyfriars
+stands on the level at the top; a few thorns are dotted here and there,
+and the ground falls by terrace and steep slope towards the north. The
+open shows many slabs and table tombstones; and all round the margin,
+the place is girt by an array of aristocratic mausoleums appallingly
+adorned. Setting aside the tombs of Roubilliac, which belong to the
+heroic order of graveyard art, we Scotch stand, to my fancy, highest
+among nations in the matter of grimly illustrating death. We seem to
+love for their own sake the emblems of time and the great change; and
+even around country churches you will find a wonderful exhibition of
+skulls, and crossbones, and noseless angels, and trumpets pealing for
+the Judgment Day. Every mason was a pedestrian Holbein: he had a deep
+consciousness of death, and loved to put its terrors pithily before the
+churchyard loiterer; he was brimful of rough hints upon mortality, and
+any dead farmer was seized upon to be a text. The classical examples of
+this art are in Greyfriars. In their time, these were doubtless costly
+monuments, and reckoned of a very elegant proportion by contemporaries;
+and now, when the elegance is not so apparent, the significance remains.
+You may perhaps look with a smile on the profusion of Latin
+mottoes--some crawling endwise up the shaft of a pillar, some issuing on
+a scroll from angels' trumpets--on the emblematic horrors, the figures
+rising headless from the grave, and all the traditional ingenuities in
+which it pleased our fathers to set forth their sorrow for the dead and
+their sense of earthly mutability. But it is not a hearty sort of mirth.
+Each ornament may have been executed by the merriest apprentice,
+whistling as he plied the mallet; but the original meaning of each, and
+the combined effect of so many of them in this quiet enclosure, is
+serious to the point of melancholy.
+
+Round a great part of the circuit, houses of a low class present their
+backs to the churchyard. Only a few inches separate the living from the
+dead. Here, a window is partly blocked up by the pediment of a tomb;
+there, where the street falls far below the level of the graves, a
+chimney has been trained up the back of a monument, and a red pot looks
+vulgarly over from behind. A damp smell of the graveyard finds its way
+into houses where workmen sit at meat. Domestic life on a small scale
+goes forward visibly at the windows. The very solitude and stillness of
+the enclosure, which lies apart from the town's traffic, serves to
+accentuate the contrast. As you walk upon the graves, you see children
+scattering crumbs to feed the sparrows; you hear people singing or
+washing dishes, or the sound of tears and castigation; the linen on a
+clothes-pole flaps against funereal sculpture; or perhaps the cat slips
+over the lintel and descends on a memorial urn. And as there is nothing
+else astir, these incongruous sights and noises take hold on the
+attention and exaggerate the sadness of the place.
+
+Greyfriars is continually overrun by cats. I have seen one afternoon, as
+many as thirteen of them seated on the grass beside old Milne, the
+Master Builder, all sleek and fat, and complacently blinking, as if they
+had fed upon strange meats. Old Milne was chanting with the saints, as
+we may hope, and cared little for the company about his grave; but I
+confess the spectacle had an ugly side for me; and I was glad to step
+forward and raise my eyes to where the Castle and the roofs of the Old
+Town, and the spire of the Assembly Hall, stood deployed against the sky
+with the colourless precision of engraving. An open outlook is to be
+desired from a churchyard, and a sight of the sky and some of the
+world's beauty relieves a mind from morbid thoughts.
+
+I shall never forget one visit. It was a grey, dropping day; the grass
+was strung with rain-drops; and the people in the houses kept hanging
+out their shirts and petticoats and angrily taking them in again, as the
+weather turned from wet to fair and back again. A gravedigger, and a
+friend of his, a gardener from the country, accompanied me into one
+after another of the cells and little courtyards in which it gratified
+the wealthy of old days to enclose their old bones from neighbourhood.
+In one, under a sort of shrine, we found a forlorn human effigy, very
+realistically executed down to the detail of his ribbed stockings, and
+holding in his hand a ticket with the date of his demise. He looked most
+pitiful and ridiculous, shut up by himself in his aristocratic precinct,
+like a bad old boy or an inferior forgotten deity under a new
+dispensation; the burdocks grew familiarly about his feet, the rain
+dripped all round him; and the world maintained the most entire
+indifference as to who he was or whither he had gone. In another, a
+vaulted tomb, handsome externally but horrible inside with damp and
+cobwebs, there were three mounds of black earth and an uncovered
+thigh-bone. This was the place of interment, it appeared, of a family
+with whom the gardener had been long in service. He was among old
+acquaintances. "This'll be Miss Marg'et's," said he, giving the bone a
+friendly kick. "The auld ---- !" I have always an uncomfortable feeling in
+a graveyard, at sight of so many tombs to perpetuate memories best
+forgotten; but I never had the impression so strongly as that day.
+People had been at some expense in both these cases: to provoke a
+melancholy feeling of derision in the one, and an insulting epithet in
+the other. The proper inscription for the most part of mankind, I began
+to think, is the cynical jeer, _cras tibi_. That, if anything, will stop
+the mouth of a carper; since it both admits the worst and carries the
+war triumphantly into the enemy's camp.
+
+Greyfriars is a place of many associations. There was one window in a
+house at the lower end, now demolished, which was pointed out to me by
+the gravedigger as a spot of legendary interest. Burke, the
+resurrection-man, infamous for so many murders at five shillings a head,
+used to sit thereat, with pipe and nightcap, to watch burials going
+forward on the green. In a tomb higher up, which must then have been but
+newly finished, John Knox, according to the same informant, had taken
+refuge in a turmoil of the Reformation. Behind the church is the haunted
+mausoleum of Sir George Mackenzie: Bloody Mackenzie, Lord Advocate in
+the Covenanting troubles and author of some pleasing sentiments on
+toleration. Here, in the last century, an old Heriot's Hospital boy once
+harboured from the pursuit of the police. The Hospital is next door to
+Greyfriars--a courtly building among lawns, where, on Founder's Day, you
+may see a multitude of children playing Kiss-in-the-Ring and Round the
+Mulberry-bush. Thus, when the fugitive had managed to conceal himself in
+the tomb, his old schoolmates had a hundred opportunities to bring him
+food; and there he lay in safety till a ship was found to smuggle him
+abroad. But his must have been indeed a heart of brass, to lie all day
+and night alone with the dead persecutor; and other lads were far from
+emulating him in courage. When a man's soul is certainly in hell, his
+body will scarce lie quiet in a tomb, however costly; some time or other
+the door must open, and the reprobate come forth in the abhorred
+garments of the grave. It was thought a high piece of prowess to knock
+at the Lord Advocate's mausoleum and challenge him to appear. "Bluidy
+Mackenzie, come oot if ye daur!" sang the foolhardy urchins. But Sir
+George had other affairs on hand; and the author of an essay on
+toleration continues to sleep peacefully among the many whom he so
+intolerantly helped to slay.
+
+For this _infelix campus_, as it is dubbed in one of its own
+inscriptions--an inscription over which Dr. Johnson passed a critical
+eye--is in many ways sacred to the memory of the men whom Mackenzie
+persecuted. It was here, on the flat tombstones, that the Covenant was
+signed by an enthusiastic people. In the long arm of the churchyard that
+extends to Lauriston, the prisoners from Bothwell Bridge--fed on bread
+and water, and guarded, life for life, by vigilant marksmen--lay five
+months looking for the scaffold or the plantations. And while the good
+work was going forward in the Grassmarket, idlers in Greyfriars might
+have heard the throb of the military drums that drowned the voices of
+the martyrs. Nor is this all: for down in the corner farthest from Sir
+George, there stands a monument, dedicated, in uncouth Covenanting
+verse, to all who lost their lives in that contention. There is no
+moorsman shot in a snow shower beside Irongray or Co'monell; there is
+not one of the two hundred who were drowned off the Orkneys; nor so much
+as a poor, over-driven, Covenanting slave in the American plantations;
+but can lay claim to a share in that memorial, and, if such things
+interest just men among the shades, can boast he has a monument on earth
+as well as Julius Caesar or the Pharaohs. Where they may all lie, I know
+not. Far-scattered bones, indeed! But if the reader cares to learn how
+some of them--or some part of some of them--found their way at length to
+such honourable sepulture, let him listen to the words of one who was
+their comrade in life and their apologist when they were dead. Some of
+the insane controversial matter I omit, as well as some digressions,
+but leave the rest in Patrick Walker's language and orthography:--
+
+     "The never to be forgotten Mr. _James Renwlck_ told me, that he was
+     Witness to their Public Murder at the _Gallowlee_, between _Leith_
+     and _Edinburgh_, when he saw the Hangman hash and hagg off all their
+     Five heads, with _Patrick Foreman's_ Right Hand: Their Bodies were
+     all buried at the Gallows Foot: their Heads, with _Patrick's_ Hand,
+     were brought and put upon five Pikes on the _Pleasaunce-Port_....
+     Mr. _Renwick_ told me that it was the first public Action that his
+     Hand was at, to conveen Friends, and lift their murthered Bodies,
+     and carried them to the West Churchyard of _Edinburgh_,"--not
+     Greyfriars, this time,--"and buried them there. Then they came about
+     the City ... and took down these Five Heads and that Hand; and Day
+     being come, they went quickly up the _Pleasaunce_; and when they
+     came to _Lauristoun_ Yards, upon the South-side of the City, they
+     durst not venture, being so light, to go and bury their Heads with
+     their Bodies, which they designed; it being present death, if any of
+     them had been found. _Alexander Tweedie_, a Friend, being with them,
+     who at that Time was Gardner in these Yards, concluded to bury them
+     in his Yard, being in a Box (wrapped in Linen), where they lay 45
+     Years except 3 Days, being executed upon the 10th of _October_ 1681,
+     and found the 7th Day of _October_ 1726. That Piece of Ground lay
+     for some years unlaboured; and trenching it, the Gardner found them,
+     which affrighted him; the Box was consumed. Mr. _Schaw_, the Owner
+     of these Yards, caused lift them, and lay them upon a Table in his
+     Summer-house: Mr. _Schaw's_ mother was so kind, as to cut out a
+     Linen-cloth and cover them. They lay Twelve Days there, where all
+     had Access to see them. _Alexander Tweedie_, the foresaid Gardner,
+     said, when dying, There was a Treasure hid in his Yard, but neither
+     Gold nor Silver. _Daniel Tweedie_, his Son, came along with me to
+     that Yard, and told me that his Father planted a white Rose-bush
+     above them, and farther down the Yard a red Rose-bush, which were
+     more fruitful than any other Bush in the Yard.... Many came"--to see
+     the heads--"out of Curiosity; yet I rejoiced to see so many
+     concerned grave Men and Women favouring the Dust of our Martyrs.
+     There were Six of us concluded to bury them upon the Nineteenth Day
+     of _October_ 1726, and every one of us to acquaint Friends of the
+     Day and Hour, being _Wednesday_, the Day of the Week on which most
+     of them were executed, and at 4 of the Clock at Night, being the
+     Hour that most of them went to their resting Graves. We caused make
+     a compleat Coffin for them in Black, with four Yards of fine Linen,
+     the way that our Martyrs Corps were managed.... Accordingly we kept
+     the aforesaid Day and Hour, and doubled the Linen, and laid the Half
+     of it below them, their nether Jaws being parted from their Heads;
+     but being young Men, their Teeth remained. All were Witness to the
+     Holes in each of their Heads, which the Hangman broke with his
+     Hammer; and according to the Bigness of their Sculls, we laid the
+     Jaws to them, and drew the other Half of the Linen above them, and
+     stufft the Coffin with Shavings. Some prest hard to go thorow the
+     chief Parts of the City as was done at the Revolution; but this we
+     refused, considering that it looked airy and frothy, to make such
+     Show of them, and inconsistent with the solid serious Observing of
+     such an affecting, surprizing unheard-of Dispensation: But took the
+     ordinary Way of other Burials from that Place, to wit, we went east
+     the Back of the Wall, and in at _Bristo-Port_, and down the Way to
+     the Head of the _Cowgate_, and turned up to the Churchyard, where
+     they were interred closs to the Martyrs Tomb, with the greatest
+     Multitude of People Old and Young, Men and Women, Ministers and
+     others, that ever I saw together."
+
+And so there they were at last, in "their resting graves." So long as
+men do their duty, even if it be greatly in a misapprehension, they will
+be leading pattern lives; and whether or not they come to lie beside a
+martyrs' monument, we may be sure they will find a safe haven somewhere
+in the providence of God. It is not well to think of death, unless we
+temper the thought with that of heroes who despised it. Upon what
+ground, is of small account; if it be only the bishop who was burned for
+his faith in the antipodes, his memory lightens the heart and makes us
+walk undisturbed among graves. And so the martyrs' monument is a
+wholesome heartsome spot in the field of the dead; and as we look upon
+it, a brave influence comes to us from the land of those who have won
+their discharge and, in another phrase of Patrick Walker's, got "cleanly
+off the stage."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+NEW TOWN: TOWN AND COUNTRY
+
+
+It is as much a matter of course to decry the New Town as to exalt the
+Old; and the most celebrated authorities have picked out this quarter as
+the very emblem of what is condemnable in architecture. Much may be
+said, much indeed has been said, upon the text; but to the
+unsophisticated, who call anything pleasing if it only pleases them, the
+New Town of Edinburgh seems, in itself, not only gay and airy, but
+highly picturesque. An old skipper, invincibly ignorant of all theories
+of the sublime and beautiful, once propounded as his most radiant notion
+for Paradise: "The new town of Edinburgh, with the wind the matter of a
+point free." He has now gone to that sphere where all good tars are
+promised pleasant weather in the song, and perhaps his thoughts fly
+somewhat higher. But there are bright and temperate days--with soft air
+coming from the inland hills, military music sounding bravely from the
+hollow of the gardens, the flags all waving on the palaces of Princes
+Street--when I have seen the town through a sort of glory, and shaken
+hands in sentiment with the old sailor. And indeed, for a man who has
+been much tumbled round Orcadian skerries, what scene could be more
+agreeable to witness? On such a day, the valley wears a surprising air
+of festival. It seems (I do not know how else to put my meaning) as if
+it were a trifle too good to be true. It is what Paris ought to be. It
+has the scenic quality that would best set off a life of unthinking,
+open-air diversion. It was meant by nature for the realization of the
+society of comic operas. And you can imagine, if the climate were but
+towardly, how all the world and his wife would flock into these gardens
+in the cool of the evening, to hear cheerful music, to sip pleasant
+drinks, to see the moon rise from behind Arthur's Seat and shine upon
+the spires and monuments and the green tree-tops in the valley. Alas!
+and the next morning the rain is splashing on the window, and the
+passengers flee along Princes Street before the galloping squalls.
+
+It cannot be denied that the original design was faulty and
+short-sighted, and did not fully profit by the capabilities of the
+situation. The architect was essentially a town bird, and he laid out
+the modern city with a view to street scenery, and to street scenery
+alone. The country did not enter into his plan; he had never lifted his
+eyes to the hills. If he had so chosen, every street upon the northern
+slope might have been a noble terrace and commanded an extensive and
+beautiful view. But the space has been too closely built; many of the
+houses front the wrong way, intent, like the Man with the Muck-Rake, on
+what is not worth observation, and standing discourteously back-foremost
+in the ranks; and in a word, it is too often only from attic windows, or
+here and there at a crossing, that you can get a look beyond the city
+upon its diversified surroundings. But perhaps it is all the more
+surprising, to come suddenly on a corner, and see a perspective of a
+mile or more of falling street, and beyond that woods and villas, and a
+blue arm of sea, and the hills upon the farther side.
+
+Fergusson, our Edinburgh poet, Burns's model, once saw a butterfly at
+the Town Cross; and the sight inspired him with a worthless little ode.
+This painted countryman, the dandy of the rose garden, looked far abroad
+in such a humming neighbourhood; and you can fancy what moral
+considerations a youthful poet would supply. But the incident, in a
+fanciful sort of way, is characteristic of the place. Into no other city
+does the sight of the country enter so far; if you do not meet a
+butterfly, you shall certainly catch a glimpse of far-away trees upon
+your walk; and the place is full of theatre tricks in the way of
+scenery. You peep under an arch, you descend stairs that look as if
+they would land you in a cellar, you turn to the back window of a grimy
+tenement in a lane:--and behold! you are face-to-face with distant and
+bright prospects. You turn a corner, and there is the sun going down
+into the Highland hills. You look down an alley, and see ships tacking
+for the Baltic.
+
+For the country people to see Edinburgh on her hill-tops is one thing;
+it is another for the citizen, from the thick of his affairs, to
+overlook the country. It should be a genial and ameliorating influence
+in life; it should prompt good thoughts and remind him of Nature's
+unconcern: that he can watch from day to day, as he trots officeward,
+how the Spring green brightens in the wood or the field grows black
+under a moving ploughshare. I have been tempted, in this connection, to
+deplore the slender faculties of the human race, with its penny-whistle
+of a voice, its dull ears, and its narrow range of sight. If you could
+see as people are to see in heaven, if you had eyes such as you can
+fancy for a superior race, if you could take clear note of the objects
+of vision, not only a few yards, but a few miles from where you
+stand:--think how agreeably your sight would be entertained, how
+pleasantly your thoughts would be diversified, as you walked the
+Edinburgh streets! For you might pause, in some business perplexity, in
+the midst of the city traffic, and perhaps catch the eye of a shepherd
+as he sat down to breathe upon a heathery shoulder of the Pentlands; or
+perhaps some urchin, clambering in a country elm, would put aside the
+leaves and show you his flushed and rustic visage; or a fisher racing
+seawards, with the tiller under his elbow, and the sail sounding in the
+wind, would fling you a salutation from between Anst'er and the May.
+
+To be old is not the same thing as to be picturesque; nor because the
+Old Town bears a strange physiognomy, does it at all follow that the New
+Town shall look commonplace. Indeed, apart from antique houses, it is
+curious how much description would apply commonly to either. The same
+sudden accidents of ground, a similar dominating site above the plain,
+and the same superposition of one rank of society over another, are to
+be observed in both. Thus, the broad and comely approach to Princes
+Street from the east, lined with hotels and public offices, makes a leap
+over the gorge of the Low Calton; if you cast a glance over the parapet,
+you look direct into that sunless and disreputable confluent of Leith
+Street; and the same tall houses open upon both thoroughfares. This is
+only the New Town passing overhead above its own cellars; walking, so to
+speak, over its own children, as is the way of cities and the human
+race. But at the Dean Bridge, you may behold a spectacle of a more novel
+order. The river runs at the bottom of a deep valley, among rocks and
+between gardens; the crest of either bank is occupied by some of the
+most commodious streets and crescents in the modern city; and a handsome
+bridge unites the two summits. Over this, every afternoon, private
+carriages go spinning by, and ladies with card cases pass to and fro
+about the duties of society. And yet down below, you may still see, with
+its mills and foaming weir, the little rural village of Dean. Modern
+improvement has gone overhead on its high-level viaduct; and the
+extended city has cleanly overleapt, and left unaltered, what was once
+the summer retreat of its comfortable citizens. Every town embraces
+hamlets in its growth; Edinburgh herself has embraced a good few; but it
+is strange to see one still surviving--and to see it some hundreds of
+feet below your path. Is it Torre del Greco that is built above buried
+Herculaneum? Herculaneum was dead at least; but the sun still shines
+upon the roofs of Dean; the smoke still rises thriftily from its
+chimneys; the dusty miller comes to his door, looks at the gurgling
+water, hearkens to the turning wheel and the birds about the shed, and
+perhaps whistles an air of his own to enrich the symphony--for all the
+world as if Edinburgh were still the old Edinburgh on the Castle Hill,
+and Dean were still the quietest of hamlets buried a mile or so in the
+green country.
+
+It is not so long ago since magisterial David Hume lent the authority of
+his example to the exodus from the Old Town, and took up his new abode
+in a street which is still (so oddly may a jest become perpetuated)
+known as Saint David Street. Nor is the town so large but a holiday
+schoolboy may harry a bird's nest within half a mile of his own door.
+There are places that still smell of the plough in memory's nostrils.
+Here, one had heard a blackbird on a hawthorn; there, another was taken
+on summer evenings to eat strawberries and cream; and you have seen a
+waving wheatfield on the site of your present residence. The memories of
+an Edinburgh boy are but partly memories of the town. I look back with
+delight on many an escalade of garden walls; many a ramble among lilacs
+full of piping birds; many an exploration in obscure quarters that were
+neither town nor country; and I think that both for my companions and
+myself, there was a special interest, a point of romance, and a
+sentiment as of foreign travel, when we hit in our excursions on the
+butt-end of some former hamlet, and found a few rustic cottages embedded
+among streets and squares. The tunnel to the Scotland Street Station,
+the sight of the trains shooting out of its dark maw with the two guards
+upon the brake, the thought of its length and the many ponderous
+edifices and open thoroughfares above, were certainly things of
+paramount impressiveness to a young mind. It was a subterranean passage,
+although of a larger bore than we were accustomed to in Ainsworth's
+novels; and these two words, "subterranean passage," were in themselves
+an irresistible attraction, and seemed to bring us nearer in spirit to
+the heroes we loved and the black rascals we secretly aspired to
+imitate. To scale the Castle Rock from West Princes Street Gardens, and
+lay a triumphal hand against the rampart itself, was to taste a high
+order of romantic pleasure. And there are other sights and exploits
+which crowd back upon my mind under a very strong illumination of
+remembered pleasure. But the effect of not one of them all will compare
+with the discoverer's joy, and the sense of old Time and his slow
+changes on the face of this earth, with which I explored such corners as
+Cannon-mills or Water Lane, or the nugget of cottages at Broughton
+Market. They were more rural than the open country, and gave a greater
+impression of antiquity than the oldest _land_ upon the High Street.
+They too, like Fergusson's butterfly, had a quaint air of having
+wandered far from their own place; they looked abashed and homely, with
+their gables and their creeping plants, their outside stairs and running
+null-streams; there were corners that smelt like the end of the country
+garden where I spent my Aprils; and the people stood to gossip at their
+doors, as they might have done in Colinton or Cramond.
+
+In a great measure we may, and shall, eradicate this haunting flavour of
+the country. The last elm is dead in Elm Row; and the villas and the
+workmen's quarters spread apace on all the borders of the city. We can
+cut down the trees; we can bury the grass under dead paving-stones; we
+can drive brisk streets through all our sleepy quarters; and we may
+forget the stories and the play-grounds of our boyhood. But we have some
+possessions that not even the infuriate zeal of builders can utterly
+abolish and destroy. Nothing can abolish the hills, unless it be a
+cataclysm of nature, which shall subvert Edinburgh Castle itself and lay
+all her florid structures in the dust. And as long as we have the hills
+and the Firth, we have a famous heritage to leave our children. Our
+windows, at no expense to us, are mostly artfully stained to represent a
+landscape. And when the Spring comes round, and the hawthorn begins to
+flower, and the meadows to smell of young grass, even in the thickest of
+our streets, the country hill-tops find out a young man's eyes, and set
+his heart beating for travel and pure air.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE VILLA QUARTERS
+
+
+Mr. Ruskin's denunciation of the New Town of Edinburgh includes, as I
+have heard it repeated, nearly all the stone and lime we have to show.
+Many, however, find a grand air and something settled and imposing in
+the better parts; and upon many, as I have said, the confusion of styles
+induces an agreeable stimulation of the mind. But upon the subject of
+our recent villa architecture, I am frankly ready to mingle my tears
+with Mr. Ruskin's, and it is a subject which makes one envious of his
+large declamatory and controversial eloquence.
+
+Day by day, one new villa, one new object of offence, is added to
+another; all around Newington and Morningside, the dismalest structures
+keep springing up like mushrooms; the pleasant hills are loaded with
+them, each impudently squatted in its garden, each roofed and carrying
+chimneys like a house. And yet a glance of an eye discovers their true
+character. They are not houses; for they were not designed with a view
+to human habitation, and the internal arrangements are, as they tell me,
+fantastically unsuited to the needs of man. They are not buildings; for
+you can scarcely say a thing is built where every measurement is in
+clamant disproportion with its neighbour. They belong to no style to
+art, only to a form of business much to be regretted.
+
+Why should it be cheaper to erect a structure where the size of the
+windows bears no rational relation to the size of the front? Is there
+any profit in a misplaced chimney-stalk? Does a hard-working, greedy
+builder gain more on a monstrosity than on a decent cottage of equal
+plainness? Frankly, we should say, No. Bricks may be omitted, and green
+timber employed, in the construction of even a very elegant design; and
+there is no reason why a chimney should be made to vent, because it is
+so situated as to look comely from without. On the other hand, there is
+a noble way of being ugly: a high-aspiring fiasco like the fall of
+Lucifer. There are daring and gaudy buildings that manage to be
+offensive, without being contemptible; and we know that "fools rush in
+where angels fear to tread." But to aim at making a commonplace villa,
+and to make it insufferably ugly in each particular; to attempt the
+homeliest achievement and to attain the bottom of derided failure; not
+to have any theory but profit, and yet, at an equal expense, to outstrip
+all competitors in the art of conceiving and rendering permanent
+deformity; and to do this in what is, by nature, one of the most
+agreeable neighbourhoods in Britain:--what are we to say, but that this
+also is a distinction, hard to earn although not greatly worshipful?
+
+Indifferent buildings give pain to the sensitive; but these things
+offend the plainest taste. It is a danger which threatens the amenity of
+the town; and as this eruption keeps spreading on our borders, we have
+ever the farther to walk among unpleasant sights, before we gain the
+country air. If the population of Edinburgh were a living, autonomous
+body, it would arise like one man and make night hideous with arson; the
+builders and their accomplices would be driven to work, like the Jews of
+yore, with the trowel in one hand and the defensive cutlass in the
+other; and as soon as one of these masonic wonders had been consummated,
+right-minded iconoclasts should fall thereon and make an end of it at
+once.
+
+Possibly these words may meet the eye of a builder or two. It is no use
+asking them to employ an architect; for that would be to touch them in a
+delicate quarter, and its use would largely depend on what architect
+they were minded to call in. But let them get any architect in the world
+to point out any reasonably well-proportioned villa not his own design;
+and let them reproduce that model to satiety.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE CALTON HILL
+
+
+The east of New Edinburgh is guarded by a craggy hill, of no great
+elevation, which the town embraces. The old London road runs on one side
+of it; while the New Approach, leaving it on the other hand, completes
+the circuit. You mount by stairs in a cutting of the rock to find
+yourself in a field of monuments. Dugald Stewart has the honours of
+situation and architecture; Burns is memorialized lower down upon a
+spur; Lord Nelson, as befits a sailor, gives his name to the top-gallant
+of the Calton Hill. This latter erection has been differently and yet,
+in both cases, aptly compared to a telescope and a butterchurn;
+comparisons apart, it ranks among the vilest of men's handiworks. But
+the chief feature is an unfinished range of columns, "the Modern Ruin"
+as it has been called, an imposing object from far and near, and giving
+Edinburgh, even from the sea, that false air of a modern Athens which
+has earned for her so many slighting speeches. It was meant to be a
+National Monument; and its present state is a very suitable monument to
+certain national characteristics. The old Observatory--a quaint brown
+building on the edge of the steep--and the New Observatory--a classical
+edifice with a dome--occupy the central portion of the summit. All these
+are scattered on a green turf, browsed over by some sheep.
+
+The scene suggests reflections on fame and on man's injustice to the
+dead. You see Dugald Stewart rather more handsomely commemorated than
+Burns. Immediately below, in the Canongate churchyard, lies Robert
+Fergusson, Burns's master in his art, who died insane while yet a
+stripling; and if Dugald Stewart has been somewhat too boisterously
+acclaimed, the Edinburgh poet, on the other hand, is most unrighteously
+forgotten. The votaries of Burns, a crew too common in all ranks in
+Scotland, and more remarkable for number than discretion, eagerly
+suppress all mention of the lad who handed to him the poetic impulse,
+and, up to the time when he grew famous, continued to influence him in
+his manner and the choice of subjects. Burns himself not only
+acknowledged his debt in a fragment of autobiography, but erected a tomb
+over the grave in Canongate churchyard. This was worthy of an artist,
+but it was done in vain; and although I think I have read nearly all the
+biographies of Burns, I cannot remember one in which the modesty of
+nature was not violated, or where Fergusson was not sacrificed to the
+credit of his follower's originality. There is a kind of gaping
+admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have
+a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author
+without disparaging all others. They are indeed mistaken if they think
+to please the great originals; and whoever puts Fergusson right with
+fame cannot do better than dedicate his labours to the memory of Burns,
+who will be the best delighted of the dead.
+
+Of all places for a view, this Calton Hill is perhaps the best; since
+you can see the Castle, which you lose from the Castle, and Arthur's
+Seat, which you cannot see from Arthur's Seat. It is the place to stroll
+on one of those days of sunshine and east wind which are so common in
+our more than temperate summer. The breeze comes off the sea, with a
+little of the freshness, and that touch of chill, peculiar to the
+quarter, which is delightful to certain very ruddy organizations and
+greatly the reverse to the majority of mankind. It brings with it a
+faint, floating haze, a cunning decolouriser, although not thick enough
+to obscure outlines near at hand. But the haze lies more thickly to
+windward at the far end of Musselburgh Bay; and over the Links of
+Aberlady and Berwick Law and the hump of the Bass Rock it assumes the
+aspect of a bank of thin sea fog.
+
+Immediately underneath upon the south, you command the yards of the High
+School, and the towers and courts of the new Jail--a large place,
+castellated to the extent of folly, standing by itself on the edge of a
+steep cliff, and often joyfully hailed by tourists as the Castle. In the
+one, you may perhaps see female prisoners taking exercise like a string
+of nuns; in the other, schoolboys running at play and their shadows
+keeping step with them. From the bottom of the valley, a gigantic
+chimney rises almost to the level of the eye, a taller and a shapelier
+edifice than Nelson's Monument. Look a little farther, and there is
+Holyrood Palace, with its Gothic frontal and ruined abbey, and the red
+sentry pacing smartly to and fro before the door like a mechanical
+figure in a panorama. By way of an outpost, you can single out the
+little peak-roofed lodge, over which Rizzio's murderers made their
+escape, and where Queen Mary herself, according to gossip, bathed in
+white wine to entertain her loveliness. Behind and overhead, lie the
+Queen's Park, from Muschat's Cairn to Dumbiedykes, St. Margaret's Loch,
+and the long wall of Salisbury Crags; and thence, by knoll and rocky
+bulwark and precipitous slope, the eye rises to the top of Arthur's
+Seat, a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold design.
+This upon your left. Upon the right, the roofs and spires of the Old
+Town climb one above another to where the citadel prints its broad bulk
+and jagged crown of bastions on the western sky.--Perhaps it is now one
+in the afternoon; and at the same instant of time, a ball rises to the
+summit of Nelson's flagstaff close at hand, and, far away, a puff of
+smoke followed by a report bursts from the half-moon battery at the
+Castle. This is the time-gun by which people set their watches, as far
+as the sea coast or in hill farms upon the Pentlands.--To complete the
+view, the eye enfilades Princes Street, black with traffic, and has a
+broad look over the valley between the Old Town and the New: here, full
+of railway trains and stepped over by the high North Bridge upon its
+many columns, and there, green with trees and gardens.
+
+On the north, the Calton Hill is neither so abrupt in itself nor has it
+so exceptional an outlook; and yet even here it commands a striking
+prospect. A gully separates it from the New Town. This is Greenside,
+where witches were burned and tournaments held in former days. Down that
+almost precipitous bank, Bothwell launched his horse, and so first, as
+they say, attracted the bright eyes of Mary. It is now tessellated with
+sheets and blankets out to dry, and the sound of people beating carpets
+is rarely absent. Beyond all this, the suburbs run out to Leith; Leith
+camps on the seaside with her forest of masts; Leith roads are full of
+ships at anchor; the sun picks out the white pharos upon Inchkeith
+Island: the Firth extends on either hand from the Ferry to the May; the
+towns of Fifeshire sit, each in its bank of blowing smoke, along the
+opposite coast; and the hills inclose the view, except to the farthest
+east, where the haze of the horizon rests upon the open sea. There lies
+the road to Norway: a dear road for Sir Patrick Spens and his Scots
+Lords; and yonder smoke on the hither side of Largo Law is Aberdour,
+from whence they sailed to seek a queen for Scotland.
+
+    "O lang, lang, may the ladies sit,
+      Wi' their fans into their hand,
+    Or e'er they see Sir Patrick Spens
+      Come sailing to the land!"
+
+The sight of the sea, even from a city, will bring thoughts of storm and
+sea disaster. The sailors' wives of Leith and the fisherwomen of
+Cockenzie, not sitting languorously with fans, but crowding to the tail
+of the harbour with a shawl about their ears, may still look vainly for
+brave Scotsmen who will return no more, or boats that have gone on their
+last fishing. Since Sir Patrick sailed from Aberdour, what a multitude
+have gone down in the North Sea! Yonder is Auldhame, where the London
+smack went ashore and wreckers cut the rings from ladies' fingers; and a
+few miles round Fife Ness is the fatal Inchcape, now a star of guidance;
+and the lee shore to the east of the Inchcape is that Forfarshire coast
+where Mucklebackit sorrowed for his son.
+
+These are the main features of the scene roughly sketched. How they are
+all tilted by the inclination of the ground, how each stands out in
+delicate relief against the rest, what manifold detail, and play of sun
+and shadow, animate and accentuate the picture, is a matter for a person
+on the spot, and turning swiftly on his heels, to grasp and bind
+together in one comprehensive look. It is the character of such a
+prospect, to be full of change and of things moving. The multiplicity
+embarrasses the eye; and the mind, among so much, suffers itself to grow
+absorbed with single points. You remark a tree in a hedgerow, or follow
+a cart along a country road. You turn to the city, and see children,
+dwarfed by distance into pygmies, at play about suburban doorsteps; you
+have a glimpse upon a thoroughfare where people are densely moving; you
+note ridge after ridge of chimney-stacks running downhill one behind
+another, and church spires rising bravely from the sea of roofs. At one
+of the innumerable windows, you watch a figure moving; on one of the
+multitude of roofs, you watch clambering chimney-sweeps. The wind takes
+a run and scatters the smoke; bells are heard, far and near, faint and
+loud, to tell the hour; or perhaps a bird goes dipping evenly over the
+housetops, like a gull across the waves. And here you are in the
+meantime, on this pastoral hillside, among nibbling sheep and looked
+upon by monumental buildings.
+
+Return thither on some clear, dark, moonless night, with a ring of frost
+in the air, and only a star or two set sparsely in the vault of heaven;
+and you will find a sight as stimulating as the hoariest summit of the
+Alps. The solitude seems perfect; the patient astronomer, flat on his
+back under the Observatory dome and spying heaven's secrets, is your
+only neighbour; and yet from all round you there come up the dull hum of
+the city, the tramp of countless people marching out of time, the rattle
+of carriages and the continuous jingle of the tramway bells. An hour or
+so before, the gas was turned on; lamplighters scoured the city; in
+every house, from kitchen to attic, the windows kindled and gleamed
+forth into the dusk. And so now, although the town lies blue and
+darkling on her hills, innumerable spots of the bright element shine far
+and near along the pavements and upon the high facades. Moving lights of
+the railway pass and re-pass below the stationary lights upon the
+bridge. Lights burn in the Jail. Lights burn high up in the tall _lands_
+and on the Castle turrets; they burn low down in Greenside or along the
+Park. They run out one beyond the other into the dark country. They walk
+in a procession down to Leith, and shine singly far along Leith Pier.
+Thus, the plan of the city and her suburbs is mapped out upon the ground
+of blackness, as when a child pricks a drawing full of pinholes and
+exposes it before a candle; not the darkest night of winter can conceal
+her high station and fanciful design; every evening in the year she
+proceeds to illuminate herself in honour of her own beauty; and as if to
+complete the scheme--or rather as if some prodigal Pharaoh were
+beginning to extend to the adjacent sea and country--half-way over to
+Fife, there is an outpost of light upon Inchkeith, and far to seaward,
+yet another on the May.
+
+And while you are looking, across upon the Castle Hill, the drums and
+bugles begin to recall the scattered garrison; the air thrills with the
+sound; the bugles sing aloud; and the last rising flourish mounts and
+melts into the darkness like a star: a martial swan-song, fitly rounding
+in the labours of the day.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+WINTER AND NEW YEAR
+
+
+The Scots dialect is singularly rich in terms of reproach against the
+winter wind. _Snell_, _blae_, _nirly_, and _scowthering_, are four of
+these significant vocables; they are all words that carry a shiver with
+them; and for my part as I see them aligned before me on the page, I am
+persuaded that a big wind comes tearing over the Firth from Burntisland
+and the northern hills; I think I can hear it howl in the chimney, and
+as I set my face northwards, feel its smarting kisses on my cheek. Even
+in the names of places there is often a desolate, inhospitable sound;
+and I remember two from the near neighbourhood of Edinburgh, Cauldhame
+and Blaw-weary, that would promise but starving comfort to their
+inhabitants. The inclemency of heaven, which has thus endowed the
+language of Scotland with words, has also largely modified the spirit of
+its poetry. Both poverty and a northern climate teach men the love of
+the hearth and the sentiment of the family; and the latter, in its own
+right, inclines a poet to the praise of strong waters. In Scotland, all
+our singers have a stave or two for blazing fires and stout
+potations:--to get indoors out of the wind and to swallow something hot
+to the stomach, are benefits so easily appreciated where they dwelt!
+
+And this is not only so in country districts where the shepherd must
+wade in the snow all day after his flock, but in Edinburgh itself, and
+nowhere more apparently stated than in the works of our Edinburgh poet,
+Fergusson. He was a delicate youth, I take it, and willingly slunk from
+the robustious winter to an inn fireside. Love was absent from his
+life, or only present, if you prefer, in such a form that even the least
+serious of Burns's amourettes was ennobling by comparison; and so there
+is nothing to temper the sentiment of indoor revelry which pervades the
+poor boy's verses. Although it is characteristic of his native town, and
+the manners of its youth to the present day, this spirit has perhaps
+done something to restrict his popularity. He recalls a supper-party
+pleasantry with something akin to tenderness; and sounds the praises of
+the act of drinking as if it were virtuous, or at least witty, in
+itself. The kindly jar, the warm atmosphere of tavern parlours, and the
+revelry of lawyers' clerks, do not offer by themselves the materials of
+rich existence. It was not choice, so much as an external fate, that
+kept Fergusson in this round of sordid pleasures. A Scot of poetic
+temperament, and without religious exaltation, drops as if by nature
+into the public-house. The picture may not be pleasing; but what else is
+a man to do in this dog's weather?
+
+To none but those who have themselves suffered the thing in the body,
+can the gloom and depression of our Edinburgh winters be brought home.
+For some constitutions there is something almost physically disgusting
+in the bleak ugliness of easterly weather; the wind wearies, the sickly
+sky depresses them; and they turn back from their walk to avoid the
+aspect of the unrefulgent sun going down among perturbed and pallid
+mists. The days are so short that a man does much of his business, and
+certainly all his pleasure, by the haggard glare of gas lamps. The roads
+are as heavy as a fallow. People go by, so drenched and draggle-tailed
+that I have often wondered how they found the heart to undress. And
+meantime the wind whistles through the town as if it were an open
+meadow; and if you lie awake all night, you hear it shrieking and raving
+overhead with a noise of shipwrecks and of falling houses. In a word,
+life is so unsightly that there are times when the heart turns sick in
+a man's inside; and the look of a tavern, or the thought of the warm,
+firelit study, is like the touch of land to one who has been long
+struggling with the seas.
+
+As the weather hardens towards frost, the world begins to improve for
+Edinburgh people. We enjoy superb, sub-arctic sunsets, with the profile
+of the city stamped in indigo upon a sky of luminous green. The wind may
+still be cold, but there is a briskness in the air that stirs good
+blood. People do not all look equally sour and downcast. They fall into
+two divisions: one, the knight of the blue face and hollow paunch, whom
+Winter has gotten by the vitals; the other well lined with New-year's
+fare, conscious of the touch of cold on his periphery, but stepping
+through it by the glow of his internal fires. Such an one I remember,
+triply cased in grease, whom no extremity of temperature could vanquish.
+"Well," would be his jovial salutation, "here's a sneezer!" And the look
+of these warm fellows is tonic, and upholds their drooping
+fellow-townsmen. There is yet another class who do not depend on
+corporal advantages, but support the winter in virtue of a brave and
+merry heart. One shivering evening, cold enough for frost but with too
+high a wind, and a little past sundown, when the lamps were beginning to
+enlarge their circles in the growing dusk, a brace of barefoot lassies
+were seen coming eastward in the teeth of the wind. If the one was as
+much as nine, the other was certainly not more than seven. They were
+miserably clad; and the pavement was so cold, you would have thought no
+one could lay a naked foot on it unflinching. Yet they came along
+waltzing, if you please, while the elder sang a tune to give them music.
+The person who saw this, and whose heart was full of bitterness at the
+moment, pocketed a reproof which has been of use to him ever since, and
+which he now hands on, with his good wishes, to the reader.
+
+At length, Edinburgh, with her satellite hills and all the sloping
+country, is sheeted up in white. If it has happened in the dark hours,
+nurses pluck their children out of bed and run with them to some
+commanding window, whence they may see the change that has been worked
+upon earth's face. "A' the hills are covered wi' snaw," they sing, "and
+Winter's noo come fairly!" And the children, marveling at the silence
+and the white landscape, find a spell appropriate to the season in the
+words. The reverberation of the snow increases the pale daylight, and
+brings all objects nearer the eye. The Pentlands are smooth and
+glittering, with here and there the black ribbon of a dry-stone dyke,
+and here and there, if there be wind, a cloud of blowing snow upon a
+shoulder. The Firth seems a leaden creek, that a man might almost jump
+across, between well-powdered Lothian and well-powdered Fife. And the
+effect is not, as in other cities, a thing of half a day; the streets
+are soon trodden black, but the country keeps its virgin white; and you
+have only to lift your eyes and look over miles of country snow. An
+indescribable cheerfulness breathes about the city; and the well-fed
+heart sits lightly and beats gaily in the bosom. It is New-year's
+weather.
+
+New-year's Day, the great national festival, is a time of family
+expansions and of deep carousal. Sometimes, by a sore stroke of fate for
+this Calvinistic people, the year's anniversary falls upon a Sunday,
+when the public-houses are inexorably closed, when singing and even
+whistling is banished from our homes and highways, and the oldest toper
+feels called upon to go to church. Thus pulled about, as if between two
+loyalties, the Scots have to decide many nice cases of conscience, and
+ride the marches narrowly between the weekly and the annual observance.
+A party of convivial musicians, next door to a friend of mine, hung
+suspended in this manner on the brink of their diversions. From ten
+o'clock on Sunday night, my friend heard them tuning their instruments;
+and as the hour of liberty drew near, each must have had his music open,
+his bow in readiness across the fiddle, his foot already raised to mark
+the time, and his nerves braced for execution; for hardly had the
+twelfth stroke sounded from the earliest steeple, before they had
+launched forth into a secular bravura.
+
+Currant-loaf is now popular eating in all households. For weeks before
+the great morning, confectioners display stacks of Scots bun--a dense,
+black substance, inimical to life--and full moons of shortbread adorned
+with mottoes of peel or sugar-plum, in honour of the season and the
+family affections. "Frae Auld Reekie," "A guid New Year to ye a'," "For
+the Auld Folk at Hame," are among the most favoured of these devices.
+Can you not see the carrier, after half-a-day's journey on pinching
+hill-roads, draw up before a cottage in Teviotdale, or perhaps in Manor
+Glen among the rowans, and the old people receiving the parcel with
+moist eyes and a prayer for Jock or Jean in the city? For at this
+season, on the threshold of another year of calamity and stubborn
+conflict, men feel a need to draw closer the links that unite them; they
+reckon the number of their friends, like allies before a war; and the
+prayers grow longer in the morning as the absent are recommended by name
+into God's keeping.
+
+On the day itself, the shops are all shut as on a Sunday; only taverns,
+toyshops, and other holiday magazines, keep open doors. Everyone looks
+for his handsel. The postmen and the lamplighters have left, at every
+house in their districts, a copy of vernacular verses, asking and
+thanking in a breath; and it is characteristic of Scotland that these
+verses may have sometimes a touch of reality in detail of sentiment and
+a measure of strength in the handling. All over the town, you may see
+comforter'd schoolboys hastening to squander their half-crowns. There
+are an infinity of visits to be paid; all the world is in the street,
+except the daintier classes; the sacramental greeting is heard upon all
+sides; Auld Lang Syne is much in people's mouths; and whisky and
+shortbread are staple articles of consumption. From an early hour a
+stranger will be impressed by the number of drunken men; and by
+afternoon drunkenness has spread to the women. With some classes of
+society, it is as much a matter of duty to drink hard on New-year's Day
+as to go to church on Sunday. Some have been saving their wages for
+perhaps a month to do the season honour. Many carry a whisky-bottle in
+their pocket, which they will press with embarrassing effusion on a
+perfect stranger. It is not expedient to risk one's body in a cab, or
+not, at least, until after a prolonged study of the driver. The streets,
+which are thronged from end to end, become a place for delicate
+pilotage. Singly or arm-in-arm, some speechless, others noisy and
+quarrelsome, the votaries of the New Year go meandering in and out and
+cannoning one against another; and now and again, one falls, and lies as
+he has fallen. Before night, so many have gone to bed or the police
+office, that the streets seem almost clearer. And as _guisards_ and
+_first-footers_ are now not much seen except in country places, when
+once the New Year has been rung in and proclaimed at the Tron railings,
+the festivities begin to find their way indoors and something like quiet
+returns upon the town. But think, in these piled _lands_, of all the
+senseless snorers, all the broken heads and empty pockets!
+
+Of old, Edinburgh University was the scene of heroic snowballing; and
+one riot obtained the epic honours of military intervention. But the
+great generation, I am afraid, is at an end; and even during my own
+college days, the spirit appreciably declined. Skating and sliding, on
+the other hand, are honoured more and more; and curling, being a
+creature of the national genius, is little likely to be disregarded. The
+patriotism that leads a man to eat Scots bun will scarcely desert him at
+the curling pond. Edinburgh, with its long, steep pavements, is the
+proper home of sliders; many a happy urchin can slide the whole way to
+school; and the profession of errand-boy is transformed into a holiday
+amusement. As for skating, there is scarce any city so handsomely
+provided. Duddingston Loch lies under the abrupt southern side of
+Arthur's Seat; in summer, a shield of blue, with swans sailing from the
+reeds; in winter, a field of ringing ice. The village church sits above
+it on a green promontory; and the village smoke rises from among goodly
+trees. At the church gates is the historical _jougs_, a place of penance
+for the neck of detected sinners, and the historical _louping-on stane_,
+from which Dutch-built lairds and farmers climbed into the saddle. Here
+Prince Charlie slept before the battle of Prestonpans; and here Deacon
+Brodie, or one of his gang, stole a plough coulter before the burglary
+in Chessel's Court. On the opposite side of the loch, the ground rises
+to Craigmillar Castle, a place friendly to Stuart Mariolaters. It is
+worth a climb, even in summer, to look down upon the loch from Arthur's
+Seat; but it is tenfold more so on a day of skating. The surface is
+thick with people moving easily and swiftly and leaning over at a
+thousand graceful inclinations; the crowd opens and closes, and keeps
+moving through itself like water; and the ice rings to half a mile away,
+with the flying steel. As night draws on, the single figures melt into
+the dusk, until only an obscure stir and coming and going of black
+clusters is visible upon the loch. A little longer, and the first torch
+is kindled and begins to flit rapidly across the ice in a ring of yellow
+reflection, and this is followed by another and another, until the whole
+field is full of skimming lights.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+TO THE PENTLAND HILLS
+
+
+On three sides of Edinburgh, the country slopes downward from the city,
+here to the sea, there to the fat farms of Haddington, there to the
+mineral fields of Linlithgow. On the south alone, it keeps rising, until
+it not only out-tops the Castle, but looks down on Arthur's Seat. The
+character of the neighbourhood is pretty strongly marked by a scarcity
+of hedges; by many stone walls of varying height; by a fair amount of
+timber, some of it well grown, but apt to be of a bushy, northern
+profile and poor in foliage; by here and there a little river, Esk or
+Leith or Almond, busily journeying in the bottom of its glen; and from
+almost every point, by a peep of the sea or the hills. There is no lack
+of variety, and yet most of the elements are common to all parts; and
+the southern district is alone distinguished by considerable summits and
+a wide view.
+
+From Boroughmuirhead, where the Scottish army encamped before Flodden,
+the road descends a long hill, at the bottom of which, and just as it is
+preparing to mount up on the other side, it passes a toll-bar and issues
+at once into the open country. Even as I write these words, they are
+becoming antiquated in the progress of events, and the chisels are
+tinkling on a new row of houses. The builders have at length adventured
+beyond the toll which held them in respect so long, and proceed to
+career in these fresh pastures like a herd of colts turned loose. As
+Lord Beaconsfield proposed to hang an architect by way of stimulation, a
+man, looking on these doomed meads, imagines a similar example to deter
+the builders; for it seems as if it must come to an open fight at last
+to preserve a corner of green country unbedevilled. And here,
+appropriately enough, there stood in old days a crow-haunted gibbet,
+with two bodies hanged in chains. I used to be shown, when a child, a
+flat stone in the roadway to which the gibbet had been fixed. People of
+a willing fancy were persuaded, and sought to persuade others, that this
+stone was never dry. And no wonder, they would add, for the two men had
+only stolen fourpence between them.
+
+For about two miles the road climbs upwards, a long hot walk in summer
+time. You reach the summit at a place where four ways meet, beside the
+toll of Fairmilehead. The spot is breezy and agreeable both in name and
+aspect. The hills are close by across a valley: Kirk Yetton, with its
+long, upright scars visible as far as Fife, and Allermuir the tallest on
+this side: with wood and tilled field running high up on their borders,
+and haunches all moulded into innumerable glens and shelvings and
+variegated with heather and fern. The air comes briskly and sweetly off
+the hills, pure from the elevation, and rustically scented by the upland
+plants; and even at the toll, you may hear the curlew calling on its
+mate. At certain seasons, when the gulls desert their surfy forelands,
+the birds of sea and mountain hunt and scream together in the same field
+by Fairmilehead. The winged, wild things intermix their wheelings, the
+sea-birds skim the tree-tops and fish among the furrows of the plough.
+These little craft of air are at home in all the world, so long as they
+cruise in their own element; and like sailors, ask but food and water
+from the shores they coast.
+
+Below, over a stream, the road passes Bow Bridge, now a dairy-farm, but
+once a distillery of whisky. It chanced, some time in the past century,
+that the distiller was on terms of good-fellowship with the visiting
+officer of excise. The latter was of an easy, friendly disposition, and
+a master of convivial arts. Now and again, he had to walk out of
+Edinburgh to measure the distiller's stock; and although it was
+agreeable to find his business lead him in a friend's direction, it was
+unfortunate that the friend should be a loser by his visits.
+Accordingly, when he got about the level of Fairmilehead, the gauger
+would take his flute, without which he never travelled, from his pocket,
+fit it together, and set manfully to playing, as if for his own
+delectation and inspired by the beauty of the scene. His favourite air,
+it seems, was "Over the Hills and Far Away." At the first note, the
+distiller pricked his ears. A flute at Fairmilehead? and playing, "Over
+the Hills and Far Away"? This must be his friendly enemy, the gauger.
+Instantly, horses were harnessed, and sundry barrels of whisky were got
+upon a cart, driven at a gallop round Hill End, and buried in the mossy
+glen behind Kirk Yetton. In the same breath, you may be sure, a fat fowl
+was put to the fire, and the whitest napery prepared for the back
+parlour. A little after, the gauger, having had his fill of music for
+the moment, came strolling down with the most innocent air imaginable,
+and found the good people at Bow Bridge taken entirely unawares by his
+arrival, but none the less glad to see him. The distiller's liquor and
+the gauger's flute would combine to speed the moments of digestion; and
+when both were somewhat mellow, they would wind up the evening with
+"Over the Hills and Far Away," to an accompaniment of knowing glances.
+And at least there is a smuggling story, with original and half-idyllic
+features.
+
+A little farther, the road to the right passes an upright stone in a
+field. The country people call it General Kay's monument. According to
+them, an officer of that name had perished there in battle at some
+indistinct period before the beginning of history. The date is
+reassuring; for I think cautious writers are silent on the General's
+exploits. But the stone is connected with one of those remarkable
+tenures of land which linger on into the modern world from Feudalism.
+Whenever the reigning sovereign passes by, a certain landed proprietor
+is held bound to climb on to the top, trumpet in hand, and sound a
+flourish according to the measure of his knowledge in that art. Happily
+for a respectable family, crowned heads have no great business in the
+Pentland Hills. But the story lends a character of comicality to the
+stone; and the passer-by will sometimes chuckle to himself.
+
+The district is dear to the superstitious. Hard by, at the back-gate of
+Comiston, a belated carter beheld a lady in white, "with the most
+beautiful, clear shoes upon her feet," who looked upon him in a very
+ghastly manner, and then vanished; and just in front is the Hunters'
+Tryst, once a roadside inn, and not so long ago haunted by the devil in
+person. Satan led the inhabitants a pitiful existence. He shook the four
+corners of the building with lamentable outcries, beat at the doors and
+windows, over-threw crockery in the dead hours of the morning, and
+danced unholy dances on the roof. Every kind of spiritual disinfectant
+was put in requisition; chosen ministers were summoned out of Edinburgh
+and prayed by the hour; pious neighbours sat up all night making a noise
+of psalmody; but Satan minded them no more than the wind about the
+hill-tops; and it was only after years of persecution, that he left the
+Hunters' Tryst in peace to occupy himself with the remainder of mankind.
+What with General Kay, and the white lady, and this singular visitation,
+the neighbourhood offers great facilities to the makers of sun-myths;
+and without exactly casting in one's lot with that disenchanting school
+of writers, one cannot help hearing a good deal of the winter wind in
+the last story. "That nicht," says Burns, in one of his happiest
+moments,--
+
+    "That nicht a child might understand
+    The deil had business on his hand."
+
+And if people sit up all night in lone places on the hills, with Bibles
+and tremulous psalms, they will be apt to hear some of the most
+fiendish noises in the world: the wind will beat on doors and dance upon
+roofs for them, and make the hills howl around their cottage with a
+clamour like the Judgment Day.
+
+The road goes down through another valley, and then finally begins to
+scale the main slope of the Pentlands. A bouquet of old trees stands
+round a white farmhouse; and from a neighbouring dell, you can see smoke
+rising and leaves ruffling in the breeze. Straight above, the hills
+climb a thousand feet into the air. The neighbourhood, about the time of
+lambs, is clamorous with the bleating of flocks; and you will be
+awakened, in the grey of early summer mornings, by the barking of a dog
+or the voice of a shepherd shouting to the echoes. This, with the hamlet
+lying behind unseen, is Swanston.
+
+The place in the dell is immediately connected with the city. Long ago,
+this sheltered field was purchased by the Edinburgh magistrates for the
+sake of the springs that rise or gather there. After they had built
+their water-house and laid their pipes, it occurred to them that the
+place was suitable for junketing. Once entertained, with jovial
+magistrates and public funds, the idea led speedily to accomplishment;
+and Edinburgh could soon boast of a municipal Pleasure House. The dell
+was turned into a garden; and on the knoll that shelters it from the
+plain and the sea winds, they built a cottage looking to the hills. They
+brought crockets and gargoyles from old St. Giles's, which they were
+then restoring, and disposed them on the gables and over the door and
+about the garden; and the quarry which had supplied them with building
+material, they draped with clematis and carpeted with beds of roses. So
+much for the pleasure of the eye; for creature comfort, they made a
+capacious cellar in the hillside and fitted it with bins of the hewn
+stone. In process of time, the trees grew higher and gave shade to the
+cottage, and the evergreens sprang up and turned the dell into a
+thicket. There, purple magistrates relaxed themselves from the pursuit
+of municipal ambition; cocked hats paraded soberly about the garden and
+in and out among the hollies; authoritative canes drew ciphering upon
+the path; and at night, from high up on the hills, a shepherd saw
+lighted windows through the foliage and heard the voice of city
+dignitaries raised in song.
+
+The farm is older. It was first a grange of Whitekirk Abbey, tilled and
+inhabited by rosy friars. Thence, after the Reformation, it passed into
+the hands of a true-blue Protestant family. During the Covenanting
+troubles, when a night conventicle was held upon the Pentlands, the farm
+doors stood hospitably open till the morning; the dresser was laden with
+cheese and bannocks, milk and brandy; and the worshipers kept lipping
+down from the hill between two exercises, as couples visit the
+supper-room between two dances of a modern ball. In the Forty-Five, some
+foraging Highlanders from Prince Charlie's army fell upon Swanston in
+the dawn. The great-grandfather of the late farmer was then a little
+child; him they awakened by plucking the blankets from his bed, and he
+remembered, when he was an old man, their truculent looks and uncouth
+speech. The churn stood full of cream in the dairy, and with this they
+made their brose in high delight. "It was braw brose," said one of them.
+At last they made off, laden like camels with their booty; and Swanston
+Farm has lain out of the way of history from that time forward. I do not
+know what may be yet in store for it. On dark days, when the mist runs
+low upon the hill, the house has a gloomy air as if suitable for private
+tragedy. But in hot July, you can fancy nothing more perfect than the
+garden, laid out in alleys and arbours and bright, old-fashioned
+flower-plots, and ending in a miniature ravine, all trellis-work and
+moss and tinkling waterfall, and housed from the sun under fathoms of
+broad foliage.
+
+The hamlet behind is one of the least considerable of hamlets, and
+consists of a few cottages on a green beside a burn. Some of them (a
+strange thing in Scotland) are models of internal neatness; the beds
+adorned with patchwork, the shelves arrayed with willow-pattern plates,
+the floors and tables bright with scrubbing or pipeclay, and the very
+kettle polished like silver. It is the sign of a contented old age in
+country places, where there is little matter for gossip and no street
+sights. Housework becomes an art; and at evening, when the cottage
+interior shines and twinkles in the glow of the fire, the housewife
+folds her hands and contemplates her finished picture; the snow and the
+wind may do their worst, she has made herself a pleasant corner in the
+world. The city might be a thousand miles away: and yet it was close by
+that Mr. Bough painted the distant view of Edinburgh which has been
+engraved for this collection:[2] and you have only to look at the cut,
+to see how near it is at hand. But hills and hill people are not easily
+sophisticated; and if you walk out here on a summer Sunday, it is as
+like as not the shepherd may set his dogs upon you. But keep an unmoved
+countenance; they look formidable at the charge, but their hearts are in
+the right place; and they will only bark and sprawl about you on the
+grass, unmindful of their master's excitations.
+
+Kirk Yetton forms the north-eastern angle of the range; thence, the
+Pentlands trend off to south and west. From the summit you look over a
+great expanse of champaign sloping to the sea and behold a large variety
+of distant hills. There are the hills of Fife, the hills of Peebles, the
+Lammermoors, and the Ochils, more or less mountainous in outline, more
+or less blue with distance. Of the Pentlands themselves, you see a field
+of wild heathery peaks with a pond gleaming in the midst; and to that
+side the view is as desolate as if you were looking into Galloway or
+Applecross. To turn to the other, is like a piece of travel. Far out in
+the lowlands Edinburgh shows herself, making a great smoke on clear
+days and spreading her suburbs about her for miles; the Castle rises
+darkly in the midst; and close by, Arthur's Seat makes a bold figure in
+the landscape. All around, cultivated fields, and woods, and smoking
+villages, and white country roads, diversify the uneven surface of the
+land. Trains crawl slowly abroad upon the railway lines; little ships
+are tacking in the Firth; the shadow of a mountainous cloud, as large as
+a parish, travels before the wind; the wind itself ruffles the wood and
+standing corn, and sends pulses of varying colour across the landscape.
+So you sit, like Jupiter on Olympus, and look down from afar upon men's
+life. The city is as silent as a city of the dead: from all its humming
+thoroughfares, not a voice, not a footfall, reaches you upon the hill.
+The sea surf, the cries of ploughmen, the streams and the mill-wheels,
+the birds and the wind, keep up an animated concert through the plain;
+from farm to farm, dogs and crowing cocks contend together in defiance;
+and yet from this Olympian station, except for the whispering rumour of
+a train, the world has fallen into a dead silence and the business of
+town and country grown voiceless in your ears. A crying hill-bird, the
+bleat of a sheep, a wind singing in the dry grass, seem not so much to
+interrupt, as to accompany, the stillness; but to the spiritual ear, the
+whole scene makes a music at once human and rural, and discourses
+pleasant reflections on the destiny of man. The spiry habitable city,
+ships, the divided fields, and browsing herds, and the straight
+highways, tell visibly of man's active and comfortable ways; and you may
+be never so laggard and never so unimpressionable, but there is
+something in the view that spirits up your blood and puts you in the
+vein for cheerful labour.
+
+Immediately below is Fairmilehead, a spot of roof and a smoking chimney,
+where two roads, no thicker than packthread, intersect beside a hanging
+wood. If you are fanciful, you will be reminded of the gauger in the
+story. And the thought of this old exciseman, who once lipped and
+fingered on his pipe and uttered clear notes from it in the mountain
+air, and the words of the song he affected, carry your mind "Over the
+hills and far away" to distant countries; and you have a vision of
+Edinburgh not, as you see her, in the midst of a little neighbourhood,
+but as a boss upon the round world with all Europe and the deep sea for
+her surroundings. For every place is a centre to the earth, whence
+highways radiate or ships set sail for foreign ports; the limit of a
+parish is not more imaginary than the frontier of an empire; and as a
+man sitting at home in his cabinet and swiftly writing books, so a city
+sends abroad an influence and a portrait of herself. There is no
+Edinburgh emigrant, far or near, from China to Peru, but he or she
+carries some lively pictures of the mind, some sunset behind the Castle
+cliffs, some snow scene, some maze of city lamps, indelible in the
+memory and delightful to study in the intervals of toil. For any such,
+if this book fall in their way, here are a few more home pictures. It
+would be pleasant if they should recognise a house where they had dwelt,
+or a walk that they had taken.
+
+[2] Reference to an etching in original edition.
+
+END OF VOL. I.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson -
+Swanston Edition, by Robert Louis Stevenson
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